The letters from Venice, and still more those written after her return to France, tell the understanding reader how humiliated George Sand felt by the loss of De Musset's friendship, how sadly she missed it, and what a fictitious account of the whole episode it was which she gave to the public some twenty years later in _Elle et Lui_. There is little doubt that there were times when she felt utterly overwhelmed with longing, shame, and grief. In a letter to Rollinat written in January 1835, there is a significant and, as far as I know, hitherto unnoticed passage, which, beautiful in itself, also contains a confession:
"Listen to a tale and weep! There was once an excellent artist, by name Watelet, who etched better than any other man of his day. He loved Marguerite Le Conte, and taught her to etch as well as himself. She left her husband, her home, and everything she possessed, to live with Watelet. The world condemned them, but, as they were poor and modest, it forgot them. Forty years later an idle wanderer in the neighbourhood of Paris found, in a little house called Moulin-Joli, an old man who etched and an old woman whom he called his 'meunière,' and who etched too, seated at the same table. The idler who made the wonderful discovery told others, and the fashionable world flocked to see this marvellous phenomenon--a love which had lasted for forty years; an occupation which had been pursued all that time with the same industry and the same devotion; two admirable twin talents. The thing made a great sensation. Fortunately the couple died of old age a few days later; the prying crowd would have spoilt everything. The last thing they etched was a drawing of Moulin-Joli, Marguerite's house.... It hangs in my room, above the portrait of a person whom no one here has ever seen. For a whole year he who left me this portrait sat working with me every night at a little table.... At daybreak each examined the other's work and criticised it, and we supped at the same little table, talking of art, of thoughts and feelings, and of the future. The future has broken its promise to us. Pray for me, O Marguerite Le Conte!"
This is perhaps the only occasion on which George Sand writes as if she owed anything to Alfred de Musset in her capacity as authoress.[4] I have already indicated the nature of his influence upon her. It was purely critical; it sharpened her aesthetic sense. His artistic method was powerless to affect her. To any direct influence upon her style George Sand was completely unreceptive. Madame Girardin's witty hit at her: "It is especially when the works of women authors are in question that we may say with Buffon, 'Le style, c'est l'homme,'" is as incorrect as it is amusing. For though it is, almost without exception, the case that each of George Sand's most important novels bears marks of the influence of a different man, yet the influence never extends to the style. Again and again she makes herself the organ of another's ideas, but never does she imitate another's style. Her talent was too independent for this, and she was moreover too little of the artist. She who was so silent, and, when she did speak, so laconic, was the improvisatrice when she wrote. She let her pen run over the paper without making preparatory studies, without thought of models, without conscious artistic aim; she never treated a given theme, or elaborated and completed a stylistic suggestion thrown out by another;--in short, she submitted to none of the conditions upon which purely technical progress in any art depends. In this she forms a marked contrast to De Musset. He was, at first, inspired by a spirit of revolt against conventions and rules in art, which was always incomprehensible to her. He intentionally spoiled the rhymes in his first poems, to make sure of annoying the Classicists. (In the first sketch of _L'Andalouse_, the Marchioness was called Amaémoni, which in French rhymes correctly with "bruni," but in the final version she received the name of Amaégui, which hardly rhymes.) When his creative capacity was on the wane, he calmly employed seven pages of Carmontelle's Proverbe, _Le Distrait_, in the manufacture of his weak little comedy, _On ne saurait penser à tout_. In his best period he was a master of the art of delicate plagiarism. I may mention, as an example, that I have found in the Prince de Ligne's works his stylistic model for the beautiful poem, "Après une lecture," quoted in a previous chapter.[5] A similar discovery in connection with George Sand would be an impossibility. She is incapable of polishing the rough diamonds of others into brilliants for the adornment of her own muse; she presents us that muse clad in simple white, with a wild flower in her hair.