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Famous Women: George Sand

by Bertha Thomas · English · Gutenberg #28209 · 409,648 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Famous Women: George Sand

Author: Bertha Thomas


        
Release date: February 27, 2009 [eBook #28209]

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Delphine Lettau, Chuck Greif and the Online
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        file was produced from images generously made available
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAMOUS WOMEN: GEORGE SAND ***




Produced by Delphine Lettau, Chuck Greif and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)









[Illustration: _FAMOUS WOMEN_]

GEORGE SAND.

BY

BERTHA THOMAS.

BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1883.

_Copyright, 1883_,
BY ROBERTS BROTHERS.

UNIVERSITY PRESS:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.




PREFATORY NOTE.


The authentic materials available for an account of the life of George
Sand, although lately increased by the publication of a large part of
her correspondence, are still incomplete. Her memoirs by her own hand,
dealing fully with her early life alone, remain unsupplemented by any
entire and detailed biography, for which, indeed, the time seems hardly
yet come. Hence one among many obvious difficulties in the way of this
attempt to prepare for English readers a brief sketch that shall at
least indicate all the more salient features of a life of singularly
varied aspect.

Much, though of interest in itself, must here be omitted, as beyond the
scope of the present study. There are points again into which, as
touching persons still living or quite recently deceased, it would be
premature to enter. But none seem of such importance as to forbid the
endeavor, by a careful review of those facts in the life of George Sand
which most justly represent her character as a whole, and were the
determining influences on her career and on her work, to arrive at truth
and completeness of general outline, the utmost it is possible to hope
to accomplish in this little volume.

BERTHA THOMAS.




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER I.

EARLY YEARS

CHAPTER II.

GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE

CHAPTER III.

DEBUT IN LITERATURE

CHAPTER IV.

LELIA--ITALIAN JOURNEY

CHAPTER V.

MENTAL DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER VI.

SOLITUDE, SOCIETY AND SOCIALISM

CHAPTER VII.

CONSUELO--HOME LIFE AT NOHANT  149

CHAPTER VIII.

NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN  170

CHAPTER IX.

PASTORAL TALES

CHAPTER X.

PLAYS AND LATER NOVELS

CHAPTER XI.

ARTIST AND MORALIST

CHAPTER XII.

LATER YEARS




GEORGE SAND.




CHAPTER I.

EARLY YEARS.


In naming George Sand we name something more exceptional than even a
great genius. Her rise to eminence in the literature of her century, is,
if not without a parallel, yet absolutely without a precedent, in the
annals of women of modern times.

The origin of much that is distinctive in the story of her life may be
traced in the curious story of her lineage.

George Sand was of mixed national descent, and in her veins ran the
blood of heroes and of kings. The noble and the artist, the
_bourgeoisie_ and the people, all had their representatives among their
immediate ancestors. Her grandmother, the guardian of her girlhood, was
the child of Maurice, Marshal Saxe, that favorite figure in history and
romance, himself son of the famous Augustus II., Elector of Saxony, and
King of Poland, and the Swedish Countess Aurora von Koenigsmark. The
Marshal's daughter Aurore, though like her father of illegitimate
birth--her mother, who was connected with the stage, passed by her
professional name of Mlle. Verrieres--obtained after the Marshal's death
the acknowledgment and protection of his relatives in high places,
notably of his niece, the Dauphin of France, grand-daughter of Augustus
of Poland, and mother of the three kings--Louis XVI., Louis XVIII., and
Charles X.

Carefully educated at St. Cyr, Mlle. de Saxe was married, when little
more than a child, to the Count de Horn, who was also of partly royal
but irregular origin. He very shortly afterward fell in a duel. His
widow, at thirty, became the wife of M. Dupin de Franceuil, an old
gentleman of good provincial family and some fortune. Maurice, their
only child, was the father of George Sand.

Madame Dupin (the suffix de Franceuil was afterwards dropped by her
husband) appears to have inherited none of the adventurous and erratic
tendencies of her progenitors. Aristocratic in her sympathies,
philosophic in her intellect, and strictly decorous in her conduct,
throughout the whole of her long and checkered life she was regarded
with respect. Left a widow again, ten years after her second marriage,
she concentrated her hopes and affections on her handsome and amiable
son Maurice. Though fondly attached to her, he was yet to be the cause
of her heaviest sorrows, by his more than hazardous marriage, and by his
premature and tragical fate.

His strongest natural leanings seem to have been towards art in general,
music and the drama in particular, and of his facile, buoyant, artist
temperament there is ample evidence; but the political conditions of
France under the Directory in 1798 left him no choice but to enter the
army, where he served under Dupont, winning his commission on the field
of Marengo in 1800. It was during this Italian campaign that the young
officer met with the woman who, four years later, became his wife, and
the mother of his illustrious child.

Mademoiselle Sophie Victorie Delaborde, was, emphatically speaking, a
daughter of the people. Her father had been a poor bird-seller at Paris,
where she herself had worked as a milliner. Left unprotected at a very
early age, thoroughly uneducated and undisciplined, gifted with
considerable beauty, and thrown on the world at a time when the very
foundations of society seemed to be collapsing, she had been exposed to
extreme dangers, and without any of the ordinary safeguards against
them. That she proved herself not undeserving of the serious attachment
with which she inspired Maurice Dupin, her least favorable judges were
afterwards forced to admit; though, at the time this infatuation of the
lieutenant of six-and-twenty for one four years his senior, and of the
humblest extraction, and whose life hitherto had not been blameless, was
naturally regarded as utterly disastrous by his elders.

The devoted pair were married secretly at Paris in 1804; and on the 5th
of July in the same year--the last of the French Republic and the first
of the Empire--their daughter entered the world, receiving the name of
Amantine-Lucile-Aurore.

The discovery of the _mesalliance_ she had been dreading for some time,
and which her son had not dared to confess to her, was a heavy blow to
old Madame Dupin. However, she schooled herself to forgive what was
irrevocable, and to acknowledge this most unwelcome daughter-in-law, the
infant Aurore helping unconsciously to effect the reconciliation. But
for more than three years M. Dupin's mother and his wife scarcely ever
met. Madame Dupin _mere_ was living in a retired part of the country, in
the very centre of France, on the little property of Nohant, which she
had bought with what the Revolution had left her out of her late
husband's fortune. Maurice, now Captain Dupin and _aide-de-camp_ to
Murat, resided, when not on service, in Paris, where he had settled with
his wife and child. The union, strange though it may seem, continued to
be a happy one. Besides a strong attachment there existed a real
conformity of disposition between the two. The mother of George Sand was
also, in her way, a remarkable woman. She has been described by her
daughter as "a great artist lost for want of development"; showing a
wonderful dexterity in whatever she put her hand to, no matter if
practiced in it or not. "She tried everything, and always
succeeded"--sewing, drawing, tuning the piano--"she would have made
shoes, locks, furniture, had it been necessary." But her tastes were
simple and domestic. Though married out of her rank, she was entirely
without any vain ambition to push herself into fashionable society, the
constraint of which, moreover, she could not bear. "She was a woman for
the fire-side, or for quick, merry walks and drives. But in the house or
out of doors, what she wanted was intimacy and confidence, complete
sincerity in her relations with those around her, absolute liberty in
her habits and the disposal of her time. She always led a retired life,
more anxious to keep aloof from tiresome acquaintance than to seek such
as might be advantageous. That was just the foundation of my father's
character; and in this respect never was there a better-assorted couple.
They could never be happy except in their own little _menage_.
Everywhere out of it they had to stifle their melancholy yawns, and they
have transmitted to me that secret shyness which has always made the gay
world intolerable, and home a necessity to me."

In a modest _bourgeois_ habitation in the Rue Meslay, afterwards
transferred to the Rue Grange-Bateliere, Aurore Dupin's infancy passed
tranquilly away, under the wing of her warmly affectionate mother who,
though utterly illiterate, showed intuitive tact and skill in fostering
the child's intelligence. "Mine," says her daughter, "made no
resistance; but was never beforehand with anything, and might have been
very much behindhand if left to itself."

Aurore was not four years old when adventures began for her in earnest.
In the spring of 1808, her father was at Madrid, in attendance upon
Murat; and Madame Maurice Dupin, becoming impatient of prolonged
separation from her husband, started off with her little girl to join
him. The hazards and hardships of the expedition, long mountain drives
and wild scenery, strange fare and strange sights, could not fail
vividly to impress the child, whose imagination from her cradle was
extraordinarily active. Her mother ere this had discovered that Aurore,
then little more than a baby, and pent up within four chairs to keep her
out of harm's way, would make herself perfectly happy, plucking at the
basket-work and babbling endless fairy tales to herself, confused and
diluted versions of the first fictions narrated to her. A picturesque
line in a nursery song was enough to bring before her a world of
charming wonders; the figures, birds, and flowers on a Sevres china
candelabrum would call up enchanting landscapes; and the sound of a
flageolet played from some distant attic start a train of melodious
fancies and throw her into musical raptures. Her daily experiences,
after reaching Madrid with her mother, continued to be novel and
exciting in the extreme. The palace of the Prince de la Paix, where
Murat and his suite had their quarters, was to her the realization of
the wonder-land of Perrault and d'Aulnoy; Murat, the veritable Prince
Fanfarinet. She was presented to him in a fancy court-dress, devised for
the occasion by her mother, an exact imitation of her father's uniform
in miniature, with spurs, sword, and boots, all complete. The Prince
was amused by the jest, and took a fancy to the child, calling her his
little _aide-de-camp_. After a residence of several weeks in this abode,
whose splendor was alloyed by not a little discomfort and squalor, the
return-journey had to be accomplished in the height of summer, amid
every sort of risk; past reeking battle-fields, camps, sacked and
half-burnt villages and beleaguered cities. Captain Dupin succeeded,
however, in escorting his family safely back into France again, the
party halting to recruit awhile under his mother's roof.

Nohant, a spot that has become as famous through its associations as
Abbotsford, lies about three miles from the little town of La Chatre, in
the department of the Indre, part of the old province of Berry. The
manor is a plain gray house with steep mansard roofs, of the time of
Louis XVI. It stands just apart from the road, shaded by trees, beside a
pleasure ground of no vast extent, but with its large flower-garden and
little wood allowed to spread at nature's bidding, quite in the English
style. Behind the house cluster a score of cottages of the scattered
hamlet of Nohant; in the centre rises the smallest of churches, with a
tiny cemetery hedged around and adjoining the wall of the manor garden.

At this country home the tired travellers gladly alighted; but they had
barely a few weeks in which to recover from the fatigues of their
Spanish campaign, when a terrible calamity overwhelmed the household.
Maurice Dupin, riding home one night from La Chatre, was thrown from his
horse and killed on the spot.

The story of Aurore Dupin's individual life opens at once with the death
of her father--a loss she was still too young to comprehend, but for
which she was soon to suffer through the strange, the anomalous
position, in which it was to place her. Maurice Dupin's patrician mother
and her plebeian daughter-in-law, bereft thus violently of him who had
been the only possible link between them, found themselves hopelessly,
actively, and increasingly at variance. Their tempers clashed, their
natures were antipathetic, their views contradictory, their positions
irreconcilable. Aurore was not only thrust into an atmosphere of strife,
but condemned to the apple of discord. She was to grow up between two
hostile camps, each claiming her obedience and affection.

The beginning was smooth, and the sadness which alone kept the peace was
not allowed to weigh on the child. She ran wild in the garden, the
country air and country life strengthening a naturally strong
constitution; and her intelligence, though also allowed much freedom in
its development, was not neglected. A preceptor was on the spot in the
person of the fourth inmate of Nohant, an old pedagogue, Deschartres by
name, formerly her father's tutor, who had remained in Madame Dupin's
service as "intendant." The serio-comic figure of this personage, so
graphically drawn by George Sand herself in the memoirs of her early
life, will never be forgotten by any reader of those reminiscences.
Pedant, she says, was written in every line of his countenance and every
movement that he made. He was possessed of some varied learning, much
narrow prejudice, and a violent, crotchety temper, but had proved during
the troubles of the Revolution his sincere and disinterested devotion to
the family he served, and Aurore and "the great man," as she afterwards
nicknamed her old tutor, were always good friends.

Before she was four years old she could read quite well; but she remarks
that it was only after learning to write that what she read began to
take a definite meaning for her. The fairy-tales perused but half
intelligently before were re-read with a new delight. She learnt grammar
with Deschartres, and from her grandmother took her first lessons in
music, an art of which she became passionately fond; and it always
remained for her a favourite source of enjoyment, though she never
acquired much proficiency as a musical performer. The educational
doctrines of Rousseau had then brought into fashion a _regime_ of
open-air exercise and freedom for the young, such as we commonly
associate with English, rather than French, child-life; and Aurore's
early years--when domestic hostilities and nursery tyrannies, from
which, like most sensitive children, she suffered inordinately, were
suspended--were passed in the careless, healthy fashion approved in this
country. A girl of her own age, but of lower degree, was taken into the
house to share her studies and pastimes. Little Ursule was to become, in
later years, the faithful servant of her present companion, who had then
become lady of the manor, and who never lost sight of this humble
friend. Aurore had also a boy playmate in a _protege_ of her
grandmother's, five years her senior, who patronised and persecuted her
by turns, in his true fraternal fashion. This boy, Hippolyte, the son of
a woman of low station, was in fact Aurore's half-brother, adopted from
his birth and brought up by Madame Dupin the elder, whose indulgence,
where her son was concerned, was infinite. With these, and the children
of the farm-tenants and rural proprietors around, Aurore did not want
for companions. But the moment soon arrived when the painful family
dispute of which she was the object, was to become the cause of more
distress to the child than to her elders. There were reasons which stood
in the way of Madame Maurice Dupin's fixing her residence permanently
under her mother-in-law's roof. But the mind of the latter was set on
obtaining the guardianship of her grand-daughter, the natural heir to
her property, and on thus assuring to her social and educational
privileges of a superior order. The child's heart declared unreservedly
for her mother, whose passionate fondness she returned with the added
tenderness of a deeper nature, and all attempts to estrange the two had
only drawn them closer together. But the pecuniary resources of Maurice
Dupin's widow were of the smallest, and the advantages offered to her
little girl by the proposed arrangement so material, that the older lady
gained her point in the end. Madame Maurice settled in Paris. Aurore
grew up her grandmother's ward, with Nohant for her home; a home she was
to keep, knowing no other, till the end of her life.

The separation was brought about very gradually to the child. The first
few winters were spent in Paris, where her grandmother had an
establishment. Then she could pass whole days with her mother, who, in
turn, spent summers at Nohant, and Aurore for years was buoyed up by the
hope that a permanent reunion would still be brought about. But meantime
domestic jealousy and strife, inflamed by the unprincipled meddling of
servants, raged more fiercely than ever, and could not but be a source
of more than ordinary childish misery to their innocent object. It was
but slowly that she became attached to her grandmother, whose
undemonstrative temper, formal habits and condescending airs were little
calculated to win over her young affections, or fire her with gratitude
for the anxiety displayed by this guardian to form her manners and
cultivate her intellect. Nay, the result was rather to implant in her a
premature dislike and distrust for conventional ideals. From the
standard of culture and propriety, from the temptations of social rank
and wealth held up for her preference, she instinctively turned to the
simple, unrestrained affection of the despised mother, and the greater
freedom and expansion enjoyed in such company. In vain did disdainful
lady's-maids try to taunt her into precocious worldly wisdom, asking if
she could really want to go and eat beans in a little garret. Such a
condition, naturally, she began to regard as the equivalent of a noble
and glorious existence!

Meantime, throughout all these alternations of content and distress,
Nohant and its surroundings were perforce becoming dear to her, as only
the home of our childhood can ever become. The scenery and
characteristics of that region are familiar to all readers of the works
of George Sand; a quiet region of narrow, winding, shady lanes, where
you may wander long between the tall hedges without meeting a living
creature but the wild birds that start from the honey-suckle and
hawthorn, and the frogs croaking among the sedges; a region of
soft-flowing rivers with curlew-haunted reed beds, and fields where
quails cluck in the furrows; the fertile plain studded with clumps of
ash and alder, and a rare farm-habitation standing amid orchards and
hemp-fields, or a rarer hamlet of a dozen cottages grouped together. The
country is flat, and, viewed from the rail or high road, unimpressive.
But those fruitful fields have a placid beauty, and it needs but to
penetrate the sequestered lanes and explore the thicket-bound courses of
the streams, to meet with plenty of those pleasant solitudes after a
poet's own heart, whose gift is to seize and perpetuate transient
effects, and to open the eyes of duller minds to charms that might pass
unnoticed. In this sense only can George Sand be said to have idealized
for us the landscapes she loved.

The thoughtful, poetic side of her temperament showed itself early,
leading her to seek long intervals of solitude, when she would bury
herself in books or dreams, to satisfy the cravings of her intellect and
imagination. On the other hand, her vigorous physical organization kept
alive her taste for active amusements and merry companionship. So the
child-squire romped on equal terms with the little rustics of Nohant,
sharing their village sports and the occupations of the seasons as they
came round: hay-making and gleaning in summer; in winter weaving
bird-nets to spread in the snowy fields for the wholesale capture of
larks; anon listening with mixed terror and delight to the picturesque
legends told by the hemp-beaters, as they sat at their work out of doors
on September moonlight evenings--to all the traditional ghost-stories of
the "Black Valley," as she fancifully christened the country round
about. Tales were these of fantastic animals and goblins, the
_grand'-bete_ and the _levrette blanche_, Georgeon, that imp of
mischief, night apparitions of witches and charmers of wolves, singing
Druidical stones and mysterious portents--a whole fairy mythology, then
firmly believed in by the superstitious peasantry.

As a signal contrast to this way of life came for a time the annual
visits to Paris--suspended after she was ten years old. There liberty
ended, and the girl was transported into a novel and most uncongenial
sphere. Her grandmother's friends and relatives were mostly old people,
who clung to antiquated modes and customs; and distinguished though such
circles might be, the youngest member only found out that they were
intolerably dull. The wrinkled countesses with their elaborate toilettes
and ceremonious manners, the _abbes_ with their fashionable
tittle-tattle and their innumerable snuff-boxes, the long dinners, the
accomplishment-lessons, notably those in dancing and deportment, were
repugnant to the soul of the little hoyden. She made amends to herself
by observing these new scenes and characters narrowly, with the acute
natural perception that was one of her leading gifts. From this
artificial atmosphere of constraint, it was inevitable that she should
welcome hours of escape into her mother's unpretending domestic circle;
and already at ten years old she had pronounced the lot of a
scullery-maid enviable, compared to that of an old _marquise_.

Nevertheless the fact of her having, at an age when impressions are
strongest, and most lasting, mixed freely and on equal terms with the
upper classes of society, was a point in her education not without its
favorable action on her afterwards as a novelist. Despite her firm
republican sympathies, emphatic disdain for mere rank and wealth, and
her small mercy for the foibles of the fashionable world, she can enter
into its spirit, paint its allurements without exaggeration, and
indicate its shortcomings with none of that asperity of the outsider
which always suggests some unconscious envy lurking behind the scorn.

The despised accomplishment-lessons, in themselves tending only to so
much agreeable dabbling, proved useful to her indirectly by creating new
interests, and as an intellectual stimulus. There seems to have been
little or no method about her early education. The study of her own
language was neglected, and the time spent less profitably, she
considered in acquiring a smattering of Latin with Deschartres. She took
to some studies with avidity, while others remained wholly distasteful
to her. For mere head-work she cared little. Arithmetic she detested;
versification, no less. Her imagination rebelled against the
restrictions of form. Nowhere, perhaps, except in the free-fantasia
style of the novel, could this great prose-poet have found the right
field in which to do justice to her powers. The dry _technique_ in music
was a stumbling-block of which she was impatient. History and literature
she enjoyed in whatever they offered that was romantic, heroic, or
poetically suggestive. In her Nohant surroundings there was nothing to
check, and much to stimulate, this dominant, imaginative faculty. Her
youthful attempts at original composition she quickly discarded in
disgust; but it seemed almost a law of her mind that whatever was
possessing it she must instinctively weave into a romance. Thus in
writing her history-epitome she must improve on the original, when too
dry, by exercising her fancy in the description of places and
personages. The actual political events of that period were of the most
exciting character; Napoleon's Russian campaign, abdication, retreat to
Elba, the Hundred Days, Waterloo, the Restoration, following each other
in swift succession. Old Madame Dupin was an anti-Bonapartist, but
Aurore had caught from her mother something of the popular infatuation
for the emperor, and her fancy would create him over again, as he might
have been had his energies been properly directed. Her day-dreams were
often so vivid as to effect her senses with all the force of realities.

Such a visionary life might have been most dangerous and mentally
enervating had her organization been less robust, and the tendency to
reverie not been matched by lively external perception and plentiful
physical activity. As it was, if at one moment she was in a cloud-land
of her own, or poring over the stories of the Iliad, the classic
mythologies, or Tasso's _Gerusalemme_, the next would see her scouring
the fields with Ursule and Hippolyte, playing practical jokes on the
tutor, and extemporizing wild out-of-door games and dances with her
village companions.

Of serious religious education she received none at all. Here, again,
the authorities were divided. Her mother was pious in a primitive way,
though holding aloof from priestly influences. The grandmother, a
disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of Voltaire, had renounced the
Catholic creed, and was what was then called a Deist. But beyond
discouraging a belief in miraculous agencies she preserved a neutrality
with her ward on the subject, and Aurore was left free to drift as her
nature should decide. Instinctively she felt more drawn toward her
mother's unreasoning, emotional faith than toward a system of
philosophic, critical inquiry. But on both sides what was offered her to
worship was too indefinite to satisfy her strong religious instincts.
Once more she filled in the blank with her imagination, which was
forthwith called upon to picture a being who should represent all
perfections, human and divine; something that her heart could love, as
well as her intelligence approve.

This ideal figure, for whom she devised the name _Corambe_, was to
combine all the spiritual qualities of the Christian ideal with the
earthly grace and beauty of the mythological deities of Greece. For very
many years she cherished this fantasy, finding there the scope she
sought for her aspirations after superhuman excellence. It is hardly too
much to say that the Christianity which had been expressly left out in
her teaching she invented for herself. She erected a woodland altar in
the recesses of a thicket to this imaginary object of her adoration, and
it is a characteristic trait that the sacrifices she chose to offer
there were the release of birds and butterflies that had been taken
prisoners--as a symbolical oblation most welcome to a divinity whose
essential attributes were infinite mercy and love. It will be remembered
that a somewhat similar anecdote is related of the youthful Goethe.

Aurore, as the years went on, had grown sincerely fond of Madame Dupin;
but her mother still held the foremost place in her heart, and she had
never ceased to cherish the belief that if they two could live together
she would be perfectly happy. The discovery of this deeply irritated her
grandmother, who at length was provoked to intimate to the girl
something of the real motive for insisting on this separation--namely,
that her mother's antecedents were such as, in the eyes of Aurore's
well-wishers, rendered it desirable to establish the daughter's
existence apart from that of her parent. Sooner or later such a
revelation must have been made; but made as it was, thus precipitately,
in a moment of jealous anger, the chief result was of necessity to cause
a painful and dangerous shock to the sensitive young mind. It brought
about an unnatural discord in her moral nature, forbidden all at once to
respect what she had loved most, and must continue to love, in spite of
all. On the injurious effects of the over-agitation to which she was
subjected in her childhood she has laid much stress in her remarkable
work, "The Story of My Life." Much of this book, written when she was
between forty and fifty, reads like a romance; and had a certain amount
of retrospective imagination entered into the treatment of these
reminiscences it would not be surprising. The tendency to impart
poetical color and significance to whatever was capable of taking it was
her mastering impulse, and may sometimes have led her to lose the
distinction between fancy and reality, especially as by her own
confession her memory was never her strong point. But she had an
excellent memory for impressions, and no reader whose own recollections
of childhood have not grown faint, but will feel the profound truth of
the spirit of the narrative, which is of a kind that occasional
exaggerations in the letter cannot depreciate in value as a
psychological history. For an account of her early life it must always
remain the most important source.

Aurore was now thirteen, and though she had read a good deal of
miscellaneous literature her instruction had been mostly of a desultory
sort; she was behindhand in the accomplishments deemed desirable for
young ladies; and her country manners, on the score of etiquette, left
something to be desired. To school, therefore, it was decided that she
must go; and her grandmother selected that held by the nuns of the
"English convent" at Paris, as the most fashionable institution of the
kind.

This _Convent des Anglaises_ was a British community, first established
in the French capital in Cromwell's time. It has now been removed, and
its site, the Rue St. Victor, has undergone complete transformation. In
1817, however, it was in high repute among conventual educational
establishments. To this retreat Aurore was consigned and there spent
more than two years, an untroubled time she has spoken of as in many
respects the happiest of her life. There is certainly nothing more
delightful in her memoirs than the vivid picture there drawn of the
convent-school interior, drawn without flattery or malice, and with
sympathy and animation.

The nunnery was an extensive building of rambling construction--with
parts disused and dilapidated--quite a little settlement, counting some
150 inmates, nuns, pupils and teachers; with cells and dormitories, long
corridors, chapels, kitchens, distillery, spiral staircases and
mysterious nooks and corners; a large garden planted with chestnut
trees, a kitchen garden, and a little cemetery without gravestones,
over-grown with evergreens and flowers. The sisters were all English,
Irish, or Scotch, but the majority of the pupils and the secular
mistresses were French. Of the nuns the ex-scholar speaks with respect
and affection, but their religious exercises left them but the smaller
share of their time and attention to devote to the pupils. The girls
almost without exception were of high social rank, the _bourgeois_
element as yet having scarcely penetrated this exclusive seminary.
Aurore formed warm friendships with many of her school-fellows, and
seems to have been decidedly popular with the authorities as well, in
spite of the high spirits which amid congenial company found vent in
harmless mischief and a sort of organized playful insubordination. The
school had two parties: the _sages_ or good girls, and the _diables_,
their opposites. Among the latter Aurore conscientiously enrolled
herself and became a leader in their escapades, acquiring the sobriquet
of "Madcap." These outbreaks led to nothing more heinous than playing
off tricks on a tyrannical mistress, or making raids on the forbidden
ground of the kitchen garden. But the charm that held together the
confraternity of _diables_ was a grand, long-cherished design, to which
their best energy and ingenuity were devoted--a secret, heroic-sounding
enterprise, set forth as "the deliverance of the victim." A tradition
existed among them that a captive was kept languishing miserably in some
remote cell, and they had set themselves the task of discovering and
liberating this hapless wretch.

It is needless to say that prisoner and dungeon existed in their
girlishly romantic brains alone, but easy to see how such a legend might
possess itself of their imaginations, and to what bewitching exploits it
might invite firm believers. The supervision was not so very strict but
that a _diable_ of spirit might sometimes play truant from the
class-room unnoticed. The truants would then start on an exciting
journey of discovery through the tortuous passages, exploring the
darkest recesses of the more deserted portions of the convent; now
penetrating into the vaults, now adventuring on the roofs, regardless
of peril to life or limb. This sublimely ridiculous undertaking,
half-sport, half-earnest, so fascinated Aurore as to become the most
important occupation of her mind!

The teaching provided for the young ladies appears to have been of the
customary superficial order--of everything a little; a little music, a
little drawing, a little Italian. With English she had the opportunity
of becoming really conversant, as it was the language commonly spoken in
the convent, where also she could not fail to acquire some insight into
the English character. This she has treated more fairly than England for
long was to treat her. Few of her gifted literary countrymen have done
such justice to the sterling good qualities of our nation. Even when, in
delineating the Briton, she caricatures those peculiarities with which
he is accredited abroad, her blunders seem due to incomplete knowledge
rather than to any inability to comprehend the spirit of a people with
whom, indeed, she had many points of sympathy. She could penetrate that
coldness and constraint of manner so repelling to French natures, and
has said of us, with unconventional truth, that our character is in
reality more vehement than theirs; but with less mastery over our
emotions themselves, we have more mastery over the expression of our
emotions. Among her chosen school-comrades were several English girls,
but on leaving the convent their paths separated, and in her after life
she had but rare opportunities for renewing these early friendships.

Some eighteen months had elapsed in this fashion when Aurore began to
tire of _diablerie_. The victim remained undiscoverable. The store of
practical jokes was exhausted. Her restless spirit, pent up within those
convent walls, was thirsting for a new experience,--something to fill
her heart and life.

It came in the dawn of a religious enthusiasm--different from her
mystical dream of _Corambe_, which however poetical was out of harmony
with the spirit and ritual of a Catholic convent. But monastic life had
its poetical aspects also; and through these it was that its
significance first successfully appealed to her. An evening in the
chapel, a Titian picture representing Christ on the Mount of Olives, a
passage chanced upon in the "Lives of the Saints," brought impressions
that awoke in her a new fervor, and inaugurated a period of ardent
Catholicism. All vagueness was gone from her devotional aspirations,
which now acquired a direct personal import. The change brought a
revolution in her general behavior. She was understood to have been
"converted." "Madcap" was now nicknamed "Sainte Aurore" by her profane
school-fellows, and she formed the serious desire and intention of
becoming a nun.

The sisters, a practical-minded community, behaved with great good sense
and discretion. Without distressing the youthful proselyte by casting
doubts on her "vocation," they reminded her that the consideration was a
distant one, as for years to come her first duty would be to her
relatives, who would never sanction her present determination. Her
confessor, the Abbe Premord, a Jesuit and man of the world, was likewise
kindly discouraging; and perceiving that her zeal was leading her to
morbid self-accusation and asceticism of mood, he shrewdly enjoined upon
her as a penance to take part in the sports and pastimes with the rest
as heretofore, much to her dismay. But she soon found her liking for
these return, and with it her health of mind. Unshaken still in her
private belief that she would take the veil in due time, she was content
to wait, and in the interval to be a useful and agreeable member of
society. No more insubordination, no more mischievous freaks, yet
"Sainte Aurore" remained the life and soul of all recreations recognized
by authority, which even included little theatrical performances now and
then.

She had become more regular in her studies since her mind had taken a
serious turn, but her heart was less in them than ever. Considering
this, and the deficiencies in the system of instruction itself, it is
hardly surprising that when, in the spring of 1820, her grandmother
fearing that the monastic idea was taking hold of Aurore in good earnest
decided to remove her from the _Couvent des Anglaises_, she knew little
more than when first she had entered it.




CHAPTER II.

GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE.


Aurore Dupin was now fifteen, and so far, though somewhat peculiarly
situated, she and her life had presented no very extraordinary features,
nor promise of the same. Her energies had flowed into a variety of
channels, and manifestly clever and accustomed to take the lead though
she might be, no one, least of all herself, seems to have thought of
regarding her as a wonder. The Lady Superior of the _Couvent des
Anglaises_, who called her "Still Waters," had perhaps an inkling of
something more than met the eye, existent in this pupil. But a dozen
years were yet to elapse before the moment came when she was to start
life afresh for herself, on a footing of independence and literary
enterprise, and by her first published attempts raise her name at once
above the names of the mass of her fellow-creatures.

Old Madame Dupin, warned by failing health that her end was not far off,
would gladly have first assured a husband's protection for her ward,
whom she had now succeeded in really dissociating from her natural
guardian. The girl's bringing-up, and an almost complete separation for
the last five years, had made a gap--in habits of mind and feeling--such
as could hardly be quite bridged over, between her mother and herself.
But though beginning to be sadly aware of this and of the increasing
violence and asperities of poor Madame Maurice Dupin's temper, which
made peace under one roof with her a matter of difficulty, Aurore hung
back from the notion of marriage, and clearly was much too young to be
urged into taking so serious a step. So to Nohant she returned from the
convent in the spring of 1820. There she continued to strike that
judicious compromise between temporal and spiritual duties and pleasures
enjoined on her by her clerical adviser. Still bent on choosing a
monastic life, when free to choose for herself, she was reconciled in
the meantime to take things as they came, and to make herself happy and
add to the happiness of her grandmother in the ordinary way. So we find
her enjoying the visit of one of her school friends, getting up little
plays to amuse the elders, practicing the harp, receiving from her
brother Hippolyte--now a noisy hussar--during his brief visit home, her
first initiation into the arts of riding--for the future her favorite
exercise--and of pistol-shooting; and last, but not least, beginning to
suspect that she had learned nothing whatever while at school, and
setting to work to educate herself, as best she could, by miscellaneous
reading.

In the spring of the following year Madame Dupin's health and mental
faculties utterly broke down. But she lived on for another ten months.
Aurore for the time was placed in a most exceptional position for a
French girl of sixteen. She was thrown absolutely on herself and her own
resources, uncontrolled and unprotected, between a helpless, half
imbecile invalid, and the eccentric, dogmatic pedagogue, Deschartres.
Highly susceptible to influences from without, her mind, during their
sudden and complete suspension, seemed as it were invited to discover
and take its own bent.

Piqued by the charge of dense ignorance flung at her by her ex-tutor,
and aware that there was truth in it, she would now sit up all night
reading, finding her appetite for the secular knowledge she used to
despise grow by what it fed upon. The phase of religious exaltation she
had recently passed through still gave the tone to her mind, and it was
with the works of famous philosophers, metaphysicians, and Christian
mystics that she began her studies. Comparing the "Imitation of Christ"
with Chateaubriand's "Spirit of Christianity," and struck here and
elsewhere with the wide discrepancies and contradictions of opinion
manifest between great minds ranging themselves under one theological
banner, she was led on to speculations that alarmed her conscience, and
she appealed to her spiritual director, the Abbe Premord, for advice,
fearing lest her faith might be endangered if she read more. He
encouraged her to persevere, telling her in no wise to deny herself
these intellectual enjoyments. But her rigid Catholicism was doomed from
that hour. Hers was that order of mind which can never give ostensible
adhesion to a creed whilst morally unconvinced; never accept that refuge
of the weak from the torment of doubt, in abdicating the functions of
reason and conscience, shifting the onus of responsibility on to others,
and agreeing to believe, as it were, by proxy. She had plunged
fearlessly and headlong into Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, Condillac, Mably,
Leibnitz, Bossuet, Pascal, Montaigne, Montesquieu; beginning to call
many things in question, and, through the darkness and confusion into
which she was sometimes thrown, trying honestly and sincerely to feel
her way to some more glorious faith and light.

In the convent she had been familiarized with Romanism under its most
attractive aspects. The moral refinement, the mystery, the seclusion,
and picturesque beauties of that abode had a poetic charm that had
carried her irresistibly away. But, confronted with the system in its
practical working, she was staggered by many of its features. In the
country churches around her she saw the peasantry encouraged in their
grossest superstitions, and the ritual, carelessly hurried through,
degenerate often into mere mockery. The practice of confession,
moreover--her ultimate condemnation of which, as an institution whose
results for good are scanty, its dangers excessive, will be endorsed by
most persons in this country--and the Church's denial of the right of
salvation to all outside its pale, revolted her; and she caught at the
teaching of those who claimed liberty of conscience. "Reading Leibnitz,"
she observes, "I became a Protestant without knowing it." That purer and
more liberal Christianity she dreamed of had, she discovered, been the
ideal of many great men. The step brought her face to face with fresh
and grave problems of which, she truly observes, the solutions were
beyond her years, and beyond that era. There came to her rare moments of
celestial calm and concord, but she owed them to other and indirect
sources of inspiration. The study of philosophy, indeed, was not much
more congenial to her at sixteen than arithmetic had been at six. In
what merely exercised memory and attention she took comparatively but
languid interest. Instruction, to bring her its full profit, must be
conveyed through the medium of moral emotion, but the mysterious power
of feeling to stimulate intellect was with her immense. She turned now
to the poets--Shakespeare, Byron, Dante, Milton, Virgil, Pope. A poet
herself, she discovered that these had more power than controversialists
to strengthen her religious convictions, as well as to enlarge her mind.
Above all, the writings of the poet-moralist, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
helped her towards resolving the question that occupied her, of her true
vocation in life, now that her determination to take the veil was not a
little shaken.

The midnight student was by turns Amazon and sick-nurse as well. From
the fatigue of long watches over her books or by the invalid's bedside,
she found a better and more invigorating refreshment than sleep in
solitary morning rides across country. Her fearlessness on horseback was
madness in the eyes of the neighbors. Riding, then and there, was almost
unheard of for ladies, a girl in a riding-habit regarded as simply a
Cossack in petticoats, and Mademoiselle Dupin's delight in
horse-exercise sufficed to stamp her as eccentric and strong-minded in
the opinion of the country gentry and the towns-folk of La Chatre. They
had heard of her studies, too, and disapproved of them as unlady-like in
character. Philosophy was bad enough, but anatomy, which she had been
encouraged to take up by Deschartres, himself a proficient in medical
science, was worse--sacrilegious, for a person understood to be
professedly of a devotional turn of mind. She went game-shooting with
the old tutor; he had a mania for the sport, which she humored though
she did not share. But when quails were the object, she owns to have
enjoyed her part in the chase, which was to crouch in the furrows among
the green corn, imitating the cry of the birds to entice them within
gunshot of the sportsman. Lastly, finding in the feminine
costume-fashions of that period a dire impediment to out-door enterprise
of the sort, in a region of no roads, or bad roads, of rivers
perpetually in flood, turning the lanes into water-courses for
three-fourths of the year, of miry fields and marshy heaths, she
procured for herself a suit of boy's clothes, donning blouse and gaiters
now and then without compunction for these rough country walks and
rambles.

Here, indeed, was more than enough to raise a hue-and-cry at La Chatre,
a small provincial town, probably neither better nor worse than the rest
of its class, a class never yet noted for charity or liberality of
judgment. The strangest stories began to be circulated concerning her,
stories for the most part so false and absurd as to inspire her with a
sweeping contempt for public opinion. By a very common phenomenon, she
was to incur throughout her life far more censure through freaks,
audacious as breaches of custom, but intrinsically harmless, nor likely
to set the fashion to others, than is often reserved for errors of a
graver nature. The conditions of ordinary middle-class society are
designed, like ready-made clothes, to fit the vast majority of human
beings, who live under them without serious inconvenience. For the
future George Sand to confine her activities within the very narrow
restrictions laid down by the social code of La Chatre was, it must be
owned, hardly to be expected. It was perhaps premature to throw down the
gauntlet at sixteen, but her inexperience and isolation were complete.
The grandmother in her dotage was no counsellor at all. Deschartres, an
oddity himself, cared for none of these things. Those best acquainted
with her at La Chatre, families the heads of which had known her father
well and whose younger members had fraternized with her from childhood
upwards, liked her none the less for her unusual proceedings, and
defended her stoutly against her detractors.

"You are losing your best friend," said her dying grandmother to her
when the end came, in December, 1821. Aurore was, indeed, placed in a
difficult and painful situation. She had inherited all the property of
the deceased, who, in her will, expressed her desire that her own
nearest relations by her marriage with M. Dupin, a family of the name of
de Villeneuve, well-off and highly connected, should succeed her as
guardians to her ward. But it was impossible to dispute the claims of
Madame Maurice Dupin to the care of her own daughter if she chose to
assert them, which she quickly did, bearing off the girl with her to
Paris--Nohant being left under the stewardship of Deschartres--and by
her unconciliatory behavior further alienating the other side of the
family from whom Aurore, through no fault of her own, was virtually
estranged at the moment when she stood most in need of a friend. Twenty
years later they came forward to claim kinship and friendship again: it
was then with George Sand, the illustrious writer, become one of the
immortals.

Thus her lot was cast for her in her mother's home and plebeian circle
of acquaintance. So much the worse, it was supposed, for her prospects,
social and matrimonial. This did not distress her, but none the less was
the time that followed an unhappy one. The mother whom she had idolized,
and of whom she always remained excessively fond, appears to have been
something of a termagant in her later years. The heavy troubles of her
life had aggravated one of those irascible and uncontrollable tempers
that can only be soothed by superior violence. Aurore, saddened, gentle,
and submissive, only exasperated her. Her fitful affection and fitful
rages combined to make her daughter's life miserable, and to incline the
girl unconsciously to look over-favorably on any recognized mode of
escape that should present itself.

A long visit to the country-house of some friends near Melun, was hailed
as a real relief by both. Here there were young people, and plenty of
cheerful society. Aurore became like one of the family, and her mother
was persuaded to allow her to prolong her stay indefinitely. Among the
new acquaintance she formed whilst on this visit was one that decided
her future.

M. Casimir Dudevant was a young man on terms of intimacy with her hosts,
the Duplessis family. From the first he was struck by Mlle. Dupin, who
on his further acquaintance was not otherwise than pleased with him.
The sequel, before long, came in an offer of marriage on his part, which
she accepted with the approval of her friends.

He was seven-and-twenty, had served in the army, and studied for the
law; but had expectations which promised an independence. His father,
Colonel Dudevant, a landed proprietor in Gascony, whose marriage had
proved childless, had acknowledged Casimir, though illegitimate, and
made him his heir. It was reckoned not a brilliant _parti_ for the
_chatelaine_ of Nohant, but a perfectly eligible one. It was not a
_mariage de convenance_; the young people had chosen freely. Still less
was it a love match. Romantic sentiment--counted out of place in such
arrangements by the society they belonged to--seems not to have been
dreamed of on either side. But they had arranged it for themselves,
which to Aurore would naturally seem, as indeed it was, an improvement
on the usual mode of procedure, according to which the burden of choice
would have rested with her guardians. It was a _mariage de raison_
founded, as she and he believed, on mutual friendliness; in reality on a
total and fatal ignorance of each other's characters, and probably, on
Aurore's side, of her own as well. She was only just eighteen, and had a
wretched home.

The match was sanctioned by their parents, respectively. In September,
1822, Aurore Dupin became Madame Dudevant, and shortly afterwards she
and her husband established themselves at Nohant, there to settle down
to quiet country life.

If tranquillity did not bring all the happiness that was expected, it
was at least unbroken by such positive trials as those to come, and
whatever was lacking to Madame Dudevant's felicity she forgot for a
while in her joy over the birth of her son Maurice, in the summer of
1823--a son for whom more than ordinary treasures of maternal affection
were in store, and who, when his childhood was past, was to become and
remain until the time of her death a sure consolation and compensation
to her for the troubles of her life.

The first two years after her marriage were spent almost without
interruption in the still monotony of Nohant. "We live here as quietly
as possible," she writes to her mother in June, 1825, "seeing very few
people, and occupying ourselves with rural cares." That absolute
dependence on each other's society that might have had its charm for a
really well-assorted couple was, however, not calculated to prolong any
illusions that might exist as to the perfect harmony of their
dispositions. Already in the summer of 1824 the Dudevants had sought a
change from seclusion in a long visit to their friends the Duplessis,
after which they rented a villa in the environs of Paris for a short
while. The spring found them back at Nohant, and the summer of 1825 was
marked by a tour to the Pyrenees, undertaken in concert with some old
school-fellows of Aurore's, two sisters, who with their father were
starting for Cauterets. The pleasure of girlish friendships renewed gave
double charm to the trip, and her delight in the mountain scenery knew
no bounds.

"I am in such a state of enthusiasm about the Pyrenees," she writes to
her mother, "that I shall dream and talk of nothing but mountains and
torrents, caves and precipices, all the rest of my life." She joined
eagerly in every excursion on foot and horseback, but even moderate
feats of mountaineering, such as are now expected of the quietest
English lady-tourists by their husbands and brothers, were then deemed
startlingly eccentric, and got her into fresh trouble on this head.

Her letters and the fragments of her journal kept during this time, and
in which she tried to commit to paper her impressions, whilst fresh and
vivid, of the Pyrenees, show the same peculiar descriptive power that
distinguished her novels--that art of seizing grand general effects
together with picturesque detail, and depicting them in a simple and
straightforward manner, in which she was an adept. It must be added that
the diffuseness which characterizes her fiction, also pervades her
correspondence. Neither can be adequately represented by extracts. Her
composition is like a gossamer web, that must be shown in its entirety,
as to split it up is to destroy it.

The ensuing winter and spring were passed agreeably in visits with her
husband to his family at Nerac, Gascony, and to friends in the
neighborhood. In the summer of 1826 their wanderings ended. Once more
they settled down at Nohant, where Madame Dudevant, except for a few
brief absences on visits to friends, or to health resorts in the
vicinity, remained stationary for the next four years, during which her
after-destiny was unalterably shaping itself.

It is perfectly idle to speculate on what might have happened had her
lot in marriage turned out a fortunate one, or had she married for love,
or had the moral character of the partner of her life preserved any
solid claim on her respect, since the contrary was unhappily the case.
Their situation, no doubt, was anomalous. In the young girl of barely
eighteen, country-bred and intellectually immature, whom M. Dudevant had
chosen to marry, who could have discerned one of the greatest poetical
geniuses and most powerful minds of the century? Some commiseration
might _a priori_ be felt for the petty squire's son who had taken the
hand of the pretty country-heiress, promising himself, no doubt, a
comfortable jog-trot existence in the ordinary groove, to discover in
after years that he was mated with the most remarkable woman that had
made herself heard of in the literary world since Sappho! But he
remained fatally blind to the nature of the development that was taking
place under his eyes, preserving to the last the serenest contempt for
his wife's intelligence. Her large mind and enthusiastic temperament
sought in vain for moral sympathy from a narrow common spirit, and in
proportion as her faculties unfolded, increasing disparity between them
brought increasing estrangement. Such a strong artist-nature may require
for its expansion an amount of freedom not easily compatible with
domestic happiness. But of real domestic happiness she never had a fair
chance, and for a time the will to make the best of her lot as it was
cast appears not to have been wanting.

The Dudevants, after their return home in 1826, began to mix more freely
in such society as La Chatre and the environs afforded, and at certain
seasons there was no lack of provincial gayeties. Aurore Dudevant all
her life long was quite indifferent to what she has summarily dismissed
as "the silly vanities of finery"--"_Souffrir pour etre belle_" was what
from her girlhood she declined to do. Regard for the brightness of her
eyes, her complexion, the whiteness of her hands, the shape of her foot,
never made her sacrifice her midnight study, her walks in the sunshine,
or her good country sabots for the rough lanes of Berry. "To live under
glass, in order not to get tanned, or chapped, or faded before the time,
is what I have always found impossible," she for her part has
acknowledged. And she cared very moderately for general society. She
writes to her mother in spring, 1826: "It is not the thing of all others
that reposes, or even that amuses me best; still there are obligations
in this life, which one must take as they come." She was not yet
two-and-twenty, and carnival-tide with its social "obligations" in the
form of balls and receptions was not unwelcome. They snatched her away
from her increasing depression. She writes of these diversions to her
mother in a lively strain, describing how one ball was kept up till nine
o'clock the next day, how every Sunday morning the _cure_ preaches
against dancing, but in the evening the dance goes on in despite of
him--how this cross _cure_ is not their own parish _cure_ of St.
Chartier,--a very old friend and a "character" who, when Madame Dudevant
was five-and-thirty, used to say of her, "Aurore is a child I have
always been fond of." "As for him, if only he were sixty years younger,"
she adds, "I would undertake to make him dance himself if I set about
it." Then follows an amusing sketch of a rustic bridal, the double
marriage of two members of the Nohant establishment:

     The wedding-feast came off in our coach-houses--there was dinner in
     one, dancing in the other. The splendor was such as you may
     imagine; three tallow candle-ends by way of illumination, lots of
     home-made wine for refreshment; the orchestra consisting of a
     bagpipe and a hurdy-gurdy, the noisiest and, therefore, the best
     appreciated in the country side. We invited some friends over from
     La Chatre, and made fools of ourselves in a hundred thousand ways;
     as, for instance, dressing up as peasants in the evening and
     disguising ourselves so well as not to recognize each other. Madame
     Duplessis was charming in a red petticoat; Ursule, in a blue blouse
     and a big hat was a most comical fellow; Casimir, got up as a
     beggar, had some halfpence given him in all good faith; Stephane,
     whom I think you know, as a spruce peasant, made believe to have
     been drinking, stumbled against our _sous-prefet_ and accosted
     him--he is a nice fellow, and was just going to depart when all of
     a sudden he recognized us. Well, it was a most farcical evening,
     and would have amused you I will engage. Perhaps you, too, would
     have been tempted to put on the country-cap, and I will answer for
     it that there would not have been a pair of black eyes to compete
     with yours.

In other letters written in a vein of charming good humor, her facility
and spirit are shown in her treatment of trivial incidents, or sketches
of local characters, as this, for example, of an ancient female servant
in her employ:

     The strangest old woman in the world--active, industrious, clean
     and faithful, but an unimaginable grumbler. She grumbles by day,
     and I think by night, when asleep. She grumbles whilst making the
     butter, she grumbles when feeding the poultry, she grumbles even at
     her meals. She grumbles at other people, and when she is alone she
     grumbles at herself. I never meet her without asking her how her
     grumbling is getting on, and she grumbles away more than ever.

And elsewhere she has her fling at the little squabbles and absurdities
of provincial society, the "sets" and petty distinctions, giving a
humorous relation of the collapse of her well-meaning efforts, in
conjunction with friends at the _sous-prefecture_, to do away with some
of these caste prejudices, of the horror and indignation created in the
oligarchy of La Chatre by the apparition of an inoffensive music-master
and his wife at the _sous-prefet's_ reception, horror so great that on
the next occasion, the _salon_ of the official was unfurnished with
guests, except for the said music-master and the Dudevants themselves.
She wrote a poetical skit to commemorate the incident, which created
great amusement among her friends.

In the autumn, 1828, her daughter Solange was born. The care of her two
children, to whom she was devoted, occupied her seriously. Maurice's
education was beginning, a fresh inducement to her to study that she
might be better able to superintend his instruction. His least
indisposition put her into a fever of anxiety. Her own health during all
these years had repeatedly given cause for alarm. Symptoms of
chest-disease showed themselves, but afterwards disappeared, her
constitutional vigor triumphing in the end over complaints which seem to
a great extent to have been of a nervous order. Meantime her domestic
horizon was becoming overcast at many points.

Her brother, Hippolyte Chatiron, now married, came with his family to
settle in the neighborhood, and spent some time at Nohant. He had fallen
into the fatal habit of drinking, in which he was joined by M. Dudevant
to the degradation of his habits and, it would be charitable to suppose,
to the confusion of his intelligence. This grave ill came to make an
open break in the household calm, hitherto undisturbed on the surface.
Low company and its brutalizing influences were tending to bring about a
state of things to which the most patient of wives might find it hard to
submit. A role of complete self-effacement was not one it was in her
power long to sustain, and the utter moral solitude into which she was
thrown consolidated those forces inclining her to the extreme of
self-assertion. For together with trials without came the growing sense
of superiority, the _ennui_ and unrest springing from mental faculties
with insufficient outlet, and moreover, denied the very shadow of
appreciation at home, where she saw the claim to her deference and
allegiance co-exist with a repudiation she resented of all idea of the
reciprocity of such engagements.

She had voluntarily handed over the management of her property--the
revenue of which was hardly proportionate to the necessary expenses and
required careful economy--to her husband, an arrangement which left her,
even for pocket money, dependent on him. She now set herself to devise
some means of adding to her resources by private industry. The more
ambitious project of securing by her own exertions a separate
maintenance for herself and her children would at this time have seemed
chimerical, but it haunted her as a dream long before it took definite
shape.

It was not in literature that she first fancied she saw her way to
earning an independent income. She had begun to make amateur essays in
novel-writing, but was as dissatisfied with them as with the
compositions of her childhood, and with a religious novelette she had
produced whilst in the convent, and speedily committed to the flames.
Again, alluding to her attempts, in 1825, at descriptions of the
Pyrenees, she says: "I was not capable then of satisfying myself by what
I wrote, for I finished nothing, and did not even acquire a taste for
writing."

But she had dabbled in painting, and remained fond of it. "The finest of
the arts," she calls it, writing to her mother in 1830, "and the most
pleasant, as a life-occupation, whether taken up for a profession, or
for amusement merely. If I had real talent, I should consider such a lot
the finest in the world." But neither did the decoration of fans and
snuff-boxes nor the production of little water-color likenesses of her
children and friends, beyond which her art did not go, promise anything
brilliant in the way of remuneration.

In her circle of friends at La Chatre--old family friends who had known
her all her life--were those who had recognized and admired her superior
ability. Here, too, she met more than one young spirit with literary
aspirations, and one, at least, M. Jules Sandeau, who was afterwards to
achieve distinguished literary success. The desire to go and do
likewise came and took hold of her, together with the conviction of her
capability to make her mark. However discontented with her essays in
novel-writing hitherto, she began to be conscious she was on the right
track. The Revolution of July, 1830, had just been successfully
accomplished, and new hopes and ambitions for the world in general, and
their own country in particular, lent a stimulus to the intellectual
activity of the youth of France--a movement too strong not to make
itself felt, even in Berry.

The state of things at Nohant for the last two years had, as we have
seen, been tending rather to stifle than to keep alive any hesitation or
compunction Madame Dudevant might have felt at breaking openly from her
present condition. In a letter, dated October, 1830, to her son's
private tutor, M. Boucoiran, who had then been a year under their roof
in that capacity, she remarks, significantly:

     You often wonder at my mobility of temper, my flexible character.
     What would become of me without this power of self-distraction? You
     know all in my life, and you ought to understand that but for that
     happy turn of mind which makes me quickly forget a sorrow, I should
     be disagreeable and perpetually withdrawn into myself, useless to
     others, insensible to their affection.

The distance between herself and her husband had, indeed, been widening
until now the sole real link between them was their joint love for the
children. No pretence of mutual affection existed any longer. Madame
Dudevant's feeling seems to have been of indifference merely; M.
Dudevant's of dislike, mingled, probably, with a little fear. It appears
that he committed to paper his sentiments on the subject, and that this
document, ostensibly intended by him not to be opened till after his
death, was found and perused by his wife. It was the provocation thus
occasioned her, and the certainty thus acquired of her husband's
aversion to her society, that brought matters to a climax; so, at least,
she asserted in the heat of the moment. But nothing, we imagine, could
long have deferred her next step, strange and venturesome though it was.
Violent in acting on a determination when taken, after the manner, as
she observes, of those whose determinations are slow in forming, she
declared her intentions to her husband, and obtained his consent to her
plan.

According to this singular arrangement she was to be permitted to spend
every alternate three months in Paris, where she proposed to try her
fortune with her pen. She looked forward to having her little girl to be
there with her as soon as she was comfortably settled, supposing the
experiment to succeed. For half the year she would continue to reside,
as hitherto, at Nohant, so as not to be long separated from her son, who
was old enough to miss her, and to part from whom, on any terms, cost
her dear. But he was to be sent to school in two years, and for the
meantime she had secured for him the care and services of M. Boucoiran,
whom she thoroughly trusted.

Her husband was to allow her L120 a year out of her fortune, and on
condition that the allowance should not be exceeded, he left her at
liberty to get on as she chose, abstaining from further interference.

It seems obvious that this compromise, whilst postponing, could only
render more inevitable a future separation on less amicable terms,
though neither appear to have realized it at the time. Madame Dudevant
can have had no motive to blind her in the matter beyond her desire, in
detaching herself from her present position, not to disconnect her life
from that of her children. The freedom she demanded it was probably too
late to deny. Those about her, her husband and M. Chatiron, who, with
his family, was temporarily domesticated at Nohant, and who so far
supported her as to offer her the loan of rooms held by him in Paris,
for the first part of her stay, thought her resolution but a caprice.
And viewed by the light of her subsequent success it is hard now to
realize the boldness of an undertaking whose consequences, had it
failed, must have been humiliating and disastrous. She had no practical
knowledge of the world, had received no artistic training, and enjoyed
none of the advantages of intellectual society. But she had
extraordinary courage, spirit, and energy, springing no doubt from a
latent sense of extraordinary powers, almost matured, though as yet but
half-manifest. So much she knew of herself, and states modestly: "I had
discovered that I could write quickly, easily, and for long at a time
without fatigue; that my ideas, torpid in my brain, woke up and linked
themselves together deductively in the flow of the pen; that in my life
of seclusion, I had observed a good deal, and understood pretty well the
characters I had chanced to come across, and that, consequently, I knew
human nature well enough to describe it." A most moderate estimate, in
which, however, she had yet to convince people that she was not
self-deceived.




CHAPTER III.

DEBUT IN LITERATURE.


In the first days of January 1831, the Rubicon was passed. The step,
though momentous in any case to Madame Dudevant, was one whose ultimate
consequences were by none less anticipated than by herself, when to town
she came, still undecided whether her future destiny were to decorate
screens and tea-caddies, or to write books, but resolved to give the
literary career a trial.

For actual subsistence she had her small fixed allowance from home; for
credentials she was furnished with an introduction or two to literary
men from her friends in the country who had some appreciation, more or
less vague, of her intellectual powers. Though courageous and
determined, she was far from self-confident; she asked herself if she
might not be mistaking a mere fancy for a faculty, and her first step
was to seek the opinion of some experienced authority as to her talent
and chances.

M. de Keratry, a popular novelist, to whom she was recommended, spoke
his mind to her without restraint. It was to the crushing effect that a
woman ought not to write at all. Her sex, Madame Dudevant was informed,
can have no proper place in literature whatsoever. M. Delatouche,
proprietor of the _Figaro_, poet and novelist besides, and cousin of her
old and intimate friends the Duvernets, of La Chatre, was a shade more
encouraging, even so far committing himself as to own that, if she would
not let herself be disgusted by the struggles of a beginner, there might
be a distant possibility for her of making some sixty pounds a year by
her pen. Such specimens of her fiction as she submitted to him he
condemned without appeal, but he encouraged her to persevere in trying
to improve upon them, and advised her well in advising her to avoid
imitation of any school or master, and fearlessly to follow her own
bent.

Meantime he took her on to the staff of his paper, then in its infancy
and comparative obscurity. Journalism however was the department of
literature least suited to her capabilities, and her
fellow-contributors, though so much less highly gifted than Madame
Dudevant, excelled her easily in the manufacture of leaders and
paragraphs to order. To produce an article of a given length, on a given
subject, within a given time, was for her the severest of ordeals; here
her exuberant facility itself was against her. She would exhaust the
space allotted to her, and find herself obliged to break off just at the
point when she felt herself "beginning to begin." But she justly valued
this apprenticeship as a professional experience, bringing her into
direct relations with the literary world she was entering as a perfect
stranger. Once able to devote herself entirely to composition and to
live for her work, she found her calling begin to assert itself
despotically. In a letter to a friend, M. Duteil, at La Chatre, dated
about six weeks after her arrival in Paris, she writes:--

     If I had foreseen half the difficulties that I find, I should not
     have undertaken this enterprise. Well, the more I encounter the
     more I am resolved to proceed. Still, I shall soon be returning
     home again, perhaps without having succeeded in launching my boat,
     but with hopes of doing better another time, and with plans of
     working harder than ever.

Three weeks later we find her writing to her son's tutor, M. Boucoiran,
in the same strain:--

     I am more than ever determined to follow the literary career. In
     spite of the disagreeables I often meet with, in spite of days of
     sloth and fatigue that come and interrupt my work, in spite of the
     more than humble life I lead here, I feel that henceforth my
     existence is filled. I have an object, a task, better say it at
     once, a passion. The profession of a writer is a violent one, and
     so to speak, indestructible. Once let it take possession of your
     wretched head, you cannot stop. I have not been successful; my work
     was thought too unreal by those whom I asked for advice.

But still she persisted, providing, as best she could, "copy" for the
_Figaro_, at seven francs a column, and trying the experiment of
literary collaboration, working at fictions and magazine articles, the
joint productions of herself and her friend and fellow-student, Jules
Sandeau, who wrote for the _Revue de Paris_. It was under his name that
these compositions appeared, Madam Dudevant, in these first
trial-attempts, being undesirous to bring hers before the public.

"I have no time to write home," she pleads, petitioning M. Boucoiran for
news from the country, "but I like getting letters from Nohant, it rests
my heart and my head."

And alluding to her approaching temporary return thither, in accordance
with the terms of her agreement with M. Dudevant, she writes to M.
Charles Duvernet:--

     I long to get back to Berry, for I love my children more than all
     besides, and, but for the hopes of becoming one day more useful to
     them with the scribe's pen than with the housekeeper's needle, I
     should not leave them for so long. But in spite of innumerable
     obstacles I mean to take the first steps in this thorny career.

In her case it was really the first step only that cost dear; whilst
against the annoyances with which, as a new comer, she had to contend,
there was ample compensation to set in the novel interests of the
intellectual, political, and artistic world stirring around her. Country
life and peasant life she had had the opportunity of studying from her
youth up; of middle-class society she had sufficient experience; she
counted relatives and friends among the _noblesse_, and had moved in
those charmed circles; but the republic of art and letters, to which by
nature and inclination she emphatically belonged, was a land of promise
first opened up to her now. She was eager and impatient to
deprovincialize herself.

In the art galleries of the Louvre, at the theatre and the opera, in the
daily interchange of ideas on all kinds of topics with her little circle
of intelligent acquaintance, her mind grew richer by a thousand new
impressions and enjoyments, and rapidly took fresh strength together
with fresh knowledge. The heavy practical obstacles that interfere with
such self-education on the part of one of her sex were seriously
aggravated in her case by her narrow income. How she surmounted them is
well known; assuming on occasion a disguise which, imposing on all but
the initiated, enabled her everywhere to pass for a collegian of
sixteen, and thus to go out on foot in all weathers, at all hours, alone
if necessary, unmolested and unobserved, in theatre or restaurant,
boulevard or reading-room. In defense of her adoption of this strange
measure, she pleads energetically the perishable nature of feminine
attire in her day,--a day before double-soles or ulsters formed part of
a lady's wardrobe,--its incompatibility with the incessant going to and
fro which her busy life required, the exclusion of her sex from the best
part of a Paris theatre, and so forth; the ineffable superiority of a
costume which, economy and comfort apart, secured her equal independence
with her men competitors in the race, and identical advantages as to the
rapid extension of her field of observation. The practice, though never
carried on by her to such an extent as very commonly asserted, was one
to which she did not hesitate to resort now and then in later years, as
a mere measure of convenience--a measure the world will only tolerate in
the Rosalinds and Violas of the stage. The career of George Sand was,
like her nature, entirely exceptional, and any attempt to judge it in
any other light lands us in hopeless moral contradictions. She had
extraordinary incentives to prompt her to extraordinary actions, which
may be condemned or excused, but which there could be no greater
mistake than to impute to ordinary vulgar motives. It must also be
remembered that fifty years ago, the female art student had no
recognized existence. She was shut out from that modicum of freedom and
of practical advantages it were arbitrary to deny, and which may now be
enjoyed by any earnest art aspirant in almost any great city. However
unjustifiable the proceeding resorted to for a time by George Sand and
Rosa Bonheur may be held to be, it cannot possibly be said they had no
motive for it but a fantastic one.

Writing to her mother from Nohant, whither she had returned in April for
a length of time as agreed, Madam Dudevant speaks out characteristically
in defense of her love of independence:--

     I am far from having that love of pleasure, that need of amusement
     with which you credit me. Society, sights, finery, are not what I
     want,--you only are under this mistake about me,--it is liberty. To
     be all alone in the street and able to say to myself, I shall dine
     at four or at seven, according to my good pleasure; I shall go to
     the Tuileries by way of the Luxembourg instead of going by the
     Champs Elysees; this is what amuses me far more than silly
     compliments and stiff drawing-room assemblies.

Such audacious self-emancipation, she was well aware, must estrange her
from her friends of her own sex in the upper circles of Parisian
society, and she anticipated this by making no attempt to renew such
connections. For the moment she thought only of taking the shortest,
and, as she judged, the only way for a "torpid country wife," like
herself, to acquire the freedom of action and the enlightenment she
needed. Those most nearly related to her offered no opposition. It was
otherwise with her mother-in-law, the _baronne_ Dudevant, with whom she
had a passage-of-arms at the outset on the subject of her literary
campaign, here disapproved _in toto_.

"Is it true," enquired this lady, "that it is your intention to _print
books_?"

"Yes, madame."

"Well, I call that an odd notion!"

"Yes, madame."

"That is all very good and very fine, but I hope you are not going to
put the name that I bear on the _covers of printed books_?"

"Oh, certaintly not, madame, there is no danger."

The liberty to which other considerations were required to give way was
certainly complete enough. The beginning of July found her back at work
in the capital. On the Quai St. Michel--a portion of the Seine
embankment facing the towers of Notre Dame, the Sainte Chapelle, and
other picturesque monuments of ancient Paris--she had now definitely
installed herself in modest lodgings on the fifth story. Accepted and
treated as a comrade by a little knot of fellow _literati_ and
colleagues on the _Figaro_, two of whom--Jules Sandeau and Felix
Pyat--were from Berry, like herself; and with Delatouche, also a
Berrichon, for their head-master, she served thus singularly her brief
apprenticeship to literature and experience;--sharing with the rest both
their studies and their relaxations, dining with them at cheap
restaurants, frequenting clubs, studios, and theatres of every degree;
the youthful effervescence of her student-friends venting itself in such
collegians' pranks as parading deserted quarters of the town by
moonlight, in the small hours, chanting lugubrious strains to astonish
the shopkeepers. The only great celebrity whose acquaintance she had
made was Balzac, himself the prince of eccentrics. Although he did not
encourage Madame Dudevant's literary ambition, he showed himself kindly
disposed towards her and her young friends, and she gives some amusing
instances that came under her notice of his oddities. Thus, once after a
little Bohemian dinner at his lodgings in the Rue Cassini, he insisted
on putting on a new and magnificent dressing-gown, of which he was
exceedingly vain, to display to his guests, of whom Madame Dudevant was
one; and not satisfied therewith, must needs go forth, thus accoutred,
to light them on their walk home. All the way he continued to hold forth
to them about four Arab horses, which he had not got yet, but meant to
get soon, and of which, though he never got them at all, he firmly
believed himself to have been possessed for some time. "He would have
escorted us thus," says Madame Dudevant, "from one extremity of Paris to
another, if we had let him."

Twice again before the end of the year, faithful to her original
intentions, we find her returning to her place as mistress of the house
at Nohant, occupying herself with her children, and working at the novel
_Indiana_, which was to create her reputation the following year.

Meanwhile, a novelette, _La Prima Donna_, the outcome of the literary
collaboration with Jules Sandeau, had found its way into a magazine, the
_Revue de Paris_; and was followed by a longer work of fiction, of the
same double authorship, entitled _Rose et Blanche_, published under
Sandeau's _nom de plume_ of Jules Sand.

This literary partnership was not to last long, and to-day the novel
will be found omitted in the list of the respective works of its
authors. Its perusal will hardly repay the curious. The powerful genius
of Madame Dudevant, the elegant talent of the author of _Mlle. de la
Seigliere_, are mostly conspicuous by their absence in _Rose et
Blanche_, or _La Comedienne et la Religieuse_, an imitative attempt, and
not a happy one, in the style of fiction then in vogue.

Madame Dudevant had stepped into the literary world at the moment of the
most ardent activity of the Romantic movement. The new school was on the
point of achieving its earliest signal triumphs. Victor Hugo's first
poems had just been followed by the dramas _Hernani_ and _Marion
Delorme_. Dumas' _Antony_ was drawing crowded and enthusiastic houses. A
few months before the publication of _Rose et Blanche_ appeared _Notre
Dame de Paris_. The passion for innovation which had seized on all the
younger school of writers was leading many astray. The strange freaks of
Hugo's genius had, to quote Madame Dudevant's own expression, excited a
"ferocious appetite" for whatever was most outrageous, and set taste,
precedent, and probability most flatly at defiance. From those
aberrations into which the great master's imitators had been betrayed
Madame Dudevant's fine art-instincts were calculated to preserve her;
but she had not yet learned to trust to them implicitly.

_Rose et Blanche_, though containing many clever passages--waifs and
strays of shrewd observation, description and character analysis,--is in
the main ill-conceived, ill-constructed, and unreal. The two authors
have sacrificed their individualities in a mistaken effort to follow the
fashion's lead, resulting in a most ineffective compound of tameness and
sensationalism. Amazing adventures are undergone by each heroine before
she is one-and-twenty. Angels of innocence, they are doomed to have
their existences crushed out by the heartless conduct of man, Blanche
expiring of dismay almost as soon as she is led from the altar, Rose
burying herself and her despair in a convent. The then favorite heroes
of romance were of the French Byronic type--young men of fortune who
have exhausted life before they are five-and-twenty, whose minds are
darkened by haunting memories of some terrific crime, but who are none
the less capable of all the virtues and great elevation of sentiment on
occasion. None of these requisitions are left unfulfilled by the
unamiable hero of _Rose et Blanche_, a work which did little to advance
the fortunes of its authors, and whose intrinsic merits offer little
warrant for dragging it out of the oblivion into which it has been
suffered to drop.

To escape the influences of the literary revolution everywhere then
triumphant was of course impossible. To make them serve her individual
genius instead of enslaving her individuality was all Madame Dudevant
needed to learn. Her friend Balzac had done this for himself, suiting
his genius to the period without any sacrifice of originality. Although
not yet at the height of his fame he had produced many most successful
works, and Madame Dudevant, according to her own account, derived great
profit from the study of his method, although with no inclination to
follow in his direction. Yet he afterwards observed to her, "Our two
roads lead to the same goal."

_Rose et Blanche_, though little noticed by the public, brought a
publisher to the door, one Ernest Dupuy, with an order for another novel
by the same authors. _Indiana_ was ready-written, and came in response
to the demand. But as Sandeau had had no hand whatever in this
composition, the signature had of course to be varied. The publisher
wishing to connect the new novel with its predecessor it was decided to
alter the prefix only. She fixed on George, as representative of Berry,
the land of husbandmen; and George Sand thus became pseudonym of the
author of _Indiana_, a pseudonym whose origin imaginative critics have
sought far afield and some have discovered in her alleged sympathy with
Kotzebue's murderer, Karl Sand, and political assassination in general!
Its assumption was to inaugurate a new era in her life.

In the last days of April, 1832, appeared _Indiana_, by George Sand. "I
took," says Madame Dudevant, in her account of the transaction, "the
1,200 francs paid me by the publisher, which to me were a little
fortune, hoping he would see his money back again." She had recently
returned from one of her periodical visits to Nohant, accompanied this
time by her little girl, whom the progress already achieved enabled her
now to take into her charge, and was living very quietly and studiously
in her humble establishment on the Quai St. Michel, when she awoke to
find herself famous.

Her success, for which indeed there had been nothing to prepare
her--neither flattery of friends, nor vain-glorious ambition within
herself--was immediate and conclusive. Whatever differences of opinion
might exist about the book, critics agreed in recognizing there the
revelation of a new writer of extraordinary power. "One of those masters
who have been gifted with the enchanter's wand and mirror," wrote
Sainte-Beuve, a few months later, when he did not hesitate to compare
the young author to Madame de Stael. The novel of sentimental analysis,
a style in which George Sand is unsurpassed, was then a fresh and
promising field. _Indiana_, without the aid of marvellous incidents,
startling crimes, or iniquitous mysteries, riveted the attention of its
readers as firmly as the most thrilling tales of adventure and horror.
It is a "soul's tragedy," and that is all--the love-tragedy vulgarized
since by repeated treatment by inferior novelists, of a romantic,
sensitive, passionate, high-natured girl, hopelessly ill-mated with a
somewhat tyrannical and stupid, yet not entirely ill-disposed old
colonel, and exposed to the seductions of a Lovelace--the truth about
whose unloveable character, in its profound and heartless egoism, first
bursts upon her at the moment when, maddened by brutal insult, she is
driven to claim the generous devotion he has proffered a thousand times.
Side by side with the ideal of selfishness, Raymon stands in contrast
with the ideally chivalrous Ralph, Indiana's despised cousin, who,
loving her disinterestedly and in silence, has watched over her as a
guardian-friend to the last, and does save her ultimately. The florid
descriptions, the high-flown strains of emotion, which now strike as
blemishes in the book, were counted beauties fifty years since; and even
to-day, when reaction has brought about an extreme distaste for
emotional writing, they cannot conceal the superior ability of the
novelist. The sentiment, however extravagantly worded, is genuine and
spontaneous, and has the true ring of passionate conviction. The
characters are vividly, if somewhat closely drawn and contrasted, the
scenes graphic; every page is colored by fervid imagination, and despite
some violations of probability in the latter portion, out of keeping
artistically with the natural character of the rest of the book, the
whole has the strength of that unity and completeness of conception
which is the distinguishing stamp of a genius of the first order. The
_entrain_ of the style is irresistible. It was written, she tells us,
_tout d'un jet_, under the force of a stimulus from within. Ceasing to
counterfeit the manner of anyone, or to consult the exigencies of the
book-market, she for the first time ventures to be herself responsible
for the inspiration and the mode of expression adopted.

The papers spoke of the new novel in high tones of praise, the public
read it with avidity. The authorship, for a time, continued to perplex
people. In spite of the masculine pseudonym, certain feminine qualities,
niceties of perception and tenderness, were plainly recognized in the
work, but the possibility that so vigorous and well-executed a
composition could come from a feminine hand was one then reckoned
scarcely admissible. Even among those already in the secret were
sceptics who questioned the author's power to sustain her success,
since nearly everybody, it is said, can produce one good novel.

"The success of _Indiana_ has thrown me into dismay," writes Madame
Dudevant, in July, 1832, to M. Charles Duvernet, at La Chatre. "Till
now, I thought my writing was without consequence, and would not merit
the slightest attention. Fate has decreed otherwise. The unmerited
admiration of which I have become the object must be justified." And
_Valentine_ was already in progress; and its publication, not many
months after _Indiana_, to be a conclusive answer to the challenge.

The season of 1832, in which George Sand made her _debut_ in literature,
was marked, in Paris, by public events of the most tragic character. In
the spring, the cholera made its appearance, and struck panic into the
city. Six people died in the house where Madame Dudevant resided, but
neither she nor any of her friends were attacked. She was next to be a
witness of political disturbances equally terrible. The disappointment
felt by the Liberals at the results of the Revolution of 1830, and of
the establishment of Louis Philippe's Government, upon which such high
hopes had been founded, was already beginning to assert itself in secret
agitation, and in the sanguinary street insurrections, such as that of
June, 1832, sanguinarily repressed. Madame Dudevant at this time had no
formulated political creed, and political subjects were those least
attractive to her. But though born in the opposite camp she felt all her
natural sympathies incline to the Republican side. They were further
intensified by the scenes of which she was an eye-witness, and which
roused a similar feeling even among anti-revolutionists. Thus Heine, in
giving an account of the struggle mentioned above, and speaking of the
enthusiasts who sacrificed their lives in this desperate demonstration,
exclaims: "I am, by God! no Republican. I know that if the Republicans
conquer they will cut my throat, and all because I don't admire all they
admire; but yet the tears came into my eyes as I trod those places still
stained with their blood. I had rather I, and all my fellow-moderates,
had died than those Republicans."

Amid such disturbing influences it is not surprising that we find her
complaining in the letter last quoted that her work makes no progress;
but the lost time was made up for by redoubled industry during her
summer visit to Nohant.

In the autumn appeared _Valentine_. This second novel not only confirmed
the triumph won by the first, but was a surer proof of the writer's
calibre, as showing what she could do with simpler materials. Here,
encouraged by success, she had ventured to take her stand entirely on
her own ground--dispensing even with an incidental trip to the tropics,
which, in _Indiana_, strikes as a misplaced concession to the prevalent
craze for Oriental coloring--and to lay the scene in her own obscure
province of Berry, her first descriptions of which show her rare
comprehension of the poetry of landscape. Like _Indiana_, _Valentine_ is
a story of the affections; like _Indiana_, it is a domestic tragedy, of
which the girl-heroine is the victim of a pernicious system that makes
of marriage, in the first instance, a mere commercial speculation.
Indeed, the extreme painfulness of the story would render the whole too
repulsive but for the charm of the setting, which relieves it not a
little, and a good deal of humor in the treatment of the minor
characters, notably the eighteenth century _marquise_, and the Lhery
family of peasant-_parvenus_. The personages are drawn with more finish
than those in _Indiana_; the tone is more natural in its pitch. It is
the work of one who finds in every-day observation, as well as in such
personal emotions as come but once in a lifetime, the inspiration that
smaller talents can derive from the latter alone.

In both her consummate art, or rather natural gift of the art of
narrative, is the mainstay of the fabric her imagination has reared.
That incomparable style of hers is like some magic fairy-ring, that
bears the wearer, safe and victorious, through manifold perils--perils
these of prolixity, exaggeration, and disdain of careful construction.
Both _Indiana_ and _Valentine_, moreover, contain scenes and passages
offensive to English taste, but it is impossible fairly to criticise the
fiction of a land where freer expression in speech and in print than
with us is habitually recognized and practiced, from our own standpoint
of literary decorum. It was not for this feature that French criticism
had already begun to charge her books with dangerous tendencies (thus
contributing largely to noise her fame abroad), as breathing rebellion
against the laws of present society; charges which, so far as _Indiana_
and _Valentine_ are concerned, had, as is now generally admitted, but
little foundation. Each is the story of an unhappy marriage, but there
is no attempt whatever to throw contempt on existing institutions, or to
propound any theory, unless it be the idea--no heresy or novelty in
England at least--that marriage, concluded without love on either side,
is fraught with special dangers to the wife, whose happiness is bound up
with her affections. It was the bold and uncompromising manner in which
this plain fact was brought forward, the energy of the protest against
a real social abuse, which moved some critics to sound a war-cry for
which, as yet, no just warrant had been given.

Besides these two novels, containing full proof of her genius, if not of
its highest employment, there appeared, late in 1832, that remarkable
novelette, _La Marquise_, revealing fresh qualities of subtle
penetration and clear analysis. The flexibility of her imagination, the
variety in her modes of its application, form an essential
characteristic of her work. Not by any single novel, nor, indeed by
half-a-dozen taken at random, can she be adequately represented.

When in the winter of 1832 Madame Sand returned with her little girl to
Paris after spending the autumn, as usual, at Nohant, it was to rather
more comfortable quarters, on the Quai Malplaquet. The rapid sale of her
books was placing her in comparatively easy circumstances, and giving
fresh spur to her activity. But her situation was transforming itself
fast; the freedom of obscurity was lost to her for ever from the day
when the unknown personage, George Sand, became the object of general
curiosity--of curiosity redoubled in Paris by the rumors current there
of her exceptional position, eccentric habits, and interesting
personality.

The celebrated portrait of her by Eugene Delacroix was painted in the
year 1833. It is a three-quarter view, and represents her wearing her
_quasi_ masculine _redingote_, with broad _revers_ and loosely knotted
silk neck-tie. Of somewhat later date is a highly interesting drawing by
Calamatta, well-known by engravings; but of George Sand in her first
youth no likeness unfortunately has been left to the world. She has been
most diversely described by her different contemporaries. But that at
this time she possessed real beauty is perfectly evident; for all that
she denies it herself, and that, unlike most women, and nearly all
French women, she scorned to enhance it by an elaborated toilette.
Heine, though he never professed himself one of her personal adorers,
compares the beauty of her head to that of the Venus of Milo, saying,
"It bears the stamp of ideality, and recalls the noblest remaining
examples of Greek art." Her figure was somewhat too short, but her hands
and feet were very small and beautifully shaped. His acquaintance with
her dates from the early years of her literary triumphs, and his
description is in harmony with Calamatta's presentation. She had dark
curling hair, a beauty in itself, falling in profusion to her shoulders,
well-formed features, pale olive-tinted complexion, the countenance
expressive, the eyes dark and very fine, not sparkling, but mild and
full of feeling. The face reminds us of the character of "Still Waters,"
attributed to the Aurore Dupin of fifteen by the Lady Superior of the
English convent. Her voice was soft and muffled, and the simplicity of
her manner has been remarked on by those who sought her acquaintance, as
a particular charm. Yet, like all reserved natures, she often failed to
attract strangers at a first meeting. In general conversation she
disappointed people, by not shining. Men and women, immeasurably her
inferiors, surpassed her in ready wit and brilliant repartee. Her
taciturnity in society has been somewhat ungenerously laid to a _parti
pris_. She was one, it is said, who took all and gave nothing. That she
was intentionally chary of her passing thoughts and impressions to those
around her, is, however, sufficiently disproved by her letters. Here she
shows herself lavish of her mind to her correspondents. Conversation and
composition necessitate a very different brain action, and her
marvellous facility in writing seems really to have been accompanied
with no corresponding readiness of speech and reply. Probably it was
only, as she herself states, when she had a pen in her hand that her
lethargic ideas would arise and flow in order as they should. And the
need of self-expression felt by all those who have not the gift of
communicating themselves fully and easily in speech or manner, a strong
need in her case, from her having so much to express, was the spur that
drove her to seek and find the mode of so doing in art.

Her silence in company certainly did not detract from her fascination
upon a closer acquaintance. Of those who fell under the spell, the more
fortunate came at once to terms of friendship with her, which remained
undisturbed through life. Thus, of one among this numerous brotherhood,
Francois Rollinat, with whom she would congratulate herself on having
realized the perfection of such an alliance of minds, she could write
when recording their friendship, then already a quarter of a century
old, that it was still young as compared with some that she counted, and
that dated from her childhood.

Others fell in love with her, and found her unresponsive. With some of
these, jealousies and misunderstandings arose, and led to estrangements,
for the most part but temporary. Yet the winner of her heart was
scarcely to be envied. She was apt--she has herself thus expressed
it--to see people through a prism of enthusiasm, and afterwards to
recover her lucidity of judgment. Great, no doubt, was her power of
self-illusion; it betrayed her into errors that have been unsparingly
judged. For her power of calm and complete disillusion she was perhaps
unique among women, and it is no wonder if mankind have found it hard to
forgive.




CHAPTER IV.

LELIA.--ITALIAN JOURNEY.


It was less than two years since she had come up to the capital, to seek
her fortunes there in literature. Aurore Dudevant, hereafter to be
spoken of as George Sand (for she made her adopted name more her own
than that she had borne hitherto, and became George Sand for her private
friends as well as for the public,) found herself raised to eminence
among the eminent. And it was at an exceptionally brilliant epoch in
French imaginative literature that the distinction had been won. Such a
burst of talent as that which signalized the opening years of Louis
Philippe's reign is unexampled in French literary history. With Hugo,
Dumas, De Musset, Balzac, not to mention lesser stars, the author of
_Indiana_ and _Valentine_, although a woman, was acknowledged as worthy
to rank. The artist in her, a disturbing element in her inner life which
had driven her out of the spiritual bondage and destitution of a petty
provincial environment to secure for herself freedom and expansion, had
justified the audacity of the move by a triumphant artistic success.
From this time onward her artistic faculty dominated her life, often,
probably, unknown to herself an invincible force of instinct she obeyed,
whilst assigning, in all good faith, other motives for her course of
action, and for real or apparent inconsequences, that have been
constantly misrepresented and misunderstood.

So sudden and abrupt a change would have turned all heads but the
strongest. Publishers competed with one another to secure her next work.
Buloz, proprietor of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, engaged her to write
regularly for his periodical, to which, for the next ten years, she
never ceased to be a regular and extensive contributor. Although the
scale of remuneration was not then very high she was clearly secure, so
long as she allowed nothing to interfere with her literary work, of
earning a sufficient income for her own needs. She had learnt the
importance of pecuniary independence, and never pretended to despise the
reward of her industry. To luxury she was indifferent, but the necessity
of strict economy was a burden she was impatient of; she liked to have
plenty to give away, and was always excessively liberal to the poor. Her
little dwelling on the Quai Malplaquet was no longer the hermitage of
an anonymous writer of no account. The great in art and letters,
leading critics, such as Sainte-Beuve and Gustave Planche, came eager to
seek her acquaintance, and delighting to honor the obscure student of a
year ago.

Writing to M. Boucoiran after her return to Paris in December, 1832, she
describes her altered position:--

     All day long I am beset with visitors, who are not all
     entertaining. It is a calamity of my profession, which I am partly
     obliged to bear. But in the evening I shut myself up with my pens
     and ink, Solange, my piano, and a fire. With all these I pass some
     right pleasant hours. No noise but the sounds of a harp, coming I
     know not whence, and of the playing of a fountain under my window.
     This is highly poetical--pray don't make game of me!

There was another side to her success. Fame brought trials and
annoyances that fell with double severity on her as a woman. Her door
was besieged by a troop of professional beggars, impostors, impertinent
idlers, and inquisitive newsmongers. Jealousy and ill-will, inevitably
attendant on sudden good fortune such as hers, busied themselves with
direct calumny and insidious misrepresentation. No statement so
unfounded, so wildly improbable about her, but it obtained circulation
and credit. Till the end of her life she remained the centre of a cloud
of myths, many, to the present day, accepted as gospel. People insisted
on identifying her with the heroines of her novels. Incidents, personal
descriptions, nay, whole letters extracted from these novels will be
found literally transcribed into alleged biographies of herself and her
friends, as her own statement of matters of fact. Now, though the spirit
of her life is strongly and faithfully represented by her fiction taken
as a whole, those who would read in any special novel the literal record
of any of the special events of her existence cannot be too much on
their guard. Whatever the material under treatment, George Sand must
retouch, embellish, transform, artist-fashion, as her genius shall
dictate, till often little resemblance is left between the original and
the production it has done no more than suggest. Romance and reality are
so fused together in these apparent outpourings of spirit that her
nearest friends were at a loss how to separate them. As an actress into
many a favorite part, so could she throw herself into her favorite
characters; but seldom if ever will much warrant be found in actual fact
for identifying these creations with their creatress.

How, indeed, could so many-sided a nature as hers be truly represented
in a single novel? Her rare physical and mental energies enabled her to
combine a life of masculine intellectual activity with the more highly
emotional life of a woman, and with vigilance in her maternal cares.
Maurice was placed in the spring of 1833 at the College Henri IV., at
Paris; thus she had now both son and daughter near her, and watched
indefatigably over them, their childish illnesses and childish
amusements, their moral and intellectual training absorbing a large
share of her time and attention. Heine, a friendly visitor at her house,
says:--

     I have often been present for hours whilst she gave her children a
     lesson in French, and it is a pity that the whole of the French
     Academy could not have been present too, as it is quite certain
     that they might have derived great profit from it.

Not all the distractions of fame and work, of passionate pleasure or
passionate sorrow, ever relaxed her active solicitude for the present
and future welfare of her two young children. "They give me the only
real joys of my life," she repeats again and again.

_Lelia_, begun immediately after _Valentine_ was published in the spring
of 1833, and created an immense sensation. Hailed by her admirers as a
sign of an accession of power, of power exerted in quite a new
direction, it brought down on the writer's head a storm of hostile
criticism, as a declared enemy of religion and domestic
morality--enhancing her celebrity not a little.

_Lelia_, a lyrical novel--an outburst of poetical philosophy in prose,
stands alone among the numerous productions of George Sand. Here she
takes every sort of poetical license, in a work without the restrictions
of poetic form, which are the true conditions of so much latitude.
"Manfred" and "Alastor" are fables not further removed from real life
than is _Lelia_. The personages are like allegorical figures, emblematic
of spiritual qualities on a grand scale, the scenes like the
paradisiacal gardens that visited the fancy of Aurore Dupin when a
child. There is no action. The interest is not in the characters and
what they do, but in what they say. The declamatory style, then so
popular, is one the taste for which has so completely waned that _Lelia_
will find comparatively few readers in the present day, fewer who will
not find its perusal wearisome, none perhaps whose morality, however
weak, will be seriously shaken by utterances ever and anon hovering on
the perilous confines of the sublime and the ludicrous.

_Lelia_, a female Faust or Manfred, a mysterious muse-like heroine, who
one night sleeps on the heathery mountain-side, the next displays the
splendor of a queen in palaces and fairy-like villas; her sorely tried
and hapless lover, Stenio, the poet, who pours forth odes to his own
accompaniment on the harp, and lingers the night long among Alpine
precipices brooding over the abyss; Trenmor, the returned gentleman
convict and Apostle of the Carbonari, whose soul has been refreshed,
made young and regenerated at the galleys; and the mad Irish priest,
Magnus, are impossible personages, inviting to easy ridicule, and
neither wisdom nor folly from their lips is likely to beguile the ears
of the present generation.

It is no novel, but a poetical essay, fantastically conceived and
executed with the _sans gene_ of an improvisatore. For those who admire
the genius of George Sand its interest as a psychological revelation
remains unabated. Into _Lelia_, she owns, she put more of her real self
than into any other of her books--of herself, that is, and her state of
mind at the dawn of a period of moral disturbance and revolt. All must
continue to recognize there an extraordinary exhibition of poetical
power and musical style. As a work of art George Sand has herself
pronounced it absurd, yet she always cherished for it a special
predilection, and, as will be seen, took the trouble to rewrite it some
years later, when in a happier and healthier frame of mind than that
which inspired this unique and most characteristic composition.

The note of despair struck in _Lelia_, the depth of bitter feeling, the
capacity for mental and moral speculation and suffering it seemed to
disclose, astounded many of her familiar acquaintance. "_Lelia_ is a
fancy-type," so writes to the author her friend and neighbor in Berry,
Jules Neraud, an ardent naturalist, whose botanical and entomological
pursuits she had often shared: "it is not like you--you who are merry,
dance the _bourree_, appreciate lepidoptera, do not despise puns, who
are not a bad needlewoman, and make very good preserves. Is it possible
you should have thought so much, felt so much, without anyone having any
idea of it?"

_Lelia_ was certainly the expression of a new phase in her mind's
history, a moral crisis she could not escape, which was all the more
severe for her having, as she remarks, reached her thirtieth year
without having opened her eyes to the realities of life. Till the time
of her coming to Paris, for very dearth of outward impressions, she had
lived chiefly in dreams, the life of all others most favorable to the
prolongation of ignorance and credulity. The liberty and activity she
had enjoyed for the last two years were fatal to Utopian theories.

It was not only the bitterness that springs from disenchantment in
individuals, the sense of the miserable insufficiency of human love to
satisfy her spiritual aspirations producing "that widely concluding
unbelief which," as her sister in greatness has said, "we call knowledge
of the world, but which is really disappointment in you and in me."
George Sand was one to whom scepticism was intolerable. Pessimistic
doctrines were fatal to her mind's equilibrium, and private experience
and outward intellectual influences were driving her to distrust all
objects of her previous worship, human and divine. The moment was one
when the most fundamental social and religious principles were being
called in question.

"Nothing in my old beliefs," she writes, "was sufficiently formulated in
me, from a social point of view, to help me to struggle against this
cataclysm; and in the religious and socialistic theories of the moment I
did not find light enough to contend with the darkness." The poet's
creed, with which her mind had hitherto rested satisfied, was shaken,
and appeared to prove a false one. She was staggered by the infinity of
evil, misery, and injustice, which dwellers in great cities are not
allowed to forget, the problem of humanity, the eternal mystery of
suffering and wrong predominant in a world on the beneficence of whose
Supreme Power all her faiths were founded.

Her mental revolt and suffering found vent in _Lelia_, which it was an
immense relief to her to write. Characteristic as an exhibition of
feeling and of mastery of language, it is not in the least typical of
her fiction. Yet, but for _Lelia_, and its successor _Jacques_, it is
impossible to point to a work of hers that would ever have lastingly
stamped her, in the public mind, as an expounder of dangerous theories.
In _Lelia_, however, which is strongly imbued with Byronic coloring, she
had chosen to pose somewhat as the proud angel in rebellion; and the
immediate effect of hostile criticism was to confirm her in the position
taken up. Neither _Lelia_ nor _Jacques_ combined the elements of lasting
popularity with those of instant success; but they roused a stir and
strife which created an impression of her as a writer systematically
inimical to religion and marriage--an impression almost ludicrously at
variance with facts, taking her fiction as a whole, but which has only
recently begun to give way, in this country, to a juster estimate of its
tendencies.

The morality of _Lelia_, which it is rather difficult to discuss
seriously in the present day, both the personages and their environment
being too preternatural for any direct application to be drawn from
them, as reflecting modern society, found indiscreet champions as
determined as its aggressors. Violently denounced by M. Capo de
Feuillide, of the _Europe litteraire_, it was warmly defended by M.
Gustave Planche, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. The war of words grew
so hot between them that a challenge and encounter were the
result--surely unique in the annals of duelling. The swords of the
critics fortunately proved more harmless than their words.

From the morbid depression that had tormented her mind and imagination,
and has its literary memorial in _Lelia_, she was to find a timely,
though but a temporary rescue, in the charm of a new acquaintance--the
delighting society of a poetic mind of an order not inferior to her own.

It was in August, 1833, at a dinner given by Buloz to the staff of the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, that George Sand first made the personal
acquaintance of Alfred de Musset, then in his twenty-third year, and
already famous through his just published poem, _Rolla_, and his earlier
dramas, _Andrea del Sarto_ and _Les Caprices de Marianne_. He rapidly
became enamored of the author of _Lelia_, who for her part felt
powerfully the attraction of his many admirable qualities, mutual
enchantment leading them so far as to believe they could be the hero and
heroine of a happy love tale. In a letter of September 21, addressed to
her friend and correspondent Sainte-Beuve, whom she had made the
confidant of her previous depression and strange moods of gloom, she
writes of herself as lifted out of such dangers by a happiness beyond
any she had imagined, restoring youth to her heart--the happiness
accorded her by the poet's society and his preference for her own. De
Musset, at this time, would have given the world to have been able to
make her his wife.

The story of their short-lived infatuation and of the swift-following
mutual disenchantment,--a story which, says Sainte-Beuve, has become
part of the romance of the nineteenth century,--is perhaps of less
consequence here than in the life of De Musset,[A] in whom the
over-sensitiveness of genius was not allied with the extraordinary
healthy vitality which enabled George Sand to come out of the most
terrible mental experiences unembittered, with the balance of her mind
unshaken, and her powers unimpaired. Yet that he acquired an empire over
her no other ever acquired there is much to indicate. It took her from
France for a while, from her children, her friends--and the breaking of
the spell set her at war, not only with him, but for a while with
herself, with life, and her fellow creatures.

In the last days of 1833, she and the author of _Rolla_ started on a
journey to Italy, where George Sand spent six months, and where she has
laid the scene of a number of her novels: the first and best part of
_Consuelo_, _La Derniere Aldini_, _Leone_, _Leoni_, _La Daniella_, and
others. The spirit of that land she has caught and reproduced perhaps
more successfully than any other of the many novelists who have chosen
it for a frame--of Italy as the artist's native country, that is--not
the Italy of political history, nor of the Medici, but the Italy that is
the second home of painters, poets, and musicians. Can anything be more
enjoyable, and at the same time more vividly true, than George Sand's
delineations of Venice; and, in the first of the _Lettres d'un
Voyageur_, the pictures given of her wanderings on the shores of the
Brenta, of Bassano, the Brenta valley, Oliero, Possagno, Asolo, a
delicious land, till quite recently as little tourist-trodden as in
1834? What a contrast to the purely imaginary descriptions in _Lelia_,
written before those beauties had appeared to her except in dreams!

From Genoa the travellers journeyed to Pisa, Florence, and thence to
Venice, where first George Sand felt herself really at home in Italy.
The architecture, the simplicity of Venetian life and manners, the
theatres--from the opera-houses, where Pasta and Donzelli were singing,
down to the national drama of Pulchinello--the pictures, the sea, the
climate, combined to make of it a place of residence so perfectly to her
mind, that again and again in her letters she expresses her wish that
she could bring over her children and there fix her abode.

"It is the only town I can love for its own sake," she says of it.
"Other cities are like prisons, which you put up with for the sake of
your fellow-prisoners." This Italian journey marks a fresh stage in her
artistic development, quite apart from the attendant romantic
circumstances, the alleged disastrous consequences to a child of genius
less wise and fortunate than herself, which has given an otherwise
disproportionate notoriety to this brief episode.

George Sand was no doubt fatally in error when she persuaded herself,
and even succeeded in persuading the poet's anxious mother, that she had
it in her to be his guardian angel, and reform him miraculously in a
short space of time; and that because he had fallen in love with her she
would know how to make him alter a way of life he had no abiding desire
to abandon. Such a task demands a readiness not merely for
self-sacrifice, but for self-suppression; and her individuality was far
too pronounced to merge itself for long in ministering to another's. She
never seems to have possessed the slightest moral ascendancy over him,
beyond the power of wounding him very deeply by the change in her
sentiments, however much he might feel himself to blame for it.

The history of the separation of the lovers--of De Musset's illness,
jealousy, and departure from Venice alone--is a thrice-told tale. Like
the subject of "The Ring and the Book," it has been set forth, by
various persons, variously interested, with correspondingly various
coloring. The story, as told by George Sand in her later novel, _Elle et
Lui_, is substantially the same as one related by De Musset in his
_Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle_, published two years after these
events, and in which, if it is to be regarded as reflecting personal
idiosyncrasies in the slightest degree, the poet certainly makes himself
out as the most insupportable of human companions. None the less did the
publication of _Elle et Lui_, a quarter of a century later, provoke a
savage retort from the deceased poet's brother, in _Lui et Elle_.
Finally, in _Lui_, a third novelist, Madame Colet, presented the world
with a separate version of the affair from one who imagined she could
have made up to the poet for what he had lost.

But it needs no deep study of human nature, or yet of these novels, to
understand the impracticability of two such minds long remaining
together in unity. Genius, in private life, is apt to be a torment--its
foibles demanding infinite patience, forbearance, nay, affectionate
blindness, in those who would minister to its happiness, and mitigate
the worst results of those foibles themselves. Certainly George Sand,
for a genius, was a wonderfully equable character; her "satanic" moods
showed themselves chiefly in pen and ink; her nerves were very strong,
the balance of her physical and mental organization was splendidly even,
as one imagines Shakespeare's to have been. But the very vigor of her
character, its force of self-assertion, unfitted her to be the
complement to any but a very yielding nature. The direct influence a
passive, merely receptive spirit would have accepted, and gratefully,
was soon felt as an intolerable burden by a mind in many ways different
from her own, but with the same imperious instinct of freedom, and as
little capable of playing anvil to another mind for long. He rebelled
against her ascendancy, but suffered from the spell. She was no Countess
Guiccioli, content to adore and be adored, and exercise an indirect
power for good on a capricious lover. Her logical mind, energetic and
independent, grew impatient of the seeming inconsistencies of her gifted
companion; and when at last she began to perceive in them the fatal
conditions of those gifts themselves, only compassion survived in her,
as she thought, and compassion was cold.

How could De Musset, with such an excellent example of prudence, regular
hours, good sense, calm self-possession, and ceaseless literary industry
as hers before his eyes, not be stirred up to emulate such admirable
qualities? But her reason made him unreasonable; the indefatigability of
her pen irritated his nerves, and made him idle out of contradiction;
her homilies provoked only fresh imprudences--as though he wanted to
make proof of his independence whilst secretly feeling her dominion--a
phenomenon with which highly nervous people will sympathize not a
little, but which was perfectly inexplicable to George Sand.

His genius was of a more delicate essence than hers; he has struck, at
times, a deeper note. But his nature was frailer, his muse not so easily
within call, his character as intolerant of restraint as her own, but
less self-sufficing; and the morbid taint of thought then prevalent, and
which her natural optimism and better balanced faculties enabled her to
throw off very shortly, had entered into him ineffaceably. Whether or
not she brought a fresh blight on his mind, she certaintly failed to
cure it.

The spring had hardly begun when De Musset was struck down by fever.
George Sand, who had previously been very ill herself, nursed him
through his attack with great devotion; and in six weeks' time he was
restored to health, if not to happiness. Theirs was at an end, as they
recognized, and agreed to part--"for a time, perhaps, or perhaps for
ever," she wrote,--with their attachment broken but not destroyed.

It was early in April that De Musset started on his homeward journey.
George Sand saw him on his way as far as Vicenza, and ere returning to
Venice, made a little excursion in the Alps, along the course of the
Brenta. "I have walked as much as four-and-twenty miles a day," she
writes to M. Boucoiran, "and found out that this sort of exercise is
very good for me, both morally and physically. Tell Buloz I will write
some letters for the _Revue_, upon my pedestrian tours. I came back into
Venice with only seven centimes in my pocket, otherwise I should have
gone as far as the Tyrol; but the want of baggage and money obliged me
to return. In a few days I shall start again, and cross over the Alps by
the gorges of the Piave."

And the spring's delights on the Alpine borders of Lombardy are
described by her _con amore_, in the promised letters:--

     The country was not yet in its full splendor; the fields were of a
     faint green, verging on yellow, and the leaves only coming into bud
     on the trees. But here and there the almonds and peaches in flower
     mixed their garlands of pink and white with the dark clumps of
     cypress. Through the midst of this far-spreading garden the Brenta
     flowed swiftly and silently over her sandy bed, between two large
     banks of pebbles, and the rocky _debris_ which she tears out of the
     heart of the Alps, and with which she furrows the plains in her
     days of anger. A semi-circle of fertile hills, overspread with
     those long festoons of twisting vine that suspend themselves from
     all the trees in Venetia, made a near frame to the picture; and the
     snowy mountain-heights, sparkling in the first rays of sunshine,
     formed an immense second border, standing, as if cut out in silver,
     against the solid blue of the sky.

None of these excursions, however, were ever carried very far. For the
next three months she remained almost entirely stationary at Venice, her
head-quarters. She had taken apartments for herself in the interior of
the city, in a little low-built house, along the narrow, green, and yet
limpid canal, close to the Ponte dei Barcaroli. "There," she tells us,
"alone all the afternoon, never going out except in the evening for a
breath of air, working at night as well, to the song of the tame
nightingales that people all Venetian balconies, I wrote _Andre_,
_Jacques_, _Mattea_, and the first _Lettres d'un Voyageur_."

None can read the latter and suppose that the suffering of the recent
parting was all on one side. The poet continued to correspond with her,
and the consciousness of the pain she had inflicted she was clearly not
sufficiently indifferent herself to support. But neither De Musset nor
any other in whom, through the "prism of enthusiasm," she may have seen
awhile a hero of romance, was ever a primary influence on her life.
These were two. Firstly, her children, who although at a distance were
seldom absent from her thoughts. Of their well-being at school and at
home respectively, she was careful to keep herself informed, down to the
minutest particulars, by correspondents in Paris and at Nohant, whence
no opposition whatever was raised by its occupier to her prolonged
absence abroad. Secondly, her art-vocation. She wrote incessantly; and
independently of the pecuniary obligations to do so which she put
forward, it is obvious that she had become wedded to this habit of work.
"The habit has become a faculty--the faculty a need. I have thus come to
working for thirteen hours at a time without making myself ill; seven
or eight a day on an average, be the task done better or worse," she
writes to M. Chatiron, from Venice, in March. Sometimes, as with _Leone
Leoni_, she would complete a novel in a week; a few weeks later it was
in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Such haste she afterward deprecated,
and, like all other workers, she aspired to a year's holiday in which to
devote herself to the study of the masterpieces of modern literature;
but the convenient season for such suspension of her own productive
activity never came. And whilst at Venice she found herself literally in
want of money to leave it. Buloz had arranged with her that she should
contribute thirty-two pages every six weeks to his periodical for a
yearly stipend of L160. She had anticipated her salary for the expenses
of her Italian journey, and must acquit herself of the arrears due
before she could take wing.

_Jacques_, the longest of the novels written at Venice, afforded fresh
grounds to those who taxed her works with hostility to social
institutions. Without entering into the vexed question of the right of
the artist in search of variety to exercise his power on any theme that
may invite to its display, and of the precise bearing of ethical rules
on works of imagination, it is permissible to doubt that _Jacques_,
however bitter the sentiments of the author at that time regarding the
marriage tie, ever seriously disturbed the felicity of any domestic
household in the past or present day. It is too lengthy and too
melancholy to attract modern readers, who care little to revel in the
luxuries of woe, so relished by those of a former age. We cannot do
better than quote the judgment pronounced by Madame Sand herself, thirty
years later, on this work of pure sentimentalism--generated by an epoch
thrown into commotion by the passionate views of romanticism--the epoch
of Rene, Lara, Childe Harold, Werther, types of desperate men; life
weary, but by no means weary of talking. "_Jacques_," she observes,
"belonged to this large family of disillusioned thinkers; they had their
_raison d'etre_, historical and social. He comes on the scene in the
novel, already worn by deceptions; he thought to revive through his
love, and he does not revive. Marriage was for him only the drop of
bitterness that made the cup overflow. He killed himself to bequeath to
others the happiness for which he cared not, and in which he believed
not."

_Jacques_, taken as a _plaidoyer_ against domestic institutions,
singularly misses its aim. As critics have remarked, some of the most
eloquent pages are those that treat of married bliss. Our sympathies
are entirely with the wronged husband against his silly little wife. It
is a kindred work to _Lelia_, and its faults are the same; but whilst
dealing ostensibly with real life and possible human beings it cannot,
like _Lelia_, be placed apart, and retain interest as a literary
curiosity.

_Andre_ is a very different piece of work and a little masterpiece of
its kind. The author, in her preface, tells us how, whilst mechanically
listening to the incessant chatter of the Venetian sempstresses in the
next room to her own, she was struck by the resemblance between the mode
of life and thought their talk betrayed, and that of the same class of
girls at La Chatre; and how in the midst of Venice, to the sound of the
rippling waters stirred by the gondolier's oar, of guitar and serenade,
and within sight of the marble palaces, her thoughts flew back to the
dark and dirty streets, the dilapidated houses, the wretched moss-grown
roofs, the shrill concerts of the cocks, cats, and children of the
little French provincial town. She dreamt also of the lovely meadows,
the scented hay, the little running streams, and the floral researches
she had been fond of. This tenacity of her instincts was a safeguard she
may have sometimes rebelled against as a chain; it was with her an
essential feature, and, despite all vagaries, gave a great unity to her
life.

"Venice," she writes to M. Chatiron in June, "with her marble staircases
and her wonderful climate, does not make me forget anything that has
been dear to me. Be sure that nothing in me dies. My life has its
agitations; destiny pushes me different ways, but my heart does not
repudiate the past. Old memories have a power none can ignore, and
myself less than another. I love on the contrary to recall them, and we
shall soon find ourselves together again in the old nest at Nohant."
_Andre_ she considered the outcome of this feeling of nostalgia. In it
she has put together the vulgar elements of inferior society in a
common-place country town, and produced a poem, though one of the
saddest. If the florist heroine, Genevieve, is a slightly idealized
figure, the story and general character-treatment are realistic to a
painful degree. There is more power of simple pathos shown here than is
common in the works of George Sand. _Andre_ is a refreshing contrast, in
its simplicity and brevity, to the inflation of _Lelia_ and _Jacques_.
It was an initial essay, and a model one, in a style with better claims
to enduring popularity.

As the summer advanced, George Sand found herself free to depart, and
started on her way back to France, famishing, as she tells us, for the
sight of her children. Her grand anxiety was to reach her destination
in time for the breaking-up day and distribution of prizes at the
College Henri IV. "I shall be at Paris before then," she writes from
Milan, to her son, "if I die on the way, and really the heat is such
that one might die of it." From Milan she journeyed over the Simplon to
the Rhone valley, Martigny, Chamounix, and Geneva, performing great part
of the way on foot. She reached Paris in the middle of August, and a few
days later started with her boy for Nohant, where Solange had spent the
time during her mother's absence, and where they remained together for
the holidays. Here too she was in the midst of a numerous circle of
friends of both sexes, in whose staunch friendliness she found a solace
of which she stood in real need.




CHAPTER V.

MENTAL DEVELOPMENT.


The period immediately following George Sand's return from Italy in
August 1834, was a time of transition, both in her outer and inner life.
If undistinguished by the production of any novel calculated to create a
fresh sensation, it shows no abatement of literary activity. This, as we
have seen, had become to her a necessity of nature. Neither vicissitudes
without nor commotions within, though they might direct or stimulate,
seem to have acted as a check on the flow of her pen.

During the first twelvemonth she continued to reside alternately at
Nohant, whither she came with her son and daughter for their
holidays--Solange being now placed in a children's school kept by some
English ladies at Paris,--and her "poet's garret," as she styled her
third floor _appartement_ on the Quai Malplaquet.

This winter saw the ending for herself and De Musset of their hapless
romance. An approach to complete reconciliation--for the existing
partial estrangement had been discovered to be more unbearable than all
besides--led to stormy scenes and violent discord, and resulted before
very long in mutual avoidance, which was to be final. It is said that
forgiveness is the property of the injured, and it should be remembered
that whenever De Musset's name is mentioned by George Sand it is with
the admiring respect of one to whom his genius made that name sacred,
and who refused to the end of his life to use the easy weapon offered
her by his notorious frailties for vindicating herself at his expense.
And, however pernicious the much talked of effect on De Musset's mind,
it is but fair to the poet to recollect that it is no less true of him
than of George Sand that his best work, that with which his fame has
come chiefly to associate itself, was accomplished after this painful
experience.

Into her own mental state--possibly at this time the least enviable of
the two--we get some glimpses in the _Lettres d'un Voyageur_ of the
autumn 1834, and winter 1834-35. Here, again, we should be content with
gathering a general impression, and not ingenuously read literal facts
in all the self-accusations and recorded experiences of the
"_voyageur_"--a semi-fictitious personage whose improvisations were,
after all, only a fresh exercise which George Sand had invented for her
imagination taking herself and reality for a starting-point merely, a
suggestive theme.

But the despair and disgust of life, to which both these and her private
letters give such uncompromising and eloquent expression, indubitably
reflect her feelings at this moral crisis--the feelings of one who
having openly braved the laws of society, to become henceforward a law
unto herself, recognizes that she has only found her way to fresh
sources of misery. Never yet had she had such grave and deep causes of
individual mental torment to blacken her views of existence, and incline
her to abhor it as a curse. "Your instinct will save you, bring you back
to your children," wrote a friend who knew her well. But her maternal
love and solicitude themselves were becoming a source of added distress
and apprehension.

The extraordinary arrangement she and M. Dudevant had entered into four
years before with regard to each other, was clearly one impossible to
last. It will be recollected that she at that time had relinquished her
patrimony to those who had thought it no dishonor to continue to enjoy
it; and the terms of that agreement had since been nominally
undisturbed. But besides that, the control of the children remained a
constant subject of dissension. M. Dudevant was beginning to get into
pecuniary difficulties in the management of his wife's estate. Sometimes
he contemplated resigning it to her, and retiring to Gascony, to live
with his widowed stepmother on the property which at her death would
revert to him. But unfortunately he could not make up his mind to this
course. No sooner had he drawn up an agreement consenting to a division
of property, than he seemed to regret the sacrifice; upon which she
ceased to press it.

Meantime Madame Dudevant, whose position at Nohant was that of a visitor
merely, and becoming untenable, felt her hold on her cherished home and
her children becoming more precarious day by day.

Some of her friends had strongly advised her to travel for a length of
time, both as offering a mortal remedy, and as a temporary escape from
the practical perplexities of the moment. Her rescue, however, was to be
otherwise effected, and a number of new intellectual interests that
sprang up for her at this time all tended to retain her in her own
country.

It was in the course of this spring that she made the acquaintance of M.
de Lamennais, introduced to her by their common friend, the composer,
Franz Liszt. The famous author of the _Paroles d'un Croyant_ had
virtually severed himself from the Church of Rome by his recent
publication of this little volume, pronounced by the Pope, "small in
size, immense in perversity!" The eloquence of the poet-priest, and the
doctrines of the anti-Catholic and humanitarian Christianity of which he
came forward as the expounder, could not fail powerfully to impress her
intelligence. Here seemed the harbor of refuge her half-wrecked faiths
were seeking, and what the abbe's antagonists denounced as the
"diabolical gospel of social science," came to her as the teachings of
an angel of light. Christianity as preached by him was a sort of
realization of the ideal religion of Aurore Dupin--faith divorced from
superstition and the doctrine of Romish infallibility. Complete identity
of sentiments between herself and the abbe was out of the question. But
his was the right mind coming to her mind at the right moment, and
exercised a healing influence over her troubled spirits. For _Le Monde_,
a journal founded by him shortly after this time, she wrote the _Lettres
a Marcie_, an unfinished series, treating of moral and spiritual
problems and trials. Finally, the position M. de Lamennais had taken up
as the apostle of the people further enlisted her sympathies in his
cause, which made religious one with social reform, and amalgamated the
protest against moral enslavement with the liberation-schemes then
fermenting in young and generous minds all over Europe.

The belief in the possibility of their speedy realization was then
wide-spread--a conviction that, as Heine puts it, some grand recipe for
freedom and equality, invented, well drawn up, and inserted in the
_Moniteur_, was all that was needed to secure those benefits for the
world at large. If George Sand, led afterwards into searching for this
empirical remedy for the wrongs and sufferings of the masses, believed
the elixir to have been found in the establishment of popular
sovereignty by universal suffrage, it was through the persuasive
arguments of the leaders of the movement, with whom at this period she
was first brought into personal relations. Her own unbiassed judgment,
to which she reverted long years after, when she had seen these
illusions perish sadly, was less sanguine in its prognostications for
the immediate future, as appears in her own reflections in a letter of
this time:--

     What I see in the midst of the divergencies of all these reforming
     sects is a waste of generous sentiments and of noble thoughts, a
     tendency towards social amelioration, but an impossibility for the
     time to bring forth through the want of a head to that great body
     with a hundred hands, that tears itself to pieces, for not knowing
     what to attack. So far the struggles make only dust and noise. We
     have not yet come to the era that will construct new societies, and
     people them with perfected men.

She had recently been introduced to a political and legal celebrity of
his day, the famous advocate Michel, of Bourges. He was then at the
height of his reputation, which, won by his eloquent and successful
defense of political prisoners on various occasions, was considerable.
Madame Sand had been advised to consult him professionally about her
business affairs, and for this purpose went over one day with some of
her Berrichon friends to see him at Bourges. But the man of law had, it
appears, been reading _Lelia_, and instead of talking of business with
his distinguished client, dashed at once into politics, philosophy, and
social science, overpowering his listeners with the strength of his
oratory. His sentiments were those of extreme radicalism, and he carried
on a little private propaganda in the country around. The force of his
character seems to have spent itself in oratorical effort. He could
preach revolution, but not suggest reform; denounce existing abuses, but
do nothing towards the remodelling of social institutions; and in after
years he failed, as so many leading men in his profession have failed,
to make any impression as a speaker in Parliament. The author of
_Lelia_ was overwhelmed, if not all at once converted, by the tremendous
rhetorical power of this singular man. She was a proselyte worth the
trouble of making, and Michel was bent on drawing her more closely into
active politics, with which hitherto she had occupied herself very
little. He began a correspondence, writing her long epistles, the sum of
which, she says, may thus be resumed:--"Your scepticism springs from
personal unhappiness. Love is selfish. Extend this solicitude for a
single individual to the whole human race." He certainly succeeded in
inspiring her with a strong desire to share his passion for politics,
his faith, his revivifying hopes of a speedy social renovation, his
ambition to be one of its apostles. To Michel, under the sobriquet of
"Everard," are addressed several of the _Lettres d'un Voyageur_ of the
spring and summer of 1835, letters which she defines as "a rapid
analysis of a rapid conversion."

But Michel's work was a work of demolition only; and when his earnest
disciple wanted new theories in place of the old forms so ruthlessly
destroyed, he had none to offer. There were others, however, who could.
She was soon to be put into communication with a number of the active
workers for the republican cause throughout the country. They counted
many of the best hearts and not the worst heads in France, and were
naturally eager to enlist her energies on their side.

Foremost, by right of the influence exercised over her awhile by his
writings, was the philosopher Pierre Leroux, with whom her acquaintance
dates from this same year. In spite of the wide divergence between her
pre-eminently artistic spirit and a mind of the rougher stamp of this
born iconoclast, he was to indoctrinate her with many new opinions. His
disinterested character won her admiration; he was a practical
philanthropist as well as a critical thinker, one whose life and
fighting power were devoted to promoting the good of the working classes
to whom he belonged, having been brought up as a printer. He was
regarded as the apostle of communism, as then understood, or rather not
understood--for the form under which it suggested itself to the social
reformers of the period in question was entirely indefinite.

Meantime the novelist's pen was far from idle. One or two pleasant
glimpses she has given us into her manner of working belong to this
year. In the summer the heat in her "poet's garret" becoming
intolerable, she took refuge in a congenial solitude offered by the
ground-floor apartments of the house, then in course of reconstruction,
dismantled and untenanted. The works had been temporarily suspended,
and Madame Sand took possession of the field abandoned by the builders
and carpenters. The windows and doors opening into the garden had been
taken away, and the place thus turned into an airy, cool retreat. Out of
the apparatus of the workmen, left behind, she constructed her
writing-establishment, and here, secure from interruption, denying
herself to all visitors, never going out except to visit her children at
their respective schools, she completed her novel with no companions but
the spiders crawling over the planks, the mice running in and out of the
corners, and the blackbirds hopping in from the garden; the deep sense
of solitude enhanced by the roar of the city in the very heart of which
she had thus voluntarily isolated herself.

As an artistic experience she found it refreshing, and repeated it more
than once. Soon after, a friend offered her the loan of an empty house
at Bourges, a town that had been suggested to her as a desirable place
of residence, should the circumstances at Nohant ever force her to
abandon it entirely. As a home she saw and disapproved of Bourges, but
she thoroughly enjoyed a brief retreat spent there in an absolutely
deserted, vine-covered dwelling, standing in a garden enclosed by stone
walls. Her meals were handed in through a wicket. A few friends came to
see her in the evenings. The days, and often the nights, she passed in
study and meditation, shut up in the library reading Lavater,
expatiating on her impressions of his theories in a letter addressed to
Franz Liszt (inserted among the _Lettres d'un Voyageur_), or strolling
in the flower garden--"forgotten," she tells us, "by the whole world,
and plunged into oblivion of the actualities of my own existence."

Of her numerous letters of advice to her boy at school, we quote one
written during this summer of 1835, when their future relations to each
other were in painful uncertainty:--

     Work, be strong and proud; despise the little troubles supposed to
     belong to your age. Reserve your strength of resistance for deeds
     and facts that are worth the effort. If I am here no longer, think
     of me who worked and suffered cheerfully. We are like each other in
     mind and in countenance. I know already from this day what your
     intellectual life will be. I fear for you many and deep sorrows. I
     hope for you the purest of joys. Guard within yourself that
     treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to
     lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness. Know how to
     replace in your heart, by the happiness of those you love, the
     happiness that may be wanting to yourself. Keep the hope of another
     life. It is there that mothers meet their sons again. Love all
     God's creatures. Forgive those who are ill-conditioned, resist
     those who are unjust, and devote yourself to those who are great
     through their virtue. Love me. I will teach you many, many things
     if we live together. If that blessing (the greatest that can befall
     me, the only one that makes me wish for a long life) is not to be,
     you must pray for me, and from the grave itself, if anything
     remains of me in the universe, the spirit of your mother will watch
     over you.

In the autumn, 1835, Madame Dudevant, under legal advice, and supported
by the approval of friends of both parties, determined to apply to the
courts for a judicial separation from her husband, on the plea of
ill-treatment. She had sufficient grounds to allege for her claim, and
had then every reason to hope that her demand would not even be
contested by M. Dudevant, who, on former occasions, had voluntarily
signed but afterwards revoked the agreement she hereby only desired to
make valid and permanent, and which, ensuring to him a certain
proportion of her income, gave her Nohant for a place of habitation, and
established the children under her care.

Pending the issue of this suit, which, unexpectedly protracted, dragged
on until the summer of the next year, she availed herself of the
hospitality of a family at La Chatre, friends of old standing, and from
under whose roof she awaited, as from a neutral ground, the decision of
her judges. During this year she saw little of Paris, and less of
Nohant, except for a brief visit which, profiting by a moment when its
walls were absolutely deserted by every other human being, she paid to
her house--not knowing then whether she would ever, so to speak, inhabit
it again in her own right.

On the result of the legal proceedings depended her future home and the
best part of her happiness. Sooner than be parted from her children, she
contemplated the idea, in case of the decision going against her, of
escaping with them to America! Yet, in the midst of all this suspense,
we find her industrious as ever, joining in the daytime in the family
life of the household with which she was domesticated, helping to amuse
the children among them, retiring to her room at ten at night, to work
on at her desk till seven in the morning, according to her wont. A more
cheerful tone begins to pervade her effusions. The clouds were slowly
breaking on all sides at once, and a variety of circumstances combining
to restore to her mind its natural tone--faith, hope, and charity to her
heart, and harmony to her existence. She began to perceive what she was
enabled afterwards more fully to acknowledge as follows:--

     As to my religion, the ground of it has never varied. The forms of
     the past have vanished, for me as for my century, before the light
     of study and reflection. But the eternal doctrine of believers, of
     God and His goodness, the immortal soul and the hopes of another
     life, this is what, in myself, has been proof against all
     examination, all discussion, and even intervals of despairing
     doubt.

It is significant that during these months, spent for the most part at
La Chatre, we find her rewriting _Lelia_, trying, as she expressed her
intention, "to transform this work of anger into a work of gentleness."
_Engelwald_, a novel of some length on which she was engaged, was
destined never to see the light.

To the Comtesse d'Agoult, better known by her _nom de plume_ of Daniel
Stern, whose acquaintance she had recently made in Paris, she writes in
May, 1836:--

     I am still at La Chatre, staying with my friends, who spoil me like
     a child of five years old. I inhabit a suburb, built in terraces
     against the rock. At my feet lies a wonderfully pretty valley. A
     garden thirty feet square and full of roses, and a terrace
     extensive enough for you to walk along it in ten steps, are my
     drawing-room, my study, and gallery. My bed-room is rather
     large--it is decorated with a red cotton curtained bed--a real
     peasant's bed, hard and flat, two straw chairs, and a white wooden
     table. My window is situated six feet above the terrace. By the
     trellised trees on the wall I can get out and in, and stroll at
     night among my thirty feet of flowers without having to open a door
     or wake anyone.

     Sometimes I go out riding alone, at dusk. I come in towards
     midnight. My cloak, my rough hat, and the melancholy trot of my
     nag, make me pass in the darkness for a commercial traveller, or a
     farm-boy.

     One of my grand amusements is to watch the transition from night to
     day; it effects itself in a thousand different manners. This
     revolution, apparently so uniform, has every day a character of its
     own.

The summer that had set in was unusually hot and sultry. Writing to
Madame d'Agoult, July 10, 1836, she thus describes her enjoyment of a
season that allowed of some of the pleasures of primitive existence:--

     I start on foot at three in the morning, fully intending to be back
     by eight o'clock; but I lose myself in the lanes; I forget myself
     on the banks of the river; I run after butterflies; and I get home
     at midday in a state of torrefaction impossible to describe.

Another time the sight of the cooling stream is more than she can
resist, and she walks into the Indre fully dressed; but a few minutes
more and the sun has dried her garments, and she proceeds on her walk of
ten or twelve miles--"Never a cockchafer passes but I run after it."

     You have no idea of all the dreams I dream during my walks in the
     sun. I fancy myself in the golden days of Greece. In this happy
     country where I live you may often go for six miles without meeting
     a human creature. The flocks are left by themselves in pastures
     well enclosed by fine hedges; so the illusion can last for some
     time. One of my chief amusements when I have got out to some
     distance, where I don't know the paths, is to fancy I am wandering
     over some other country with which I discover some resemblance. I
     recollect having strolled in the Alps, and fancied myself for hours
     in America. Now I picture to myself an Arcadia in Berry. Not a
     meadow, not a cluster of trees which, under so fine a sun, does not
     appear to me quite Arcadian.

We give these passages because they seem to us very forcibly to portray
one side, and that the strongest and most permanent, of the character of
George Sand: the admixture of a child's simplicity of tastes, a poet's
fondness for reverie, and that instinctive independence of habits--an
instinct stronger than the restraints of custom--which her individuality
seemed to demand.

In the letter last quoted to Madame d'Agoult, the new ideal which was
arising out of these contemplations is thus resumed:--

     To throw yourself into the lap of mother nature: to take her really
     for mother and sister; stoically and religiously to cut off from
     your life what is mere gratified vanity; obstinately to resist the
     proud and the wicked; to make yourself humble with the unfortunate,
     to weep with the misery of the poor; nor desire another consolation
     than the putting down of the rich; to acknowledge no other God than
     Him who ordains justice and equality upon men; to venerate what is
     good, to judge severely what is only strong, to live on very
     little, to give away nearly all, in order to re-establish primitive
     equality and bring back to life again the Divine institution: that
     is the religion I shall proclaim in a little corner of my own, and
     that I aspire to preach to my twelve apostles under the lime-trees
     in my garden.

The judgment of the court, first pronounced in February, 1836, and given
in her favor by default, no opposition having been raised to her claims
to the proposed partition of property by the defendant, placed her in
legal possession of her house and her children. Appeal was made,
however, prolonging and complicating the case, but without affecting its
termination. In the war of mutual accusations thus stirred up, M.
Dudevant's _role_ as accuser, yet objecting in the same breath to the
separation, had an appearance of insincerity that could not fail to
withdraw sympathy from his side, irrespective of any judgment that might
be held on the conduct of the wife, whose absence and complete
independence he had authorized or acquiesced in. Before the actual
conclusion of the law-suit his appeal was withdrawn. As a result, the
previous judgment in favor of Madame Dudevant was virtually confirmed,
and the details were settled by private agreement.

It is almost impossible to overrate the importance to George Sand of a
conclusion that gave her back her old home of Nohant, and secured to her
the permanent companionship of her children. The present pecuniary
arrangement left M. Dudevant some hold over Maurice and his education,
concerning which his parents had long disagreed, and which for another
year remained a source of contention.

The affair thus concluded, Madame Sand entered formally into possession
of Nohant; and early in September she started with her two children for
Switzerland, where they spent the autumn holidays in a long-contemplated
visit to her friend the Comtesse d'Agoult, then at Geneva. This tour is
fancifully sketched in a closing number of the _Lettres d'un Voyageur_,
a volume which stands as a sort of literary memorial of two years of
unsettled, precarious existence, material and spiritual--a time of trial
now happily at an end.

_Simon_, a tale dedicated to Madame d'Agoult, and published in the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, 1836--a graceful story, of no high
pretentions--is noticeable as marking the commencement of a decided and
agreeable change in the tone of George Sand's fiction. Hitherto the
predominant note struck had been most often one of melancholy, if not
despair--the more hopelessly painful the subject, the more fervent,
apparently, the inspiration to the writer. In _Indiana_ she had
portrayed the double victim of tyranny and treachery; in _Valentine_, a
helpless girl sacrificed to family ambition and social prejudice; in
_Lelia_ and _Jacques_, the incurable _Weltschmerz_, heroism unvalued and
wasted; in _Leone Leoni_, the infatuation of a weak-minded woman for a
phenomenal scoundrel; in _Andre_, the wretchedness which a timid,
selfish character, however amiable, may bring down on itself and on all
connected with it. Henceforward she prefers themes of a pleasanter
nature. In _Simon_ she paints the triumph of true and patient love over
social prejudice and strong opposition. In _Mauprat_,[B] written in
1837, at Nohant, she exerts all the force of her imagination and
language to bring before us vividly the gradual redemption of a noble
but degraded nature, through the influence of an exclusive, passionate
and indestructible affection. The natural optimism of her temperament,
not her incidental misfortunes, began and continued to color her
compositions.

From Switzerland she returned for part of the winter to Paris. She had
given up her "poet's garret," and occupied for a while a suite of rooms
in the Hotel de France, where resided also Madame d'Agoult. The _salon_
of the latter was a favorite _rendezvous_ of cosmopolitan artistic
celebrities, whose general _rendezvous_ just then was Paris. A very
Pantheon must have been an intimate circle that included, among others,
George Sand, Daniel Stern, Heine, the Polish poet Mickiewicz, Eugene
Delacroix, Meyerbeer, Liszt, Hiller, and Frederic Chopin.

The delicate health of her son forced Madame Sand to leave with him
shortly for Berry, where he soon became convalescent. Later in the
season, some of the same party of friends that had met in Paris met
again at Nohant. It was during this summer that George Sand wrote for
her child the well-known little tale, _Les Maitres Mosaistes_, in which
the adventures of the Venetian mosaic-workers are woven into so charming
a picture. "I do not know why, but it is seldom that I have written
anything with so much pleasure," she tells us. "It was in the country,
in summer weather, as hot as the Italian climate I had lately left. I
have never seen so many birds and flowers in my garden. Liszt was
playing the piano on the ground floor, and the nightingales, intoxicated
with music and sunshine, were singing madly in the lilac-trees around."

The party was abruptly dispersed upon the intelligence that reached
Madame Sand of her mother's sudden, and, as it proved, fatal illness.
She hurried to Paris, and remained with Madame Maurice Dupin during her
last days. The old fond affection between them, though fitful in its
manifestations on the part of the mother, had never been impaired, and
the breaking of this old link with the past was very deeply felt by
Madame Sand.

Before returning to Nohant, she spent a few weeks at Fontainebleau with
her son, from whom she never liked to separate. They passed their days
in exploring the forest, then larger and wilder than now, botanizing and
butterfly-hunting. At night she sat up writing, when all was quiet in
the inn. Just as, whilst at Venice, her fancy flew back to the scenes
and characters of French provincial life, and _Andre_ was the result, so
here, amid the forest landscapes of her own land, her imagination rushed
off to Venice and the shores of the Brenta, and produced _La Derniere
Aldini_.

This constant industry, which had now become her habit of life, was more
of a practical necessity than ever. Nohant, as already mentioned, barely
repaid the owner the expenses of keeping it up. Madame Sand, who desired
to be liberal besides, to travel occasionally, to gratify little
artistic fancies as they arose, must look to her literary work to
furnish the means.

"Sometimes," she writes from Nohant, in October, 1837, to Madame
d'Agoult, then in Italy, "I am tempted to realize my capital, and come
and join you; but out there I should do no work, and the galley-slave is
chained up. If Buloz lets him go for a walk it is on _parole_, and
_parole_ is the cannon-ball the convict drags on his foot."

Nor was it for herself only that she worked in future, but for her
children, the whole responsibility of providing for both of whose
education she was now about definitely to take on her own shoulders. The
power of interference left to M. Dudevant by the recent legal decision
had been exercised in a manner leading to fresh vexatious contention,
and continual alarm on Madame Sand's part lest the boy should be taken
by force from her side. These skirmishes included the actual abduction
of Solange from Nohant by M. Dudevant during her mother's absence at
Fontainebleau; a foolish and purposeless trick, by which nothing was to
be gained, except annoyance and trouble to Madame Sand, whose right to
the control of her daughter had never been contested. A final settlement
entered into between the parties, in 1838, placed these matters
henceforward on a footing of peace, fortunately permanent. By this
agreement Madame Sand received back from M. Dudevant--who had lately
succeeded to his father's estate--some house property that formed part
of her patrimony, and paid down to him the sum of L2,000; he ceding to
her the remnant of his paternal rights; she freeing him from all charges
for Maurice's education, her authority over which, in future, was
recognized as complete.




CHAPTER VI.

SOLITUDE, SOCIETY AND SOCIALISM.


The charge of both children now resting entirely in her hands, Madame
Sand was enabled to fulfill her desire of permanently removing her boy,
now fourteen years of age, from the college Henri IV. Not only was she
opposed to the general _regime_ and educational system pursued in French
public schools of this type, she felt persuaded of its special
unsuitability to her son, whose tastes and temperament were artistic,
like her own, and whose classical studies had been repeatedly
interrupted by illness. His delicate health determined her to spend the
winter of 1838-9 abroad with her family. Having heard the climate and
scenery of Majorca highly praised, she selected the island for their
resort; tempted herself by the prospect of a few months absolute quiet,
where, with neither letters to answer, nor newspapers to read, she would
enjoy some rare leisure, which she proposed to spend in studying history
and teaching French to her children.

Just at this time her friend and ardent admirer, Frederic Chopin, was
recovering from a chest attack, the first presage of the illness that
caused his early death. The eminent pianist and composer had also been
recommended to winter in the South, and greatly needed repose and change
of air to recruit him from the fatigues of the Parisian season. It was
arranged that the convalescent should make one of the expedition to
Majorca. He joined Madame Sand and her children at Perpignan, and they
embarked for Barcelona, whence the sea-voyage to the island was safely
accomplished, the party reaching Palma, the capital, in magnificent
November weather, and never suspecting how soon they would have cause to
repent their choice of a retreat.

But their practical information about the island proved lamentably
insufficient. With the scenery, indeed, they were enraptured. "We
found," says Madame Sand in her little volume, _Un Hiver a Majorque_,
published the following year, "a green Switzerland under a Calabrian
sky, with all the solemnity and stillness of the East." But though a
painter's Elysium, Majorca was wanting in the commonest comforts of
civilized life. Inns were non-existent, foreigners viewed and treated
with suspicion. The party thought themselves fortunate in securing a
villa some miles from Palma, furnished, though scantily. "The country,
nature, trees, sky, sea, and mountains surpass all my dreams," she
writes in the first days, "it is the promised land; and as we have
succeeded in housing ourselves pretty well, we are delighted."

The delight was of brief duration. That Madame Sand's manuscripts took a
month to reach the editor of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_; that the piano
ordered from Paris for Chopin took two months to get to Majorca, were
the least among their troubles. A rainy season of exceptional severity
set in, and the villa quickly became uninhabitable. It was not
weatherproof. Chopin fell alarmingly ill. Good food and medical
attendance were hardly to be procured for him; and finally, the villa
proprietor, having heard that his tenant was suffering from
consumption--an illness believed to be infectious by the Majorcans--gave
the whole party notice to quit. The invalid improving somewhat, though
still too weak to attempt the return journey to France, Madame Sand
transported her ambulance, as she styled it, to some tolerable quarters
she had already discovered in the deserted Carthusian monastery of
Valdemosa--"a poetical name and a poetical abode," she writes; "an
admirable landscape, grand and wild, with the sea at both ends of the
horizon, formidable peaks around us, eagles pursuing their prey even
down to the orange-trees in our garden, a cypress walk winding from the
top of our mountain to the bottom of the gorge, torrents over-grown with
myrtles, palm-trees below our feet, nothing could be more magnificent
than this spot."

Parts of the old monastic buildings were dilapidated; the rest were in
good order, being frequented as a summer retreat by the inhabitants of
Palma. Now, in December, the Chartreuse was entirely abandoned, except
by a housekeeper, a sacristan and a lone monk, the last offshoot of the
community--a kind of apothecary, whose stock-in-trade was limited to
guimauve and dog-grass.

The rooms into which the travellers moved had just been vacated by a
Spanish family of political refugees departing for France. These
lodgings were at least provided with doors, window-panes, and decent
furniture; but the luxury of chimneys was unknown, and a stove, which
had to be manufactured at an enormous price on purpose for the party, is
described as "a sort of iron cauldron, that made our heads ache and
dried up our throats." Continuous stormy weather having suspended steam
traffic with the mainland, the visitors had no choice but to remain
prisoners some two months more, during which the deluge went on with
little intermission.

Still, to young and romantic imaginations the island and life in the
ex-monastery offered considerable charm. Madame Sand and her children
were delighted with the unfamiliar vegetation, the palms, aloes, olives,
almond and orange trees, the Arab architecture, and picturesque
costumes. Valdemosa itself was splendidly situated among the mountains,
in a stone-walled garden surrounded with cypress trees and planted with
palms and olives. In the morning, Madame Sand gave lessons to the
children; in the afternoon, they ran wild out of doors whilst she
wrote--when the invalid musician was well enough to be left. In the
evenings she and the young people went wandering by moonlight through
the cloisters, exploring the monkish cells and chapels. Maurice had
fortunately recovered his health completely, but poor Chopin's state,
aggravated by the damp weather and privations--for the difficulties in
obtaining a regular supply of provisions were immense--remained
throughout their stay a constant and terrible cause of anxiety and
responsibility to Madame Sand. From the islanders no sort of help or
even sympathy was forthcoming, and thievish servants and extortionate
traders were not the least of the annoyances with which the strangers
had to contend. In a letter to Francois Rollinat she gives a graphic
account of their misfortunes:--

     It has rightly been laid down as a principle that where nature is
     beautiful and generous, men are bad and avaricious. We had all the
     trouble in the world to procure the commonest articles of food,
     such as the island produces in abundance; thanks to the signal
     dishonesty, the plundering spirit of the peasants, who made us pay
     for everything three times what it was worth, so that we were at
     their mercy under the penalty of dying of hunger. We could get no
     one to serve us, because we were not _Christians_ [the travellers
     passed for being "sold to the Devil" because they did not go to
     Mass], and, besides, nobody would attend on a consumptive invalid.
     However, for better for worse, we were established.... The place
     was incomparably poetical; we did not see a living soul, nothing
     disturbed our work; after waiting two months, and paying three
     hundred francs extra, Chopin had at last received his piano, and
     delighted the vaults of his cell with his melodies. Health and
     strength were visibly returning to Maurice; as for me, I worked as
     tutor seven hours a day: I sat up working on my own account half
     the night; Chopin composed masterpieces, and we hoped to put up
     with the remainder of our discomforts by the aid of these
     compensations.

It was in the cells of Valdemosa that Madame Sand completed her novel of
Monastic life, _Spiridion_, then publishing in the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_. "For heaven's sake not so much mysticism!" prayed the editor of
her, now and then; and assuredly those readers for whom George Sand was
simply a purveyor of passionate romances, those critics who set her down
in their minds as exclusively a glorifier of mutinous emotion and the
apologist of lawless love, must have been taken aback by these pages, in
which she had devoted her most fervent energies to tracing the spiritual
history, _peu recreatif_, as she dryly observes, of a monk who, in the
days of the decadence of the monastic orders, retained earnestness and
sincerity; whose mind, revolted by the hypocrisy and worldliness around
him, passes through the successive stages of heresy and philosophic
doubt, and to whom is finally revealed an eternal gospel, which lies at
the core of his old religion, but which later growths have stifled, and
which outlasts all shocks and changes, and is to generate the religion
of the future.

The compositions of Chopin above alluded to, include the finest of his
well-known Preludes, which may easily be conceived of as suggested by
the strange mingling of contrasting impressions in the Chartreuse.
"Several of these Preludes," writes Madame Sand, "represent the visions
that haunted him of deceased monks, the sounds of funeral chants;
others are soft and melancholy; these came to him in his hours of
sunshine and health, at the sound of the children's laughter beneath the
window, the distant thrum of guitars and the songs of the birds under
the damp foliage; at the sight of the pale little roses in bloom among
the snow."

The loneliness and melancholy beauty of the spot, however congenial to
the romance writer or inspiring to the composer, were not the right
tonics for the nerves of the over-sensitive, imaginative invalid. The
care and nursing of Madame Sand made amends for much, and by her good
sense she saved him from being doctored to death by local practitioners.
But his fortitude, which bore up heroically against his personal danger,
was not proof against the dreary influences of Valdemosa in bad weather,
the fogs, the sound of the hurricane sweeping through the valley, and
bringing down portions of the dilapidated building, the noise of the
torrents, the cries of the scared sea-birds and the roar of the sea.

The elevation of the Chartreuse made the climate peculiarly disagreeable
at this season. She writes on:--

     We lived in the midst of clouds, and for fifty days were unable to
     get down into the plains; the roads were changed to torrents, and
     we saw nothing more of the sun. I should have thought it all
     beautiful if poor Chopin could only have got on. Maurice was none
     the worse. The wind and the sea sung sublimely as they beat against
     the rocks. The vast and empty cloisters cracked over our heads. If
     I had been there when I wrote the portion of _Lelia_ that takes
     place in the convent, I should have made it finer and truer. But my
     poor friend's chest got worse and worse. The fine weather did not
     return.... A maid I had brought over from France, and who so far
     had resigned herself, on condition of enormous wages, to cook and
     do the housework, began to refuse attendance, as too hard. The
     moment was coming when after having wielded the broom and managed
     the _pot au feu_, I was ready to drop with fatigue--for besides my
     work as tutor, besides my literary labor, besides the continual
     attention necessitated by the condition of my invalid, I had
     rheumatism in every limb.

The return of spring was hailed as offering a tardy release from their
island. The steamers were running again, and the party determined to
leave at all risks; for though Chopin's state was more precarious than
ever, nothing could be worse for him than to remain. They departed,
feeling, she admits, as though they were escaping from the tender
mercies of Polynesian savages, and once safely on board a French vessel
at Barcelona, they thankfully welcomed the day that restored them to
comfort and civilization, and saw the end of an expedition that had
turned out in most respects so disastrous a _fiasco_.

They remained throughout April at Marseilles, where Chopin, in the hands
of a good doctor, became convalescent. From Marseilles they made a short
tour in Italy, visiting Genoa and the neighborhood, and returning to
France in May, Chopin apparently on the high road to complete recovery.
It was in the following year that his illness returned in a graver form,
and unmistakable symptoms of consumption showed themselves. The life of
a fashionable pianist in Paris, the constant excitement, late hours, and
heavy strain of nervous exertion, were fatal to his future chances of
preserving his health; but it was a life to which he had now become
wedded, and which he never willingly left, except for his long annual
visits to Nohant.

Madame Sand repeatedly contemplated settling herself entirely in the
country. She had no love for Paris. "Parisian life strains our nerves
and kills us in the long run," she writes from Nohant to one of her
correspondents. "Ah, how I hate it, that centre of light! I would never
set foot in it again, if the people I like would make the same
resolution." And again, speaking of her "Black Valley, so good and so
stupid," she adds, "Here I am always more myself than at Paris, where I
am always ill, in body and in spirit."

Paris, however, afforded greater facilities for her children's
education. She had a strong desire to see her son an artist, and he was
already studying painting in Delacroix's studio. Also her income at this
moment did not suffice to enable her to live continuously at Nohant
where, she frankly confessed, she had not yet found out how to live
economically, expected as she was to keep open house, regarded as
grudging and unneighborly if she did not maintain her establishment on a
scale to which her resources as yet were unequal. Her expenses in the
country she calculated as double those in Paris, where, as she writes to
M. Chatiron,--

     Everyone's independence is admirable. You invite whom you like, and
     when you don't wish to receive anyone you let the porter know you
     are not at home. Yet I hate Paris in all other respects. There I
     grow stout, and my mind grows thin. You know how quiet and retired
     my life there is, and I do not understand why you tell me, as they
     say in the provinces, that glory keeps me there. I have no glory, I
     have never sought for it, and I don't care a cigarette for it. I
     want to breath fresh air and live in peace. I am succeeding, but
     you see and you know on what conditions.

Her Paris residence, a few seasons later, she fixed in the Cour
d'Orleans Rue St. Lazare, in a block of buildings one-third of which
was occupied by herself and her family; another belonged to her friend,
Madame Marliani, wife of the Spanish Consul, the third to Frederic
Chopin.

With respect to Chopin's long and deep attachment to Madame Sand, and
its requital, concerning which so much has been written, there can
surely be no greater misstatement than to speak of her as having
blighted his life. This last part of his life was indeed blighted, but
by ill-health and consequent nervous irritability and suffering; but
such mitigation as was possible he found for eight years in the womanly
devotion and genial society of Madame Sand--real benefits to one whose
strange and delicate individuality it was not easy to befriend--and
which the breach that took place between them shortly before his death
should not allow us to forget.

"Chopin," observes Eugene Delacroix, "belongs to the small number of
those whom one can both esteem and love." Madame Sand joined a
sympathetic appreciation of the refinement of his nature, and an
enthusiastic admiration of his genius--feelings she shared with his
numberless female worshippers--to a strength of character that lent the
support no other could perhaps so fully have given, or that he would
accept from no other, to the fragile, nervous, suffering tone-poet. Her
sentiments towards him seem to resolve themselves into a great
tenderness rather than a passionate fervor--a placid affection for
himself, and an adoration for his music.

All the time their existences, so far from having been united, flowed in
different, nay divergent channels. Chopin, the idol of Paris society,
moved constantly in the aristocratic and fashionable world, from which
Madame Sand lived aloof. She for her part had heavy domestic cares and
anxieties that did not touch him, and with the political party which was
absorbing more and more of her energies he had no sympathy whatever.
Whether the cause were the false start she had made at the outset by her
marriage, forbidding her the realization of a woman's ideal, the
non-separation of the gift of her heart from that of her whole life, or
whether that her masculine strength of intellect created for her serious
public interests and occupations, beside which personal pleasures and
pains are apt to become of secondary moment, certain it appears that
with George Sand, as with many an eminent artist of the opposite sex,
such _affaires de coeur_ were but ripples on the sea of a large and
active existence.

The year after her return from Majorca was marked by her first
appearance before the public as a dramatic author. Although it was a
line in which she afterwards obtained successes, as will be seen in a
future chapter, the result of this initial effort, _Cosima_, a five-act
drama, was not encouraging. It was acted at the Theatre Francais in the
spring of 1840, and proved a failure. It betrays no insufficient sense
of dramatic effect, nor lack of the means for producing it, but decided
clumsiness in the adaptation of these means to that end. The plot and
personages recall those of _Indiana_, with the important differences
that the _beau role_ of the piece falls to the husband, and that the
scene is transported back to Florence in the Middle Ages--an undoubted
error, as giving to a play essentially modern and French in its
complexities of sentiment and motive a strong local coloring of a past
time and another people, making the whole seem unreal. It has a
psychological subject which Emile Augier or Dumas _fils_ would know how
to handle dramatically; but as treated by George Sand, we are
perpetually being led to anticipate too much in the way of action, to
have our expectations dissipated the next moment. A wet blanket of
disappointment on this head dampens any other satisfaction that the
merits of the play might otherwise afford.

Hitherto she had continued to write regularly for the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_. As her revolutionary opinions became more pronounced, they
began to find utterance in her romances. Her conversion by Michel had
not only been complete, but the disciple had outstripped the master. The
study of the communistic theories of Pierre Leroux had familiarized her
with the speculations in social science of those who at this time were
devoting their attention to criticising the existing social
organization, and seeking, and sometimes imagining they had found, the
secret of creating a better. George Sand's strong admiration for the
writings of Leroux, always praised by her in the highest terms, strikes
us now as extravagant, but was shared to some extent by not a few
leading men of the time, such as Sainte-Beuve and Lamartine. Her
intellect had eagerly followed this bold and earnest pioneer in
new-discovered worlds of thought; "I do not say it is the last word of
humanity, but, so far, it is its most advanced expression," she states
of his philosophy. The study of it had brought a clearness into her own
views, due, probably, much more to the action of her own mind upon the
novel ideas suggested than to the lucidity of a system of social science
as yet undetermined in some of its main points.

She writes, when looking back on this period from a long distance of
time,--

     After the despairs of my youth, I was governed by too many
     illusions. Morbid scepticism was succeeded in me by too much
     kindliness and ingenuousness. A thousand times over I was duped by
     dreams of an archangelic fusion of the opposing forces in the great
     strife of ideas.

Her novel _Horace_, written for the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, was
rejected--as subversive of law and order--by the editor, except on
condition of alterations which she declined to make.

After this temporary rupture with Buloz, Madame Sand's services were
largely appropriated by the _Revue Independante_, a new journal founded
in 1840 by her friends Pierre Leroux and Louis Viardot, in conjunction
with whose names hers appears on the title page as leading contributor.
For this periodical no theories could be too advanced, no fictitious
illustrations too audacious, and to its pages accordingly was _Horace_
transferred. Among the secondary characters in this novel figure a young
couple, immaculate otherwise in principle and in conduct, but who as
converts to St. Simonism have dispensed with the ordinary legal sanction
to their union. Perhaps a more solid objection to its insertion in the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_ was the picture introduced of the _emcute_ of
June 1832, painted in heroic colors. Both these features, however, are
purely incidental. The main interest and the real strength of the book
lie in a remarkable study of character-development--that of the chief
personage, Horace. It is a cleverly painted portrait of a type that
reappears, with slight modifications, in all ages; a moral charlatan,
who half imposes on himself, and entirely for a while on other people. A
would-be hero, genius, and chivalrous lover, he has none of the genuine
qualities needed for sustaining the parts. Nonchalant and inert of
temperament, he is capable of nothing beyond a short course of
successful affectation. The imposition breaking down at last, he sinks
helplessly into the unheroic mediocrity of position and pretension for
which alone he is fit.

A veritable attempt at a Socialist novel is the _Compagnon du Tour de
France_ written in the course of 1840, which must surely be ranked as
one of the weakest of George Sand's productions. Exactly the converse of
_Horace_ may be said of this book. In the former, those most repelled by
the revolutionary doctrines flashing out here and there, will yet be
struck and interested by the masterly piece of character-painting that
makes of the novel a success. The utmost fanaticism for the ideas
ventilated in the _Compagnon du Tour de France_ can reconcile no reader
to the dullness and unreality of the story which make of it a failure.
For her socialism itself, as set forth in her writings, dispassionate
examination of what she actually inculcated, leaves but little warrant,
in the state of progress now reached, for echoing the mighty outcry
raised against it at the time. No doubt she thought that a complete
reorganization of society on a new basis was eminently to be desired.
But what she definitely advocated was, first, free education for the
poor, and secondly, some fairer adjustment of the relations to each
other of capital and labor. As to the first, authority has already
sanctioned her opinion; the second question, if unsettled, has become a
first preoccupation with statesmen and philosophers of all denominations
in the present day.

With regard to the complete solution of the problem, she leaves her
socialist heroes, as she herself felt, in doubt and perplexity. There
was something in the schemes and doctrines she conscientiously approved,
irreconcilable with her artist-nature--a materialistic tendency which
clashed with her poetical instincts. When the stern demagogue Michel
denounced the whole tribe of artists as a corrupting influence,
enervating to the courage and will of a nation, she rose up
energetically in defense of the confraternity to which she was born:--

     Will you tell me, pray, what you mean, with your declamations
     against artists? Cry out against them as much as you please, but
     respect art. Oh, you Vandal! I like that stern sectarian who wants
     to dress Taglioni in a stuff-gown and _sabots_, and set Liszt's
     hands to turn the machinery of a wine-press, and who yet, as he
     lies on the grass, finds the tears come into his eyes at the least
     linnet's song, and who makes a disturbance in the theatre to stop
     Othello from murdering Malibran! The austere citizen would suppress
     artists as social excrescences that absorb too much of the sap; but
     this gentleman is fond of vocal music, and so will spare the
     singers. Let us hope that painters will find one among your strong
     heads who appreciates painting, and won't wall up all studio
     windows. And as for the poets, they are your cousins; and you don't
     despise their forms of language and their rhythmical mechanism when
     you want to make an impression on the idle crowd. You will go to
     them to take lessons in metaphor, and how to make use of it.

     Unfortunately for the cause of the superiority of antiquity,
     whenever you go to hear Berlioz's _Funeral March_, the least that
     can happen to you will be to confess that this music is rather
     better than what they used to give us in Sparta, when we served
     under Lycurgus; you will think that Apollo, displeased to see us
     sacrificing to Pallas exclusively, has played us a trick in giving
     lessons to that _Babylonian_, so that by the exercise of a magnetic
     and disastrous power over us, he may lead our spirits astray.

And she would prove to the demagogue, out of his own mouth, that
everything cannot be reduced to "bread and shoes all round," as the
grand desideratum. Give these to men, it will not suffice. The eloquent
orator instinctively seeks besides to impart "hallowed emotions and
mystic enthusiasm to those who toil and sweat--he teaches them to hope,
to dream of God, to take courage and lift themselves above the sickening
miseries of human conditions by the thought of a future, chimerical it
may be, but strengthening and sublime."

For a period, however, she was too fascinated by the new ideas to judge
them, and she straightway sought in her art a means of popularizing
them. "These ideas," she writes in a later preface to her socialist
novel, _Le Peche de M. Antoine_, "at which, as yet but a small number of
conservative spirits had taken alarm, had, as yet, only really begun to
sprout in a small number of attentive, laborious minds. The government,
so long as no actual form of political application was assumed, was not
to be disquieted by theories, and let every man make his own, put forth
his dream, and innocently construct his city of the future, by his own
fire-side, in the garden of his imagination."

She was aware that her readers thought her novels getting more and more
tedious, in proportion as she communicated to her fictitious heroes and
heroines the pre-occupations of her brain, and that she was thus
stepping out of the domain of art. But she affirmed she could never help
writing of whatever was absorbing her thoughts and feelings at the
moment, and must take her chance of boring the public. Fortunately for
_Le Peche de M. Antoine_, nature and human nature are here allowed to
claim the larger share of our attention, and philosophy is a secondary
feature. The scene is laid in the picturesque Marche country on the
confines of Berry, a day's journey from Nohant, and we are glad to
linger with her along the rocky banks of the Creuse, or among the ruined
castles of Crozant and Chateaubrun. The novel contains much that is
original and admirable in the drawing of characters of the most opposite
classes.

Finally, in _Le Meunier d'Angibault_,[C] written as was the
last-mentioned work some four or five years later (1844-45), but which
may be named here, as making up with _Le Compagnon du Tour de France_
the trio of "socialist" novels, the _Tendenz_ does not interfere to the
detriment of the artistic plan of the book. In it the romantic elements
of the remote country nook she inhabited are cleverly brought together,
without departing too widely from probability. The dilapidated castle,
the picturesque mill, the traditions of brigandage two generations ago,
all these were realities familiar to her notice. The painting of the
country and country people is masterly; and there is not a passage in
the book to offend the taste of the most scrupulous reader. Nor can it
be justly impugned on the ground of inculcating disturbing political
principles. The personages, in their preference of poverty and obscurity
to rank and wealth, may, in the judgment of some, think and conduct
themselves like chimerical dreamers, but their actions, however
quixotic, concern themselves alone.

But, previous to either of the two novels last named, she had presented
the world with a more ambitious work, whose merit was to compel
universal acknowledgment--the most important, in fact, she had produced
for eight years.




CHAPTER VII.

CONSUELO--HOME LIFE AT NOHANT.


CONSUELO first appeared in the _Revue Independante_, 1842-43. This noble
book might not be inaptly described as,

    --a whole which, irregular in parts,
    Yet left a grand impression on the mind.

Its reckless proportions naturally "shocked the connoisseurs" among
literary critics, especially in her own land; but nevertheless it
became, and deservedly, one of her most popular productions, and did
more than any other single novel she ever wrote to spread her popularity
abroad. If _Indiana_, _Valentine_, and _Lelia_ had never been written to
create the fame of George Sand, _Consuelo_ would have done so, and may
be said to have established it over again, on a better and more lasting
basis. Upon so well-known a work lengthened comment here would be
superfluous. Originally intended for a novelette,--the opening chapters
appear in the _Revue_ under the modest heading, _Consuelo_,
_conte_,--the beginning was so successful that the author was urged to
extend her plan beyond its first proposed limits. The novel is an
ephemeral form of art, no doubt, but it is difficult to conceive of a
stage of social and intellectual progress when the first part of
_Consuelo_ will cease to be read with interest and delight.

The heroine once transported from the lagunes of Venice to the frontier
of Bohemia and the castle of Rudolstadt, the character of the story
becomes less naturalistic; the storyteller loses herself somewhat in
subterranean passages and the mazes of adventure generally. She wrote
on, she acknowledges, at hap-hazard, tempted and led away by the new
horizons which the artistic and historical researches her work required
kept opening to her view. But the powerful contrast between the two
pictures,--of bright, sunshiny, free, sensuous, careless Venetian
folk-life, and of the stern gloom of the mediaeval castle, where the more
spiritual consolations of existence come into prominence--is singularly
effective and original. So also is the charming way in which an incident
in the boyhood of young Joseph Haydn is treated by her fancy, in the
episode of Consuelo's flight from the castle, when he becomes her
fellow-traveller, and their adventures across country are told with
such zest and _entrain_, in pages where life-sketches of character, such
as the good-natured, self-indulgent canon, the violent, abandoned
Corilla, make us forget the wildest improbabilities of the fiction
itself. The concluding portion of the book, again entirely different in
frame, with its delineation of art-life in a fashionable capital,
Vienna, is as true as it is brilliant. It teems with suggestive ideas on
the subject of musical and dramatic art, and with excellently drawn
types. The relations of professional and amateur, the contradictions and
contentions to which, in a woman's nature, the rival forces of love and
of an artistic vocation may give rise, have never been better portrayed
in any novel. The heroine, Consuelo, is of course an ideal character:
her achievements partake of the marvellous; and there are digressions in
the book which are diffuse in the extreme; but nowhere is the author's
imagination more attractively displayed and her style more engaging. The
tone throughout is noble and pure. To look on _Consuelo_ as an agreeable
story merely is to overlook the elevation of the moral standard of the
book, in which much of its power resides. It marks more strongly than
_Mauprat_ the change that had come over the spirit of George Sand's
compositions.

In the continuation, _La Comtesse de Rodolstadt_, which followed
immediately in the _Revue Independante_, 1843, the novelist strays
further and further from reality--the _terra firma_ on which her fancy
improvises such charming dances. Here she only touches the ground now
and then, and between whiles her imagination asks ours to accompany it
on the most extraordinary flights. As a novel of adventure, it is
written with unflagging spirit; and in the rites and doctrines of the
_Illuminati_, an idealization of the feature of the secret sects of the
last century, she found a new medium of expression for her sentiments
regarding the present abuses of society and the need of thorough
renovation. Secret societies, at that time, were extremely numerous and
active among the Republican workers in France. Madame Sand seems
thoroughly to have appreciated their dangers, and has expressly stated
that she was no advocate of such sects; that though under a tyranny,
such as that which oppressed Germany in the times of which she wrote,
they may be a necessity, elsewhere they are an abuse if not a crime.
"The custom indeed I have never regarded as applicable for good in our
time and our country; I have never believed that it can bring forth
anything in future but a dictatorship, and the dictatorial principle is
one I have never accepted." (_Histoire de ma Vie._)

But the romance of the subject was irresistibly tempting to her
inventive faculty. "Tell Leroux to send me some more books on
freemasonry, if he can find any," she writes to a correspondent at Paris
whilst working at the _Comtesse de Rudolstadt_ at Nohant; "I am plunged
into it over head and ears. Tell him also that he has there thrown me
into an abyss of follies and absurdities, but that I am dabbling about
courageously though prepared to extract nothing but nonsense."

For the musical miracles which it is given to Madame Sand's heroes and
heroines to perform at a trifling cost, she may well at this time have
come to regard them as almost in the natural order. She had received her
second, and her best musical education through the contemplation of
original musical genius, of the rarest quality, among her most intimate
friends, her constant guests at Paris and Nohant. The vocal and
instrumental feats of Consuelo and Count Albert themselves are not more
astonishing than the actual recorded achievements of Liszt, pronounced a
perfect _virtuoso_ at twelve years old--and no wonder! The boy had so
carried away his accompanyists, the band of the Italian opera at Paris,
by his performance of the solo in an orchestral piece, that when the
moment came for them to strike in, one and all forgot to do so, but
remained silent, petrified with amazement. And Liszt when in the full
development of his genius, had, as we have seen, been the art-comrade of
George Sand; he had spent the whole of the summer season of 1837 at
Nohant, transcribing Beethoven's symphonies for the piano-forte whilst
she wrote her romances; she was familiar with his marvellous
improvisations. In her "Trip to Chamounix" (_Lettre

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