EBOOK MAUPRAT ***
Produced by Dagny; and John Bickers
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.
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