The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters | Page 9

emphasize that precious thing which George Sand loved to
impart, and which she had the gift of imparting, namely, joy, the
spontaneous joyousness of her own nature. The first passage is from a
letter of June 14, 1867:
"I am a little remorseful to take whole days from your work, I who am
never bored with loafing, and whom you could leave for whole hours
under a tree, or before two lighted logs, with the assurance that I should
find there something interesting. I know so well how to live OUTSIDE
OF MYSELF. It hasn't always been like that. I also was young and
subject to indignations. It is over! Since I have dipped into real nature, I
have found there an order, a system, a calmness of cycles which is
lacking in mankind, but which man can, up to a certain point,
assimilate when he is not too directly at odds with the difficulties of his
own life. When these difficulties return, he must endeavor to avoid
them; but if he has drunk the cup of the eternally true, he does not get
too excited for or against the ephemeral and relative truth."
The second passage is of June 21:
"I love everything that makes up a milieu, the rolling of the carriages
and the noise of the workmen in Paris, the cries of a thousand birds in
the country, the movement of the ships on the waters. I love also
absolute, profound silence, and, in short, I love everything that is

around me, no matter where I am."
The last passage gives a glimpse of the seventeenth of January, 1869, a
typical day in Nohant:
"The individual named George Sand is well: he is enjoying the
marvellous winter which reigns in Berry, gathering flowers, noting
interesting botanical anomalies, making dresses and mantles for his
daughter-in-law, costumes for the marionettes, cutting out scenery,
dressing dolls, reading music, but above all spending hours with the
little Aurore, who is a marvellous child. There is not a more tranquil or
a happier individual in his domestic life than this old troubadour retired
from business, who sings from time to time his little song to the moon,
without caring much whether he sings well or ill, provided he sings the
motif that runs in his head, and who, the rest of the time, idles
deliciously.... This pale character has the great pleasure of loving you
with all his heart, and of not passing a day without thinking of the other
old troubadour, confined in his solitude of a frenzied artist, disdainful
of all the pleasures of the world."
Flaubert did "exercise" a little--once or twice--in compliance with the
injunctions of his "dear master"; but he rather resented the implication
that his pessimism was personal, that it had any particular connection
with his peculiar temperament or habits. He wished to think of himself
as a stoic, quite indifferent about his "carcase." His briefer black moods
he might acknowledge had transitory causes. But his general and
abiding conceptions of humanity were the result of dispassionate
reflections. "You think," he cries in half-sportive pique, "that because I
pass my life trying to make harmonious phrases, in avoiding
assonances, that I too have not my little judgments on the things of this
world? Alas! Yes! and moreover I shall burst, enraged at not expressing
them." And later: "Yes, I am susceptible to disinterested angers, and I
love you all the more for loving me for that. Stupidity and injustice
make me roar,--and I howl in my corner against a lot of things 'that do
not concern me.'" "On the day that I am no longer in a rage, I shall fall
flat as the marionette from which one withdraws the support of the
stick."
So far as Flaubert's pessimism has an intellectual basis, it rests upon his
researches in human history. For Salammbo and The Temptation of St.
Anthony he ransacked ancient literature, devoured religions and

mythologies, and saturated himself in the works of the Church Fathers.
In order to get up the background of his Education Sentimentale he
studied the Revolution of 1848 and its roots in the Revolution of 1789.
He found, shall we say? what he was looking for- -inexhaustible proofs
of the cruelty and stupidity of men. After "gulping" down the six
volumes of Buchez and Roux, he declares: "The clearest thing I got out
of them is an immense disgust for the French.... Not a liberal idea
which has not been unpopular, not a just thing that has not caused
scandal, not a great man who has not been mobbed or knifed. 'The
history of the human mind is the history of human folly,' as says M.
Voltaire. ... Neo-Catholicism on the one hand, and Socialism on the
other, have stultified France." In