"Je suis bien d'âge à être votre mère, car j'ai 55 ans, et j'ai de bonnes mains bien adroites, mais pas belles du tout."

Autograph letter signed by George Sand addressed to Ernest Feydeau. Four pages written in blue ink on a double sheet bearing, at the head of the first page, the sender's blind stamp.
This letter was published in the complete correspondence of George Sand established by Georges Lubin.
Fine and lengthy letter discussing literature and friendship between writers.
Initially a stockbroker and specialist in Antiquity, Ernest Feydeau launched himself late into fiction. Anxious to occupy a literary space in which he did not feel justly appreciated, he used his connections and maintained a regular epistolary relationship with illustrious correspondents such as Gustave Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve and George Sand, to whom he sent drafts of his novels and whose opinions he sought. This letter forms Sand's response after having just finished reading Daniel, Feydeau's second novel. George Sand, then at the height of her literary career, describes herself thus: "I am quite old enough to be your mother, for I am 55 years old, and I have good hands quite skillful, but not beautiful at all. I have earned the right to no longer be coquettish, I have been quite reproached for never having been so. I will tell you anything about myself that you wish."
As was her habit, much solicited by her peers, she delivers a very detailed critique of the text her colleague submits to her: "I am not against sentences that jar, where they need to jar, but I am not for harmony being sacrificed to rhythm. Nor am I for the contrary. Understand me well, I only blame what is too noticeable, what reveals the technique. Do not touch the passages you speak of, they are excellent. And, in sum, I will not insist furiously on the question of form in style, seeing that if the qualities of yours should disappear with what sometimes seems to me a flaw, I would be in despair at having pointed out the flaw." Herself very close to Flaubert whom she nicknamed her "leaden bottom," Sand seems delighted that the two men know each other: "I do not have time. But I will have time to receive you when you are free, you must come with Flaubert who also has in me an enchanted reader and a wholehearted literary friend. I did not know he was your friend, and I am pleased that he is." The friendship goes so far that Sand soon brings the two writers together, placing them on complete equal footing: "It is no misfortune for you, any more than for Flaubert, to belong to the race of seers." A form of solidarity then establishes itself in the face of critical adversity: "All this is felt better than it can be said, and that is why criticism loses its reason three-quarters of the time." For criticism has had the misfortune of labeling Feydeau, as it did with Flaubert, a realist: "People have taken it upon themselves to baptize your manner and his as realism. I do not know why; unless realism is something entirely different from what the first adherents attempted to explain to us. I suspect, indeed, that there is a way of envisaging the reality of things and beings, which is great progress, and you bring triumphant proof of it. But the name realism does not suit, because art is a multiple, infinite interpretation. It is the artist who creates reality within himself, his own reality, and not that of another. Two painters paint the portrait of the same person. Both create a work that represents the person, if they are both masters. And yet the two paintings do not resemble each other. What has become of reality?" This long diatribe - a true manifesto - forms a powerful testimony to the repulsion of George Sand and Flaubert for theorists, obsessed with the idea of classifying literature according to a "system that [...] blinds".