It is easy to see the meaning of all these things. They show us how natural kindliness is to the heart of man. If we try to find out why Germain and Marie appear so delightful to us, we shall discover that it is because they are simple-hearted, and follow the dictates of Nature. Nature must not be deformed, therefore, by constraint nor transformed by convention, as it leads straight to virtue.
We have heard the tune of this song before, and we have seen the blossoming of some very fine pastoral poems and a veritable invasion of sentimental literature. In those days tears were shed plentifully over poetry, novels and plays. We have had Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Sedaine, Florian and Berquin. The Revolution, brutal and sanguinary as it was, did not interrupt the course of these romantic effusions. Never were so many tender epithets used as during the years of the Reign of Terror, and in official processions Robespierre was adorned with flowers like a village bride.
This taste for pastoral things, at the time of the Revolution, was not a mere coincidence. The same principles led up to the idyll in literature and to the Revolution in history. Man was supposed to be naturally good, and the idea was to take away from him all the restraints which had been invented for curbing his nature.
Political and religious authority, moral discipline and the prestige of tradition had all formed a kind of network of impediments, by which man had been imprisoned by legislators who were inclined to pessimism. By doing away with all these fetters, the Golden Age was to be restored and universal happiness was to be established.
Such was the faith of the believers in the millennium of 1789, and of 1848. The same dream began over and over again, from Diderot to Lamartine and from Jean-Jacques to George Sand. The same state of mind which we see reflected in _La Mare au Diable_ was to make of George Sand the revolutionary writer of 1848. We can now understand the _role_ which the novelist played in the second Republic.
It is one of the most surprising pages in the history of this extraordinary character.
The joy with which George Sand welcomed the Republic can readily be imagined. She had been a Republican ever since the days of Michel of Bourges, and a democrat since the time when, as a little girl, she took the side of her plebeian mother against "the old Countesses."For a long time she had been wishing for and expecting a change of government. She would not have been satisfied with less than this.
She was not much moved by the Thiers-Guizot duel, and it would have given her no pleasure to be killed for the sake of Odilon Barrot.
She was a disciple of Romanticism, and she wanted a storm.
When the storm broke, carrying all before it, a throne, a whole society with its institutions, she hurried away from her peaceful Nohant.
She wanted to breathe the atmosphere of a revolution, and she was soon intoxicated by it.
"Long live the Republic," she wrote in her letters. "What a dream and what enthusiasm, and then, too, what behaviour, what order in Paris.
I have just arrived, and I saw the last of the barricades. The people are great, sublime, simple and generous, the most admirable people in the universe. I spent nights without any sleep and days without sitting down. Every one was wild and intoxicated with delight, for after going to sleep in the mire they have awakened in heaven."[39]
[39] _Correspondance: _ To Ch. Poncy, March 9, 1848.
She goes on dreaming thus of the stars. Everything she hears, everything she sees enchants her. The most absurd measures delight her.
She either thinks they are most noble, liberal steps to have taken, or else they are very good jokes.
"Rothschild," she writes, "expresses very fine sentiments about liberty at present. The Provisional Government is keeping him in sight, as it does not wish him to make off with his money, and so will put some of the troops on his track. The most amusing things are happening." A little later on she writes:
"The Government and the people expect to have bad deputies, but they have agreed to put them through the window. You must come, and we will go and see all this and have fun."[40]
[40] _Correspondance:_ To Maurice Sand, March 24, 1848.
She was thoroughly entertained, and that is very significant.
We must not forget the famous phrase that sounded the death-knell of the July monarchy, "La France s'ennuie." France had gone in for a revolution by way of being entertained.
George Sand was entertained, then, by what was taking place.
She went down into the street where there was plenty to see.
In the mornings there were the various coloured posters to be read.
These had been put up in the night, and they were in prose and in verse.
Processions were also organized, and men, women and children, with banners unfurled, marched along to music to the Hotel de Ville, carrying baskets decorated with ribbons and flowers. Every corporation and every profession considered itself bound in honour to congratulate the Government and to encourage it in its well-doing. One day the procession would be of the women who made waistcoats or breeches, another day of the water-carriers, or of those who had been decorated in July or wounded in February; then there were the pavement-layers, the washerwomen, the delegates from the Paris night-soil men.
There were delegates, too, from the Germans, Italians, Poles, and most of the inhabitants of Montmartre and of Batignolles.
We must not forget the trees of Liberty, as George Sand speaks of meeting with three of these in one day. "Immense pines," she writes, "carried on the shoulders of fifty working-men. A drum went first, then the flag, followed by bands of these fine tillers of the ground, strong-looking, serious men with wreaths of leaves on their head, and a spade, pick-axe or hatchet over their shoulder. It was magnificent;finer than all the _Roberts_ in the world."[41] Such was the tone of her letters.
[41] _Correspondance._
