"I trust to his intelligence because it has its source in the heart. May God give you genius, Emile, and may He give it to the men of your time! for the genius of one man is almost nothing. For my part, I have nothing more to do but to fall asleep peacefully in my grave. If I am privileged to live a few days with you two, I shall have begun to live on the eve of my death. But I shall not have lived in vain, indolent, disheartened and useless as I have been, if I have found the man who can and will act in my place.
"Keep the secret of my opinions and our plans until after your marriage, and even until after the new and thorough education which Emile must make it his duty to acquire. I aspire to see you free and powerful, in order that I may die at peace. And after all, my children, whatever course you may take, whatever errors you may commit, whatever success may crown your efforts, I confess that it is impossible for me to be anxious concerning the future of the world. In vain will the tempest rage over the generations now born or to be born; in vain will error and falsehood labor to perpetuate the horrible confusion which certain minds call to-day, in derision apparently, social order; in vain will wickedness wage war on earth; eternal truth will have its day at last. And if my spirit is able to return, a few centuries hence, to visit this immense heritage and glide beneath the venerable trees that my hand planted, it will see men free, happy, equal, united, that is to say, just and wise! These shaded paths where I have walked so often, oppressed by ennui and sorrow, whither I have fled in horror from the presence of the men of to-day, will shelter then, like the arched roof of a divine temple, a numerous family kneeling to pray and bless the Author of nature and the Father of mankind! This will be the garden of the commune, that is to say, its gynæceum, its festal and banqueting hall, its theatre and its church; for speak not to me of the cramped spaces where stone and cement pen up men and thought; nor of your superb colonnades and magnificent squares, in comparison with this natural architecture, of which the Supreme Creator bears all the expense! I have expressed in the trees and flowers, in the brooks, in the cliffs and fields all the poetry of my thoughts. Do not rob the old planter of his illusion, if illusion it be. He still believes in the adage that God is in everything and that Nature is His temple!"
[LEONE LEONI]
[INTRODUCTION]
Being at Venice, in very cold weather and under very depressing circumstances, the carnival roaring and whistling outside with the icy north wind, I experienced the painful contrast which results from inward suffering, alone amid the wild excitement of a population of strangers.
I occupied a vast apartment in the former Nasi palace, now a hotel, which fronts on the quay, near the Bridge of Sighs. All travellers who have visited Venice know that hotel, but I doubt if many of them have ever happened to be there on Mardi Gras, in the heart of the classic carnival city, in a frame of mind so painfully meditative as mine.
Striving to escape the spleen by forcing my imagination to labor, I began at hazard a novel which opened with a description of the locality, of the festival out-of-doors and of the solemn apartment in which I was writing. The last book I had read before leaving Paris was Manon Lescaut. I had discussed it, or rather listened to others discussing it, and I had said to myself that to make Manon Lescaut a man and Desgrieux a woman would be worth trying, and would present many tragic opportunities, vice being often very near crime in man, and enthusiasm closely akin to despair in woman.
I wrote this book in a week and hardly read it over before sending it to Paris. It had answered my purpose and expressed my thoughts; I could have added nothing to it if I had thought it over. And why should a work of the imagination need to be thought over? What moral could we expect to deduce from a fiction which everyone knows to be quite possible in the world of reality? Some people who are very rigid in theory—no one knows just why—have pronounced it a dangerous book. After the lapse of twenty years, I look it over, and can detect no such tendency in it. The Leone Leoni type, although not untrue to life, is exceptional, thank God! and I do not see that the infatuation he inspires in a weak mind is rewarded by very enviable joys. However, I have, at the present moment, a well-fixed opinion concerning the alleged morals of the novel, and I have expressed elsewhere my deliberate ideas thereon.
GEORGE SAND.