to write a novel from the episode which was still unfinished. "I will
not die," he says, "until I have written my book on you and on myself,
more particularly on you. No, my beautiful, holy fiancee, you shall not
return to this cold earth before it knows the woman who has walked on
it. No, I swear this by my youth and genius." Musset's contributions to
this literature were _Confession d'un enfant du siecle_, _Histoire d'un
merle blanc_, _Elle et Lui_, and all that followed.

In an inverse order, romanticism consists in putting literature into our
life, in taking the latest literary fashion for our rule of action. This
is not only a proof of want of taste; it is a most dangerous mistake.
The romanticists, who had so many wrong ideas, had none more erroneous
than their idea of love, and in the correspondence between George Sand
and Musset we see the paradox in all its beauty. It consists in saying
that love leads to virtue and that it leads there through change.
Whether the idea came originally from _her_ or from _him_, this was
their common faith.

"You have said it a hundred times over," writes George Sand, "and it
is all in vain that you retract; nothing will now efface that sentence:
'Love is the only thing in the world that counts.' It may be that it
is a divine faculty which we lose and then find again, that we must
cultivate, or that we have to buy with cruel suffering, with painful
experience. The suffering you have endured through loving me was perhaps
destined, in order that you might love another woman more easily.
Perhaps the next woman may love you less than I do, and yet she may be
more happy and more beloved. There are such mysteries in these things,
and God urges us along new and untrodden paths. Give in; do not attempt
to resist. He does not desert His privileged ones. He takes them by the
hand and places them in the midst of the sandbanks, where they are to