Madame Sand can be converted only by the preaching of that missionary with the bald forehead and the white beard whose name is Time. At present, a less austere voice enchains the poet's captive ear. Now I am convinced that Madame Sand's talent is in some way rooted in corruption; she would become commonplace if she became timorous. The case would be different if she had always remained within the sanctuary unfrequented by men; her power of love, restrained and hidden under the virginal fillet, would have drawn from her bosom those decent melodies which suggest the woman and the angel. Be this as it may, boldness of doctrine and voluptuousness of manners are a field which had not yet been cleared by a daughter of Adam and which, delivered to female cultivation, has produced a harvest of unknown flowers. Let us leave Madame Sand to bring forth perilous marvels till the winter; she will sing no more "when the cold winds blow:" meantime let us permit her, less improvident than the grasshopper, to make a provision of glory for the time when there shall be a dearth of pleasure. Musarion's mother used to say to her: "Thou wilt not always be sixteen.... Will Ch‚‚‚æreas always remember his oaths, his tears and his kisses[353]?" For the rest, many women have been seduced and as it were carried off by their young years: when the autumn days come, brought back to the maternal hearth, they have added to their cithern the grave or plaintive string on which religion or misfortune is expressed. Old age is a nocturnal traveller: the earth is hidden to her and she no longer discerns aught save the sky shining over her head. [Sidenote: Her eccentricities.] I have not seen Madame Sand dressed as a man or wearing the smock-frock and the ferruled stick of the mountaineer; I have not seen her drink of the bacchantes' cup or smoke, seated indolently on a sofa, like a sultana: these are natural or affected singularities that would add nothing, in my eyes, to her charm or her genius. Is she more inspired when she sends a cloud from her mouth to mount up around her hair? Did Lélia escape from her mother's brain through a burning puff of smoke, even as Sin, according to Milton, issued from the head of the beautiful, guilty archangel amid a whirl of flame[354]? I do not know what happens in the Heavens; but, here below, Néméade[355], Phila[356], Lais[357], the witty Gnathæna[358], Phryne[359], the despair of Apelles'[360] pencil and Praxiteles'[361] chisel, Lesena[362], who was loved by Harmodius[363], the two sisters surnamed Aphyes, because they were slender and had large eyes, Dorica, whose head-band and perfumed robe were dedicated in the temple of Venus: all these enchantresses, in fine, knew none but the perfumes of Araby. Madame Sand, it is true, has on her side the authority of the Odalisks and the young Mexican girls who dance with a cigar between their lips.