Mauprat | Page 3

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Etext prepared by Dagny, [email protected] and John Bickers,
[email protected]

MAUPRAT
by GEORGE SAND

Translated by Stanley Young

CONTENTS
George Sand Pearl Mary-Teresa Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes)
Life of George Sand Edmund Gosse
The Author's Preface

Mauprat

GEORGE SAND
Napoleon in exile declared that were he again on the throne he should
make a point of spending two hours a day in conversation with women,
from whom there was much to be learnt. He had, no doubt, several
types of women in mind, but it is more than probable that the
banishment of Madame de Stael rose before him as one of the mistakes
in his career. It was not that he showed lack of judgment merely by the
persecution of a rare talent, but by failing to see that the rare talent was
pointing out truths very valuable to his own safety. This is what
happened in France when George Sand--the greatest woman writer the
world has known, or is ever likely to know--was attacked by the
orthodox critics of her time. They feared her warnings; they detested
her sincerity--a sincerity displayed as much in her life as in her works
(the hypocrite's Paradise was precisely her idea of Hell); they resented
bitterly an independence of spirit which in a man would have been in
the highest degree distinguished, which remained, under every test,
untamable. With a kind of /bonhomie/ which one can only compare
with Fielding's, with a passion as great as Montaigne's for
acknowledging the truths of experience, with an absence of self-
consciousness truly amazing in the artistic temperament of either sex,
she wrote exactly as she thought, saw and felt. Humour was not her
strong point. She had an exultant joy in living, but laughter, whether
genial or sardonic, is not in her work. Irony she seldom, if ever,
employed; satire she never attempted. It was on the maternal, the
sympathetic side that her femininity, and therefore her creative genius,
was most strongly developed. She was masculine only in the deliberate
libertinism of certain episodes in her own life. This was a
characteristic--one on no account to be overlooked or denied or
disguised, but it was not her character. The character was womanly,
tender, exquisitely patient and good-natured. She would take cross
humanity in her arms, and carry it out into the sunshine of the fields;
she would show it flowers and birds, sing songs to it, tell it stories,
recall its original beauty. Even in her moods of depression and revolt,
one recognises the fatigue of the strong. It is never for a moment the
lassitude of the feeble, the weary spite of a sick and ill-used soul. As
she was free from personal vanity, she was also