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<h2> THE STORY OF GEORGE SAND </h2>
<p>To the student of feminine psychology there is no more curious and complex
problem than the one that meets us in the life of the gifted French writer
best known to the world as George Sand.</p>
<p>To analyze this woman simply as a writer would in itself be a long,
difficult task. She wrote voluminously, with a fluid rather than a fluent
pen. She scandalized her contemporaries by her theories, and by the way in
which she applied them in her novels. Her fiction made her, in the history
of French literature, second only to Victor Hugo. She might even challenge
Hugo, because where he depicts strange and monstrous figures, exaggerated
beyond the limits of actual life, George Sand portrays living men and
women, whose instincts and desires she understands, and whom she makes us
see precisely as if we were admitted to their intimacy.</p>
<p>But George Sand puzzles us most by peculiarities which it is difficult for
us to reconcile. She seemed to have no sense of chastity whatever; yet, on
the other hand, she was not grossly sensual. She possessed the maternal
instinct to a high degree, and liked better to be a mother than a mistress
to the men whose love she sought. For she did seek men's love, frankly and
shamelessly, only to tire of it. In many cases she seems to have been
swayed by vanity, and by a love of conquest, rather than by passion. She
had also a spiritual, imaginative side to her nature, and she could be a
far better comrade than anything more intimate.</p>
<p>The name given to this strange genius at birth was Amantine Lucile Aurore
Dupin. The circumstances of her ancestry and birth were quite unusual. Her
father was a lieutenant in the French army. His grandmother had been the
natural daughter of Marshal Saxe, who was himself the illegitimate son of
Augustus the Strong of Poland and of the bewitching Countess of
Konigsmarck. This was a curious pedigree. It meant strength of character,
eroticism, stubbornness, imagination, courage, and recklessness.</p>
<p>Her father complicated the matter by marrying suddenly a Parisian of the
lower classes, a bird-fancier named Sophie Delaborde. His daughter, who
was born in 1804, used afterward to boast that on one side she was sprung
from kings and nobles, while on the other she was a daughter of the
people, able, therefore, to understand the sentiments of the aristocracy
and of the children of the soil, or even of the gutter.</p>
<p>She was fond of telling, also, of the omen which attended on her birth.
Her father and mother were at a country dance in the house of a fellow
officer of Dupin's. Suddenly Mme. Dupin left the room. Nothing was thought
of this, and the dance went on. In less than an hour, Dupin was called
aside and told that his wife had just given birth to a child. It was the
child's aunt who brought the news, with the joyous comment:</p>
<p>"She will be lucky, for she was born among the roses and to the sound of
music."</p>
<p>This was at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Lieutenant Dupin was on the
staff of Prince Murat, and little Aurore, as she was called, at the age of
three accompanied the army, as did her mother. The child was adopted by
one of those hard-fighting, veteran regiments. The rough old sergeants
nursed her and petted her. Even the prince took notice of her; and to
please him she wore the green uniform of a hussar.</p>
<p>But all this soon passed, and she was presently sent to live with her
grandmother at the estate now intimately associated with her name—Nohant,
in the valley of the Indre, in the midst of a rich country, a love for
which she then drank in so deeply that nothing in her later life could
lessen it. She was always the friend of the peasant and of the
country-folk in general.</p>
<p>At Nohant she was given over to her grand-mother, to be reared in a
strangely desultory sort of fashion, doing and reading and studying those
things which could best develop her native gifts. Her father had great
influence over her, teaching her a thousand things without seeming to
teach her anything. Of him George Sand herself has written:</p>
<p>Character is a matter of heredity. If any one desires to know me, he must
know my father.</p>
<p>Her father, however, was killed by a fall from a horse; and then the child
grew up almost without any formal education. A tutor, who also managed the
estate; believed with Rousseau that the young should be reared according
to their own preferences. Therefore, Aurore read poems and childish
stories; she gained a smattering of Latin, and she was devoted to music
and the elements of natural science. For the rest of the time she rambled
with the country children, learned their games, and became a sort of
leader in everything they did.</p>
<p>Her only sorrow was the fact that her mother was excluded from Nohant. The
aristocratic old grandmother would not allow under her roof her son's
low-born wife; but she was devoted to her little grandchild. The girl
showed a wonderful degree of sensibility.</p>
<p>This life was adapted to her nature. She fed her imagination in a
perfectly healthy fashion; and, living so much out of doors, she acquired
that sound physique which she retained all through her life.</p>
<p>When she was thirteen, her grandmother sent the girl to a convent school
in Paris. One might suppose that the sudden change from the open woods and
fields to the primness of a religious home would have been a great shock
to her, and that with her disposition she might have broken out into wild
ways that would have shocked the nuns. But, here, as elsewhere, she showed
her wonderful adaptability. It even seemed as if she were likely to become
what the French call a devote. She gave herself up to mythical thoughts,
and expressed a desire of taking the veil. Her confessor, however, was a
keen student of human nature, and he perceived that she was too young to
decide upon the renunciation of earthly things. Moreover, her grandmother,
who had no intention that Aurore should become a nun, hastened to Paris
and carried her back to Nohant.</p>
<p>The girl was now sixteen, and her complicated nature began to make itself
apparent. There was no one to control her, because her grandmother was
confined to her own room. And so Aurore Dupin, now in superb health,
rushed into every sort of diversion with all the zest of youth. She read
voraciously—religion, poetry, philosophy. She was an excellent
musician, playing the piano and the harp. Once, in a spirit of unconscious
egotism, she wrote to her confessor:</p>
<p>Do you think that my philosophical studies are compatible with Christian
humility?</p>
<p>The shrewd ecclesiastic answered, with a touch of wholesome irony:</p>
<p>I doubt, my daughter, whether your philosophical studies are profound
enough to warrant intellectual pride.</p>
<p>This stung the girl, and led her to think a little less of her own
abilities; but perhaps it made her books distasteful to her. For a while
she seems to have almost forgotten her sex. She began to dress as a boy,
and took to smoking large quantities of tobacco. Her natural brother, who
was an officer in the army, came down to Nohant and taught her to ride—to
ride like a boy, seated astride. She went about without any chaperon, and
flirted with the young men of the neighborhood. The prim manners of the
place made her subject to a certain amount of scandal, and the village
priest chided her in language that was far from tactful. In return she
refused any longer to attend his church.</p>
<p>Thus she was living when her grandmother died, in 1821, leaving to Aurore
her entire fortune of five hundred thousand francs. As the girl was still
but seventeen, she was placed under the guardianship of the nearest
relative on her father's side—a gentleman of rank. When the will was
read, Aurore's mother made a violent protest, and caused a most unpleasant
scene.</p>
<p>"I am the natural guardian of my child," she cried. "No one can take away
my rights!"</p>
<p>The young girl well understood that this was really the parting of the
ways. If she turned toward her uncle, she would be forever classed among
the aristocracy. If she chose her mother, who, though married, was
essentially a grisette, then she must live with grisettes, and find her
friends among the friends who visited her mother. She could not belong to
both worlds. She must decide once for all whether she would be a woman of
rank or a woman entirely separated from the circle that had been her
father's.</p>
<p>One must respect the girl for making the choice she did. Understanding the
situation absolutely, she chose her mother; and perhaps one would not have
had her do otherwise. Yet in the long run it was bound to be a mistake.
Aurore was clever, refined, well read, and had had the training of a
fashionable convent school. The mother was ignorant and coarse, as was
inevitable, with one who before her marriage had been half shop-girl and
half courtesan. The two could not live long together, and hence it was not
unnatural that Aurore Dupin should marry, to enter upon a new career.</p>
<p>Her fortune was a fairly large one for the times, and yet not large enough
to attract men who were quite her equals. Presently, however, it brought
to her a sort of country squire, named Casimir Dudevant. He was the
illegitimate son of the Baron Dudevant. He had been in the army, and had
studied law; but he possessed no intellectual tastes. He was outwardly
eligible; but he was of a coarse type—a man who, with passing years,
would be likely to take to drink and vicious amusements, and in serious
life cared only for his cattle, his horses, and his hunting. He had,
however, a sort of jollity about him which appealed to this girl of
eighteen; and so a marriage was arranged. Aurore Dupin became his wife in
1822, and he secured the control of her fortune.</p>
<p>The first few years after her marriage were not unhappy. She had a son,
Maurice Dudevant, and a daughter, Solange, and she loved them both. But it
was impossible that she should continue vegetating mentally upon a farm
with a husband who was a fool, a drunkard, and a miser. He deteriorated;
his wife grew more and more clever. Dudevant resented this. It made him
uncomfortable. Other persons spoke of her talk as brilliant. He bluntly
told her that it was silly, and that she must stop it. When she did not
stop it, he boxed her ears. This caused a breach between the pair which
was never healed. Dudevant drank more and more heavily, and jeered at his
wife because she was "always looking for noon at fourteen o'clock." He had
always flirted with the country girls; but now he openly consorted with
his wife's chambermaid.</p>
<p>Mme. Dudevant, on her side, would have nothing more to do with this rustic
rake. She formed what she called a platonic friendship—and it was
really so—with a certain M. de Seze, who was advocate-general at
Bordeaux. With him this clever woman could talk without being called
silly, and he took sincere pleasure in her company. He might, in fact,
have gone much further, had not both of them been in an impossible
situation.</p>
<p>Aurore Dudevant really believed that she was swayed by a pure and mystic
passion. De Seze, on the other hand, believed this mystic passion to be
genuine love. Coming to visit her at Nohant, he was revolted by the
clownish husband with whom she lived. It gave him an esthetic shock to see
that she had borne children to this boor. Therefore he shrank back from
her, and in time their relation faded into nothingness.</p>
<p>It happened, soon after, that she found a packet in her husband's desk,
marked "Not to be opened until after my death." She wrote of this in her
correspondence:</p>
<p>I had not the patience to wait till widowhood. No one can be sure of
surviving anybody. I assumed that my husband had died, and I was very glad
to learn what he thought of me while he was alive. Since the package was
addressed to me, it was not dishonorable for me to open it.</p>
<p>And so she opened it. It proved to be his will, but containing, as a
preamble, his curses on her, expressions of contempt, and all the vulgar
outpouring of an evil temper and angry passion. She went to her husband as
he was opening a bottle, and flung the document upon the table. He cowered
at her glance, at her firmness, and at her cold hatred. He grumbled and
argued and entreated; but all that his wife would say in answer was:</p>
<p>"I must have an allowance. I am going to Paris, and my children are to
remain here."</p>
<p>At last he yielded, and she went at once to Paris, taking her daughter
with her, and having the promise of fifteen hundred francs a year out of
the half-million that was hers by right.</p>
<p>In Paris she developed into a thorough-paced Bohemian. She tried to make a
living in sundry hopeless ways, and at last she took to literature. She
was living in a garret, with little to eat, and sometimes without a fire
in winter. She had some friends who helped her as well as they could, but
though she was attached to the Figaro, her earnings for the first month
amounted to only fifteen francs.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, she would not despair. The editors and publishers might turn
the cold shoulder to her, but she would not give up her ambitions. She
went down into the Latin Quarter, and there shook off the proprieties of
life. She assumed the garb of a man, and with her quick perception she
came to know the left bank of the Seine just as she had known the
country-side at Nohant or the little world at her convent school. She
never expected again to see any woman of her own rank in life. Her
mother's influence became strong in her. She wrote:</p>
<p>The proprieties are the guiding principle of people without soul and
virtue. The good opinion of the world is a prostitute who gives herself to
the highest bidder.</p>
<p>She still pursued her trade of journalism, calling herself a "newspaper
mechanic," sitting all day in the office of the Figaro and writing
whatever was demanded, while at night she would prowl in the streets
haunting the cafes, continuing to dress like a man, drinking sour wine,
and smoking cheap cigars.</p>
<p>One of her companions in this sort of hand-to-mouth journalism was a young
student and writer named Jules Sandeau, a man seven years younger than his
comrade. He was at that time as indigent as she, and their hardships,
shared in common, brought them very close together. He was clever, boyish,
and sensitive, and it was not long before he had fallen at her feet and
kissed her knees, begging that she would requite the love he felt for her.
According to herself, she resisted him for six months, and then at last
she yielded. The two made their home together, and for a while were
wonderfully happy. Their work and their diversions they enjoyed in common,
and now for the first time she experienced emotions which in all
probability she had never known before.</p>
<p>Probably not very much importance is to be given to the earlier
flirtations of George Sand, though she herself never tried to stop the
mouth of scandal. Even before she left her husband, she was credited with
having four lovers; but all she said, when the report was brought to her,
was this: "Four lovers are none too many for one with such lively passions
as mine."</p>
<p>This very frankness makes it likely that she enjoyed shocking her prim
neighbors at Nohant. But if she only played at love-making then, she now
gave herself up to it with entire abandonment, intoxicated, fascinated,
satisfied. She herself wrote:</p>
<p>How I wish I could impart to you this sense of the intensity and
joyousness of life that I have in my veins. To live! How sweet it is, and
how good, in spite of annoyances, husbands, debts, relations,
scandal-mongers, sufferings, and irritations! To live! It is intoxicating!
To love, and to be loved! It is happiness! It is heaven!</p>
<p>In collaboration with Jules Sandeau, she wrote a novel called Rose et
Blanche. The two lovers were uncertain what name to place upon the
title-page, but finally they hit upon the pseudonym of Jules Sand. The
book succeeded; but thereafter each of them wrote separately, Jules
Sandeau using his own name, and Mme. Dudevant styling herself George Sand,
a name by which she was to be illustrious ever after.</p>
<p>As a novelist, she had found her real vocation. She was not yet well
known, but she was on the verge of fame. As soon as she had written
Indiana and Valentine, George Sand had secured a place in the world of
letters. The magazine which still exists as the Revue des Deux Mondes gave
her a retaining fee of four thousand francs a year, and many other
publications begged her to write serial stories for them.</p>
<p>The vein which ran through all her stories was new and piquant. As was
said of her:</p>
<p>In George Sand, whenever a lady wishes to change her lover, God is always
there to make the transfer easy.</p>
<p>In other words, she preached free love in the name of religion. This was
not a new doctrine with her. After the first break with her husband, she
had made up her mind about certain matters, and wrote:</p>
<p>One is no more justified in claiming the ownership of a soul than in
claiming the ownership of a slave.</p>
<p>According to her, the ties between a man and a woman are sacred only when
they are sanctified by love; and she distinguished between love and
passion in this epigram:</p>
<p>Love seeks to give, while passion seeks to take.</p>
<p>At this time, George Sand was in her twenty-seventh year. She was not
beautiful, though there was something about her which attracted
observation. Of middle height, she was fairly slender. Her eyes were
somewhat projecting, and her mouth was almost sullen when in repose. Her
manners were peculiar, combining boldness with timidity. Her address was
almost as familiar as a man's, so that it was easy to be acquainted with
her; yet a certain haughtiness and a touch of aristocratic pride made it
plain that she had drawn a line which none must pass without her wish.
When she was deeply stirred, however, she burst forth into an
extraordinary vivacity, showing a nature richly endowed and eager to yield
its treasures.</p>
<p>The existence which she now led was a curious one. She still visited her
husband at Nohant, so that she might see her son, and sometimes, when M.
Dudevant came to town, he called upon her in the apartments which she
shared with Jules Sandeau. He had accepted the situation, and with his
crudeness and lack of feeling he seemed to think it, if not natural, at
least diverting. At any rate, so long as he could retain her half-million
francs, he was not the man to make trouble about his former wife's
arrangements.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, there began to be perceptible the very slightest rift within
the lute of her romance. Was her love for Sandeau really love, or was it
only passion? In his absence, at any rate, the old obsession still
continued. Here we see, first of all, intense pleasure shading off into a
sort of maternal fondness. She sends Sandeau adoring letters. She is
afraid that his delicate appetite is not properly satisfied.</p>
<p>Yet, again, there are times when she feels that he is irritating and ill.
Those who knew them said that her nature was too passionate and her love
was too exacting for him. One of her letters seems to make this plain. She
writes that she feels uneasy, and even frightfully remorseful, at seeing
Sandeau "pine away." She knows, she avows, that she is killing him, that
her caresses are a poison, and her love a consuming fire.</p>
<p>It is an appalling thought, and Jules will not understand it. He laughs at
it; and when, in the midst of his transports of delight, the idea comes to
me and makes my blood run cold, he tells me that here is the death that he
would like to die. At such moments he promises whatever I make him
promise.</p>
<p>This letter throws a clear light upon the nature of George Sand's
temperament. It will be found all through her career, not only that she
sought to inspire passion, but that she strove to gratify it after
fashions of her own. One little passage from a description of her written
by the younger Dumas will perhaps make this phase of her character more
intelligible, without going further than is strictly necessary:</p>
<p>Mme. Sand has little hands without any bones, soft and plump. She is by
destiny a woman of excessive curiosity, always disappointed, always
deceived in her incessant investigation, but she is not fundamentally
ardent. In vain would she like to be so, but she does not find it
possible. Her physical nature utterly refuses.</p>
<p>The reader will find in all that has now been said the true explanation of
George Sand. Abounding with life, but incapable of long stretches of
ardent love, she became a woman who sought conquests everywhere without
giving in return more than her temperament made it possible for her to do.
She loved Sandeau as much as she ever loved any man; and yet she left him
with a sense that she had never become wholly his. Perhaps this is the
reason why their romance came to an end abruptly, and not altogether
fittingly.</p>
<p>She had been spending a short time at Nohant, and came to Paris without
announcement. She intended to surprise her lover, and she surely did so.
She found him in the apartment that had been theirs, with his arms about
an attractive laundry-girl. Thus closed what was probably the only true
romance in the life of George Sand. Afterward she had many lovers, but to
no one did she so nearly become a true mate.</p>
<p>As it was, she ended her association with Sandeau, and each pursued a
separate path to fame. Sandeau afterward became a well-known novelist and
dramatist. He was, in fact, the first writer of fiction who was admitted
to the French Academy. The woman to whom he had been unfaithful became
greater still, because her fame was not only national, but cosmopolitan.</p>
<p>For a time after her deception by Sandeau, she felt absolutely devoid of
all emotions. She shunned men, and sought the friendship of Marie Dorval,
a clever actress who was destined afterward to break the heart of Alfred
de Vigny. The two went down into the country; and there George Sand wrote
hour after hour, sitting by her fireside, and showing herself a tender
mother to her little daughter Solange.</p>
<p>This life lasted for a while, but it was not the sort of life that would
now content her. She had many visitors from Paris, among them
Sainte-Beuve, the critic, who brought with him Prosper Merimee, then
unknown, but later famous as master of revels to the third Napoleon and as
the author of Carmen. Merimee had a certain fascination of manner, and the
predatory instincts of George Sand were again aroused. One day, when she
felt bored and desperate, Merimee paid his court to her, and she listened
to him. This is one of the most remarkable of her intimacies, since it
began, continued, and ended all in the space of a single week. When
Merimee left Nohant, he was destined never again to see George Sand,
except long afterward at a dinner-party, where the two stared at each
other sharply, but did not speak. This affair, however, made it plain that
she could not long remain at Nohant, and that she pined for Paris.</p>
<p>Returning thither, she is said to have set her cap at Victor Hugo, who
was, however, too much in love with himself to care for any one,
especially a woman who was his literary rival. She is said for a time to
have been allied with Gustave Planche, a dramatic critic; but she always
denied this, and her denial may be taken as quite truthful. Soon, however,
she was to begin an episode which has been more famous than any other in
her curious history, for she met Alfred de Musset, then a youth of
twenty-three, but already well known for his poems and his plays.</p>
<p>Musset was of noble birth. He would probably have been better for a
plebeian strain, since there was in him a touch of the degenerate. His
mother's father had published a humanitarian poem on cats. His great-uncle
had written a peculiar novel. Young Alfred was nervous, delicate, slightly
epileptic, and it is certain that he was given to dissipation, which so
far had affected his health only by making him hysterical. He was an
exceedingly handsome youth, with exquisite manners, "dreamy rather than
dazzling eyes, dilated nostrils, and vermilion lips half opened." Such was
he when George Sand, then seven years his senior, met him.</p>
<p>There is something which, to the Anglo-Saxon mind, seems far more absurd
than pathetic about the events which presently took place. A woman like
George Sand at thirty was practically twice the age of this nervous boy of
twenty-three, who had as yet seen little of the world. At first she seemed
to realize the fact herself; but her vanity led her to begin an intrigue,
which must have been almost wholly without excitement on her part, but
which to him, for a time, was everything in the world.</p>
<p>Experimenting, as usual, after the fashion described by Dumas, she went
with De Musset for a "honeymoon" to Fontainebleau. But they could not stay
there forever, and presently they decided upon a journey to Italy. Before
they went, however, they thought it necessary to get formal permission
from Alfred's mother!</p>
<p>Naturally enough, Mme. de Musset refused consent. She had read George
Sand's romances, and had asked scornfully:</p>
<p>"Has the woman never in her life met a gentleman?"</p>
<p>She accepted the relations between them, but that she should be asked to
sanction this sort of affair was rather too much, even for a French mother
who has become accustomed to many strange things. Then there was a curious
happening. At nine o'clock at night, George Sand took a cab and drove to
the house of Mme. de Musset, to whom she sent up a message that a lady
wished to see her. Mme. de Musset came down, and, finding a woman alone in
a carriage, she entered it. Then George Sand burst forth in a torrent of
sentimental eloquence. She overpowered her lover's mother, promised to
take great care of the delicate youth, and finally drove away to meet
Alfred at the coach-yard.</p>
<p>They started off in the mist, their coach being the thirteenth to leave
the yard; but the two lovers were in a merry mood, and enjoyed themselves
all the way from Paris to Marseilles. By steamer they went to Leghorn; and
finally, in January, 1834, they took an apartment in a hotel at Venice.
What had happened that their arrival in Venice should be the beginning of
a quarrel, no one knows. George Sand has told the story, and Paul de
Musset—Alfred's brother—has told the story, but each of them
has doubtless omitted a large part of the truth.</p>
<p>It is likely that on their long journey each had learned too much of the
other. Thus, Paul de Musset says that George Sand made herself outrageous
by her conversation, telling every one of her mother's adventures in the
army of Italy, including her relations with the general-in-chief. She also
declared that she herself was born within a month of her parents'
wedding-day. Very likely she did say all these things, whether they were
true or not. She had set herself to wage war against conventional society,
and she did everything to shock it.</p>
<p>On the other hand, Alfred de Musset fell ill after having lost ten
thousand francs in a gambling-house. George Sand was not fond of persons
who were ill. She herself was working like a horse, writing from eight to
thirteen hours a day. When Musset collapsed she sent for a handsome young
Italian doctor named Pagello, with whom she had struck up a casual
acquaintance. He finally cured Musset, but he also cured George Sand of
any love for Musset.</p>
<p>Before long she and Pagello were on their way back to Paris, leaving the
poor, fevered, whimpering poet to bite his nails and think unutterable
things. But he ought to have known George Sand. After that, everybody knew
her. They knew just how much she cared when she professed to care, and
when she acted as she acted with Pagello no earlier lover had any one but
himself to blame.</p>
<p>Only sentimentalists can take this story seriously. To them it has a sort
of morbid interest. They like to picture Musset raving and shouting in his
delirium, and then, to read how George Sand sat on Pagello's knees,
kissing him and drinking out of the same cup. But to the healthy mind the
whole story is repulsive—from George Sand's appeal to Mme. de Musset
down to the very end, when Pagello came to Paris, where his broken French
excited a polite ridicule.</p>
<p>There was a touch of genuine sentiment about the affair with Jules
Sandeau; but after that, one can only see in George Sand a half-libidinous
grisette, such as her mother was before her, with a perfect willingness to
experiment in every form of lawless love. As for Musset, whose heart she
was supposed to have broken, within a year he was dangling after the
famous singer, Mme. Malibran, and writing poems to her which advertised
their intrigue.</p>
<p>After this episode with Pagello, it cannot be said that the life of George
Sand was edifying in any respect, because no one can assume that she was
sincere. She had loved Jules Sandeau as much as she could love any one,
but all the rest of her intrigues and affinities were in the nature of
experiments. She even took back Alfred de Musset, although they could
never again regard each other without suspicion. George Sand cut off all
her hair and gave it to Musset, so eager was she to keep him as a matter
of conquest; but he was tired of her, and even this theatrical trick was
of no avail.</p>
<p>She proceeded to other less known and less humiliating adventures. She
tried to fascinate the artist Delacroix. She set her cap at Franz Liszt,
who rather astonished her by saying that only God was worthy to be loved.
She expressed a yearning for the affections of the elder Dumas; but that
good-natured giant laughed at her, and in fact gave her some sound advice,
and let her smoke unsentimentally in his study. She was a good deal taken
with a noisy demagogue named Michel, a lawyer at Bourges, who on one
occasion shut her up in her room and harangued her on sociology until she
was as weary of his talk as of his wooden shoes, his shapeless greatcoat,
his spectacles, and his skull-cap, Balzac felt her fascination, but cared
nothing for her, since his love was given to Mme. Hanska.</p>
<p>In the meanwhile, she was paying visits to her husband at Nohant, where
she wrangled with him over money matters, and where he would once have
shot her had the guests present not interfered. She secured her dowry by
litigation, so that she was well off, even without her literary earnings.
These were by no means so large as one would think from her popularity and
from the number of books she wrote. It is estimated that her whole gains
amounted to about a million francs, extending over a period of forty-five
years. It is just half the amount that Trollope earned in about the same
period, and justifies his remark—"adequate, but not splendid."</p>
<p>One of those brief and strange intimacies that marked the career of George
Sand came about in a curious way. Octave Feuillet, a man of aristocratic
birth, had set himself to write novels which portrayed the cynicism and
hardness of the upper classes in France. One of these novels, Sibylle,
excited the anger of George Sand. She had not known Feuillet before; yet
now she sought him out, at first in order to berate him for his book, but
in the end to add him to her variegated string of lovers.</p>
<p>It has been said of Feuillet that he was a sort of "domesticated Musset."
At any rate, he was far less sensitive than Musset, and George Sand was
about seventeen years his senior. They parted after a short time, she
going her way as a writer of novels that were very different from her
earlier ones, while Feuillet grew more and more cynical and even stern, as
he lashed the abnormal, neuropathic men and women about him.</p>
<p>The last great emotional crisis in George Sand's life was that which
centers around her relations with Frederic Chopin. Chopin was the greatest
genius who ever loved her. It is rather odd that he loved her. She had
known him for two years, and had not seriously thought of him, though
there is a story that when she first met him she kissed him before he had
even been presented to her. She waited two years, and in those two years
she had three lovers. Then at last she once more met Chopin, when he was
in a state of melancholy, because a Polish girl had proved unfaithful to
him.</p>
<p>It was the psychological moment; for this other woman, who was a devourer
of hearts, found him at a piano, improvising a lamentation. George Sand
stood beside him, listening. When he finished and looked up at her, their
eyes met. She bent down without a word and kissed him on the lips.</p>
<p>What was she like when he saw her then? Grenier has described her in these
words:</p>
<p>She was short and stout, but her face attracted all my attention, the eyes
especially. They were wonderful eyes—a little too close together, it
may be, large, with full eyelids, and black, very black, but by no means
lustrous; they reminded me of unpolished marble, or rather of velvet, and
this gave a strange, dull, even cold expression to her countenance. Her
fine eyebrows and these great placid eyes gave her an air of strength and
dignity which was not borne out by the lower part of her face. Her nose
was rather thick and not over shapely. Her mouth was also rather coarse,
and her chin small. She spoke with great simplicity, and her manners were
very quiet.</p>
<p>Such as she was, she attached herself to Chopin for eight years. At first
they traveled together very quietly to Majorca; and there, just as Musset
had fallen ill at Venice, Chopin became feverish and an invalid. "Chopin
coughs most gracefully," George Sand wrote of him, and again:</p>
<p>Chopin is the most inconstant of men. There is nothing permanent about him
but his cough.</p>
<p>It is not surprising if her nerves sometimes gave way. Acting as sick
nurse, writing herself with rheumatic fingers, robbed by every one about
her, and viewed with suspicion by the peasants because she did not go to
church, she may be perhaps excused for her sharp words when, in fact, her
deeds were kind.</p>
<p>Afterward, with Chopin, she returned to Paris, and the two lived openly
together for seven years longer. An immense literature has grown around
the subject of their relations. To this literature George Sand herself
contributed very largely. Chopin never wrote a word; but what he failed to
do, his friends and pupils did unsparingly.</p>
<p>Probably the truth is somewhat as one might expect. During the first
period of fascination, George Sand was to Chopin what she had been to
Sandeau and to Musset; and with her strange and subtle ways, she had
undermined his health. But afterward that sort of love died out, and was
succeeded by something like friendship. At any rate, this woman showed, as
she had shown to others, a vast maternal kindness. She writes to him
finally as "your old woman," and she does wonders in the way of nursing
and care.</p>
<p>But in 1847 came a break between the two. Whatever the mystery of it may
be, it turns upon what Chopin said of Sand:</p>
<p>"I have never cursed any one, but now I am so weary of life that I am near
cursing her. Yet she suffers, too, and more, because she grows older as
she grows more wicked."</p>
<p>In 1848, Chopin gave his last concert in Paris, and in 1849 he died.
According to some, he was the victim of a Messalina. According to others,
it was only "Messalina" that had kept him alive so long.</p>
<p>However, with his death came a change in the nature of George Sand.
Emotionally, she was an extinct volcano. Intellectually, she was at her
very best. She no longer tore passions into tatters, but wrote naturally,
simply, stories of country life and tales for children. In one of her
books she has given an enduring picture of the Franco-Prussian War. There
are many rather pleasant descriptions of her then, living at Nohant, where
she made a curious figure, bustling about in ill-fitting costumes, and
smoking interminable cigarettes.</p>
<p>She had lived much, and she had drunk deep of life, when she died in 1876.
One might believe her to have been only a woman of perpetual liaisons.
Externally she was this, and yet what did Balzac, that great master of
human psychology, write of her in the intimacy of a private
correspondence?</p>
<p>She is a female bachelor. She is an artist. She is generous. She is
devoted. She is chaste. Her dominant characteristics are those of a man,
and therefore, she is not to be regarded as a woman. She is an excellent
mother, adored by her children. Morally, she is like a lad of twenty; for
in her heart of hearts, she is more than chaste—she is a prude. It
is only in externals that she comports herself as a Bohemian. All her
follies are titles to glory in the eyes of those whose souls are noble.</p>
<p>A curious verdict this! Her love-life seems almost that of neither man nor
woman, but of an animal. Yet whether she was in reality responsible for
what she did, when we consider her strange heredity, her wretched
marriage, the disillusions of her early life—who shall sit in
judgment on her, since who knows all?</p>
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