Fortunately it is nothing of the kind. This is one of those explanations
arranged afterwards, peculiar sometimes to authors. The reality about
all this is quite different.

In this book George Sand had just given the reins to her imagination,
without allowing sociological preoccupations to spoil everything. During
her excursions in Berry, she had stopped to gaze at the ruins of an old
feudal castle. We all know the power of suggestion contained in those
old stones, and how wonderfully they tell stories of the past they
have witnessed to those persons who know how to question them. The
remembrance of the _chateau_ of Roche Mauprat came to the mind of the
novelist. She saw it just as it stood before the Revolution, a fortress,
and at the same time a refuge for the wild lord and his eight sons,
who used to sally forth and ravage the country. In French narrative
literature there is nothing to surpass the first hundred pages in which
George Sand introduces us to the burgraves of central France. She is
just as happy when she takes us to Paris with Bernard de Mauprat, to
Paris of the last days of the old _regime_. She introduces us to the
society which she had learnt to know through the traditions of her
grandmother. It is not only Nature, but history, which she uses as a
setting for her story. How cleverly, too, she treats the analysis which
is the true subject of the book, that of education through love. We see
the untamed nature of Bernard de Mauprat gradually giving way under the
influence of the noble and delicious Edmee.

There are typical peasants, too, in _Mauprat_. We have Marcasse, the
mole-catcher, and Patience, the good-natured Patience, the rustic
philosopher, well up in Epictetus and in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who has
gone into the woods to live his life according to the laws of Nature and
to find the wisdom of the primitive days of the world. We are told that,