bourgeois, translated into a principle of action, expressing itself in the horrors of the Commune, with half the population trying to strangle the other half.  Hatred, after all, contempt and hatred, are not quite the most felicitous watchwords for the use of human society.  Like one whose cruel jest has been taken more seriously than he had intended and has been turned upon his own head, Flaubert considers flight:  “I cherish the following dream:  of going to live in the sun in a tranquil country.”  As a substitute for a physical retreat, he buries himself in a study of Buddhism, and so gradually returns to the pride of his intellectual isolation.  As the tumult in his senses subsides, he even ventures to offer to George Sand the anodyne of his old philosophical despair:  “Why are you so sad?  Humanity offers nothing new.  Its irremediable misery has filled me with sadness ever since my youth.  And in addition I now have no disillusions.  I believe that the crowd, the common herd will always be hateful.  The only important thing is a little group of minds always the same—­ which passes the torch from one to another.”

There we must leave Flaubert, the thinker.  He never passes beyond that point in his vision of reconstruction:  a “legitimate aristocracy” established in contempt of the average man—­with the Academy of Sciences displacing the Pope.

George Sand, amid these devastating external events, is beginning to feel the insidious siege of years.  She can no longer rally her spiritual forces with the “bright speed” that she had in the old days.  The fountain of her faith, which has never yet failed of renewal, fills more slowly.  For weeks she broods in silence, fearing to augment her friend’s dismay with more of her own, fearing to resume a debate in which her cause may be better than her arguments and in which depression of her physical energy may diminish her power to put up a spirited defence before the really indomitable “last ditch” of her position.  When Flaubert himself makes a momentary gesture towards the white flag, and talks of retreat, she seizes the opportunity for a short scornful sally.  “Go to live in the sun in a tranquil country!  Where?  What country is going to be tranquil in this struggle of barbarity against civilization, a struggle which is going to be universal?” A month later she gives him fair warning that she has no intention of acknowledging final defeat:  “For me, the ignoble experiment that Paris is attempting or is undergoing, proves nothing against the laws of the eternal progression of men and things, and, if I have gained any principles in my mind, good or bad, they are neither shattered nor changed by it.  For a long time I have accepted patience as one accepts the sort of weather there is, the length of winter, old age, lack of success in all its forms.”  But Flaubert, thinking that he has detected in her public utterances a decisive change of front, privately urges her in a finely figurative passage of a letter which denounces modern republicanism, universal suffrage, compulsory education, and the press—­Flaubert urges her to come out openly in renunciation of her faith in humanity and her popular progressivistic doctrines.  I must quote a few lines of his attempt at seduction: