" How comes the idea to be so current;
and to be passionately believed in, as we have seen, by such a woman as
George Sand? It was so passionately believed in by her, that when one
seeks, as I am now seeking, to recall her image, the image is incomplete
if the passionate belief is kept from appearing.
I will not, with my scanty space, now discuss the belief; but I will
seek to indicate how it must have commended itself, I think, to George
Sand. I have somewhere called France "the country of Europe where _the
people_ is most alive."[333] _The people_ is what interested George
Sand. And in France _the people_ is, above all, the peasant. The workman
in Paris or in other great towns of France may afford material for such
pictures as those which M. Zola[334] has lately given us in
_L'Assommoir_--pictures of a kind long ago labelled by Madame Sand as
"_the literature of mysteries of iniquity_, which men of talent and
imagination try to bring into fashion." But the real _people_ in France,
the foundation of things there, both in George Sand's eyes and in
reality, is the peasant.
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