Two years later the principles and tempers of both these
philosophers were put to their severest trial. In 1870, George Sand
had opportunity to apply her doctrine of universal acceptance to the
Prussians in Paris. Flaubert had opportunity to welcome scientific
organization in the Prussian occupation of his own home at Croisset.
The first reaction of both was a quite simple consternation and
rage, in which Flaubert cries, "The hopeless barbarism of humanity
fills me with a black melancholy," and George Sand, for the moment
assenting, rejoins: "Men are ferocious and conceited brutes." As the
war thickens around him and the wakened militancy of his compatriots
presses him hard, Flaubert becomes more and more depressed; he
forebodes a general collapse of civilization--before the century
passes, a conflict of races, "in which several millions of men kill
one another in one engagement." With the curiously vengeful
satisfaction which mortals take in their own misery when it offers
occasion to cry "I told you so," he exclaims: "Behold then, the
NATURAL MAN. Make theories now! Boast the progress, the
enlightenment and the good sense of the masses, and the gentleness
of the French people! I assure you that anyone here who ventured to
preach peace would get himself murdered."

George Sand in her fields at Nohant--not "above" but a little aside
from the conflict--turns instinctively to her peasant doggedly,
placidly, sticking at his plow; turns to her peasant with a kind of
intuition that he is a symbol of faith, that he holds the keys to a
consolation, which the rest of us blindly grope for: "He is
imbecile, people say; no, he is a child in prosperity, a man in
disaster, more of a man than we who complain; he says nothing, and
while people are killing, he is sowing, repairing continually on one
side what they are destroying on the other." Flaubert, who thinks