“‘GEORGE,—I beg your pardon; I am at your feet. Forgive the insulting observations I made last night. Forgive all that I have said to you for the last six months. I have spent the night reading your book. Ah, my child! How proud I am of you!’”
The following extract from one of her letters written after the publication of “Indiana” shows how modest she remained in the midst of her success:
“The popularity of my book frightens me. Up to this moment I have worked inconsequently, convinced that anything I produced would pass unnoticed. Fate has ordained otherwise. I must try to justify the undeserved admiration of which I am the object.
“Curiously enough, it seems as if half the pleasure of my profession were gone. I had always thought the word inspiration very ambitious, and only to be employed when referring to genius of the highest order. I would never dare to use it when speaking of myself without protesting against the exaggeration of a term which is only sanctioned by an incontestable success. We must find a word, however, which will not make modest people blush, and will express that ‘grace’ which descends more or less intensely on all heads in earnest about their work. There is no artist, however humble, who has not his moments of inspiration, and perhaps the heavenly liquor is as precious in an earthenware vessel as in a golden one. Only one keeps it pure and clear, while the other transmutes it or breaks itself. Let us accept the word as it is therefore, and take it for granted that from my pen it means nothing presumptuous.
“When beginning to write ‘Indiana,’ I felt an unaccustomed and strong emotion, unlike anything I had ever experienced in my former efforts at composition; it was more painful than agreeable. I wrote spontaneously, never thinking of the social problem on which I was touching. I was not Saint-Simonian, I never have been, although I have had great sympathy with some of the ideas and for some of the members of the fraternity; but I did not know them at that time, and was uninfluenced by their tenets. The only feeling I had was a horror of ignorant tyranny.”
In spite of her literary success the year 1833 was one of the most unhappy of George Sand’s life. We know the lines addressed to her by Mrs. Browning: