No doubt Madame Sand will in this way prove her intellectual omnipotence, and yet she will please less, because she will be less original: she will believe herself to be increasing her power by sounding the depths of those reveries under which she buries us vulgar men, and she will be mistaken; for she stands far above that pit, that watery hollow, that proud balderdash. While we have to put a rare, but too flexible faculty on its guard against the follies of superiority, we must also warn it that fantastic writings, intimate descriptions, to employ the jargon of the day, are limited, that their source lies in youth, that each moment of time dries up a few drops of it and that, after a certain number of productions, we end with feeble repetitions. Is it quite sure that Madame Sand will always find the same charm in what she is writing to-day? Will not the merit and allurement of the passions of twenty years depreciate in her mind, even as the works of my early days have lost their value in mine? It is only the works of the Ancient Muse that do not change, supported as they are by the nobility of manners, the beauty of language and the majesty of those sentiments bestowed upon the whole human race. The fourth book of the _Æneid_ remains for ever exposed to the admiration of men, because it is hung up in the sky. The fleet carrying the founder of the Roman Empire; Dido, the foundress of Carthage, stabbing herself after foretelling the coming of Hannibal: Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor[352]; Love causing the rivalry of Rome and Carthage to blaze forth from its torch, setting fire to the funeral pile whose flame the flying Æneas sees on the waves: these are very different from the walk of a dreamer in a wood or the disappearance of a libertine who drowns himself in a pond. Madame Sand will, I hope, link her talent with subjects worthy of her genius.