with Pagello. George Sand declared that she had neither put herself nor
Musset into this book. She was nevertheless inspired by their case,
and she merely transposed their ideal of renunciation. _Andre_ may be
classed among the second-rate work. It is the story of a young noble who
seduces a girl of the working-class. It is a souvenir of Berry, written
in a home-sick mood when George Sand was at Venice. _Simon_ also belongs
to the second-rate category. The portrait of Michel of Bourges can
easily be traced in it. George Sand had intended doing more for Michel
than this. She composed a revolutionary novel in three volumes, in his
honour, entitled: _Engelwald with the high forehead_. Buloz neither
cared for _Engelwald_ nor for his high forehead, and this novel was
never published.

According to George Sand, when she wrote _Mauprat_ her idea was
the rehabilitation of marriage. "I had just been petitioning for a
separation," she says. "I had, until then, been fighting against the
abuses of marriage, and, as I had never developed my ideas sufficiently,
I had given every one the notion that I despised the essential
principles of it. On the contrary, marriage really appeared to me in all
the moral beauty of those principles, and in my book I make my hero, at
the age of eighty, proclaim his faithfulness to the only woman he has
ever loved."

"She is the only woman I have ever loved," says Bernard de Mauprat. "No
other woman has ever attracted my attention or been embraced by me. I am
like that. When I love, I love for ever, in the past, in the present and
in the future."

_Mauprat_, then, according to George Sand, was a novel with a purpose,
just as _Indiana_ was, although they each had an opposite purpose.