We can understand how it was that weak men had an attraction for Lucrezia. Her independent character in combination with her motherly instincts drew her to the weak. The idea of being protected was intolerable to her; and on occasions when she had felt the desire to lean upon those who were stronger than herself, she had too often been repelled by their coldness. She was therefore inclined to believe that love and energy were to be found in combination only in hearts which had suffered as much as her own.
Finally, we see how her relation to her children--and Lucrezia, like George Sand, is the tenderest, most affectionate of mothers--influenced her erotic life. "She had wished to be a mother to her lovers without ceasing to be the mother of her children, and the conflict between the two feelings had always ended in the extinction of the less obstinate passion. The children triumphed, and the lovers, who, to speak metaphorically, had been taken from the Foundling Hospital of civilisation, were obliged, sooner or later, to return there."
Lucrezia speaks of her attitude to the verdict of the world on her character and life in terms which are directly applicable to George Sand. "I have never sought notoriety. I may have caused scandal, but never knowingly or willingly. I have never loved two men at the same time. I have never, even in thought, belonged to more than one during any given time, that is, as long as my passion lasted. When I no longer loved a man, I did not deceive him. I broke off with him entirely. I had vowed, it is true, in my enthusiasm, to love him always; and I made the vow in absolute good faith. Every time I loved, it was so ardently and perfectly that I believed it was for the first and last time in my life. You cannot call me a respectable woman. But I myself am certain that I am one; I even lay claim to be a virtuous woman, though I know that, according to your ideas and public opinion, this is blasphemy. I submit my life to the verdict of the world without rebelling, without disputing the justice of its general laws, but not acknowledging that it is right in my case."[6]
The contrast between _Lucrezia Floriani_ and the short series of simple, beautiful peasant stories which follow it after a short interval and bring us up to 1848, seems at first sight a very marked one. In reality, however, the gulf separating _Lucrezia_ from _La Mare au Diable, François le Champi_, and _La petite Fadette_ is not so wide as it appears. What attracted George Sand to the peasants of Berry, to the rustic idylls of her native province, was the very same Rousseau-like enthusiasm for nature that had lent impetus and weight to her protests against the laws of society. Her secretary and intimate friend, Müller-Strübing, a German, is said to have drawn her attention to Auerbachs earliest village stories, and thereby to have instigated her to the production of the works which, thanks to their simplicity and calm purity, no less than to their wealth of feeling, have gained her the widest circle of readers. Auerbach was consecrated peasant-annalist by Spinoza, the apostle of natural piety, George Sand by Rousseau, the worshipper of nature. Her French peasants are very certainly not "real" in the same sense as Balzac's in _Les Paysans_; they are not merely represented with a sympathy which is as strong as his antipathy, but are made out to be amiable, tender-hearted, and sensitively delicate in their feelings; they are to real French peasants what the shepherds of Theocritus were to the real shepherds of Greece. Nevertheless, these tales have one merit which they owe entirely to their subject-matter and which George Sand's other novels lack--they possess the charm, always rare, but doubly rare in French literature, of naïveté. All that there was of the peasant girl, of the country child, in George Sand; everything in her which was akin to the plants that grow, to the breeze that blows, knowing not whence it cometh nor whither it goeth; all that which, unconscious and dumb, was so legible in her countenance and behaviour, but was so often nullified in her works by sentimentality and phrase-mongering, revealed itself here in its childlike simplicity.