the affections were the phases of her middle life.  And so she wrote a “sweet song” in prose, one of the most delightful of her Bergeries, “La Petite Fadette.”  It was her contribution to the hatreds and agitations of the time—­she gave a refuge to the souls that could accept it—­an “Ideal of calmness and innocence and reverie.”  “La Petite Fadette” and “Le Meunier d’Angibault” reveal her fascinating intelligence and her idyllic imagination.  “Le Meunier d’Angibault,” she tells us, was the result of a walk, a meeting, a day of leisure, an hour of far niente, followed by Reverie, that play of the imagination which, clothes with beauty and perfects, and interprets, the isolated and small events and facts of life.  There are books of hers in early life that are simply self-revelations—­outpourings of her indignations.  She is not at her best in these.  “Indiana,” written in her age of revolt, is too obviously a pamphlet to reveal her passionate hatred of marriage.  In it she looked on marriage as “un malheur insupportable.”  But “Consuelo,” “La Comtesse de Rudolstadt,” “Lettres d’un voyageur,” Lelia, Spiridion, Valvedre, Valentine, “History of her Life and letters,” and many other books reveal her agonies and agitations, her hope and power, her love of beauty both outward and inward as represented in Consuelo herself, who is contrasted with the mere beautiful “animal” Anzoleto, the artist in his lowest form.  He cared only for physical loveliness, he was a great child, who needed nothing but amusement, emotion and beauty.  But George Sand herself felt the delight of existence.  She says of Joy “It is the great uplifter of men, the great upholder.  For life to be fruitful, life must be felt as a blessing.”  In all she wrote we feel the rare charm of perfect ease and naturalness, combined with the cadences of beauty.  We never feel that she is “posing.”  And yet the author of the bitter attack “Lui et elle,” accused her of continual “posing.”  Edonard de Musset wrote with an envenomed pen, (but we must remember he was defending a brother), in that strange literary duel between him and George Sand.  Alfred de Musset had accused her of assuming the maternal “pose” towards poets and musicians who adored her, whilst she absorbed their loves and lives and then deserted them.  It is certainly very striking how her strong vitality seemed to sway and overpower some of those with whom she came in contact.  She was the oak, and the others were the ivy.  When they were torn apart, the oak was scarred but not irreparably injured, it was the ivy that was destroyed.  In, “Elle et Lui,” George Sand claims that hers was a protecting love for the wayward, gifted child of art, the poet whose ingratitude she bore with, whose nerves she soothed, and whom she cared for and nursed in illness.  Kindly time throws a softening veil over the acutest differences, and the clash of temperaments, even where they remain inexplicable.  But the answer to Alfred de Musset’s reproaches