The Twilight of the Idols · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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_George Sand._—I have been reading the first “_Lettres d’un Voyageur_:” like everything that springs from Rousseau’s influence it is false, made-up, blown out, and exaggerated! I cannot endure this bright wall-paper style, any more than I can bear the vulgar striving after generous feelings. The worst feature about it is certainly the coquettish adoption of male attributes by this female, after the manner of ill-bred schoolboys. And how cold she must have been inwardly all the while, this insufferable artist! She wound herself up like a clock—and wrote. As cold as Hugo and Balzac, as cold as all Romanticists are as soon as they begin to write! And how self-complacently she must have lain there, this prolific ink-yielding cow. For she had something German in her (German in the bad sense), just as Rousseau, her master, had;—something which could only have been possible when French taste was declining!—and Renan adores her!...
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.