CHAPTER VIII.
NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN.
By her novels classed as "socialistic," Madame Sand had, as we have seen, incurred the public hostility of those whom her doctrines alarmed. And yet her "communist" heroes and heroines are the most pacific and inoffensive of social influences. They merely aspire to isolate themselves, and personally to practise principles and virtues of the highest order; unworldliness such as, if general, might indeed turn the earth into the desired Utopia. Nothing can be said against their example, unless that it is too good, and that there is little hope of its being widely followed.
Charges of another sort, no less bitter, and though exaggerated somewhat better founded, assailed her after the appearance in 1847 of Lucrezia Floriani, a novel of character-analysis entirely, but into which she was accused of having introduced an unflattering portrait of Frédéric Chopin, whose long and long-
