George Sand 9780271082721

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George Sand

George Sand

Martine Reid Translated with an introduction by

Gretchen van Slyke

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Frontispiece: Nadar, portrait of George Sand, 1864. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Ministère de la Culture—Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine—diffusion RMN). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Reid, Martine, author. | Van Slyke, Gretchen Jane, translator. Title: George Sand / Martine Reid ; translated with an introduction by Gretchen van Slyke. Other titles: George Sand. English Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2018] | Originally published in French: Paris : Gallimard, 2013. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “A biography of the celebrated nineteenth-century author George Sand. Examines her public image, her relationships with her husband, lovers, and children, and her lifelong political commitment”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2017060111 | ISBN 9780271081069 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Sand, George, 1804-1876. | Novelists, French— 19th century—Biography. Classification: LCC PQ2412 .R4513 2018 | DDC 843/.8 [B] —dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017060111 © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2013. Copyright © 2018 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

Contents

Foreword by Gretchen van Slyke  vii Chronological Points of Reference  x

Introduction 1 1832 5 I. 1804–1831  16 II. 1832–1851  57 III. 1852–1875  125 1876 198

Notes 212 Bibliography 245 Index 249

Foreword George Sand was no man but quite an exceptional woman. Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, who would take the name George Sand some thirty years later, was born in 1804 to an aristocratic officer in Napoleon’s army and a working-class woman who had made her way to this union in shady ways. When writing her autobiography, Sand would proudly declare that in her veins there commingled the blood of both kings and humble folks. After her father unexpectedly died in 1808, her mother and her paternal grandmother had very different ideas about how Aurore should be reared and fought over the little girl’s upbringing. Finally buying off her daughter-in-law, Aurore’s grandmother gained custody of the girl and raised her on the country estate at Nohant where Aurore’s father had grown up. Aurore spent a good part of her childhood romping with peasant children in nearby fields and woods when she could, receiving lessons from her father’s eccentric preceptor, and grudgingly complying with her grandmother’s rules for ladylike decorum. When Aurore was twelve or thirteen, she began rebelling against her grandmother’s expectations and saying that she wanted to go live with her mother in Paris. Seeing no alternative, her grandmother detailed her suspicions about Aurore’s mother’s promiscuous past and present. These revelations precipitated a crisis for Aurore. Coming to hate herself as well as her mother, the traumatized girl became quite unmanageable. Aurore was subsequently packed off to the convent of English Augustinian Sisters in Paris, where she spent the next two years dreaming up pranks with other boarders and finally feeling herself called to the religious life. Aurore was not yet sixteen when her elderly and ailing grandmother took her back home to the country. Her grandmother died when Aurore was seventeen, at which point she suddenly found herself the proprietor of Nohant and the vast

viii Foreword

property surrounding it. Within another year Aurore, now the wife of Baron Casimir Dudevant and soon to be a mother, was following the domestic path that most women of her station and wealth took in early nineteenth-century France. The marriage was not a happy one. Casimir drank, hunted, and sought the company of women less complicated than his moody wife. Irritated by the suffocating constraints of her life, Aurore took great interest in books as well as in men who read and wrote them. She began writing a bit herself and met Jules Sandeau, a young man who dreamed of a literary career. After heated quarrels with her husband, Aurore in 1831 worked out an arrangement with him so that she could go off to Paris with Jules Sandeau. There they published under the pen name “J. Sand” a few short stories and a novel written mainly by her. Her first big novel, Indiana, published in 1832, was signed “G. Sand.” By the mid-1830s the literary career of the author henceforth known as George Sand— who would become as famous for wearing men’s suits, smoking cigars, and collecting famous lovers, such as Alfred de Musset and Frédéric Chopin, as for her novels and plays—was well under way. An outspoken feminist, socialist, anticlericalist, and idealist, she would continue writing and publishing until her death in 1876. During her lifetime she enjoyed a reputation as one of the great authors of the nineteenth century and earned the praise of writers such as Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. This biography takes into account the numerous biographies, in French and English, that have already been devoted to the most famous woman writer in nineteenth-century France. Drawing on these sources, as well as Sand’s novels, plays, autobiographical texts, and correspondence, some of which have been published only in the last few years, this biography stands apart from the previous biographies in several notable ways: it gives a central place to literature, without which there would not have been the phenomenon known as George Sand; it closely examines the meaning and importance of the name George Sand (how the choice of this pen name resulted from the particularly complex

Foreword  ix

personal experiences of the budding author, and how this name ultimately came to designate a public image with which she came to identify); it reveals multiple facets of the life of George Sand, not just her husband, lovers, and children or the books and plays that she wrote, but also the various expressions of her political commitment, in addition to her wide-ranging artistic and scientific interests and the ways she organized her days and nights in a busy household. Incorporating texts by and about Sand that have been published only recently, Martine Reid endeavors to draw the most complete portrait possible of George Sand. She also strives to put forth a candid, even-handed, and analytical representation of a remarkable woman in remarkable times. Her overall aim has been to put Sand in the place that she deserves in history, as one of the great authors of nineteenth-century France, standing alongside Victor Hugo, as well as Balzac and Flaubert, who were her friends and correspondents. With its clear, flowing language and impeccable scholarship, this biography will be of great interest to specialists on Sand. At the same time it will sustain the interest of general readers curious to know more about the celebrated and vilified woman who wrote and lived so abundantly. —Gretchen van Slyke

Chronological Points of Reference

1804 1 July: Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin is born in Paris. Her father, Maurice Dupin, is an officer in the army and the son of aristocrats established at Nohant, in Berry. Her mother, Sophie Delaborde, is the daughter of a Parisian bird-seller. The young couple, who have been together for several years, are married on 5 June. Maurice Dupin is already the father of Hippolyte Chatiron, a son whom he did not recognize; Sophie Delaborde already has a daughter from an earlier affair, Caroline Delaborde, and has lost several children in their infancy. Maurice and Sophie have already had two children together, these also dying in infancy. 1808 Sophie Dupin joins her husband in Spain where he is stationed with Napoleon’s army. 12 June: Their son, Auguste-Louis, is born in Madrid. In July the family returns to France and takes up residence in Nohant with Maurice’s mother, Mme Dupin de Fancueil. 8 September: The infant son suddenly dies. 16 September: Maurice Dupin dies at La Châtre after a fall from a horse. 1809 For financial reasons Sophie Dupin gives up custody of her daughter to her mother-in-law and returns to Paris. Aurore grows up at Nohant and receives a rather curious education under the direction of Jean-François Deschartres who is also in charge of schooling her half brother, Hippolyte. Her mother spends a few weeks at Nohant every summer, and Aurore occasionally visits her in Paris. 1817– Aurore is sent to the convent of English Augustinian Sisters, 1820 rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor in Paris. There she makes friends with several students. Having become very devout, she thinks for a while about taking religious vows. 1821 Mme Dupin dies after a long illness during which her granddaughter does a lot of serious reading at her bedside. Aurore, at age seventeen, inherits the château of Nohant and the vast property surrounding it.

Chronological Points of Reference  xi 1822 17 September: Aurore Dupin and Casimir Dudevant are married in Paris. He is twenty-seven, the recognized illegitimate son of Baron Dudevant, who lives at the château of Guillery in Lot-et-Garonne. The couple settles at Nohant a few weeks later. 1823 30 June: Maurice, the first child of Aurore and Casimir Dudevant, is born in Paris. 1824 After stays in Nohant and Plessis-Picard, the couple moves to Paris at the end of the year. 1825 They travel to the Pyrenees. There Aurore, at the age of twenty-one, meets Aurélien de Sèze, a young judge from Bordeaux and falls in love with him. They exchange love letters for several years and see each other a few times up until 1830. November: After a period of great stress Aurore tells her husband about her interest in Aurélien de Sèze and calls for “household peace,” stipulating its conditions in writing. 1826 Stays in Paris and in Nohant. Aurore tells Zoé Leroy, her friend and confidente, that Stéphane Ajasson de Grandsagne has returned to Nohant. She becomes very fond of the young scholar, who gave her natural history lessons in Nohant in years past. 1827 August: A short trip to Auvergne. Various health problems. December: On the pretext of medical consultations, Aurore goes to Paris to be with Stéphane Ajasson de Grandsagne. 1828 13 September: Solange is born. Her father is most likely Stéphane Ajasson de Grandsagne. 1829 Aurore writes travel memories, La marraine, and an unfinished text, Histoire d’un rêveur. A few brief stays in southwest France, in particular, at Guillery, at the house of Casimir Dudevant’s father. 1830 July: Aurore meets Jules Sandeau, seven years her junior, who is dreaming of becoming a writer. She soon becomes his mistress. November: After violent quarrels Casimir Dudevant accepts that his wife will henceforth spend six months of the year in Paris. 1831 Aurore moves to 25 quai Saint-Michel. Maurice, who is eight years old, is entrusted to the care of a tutor, Jules Boucoiran, while Solange, who is three, stays at Nohant with her father.

xii  Chronological Points of Reference Aurore briefly thinks about decorating Spa boxes to earn a living. Henri de Latouche (or Delatouche) asks her to write a few articles for a satirical paper, the Figaro. With or without the help of Jules Sandeau, she publishes a few short stories (La prima donna, La fille d’Albano), then a novel, Rose et Blanche ou La comédienne et la religieuse, that they sign together with the pseudonym “J. Sand.” 1832 May: Publication of Indiana, which Aurore wrote at Nohant the previous winter. The novel is signed “G. Sand.”* October: She breaks up with Jules Sandeau and moves to 19 quai Malaquais. This time Solange is with her. She publishes two short stories, Melchior and La marquise. November: Sand publishes her second novel, Valentine. December: Sand’s only poem in verse, La reine Mab, and Le toast are published. She agrees to collaborate on a regular basis with the prestigious Revue des Deux Mondes, directed by François Buloz. 1833 January: Sand meets Marie Dorval, a great star of Romantic theater, and becomes passionately involved with her. She publishes some short stories, Cora, Une vieille histoire, then Aldo le rimeur and Métella. Spring: She meets Alfred de Musset at a dinner. They begin writing to each other. July: Sand becomes Musset’s mistress. She has just published Lélia and been harshly criticized by the press. December: The lovers leave for Italy. 1834 Their stay in Venice soon turns to drama. Sand falls ill with dysentery, then Musset gets typhoid fever with attacks of delirium. Dr. Luigi Pagello, who was called to treat Musset, becomes Sand’s lover. Late March: Musset leaves Italy. Sand spends the next three months in Venice, then decides to go back to Paris with Pagello in order to see her children. July: She leaves Pagello and goes back to Musset. The couple separates once again a few weeks later. Le secrétaire intime, Jacques, and Léone Léoni are published in installments in the Revue des Deux Mondes. Garnier and four open letters are published in a volume entitled Lettres d’un voyageur. 1835 Sand and Musset become lovers once again.

Chronological Points of Reference  xiii March: They break up once and for all. Sand returns to Nohant and meets the lawyer Michel who will be her lover until the spring of 1837. She also becomes friends with Félicité de Lamennais and Pierre Leroux, a socialist thinker to whom she will give financial support for years. Her political sympathies, republican and socialist, are becoming clearer. The Revue des Deux Mondes publishes André and three new open letters. 1836 The legal separation between Sand and her husband keeps the first months of the year busy. Late July: A final judgment gives Sand back all the property she owned at the time of her wedding and awards her custody of the children. Late August: She goes to Chamonix with Maurice and Solange. There she meets up with Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult. She publishes Simon, Poème de Myrza, Mattéa, and Le Dieu inconnu. 1837 February–March: Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult come to stay at Nohant. May–July: Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult once again stay at Nohant. Sand publishes Lettres d’un voyageur, Mauprat, and Les maîtres mosaïstes. She also publishes some open letters in Lamennais’s paper, Le Monde (they will be published as a volume entitled Lettres à Marcie), but Lamennais refuses to publish her defense of divorce. 1838 Winter: Balzac spends a week at Nohant. June: Sand becomes the mistress of Frédéric Chopin, age twenty-eight, and they will spend nine years together. October: The lovers decide to go to Spain along with Sand’s children. December: After their arrival in Majorca, they settle in at the charterhouse of Valldemosa where they spend only a few weeks because of Chopin’s health and the uncomfortable quarters. Sand publishes in installments La dernière Aldini, L’Uscoque, and Spiridion as well as the short story L’orco. 1839 Summer: Sand is at Nohant with Chopin. October: Sand moves to an apartment in rue Pigalle, in Paris. She publishes a new version of Lélia. The Revue des Deux Mondes publishes Gabriel, Pauline et Les sept cordes de la lyre.

xiv  Chronological Points of Reference 1840 April: Sand ventures into theater for the first time with Cosima, a failure. She meets Agricol Perdiguier, compagnon du Devoir in Avignon and author of the Livre du compagnonnage (1839). Sand’s Le compagnon du tour de France, which draws on Perdiguier’s work, is published as a book in December. 1841 Sand publishes articles under the title Un hiver au midi de l’Europe (these articles will be published all together the following year under the title Un hiver à Majorque) and Mouny-Robin. July: Sand breaks off all professional dealings with François Buloz after a disagreement about her novel Horace, which the director of the Revue des Deux Mondes found too ideological. November: The first issue of the Revue Indépendante, founded by Sand, Pierre Leroux, and Louis Viardot, the husband of the opera singer Pauline Garcia, is published. 1842 May–September: Sand is in Nohant. The painter Eugène Delacroix, in whose studio Maurice is working as an apprentice, makes a visit. October: Sand and Chopin return to Paris; they settle respectively at 5 and 9 square d’Orléans. La Revue Indépendante begins publishing Consuelo. 1843 Late spring, summer, and fall: Sand is in Nohant, entertaining in particular Louis and Pauline Viardot as well as Eugène Delacroix. La Revue Indépendante continues publishing Consuelo, then the sequel, La comtesse de Rudolstadt, plus various articles. Kourroglou, Jean Ziska, and Carl are published in magazines. Sand publishes a brochure in defense of “Fanchette,” a young mentally handicapped woman. This signals her entry into politics. 1844 Another stay of several months at Nohant. September: The first issue of L’Éclaireur: Journal des Départements de l’Indre, du Cher et de la Creuse, founded by Sand and socialist friends of hers, is published. In this paper she publishes several articles about the situation of peasants and criticizes the government’s policies. Jeanne is published in installments along with various little pieces in prose. 1845 June–December: Sand is in Nohant with Chopin and receives a number of guests. Two of her “socialist” novels, Le meunier d’Angibault and Le péché de monsieur Antoine, are published in installments. Isidora and Teverino are also published. The writer

Chronological Points of Reference  xv and publisher Pierre Hetzel works as Sand’s literary agent, negotiating contracts and making sure that her numerous publications in books and magazines run smoothly (he goes into exile in Brussels after the coup d’état in December 1851). 1846 May: Sand settles in at Nohant and stays there until February of the following year. Chopin accompanies her. November: Chopin leaves Nohant for good. Solange turns eighteen and is courted by Fernand de Préaulx. December: Sand puts on her first play for the parlor-theater at Nohant, and this one is followed by many others. The various roles are played by members of the family, friends, and servants. Costumes and decors are made by the group. La mare au diable and Lucrezia Floriani are published in installments. 1847 February: Sand and Solange pose in the studio of Jean-Baptiste (a.k.a. Auguste) Clésinger, who sculpts busts of the two. Solange falls in love with the artist and breaks things off with Fernand de Préaulx. May: Solange’s wedding, despite Sand’s reservations, is celebrated on 19 May. July: A violent scene about money occurs between Sand, Maurice, and the Clésingers, husband and wife. The sculptor threatens Sand with his gun. Chopin defends Solange and breaks things off with Sand by letter. Il piccinino is published in installments, along with several articles and reviews in various newspapers and magazines. 1848 When the February Revolution breaks out, George Sand goes to Paris and meets up with her friends in the provisional government, including Louis Blanc, Armand Barbès, and Ledru-Rollin. She publishes various brochures at her own expense and participates in writing issues of the Bulletin de la République. She founds a newspaper, La Cause du Peuple, and also writes in La Vraie République of Théophile Thoré. Her prologue, Le roi attend, opens at the Théâtre-Français, renamed Théâtre de la République. March: Sand crosses paths for the last time with Frédéric Chopin, who tells her that Solange has given birth to a little girl, Jeanne-Gabrielle, who will live only a few days. May: Dismayed to witness the failure of the socialist republic she so desired, Sand returns to Nohant.

xvi  Chronological Points of Reference June: The June Days, during which the demonstrations of workers are severely repressed, brings her to total despair. Two of her most famous novels, François le Champi and La petite fadette, are published as serials. 1849 Sand spends most of her time at Nohant, only going to Paris from time to time, as she will continue to do for the rest of her life. May: Solange’s second daughter, Jeanne Clésigner, nicknamed Nini, is born. 17 October: Chopin dies. November: The stage adaptation of François le Champi is a great success at the Odéon Theater. Alexandre Manceau, engraver and friend of Maurice, moves into the château of Nohant. He is thirty-one and will share Sand’s life until his death in 1865. 1850 Summer: Numerous visitors at Nohant. The theater activities continue, especially the puppet theater. Sand takes part in writing sketches, plus making costumes and props. Histoire du véritable gribouille is published. 1851 February: The parlor theater of Nohant is inaugurated. September: The Œuvres illustrées of Sand, published jointly by Blanchard, Hetzel, and Marescq, begin appearing. Tony Johannot and Maurice Sand are the illustrators. Le château des désertes is published. Claudie opens at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, Molière at the Théâtre de la Gaîté, and Le mariage de Victorine at the Théâtre du Gymnase. 1852 January: Sand meets in Paris with Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who, after the coup d’état of 2 December 1851, ordered that many political opponents be arrested and deported. Sand obtains pardons and reduced sentences for many of them. February: Sand meets Prince Jérôme Napoléon, who brings together republicans and moderate liberals (the prince will become the godfather of Sand’s granddaughter, Aurore). June: Solange and her daughter arrive in Nohant. August: When Solange leaves Nohant, she entrusts her daughter to her mother. Les vacances de Pandolfe, followed by Le démon du foyer, opens at the Théâtre du Gymnase. Mont-Revêche and various articles are published in installments.

Chronological Points of Reference  xvii 1853 To ensure her children’s financial future Sand tries to sell her “literary property,” meaning her future royalties. She spends a good part of the year dealing with various publishers, without success. Le pressoir opens at the Théâtre du Gymnase, then a stage adaptation of Mauprat is mounted at the Odéon. La filleule and Les maîtres sonneurs are published in installments. 1854 May: Jean-Baptiste Clésinger, now separated from his wife, comes to Nohant to get Nini and demands custody of the little girl. Flaminio opens at the Théâtre du Gymnase. 5 October: Installments of Adriani start appearing. La Presse, a newspaper founded by Émile de Girardin in 1836, begins publishing Histoire de ma vie. Sand’s autobiography will appear in 138 installments; at the same time, the publisher Lecou guarantees its publication in book form: twenty volumes appear between 1854 and 1855. 1855 Just when Sand obtains custody of her granddaughter Nini, the little girl dies of scarlet fever in Paris. She is buried at Nohant, next to Sand’s father and grandmother. In March Sand, Manceau, and Maurice leave Nohant for three months in Italy (Maurice leaves lots of drawings of the trip). Sand stays for several weeks in a villa in Frascati. Le maître Favilla opens at the Odéon. Le diable aux champs is published. Sand signs a contract with the publisher Hachette for ten novels in the collection Bibliothèque des chemins de fer. 1856 Performances at the theater in Nohant continue in full swing. The amateur actors, and sometimes professional actors from Paris, improvise in part under Sand’s direction. Lucie and then Françoise open at the Théâtre du Gymnase as well as a stage adaptation of Comme il vous plaira at the Comédie-Française. There is a new production of Claudie at the Odéon, and this will be the only one of Sand’s plays to be performed on a regular basis up through the nineteenth century. Évenor and Leucippe are published in installments. May: Sand changes her penmanship in order to write more quickly and to give her publishers more legible manuscripts. 1857 July: Manceau buys a little house in the village of Gargilesse, in Creuse. The couple will often stay there for short periods of time. In 1864, Manceau will sell the house to Maurice, subject to usufruct. La Daniella, Les dames vertes, and Les beaux messieurs de Bois-Doré are published in installments.

xviii  Chronological Points of Reference 1858 After years of conflict François Buloz reconciles with Sand and agrees to publish L’homme de neige in the Revue des Deux Mondes. Narcisse is published in installments. Légendes rustiques is published by Morel, with illustrations by Maurice, to whom the work is dedicated. 1859 Elle et lui, a fictional version of Sand’s affair with Musset, is published in installments. Musset published his own version in La confession d’un enfant du siècle in 1836. Defending his brother who had died two years before, Paul de Musset retorts by publishing Lui et elle. Louise Colet, Musset’s last mistress, does the same with Lui. Marguerite de Saint-Gemme opens at the Théâtre du Gymnase. Flavie, Jean de la Roche, and Constance Verrier are published in installments. May: Sand has her first contacts with Michel Lévy, who will soon become her nearly exclusive publisher. September: Masques et bouffons, written and illustrated by Maurice Sand, with a preface by George Sand, is published. December: The perfume manufacturer Henri Rafin launches an “Eau de George Sand for the body and the hanky.” 1860 Early March: Sand is in Paris and meets her writer friends, including the young Gustave Flaubert. She visits the Pompei-style house that Prince Jérôme had built for himself on the Champs-Elysées. Summer: Sand is particularly busy, writing numerous sketches for the theater of Nohant. Fall: Sand falls ill with typhoid fever and gallbladder problems that leave her feeling very weak. La ville noire and Le marquis de Villemer are published in installments. Four volumes of Sand’s Théâtre, with a selection of plays written over a period of more than ten years, are published. 1861 February–May: Sand convalesces in Tamaris, near Toulon, with Manceau, Maurice, and Marie Caillaud, a maid and much appreciated actress in the parlor-theater of Nohant. Maurice leaves an album of drawings of this trip. Fall: Sand is again at loggerheads with Solange whom she has accused of being a kept woman. For the next four years Solange writes no letters to her mother. To Alexandre Dumas fils, a regular visitor to Nohant, Sand confesses her feelings for the painter Charles Marchal. She is fifty-seven, and he is

Chronological Points of Reference  xix thirty-six. They have a brief exchange of love letters. Valvèdre and La famille de Germandre are published in installments. 1862 17 May: Maurice, age thirty-nine, weds Lina Calamatta, age twenty, daughter of the engraver Luigi Calamatta, a longtime friend, in a civil wedding ceremony. The following year they are married in a Protestant ceremony. Eugène Fromentin has a brief stay in Nohant. The family and friends spend time at Gargilesse, walking in the countryside to better their knowledge of plants, minerals, and insects and writing sketches for the parlor theater. Pavé opens at the Théâtre du Gymnase, followed by the stage adaptation of Les beaux messieurs de Bois-Doré at the Ambigu-Comique. Tamaris and Antonia are published in installments; two collections of articles, Autour de la table and Souvenirs et impressions littéraires, are published in book form. Sand writes the preface for Maurice’s Six mille lieues à toute vapeur, a narrative about his trip to America on Prince Jérôme’s yacht. 1863 14 July: Marc-Antoine, the son of Maurice and Lina, is born. He will die of dysentery a year later. November: Maurice expresses his wish to see Manceau leave Nohant. Sand decides to follow her companion. Mademoiselle La Quintinie, a critique of the way confession is practiced at the time in the Roman Catholic Church, is published in installments. Because of this book Sand’s complete works are put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. 1864 February: The stage adaptation of Le marquis de Villemer opens at the Odéon, and Sand is enthusiastically hailed. June: Sand and Manceau settle in a villa surrounded by a garden that they bought in Palaiseau. The house will be sold in 1869. They keep a pied-à-terre in Paris. Drac opens at the Théâtre du Vaudeville. A selection of Nohant’s parlor theater, Le théâtre de Nohant, is published. Laura and La confession d’une jeune fille are published in installments. 1865 18 August: Alexandre Manceau, who had has tuberculosis for several years, dies in Palaiseau after protracted suffering. Monsieur Sylvestre and a short story, La coupe, are published in installments. 1866 10 January: Aurore, the daughter of Maurice and Lina, is born in Nohant.

xx  Chronological Points of Reference February: On a trip to Paris Sand goes for the first time to dinner at Magny’s, a monthly event for writers that Sainte-Beuve organized in 1863. She becomes friends with Gustave Flaubert. Don Juan de village and Lys du Japon, a stage adaptation of Antonia, open at the Théâtre du Vaudeville. Sand travels to Brittany and stays with Flaubert at Croisset. Le dernier amour is published in installments, and Promenades autour d’un village is published in book form. Sand writes the preface for Maurice’s Le monde des papillons. 1867 Sand goes back to live at Nohant. In September she has two briefs stays in Normandy in order to write Mademoiselle Merquem. Cadio is published in installments. Maurice publishes Le coq aux cheveux d’or. 1868 Winter: Sand travels to the French Riviera and stays with Juliette Adam in Bruyères. 11 March: Gabrielle, the second daughter of Maurice and Lina, is born at Nohant. May: After a brief stay with Flaubert in Croisset, Sand visits the Art Salon at the Louvre where she admires paintings by Marchal, Daubigny, Fromentin, and Gérôme. Sand moves for the last time in Paris, to 5 rue Gay-Lussac. Mademoiselle Merquem and a few articles that will be part of the collection Nouvelles lettres d’un voyageur are published in installments. 1869 Spring: While visiting Paris, Sand poses for Félix Nadar. Wearing a striped shawl, she is sixty-five years old. Fall: Sand makes two short trips to the Ardennes with friends. Flaubert comes to spend the last days of the year at Nohant. Pierre qui roule and Lupo Liverani are published in installments. 1870 September: Fleeing from a smallpox epidemic, Sand and family, who are also fearing that the Prussians will arrive in Berry, take refuge with friends in Creuse. L’autre opens at the Odéon. Malgrétout and Césarine Dietrich are published in installments. Against her mother’s advice, Solange publishes Jacques Bruneau (she will publish a second novel, Carl Robert, in 1884). 1871 March: Sand severely criticizes the Paris Commune, even though she condemned the bloody repression that followed. Francia and the Journal d’un voyageur pendant la guerre are published in installments.

Chronological Points of Reference  xxi August: Sand becomes a regular collaborator of the newspaper Le Temps. 1872 Summer: Sand stays in Cabourg with her granddaughters. Fall: Sand entertains the Viardot family and Ivan Turgenev. Nanon, Un bienfait n’est jamais perdu, and her first stories for children are published in installments. These stories will later appear under the title Contes d’une grand-mère. 1873 April: Flaubert, then the Viardot family and Turgenev visit Nohant. Solange buys the château of Montgivray. A few kilometers from Nohant, it once belonged to Hippolyte Chatiron. August: Trip to Auvergne. September: The Viardot family and Turgenev return to Nohant. Impressions et souvenirs and Contes d’une grand-mère, dedicated to Gabrielle and Aurore, are published. 1874 Sand’s health is deteriorating. After trying her hand at dendritic painting, she spends the winter using this technique with Maurice. December: Maurice is elected mayor of the commune of Nohant-Vicq (he was also mayor for a few weeks in 1848). Ma sœur Jeanne is published. 1875 During the winter Sand, who is planning a new edition of her complete works with Michel Lévy, organizes what she has written and composes a general preface. Flamarande, Marianne Chevreuse, and La tour de Percemont, plus a new series of stories, are published in installments. 1876 Winter: Sand starts her last novel, Albine Fiori, which will remain unfinished. *All of Sand’s published works are listed here, except for brochures, articles, prefaces, and many reviews of works. The works are dated with the time of their publication as newspaper installments or magazines or, in some rare cases, just as books. Her plays are listed with the date of their first performance.

introduction

George Sand? Just hearing the name of one of the most famous women in French literature, people, even today, readily express their admiration or aggravation. They really love her or they don’t like her much at all; they can’t get enough of her novels or they basically ignore them. Most people seem to fall in the second category. Take a look at the current literary histories or manuals for high school and university students in France, and you’ll see that Sand continues to occupy a modest place, her work often being reduced to a few “rustic” novels. Yet her place should be right beside the other literary giant of the time, Victor Hugo. Both produced a huge corpus and were eager to make literature a space for moral and political commitment; both exercised the same vibrant influence over the intellectual life of France for nearly half a century, demonstrating the same vigilant care for society and the lower classes, in short, the same way of being in the world, bountiful and generous. Half admiring, half tongue in cheek, Gustave Flaubert gladly referred to “Mama Sand” and “Papa Hugo,” making these two the symbolic parents of every author in the second half of the nineteenth century, and his own for starters. Yet the way the two of them are treated is quite different, and the same goes for the place reserved to each in France’s literary tradition, the way that these men, women, and the books they wrote are generally remembered. There are all kinds of reasons for this, having to do with their sex, how being a man or a woman conditioned the way they got into literature, the course of their careers, the reception given to their works at the time of publication, and their reputation for posterity. Hugo, whom Sand never met, with whom she had more political affinities than literary ones, no doubt found the best words for

2  George Sand

sizing up the importance of the woman who was just two years shy of being his exact contemporary. For her funeral in June 1876 he wrote: “George Sand has a unique place in our time. The others are great men; she is the great woman. It is this century’s duty to complete the French Revolution and to start the human revolution, sexual equality being part of mankind’s equality, and so there had to be a great woman. . . . This is how the revolution is fulfilled.”1 Yet the majority of France’s “great men” did not share this point of view and would not for quite a while. They preferred to see Sand as “an error of Nature,”2 unsettling by virtue of her genius or frankly ridiculous by dint of her ambitions to genius. They were revolted by her singularly free behavior that kept the contradictions inherent in private life separate from the convictions that she expressed again and again in her particularly abundant and varied works. More fundamentally perhaps, they were thoroughly annoyed to see a woman abandon her role as muse, mother, as giver of inspiration or consolation, in order to do just what they did. “Bluestocking,” they bellowed, “housekeeper,” “sleepwalker,” “big silly,” “show-off,” “a non-genius,” “a she-ghoul,” “a latrine,” “a ruminating sphinx,” “the Prudhomme3 of immorality,” “the mum of mush,” “the plague of the Republic,” “the Marquis de Sade’s daughter,” “the novel-writing cow.” The period’s misogyny was not limited to this deluge of insults. It also churned out loads of caricatures making fun of the woman wearing pants, smoking cigars, dreaming about a “Chamber of Female Representatives,” and spinning her literary yarns among a flock of sheep. Honoré Daumier’s series called The Bluestockings [Les bas-bleus] took aim at the women who wanted to imitate Sand, dreaming of writing novels and, in the meantime, refusing to sew the buttons back on their husband’s trousers. Literary criticism quickly got tangled up in contradictions. Either Sand was mediocre, because she “is a woman and will remain one forever”4 (Zola), and there’s always been “something very homey about her, like a pot-roast”5 (Maupassant); from that point on she amounted to “the greatest prejudice of our time, the century’s most routine exercise of admiration”6 (Barbey). Or, on the other hand, Sand was a genius.

Introduction  3

In this case, however, “she’s a man and all the more man that she wants to be one and has stepped out of a woman’s role”7 (Balzac); “a woman made man,” her talent having made a monster out of her: if she’s not “that hermaphrodite genius that brings together a man’s vigor and a woman’s grace”8 (Dumas), she belongs to some “third sex”9 (Flaubert). Endowed with this “narrative genius”10 hailed by Flaubert, acting as the tireless advocate of the “great forces in charge of the world,”11 according to Taine, resolute in politics, courageous in the defense of women and peasants, always endeavoring to be perfectly independent in tone, behavior, and expression, Sand had a complicated personality, and the history of her life is no less complicated. Her works, novels, and plays, autobiographical writings and correspondence, reflect this, but like a mirror in a funhouse. In her works Sand undergoes dizzying metamorphoses: “Where would art be, great God! if one not did invent three-quarters of the characters, magnifying their beauty or ugliness, traits in which the stupid and curious public wants to recognize the people they were modeled on?”12 she asks. For the same reason, the life of the woman who chose to hide under the masculine mask of “George Sand” to get herself into literature and make a name for herself there only sheds light on part of her extremely varied production, and vice versa. This biography does not aim to account for all of the many lives and publications that made of Sand an extraordinary woman and a woman of letters. Its purpose is more modest: to put forth a series of observations that will allow the reader to size up an exceptional personality and fount of creativity and at the same time to refute a few die-hard clichés. Any attempt to talk about all the years of Sand’s life, the men and women who crossed her path, the books she wrote, and the causes she defended could only take the form of a painting with some spots only sketched out. This will be an unfinished portrait of a great woman, but a portrait rich with suggestions about a milieu, a moment, and a singular destiny. “She has died, here now she lives,” Victor Hugo proclaimed in the funeral oration already quoted. The old man knew how to find just the right words. The same words apply here. After many other

4  George Sand

attempts at Sand’s biography, it is now a matter of breathing life back into Aurore who became George, Madame Dudevant who all of a sudden became Madame Sand one fine day in May 1832—and of telling her fascinating story.

1832

Before May 1832 “George Sand” did not exist, or more precisely she existed under another name. Her first name was Aurore, she was twenty-seven and married to Casimir Dudevant, a country gentleman from Quercy, in southwestern France. “Dark eyes, dark hair, ordinary forehead, pale complexion, well-formed nose, round chin, average mouth, five feet tall, with no particular identifying marks,”1 she noted in Story of My Life [Histoire de ma vie], judging that she had been “neither ugly nor beautiful”2 in her youth. She was living in the château of Nohant, a mile or two from La Châtre, some twenty-five miles south of Châteauroux, in the central French province of Berry. She dressed with a certain elegance, and the neighbors who had watched her grow up thought her a rather strange and unpredictable young woman. She was bored or else lost in dreams, by turns wildly amused or deeply sad. Her two children, Maurice and Solange, were eight and three. During the summer of 1830, at the château of Coudray, owned by her friends the Duvernets, she met a frail young man with blond hair and a sweet look about him. She penciled his portrait. Seven years her junior, Jules Sandeau aspired to be a man of letters. Aurore Dudevant, having become his mistress, planned to move to Paris with him. They in fact did so the following January when the lovers settled down together at 21 quai des Grands-Augustins. After bitter rows (and a history of discord and infidelity already rather long), Casimir Dudevant agreed to let his wife spend a few months a year away from Nohant and gave her an allowance from the income of the estate he continued to manage. She gave him temporary custody of their two children. Hoping to pad her purse a bit, the young woman first thought about decorating screens, snuff boxes, and Spa boxes, which took

6  George Sand

their name from the famous Belgian resort that launched the fashion of these little hand-painted souvenir chests. But others were better at varnishing the pansies, daisies, and lilies of the valley painted in delicate gouache colors. Her boxes didn’t move from the shopwindow. With the help of her friends from Berry, she soon met Henri Delatouche (or de Latouche), a cousin of the Duvernets and the editor of the Figaro, a little satirical paper, and he invited her to publish texts of her choice in that venue. Aurore Dudevant had already been thinking about writing for some time. Like all the young ladies of her class, she had written long letters to her friends from boarding school, but from the very start hers were far livelier than those of her correspondents, funnier as well. In the past she had tried describing the countryside around Nohant, drafted memories of a few trips with her husband, and penned some sketches of people who were part of her daily life. In a short text entitled Cuttings [Les couperies] dated 3 September 1830, she had imagined a face-to-face confrontation between a young man and an old woman. Through a sort of fantastic projection of what her future held in store, this piece summed up an entire life, her joys and sorrows, hopes and disappointments, dreams of faraway places and the separations that necessarily occur when these dreams are realized. But writing is not just finding words for one’s moods, memories, or flights of fancy. With Jules Sandeau, Aurore Dudevant was discovering the life of journalists paid by the line, writing all together under the supervision of a newspaper director watching over every detail and keeping everybody busy. As she relayed to her son’s tutor, Jules Boucoiran, on 4 March 1831, “We are not exactly free, at the Figaro. M. Delatouche, our worthy boss . . . orders us around, pruning, hacking away, imposing his fancies, whims, and odd notions. And we’ve got to write the way he wants. After all, it’s his business and we’re just his unskilled laborers: a news-worker, a junior staff-writer, that’s me for the moment.”3 Still in conjunction with Sandeau, she wrote several short stories that appeared in the Figaro but also La Mode and La Revue de Paris. They had to write lots and quickly: “Writers (says the

1832  7

sublime Latouche) are tools . . . , not men, but pens!”4 The young couple even agreed to write a counterfeit novel entitled Le commissaire, presented by the publisher Renault as the posthumous work of Alphonse Signol, killed in a duel a short time before. On Delatouche’s suggestion, Aurore Dudevant and Jules Sandeau signed their first texts as “J. S.” or “J. Sand,” sharing this slight modification of the young man’s last name as one pen name for the two of them.5 Women singers, passionate artists, and gentlemen involved in rather tormented love affairs were their staple. Such characters and subjects were fashionable, terribly melodramatic sentimental novels still being all the rage, and publishers were soliciting them from every writer eager to earn some money. In December 1831 Jules Sandeau and Aurore Dudevant published another novel, Rose and Blanche, or the Actress and the Nun [Rose et Blanche ou La comédienne et la religieuse]. Signed “J. Sand,” this one drew the attention of the critics. All the young men dreaming of a literary career at that time started out more or less the same way. While waiting for their first work to get published, they would agree to be ghostwriters or assistants for a book publisher or newspaper editor, generally for a press whose growing success would altogether change the literary landscape for years to come. Literature was becoming “industrial.” So said Sainte-Beuve in an article written in 1839. This would cause a radical change in the trade, turning authors into chroniclers and novelists who would first publish their works in a newspaper or magazine, then in book form. Nearly all the great authors of the time worked this way. In those years there were very few women in the press or literary establishment. The reasons for this are complex and go far back in time. Women had been writing for centuries, but always as a minority, and their talents were generally tolerated as an exception. The shapers of opinion, from medieval clerics to Enlightenment philosophers, had always repeated that no decent woman could tolerate the publicity of publication: once her work reached the man in the street, the female author became a “public” woman, no more and no less than actresses and prostitutes, an old adage that

8  George Sand

Baudelaire would see fit to repeat. Likewise, for hundreds of years there had been men, admittedly few in number, who encouraged women to learn, write, and publish and not to content themselves with age-old arguments about their “natural” inferiority and the supposed superiority of the “strong” sex. And for hundreds of years, women had been thinking about their place in literature, highlighting the difficulties of their situation and their unfriendly treatment at the hands of the critics. With this in mind, they sometimes invited their sisters of the pen to sacrifice some vain dream of glory to the joys of marriage and family; fortunately, they sometimes exhorted them to write poems, plays, and novels, to surrender to the giddy excitement of creation. Tradition, being rather stingy in its compliments, quite agreed that these women had more than enough imagination. After the Revolution, more women began publishing. The number of female novelists alone doubled, probably representing 20 percent of the published authors at the time. During the Restoration (1815–1830) the popularity of sentimental novels even put a handful of women writers on the best-seller list, for example, Sophie Cottin, whose novels Claire d’Albe and Elizabeth or the Siberian Exiles [Claire of Alba and Elisabeth ou les exilées de Sibérie] are completely forgotten today, like many other publications that enjoyed real success at that time. The greater visibility of women authors explains the increased hostility shown them. In the 1830s the English term bluestocking, translated as bas-bleu, was making the rounds. A rallying point for lampoonists, it helped make a laughing stock out of any woman with literary or intellectual ambitions. Poking fun at learned, precious, or pretentious women of any sort was far from over. On this particular point Molière had made an enduring mark. When the “George Sand” story began in the first years of the July Monarchy (1830–1848), the prejudices about women and literature or, more generally, artistic creation were firmly entrenched. The Napoleonic Civil Code of 1804 had more strictly defined the place of men and women: the public sphere was for men, and the private sphere for women. Divorce had been abolished in 1816,

1832  9

soon after the Bourbon monarchy returned to power. The Catholic Church again took control of the schools, especially those for girls, who would mainly be taught to keep house and be mothers. They needed some instruction, since they would be their children’s first teachers. Virtue, discretion, honesty, courage, resignation, and self-denial were the keywords of the short catechism for girls. The great minds of the time proclaimed that the future of France and the nation’s moral standards depended on women being indoctrinated in this catalogue of virtues. Each sex had its role, place, and prescribed behavior. Men were to be virile, and women sweet and submissive, yet flirtatious enough to attract a future husband. No woman’s life would be considered successful without a husband and his children. Men commanded, as the judicial system bluntly stated, and women obeyed. Fortunately, there was real life, and couples enjoying mutual love and desire could shake up that mass of constraints in thousands of ways. Still a writer had to be free to move about in a way quite unimaginable for a woman. Every fledging author was not only duty bound to live in Paris, as young Sandeau and many others knew so well, but to run around the streets at any hour, frequent cafés and theaters, slip into the backrooms of bookshops, the newsroom of a magazine or newspaper, a theater director’s office. Going out unaccompanied and showing up alone in public were more complicated for a woman than one would think. There were constraints everywhere, each sex had its own place, and both were sternly enjoined to stay within those bounds. So a woman had to justify her presence in the street by displaying the reasons for it, by wearing, for example, the distinctive dress of a landlady, servant, seamstress, milliner’s assistant, or some other form of women’s work in order not to be mistaken for a prostitute. A lady could only go out chaperoned, by a maid, if necessary. Her reputation, and that of her father, brother, or husband, were at stake. So it comes as no surprise that Aurore Dudevant, having had ample opportunity to sample the reproving looks and wagging tongues of the small-town bourgeoisie of La Châtre, decided to

10  George Sand

dress as a man. That meant that she could move around discreetly without exciting gossip, go to theaters and concerts without being accosted or attracting unwanted attention. What liberty these gentlemen in trousers and frock coats enjoyed! I saw my young friends from Berry, my childhood chums, living in Paris. Broke like me, they still managed to keep up with everything that appealed to intelligent young men. Literary and political happenings, the excitement of theaters and museums, clubs and street life, they were seeing everything, going everywhere. . . . But on the streets of Paris I was like a boat on ice. My delicate shoes would split after two days, . . . I didn’t know how to lift up my hem, I was a filthy mess, worn out, sick with colds, and watching shoes and dresses, not to mention dainty velvet hats drenched by rain spouts, turn into tatters at a terrifying clip.6

Her mother suggested that she dress as a man. That is what she, like so many others, had done in her youth. It made everything easier and saved money. First off I found this idea funny and then really ingenious. I had been dressed as a boy in my childhood, then I had hunted wearing a smock frock and gaiters . . . , so I wasn’t at all amazed to start dressing again in a way that was nothing new for me. Fashion just then made it particularly easy to go about in disguise. Men were wearing long, boxy frock coats “à la propriétaire,” going down to the heels and without any waistline. Once when my brother was putting his on at Nohant, he laughed and said, “Really nice, don’t you think? . . . The tailor measures up a sentry-box, and it would fit an entire regiment just fine.” I had one made for myself, plus a pair of trousers and a vest, all in coarse grey material. With a grey hat and bulky wool necktie, I was a perfect little first-year university student. . . . I would fly from one end of Paris to the other. . . . I saw every play from the orchestra pit. . . . I was too poorly dressed and looked too unsophisticated—my usual way, absentminded and often dazed—to attract anyone’s attention.7

1832  11

And so Aurore Dudevant entered literature—on tiptoe. While she took male disguise to enjoy perfect freedom of movement, just like her old friends from Berry, she also hid behind her lover’s initials or truncated last name. That was the great difference between Sandeau and his companion. More than fifty years later, Gabrielle-Sidonie Colette started her literary career quite the same way. She allowed her husband, the influential Henri Gauthier-Villars, to sign her first novels with the sole name “Willy” and let herself be photographed dressed as Claudine, the character of the libertine schoolgirl in her novel, sitting at the feet of her master along with her dog Toby-chien. After this trying début in the offices of the Figaro, she could have just given up. Such was not the case. Back in Nohant in the fall of 1831, she started a novel whose title was drawn from the first name of her heroine, Indiana. The narration opens on a tedious country evening: “On a cool and rainy autumn evening three people in a little castle down in Brie were seriously occupied. Lost in thought, they were watching the embers smoldering in the hearth and the clock’s hands proceeding along their slow march.”8 Unhappily married, Indiana falls in love with another man and winds up leaving her husband. But her lover is fickle, and it seems impossible to overcome the force of prejudice. Finally, the young woman and her childhood friend Ralph who has fallen in love with her decide to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff. This last chapter is followed by a “conclusion” in which a traveler comes upon the young couple leading a quiet life on the isle of Bourbon. Instead of the existential brick wall leading to suicide, the author finally preferred a kind of mythic retreat inspired by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie. Indiana is not just another of the many romances that women tended to write—love being the feeling women know best, or so it is said. The novel describes and takes a stand against the condition of married women’s lives and, more generally, of society itself: “If the writer, while carrying out his task, has happened to voice complaints wrung out of his characters by the social problems affecting them; if he has not been afraid to repeat their aspirations

12  George Sand

for a better life, let the inequalities of society and the whims of destiny bear the blame! Writers are just a mirror that reflects these problems, a machine that reproduces them.”9 Using masculine pronouns to refer to herself throughout this work, Aurore Dudevant insisted on spelling out this message in a carefully argued preface. A writer was born, and this first work is certainly a masterpiece that seems to have required remarkably little preparation. Aside from bits and pieces of various manuscripts, there are few early works10 or expressions of ambition for a literary career. Glory? Fame? Just a few months earlier, Aurore Dudevant was poking fun at this idea as something perfectly improbable, as she wrote to Jules Boucoiran: “My husband has given me an allowance of 3,000 francs. . . . So I only wish to increase my comfort by turning a little profit, and since I have no ambition for fame, I won’t be famous. . . . So when people come tell me that glory is yet more trouble that I’m preparing for myself, I can’t help laughing at the word, not at all felicitous, and all the stereotypes that apply only to genius or vanity. I’ve got neither one nor the other.”11 A writer was born, but what about her name? Was Aurore Dudevant going to keep the pseudonym “J. Sand” that Delatouche had given her? I had written Indiana at Nohant; I wanted to sign it with the popular pseudonym, but Jules Sandeau, out of modesty, did not want to accept fathering a book that was totally alien to him. That didn’t suit the publisher. A name is everything, it sells the book, and since the little pseudonym had had a good run, we basically wanted to keep it. When Delatouche was asked, he settled the matter with a compromise: Sand would stay the same, and I’d take another first name just for myself. Without giving it much thought, I seized upon the name of George, which seemed to me synonymous with the Berry. Jules and George, unknown to the public, would pass for brothers and cousins.12

And so Aurore Dudevant became “George Sand” in literature. Everything was decided in just minutes, if one can believe what

1832  13

she says. Still disguised as a man of letters, she only had to choose a masculine first name. For her, literature was definitely a thing to be shared among friends and comrades; she was making her dreams come true among lads from Berry now living in Paris, childhood friends and cousins, George, Jules, Henri, and a few others. For “George Sand,” it seemed just one more step toward autonomy and a steady income; in fact, the very enthusiastic reception given to Indiana was going to thrust the author to the forefront of the literary scene of Paris. In all respects, there is nothing banal about the publication of Indiana or the choice of the pseudonym on its cover. For starters, literary pseudonyms were much less frequent than is often said. For a long time women authors, quite like men authors and for the same reasons, had been doing all kinds of things to get into print, from publishing their works anonymously or under their real names or husband’s name if they were married. Most nineteenth-century women authors who were George Sand’s contemporaries, such as Flora Tristan, Delphine de Girardin, Hortense Allart, or Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, published under their own names, except in newspapers where a generally masculine “pen name” was the usual practice. Marie d’Agoult alone chose to imitate Sand when she signed her books as “Daniel Stern.” What authors built a literary career around an invented name of their own choosing? What authors little by little took on the literary identity they had chosen for themselves? Very few, in fact. Voltaire in the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth, just Stendhal and Gérard de Nerval (who kept his first name), and later Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse) and Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery) chose a pseudonym and “became” the character they had created in their books. Yet the matter of the (false) name was not entirely settled thanks to a few quick words with Delatouche, as George Sand maintains in her autobiography. Indiana is signed “G. Sand,” like her second novel Valentine, published in November 1832. When she signed with the full first name, Sand first used the French form “Georges.” Several short stories that appeared in newspapers between the fall

14  George Sand

of 1832 and the spring of 1833 were also signed with the name “Georges Sand.” When Lelia was published in July 1833, more than a year after Indiana, “George Sand” appeared for the first time on the book’s cover in its definitive spelling. Furthermore, in March 1832 Aurore Dudevant began using the initial G. in her private correspondence, instead of her usual A. G.? Sand could have chosen that letter in memory of the young Irish girl she met at the convent of English Augustinian Sisters in 1818. As Sand herself wrote, the behavior of this mischievous eleven-year-old designated as “Mary G***” in Story of My Life created quite a sensation among the young boarding students. Since Mary Gillibrand “was not a member of our sex by temperament,”13 she was nicknamed boy. The use of the initial G. probably owes something to the “tomboy” who made such an impression on Aurore and whose family name also started with the same letter. George? In Berrichon folklore there is an impish devil known as “Georgeon,” and Sand reports his pranks in her Country Legends [Légendes rustiques]. But there is no Berrichon peasant with this first name in either the novels or the open letters about rural conditions that Sand briefly signed with the fictive name Blaise Bonnin. On the other hand, George is Byron’s first name, a European idol since his tragic death at Missolonghi in 1824. Sand would remember his epic poems, Lara and The Corsair, in her first novels. George is also the first name of the last two kings of England, George III and George IV, who succeeded his father in 1820. Sand? The word exists in English (but not as an English family name), and no doubt when Delatouche thought it up, he was thinking of exploiting the popularity of novels translated from that language. Yet Sand, as everybody knew at the time, was also the name of an assassin, Karl-Ludwig Sand. In 1820 he stabbed the German playwright August von Kotzebue, suspected of being a Russian agent, and was executed a short time later. In Story of My Life Sand denies being in favor of “political assassination.”14 Still

1832  15

she recalls that the choice of the name “Sand” did a lot for her reputation in Germany.15 So the pseudonym “George Sand” looks like a puff pastry layered with odd bits of history and legend, mixing together the Berry region, Germany, and England, with a number of exclusively masculine celebrities thrown in for good measure. When she adopted this name, choosing not only to sign her works with it but also to use it in her daily life and to become a purely imagined other person, Aurore Dudevant performed a true revolution for herself, a revolution that had probably started much earlier, as will be seen later on. She shook up the cues of gender, yielded to the urge to engender herself, abolishing the notion of the family name and everything related to history, inheritance, affiliation, that it connotes. Thanks to the pseudonym, “the individual named G[eorge] Sand”16 is no longer anybody’s daughter or wife; she becomes the son/daughter of her works. “In Paris,” she wrote to her friend Laure Decerfz on 7 July 1832, “Madame Dudevant is dead. But George Sand is known as a hale and hearty fellow.”17 Some twenty years later, having once and for all become “George Sand,” she observed in Story of My Life: “What is a name in our revolutionized and revolutionary world? A number for those who are doing nothing, a sign or a slogan for those who are working and fighting. The one I’ve been given, I made it all by myself and all alone after the fact, by my own work. . . . I live, from day to day, on this name that protects my work. . . . My tranquil conscience doesn’t think anything needs to be changed about the name designating and personifying it.”18

I

1804–1831 “In Music and Rosy Pink” “On day twelve of Messidor in year twelve of the Republic,”1 meaning 1 July 1804, a little girl was born in Paris, at 15 rue Meslée (in what is now the fifth arrondissement). The name on her birth certificate read Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin. Sand recalled in Story of My Life: “That day mother was wearing a pretty rose-pink dress, and my father was playing a contredanse of his own invention on his faithful violin from Cremona . . . ; my mother felt a bit ill, left the dance and went to her room. . . . At the end of the dance my aunt Lucie went into my mother’s room and promptly exclaimed, ‘Come here, Maurice, you’ve got a daughter.’ ‘I’ll name her Aurore, for my poor mother who is not here to bless her, but some day the little one will have her blessing,’ said my father taking me in his arms. . . . ‘She was born in music and rosy pink; she’ll have a happy life,’ said my aunt.”2 What a charming picture, with Aunt Lucie acting like a good fairy and predicting a fine future for the child. But upon closer inspection, the present and past were much less rosy than the future mother’s dress might suggest, and the same goes for what would follow. This birth in music in fact masks many problems and goes along with a few unsolved mysteries. Aurore’s parents brought together two worlds dead set against each other, both then and in later years: a twenty-six year-old army officer, a “terribly spoiled”3 son, and a woman five years his senior from a very humble background. On the paternal side of the family, there was a king and one of the greatest military strategists of

1804–1831  17

the eighteenth century, Maurice de Saxe; on the maternal side, a bird-seller, a cart-driver, and a scrap-iron seller whose names are not even known.4 “In my veins the blood of kings mixed with the blood of the poor and the powerless,”5 declared the author of Story of My Life, conscious of the enormous contrasts in her family history. These may get less attention than the illegitimate children present in every generation, including her own. Maurice Dupin and Sophie-Victoire Delaborde were married the month before their daughter was born, thereby legalizing a union begun in Italy in late 1800. Together they had already had at least two children, a son in 1801 and a daughter in 1803. Their names are not known, and both died in infancy. The young man’s mother, Marie-Aurore Dupin, was worried about her son’s affair with a woman of questionable morals. To be sure, her only son was very considerate and wrote to her regularly ever since leaving her house for a career in the Army of the Republic. Yet he kept hidden from her a relationship that she promptly divined, and for years she tried in vain to break it off. Born in 1748, Marie-Aurore Dupin was the illegitimate daughter of Maurice de Saxe, himself the illegitimate son of Frederick-Augustus, elector of Saxony and future king of Poland, and his mistress, Maria-Aurora von Kœnigsmarck. Having become the marshal general of the King’s Camps and Armies, the victor in the Battle of Fontenoy counted among his conquests a young actress by the name of Marie Rainteau, who, more for gallantry than for theater, took the name of Mlle de Verrière. She saw to it that the daughter born of her months-long affair with the great soldier was recognized and lined up high-placed protection for Marie-Aurore: at the Convent of Saint-Cyr, her daughter received an education befitting a young lady of the best society. After a first marriage, short and stormy, Marie-Aurore, age twenty-nine, was wed to Louis-Claude Dupin de Francueil, age sixty-one. She seems to have spent happy years with this wealthy man who was a friend to the Enlightenment. For a short time Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who would dedicate a few pages to him in his Confessions, was Dupin de Francueil’s guest and secretary.

18  George Sand

Widowed in 1786, Marie-Aurore Dupin first continued to live in the imposing Raoul château in Châteauroux. In 1793 she bought an estate at Nohant that better suited her income, greatly reduced after the Revolution. Six years later, in 1799, her son, the young captain Maurice Dupin, fathered a son he refused to recognize. This child was registered under the name of Pierre Laverdure, but he seems to have born the name of his mother, Chatiron. Upon the child’s birth, Mlle Chatiron, a laundress at the château of Nohant, was invited to come live in a little house nearby. Maurice seems not to have shown much interest in any of this. His mother, on the other hand, looked after “the child from the little house,”6 as he was generally known. Although Hippolyte was reared with Aurore, it took her years to understand just how she was related to her half brother. As for Sand’s mother, Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, born in Paris in 1773, was the daughter of one of the bird-sellers who traditionally did business alongside seed merchants and herbalists on the quai of the Seine near the Conciergerie. “Orphaned and hungry at the age of fourteen,”7 she was probably reduced to prostitution. Bearing her first child at seventeen, she had several children of unknown paternity, including a daughter, Caroline Delaborde, born in 1799, before her departure for Italy with Adjutant Collin who was stationed there. In Italy she met another officer, Maurice Dupin, became his mistress, and then openly started living with him. Did she continue her loose living? Wasn’t she often separated from her lover because his regiment was moving around? True, she spent the year before Aurore’s birth in Paris; her friend Pierret, who did odd jobs for her, rarely left her side and remained attached to her his whole life long.8 Meanwhile Maurice was posted in the north, in Charleville and then Sedan, all the while enjoying regular leaves with his wife in Paris. While she was writing Story of My Life and trying to organize her father’s correspondence, Sand seems to have briefly doubted her own legitimacy.9 Hadn’t her grandmother made damning revelations about her mother, and hadn’t Sand been unable to get to the bottom of them? Hardly inclined to praise her daughter-in-law’s

1804–1831  19

virtues, had Mme Dupin been repeating nasty gossip? Were her suspicions groundless? No evidence can prove or disprove the doubts that besieged Sand. Writing Story of My Life, she arranged certain facts and probably ignored others. As to the place and date of her birth, she had also heard all kinds of contradictory tales and said that her birthday was always celebrated on 5 July, not the 1st. Now married and father to a son and a little girl, Maurice went on saying nothing about his private life in his letters to his mother. She grew worried and finally asked the mayor of the fifth arrondissement to check out “the person with whom he [Maurice] had contracted marriage.” She added: “Since he’s been living in rue Meslay [Meslée], my son has had a daughter that I believe was born in Messidor [July].”10 An answer arrived, confirming the mother’s suspicions. For a moment she considered having the marriage annulled, then abandoned the idea. Some weeks later, Maurice presented the little girl to Mme Dupin on a visit to Paris. As in a Greuse painting or one of those melodramas then in vogue in the theaters, the old lady wept tenderly at the sight of her granddaughter and forgave her son. So now young Aurore was “adopted” by her grandmother and, from the looks of it, legitimized in all respects. She spent her first years in Paris in humble apartments, first in rue Meslée, then boulevard Poissonnière, and finally rue Grange-Batelière, the site of her first memories: I remember perfectly the apartment where we lived in rue Grange-Batelière. . . . That’s where the precise and nearly continuous stream of my memory got started. . . . I have just a hazy memory of long hours that I spent lying awake in my little bed and busily contemplating some fold in the curtain or flower in the wallpaper. . . .

. . . I walked at ten months, started talking rather late, but

once I had said a few words, I learned them all very fast, and at the age of four I could read really well. We were also taught to pray, and I remember reciting my prayers from one end to the other without batting an eye or understanding a single thing.11

20  George Sand

While Aurore was spending quiet days with her mother, her half sister, Caroline, and faithful Pierret (the only memorable event was “seeing the King of Rome in the arms of his nurse”12), her father, “often away,”13 was following Napoleon’s armies around France and Europe, writing frequent letters to his mother and his wife. Although Sand partially rewrote and embellished these letters in her autobiography, adding, for example, literary quotations and expurgating a romantic episode,14 they give a very lively chronicle of military life during the Consulate and the Napoleonic Empire, with an abundance of evocative details and personal impressions. First a captain and then a major in the First Regiment of Hussards, Maurice Dupin participated in the Bavarian, Prussian, and Polish campaigns. In early 1808 he left for Spain as an aide-de-camp for Prince Murat, chosen by the emperor to direct the maneuvers of the thousands of soldiers sent down there. Maurice Dupin would only stay a few months in that country ravaged by a particularly villainous and deadly war of conquest that Francisco Goya immortalized in his painting Tres de mayo and his engravings Desastres de la guerra, which Sand would evoke in the prologue of The Devil’s Pool [La mare au diable]. In April Sophie Dupin, pregnant once again, decided to go join her husband in Madrid. Sand would retain particularly vivid memories of this trip to Spain, a brief stay in Madrid while her mother gave birth to a son, the family’s return trip through a famine-stricken country, dedicating two chapters of Story of My Life to them. She remembered staying with her parents in the royal palace requisitioned by Murat, who had just turned Carlos IV and his family out of these quarters. Her father had a little aide-de-camp’s uniform made for her, and she paraded it in front of Murat. Soon she had “the most beautiful toys in the world”15 (which the king’s children had just abandoned) and saw herself in a full-size mirror for the first time. She found her mother, dressed in a Spanish costume, a black silk dress with a fringe and a black mantilla, “surprisingly beautiful.”16 A boy named Louis, blind and particularly puny, was born on 12 June 1808. (Sand had witnessed the birth, in 1805, of another

1804–1831  21

little boy who lived but a few months.) When the child was just two weeks old, Maurice Dupin and his family decided to leave “Spain in flames”17 and go back to Nohant. From Madrid, Maurice Dupin wrote to his mother: “I’m saving my newborn son’s baptism for a celebration in Nohant. What a fine opportunity to ring the bells and have a village ball!”18 The grueling trip back took several weeks. The two children came down with fevers; on the way they caught scabies, which was treated by mixing sulfur into their food. At Nohant, where she arrived for the first time in her life on 21 July 1808, Aurore met her half brother Hippolyte as well as her father’s old tutor, Jean-Louis-François Deschartres, and renewed acquaintance with her grandmother, a small woman with a commanding presence. She was wearing a brown silk dress, a “blond wig with a frizzy tuft over the forehead,” and a “little round hat with a lace cockade in the middle.”19 Finally Maurice seemed to have the “total happiness”20 he’d been dreaming about for the last eight years. His wife and two children, Aurore and Louis, were now with him in Nohant. His mother, who had not stopped quaking since he had gone to war, finally felt reassured, even though she had desired a better match for her son. Tragedy would strike a few weeks later: “On Friday 8 September the poor little blind baby, after whimpering a long time on my mother’s knees, went cold, and nothing could warm him up. Deschartres came and took him from my mother’s arms. He was dead.”21 Crazed with grief, Sophie Dupin had the newborn buried, then dug him up so that she could spend a full day beside the corpse to make sure the baby was really dead. Then she laid him to rest in the garden, at the foot of a pear tree, and started gardening on his improvised grave with Aurore and Hippolyte. From Spain Maurice Dupin had brought back a horse named Leopardo, a gift from Murat. He was a wonderful horse, but terribly skittish, and his master did not trust him—for good reason: On Friday 17 September, he mounted his terrifying horse to go visit our friends in La Châtre. He had dinner there and spent

22  George Sand

the evening. . . . Just outside of town, a hundred feet beyond the bridge that marks the entrance, the road makes a turn. . . . My father had started galloping after the bridge. He was riding the fateful Leopardo. . . . At the bend in the road my father’s horse ran into a pile of rocks in the dark. He did not come crashing down, but . . . he reared up so violently that the rider was thrown off and fell ten feet backward. Weber . . . found his master lying on his back, without any apparent wounds; but he had broken the vertebrae in his neck and was already dead.22

There is no way to describe the shock and grief at the announcement of Maurice’s death. Marie-Aurore Dupin went on foot from Nohant to the spot where her son fell and threw herself down on his body. Deschartres laughed convulsively before bursting into tears: “My mother fell into a chair behind the bed. I can see her livid face, her long dark hair floating on her chest, her bare arms that I kept kissing; I can hear her heartrending shrieks. . . . The pain and horror of it all demolished me, annihilating my sense of what was going on.”23 The house and the village of Nohant were plunged into a turmoil of grief. Superstitious servants claimed to see Maurice walking around the house in his dress uniform. He was buried as close as possible to his family, “in a little vault under the cemetery wall so that his head lay at rest in the garden and his feet in hallowed ground.”24 Eager to entertain her granddaughter, Marie-Aurore Dupin found her a playmate, a maidservant’s daughter, Ursule. She was dressed in full mourning like Aurore and stayed at the château (some years later she would leave Nohant to become an apprentice). Marie-Aurore’s plans were soon drawn up. She did not want her daughter-in-law staying on at Nohant any longer, but she had grown terribly attached to Aurore, who had become a substitute for her son Maurice, dead at the age of thirty-one. As Sand remembers in Story of My Life, “My voice, my features, my manners, my tastes, everything about me, reminded her so much of her son as a child that sometimes, as she was watching me play, she would entertain a sort of illusion, often calling me Maurice and

1804–1831  23

referring to me as her son. . . . I also showed musical talent . . . and she found that charming because it reminded her of my father’s childhood, and she became a young mother once again by giving me lessons.”25 The little girl quickly guessed what was afoot and got terribly worried. She found herself torn between her “passionate love” for her mother—begging her not to “give her up for money”26 to her grandmother—and her affection for a levelheaded, well-educated, and extremely courteous woman. In comparison with the great lady, the young plebeian seemed all the more bad mannered, ill tempered, and poorly educated. The plans for separation were more and more detailed, guaranteeing a comfortable life for Aurore as well as a proper education for a gentleman’s daughter. Everybody was getting involved, and Aurore was distraught. “Do you want to go back to eating beans in your little garret room?”27 one of the maids asked the little girl. On 3 February 1809, five months after her son’s death, Marie-Aurore Dupin made a legal commitment to pay 1,500 livres tournois per year to Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, who, in return, agreed that her mother-in-law would have legal custody of her daughter. For a long time Aurore would have the feeling that her grandmother had bought her from her mother and that an old, grief-stricken woman with aristocratic obsessions had separated her from the person she loved most of all. A victory of power and money over weakness and poverty? Aurore thought so for a good many years, but she was wrong. Her mother was not unhappy about an arrangement to which she had readily agreed, one that guaranteed her a small income and freed her from working. All the same, once this contract was signed, Aurore Dupin’s family assumed a strange and unusual structure. Maurice Dupin was dead, and his wife went back to Paris with her daughter Caroline. That meant that Aurore had lost both parents. After 1809 she would only see Sophie Dupin intermittently, a few days in Paris in the winter, a few weeks in Nohant during the summer. Her sixty-five-year-old grandmother served as a mother to the girl of five. Deschartres became her tutor, doctor, and moral guide;

24  George Sand

Hippolyte was reared alongside her. The reconstituted family included two adults and two children (in the beginning, there were four, with two born outside of wedlock), plus Ursule. The two adults were not together for reasons of heart, one being the employee of the other, and the half brother was never more than an illegitimate child being raised alongside a legitimate one, Maurice’s sole “remnant.” Curiously enough, Marie-Aurore Dupin did not rediscover Maurice’s character and features in the son he had had with a laundress, but in the daughter of a woman with a shady past who had become her daughter-in-law in 1804. It was her granddaughter, perhaps because she was just barely legitimate, that she decided to treat as her son, the heir to her name and fortune. Symbolically, Aurore took the place of her dead father, and she was always supposed to be a reminder of his existence. This peculiar script gave her two genders, her own as well as the one her grandmother authorized when she called the girl Maurice and acknowledged her as her son: “You look too much like your father,” she said one day seeing the girl in trousers, prepared to go horseback riding. “There are moments when I get the past and the present so mixed up that I no longer know where I am in my life.”28 This resemblance that made her both boy and girl, Aurore and Maurice, haunts Story of My Life. Much later, when she chose George as her pen name, Aurore may have been reenacting something that had left a deep mark on her life as a little girl. Sand’s only novel with the word “family” in the title came out in 1861: The Family Germandre [La famille de Germandre], now forgotten. In this book the novelist shakes up some preconceived ideas about the name, legacy, and connections that a family of minor Berrichon aristocrats seem to take as their birthright. She tells the story of several generations of the family and imagines them happily all together in the final pages. The novel is set in 1808, a key moment in her own story, since the family then seemed to have achieved “complete happiness” for a moment. This is the only one of Sand’s novels to take place at that time, as if the mere mention of the word “family” were enough to make

1804–1831  25

personal experience come flooding back all of a sudden and to conjure up from these memories their fantastic double, the wellspring of the novel.

Growing Up in Nohant Aside from short visits to Paris where she stayed with her grandmother in an elegant apartment in rue Neuve-des-Mathurins, Aurore spent the next nine years at Nohant. This period began with the signing of the contract between Marie-Aurore Dupin and her daughter-in-law and ended with Aurore’s being sent to Paris, to the convent of English Augustinian Sisters, to complete her education. After the trip to Madrid cut short Aurore Dupin’s early years in Paris, the most significant moments of her childhood mainly took place in a little village in Berry. Quite isolated from the rest of the countryside because the roads were hardly passable except in summer, the Black Valley [Vallée-Noire], “a huge valley measuring some 120 square miles . . . , with the villages of Marche and Bourbonnais on its southern edge,”29 has a few villages (Ardentes, Château-Meillant, Briantes, Sainte-Sévère, Sarzay, Nohant, Saint-Chartier), some isolated farms, and even a desolate moor called Brande where travelers often went astray—Aurore, her mother and a maid got lost there one memorable evening on their way back to Nohant. “The Black Valley,” as Sand recalled in the preface of her novel Valentine, “was me, it was the setting, the trappings of my existence.”30 The estate that Marie-Aurore Dupin bought in Nohant in 1793 consisted of a well-proportioned manor with outbuildings, 240 hectares of woods and farmland as well as three farms with the names Launières, Porte, and Chicoterie.31 It was considered one of the great landed estates of the department of the Indre. Mme Dupin lived on a relatively modest income from her properties, in addition to rents from a building in Paris and a few securities.

26  George Sand

Built in 1767 by Pierre Péarron de Serennes on the foundation of an old fortified castle, the manor has a front courtyard. The trees growing there now were planted by Sand in 1844, and the courtyard is enclosed by a gate with a little lodge on either side. There are outbuildings on the left, to the right a farmhouse with a stable. A second courtyard is located further to the right, one side of which is a huge barn.32 The design of the house is in keeping with the architecture of the second half of the eighteenth century. On the ground floor there is a huge vestibule flanked by a majestic stairway with a wooden banister. Mme Dupin put in the stairs when she bought the property. The vestibule leads to the formal area that looks out on the garden, a large dining room followed by a parlor decorated with paintings. To the left are Mme Dupin’s rooms, her bedroom, where she entertained her friends and acquaintances, played music, and took her meals when alone, plus a boudoir and a dressing room. Aurore slept on the second floor in one of the four big rooms with a view of the garden. Deschartres occupied a little room with a view of the courtyard, to the left of the stairs. The servants had their rooms on the third floor, with their own stairs. The garden, with a vegetable patch and an orchard, was redesigned by Mme Dupin. She rarely set foot in it, maintaining prerevolutionary habits, just taking a few steps in silk slippers while leaning on a servant’s arm. Mme Dupin was friends with most of the local château owners, wealthy members of the bourgeoisie of Châteauroux, La Châtre, and nearby villages. Their children would become her granddaughter’s friends, particularly after she was married, and Aurore would get together with some of them again in Paris. Charles Duvernet’s family lived in the château of Coudray, and the family of Gustave Papet in the château of Ars; Adolphe Duplomb, Alexis Duteil, Alphonse Fleury, Jules Néraud, Ernest Périgois, Gabriel Planet, and François Rollinat, most of whom became lawyers, would be her lifelong friends. Living in Nohant with an elderly lady educated at the Convent of Saint-Cyr more than half a century earlier was soon trouble. Mme Dupin had scarcely got rid of her daughter-in-law when she

1804–1831  27

told her granddaughter to change her tone and manners, to stop saying tu to the servants so that they would not be tempted to reply in kind, to address her in the third person as much as possible (“Will my dear grandmother allow me to go to the garden?”33). “Rolling on the ground, laughing uproariously, speaking Berrichon dialect,”34 such things were no longer permitted. Mme Dupin recommended retenue or restraint in all things, mastering one’s words and actions; she imposed her calm, orderly habits on a little girl of five who dreamed of nothing but running and skipping around: “I felt she was closing me up with her in a big box when she would tell me: ‘Go play quietly.’ She would give me prints to look at, and I didn’t see them, my head was spinning. A dog barking outside, a bird singing in the garden would give me a start. I would have liked to be the dog or the bird.”35 For Aurore, her “little mother’s passionate hugs”36 were followed by the rather chilly and solemn kisses of an old lady altogether eager to set an example and triumph over her young granddaughter’s “capricious and unmanageable”37 disposition. Mme Dupin saw in this behavior the influence of a mother of meager intelligence and virtue. Marie-Aurore Dupin undertook the mission of seeing that Maurice’s daughter and her eventual heir would have good manners as well as a solid education. She would teach Aurore music all alone,38 but for everything else, her granddaughter would be entrusted to the man who had tutored her father. Deschartres was an amazing character! One of the major figures in Mme Dupin’s life—aside from servants, he was the only man who lived under her roof after her husband’s death in 1786, when she was still residing in Châteauroux—he also played a central role in the life of her son Maurice, who lost his father as an adolescent, and then in Aurore’s life as well. As a young man, he quit his job as a professor at the Cardinal Lemoine School in Paris after he had been hired as the Dupin family’s private tutor. Deschartres was not only a learned man, of humble origins, who found in wealthy aristocratic households a way of life that gave him a certain degree of liberty and material comfort. He was also Mme Dupin’s secretary once she had lost her husband, her business manager and adviser.

28  George Sand

In addition, he took great interest in economics, trying, apparently without much success, to boost the production of Nohant’s farmlands and a little terrain of his own. Keenly interested in medicine as well, he introduced Aurore to dissection and sometimes took her to visit his patients, Berrichon peasants whom he treated for free. Curious about everything, taking correspondence courses in “physics, chemistry, medicine, and surgery,”39 he also knew a fair amount about astronomy and botany. A materialist through and through, he would have long conversations with his adolescent pupil about religion and the meaning of life. When Mme Dupin bought Nohant, Deschartres was thirty-two years old. He was forty-seven and the mayor of Nohant when Maurice Dupin returned from Spain with his family in July 1808. This erudite man, with all kinds of qualities, and one great flaw— intolerable vanity—never married and seems not to have had any kind of attachment: He had never been in a religious order. Even so, he could not rid himself of a nickname I had attached to his all-encompassing competence and self-important air; from then on nobody ever called him anything but the great man.

He had been handsome as a lad, and he still was when my

grandmother took him on: neat and tidy, clean-shaven, with a sparkle in his eye, and prominent calf muscles. In short, he really looked like a tutor. But I am sure nobody . . . could have ever looked at him without a laugh, given that the word pedant was clearly written on every line in his face and every move he made.

. . . He was tremendously knowledgeable, very abstemious,

and madly courageous. He possessed every fine quality of soul, along with an insufferable disposition and a degree of smugness close to delirium. . . . But what devotion, what zeal, what a generous and sensitive soul!40

Deschartres left the house after Mme Dupin died, in the wake of a financial disagreement with Aurore’s mother. His pupil who would soon marry and bear a son still saw him occasionally in Paris

1804–1831  29

up until his death in the spring of 1828. Sometimes she wondered if he had killed himself. Deschartres took with him “a considerable portion” of Aurore Dupin’s life, “all my childhood memories, happy and sad, all the stimulus, sometimes irritating, sometimes beneficial, of my intellectual development.”41 He also left the mystery of his character and the reasons for his behavior, about which the autobiographer may have chosen to keep silent. Maurice Dupin had been a lazy and extremely spoiled pupil. Deschartres had tried his best to follow his charge’s progress in the areas that he was unable to teach him—German, music, fencing— and for which other instructors had been hired. In 1793, when Mme Dupin had just been arrested by the revolutionary Committee of Public Safety [Comité de salut public], he was told to burn a good part of her papers so that nothing could be held against her. A second installment in his life as a tutor began in 1809. This time he was put in charge of teaching Aurore, her half brother Hippolyte, and Ursule, the little servant-girl being reared at the château. The two little girls were rather docile, but Hippolyte’s mischievous pranks and “naughty pleasures”42 were too numerous to be counted: “One day he threw burning logs into the fireplace, saying he was sacrificing to the gods of the underworld, and he set the house on fire. Another day he packed a huge log with gunpowder so that it would explode and blow pot roast all over the kitchen. He called that studying volcanic theory. And then he attached a saucepan to the dogs’ tails. . . . He gave the cats wooden shoes, meaning he glued nutshells to their four paws and threw them down on the ice or parquet floors.”43 Hippolyte was often “cruelly thrashed” by his short-tempered tutor. To the two little girls the “great man” only “said silly things.”44 Story of My Life doesn’t exactly say what the grandmother, who treated Maurice’s two children in ways so similar and so different at one and the same time, thought about this. Several years went by. Deschartres’s pupil began to find his lessons more and more tedious: Deschartres was giving me a Latin lesson that I was taking less and less well, for this dead language didn’t interest me one bit;

30  George Sand

and a lesson in French prosody left me nauseated, since this came to me no more naturally than arithmetic at which I’ve always been notoriously bad. . . . For me, botany was nothing more than a bunch of purely arbitrary classifications . . . plus Greek and Latin nomenclature just a dry chore of memorization. . . . I wondered, in my superb ignorance, what was the use of all these alignments and withering rules that hampered flights of thought and froze it in place.45

Such an education, at first sight rather catch-as-catch-can, was in keeping with a time that had not yet established a national school-system. Only after the Guizot law of 1833 was a system of elementary schools set up all over France. In these last years of the Empire, boys from wealthy families were generally sent to Catholic boarding schools and then went on to some form of higher education or a military academy, as was the case for Hippolyte. Girls would spend a few years in a convent, where intellectual aspirations were sometimes very limited. Outside of these schools, which varied greatly in form and quality, homeschooling was the general rule, in the city as well as the countryside. Peasants usually got some education only through the catechism classes that prepared them for communion.46 An apprentice, a house-servant, or even a servant’s child might happen upon a master or mistress who would teach them to read and write. This was the case for Ursule, reared alongside Aurore on her grandmother’s recommendation, and also a peasant child named Liset whom Sophie Dupin and then Aurore Dupin briefly looked after.47 As a rule, the literacy rate remained low out in the country, and education, often left to chance, was minimal—in 1850 only about 50 percent of boys were in school. Aurore hardly seemed convinced of the need for education or, at least, for the knowledge the imperious Deschartres threw at her. She rejected it in the name of the resolutely “romantic”48 side of her character. The epithet often resurfaces in Story of My Life. For Sand, the word designated one of the specific traits of her “nature”—constantly thwarted, curbed, hectored by the people

1804–1831  31

around her—and voiced a resolute plea: to be what she wanted, whenever and however she wanted it. The incessant dream of an elsewhere corresponding to her desires and needs, the constant wish for a transformed reality, the great longing for fiction, come up again and again in her narration of these years in Berry. In later years George Sand would tell Henriette La Bigottière that she was a “born novelist,”49 marrying masculine and feminine traits and never hesitating to make “storytelling” one of her innate qualities. Fortunately, growing up in Nohant meant something besides the limits determined by a grandmother obsessed with fine manners and Deschartres’s somewhat iron-fisted, ragtag schooling. Just outside the château there beckoned the countryside and the seasonal rhythms of the peasants’ work, their rustic language, habits, and ways of life, plus the many children to run around with and “just act like a kid”:50 I knew where to go find Fanchon, Pierrot, Liline, Rosette, or Sylvain, in what field, pasture, or road. We would wreak havoc in the ditches, trees, and streams. We would shepherd our flocks, meaning not shepherding them at all, and while the goats and sheep were grazing on the green wheat to their hearts’ content, we would dance wildly or picnic in the grass on our flat cakes, cheese, and dark bread. We would go right ahead and milk the goats and the ewes, even the cows and the mares when they weren’t too recalcitrant. We would roast birds and potatoes in the embers. Pears and wild apples, blackthorn berries, blackberries, roots, everything was a feast for us. . . . Every season had its pleasures. While the hay was being taken in, what fun it was rolling around way up high on the loaded carts or the little stacks.51

. . . Fall and winter were the most fun. Children in the coun-

try are freer and less busy. Before the wheat headed up in March, there were huge fields where the herds could wander without doing any harm. So the animals looked after themselves while the shepherds gathered around their wind-blown fires, talking, playing, dancing, or telling stories.52

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. . . During the winter my grandmother let me entertain my

social circle in the big dining room that was well heated by an old stove. My social circle was twenty-some children from the township who brought in their saulnées, which are immensely long strings fitted out with all kinds of horsehair slipknots for snaring larks and other small field birds when there’s snow on the ground. . . . We would set the snares out before dawn in all the right places. After sweeping the snow away all along the furrow, we would throw down grain, and two hours later we would find hundreds of larks in the snares. The donkey would bring back huge sacks filled with our harvest.53

Lots of details in Story of My Life about life in the Berry countryside resurface in the rustic novels, starting with La petite fadette, written at the same time as the passages just quoted from Sand’s autobiography. It is easy to understand how much these activities counted in the life of a little girl very often left to her own devices, her indestructible attachment to Berry and the world of peasants being a direct result. Whenever possible, especially when family tensions became too great, Aurore would run out into the fields and drown her sorrows with “the kids that liked me and rescued me from my solitude . . . tearing around over the roads, bushes, and pastures more than ever.”54 Her connection with Hippolyte, “more and more unruly,”55 became gradually more distant. The two adolescents no longer shared the same games, and Aurore’s somewhat forced levity often turned to “sulkiness and then tears.”56 Plus, Hippolyte would soon join the army, following in his father’s footsteps. Mme Dupin’s health required more and more care. She spent most of her time in her room, taking long naps and giving her granddaughter a few minutes every two or three days for a brief harpsichord lesson. Aurore got bored, and this reawakened the pain of separation from Sophie Dupin. There continued profound strife between Maurice’s mother and her daughter-in-law, and Aurore suffered terribly from the enmity of the women whom she, unable to choose either one or the other, called “my two mothers.”57 Years later Sand would

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sum things up in these terms: “Placed in an strange situation between these two loves, . . . I was by turns made victim of these two women’s feelings, and of my own, which they did nothing to spare,”58 and “my mother and my grandmother, both avid for my love, ripped my heart to shreds.”59 The first letters we have of Aurore date from this time. In 1812, at the age of eight, she wrote to her mother on stationery with little designs in the margins: How sad not to be able to say goodbye to you! You see how sad it makes me to leave you. Goodbye, keep me in your thoughts, and be sure I won’t forget you. Your daughter60

Three years later, during the winter of 1815, she wrote to reassure her mother: Oh! yes, dear mother, I kiss you, I’m waiting for you, I want you and I’m dying of impatience to see you here [in Nohant]. My God! how you worry about me! Stop worrying, dear little mother. I’m just fine. I’m taking advantage of the beautiful weather, walking, running, coming and going, having fun. I’m eating well, I’m sleeping even better and think about you even more.

Goodbye, dear mother, so don’t worry one bit. I kiss you with

all my heart. Aurore61

Her desire to go back and live in Paris with her mother and half sister, Caroline, grew stronger every day. Aurore must have been twelve or thirteen when she openly rebelled against her grandmother and the education she was getting. One day she stated loud and clear that she wanted to be sent away from Nohant. Having heard about this from her chambermaid, the grandmother decided to come down hard on such a display of ingratitude. Aurore was confined to her room and given nothing but dry bread. Another

34  George Sand

maid intervened, and the grandmother soon agreed to talk with the girl. Hoping to make her granddaughter finally understand the reasons for her own behavior, Marie-Aurore Dupin decided to pull out all the stops and give Aurore certain details about her mother to which the girl had not been made privy. She went down on her knees begging Aurore to listen to what she had to say, without sparing her a single particular: It would have been possible to reveal this awful story without destroying my respect and love for my mother. . . . It was enough to tell me everything, the reasons for her misfortunes, isolation and poverty starting at the age of fourteen, the corruption of rich men who lie in wait for hunger and innocence, the merciless rigor of opinion allowing no way back and no means of atonement. . . . I was made to understand that while I was being told everything about the past, the present was being spared me, and that there was some new secret in my mother’s life that nobody wanted to tell me, something that would make me tremble for my own future if I insisted on living with her. . . . My mother was a lost woman, and I a blind child who wanted to throw herself into an abyss.62

These revelations had a dreadful effect on Aurore. There were no words for her suffering. She hated her mother, hated herself, and had no desire for anything. One minute she was utterly dejected, and the next giddy with excitement. Her behavior was quite mad. Seeing Aurore’s extravagant ways, her grandmother decided to pack her off to the convent. Much to everyone’s surprise, her mother, despite her prejudices against her mother-in-law’s ideas, thought this an excellent notion. Aurore had no choice but to obey: —So be it, I thought to myself; I don’t know what a convent is, but it’ll be something new; and after all, since I’m having no fun at all in this life of mine, the change will do me good.

. . . I felt an imperative need to have a rest from all these

heartrending conflicts; I was tired of being an apple of discord

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between two people I loved. I would almost have preferred to be forgotten.63

Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor On 12 January 1818 Aurore Dupin and her grandmother crossed the threshold of the convent of English Augustinian Sisters located near the Pantheon. This convent and the main street nearby, the rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor, disappeared when the rue Cardinal-Lemoine was opened up, but the Scottish and Irish convents are still there. Along with Sacré-Cœur and the Abbaye-aux-Bois, this religious institution of English origin was then one of three fashionable convents for the schooling of upper-class young ladies. While the sisters and a good number of the pupils were English, the Mortemart, Chabot, Greffulhe, Montmorency, and La Rochejacquelein families sent their daughters there. Classes were given in French and English by teachers recruited in France and living at the convent, the sisters reserving for themselves the teaching of catechism. Some teaching was done in the convent parlor, the teacher on one side of the grille, and pupil on the other: “Everything was in English there, the past and present, and once you had gone beyond the grille, you felt as though you were on the other side of the English Channel. I was a peasant girl from Berry, and this amazed me, made my head spin for a full week.”64 Built around a huge garden with trees and a vegetable patch, the vast complex was directed at that time by an Englishwoman of the best society, the Reverend Mother Mrs. Canning, who was endowed with “an astute mind.”65 Aurore would spend two years in this cloistered space whose street-side windows were covered with grilles and canvas. There was no contact with the outside world aside from visits in the convent parlor and exceptional outings. More than a hundred women lived in the convent then, “ordained nuns . . . , lay sisters, boarding students, lodgers, secular teachers, and servants.”66 For the young ladies, there was a brutal contrast

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between the comfort of their châteaux or sumptuous Paris apartments and the convent’s conditions. The dormitories were cold as ice, the classrooms were disgustingly filthy, nauseating odors from the chicken coop permeated the classroom for the “little girls.” Miss D***, “an old bogeyman in dirty petticoats,”67 was their teacher, while Mother Alippe was in charge of their religious education. A young novice named Miss Hurst gave Aurore private English lessons every day in her cell. The “little girls,” between the ages of five and twelve, were divided into three categories, the “good girls,” the “dummies,” and the “devils.” The leader of the “devils” was Mary Gillibrand, “an eleven-year-old Irish girl, much bigger and stronger than I was at the age of thirteen. She owed her nickname of boy to her booming voice, frank, impudent face, and independent, untamable character.”68 When they first met, Mary pummeled Aurore with questions: “The little miss is named Du pain? bread? Aurore’s her name? rising sun? . . . what pretty names! and what a pretty face! Like a horse’s head on a hen’s back. Sunrise, I bow before you; I wish to be the sunflower greeting your first rays. . . . The whole class burst out laughing. The dummies especially were laughing hard enough to unhinge their jaws. The good girls were delighted to see two devils going after each other because they were afraid of them.”69 This astonishingly rude introduction nevertheless signaled the beginning of a great friendship. Aurore immediately joined the “devils.” Under the guidance of the dauntless Mary, they made some wild forays in the great architectural hodgepodge of the convent, a “labyrinth of roofs, overhangs, gables, attics, everything covered with mossy tiles and ramshackle chimneys.”70 Aurore remembered scary stories while Mary and her compatriots had come with their heads chock-full of terrifying Scottish and Irish legends. They would share tales about a woman being held captive in some inaccessible place and then go looking for her; they dreamed of garret rooms with hidden treasure and organized nocturnal forays to go find it. Sometimes the sorties came to an abrupt or unfortunate end, with punishments for the ringleaders, Dupin

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and Gillibrand, and a severe scolding for the others, but usually they ended in uncontrollable fits of giggles. The Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris has an English spelling manual, the Mavor Spelling Book, that was Aurore Dupin’s in 1818, the year she entered the convent. It is covered in pen annotations such as “Isabella Clifford is charming,” “Mlle Anne de Wismes est une petite mimie” [“Miss Anne de Wismes is a little darling”], “À bas les Anglais” [“Down with the English”], or “Je suis enchantée de ne plus être dans la petite classe” [“I am delighted not to be in the little girls class any longer”]. On the flip side of the last page the pupil wrote: “This respectable and interesting book belongs to the worthy Dupin, otherwise known as the illustrious marquis of Sainte-Lucy, the five-star general of the convent’s French army, a great warrior, a clever captain and intrepid soldier, crowned with oak and laurel in battle, defender of the oriflamme.”71 This rhetoric of defense and conquest belongs to the world of men. How can one not succumb to it as soon as the imagination starts dreaming of glory, warfare, and military decorations? The daughter of a soldier, Aurore was already cross-dressing and changing her name—as a joke. Lots of other little girls have done the same thing since. During her first months at the English convent, Aurore was bouncing back and forth between the exuberant pranks of a little gang of schoolgirls and utter dejection at the thought of her family. Her grandmother gave her news of Nohant on a regular basis and poured out all kinds of advice (we only have Marie-Aurore Dupin’s letters). She would repeat: “For so long as I live, I’ll celebrate your birthday as long as you console me for losing the man to whom you owe your life; and I hope to receive that consolation in the form of your efforts to develop your talents, your good behavior, and your gratitude toward your good mama to whom you are very dear.”72 These were the terms of the pact of consolation sealed at the time of Maurice’s death, a pact the little girl was never allowed to forget. After a few months in class with the “little girls,” Aurore, even though she was rather unruly, was invited to move up with the “big girls.” Her time as a “devil,” when she often wore a nightcap as a

38  George Sand

sign of punishment,73 was followed by a stretch of great serenity and the discovery of another world, that of devotion and humility, grace and mysticism. Up until then Aurore had known little about religion. Like Deschartres, who claimed to be a materialist in the name of science, her grandmother had always sided with the “philosophers,” considering Catholicism a fusty set of beliefs and practices. Even so, she was careful to respect decorum during the early years of the Restoration when religion was making an ostensible comeback and Jesuit schools were reopening, and she thought she ought to have her granddaughter prepared for communion. After a week of instruction by Nohant’s ignoramus parish priest, Aurore knew her catechism by heart. On the appointed day she took communion under the watchful eye of her grandmother who was setting foot in the church of Nohant for the first time since her son’s wedding: “All this was a puzzle to me; I was waiting for her [the grandmother] to really tell me about what she had made me do and the feeling she had shown. There was nothing of the sort. I was made to take communion again a week later, and then nobody ever said another word to me about religion, as if nothing had ever happened.”74 Aurore was thirteen. Religion, understood this way, was a mere formality, and communion, just a matter of etiquette. While this first encounter with Catholicism left her with no lasting impression, Aurore would create for herself “an inner world to [her] liking, a fantastic and poetic world . . . , religious and philosophical,”75 animated by a character of many shapes and forms that she named Corambé. To this “sort of god of [her] invention”76 Aurore would confide her sorrows and hopes, imagining for hours and hours “scores of novels that would sink back into nothingness without ever being finished,”77 all of them with Corambé as their hero. A condensation of many things that Aurore had found in books, Corambé owed something to Jesus, but also to the beauty of the Angel Gabriel, the grace of Orpheus, the determination of Ulysses, the courage of the “warrior Clorinda”78 (the heroine of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered), as well as to a few attributes of Sand’s mother. A kind of companion, both male and female, Corambé

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figures in all the fables Aurore would tirelessly invent, rethinking and refining them in her moments of loneliness, boredom, and melancholy. Corambé would amount to a mere anecdote if it didn’t occupy such a huge place in Story of My Life. Sand is one of the rare autobiographers to recognize the workings of imagination in early adolescence. In her opinion, Corambé, “and with this creature, the thousands of others that soothed me every day with their pleasant daydreams,”79 gave birth to her talent for writing novels, encouraging her to invent an imaginary universe, to play around with the characters there and invent adventures, to experiment with all the various narrative possibilities. Corambé was not just a central feature in the future writer’s relationship with literary creation. Corambé may also, and perhaps most importantly, have functioned as a defense mechanism thanks to which the little girl, torn between her mother and her grandmother, could express her irrepressible need for love to a perfectly imaginary being. From what she says, Corambé “endlessly consoled and made things right,”80 regulating unbearably strong inner tensions and slowly fostering greater resiliency in Corambé’s creator. When Indiana was published, Corambé and his imaginary universe grew dim and then disappeared: “[These dear visions] cruelly absconded to the bottom of my inkwell,” Sand declared; “this half-hallucinatory phenomenon . . . totally vanished and all at once.”81 Thanks to her writing and publishing, the powerful shadow play of her youth was no longer needed. “George Sand” clearly went on to replace Corambé. At the convent Aurore first engaged in all kinds of eccentricities, then saw how inane they were. She needed something else, “an ardent passion”82 that would give her life meaning, a powerful feeling that would anchor itself to an object. Now it was God that she entreated when she found herself up against emotions too painful to bear and women too difficult to please: “I was fifteen. All my needs were in my heart, and my heart was bored. . . . I had no feeling of personality. . . . I needed to love beyond myself, and I knew of nothing on earth that I could love with all my might.”83

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The religious sentiment that was going to grip the adolescent and inspire her fervent devotion had a visual prompt. At the back of the chancel in the convent chapel there was a painting by Titian representing Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.84 There was another interesting painting of the convent’s patron saint, “Saint Augustine, under the fig tree, with the miraculous ray of light showing the famous words Tolle, legge [‘Take, read’], these mysterious words . . . that made him decide to open the holy Gospel.”85 The story of a voice leading to conversion as well as the tale of Saint Paul hearing God’s famous apostrophe, Cur me persequeris? [“Why are you persecuting me?”], on the road to Damascus are moving images, tales of sudden illumination that radically change one’s destiny. Everything was in place so that Aurore too could be touched by grace. One evening, as she was about to leave the chapel, she suddenly felt overcome by a “feeling of terror and rapture.”86 That was it: “I felt . . . that I loved God, that my mind embraced and totally accepted this ideal of justice, love, and holiness.”87 Aurore was essentially overcome by religious “feeling.” This period had taken back up with a sense of religion more inspired by Rousseau’s Savoyard vicar than by the Catholic clergy that since the Concordat, and even more after the return of the Bourbon kings, had regained all its prerogatives. Even so, once the Catholic Church had again taken charge of girls’ education, the practice of religion started up afresh, which did a lot to instill the girls with the “natural virtues” their parents wished them to have. The century that had prided itself on attacking Catholicism was now far in the past, with Diderot’s forthright materialism and Voltaire’s battles against the power of the clergy and more general denunciation of all religion as imposture. The same could be said of the iconoclastic philosophy of the French Revolution. Most Romantic authors would invoke God and, like Rousseau, see the irrefutable sign of God’s presence in nature, love, and all forms of beauty: “Have no doubt,” the hero of The Confession of a Child of the Century [La confession d’un enfant du siècle] declared to his beloved, “Providence has led me to you. . . . God has sent you as an angel of light to

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rescue me from the abyss. You have been entrusted with this saintly mission.”88 After her conversion Aurore left the “devils” for the coterie of devout girls. She made a complete confession to the convent chaplain, Abbot de Prémord, and took communion the following day. Then began a period of ardent mysticism: “I was literally burning like Saint Theresa; I stopped eating and sleeping, I walked around totally unaware of the movements of my body. . . . In a word, I was in ecstasy, my body had no feeling, it no longer existed. My thoughts took strange, impossible turns. Was I even thinking? No, mystics don’t think. They live in an endless dream, they contemplate, they aspire, they burn, they are consumed, and they wouldn’t know how to describe this mode of existence, which is quite special and can’t be compared to anything else.”89 Aurore became friends with one of the convent’s young nuns, Sister Helen, and soon became convinced that she had to take religious orders. She folded altar linens, rehearsed chorales and motets in the organ loft, spent lots of time in the novices’ room, even going so far as to choose her spot in the little cemetery beside the convent chapel. This extravagant behavior did not escape the attention of her confessor, an enlightened Jesuit. He disapproved of all kinds of religious excesses and told Aurore to live in the present without worrying too much just then about her future vocation. She didn’t need much coaxing. Soon she was composing charades, theater sketches, and little morality plays that were performed by a few students under her direction. On the Mother Superior’s name day she even put on a sugar-coated and much abbreviated version of Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid [Le malade imaginaire]: “Total success, people couldn’t have been more enthusiastic!”90 From then on, she would never stop writing plays. The nuns were delighted to have a new kind of devout girl, “cooperative and fun.”91 The “devils” agreed with the “good girls” that this God-fearing girl was fine company. Mysticism was now far away! Yet Aurore was still thinking about taking religious vows. Her grandmother who often visited Aurore in the convent parlor on her visits to Paris wound up fearing she might actually do it. As

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Aurore’s guardian, she decided to take her out of the convent of English Sisters and back to Nohant: “This news hit me like a bolt of lightning, in the midst of the most perfect happiness I had ever known in my life. The convent had become my paradise on earth. There I was neither a pupil nor a nun, but something in between, with absolute liberty within walls that I cherished, that I was sorry to leave, even for a day. . . . I was friends with everybody, the councilor and leader for all the fun, the little ones’ idol.” She had no choice but to obey. Brokenhearted, Aurore left the convent on 12 April 1820. She was just fifteen. These two years at the convent in rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor were pivotal. No doubt she hadn’t learned much with the English Augustinian Sisters, and she would complain bitterly about this later on, but her life was calmer, merrier, more like that of girls of her age and class than her life at Nohant in the wake of her father’s death. Freed from the torment caused by the bad blood between an authoritarian grandmother and a loving, but terribly impulsive mother, freed as well from Deschartres’s capricious schooling, she had gained autonomy and self-confidence. She had been able to choose—to be a “devil” or a good girl, to become friends with this or that student, to think up some practical joke or plunge into pious reflections. From what she says in Story of My Life, it seems that her temperament was then more or less set for life: on the one hand, resolutely open, sociable, generous to a point of self-abnegation; on the other, intrinsically anxious, always keen to transcend reality in some way or other. Her future conduct would remain deeply marked by these traits. Back in Nohant, life took shape as it could. Aurore’s grandmother was less and less well. Deschartres was still there, but he was often busy outside. A certain Monsieur Lacoux served as Aurore’s English tutor and briefly gave her harp and guitar lessons. Now an army officer, Hippolyte Chatiron returned to Nohant on leave from time to time, as his father had done. Even so, the grandmother did not treat Maurice’s two children equally: Aurore “did not owe” a bastard “respect,”92 she reminded her granddaughter in a letter. “The child from the little house” gave

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the child from the château her first riding lessons: “Hang on to the mane if you wish, but don’t go let go of the bridle and don’t fall off,” he recommended. “That’s the whole thing: you fall off or you don’t.”93 She didn’t fall off and was soon riding with great pleasure. She was delighted to get back to her room at Nohant and the garden, to hear once again “the plowman’s timeless and solemn cantilena.”94 Yet this did not prevent keen anxiety and deep sadness, “a pathological hopelessness”95 that made Aurore shed bitter tears. Why? She herself didn’t understand and left the question unanswered at the time. There remained her friendships from the convent. These generated lots of letters and a few visits. Pauline de Pontcarré and her mother spent several weeks at Nohant during the summer of 1820. On 15 August, Mme Dupin’s name day, the two girls performed one of Carmontelle’s little morality plays in which Aurore, dressed as a boy, took the role of Colin while Pauline played the amorous Colette. Everybody enjoyed it. A few friends from the convent, Jane and Aimée Bazouin, Appolonie de Bruges, and Émilie de Wismes, were among Aurore’s regular correspondents. They exchanged well-turned urbanities: “Who is this writing to me? What is this stamp? whose handwriting? in short, this person whom I don’t know? . . . Come now, my dear, you know it’s your friend from the convent, and knowing that you’re back home with your family, as you were wishing for so long, I wanted to offer my regards and congratulations.”96 They talked about the people they had met at the convent, and sprinkled bits of English over their French: “Yes, my fine Wismes, I was delighted at hearing this happy news [her return home] and I once again congratulate you on the pleasure of having Miss Gabb [a lay teacher from the convent] as governess. I saw Louisa there some time ago.”97 They recounted the day’s little events to each other and ended with the usual endearments: “I kiss you and your sister a thousand times. Another day I’ll write you both a really long letter and, of course, the loveliest ever. Write to me. I love you dearly, my fine Émilie, and hug you once again.”98

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All this no doubt testifies to the pervasive influence of epistolary etiquette among upper-class young ladies, and all its conventions. Yet Aurore’s letters to her friends soon began to show a remarkable talent for observation, a touch of originality when reporting comic scenes occasionally put in dialogue form, plus a desire to reflect about life and to make general statements about behavior. They are indisputably different from the “so lovely”99 letters she received. Aurore was appropriating a form of writing that she would soon use with ease. She was breaking in a tone, a style, a personal way of expressing reality in the written word. One rarely becomes a writer for having composed, even very well, scores of witty and original letters to friends and acquaintances. Still, before Sand tried her hand at novels, a great letter-writer was being born, and she would prove particularly voluble, faithful in friendship, generous with details about her life and feelings, not to mention her religious and political convictions. In manuscript form (or lost but attested) there are now some 19,600 letters written by George Sand.100 The first was addressed to Sophie Dupin in 1812 when she was eight; the last was addressed to her nephew, Oscar Cazamajou, on 30 May 1876, a few days before she died.

Doldrums and Dreams In early 1821 Aurore’s grandmother, feeling that her strength was waning and her health failing, wanted to find a husband for her granddaughter, now going on seventeen. She consulted with old friends and quickly scanned the various possibilities. Her cousin, René de Villeneuve who owned the château of Chenonceaux, suggested one of Napoleon’s generals: “This fifty-year-old looks nearly as young as I do [Villeneuve was thirty-four]. He is intelligent, well educated, in short, everything necessary for a happy marriage; for there are lots of young men out there, but one can never be sure of their character, and their future is most uncertain; whereas this one has everything, status, money, and respect.”101 One by one, the candidates were all rejected, some by the grandmother, others by

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Aurore, who felt terribly anxious about getting married. At the end of February Marie-Aurore Dupin had a stroke. Paralyzed on one side of her body, she was confined to bed while her granddaughter read to her at length. For the time being, any marriage plans were abandoned. Managed one way or another by a disabled old lady and a very ignorant girl, Nohant fell all of a sudden into a strange state of torpor. Indeed, when Deschartres was reunited with his former pupil, he did not mince words. It only took a few conversations with Aurore for him to judge her “crassly ignorant.”102 Miffed, she decided to try to teach herself something and got into the habit of working by herself at night, “from ten until two or three in the morning.”103 At the convent she had loved reading novels, but now it was especially serious works that got her attention. The Imitation of Christ [L’imitation de Jésus-Christ, generally attributed to Thomas à Kempis] became her bedside reading, and she discovered Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity [Le génie du christianisme], which she soon came to love “passionately,”104 nor did she stop there. Taking great interest in matters of religion and theology, she decided to “read everything . . . , all the philosophers, all the nonbelievers, all the heretics, full of the sweet certainty that their errors would confirm and guarantee my own faith.”105 The few letters she exchanged with Abbot Prémord, who had once saved her from religious exaltation, show how keenly interested she was in all things religious and political. It would be impossible to understand some of her great future novels, such as Consuelo or Mademoiselle La Quintinie, without gauging Sand’s youthful interest in religion and the history of Christianity, including its errors and faulty judgments. Sand would wind up choosing the Protestant faith for herself and her family, and already late in adolescence, she was tirelessly asking herself about the nature of religious feeling, the conditions for the collective practice of religion, its articles of faith, and the role of the clergy. Soon her curiosity was aroused by the whole of Marie-Aurore Dupin’s vast library. With her irrepressible desire for knowledge,

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she read everything she could get her hands on, theologians and philosophers, thinkers and the great writers of classic texts from France and elsewhere, in other words, the compendium of knowledge and taste in the second half of the eighteenth century. Aurore was using these books to try to understand what to do with the rest of her life, whether she should get married or preferred to take religious orders: “Onward! onward! . . . I unceremoniously tackled Mably, Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bacon, Bossuet, Aristotle, Leibniz, Pascal, Montaigne. . . . Then came the poets and the moralists: La Bruyère, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare, what have you. Everything without rhyme or reason, as I came upon them. . . . To my eyes this was all a question of life or death, namely, after understanding everything I could propose to understand, whether I would go into life in society or into death in the cloister.”106 In the midst of all this reading followed by vigorous discussions with Deschartres, who was still hostile to religion, Aurore discovered Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She was dazzled: “Jean-Jacques’s language and the form of his reasoning grabbed me like a superb piece of music lit up by a giant sun. He was like Mozart to me; I could understand everything.”107 Sand’s points of view on politics, religion, and education would bear the lasting mark of Julie, or the New Eloise [La nouvelle Héloïse], of theories developed in The Social Contract [Le contrat social] or Émile. She would restate her immense admiration for Rousseau, plus a bit of criticism, in her preface to a new edition of his Confessions in 1841.108 Aurore Dupin did not content herself with spending the night reading and acquiring “principles”109 that would become the basis of all her future thinking. On her mare Colette she rode around the countryside in men’s clothing and sometimes made a game of passing herself off as a “monsieur,” as she wrote in a letter to Émilie de Wismes.110 Clearly, cross-dressing, the tone and manners that went along with it, held a powerful charm for her. “How simple it seemed to me,” she would recall, “not to live like most girls.”111 What a scandal in and around La Châtre! The “horseman’s” clothes, her hunting, her love of learning, her chumminess

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with young men her age, made tongues wag, and Deschartres told her to be more careful. “There she is, our young lady, galloping about on her huge horse; she’s got to be crazy to do things like that,”112 people would exclaim in the Berry countryside. To her mother, who worried at least as much about her “running around”113 as her desire for learning, she wrote: “I am extremely surprised that you, my mother, take a dim view of my educating myself. No doubt you think a woman has more useful things to do, things more akin to housework, which is a woman’s duty. Why must a woman be ignorant? Can’t she be educated without bragging about it or acting like a bluestocking?”114 This is the first time such a question crops up in her letters. It shows the mentality of the time—which still made fun of educated women, with people accusing them of preferring pedantry to the duties of their sex—as well as the strength of character required to break free of it and decide to learn something even so. Yet one sore point would trouble her for quite a while yet: “My melancholy became . . . dejection, and my dejection, pain. That’s just one step away from disgust with life and desire for death. My home life was so dreary, so agonizing, my body so irritated by a constant battle against depression, my brain so weary of solemn thoughts too advanced for my youth and books too engrossing for my age, that I found myself facing a very serious spiritual affliction: the temptation of suicide.”115 Aurore went on in greater detail: “Water especially held a mysterious charm for me. I wouldn’t walk anywhere but along the river, . . . following it like an automaton to some deep spot. Then, stopped on the bank and seemingly magnetized in place, I would feel a burst of fever in my head and tell myself: ‘How easy it would be! One more step, and that’s it! . . .’ I would start asking myself: Yes or no? often enough and long enough to run the risk of the ‘yes’ hurling me down into that limpid, magnetizing water.”116 One day she thought she heard the “fatal yes,”117 and into the deep water she went with her mare. She was saved by her mare Colette’s survival instinct and Deschartres’s fast work. He read her the riot act while huge tears rolled down her face. She swore not to do it again. They started talking again,

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now about free will and the strange fits of mind that can sometimes jeopardize reason. On 26 December 1821 Mme Dupin de Francueil died at Nohant, bequeathing her entire estate to her granddaughter: the house at Nohant, the three farms and more than two hundred hectares of farmland, a townhouse in Paris (the so-called hôtel de Narbonne), and a few apartments. René de Villeneuve had been named Aurore’s guardian and the manager of her property up until the time she was married. Sophie Dupin arrived in Nohant a few days later. She wrongly suspected Deschartres of embezzlement, making loud and clear how pleased she was to see her mother-inlaw six feet under. Soon she took her daughter back to Paris where she moved into the apartment in rue Neuve-des-Mathurins. It soon became clear that it would not be easy for them to live together. Sophie Dupin had no patience for the things her daughter, until quite recently a student at one of the best convents in Paris, was interested in and wanted to talk about, nor did she appreciate Aurore’s feelings for her grandmother. This brief time with her mother let Aurore take full measure of everything that would henceforth separate her from the woman whose presence and love she had once so fervently desired. While visiting friends of her grandmother at the château of Plessis-Picard, near Melun in April 1822, Aurore met a “slim, rather elegant young man with a jolly face and military bearing.”118 Twenty-seven years old, Casimir Dudevant was the son of a maid and a retired colonel, a baron of the Empire. His father recognized him at birth, and Colonel Dudevant’s wife raised the baby as her own, in a sort of rosy version of Hippolyte Chatiron’s story. When he met Aurore, Casimir was a second lieutenant and had just finished his law degree. He lived with his parents in the department of Lot-et-Garonne in the château of Guillery, “a little house with five windows . . . , furnished like all the houses in southern France, very modestly.”119 Aurore saw him several more times, in Paris and at the house of the Roëttiers du Plessis family where she spent the summer. Casimir Dudevant did not keep his plans hidden long. Like the

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pragmatic man that he was, he said they might be happy together. Aurore thought he was “nice.”120 On 18 June they had already decided to get married, and the two families had officially agreed, but not easily, on the financial arrangements for the future couple. The wedding of Aurore Dupin and Casimir Dudevant was celebrated on 17 September in Paris, first at the mayor’s office of the first arrondissement, then at the church of Saint-Louis-d’Antin. On 18 October Casimir officially resigned from his position as second lieutenant to live off his private income, as stipulated by the marriage contract. The couple arrived at Nohant at the end of the month. The following winter Aurore became pregnant. While Monsieur was out hunting, Madame tried her hand at knitting and needlepoint, which didn’t stop her from writing to her old friends from the convent and expounding on marriage, its obligations and surprises. “The beards have all the power,”121 Aurore wrote with a touch of irony, even so talking about dedication and self-abnegation to these yet unmarried friends. A son who would be named Maurice like his grandfather and great-grandfather was born in Paris on 30 June 1823. “It was the most beautiful moment of my life,”122 his mother recalled more than thirty years later. As she wrote to her friends, “My son is big and fat, he has two teeth that gave him some trouble, but that’s behind him now, and there’s no redder rose.”123 The letter writer still had her eye and taste for generalizing. “My dear Casimir is the busiest of men,” she wrote to Émilie de Wismes, who had just gotten married as well; “he does nothing but come in, go out, sing, and play with his son; I can scarcely find an hour or two to read come evening.” She added: “I read somewhere or other that two people couldn’t love each other perfectly without having the same principles and souls, but different tastes and habits.”124 Different, indeed. Casimir kept on hunting while Aurore reread Montaigne’s Essays, “her heart wounded by his contempt”125 for women. “In the spring of 1824,” Sand recounted in Story of My Life, “I got terribly depressed for reasons that escaped me.”126 Was she upset to see changes at Nohant? Casimir had straightened the garden paths

50  George Sand

and put down a mangy peacock as well as the old dogs. In a house where everything reminded her of her grandmother, was Aurore’s grief still too fresh? Was she depressed for other reasons, old and new, things that could be confessed or not, all grouped together under the name of depression for lack of a better word? In any case, the same words come back again and again for the same problems: despair without cause, dejection, disgust with life, “sadness without any purpose or name, perhaps pathological.”127 Back then not much was known about depression, what causes it, how it evolves, and how to treat it. One would have to wait for the first stirrings of psychoanalysis at the end of the century to get beyond the preconceived ideas about what had been long called “melancholy,” which the Romantics put at the very heart of literature. In The Confession of a Child of the Century Musset argued that politics was the root of this problem for his generation: because Napoleon was no more and the Bourbons were back, youth had lost all hope of glory and panache, all reason to believe in the future. For Sand, the angst that she called by turns sadness, spleen, dejection, was very deep: “I let myself be ravaged by weariness and woe,” she would remember in 1832. “I did not love life.”128 Elsewhere she clarified: “So I spent years surrounded by such indifference that I came to understand how little our individual person counts for anything, how little room one creature more or less occupies in this world, and how petty and foolish it is to be frightened of death when nobody cares about your life.”129 It would take Sand a long time to recover from this depression characterized by a profound lack of interest in oneself. Her first novels show traces of this syndrome, which was not just a sign of the times or the kind of despair shared by a disillusioned generation. In Indiana, the Creole Noun kills herself in the garden pond, while Indiana and her friend Ralph plan to hurl themselves into the sea from a high cliff. Likewise, one of the twins in La petite fadette imagines immersing himself in a spot in the river and waiting for the water to rise. Several other heroes in Sand’s novels contemplate suicide at some critical point. The futile struggles of individuals mired in hopeless dejection is at the heart of Lélia and Jacques.

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Meanwhile, beyond the pat formulas about the joys of motherhood, the stock endearments spoken to Casimir, “the kind angel”130 who was terribly missed when away, the young woman went on searching through books for answers to the questions that kept gnawing at her. What is the point of living? How can one find happiness and true love? What is the purpose of marriage? What happiness is it supposed to bring? Depression settled in, or more precisely it returned. Nothing helped, not the baby Maurice, not the hunter Casimir. Deschartres, bankrupt, died in circumstances that were never elucidated. As for Hippolyte, he had married a rather rich young woman so that he could live off her assets not far from Nohant, at the château of Montgivray. Unfortunately, he had learned to treat his depression or at least to hold it more or less in check by drinking too much. After Maurice Dupin died at the age of thirty-one after falling off a horse, what a destiny was in store for his two children! While literature would save Aurore, a “wild rage for wine and spirits”131 would kill the boy from the little house. He died in December 1848. One more “systematic suicide,”132 Sand would clarify. In June 1825, two old friends from the convent, the Bazouin sisters, would spend a few days at Nohant, and a trip to the Pyrenees was organized to keep everybody entertained. They set out on 5 July, and Aurore, amused by the novelty of it all, decided to keep a diary of the trip. She not only wrote about the landscape and the little things that happened along the way. Out of these pages wells up a great despondency, in addition to some general observations like these: Marriage is beautiful for lovers and useful for saints. . . .

Marriage is love’s supreme goal. When there is not or no

longer love, there remains sacrifice. This is fine for those who understand sacrifice. That supposes extraordinary heart and intelligence.133

Casimir kept on hunting. Once in the Pyrenees, “he would get up at two in the morning and return at dark.”134 He killed a few eagles

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and pursued izards, the lovely and elusive denizens of mountain peaks. Zoé Leroy, whom they met in the Pyrenees, introduced them to a young lawyer from Bordeaux who was also vacationing in the mountains, Aurélien de Sèze. They got to know each other, soon became friends, and the trip to the Pyrenees took on a much cheerier note: “I am so enthusiastic about the Pyrenees,” Aurore wrote to her mother, “that my whole life long I’m only going to dream and talk about mountains, rushing streams, caves, and cliffs.” 135 Cauterets, Bagnères, the Cirque de Gavarnie, the famous waterfall, the hours of hiking to get there, the visit to Lourdes, an unpretentious little town reached on horseback, the Grotte du Loup, or the Espélugues, a particularly striking natural site—its treasures still haven’t been revealed by any excavations—thrilled the traveler and her new friends. Afterward, Zoé Leroy, her husband, and Aurélien de Sèze went back to Bordeaux, and the Dudevants returned to Nohant after a brief stay in Guilléry. Aurore and Aurélien promised to write to each other and to meet up again. But what had they said exactly, and what had gone on between them? They had shared some secrets, perhaps promises, and a few caresses that Aurore seemed to have wanted to keep within bounds. As soon as she arrived at Guilléry, she began writing Aurélien a kind of deferred letter in the form of a diary; it would never be sent to him. She did not hide how attracted she felt to the young man, the “guardian angel”136 whom she told of her suffering. One long passage in particular, dated 24 October 1825, contains a detailed narrative of her childhood, a sort of embryonic version of Story of My Life. Aurore and Aurélien saw each other again in Bordeaux at the end of October. The lively affection they had felt for each other in the Pyrenees had not dissipated, far from it. Along with renewed declarations, their subsequent letters also demonstrated their desire to keep these spontaneous feelings within the bounds of chastity. Aside from this, Aurore poured out her heart in admirably tender letters that read like models of the genre, with the rhetoric of love finding a thousand felicitous ways to win someone’s heart,

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repeating things over and over, dramatizing love and the madness it can lead to. Sometimes Aurore would invoke eternal regrets and death, writing: “My life, my treasure. Adieu”;137 but she would start back up again the next day. “Ah, Casimir! It’s up to you to make me happy again,”138 she nonetheless wrote to her husband back in Nohant. She would repeat these words in an eighteen-page letter dated 15 November where she acknowledged her feelings for the lawyer from Bordeaux, saying she was ready to give him up. The letter ended with a list of eight articles meant to restore peace to the household: Article 1—We won’t go to Bordeaux this winter. . . . Article 2—If we spend the winter at Nohant, we’ll read lots of useful books. . . . We’ll talk together afterward. You’ll tell me your thoughts, and I’ll tell you mine, we’ll share all our thoughts, our pleasures. . . . Article 6—You’ll never be irritated or angry, I’ll never be sad. Article 7—In short, we’ll be happy, peaceable, we’ll banish remorse and bitter thoughts. . . . Later on, Maurice’s education will keep us totally busy.139

Alas! For a long while Casimir had preferred hunting to reading, he had stopped worrying about his wife’s state of mind and found simpler ways of consoling himself with some accommodating maidservant. Traveling a good deal, he would arrange to be at Nohant when Aurore was away, to be in Paris when she was in Nohant. “Monsieur hunts with passion,” she noted in her diary during the trip to the Pyrenees. “His wife complains about it. He seems not to anticipate a time when she’ll be delighted by it.”140 Aurore would soon confess to Zoé Leroy that she was interested in a learned young man who lived nearby, Stéphane Ajasson de Grandsagne. Having come to Nohant in 1820 to give Aurore lessons in natural history while her grandmother was ill, he was no stranger to her. A regular visitor to the Muséum d’histoire naturelle and a student of Cuvier, he was a twenty-four-year-old bachelor when he returned to La Châtre and met Aurore again,

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then twenty-two. There is no epistolary trace of this affair, which probably went on for over a year.141 The letters Aurore wrote to him as well as those he addressed to her were destroyed. In December 1827, on the pretext of health problems and medical appointments, Aurore went to stay in Paris with Stéphane. In January she was pregnant and continued to pour her heart out in long letters to Zoé Leroy and Aurélien de Sèze. On a regular basis she gave her mother news of Maurice, detailing everything going on at Nohant. She did the same for Casimir, who was always away on a trip. On 13 September 1828—in other words, nine months after her stay in Paris—Aurore gave birth to a little girl who would be called Solange, the name of Berry’s patron saint. “I had really wanted to have a little girl,” she noted in Story of My Life, “and yet I didn’t feel the joy I had with Maurice.”142 Stéphane Ajasson de Grandsagne was totally discreet. Did this birth seal the end of his relationship with Aurore Dudevant, or had it already been over for a good while? Years later, Sand would express her disgust for the women who, having no choice, sleep with their husbands when they are already carrying another man’s child.143 Solange’s illegitimacy would in any case remain a closely guarded secret. Nothing would be revealed by the young man, who would soon marry, and father four daughters. Even so, when Solange married in 1847, there were rumors about the bride’s real father that Sand immediately quashed.144 During the fall Mme Dudevant continued updating her husband about Nohant, Maurice, and her baby girl, “fat as a little chicken, and pretty as a little picture.”145 They saved face, but husband and wife had separate rooms from that point on. The few letters that Sand wrote to Zoé Leroy at this time show lots of holes cut with scissors. Nothing more can be known. Months passed, Solange was growing, Aurore was still searching for relief from her depression, for a way out of a marriage that she found more and more unbearable. She tried writing a few travel memories, including the trip to Auvergne in 1827. She entertained herself by renting an apartment in La Châtre and giving a few

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parties there. They would all sing merrily, compose poetry for special occasions, and make fun of the bourgeois; in short, have a bit of fun! The little town started gossiping again about this married woman, the mother of two children, singularly averse, or so it seemed, to showing respect for anything, starting with her “social standing.” Wagging tongues and mudslinging made Aurore furious. She warned some folks about the “terribly stupid and impertinent” things that had been “charitably and gratuitously attributed”146 to her; to others, her friends, she sent funny letters parodying the style of satirical newspapers, and signing them as “Aurore D. noble, liberal, scoundrel, democrat, heretic, schismatic, Quakeress, pamphleteer, Jacobin, Emigrée, supporter of despotism and republican government, holier-than-thou, atheist, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.”147 To her friend Jane Bazouin, now the Countess de Fenoyl, Aurore had something more important to communicate. She had promised to send her something she had written. This first manuscript of a novel, The Godmother [La marraine], kept her busy all fall long, with Aurore giving Jane a blow-by-blow account of how hard the writing was. When Casimir went to Paris in November, he brought the manuscript to his wife’s friend. Jane’s reaction to it is not known. On first sight, the year 1830 looks a lot like the year before. More displacements here and there that seem like escapes from reality, another trip to Bordeaux to visit Zoé Leroy—in fact, to see Aurélien de Sèze—a short stay in Paris with Maurice in May. To one of her friends, Mme Gondouin Saint-Agnan, Aurore sent the following self-portrait: “My physiognomy is cold, I’m awkward when I curtsey, and my manners are neither easy nor graceful. I am not shy, but I don’t like people to get inside me and pass judgment. . . . That’s why when I’m introduced somewhere, my sole desire is not to attract anyone’s attention. . . . I drag myself around like an old nag, bent over and seeming not to care, I look even more somnolent and sickly if I dress young.”148 Indeed. At the end of July, at the house of her childhood friends the Duvernets, Aurore Dudevant met a handsome young man of

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nineteen and took an immediate liking to him. Jules Sandeau was studying law, but he really wanted to become a writer. The timing was right, and she too was dreaming of another life. That would mean leaving Berry and going to live in Paris, and the two lovers soon decided to do just that at the enthusiastic start of their affair. The July Revolution forced Charles X to abdicate in favor of his cousin Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, the son of Philippe-Égalité and a pupil of Félicité de Genlis, to whom he owed his uncommon education. The liberals were victorious, the old fogies, straitlaced aristocrats, dyed-in-the-wool legitimists, and Catholics had lost the game. Aside from a few conservatives, the literary milieu greeted the news with enthusiasm. For a moment a fresh wind of youth and liberty seemed to sweep over Paris and all of France. There was an apparently fortuitous coincidence between the destiny of a young provincial woman in an unhappy marriage and the destiny of the nation. Soon Aurore was going to become seriously involved in the nation and politics, but first she would have to undergo a metamorphosis. The young woman with a complicated past, plus a rather complicated present, would have to become someone else, a real novelist.

II

1832–1851 Becoming Sand It was quite an event when Indiana was published by Jean-Pierre Roret in May 1832. The book had instant success and was reprinted twice before the year’s end. There were all kinds of questions about its author, “George Sand.” Who was hiding behind this pseudonym? Most of the newspapers praised the novel, opining “that the hand of a woman had to have slipped in here and there to show the author certain subtleties of heart and mind, but . . . the style and observations were too virile not to be a man’s work.”1 It was still thought that women could not have genius or even real talent. This was clearly impossible because of women’s “nature,” a particular set of physiological and psychological traits that made all women quite the same—just take one, and she’ll be an explanation for all the others. Having deliberately chosen a man’s first name for her entrance in literature, the brand-new “George Sand” probably thought the same thing. In her little apartment on quai Saint-Michel Aurore Dudevant received visitors and was greatly amused to see the misunderstandings caused by her disguise as a man of letters: —Monsieur George Sand?—You’re in the right place.—Can one speak to him?—He’s at your service.—Where is he?—Right in front of you.—What, Madame, you’re M. G. Sand?—By your leave.2

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Before the veil over the author’s identity was lifted, more than one reader connected Indiana with the novels of a thirty-four-year-old man who was scoring more and more success, Honoré de Balzac. The year before, Balzac’s The Wild Ass’s Skin [La peau de chagrin] had made a great splash. Delatouche, who had helped Sand take her first steps as a writer, thought so too, and he initially scolded her for doing nothing more than a pastiche. Then he ate his own words and wrote to her: “Your book is a masterpiece. . . . You can believe what your old and grumpy comrade says, Indiana has buried Balzac and Mérimée!”3 In Le National of 5 October 1832 Augustin Sainte-Beuve shared Delatouche’s enthusiasm and hailed “a natural way with words, scenes with a familiar frame, violent passions . . . sincerely felt or observed.” He concluded by saying, “So we let ourselves love the book, devouring its pages . . . and recommending it to others for its irresistible emotion.”4 The young literary chronicler would soon meet George Sand, and for a long time he would be one of her most faithful confidants and defenders. Aurore Dudevant knew everything about the man whom Delatouche had preferred to her. Having met Honoré de Balzac a few months earlier, she was struck by “his new and original style” and right away considered him “a master who deserved to be studied.”5 She had dinner with him in his apartment in rue Cassini, near the Observatory, and ate ice cream “between his silk-hung, lace-trimmed walls,” astonished by his unbridled taste for luxury and extravagant spending. “A whimsical artist, . . . a child with golden dreams, [Balzac] thought he lived in a fairy palace,”6 she would recall. Her friendship for the author of The Human Comedy [La comédie humaine] was immediate and just as strong as her unfailing admiration for his talent. Balzac spelled out the profound difference between them when he said: “You go looking for people as they ought to be; I take them as they are. Believe me, we’re both right. . . . I too love exceptional beings, and I’m one myself. Plus, I need them as foils for my vulgar creatures. . . . But these I find more interesting than you do. I magnify them, idealize them, the other way around, in their ugliness

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or stupidity.”7 This difference would be often repeated by the critics: Balzac writes realist novels, and Sand idealist ones; Balzac is “the river of truth,” while Sand represents “the river of dreams,” as Émile Zola later put it.8 Things are obviously more complicated than that. Balzac is far from being just the realist author that Zola wanted to call the ancestor of naturalism. The novels that Sand would publish at a brisk pace for over forty years vouch for her eagerness to describe the real but at the same time to go beyond it, particularly by creating a few ideal figures and situations, and essentially for purposes of demonstration. Once Sand had become famous, what happened to Jules Sandeau? In October Sand moved with her daughter, Solange, to 19 quai Malaquais while Maurice, entrusted to the care of his tutor, Jules Boucoiran, stayed in Nohant with his father. A few months later, in March 1833, she broke up with Sandeau for good. At first he thought about killing himself. Then, before going to Italy to cheer himself up, he was invited to stay with Balzac, who took pity on him. Balzac admitted wanting to know more about Sandeau’s affair with “George.” She reminded him a bit of Ève Hanska, even though he steadfastly condemned Sand’s behavior.9 Jules Sandeau would certainly not become as famous as the woman who kept a syllable of his name. Sandeau was scarcely ever “Sand,” nor would he ever be. His many novels and light comedies are now forgotten. Even so, during the Second Empire, the author of Marianna (a fictionalized adaptation of his affair with Sand) and Mademoiselle de la Seiglière was held in high regard by Napoléon III’s court. After curating the Bibliothèque Mazarine, he was appointed librarian of the Palace of Saint-Cloud. In 1858 he was elected to the French Academy. Sand became even more famous with the publication of her second novel, Valentine, in December 1832. The novel contains fine descriptions of Berry, very subtle analyses of the life of minor provincial aristocrats, and pessimistic views of love and marriage. In December, La marquise, a short story in the Revue de Paris, was applauded by Sainte-Beuve, who compared the author to another young and talented writer, Prosper Mérimée. François Buloz, the

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director of the most prestigious literary review of the time, the Revue des Deux Mondes, invited Sand to join a small group of writers who published with him on a regular basis. That was it. In just a few months Aurore Dudevant had become an important novelist. People eagerly awaited her new publications; they were in demand, sought out and generously remunerated. She wrote to Jules Boucoiran: “All day long . . . I’m besieged by visitors. This tribulation is part of my trade, and I have to put up with it a bit. But in the evening I lock myself away with my pens and ink, Solange, my piano, and my fire. . . . I get proposals from every quarter. I’ll sell my next novel for 4,000 f[rancs]. . . . I’ve taken up with the Revue des Deux Mondes for a stipend of 4,000 f. and thirty-two pages every six weeks.”10 The fact that the novelist was a pretty woman with a fast reputation made people very curious. The press quickly seized on her image, noting even her slightest appearance in public, detailing exactly what she was wearing. The portraits of Sand dressed as a man multiplied; she became the epitome of the independent woman, the flag around which all the women priding themselves on knowledge and literature rallied, according to men. The accompanying legends in the satirical paper Le Charivari, the series of caricatures by Honoré Daumier, The Bluestockings [Les bas-bleus] and Married Life [Mœurs conjugales], bear highly comical witness to this. On 15 October 1838 Aujourd’hui, Journal des Ridicules published a color lithograph entitled “Masculine-feminine-literary Congress” [“Congrès masculin-foemino-littéraire”]: there are five women writers of the time, Virginie Ancelot, Eugénie Foa, Sophie Gay, and Delphine de Girardin (depicted as “Viscount de Launay,” the pen name she used in La Presse) gathered around Sand who is standing up, wearing a frock coat, and smoking a cigar. The year 1833 was particularly tumultuous for her writing and relationships. “George Sand,” with her extraordinary energy, had some fine romantic flings and published an ambitious novel, plus several short stories. It looked as though she had to make up for her years of waiting, suffering, and self-questioning at breakneck speed, no matter the cost. She would recall in Story of My Life: “To

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be an artist! yes, I had wanted to be an artist, not only to get out of the material jail where property, big or small, keeps us locked in a circle of odious little preoccupations; but also to get away from being controlled by opinion insofar as it is narrow, stupid, egotistical, cowardly, and provincial; to live outside of society’s preconceived ideas insofar as they are false, outmoded, arrogant, cruel, impious, and stupid; but still and above all else, to reconcile me with myself, since I couldn’t stand being idle and useless.”11 Now one of the big names among Paris’s writers and artists, Sand first met a famous actress, Marie Dorval, who took the great female leads in Romantic plays by Hugo, Dumas, and Vigny, with whom Dorval was then having an affair. Sand was moved by her generous spirit and great beauty. For a few months the two women were inseparable, to the great consternation of Vigny, who railed against “that Sappho”12 and drew the following portrait of Sand in his Journal: “She looks like the famous Judith of the Museum [Cristofano Allori’s in the Louvre]. Her dark, curly hair falls to her shoulders like one of Raphael’s angels. Her eyes are huge and dark, shaped like those of the mystics and the most magnificent Italian heads. Her severe, unmoving face, the lower part of her face rather unpleasant, the mouth misshapen. A graceless demeanor, tough-talking, mannish in her bearing, speech, tone of her voice, and the boldness of her expressions.”13 George’s letters to Marie made no secret about how she felt. She sighed, she burned, she itched with impatience and waited for the show to end so that she could see the actress at home. As she wrote to her, “I haven’t found a single character like yours, frank, true, strong, supple, good, generous, sweet, great, funny, excellent, and complete. . . . I want to love you forever, crying or laughing with you.”14 This affair soon turned into a deep, enduring friendship, probably after Sand met Musset. Besides the pages she devoted to Marie Dorval in various spots,15 Sand would often worry about her friend’s finances and those of her family, actors as well, to whom she several times gave a helping hand. The author of Indiana kept on searching for a passionate relationship with an artist, male or female, and this dream would

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stay with her for a long time. A dream of physical and intellectual communion that made her say, “True love is when the heart, the mind, and the body understand and embrace each other. This happens once every thousand years.”16 Through Sainte-Beuve she was introduced to Prosper Mérimée. Smitten, he decided to spend the night with her, and it was a disaster. In a letter to Sainte-Beuve that made the rounds of Paris, Sand called this fiasco “the most incredibly stupid thing I’ve done in my whole life.”17 At the end of June 1833 she met Alfred de Musset at a dinner that brought together a few young writers of the moment, Sand being the only woman among them. Six years her junior, the viscount had published in 1829 his Tales of Spain and Italy [Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie], which guaranteed him his reputation as an inspired dandy. He had just published Les caprices de Marianne. Musset spent a lot of time in cafés and trendy restaurants, theater wings and brothels. His friends extolled his sexual prowess and, pretending to be shocked, spread tales about all sorts of his excesses. Unstable, occasionally violent, the talented poet sometimes fell victim to crises of delirium aggravated by alcohol.18 Yet he soon fell madly in love with the pretty little novelist who answered to the name of George. In a letter of 25 July he declared to her: “My dear George, I’ve got something stupid and ridiculous to say. I am foolishly writing to you instead of having told you this. . . . I’m in love with you. I’ve been in love with you since my first visit to you. . . . Now, George, you’re going to say: yet another one who means to be a nuisance! . . . But I know you’ve got a good heart, that you’ve loved before, and I’m turning myself over to you, not as to a mistress, but to a forthright and loyal comrade.”19 Right from the start Musset perceived Sand as a double being: a woman, for sure, and one you can dream of holding in your arms, and at the same time a true literary comrade. And she loved her poet the same way: “with altogether manly strength, plus all the tenderness of a woman’s love.”20 From the time that she began writing for the Figaro Sand had considered writing and publishing as activities to be lived and shared among comrades, implicitly reaffirming the idea that creation, talent, and intellectual activity are a

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man’s privilege. Once considered a reincarnation of Maurice Dupin, running around the fields like an urchin with peasant children of the same age, wearing a smock and trousers to go horseback riding, she had transgressed the boundaries, invisible but nonetheless potent, between the masculine and the feminine. Before becoming George Sand and gradually identifying with the public figure created for her books, before recognizing herself intellectually as a (male) author—not a single one of the prefaces of her many novels bears the grammatical trace of her sex—she lived and experienced strange confusion about roles and modes of behavior. After having been the lover of Marie Dorval, a “compendium of feminine anxiety to its highest power,”21 Sand became the mistress of Musset, who gladly acted like a child when he didn’t have to be a literary comrade. This bisexuality would find its full realization in the “writing trade”22 without contradicting Sand’s stated preference for men, as lovers and friends.23 The tension between the two sexes is present everywhere in her novels, starting with Lélia, which came out in July. The novel is of course signed “George Sand,” but it’s about a woman and her inability to answer the existential questions gnawing away at her. These are old anxieties that go far back in time. The readers were expecting a novel like the last two, another story about an unhappily married woman with a few well-honed arguments regarding the condition of women. Nothing of the sort. The third novel is more ambitious, more unsettling. Lélia relentlessly questions the men around her about life’s meaning and justification. Religions and philosophical systems are reviewed and discussed, as in the time of her conversations with Deschartres. None provides a satisfactory answer to the young woman’s deep angst and her desire to end it all. Love could save her, but Sténio, the young poet who has fallen in love with her, is hardly convincing. Lélia, moreover, is incapable of carnal love and avidly listens to the tales of her friend Pulchérie, a prostitute, hoping to understand what a liberated body, desire, and sexual satisfaction can mean. She winds up dying at the hands of a monk who had been lusting after her, a “gothic” ending as in so many other novels of the period. Eugène Delacroix would

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draw a pastel of this scène. In Lélia Sand recognized herself “absolutely and totally.”24 The work was an admirable synopsis, she said, of her own “inner turmoil.”25 Most of the readers were disconcerted. Shocked by the very frank nature of this new kind of novel, the critics turned uncommonly virulent. There was even talk of a duel between Capo de Feuillide, who had insulted the author of Lélia in an article in L’Europe Littéraire of 9 August, and Gustave Planche, one of Sand’s journalist friends. Musset thought it was all funny and wrote a song on the subject.26 Then he declared to her: “In Lélia there are scores of pages that go straight to the heart, in a forthright, vigorous way, altogether as beautiful as René [by Chateaubriand] and Lara [by Byron]. Now you’re George Sand; otherwise, you would have been Mme So and So writing books. . . . From now on my dear Monsieur George Sand . . . is, for me, a man of genius.”27 Sainte-Beuve, to whom Sand had read parts of the novel while she was still working on it, flew to the aid of his friend. “One of the great merits of Lélia, despite its faults and excesses,” he wrote in the Revue des Deux Mondes of 25 August, “is how daring it is. While today’s talk about it seems hostile, the very violence of these words is adequate proof that it represents a bold undertaking.” Sand would write another version of Lélia in 1839. Like Spiridion, it recounts a young monk’s spiritual itinerary and is the only piece she ever rewrote. She would acknowledge that the preoccupations she expressed there were those of her generation, but it must also be said that she succeeded in taking very personal preoccupations, including the place of sexuality in love, and shaping them into a novel. Nor can it come as any surprise that stripping oneself bare in public, especially for a woman, should be found shocking. The end of the summer and the fall of 1833 seemed like a dream. Alfred de Musset was an attentive lover, concentrating only on his gracious mistress. He sent these verses to Sand: Te voilà revenu, dans mes nuits étoilées, Bel ange aux yeux d’azur, aux paupières voilées, Amour, mon bien suprême, et que j’avais perdu.

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jamais amant aimé, mourant sur sa maîtresse, N’a dans deux yeux plus noirs bu ta céleste ivresse— Nul sur un front plus beau ne t’a jamais baisé.28

He drew charming portraits in pencil and ink, sometimes enhanced with color: George with a fan, George by a lamp, George with embroidered slippers, George in a big feathered hat with Solange and her maid.29 For some fun, Musset occasionally turned to caricature, giving George huge eyes, a big nose, thick hair parted down the middle and depicting himself with enormous curls framing a long face, a very long nose, and thick lips. He also drew a portrait of Solange with the following caption: “The incestuous fruit of a she-carp and a rabbit given to the royal menagerie by the doctor G. S.” To the little girl of six he lent the following words: “I don’t give a damn.”30 Had the lover been told something in confidence? In August, a brief stay in Fontainebleau made the dream momentarily falter. While they were walking in the forest toward the Franchard boulders, Musset started hallucinating and threatened to throw himself off a cliff. Back in Paris everything returned to normal. Sand continued writing and publishing at a brisk pace, keen to respect her contract with the Revue des Deux Mondes and to get what she had contracted for. She sketched out a historical novel, A Conspiracy in 1537 [Une conspiration en 1537], that inspired Musset to write Lorenzaccio. In December the poet finally got his mother’s permission to go to Italy with George. Rome or Venice? They drew straws, and the famous city of the Doges won out. The trip to Venice is certainly the best-known episode in George Sand’s life and also Alfred de Musset’s. The story has been told in words and images a hundred times over. Some have railed against the fickle woman, others against the cynical libertine who ran to the brothels when his mistress first began feeling ill. No doubt this adventure confirmed what the stay in Fontainebleau had forewarned: Musset’s depression, the hallucinations with himself as the object, the suicidal tendencies of an alcoholic aggravated

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by the typhoid fever he contracted soon after arriving in Italy. It also underlined Sand’s irrepressible need to love and to be loved. When this lover disappointed her, she immediately went looking for someone else. Probably the most amazing thing is that it all became such a public event. Friends talked about it and showed each other the letters they had received; writers got all worked up about it and took sides; sometimes the press joined in. On the boat from Lyon to Avignon, the famous lovers met up with Stendhal, and Musset drew a sketch of him totally drunk, “dancing around the table.”31 After their visit to Bologna and Ferrara, they stayed in a luxury hotel in Venice, the albergo royale Danieli where Sand was welcomed like a great French writer. From the end of December 1833 until July 1834 Sand lived in Venice. Once Musset had gone back to Paris, in March 1834, she took a few rooms in the house of Pietro Pagello, the young doctor to whom she had declared her love at the bedside of her delirious, feverish lover. In this working-class district of the city she doggedly got back down to work, worried about her children and lack of income. Yet the ever changing colors of the lagoon, the starry nights, the riot of flowers and fruit, wine, and fish, the way the gondoliers talked and sang, Coi pensieri malinconici / No te sta a tormentar,32 everything about Venice enchanted her. Lots of her novels and short stories hark back to this time. The lovers had scarcely separated when they began writing to each other again, mainly to talk about their relationship. Musset sometimes sent regrets in verse.33 Pragmatic, Sand gave him all kinds of things to do—buying books, getting news of her son, asking Buloz for money. After running these errands, he eagerly reported to her. Under the cover of a new disguise Sand decided to publish a series of articles about the places she had visited and those where she lived, a sort of auto-fiction narrated by a traveler. In the preface to the 1837 book edition “George” recalls: “Sometimes talking like a wandering schoolboy, a gouty old uncle, or a young impatient soldier, I was only painting how I felt deep inside at any particular moment.”34 The same dream of being free, on foot, and in male disguise resurfaces in Consuelo where, for days on end, the young

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zingarella or Rom and Haydn make their way to Vienna, all the while pretending to be poor musicians.35 The first two open letters signed “the traveler” were sent to Musset for his approval before they were published, and they were addressed to him. Thus, Sand was constantly turning her experiences into discourse, text, novels. Everything could be turned into literature. In the summer of 1834 Sand returned to France with Pagello. Soon she left him in Paris to go back to Nohant where her children were waiting. Sand recommended Pietro Pagello to a few friends, and he apparently tried to sell some Italian paintings he had brought along so that he would have a bit of money. Back with her loving children, Pagello’s mistress seemed to have quickly forgotten him. In early autumn the young doctor, singularly bruised by his adventure with the famous woman, was on his way back to Italy where he would write up the experience in great detail.36 Meanwhile Sand and Musset got back together again: “Posterity will repeat our names like those of the immortal lovers who have only one name for the two of them, like Romeo and Juliet, like Heloise and Abelard,”37 declared the poet. They separated again in November. A few diary entries describe Sand’s despair, “her hair cut short (she sent the shorn locks to Musset in a skull38), dark rings under her eyes, hollow cheeks, looking old and stupid.”39 Delacroix drew a striking portrait of Sand at this time.40 The lovers reconciled in January, but only briefly. When Sand fled to Nohant in March 1835, Musset had already decided to write a fictionalized account of their relationship. The Confession of a Child of the Century was published the following year. Sand thought the book was “magnificent,” “far better than Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe”:41 “I started crying like a baby after finishing the last page. Then I wrote a few words to the author to tell him . . . that I had really loved him, that I had totally forgiven him, and that I never wanted to see him again.”42 In 1859, two years after the death of Musset, whose career had come to a sudden end despite his being named to the French

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Academy in 1852, Sand would publish her version of what happened in She and He [Elle et lui], not without sparking controversy.43 Both were novels, Musset’s being dramatic and grandiloquent, Sand’s too eager to justify herself. Their letters ring truer. Despite certain passages having been rewritten and some others censored with scissor cuts or words scratched out, the woman who answered to Georgette, Georgeot, “my brother, my angel, my bird, my beloved darling,”44 couldn’t ever bring herself to publish them while she was alive. Their letters back and forth would be published for the first time in 1904.45 Nothing could stop the novelist at this point: short stories and open letters in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Félix Bonnaire’s publication of her novel Jacques, an epistolary novel—much admired by Flaubert and Zola—that sparked controversy because a husband commits suicide, then the publication of André, the story of a love affair between a young aristocrat and a working-class seamstress, plus Leone Leoni, imagined as a counterpart to Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, with an inversion of roles. While men were obviously free in their behavior, Sand knew this was not the case for women, unable to throw off the yoke of preconceived ideas and social constraints, as her fictions would demonstrate in so many ways. In May 1835, to the Saint-Simonian journalist Adolphe Guéroult who had openly criticized her wearing of men’s clothes, she declared: “Criticize my way of dressing with other ideas and words if you want to hold forth solemnly on such a childish prop. . . . Rest assured, I do not covet men’s dignity, as it seems to me too ridiculous not to be much preferred to women’s servility. Still I will lay claim now and forever to the superb and total independence you men think you have the sole right to enjoy.”46 She couldn’t have made things clearer. Literature empowered her to make this declaration of independence; fame authorized this plucky and clear-sighted view of her own position. “You’re now George Sand,” Musset had proclaimed after reading Lélia. He was not wrong. The publication of Lélia, with “George Sand” fully written out for the first time on the cover, truly sealed the novelist’s birth. Evoking the stormy reception of Lélia in Story of My Life, Sand

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recalled: “Seeing that . . . everything in my work was under violent attack, even the name with which it was signed, I kept the name and went on working. It would have been cowardly not to do so.”47 Three years after the publication of Indiana, “George Sand,” already the author of some ten short stories and six novels, was alive and kicking, with nothing to prove to anybody. She was a woman and a man of letters, taking on this double postulate with a sense of humor, but still making George, the novelist, more important than his female double. As she wrote to Scipion du Roure, “Madame Sand told Monsieur George of your kindness and affection for him. Madame Sand is a dimwit; I don’t encourage you to try to get to know her, as she would bore you to death. George, on the other hand, is a fine young man, brimming with cordiality and gratitude for everyone who gladly loves him.”48 There remained the last phase in this long process of self-transformation, no longer being an “enslaved woman, but [a] woman as free as our atrocious legislation will allow.”49 In October she requested legal separation from Casimir Dudevant before the court at La Châtre. Louis Michel was the lawyer defending Sand, and in a very long letter to him she summed up thirteen years of the couple’s difficult life together, spelling out how their relationship had quickly deteriorated: M. Dudevant’s behavior and manners toward me became ever more rancorous, grossly contemptuous, relentlessly bitter in a painful, brutish way. . . . Since September 1828 when we moved into separate bedrooms, M. Dudevant’s bitterness and indignation with regard to what he called my disdain sought distraction in all sorts of orgies. He got into the habit of drinking much too much wine, which made him irritable for no reason and made him rant and carry on furiously. . . . M. Dudevant’s behavior became so dissolute, so rowdy, his boasting about his libertine exploits so unseemly . . . , my quiet nights were so often interrupted by the din of his indulgences . . . that my greatest desire was to see my son go off to school so that I could leave Nohant without leaving him behind.50

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The separation procedures set out by the Napoleonic Code were long and complicated. The judges were extremely biased against an unfaithful wife, even when the husband had been unfaithful as well. Sand could also fear that her fame as a writer and her reputation as a “public” woman would be held against her. So for some months, she lived “like a monk,”51 eager not to antagonize the members of the court. To Marie d’Agoult, with whom she had recently become friends, she announced: “The reawakening will be fearsome. The day after I win my case, I’m throwing down my crutch, I’ll set fire to the four corners of the town, I’ll gallop over the belly of the presiding magistrate and the other judges.”52 On 16 February 1836 the court pronounced the separation of the Dudevant husband and wife. Aurore Dupin got back all of her property and was awarded custody of her children. To Sosthène de la Rochefoucauld she declared: “I’ll have you know that I’ve just waged a conjugal and maternal war and won the battle. . . . In short, I have my children and my fortune to boot; . . . I’ve got enough to rest my head without having to work too much, and the doors of my father’s house will no longer be closed to me. . . . Here I am settled in the provinces and very happy with my lot.”53 After Casimir Dudevant had made various futile appeals, the case was closed on 29 July.54 “Superb and unabridged independence” was hers at last! This time “George Sand” no longer had a master and depended on no one. She would never again bear any name aside from the one she had given herself.

Penchants and Persuasions Even though she had a few faithful friends, Balzac and Sainte-Beuve among them, Sand knew how conformist the literary milieu was and how fickle the Parisian press could be. There was no end to the caricature-portraits, attacks, and insults from a “multitude of dirty, shrill Myrmidons filled with hate for I don’t know whom, enraged for I don’t know what reason.”55 “I don’t think critics should bother with one’s private life,” she relayed to Alfred de Montferrand, the

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director of a Biography of Contemporary Women Authors [Biographie des femmes auteurs contemporaines], “and I don’t like either the blame or praise directed at me.”56 Jules Janin authored the entry about Sand, which began in these terms: “Who is he, or is it she? Man or woman, angel or demon, paradox or truth? Whatever the case, Sand is one of the greatest writers of our time. Where did she come from? How did he come to be? How did she all of a sudden find this marvelous style with its thousand shapes, and tell me why he started flooding the whole of society with disdain, irony, and cruel contempt? The man is such an enigma, the woman such a phenomenon!”57 The allusions to Sand’s double nature were not about to end. She also knew that many people considered her a “lost” woman quite simply because she wrote. Her son Maurice, now a boarding student at the Lycée Henri-IV, told her: “The other day . . . , they [his classmates] said all kinds of things to me because you’re a woman who writes and you’re not a prude like most of the other pupils’ mothers. Well, when I think about what they call you, I can’t tell you the word because it’s too awful, P. . . .”58 After Simon was published in July 1836, Sand’s novels became more clearly a forum for “illustrating” her ideas. Staunch convictions about social justice, close attention to the living conditions of the lower classes, a constant plea for the liberty and equality of men and women, of social classes as well, precise views about how society should be under the guidance of a “divine hand,”59 these essential positions echoed those of the first socialists, Fourierists and Saint-Simonians, positions that she expressed and tirelessly defended in her letters to more and more correspondents. These positions also governed the choices that Sand made in her personal life, the friends that she chose, the actions that she undertook with these friends. To understand her growing interest in politics, one has to recall her disappointment in a revolution “gone totally rotten” in July 1830, her astonishment when she attended a session of the Chamber of Deputies in 1831, her indignation at the massacre of republicans in the rue du Cloître Saint-Méry in June 1832 when Indiana had just been published. History in the making and what she

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and her friends called “the social question”60 never left her indifferent. In April 1835, dressed in men’s clothes, she attended the trial of the workers from Lyon defended by a few leaders of the opposition, Ledru-Rollin, Barbès, Garnier-Pagès and Louis Michel, known as Michel “de Bourges” because of his role in that city’s insurrection in 1830. This steadfast republican and greatly talented orator seven years older than Sand would have an indisputable intellectual influence over her during the two years of their affair. The sixth of her Traveler’s Letters [Lettres d’un voyageur] was addressed to him. The lawyer Louis Michel inspired Sand with her enthusiasm for the republican ideal. In the abbot Félicité Lamennais, whom she met in May 1835, Sand found the social Catholicism that would long be her religious preference. As her mentor she chose Pierre Leroux, the champion of humanitarian socialism, with whom she began corresponding in December 1836. “My friends are democrats, and for good reason; they have clunky shoes and scruffy neckties,”61 she warned. Lamennais, who wrote A Believer’s Words [Paroles d’un croyant], condemned by the Vatican for its criticism of the church’s temporal power, was “short, skinny, and sickly,” but “what a ray of light in his head!”62 Sand would exclaim. Sand was moved by his differences with the church, also by his defense of a form of democracy and a brand of Catholicism more attentive to social problems. In a moment of enthusiasm she declared herself his “disciple” and invited him to Nohant where he stayed a while, not without fueling gossip. In La Presse of 8 March 1837 Delphine de Girardin noted ironically: “Every one of Sand’s new friends is a new novel. The story of her affections is all there in the catalogue of her works.”63 Flattered to have a famous woman among his relations, Lamennais invited Sand to write several columns in Le Monde, a newspaper that he ran. During the winter of 1837 several of Sand’s open letters on the condition of women appeared there. As she wrote to Lamennais, “I’ve thrown myself into it, and I want to broaden the scope of my Letters to Marcie [Lettres à Marcie] so that they relate to women. I’d like to talk about all the duties [women

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have], marriage, motherhood, etc. . . . In a word, my bold moves would call for Divorce in marriage. I’ve sought in vain the remedy for the bloody injustices, endless wretchedness, and often hopeless passions that trouble the union of the sexes; I don’t see any other way out than the freedom to break up and remake marriages.”64 Their association soon stopped short: “[Lamennais] was asking me for literature without ideas,” Sand recalled, “and philosophy without conclusions.”65 It was said that with his prickly disposition the reformer much preferred penitent women to those in revolt. When Sand defended divorce, he got angry, broke things off with her, and, while she went on defending him, he openly made fun of her with his friends. Her Letters to Marcie were no longer to appear in Le Monde, but Sand gathered them into a volume that came out in 1838. Pierre Leroux had been a journalist for Le Globe before becoming a Saint-Simonian disciple and then stepping back a bit from what was then one of the main currents of radical thought. Along with Jean Reynaud he threw himself into writing the New Encyclopedia [Encyclopédie nouvelle], which remained unfinished, and he would ask Sand to write the articles “Depression” [“Spleen”] and “Hope” [“Espérance”]. In 1840 he published one of his most important works, Regarding Individualism and Socialism [De l’individualisme et du socialisme]. Sand’s political ideas would remain deeply marked by this book. Leroux was confident that God had ordained a perfectable society, and his views on matters of class and sex were steadfastly egalitarian. This was more than enough for Sand, searching her way through the tangle of political theories of the time, to embrace his vision. Sand wrote in Story of My Life: “[Leroux] was from that point on the greatest possible critic for the philosophy of history; . . . he cast such a vivid light over the past and such a beautiful one over the future that you felt somebody’s hand ripping a blindfold from your eyes.”66 Equally fascinated by Lamennais and Leroux whom she considered “two of the greatest minds of our century,”67 Sand was also briefly in sympathy with the Saint-Simonian movement. While she agreed with their criticism of property, she was nonetheless wary of

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their theories about free and communal sexuality. Neither did she understand the oriental dream of Saint-Simon’s disciples—which would lead to their astonishing expedition to Egypt and turn them into “soldiers”68 of progress rather than gentle visionaries. As she wrote to the Parisian Saint-Simonians who had asked for her support, “I am the child of my century; I’ve suffered its ills, shared its errors, drunk from all its springs of life and death, and while I am more fervent than most in desiring the salvation of this century, I don’t know how to teach the way to salvation any better than the rest of them.”69 What party did she belong to? “Neither Saint-Simonian, nor republican (supposing I’m a man for a moment),”70 Sand (for whom politics was a thing for men) would soon declare, to the Saint-Simonian Adolphe Guéroult who had asked her to become an official member of his “Church.” Her political positions were becoming more refined, her Jacobin ideas more precise. After reading the first volumes of Roux’s Parliamentary History of the French Revolution [Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française], Sand wrote: “The Girondists lost their leaders when Robespierre was in power, and they replaced them by Thiers, Guizot, and company under Louis-Philippe. France is governed by the three most immoral men of the century: Louis-Philippe, Talleyrand, and Thiers.”71 Her correspondence turned into a forum where Sand deliberated about how to realize the ideals of justice, equality, and fraternity in future society. All the news of the day was discussed, even the wars of conquest in Algeria that aroused her wrath.72 Mauprat, first appearing in four installments in the Revue des Deux Mondes and then as a book in August 1837, is like a sounding board of Sand’s convictions at that time. The novel combines fine narrative invention with resolutely “gothic” accents: ruins, underground passages and secret rooms, cruel men, corrupt judges, and a murderous monk are in keeping with the period’s taste for the roman noir or thriller—Hugo, Dumas, Sue, Balzac and his History of the Thirteen [Histoire des treize], Gautier, and Mérimée were all writing the same sort of thing. Sand put the same aesthetic postulate

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to work to deliver a great history lesson about France on the eve of the Revolution, a political reading of the role of social class, money, and property, fresh insights about marriage, family, and women. The descriptions of the countryside around the village of Sainte-Sévère, the rural world of the Old Regime, the relationships between dishonest little country squires and the peasants that depended on them, are wonderfully precise, and the discussions among the characters sum up the great intellectual debates in the years before the Revolution. Yet Sand “idealized” two aspects of the novel: first, by creating a very knowledgeable heroine who becomes the teacher of the man she is going to marry—up until then novels had tended to prefer things the other way around—and second, by ending her novel with the portrayal of life in community. Once the revolutionary storm was over, Edmée and Bernard share their life, their château, and their property with a few friends from every class of society, the heroine ever “faithful to her theories of absolute equality.”73 This defense of marriage, and celebration of the ideals of equality and community, were something new. They directly relate to convictions that Sand’s subsequent novels were going to set forth more and more clearly. Sand would no longer be accused of writing to express her “hatred of marriage,”74 nor would she go on publishing novels about unhappy marriages and adultery for the sake of love, as Balzac did time and time again. These times were over. Now Sand was indisputably considered a novelist and definitively freed from the tutelage of a contemptible husband, and after a few great intellectual encounters, plus a few momentous affairs, her fiction took on political, ethical, and religious convictions, and she was henceforth committed to more didactic ends. These intellectual debates left an eloquent mark on her novels, and her long, detailed letters to numerous correspondents produced a lively echo chamber of the same. In the midst of all this, Sand found the time to travel, to love, to look after her children as well as Nohant, to entertain friends, and to indulge her love of reading, walking, and music. In August 1836 she asked her maid to pack her bags:

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My old Tortoise, pack me up—my men’s shirts, I’ve only got two.—buy me two colored ones . . . —my velvet riding coat. —all my trousers —40 francs of corn-paper cigarettes —two chemical lighters . . . —a pair of very loose-fitting slippers that I can wear traveling with swollen feet . . . —my foulard dress and the sleeves of my flowered gray dress. . . . Plus, my lacework and my veil. —two toothbrushes, soft rather than hard . . . —2 cakes of honey soap.75

Along with Maurice, now thirteen, and Solange, soon to turn eight, Sand went to Chamonix to join Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult, whom she had met a few months earlier. For this occasion, Liszt and his companion were nicknamed the Longfellows, Sand and her children the Piffoëls. Marie d’Agoult recalled in her Memoirs [Mémoires]: Madame Sand was very short and seemed even shorter in the men’s clothes she wore with ease and not without a certain youthful, manly grace. Neither the development of her bust nor the curves of her hips betrayed her sex. The black velvet riding coat tight around her waist, the heeled boots on her little feet with their high arches, the necktie around her full, round neck . . . let her move freely. With all that, her forthright demeanor gave the idea of quiet strength. . . . There was something strange about the beauty of her dark eyes, her hair as well. She seemed to see without looking and . . . her gaze was impenetrable; an unsettling calm, something cold like our ideas of the sphinxes of Antiquity.76

Sand wrote this trip up twice: first, as an open letter that appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes like the previous ones; it is the tenth of Sand’s Traveler’s Letters and contains some charming observations about Maurice and Solange in the mountains.77 She composed another version as a diary entitled Daily Chats with

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the Very Learned and Very Clever Doctor Piffoël Professor of Botany and Psychology [Entretiens journaliers avec le très docte et très habile docteur Piffoël professeur de botanique et de psychologie], never published during her lifetime.78 These texts mirror each other, each one donning the clothes of the “traveler” to hail Liszt’s genius (“How soothing when Franz plays the piano. All my troubles turn to poetry, all my instincts are elated.”79) and to jeer at Lélia (“Never take a strong, selfless, courageous, wide-eyed soul as your ideal woman. The public will hiss and boo, greeting you with the odious name of Lélia, the feckless one!”80). It is not easy to be double: a strong woman and a man of letters. During the following winter and spring, Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult made two lengthy stays at Nohant. An attentive observer of these distinguished guests, Maurice sketched his mother in profile, with a fascinated eye and a cigarette in her mouth, standing behind Liszt at the piano, with his angular body and long, fluttering fingers; the sketch was captioned: “Mama amazed to be hearing Liszt.”81 Franz Liszt dedicated the third of his Letters of a Bachelor in Music [Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique] to his stay at Nohant. He wrote: I went to seek refuge in the farthest reaches of Berry, that prosaic province so divinely turned to poetry by George Sand. There, under the roof of our illustrious friend, for three months long I lived a rich life full of feeling. . . . These were our pursuits and pleasures: reading some ingenuous philosopher, profound poet . . . , or letter from a faraway friend; long walks on the secret banks of the Indre; . . . the joyful shrieks of the children who had just discovered a lovely hawk moth with diaphanous wings or some poor warbler . . . fallen from its nest down in the grass. And that’s all? Yes, in truth, that’s all. . . . The soul’s joys are not to be measured by how wide they are, but how deep.82

Sand felt great admiration and real friendship for Lizst, and he shared these sentiments. In 1836 the composer dedicated Rondo fantastique83 “to Monsieur George Sand,” which she “translated” as a short story entitled The Smuggler [Le contrebandier]. Later on,

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when evoking the beginning of his relationship with Chopin in the 1852 biography devoted to him, Franz Liszt described Sand-Lélia in these terms: Lélia with your brown hair and olive skin! you wandered through solitary places, somber like Lara, torn like Manfred [two of Byron’s heroes], rebellious like Cain, but fiercer and more pitiless, more inconsolable than they were, for there has not been a man’s heart feminine enough to love you as they have been loved, to pay your virile charms the homage of trusting and blind submission, of wordless and ardent devotion, to let your Amazon strength protect his expressions of submission! Woman-hero, you have been valiant and eager for combat like these warriors. . . . Like them, you had to armor . . . this female breast, which, charming as life itself, discreet as the tomb, is adored by man when his heart is its sole and impenetrable shield.84

As for “Arabella,” Sand appreciated the refined aristocrat and accomplished musician that she was. In particularly glowing terms she dedicated Simon to her friend and marveled at what first struck her as “incommensurable superiority.”85 Marie d’Agoult, meanwhile, did not hide her admiration for the independent woman, talented artist, and generous friend who entertained them so simply at Nohant. Yet the little brunette and the tall blonde were radically different. Endowed with more native talent, Sand soon grew impatient with Marie d’Agoult’s inflexible thinking as well as her posing as a woman of society. Marie d’Agoult began to feel jealous of the influence Sand’s strong personality exercised over the people around her, including Liszt. Their friendship, quite intense at the beginning—so much so that people thought for a moment that George was in love with Marie—would deteriorate bit by bit and come to an end after various calumnies reached Sand’s ears. “Your understanding of friendship is different from mine,” she wrote to Marie d’Agoult in November 1839, “. . . you just won’t give up being a beautiful and witty woman who slaughters and smashes all the others.”86 The

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rivalry between the two women would inspire Balzac to write his novel Béatrix, and Sand modeled the Viscountess de Chailly in her novel Horace on Marie d’Agoult. Sand’s influence, as Marie d’Agoult would herself acknowledge, helped her decide on the literary career of which she had been dreaming,87 and she too chose a masculine pen name. Marie d’Agoult had real talent, even if she seemed more comfortable writing essays rather than novels. Published under the name “Daniel Stern” in 1847, her Essay on Liberty [Essai sur la liberté] is original in a number of ways. After her breakup with Michel de Bourges who became “absorbed by a new passion”88 in the spring of 1838, Sand was keen to find another lover. The actor Pierre-François Touzé, known as Bocage, the writer Charles Didier, then the vaudevillist Félicien Mallefille, hired as Sand’s secretary and Maurice’s tutor, shared her affection one after the other. This bothered Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult during their stays at Nohant, and sometimes her best friends failed to understand. It is clear that Sand gladly yielded to the pleasure of being seduced, possessed, and loved. She also greatly enjoyed seducing, becoming one with whoever pleased her and returning the feeling: “Love bubbles in me like the sap of life in the universe,” she wrote to Michel de Bourges. “The beloved’s breast is the only pillow able to give repose to both body and soul.”89 Love and everything that went along with it corresponded to a need that nothing or nobody would ever be able to fulfill. Never failing to evoke love as a vital principle, Sand was constantly giddy with desire to feel restored through fusion with another. An impossible dream, but no less stubbornly pursued. Still, with regard to love and everything else humans do, one must think and ask questions. With rare frankness Sand would discuss all these things with her correspondents, reminding them in no uncertain terms of the contradictions in which women of her time found themselves. Neither did she ever let them forget the weight of opinion always ready to blame them: Opinion, on the one hand, doesn’t tolerate ugly, cold, or cowardly women; on the other, it is the voice of reviling, mocking, and

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insulting men who no longer want devout women, who don’t yet want enlightened women, and still want faithful women. . . . So women now are not enlightened, devout, or chaste; the moral revolution that was supposed to remake them according to the desires of the new generation of men went haywire. They didn’t want to raise women in their own eyes; they didn’t want to give women a noble role and put them on an equal footing that would make them capable of manly virtues. Chastity would have been glorious for free women. For enslaved women, it is mutilating tyranny, a yoke they’re trying hard to shake off. I can’t blame them.90

Here her views dovetail with those of Pierre Leroux, who had become the advocate of a standpoint whose “very essence was equality.”91 As for Sand’s conduct with regard to her relationships, she would still be implacably judged. “Latrine,”92 jabbed Baudelaire, one of the first; “a monster whore,”93 Alexandre Dumas fils confided (is this really so?) to the Goncourt brothers, who would smugly take note in their Journal. In early March 1838, Sand entertained Balzac at Nohant, and he eagerly reported the visit to Mme Hanska: “I found the comrade Georges [sic] Sand in her dressing gown smoking a cigar after supper near the fire. . . . She was wearing pretty yellow slippers with a fringe, elegant little stockings, and red trousers. . . . For three days we chatted from five in the evening after supper until five in the morning. . . . She was . . . even more unhappy with Musset [than with Sandeau]. Her men are few and far between, that’s the story. All the more so because she is not at all lovable. . . . She’s a boy, an artist, she is great, generous, dedicated, chaste, she has the fine traits of a man, ergo she is no woman.”94 Balzac reported to Mme Hanska that Sand seemed to have no real vision, no talent for planning her novels, nor any ability to portray truth or feeling. Yet he recognized that “without knowing the French language, she has style.”95 Together Sand and Balzac talked about marriage. Balzac was convinced that the husband had to be superior to the wife, which was Rousseau’s position in Émile. On the pretext that he understood women better than anybody (many other novelists after

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Balzac would boast of the same talent), Balzac represented women as devoted to the point of sacrifice, desperate when they understood that they had been betrayed and abandoned, deeply religious as well. “Feeling, loving, and suffering,”96 that is their destiny, he reminded his readers in Eugénie Grandet. Sand totally disagreed. The novels that she wrote at this time, The Last Aldini [La dernière Aldini] and The Master Mosaic Makers [Les maîtres mosaïstes], are no doubt marked by memories of Italy. Still, no more than in Mauprat, there was never any question of portraying heroines who did not consider themselves equal to the men they loved. Despite Balzac’s gossip with Mme Hanska about Sand, in particular, about the many lovers he chalked up to her, this fundamental difference did not interfere with their special bond. Sand occupies a particular place in the novels of The Human Comedy. In The County Muse [La muse du département] he invented the term “Sandism” to evoke a new way of life and behavior; in Béatrix, he modeled Camille Maupin on Sand; he would leave unfinished a novel entitled The Woman Author [La femme auteur]. He was obviously fascinated by Sand’s talent, originality, and prodigious capacity for work, by the exception she was in all respects. In 1842 Balzac dedicated his Letters from Two Young Brides [Lettres de deux jeunes mariées] to Sand. After reading it, she immediately wrote to him: “The book is one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever written. I don’t arrive at your conclusions, and I think instead that you prove quite the opposite of what you intend to demonstrate. All great minds feel the pros and cons of everything so intensely, so ingenuously. . . . I dream of writing a long article about you . . . perhaps contradicting you more in a thousand things than you’ve ever been before and exalting you higher than anybody else ever has. No one has ever understood you, I think, and I think I understand you well.”97 Maybe this declaration was the reason why Balzac would a few months later ask Sand to write the preface to The Human Comedy when this work was finally coming all together. What fine homage to his “comrade” Sand! This project fell by the wayside, and Balzac would wind up writing the twenty-six pages of his famous preface by himself.98

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In 1840 the German artist Josef Danhauser executed a huge oil painting on wood entitled Morning with Liszt [La matinée chez Liszt], now at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Facing a bust of Beethoven, Liszt is playing the piano, and Marie d’Agoult, with her back turned, is sitting on a cushion at his feet. Wearing a long skirt and a riding coat, Sand is stretched out in an armchair, daydreaming; she is holding a cigarette in her left hand and giving her right hand to Alexandre Dumas, sitting beside her. Victor Hugo, apparently lost in thought, is standing behind them with a book in his hands, while Rossini has a hand on Paganini’s shoulder. A perfectly improbable scene, but it has the merit of bringing together a few of the great names in European music and literature of the time and demonstrating the tremendous fame that George Sand had come to enjoy. Her works were then being translated into English, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and Russian.

Music Sand wrote to Franz Liszt that her passion for music would throw her “into otherworldly states of ecstasy and rapture.”99 She reminded Marie d’Agoult that she liked to lie under the piano while Liszt was playing: “I’m made of very strong fiber, and I never find instruments powerful enough. Besides, [Liszt] is the only artist in the world who can give soul and life to the piano.”100 Already as a child she used to crawl beneath the spinet, charmed as she was by her grandmother singing and playing some old tune.101 As she wrote, “Ah! how I’d sometimes love to be fifteen and have a smart music teacher and my whole life for me alone! I’d give myself totally to music, and it’s in that language, the most perfect of all, that I’d express my feelings and emotions.”102 Most Romantic authors were no doubt music lovers. Stendhal put Mozart, Cimarosa, and Rossini above all else and spent his evenings at the opera in Paris, Milan, and Rome. Alfred de Vigny entertained Liszt and Chopin at home and introduced them to each other. Another great music lover, Théophile Gautier wrote

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the arts column for several papers and reviewed Chopin’s rare public concerts. Honoré de Balzac was not to be outdone; it suffices to recall the first pages of La Duchesse de Langeais, dedicated to Franz Liszt, and one will hear, admirably described, the effect of an organ piece. Music was all the rage, which was both good and bad: soporific musical soirées, idle discussions among “music lovers,” lessons in piano and sensibility at home (for young ladies), nothing escaped the acerbic wit of Honoré Daumier, who published in Le Charivari the series entitled Soirées parisiennes, Croquis musicaux, and Les musiciens de Paris. With her taste for music and interest in all its forms, Sand was one of the most accomplished musicians among authors. With her natural sensuality she found endlessly renewed emotions in voice, chant, and melody. In the country she loved bird songs, savoring that of the nightingale, which “strikes the heart with an electric shock,”103 but still preferring the song of the blackbird, which “comes closer to our musical forms . . . , having phrases of a rustic ingenuity that one could almost write down and sing.”104 In Teverino, published in 1847, she created the charming character of the “bird-girl” who could attract hundreds of birds. “The bird-man,” she wrote, “is the artist.”105 In Paris Sand attended premieres of the operas of Berlioz and Meyerbeer—she dedicated the eleventh of her Traveler’s Letters to the author of Robert the Devil [Robert le diable]. Later on she would attend Gounod’s premieres and dream of writing an opera sketch for him. She was enchanted by the piano. At that time there was a lot of enthusiasm for this instrument, whose sonority had been markedly improved by the technical innovations of the manufacturers Sébastien Érard106 and Camille Pleyel. Two virtuosi, the Hungarian Franz Liszt and the Pole Frederick Chopin, who could occasionally be heard playing together and who also played their own compositions, were applauded all over Europe. Born in 1810 in a village a few kilometers outside of Warsaw, Chopin had a Polish mother and a French father who worked as a tutor for a prominent family. Very early on he showed exceptional talent. In 1829 he finished his studies at the Conservatory and gave

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a concert in Vienna that the critics hailed with enthusiasm. He went to Paris in 1831, the same year the German poet Heinrich Heine moved there. The frail, blue-eyed composer with delicate features, polished manners, and the elegance of a dandy never lost his pronounced Polish accent. He was already famous when Sand made his acquaintance. People vied for his lessons, crowded in to hear his latest compositions and to relish his tremendous skill as a performer. Aside from a few public appearances, Chopin did not give concerts. In the presence of a chosen circle he preferred to play pieces by his favorite composers (Bach, Beethoven, Schubert) and occasionally a few of his own (or of Liszt). On 8 May 1838 Astolphe de Custine invited some famous men, politicians and artists, to hear a recital by Chopin at his house. Sand was among these guests. Chopin and Sand had already met, but Chopin at first glance felt wary of this woman six years his senior and enjoying a solid reputation of freedom of every sort. Yet they took a liking to each other, said as much, and soon became lovers. “We surrendered to the wind, and it swept us both away to another realm for a few instants,”107 Sand confessed to Albert Grzymala in a letter from the end of May 1838. Grzymala, the erstwhile aide-de-camp of Prince Poniatowski, who was exiled to France after the Polish revolution, was close to Chopin, and he would be the couple’s confidant throughout their affair. Thanks to him, Sand was introduced to the circle of Polish refugees in Paris, among which there were some great aristocrats and intellectuals, such as the poet Adam Mickiewicz, “a genius equal to Byron,”108 who held the chair of Slavic literature at the Collège de France. When Sand met Chopin, she was still involved with Félicien Mallefille, and Chopin was emotionally attached to Maria Wodzinska and dreaming of getting engaged. This made Sand think twice about having a relationship with Chopin, as she explained to Grzymala: “Do I love as an artist, a woman, a sister, a nun, a poet, what on earth do I know? Some of my [feelings of love] have come to life and died the same day, without the person who inspired them ever knowing a thing about it. Some have been my martyrdom and driven me to despair, almost madness. Some have

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kept me cloistered for years in excessive spiritualism. They’ve all been perfectly sincere.”109 Something else worried her. Did Chopin prefer the communion of souls to communion between bodies? “In all sincerity, is there such a thing as . . . purely intellectual love? Is there ever love without a single kiss or a loving kiss without sensual delight?”110 she wondered. In any case, from June on, Sand and Chopin were inseparable. Sand was quite smitten and did not hide this from her correspondents. Truly in love, Chopin found in Sand generous feelings and also an exceptional sensitivity to music. “The poet and the musician”111 were both famous, but Sand was the better known of the two. She frequented the artistic elite of Paris, and between the capital and her estate at Nohant she lived comfortably, mainly because of what she earned from her novels. Their travel plans firmed up by the end of the summer of 1838. Chopin was then showing lung problems that already suggested tuberculosis, and Félicien Mallefille was threatening his former mistress. Spanish friends had recommended they stay on one of the Balearic islands off Barcelona, and on 18 October Sand went south with her two children. The travelers were in Avignon on 25 October, next they visited the fountain of Vaucluse and the arena at Nîmes. On the 29th they were in Perpignan, where Chopin joined them—the couple did not pass unnoticed and received a spontaneous ovation.112 On 1 November they all embarked at Port-Vendres for Barcelona: “I’m so happy! [Chopin] is here, and healthy. . . . He looks fine, we’re leaving in a few hours. The sky looks like Italy.”113 Chopin, Sand, Maurice, and Solange arrived at Palma on 8 November, first staying in a big house, So’n Vent, of which Maurice left a drawing. Then on 15 December they moved to an abandoned Carthusian monastery high in the mountains a few kilometers from the village of Valldemosa. They intended to stay there until the following spring. Sand wrote in an initial burst of enthusiasm: “The great charterhouse of Valldemosa . . . is poetry, solitude, the most artistic place ever, nothing more chic under the heavens, and what heavens! what a spot! we’re just delighted. . . . It’s the promised land, and we’re overjoyed to have

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found ourselves a really fine place to stay. . . . Yesterday Chopin walked seven and a half miles with Maurice and us [Sand and Solange], over sharp stones. Both of them only feel better for it today. Solange and I are growing fat enough to inspire fear but not pity.”114 Yet this second stay abroad had quite a few surprises in store for them. While Venice had for centuries been a vacation place for people of all nationalities, Majorca was a closed-minded little island where life was austere, religion powerful, and “tourism” nonexistent. “Just imagine,” Sand wrote to Balzac, “a ferocious population, loyal as Carthaginians, fanatic as Spaniards.”115 Sand was expecting an endless summer; she found cool, often quite rainy weather, not very good for someone with tuberculosis. She dreamed of a land of liberty, open to the arts and welcoming to artists; she found herself in a very humble and perfectly traditional peasant setting. Moreover, the political situation of Spain was still chaotic, mainly because of French foreign policy since the Napoleonic Empire, and the peasants of Majorca preferred the conservatives, meaning the Carlists, who supported the brother of Ferdinand VII, to the liberals, who preferred Maria-Cristina de Bourbon. The people of the island found these rich and famous strangers more and more staggering: the couple was not married, the family did not attend Sunday Mass, the musician was maybe suffering from a contagious disease and had a grand piano delivered from Paris. These people first excited their curiosity, then their hostility. There was incomprehension on both sides, then one incident after the other. A Winter in Majorca [Un hiver à Majorque] came out in 1842 and gives an account of their time there. Except for a few short passages, the work does not do justice to the special nature of Majorcan culture and comes down hard on the inhabitants. According to Sand, they were savages still back in the “age of the pig.”116 The work would not be well received in Spain—for good reason.117 Despite rather rudimentary living conditions and a steady cough, Chopin managed to finish in Majorca the twenty-four preludes, opus 28, dedicated to Camille Pleyel, thanks to whom he had

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money enough for the trip. There he composed as well a mazurka and a ballad.118 As for Sand, whom “the little Chop”119 liked to call “Jutrzenca” (“Aurora” in Polish), she was not idle. She looked after her lover “as though he were [her] child”;120 she bought, not without difficulty, everything the household needed; she would occasionally help out the cook and lend a hand to the local laundress, whose laziness she berated. She also schooled Maurice and Solange “six or seven hours” a day, and “as usual . . . spent half the night working on [her] own account.”121 So she became “father and mother to [her children], . . . the man who runs things outside the house and the woman who oversees things inside.”122 Already long used to writing at night while she was free from all the problems of life during the day, Sand finished up a revised version of Lélia and a new novel, Spiridion, whose hero is a young monk,123 and which Gustave Doré illustrated with several drawings. The health of Chopin, a “sweet and kind angel,”124 was not improving, and Sand got really worried, even though he could still joke about it.125 No doubt Maurice took advantage of his stay “in the south”126 to get stronger, and Solange’s disposition, “all resistance and rage,” improved a bit, but the charterhouse was so damp, the hostility of the Majorcans so obvious, and Chopin’s physical state so alarming that they decided to return to France at the end of February 1838. As Sand wrote in A Winter in Majorca, “We were . . . alone in Majorca, as alone as we would be in a desert, and when we had won our daily bread through a war with the monkeys, we would sit together as a family to laugh about it around the stove. But as the winter went on, sadness paralyzed my attempts to be jolly and serene. Our patient’s health got steadily worse; the wind moaned in the ravine, rain battered at our windows, thunder penetrated our thick walls and threw its gloomy note in the midst of our laughter and children’s games.”127 In a letter to Charlotte Marliani, Sand is even more brutal: “God forbid that I ever set foot in Spain again! The country doesn’t suit me in any way, shape or form. . . . Majorca’s climate was becoming more and more of a danger for Chopin; I hurried to get us out. We were like pariahs because of Chopin’s cough and also because we didn’t go to Mass. People threw rocks

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at my children on the road. They said we were pagans, what have you. It would take ten volumes to give you an idea . . . of how mean that stupid, thieving, God-fearing race can be.”128 In Marseilles a doctor named Cauvière examined Chopin and found him in critical condition. It was impossible to keep on traveling. “At night,” Chopin wrote to Grzymala, “[George] works a lot. As for me, I sleep because I’m being given opium pills—and in the morning she sleeps and I stay put, cough, and meditate.”129 The musician’s convalescence lasted four months. Maurice drew a portrait with the caption: “Chopin is scarcely having any fun in Marseilles, May 1839.”130 During her stay in that “stupid city”131 Sand composed a historical drama that took place centuries ago in Italy, where, for reasons of inheritance, the heroine was made to think she had been born a man and was reared as such. Published in 1840, Gabriel is one of Sand’s most incisive works about sexual difference and its implications. There the author shows how strong prejudices against women are and, even though the demonstration remains a bit ambiguous, strives to convince her readers of their inanity. At the beginning of the play Gabriel declares to her tutor: “As for me, I don’t feel my soul has a sex, as you’re trying to prove. . . . I’m not absolutely brave, not absolutely fainthearted either. . . . Believe me, we’re all subject to momentary impressions, and any man who would boast that he’d never been afraid would strike me as a great braggart. Likewise, I wouldn’t be astonished to hear a woman say that on some days she is courageous.”132 Balzac said that he was “carried away” reading Gabriel. “It’s a play by Shakespeare, and I don’t understand why you haven’t put it on stage,”133 he wrote to Sand in June. In early June, after a few days of vacation in Genoa, Chopin, Sand, and her children were back at Nohant. The summer of 1839 was peaceful. On the second floor of the house Chopin had a comfortable room with a view of the garden; his door was padded to protect him from outside noise. On a Pleyel grand piano in the formal living room he composed several important works, among which was the famous funeral march.134 Sand admitted treating him like “another Maurice”135 and trying to make the best of his

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unstable temperament and precarious health: “Chopin is always sometimes better, sometimes worse, never exactly sick or well. I really believe the poor child is doomed to being forever a bit languid. Fortunately, this doesn’t drag down his state of mind. He is merry as soon as he feels a bit of energy, and when he’s feeling melancholy, he takes to his piano and composes beautiful pages.”136 Plus, Sand was busy with the education of her children: I cannot teach Latin or Greek, but at least I’ve managed to teach French well, and we are up to our necks in history, philosophy, religion, with all the related questions of geography, literature, and art. In a word, Maurice [sixteen years old] and I are studying side by side, often consulting the encyclopedia [New Encyclopedia] of Leroux and Reynaud. . . . I vulgarize the text to make it easier to understand. . . . The rest of the time he is reading and drawing while I keep an eye on him. I do the same with Solange, adjusting the lessons to her mind and age [twelve years old]. . . . This tutoring is good for me, and I like it.137

From 1833 to 1837 Maurice had been studying at the Lycée Henri-IV, but Sand finally took him out because he was so unhappy there. After Jules Boucoiran and Félicien Mallefille, there were no more tutors. Sand herself would educate her son and then her daughter. But after Maurice, at age sixteen, went to study and work in Eugène Delacroix’s studio in November 1839, she grew weary of the conflicts with Solange and decided to put her in a nonreligious boarding school in Paris. “I am very happy,” she wrote to her old friend from Berry, Gustave Papet, “. . . [Maurice] is serious about painting and passionate about Delacroix. . . . Solange is still arrogant and a bit haughty, but she’s also much better off. Boarding school suits her.”138 Back in Paris in the fall of 1839, “after grousing, raging, fuming, and swearing at the upholsterers, the locksmiths, etc. etc., etc.,”139 Sand moved to 16 rue Pigalle while Chopin kept his apartment at 5 rue Tronchet so that he could give lessons there. Balzac wrote to Ève Hanska:

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G[eorge] Sand is living at 16 rue Pigalle, in a garden, . . . she has a dining room with sculpted oak furniture. Her little living room is the color of café au lait, and the formal living room is replete with superb Chinese vases full of flowers. There is always a planter loaded with flowers, the furniture is green, there is a sideboard with all kinds of curiosities, paintings by Delacroix, her portrait by Calamatta. . . . A magnificent piano, upright, square, in rosewood. Besides, Chopin is always there. She smokes just cigarettes

and nothing else. She only gets up at four, by which time

Chopin has finished giving his lessons. You get to her room by a series of steps called miller’s stairs, going straight up and steep. Her bedroom is brown, her bed is two mattresses on the floor, à la turque. She has the pretty tiny, tiny hands of a child.140

Bit by bit Sand’s life came to be entirely organized around Chopin. They spent the winter in Paris, the summer and a part of the fall at Nohant, where the children came to join them. Sand and Chopin entertained a lot, out in the country even more than in the city, his Polish friends, her friends and neighbors from Berry, in addition to Sand’s socialist friends, with personalities as varied as Emmanuel Arago, a lawyer and vaudevillist, and Agricol Perdiguier, a carpenter from Avignon who had introduced Sand to compagnonnage or craftmen’s associations. At Nohant: “We all dine outside, some friends or other come over, we smoke, chat, and when they’ve left in the evening, Chopin plays the piano for me as night falls, after which he falls asleep like a child at the same time as Maurice and Solange.”141 Coddled “like a child,” Sand’s companion seems to have become physically aloof rather quickly from the woman to whom he was sincerely attached. All the while giving him a comfortable life, Chopin having no income aside from what he earned with his piano lessons and concerts, she put him in a context altogether new to him, that of a true family. It is quite enough to read Sand’s letters142 to understand that the musician was not easy to deal with. In Paris he would rage against the problems of being in a big city; in the country he often claimed to be bored, even though it

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was mainly there that he composed. Sand wrote: “My other son, Chopin, is still frail and sickly, . . . a perfect soul in an unsound body, consequently a restless imagination and an irresolute and melancholy disposition.”143 Even though she would often make fun of an “atrabilious skeptic” and rail at Chopin’s misanthropic whims and ways, Sand never hid her deep affection and boundless admiration for the exceptional talent of the man whom she called all kinds of inventive pet names in her correspondence. While Chopin was in Paris, she wrote to Albert Grzymala: “I miss him as much as he misses me. I need to keep an eye on him as much as he needs me to look after him. I miss his face, his voice, his piano, his sad little moods, and even the heartrending sound of his cough. . . . I’ll never fail him, you can be sure, and my life is forever devoted to him.”144 With the pianist Ignaz Moscheles, Chopin gave a recital for Louis-Philippe and his family at Saint-Cloud in October 1839. In 1841, after being out of the public eye for six years, he had a hard time making up his mind to give a concert at the Pleyel concert hall and then imposed such conditions that Sand wrote: A great, really great piece of news—the little Chip Chip is going to give a grrrrrreat concert. His friends have so stuffed his head with the idea that he let himself get talked into it . . . and there’s nothing funnier than seeing the finicky, irresolute Chip forced not to change his mind anymore. . . . This chopinesque incubus will take place at the Salle Pleyel on the 26th [of April]. He doesn’t want any posters, he doesn’t want any programs, he doesn’t want a big audience. He doesn’t want people talking about it. He is afraid of so many things that I’ve told him to play without candles on a silent piano, and without anyone in the audience.145

The concert, for which Chopin played several of his own compositions,146 was a great success: Franz Liszt wrote an enthusiastic review in the Revue et Gazette Musicale of 2 May. A few days later Sand wrote to Hippolyte Chatiron: “Chopin made it possible to

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loaf around all summer long by giving a concert where, in two hours and two brilliant executions, he pocketed some 6,000 francs plus a few hundred more amid shouts of bravo, encore, with the prettiest Parisiennes wildly stamping their feet.”147 Chopin did a repeat performance the following year, with the same success,148 and along with Pauline Viardot, the concert singer of international repute who was the daughter of the Spanish tenor Manuel Garcia, the sister of Maria Malibran, and one of the artists that Sand most admired and loved.149 In August 1842 Pauline and her husband, Louis Viardot, who directed the Théâtre-Italien made a long stay at Nohant. Maurice was then busy painting a copy of a portrait of Saint Anne by his master Delacroix that would wind up in the church of Nohant. Solange was out of school for the summer. They spent their days making music and, on Sand’s advice, running around the countryside to listen to the chants and tunes of Berrichon folklore, the “solemn and melancholy chant this place’s ancient tradition passes on . . . to the [plowmen],”150 or the bourrées played on bagpipes and hurdy-gurdies to which people danced in the nearby villages. As Sand observed in Consuelo, There is music that one could call natural because it is not the product of science and reflection, but of an inspiration that escapes the grandeur of rules and conventions. That is folk music: of peasants in particular. What beautiful poems are born, live, and die among them, without ever having had the honor of being correctly noted. . . . The unknown artist who improvises his rustic ballad while watching his sheep or pushing his plow . . . will have a hard time remembering his fleeting thoughts precisely. . . . That’s why these pastoral songs and ballads get lost for the most part. . . . The musicians who know the rules of music don’t bother to collect them.151

In the fall of 1843 Sand and Chopin moved from the rue Pigalle to 5 and 7 square d’Orléans. Maurice and Solange had rooms there as well. As Sand recalled in Story of My Life,

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The kind and active Marliani [the wife of the Spanish consul] had arranged our family life. . . . We had dinner at her place all together, sharing the cost. It was a fine association, a bargain like all associations, and it allowed me to see lots of people at Madame Marliani’s house, my friends more privately at my place, and to get to work when I felt like being alone. Chopin too was delighted to have a lovely, secluded living room where he could go compose or dream. . . . Maurice had his own rooms and his studio on the floor above me. Near me Solange had a pretty little room where she loved to act like a lady . . . on the days when she was free to leave [her boarding school].152

For three years Sand and Chopin went back and forth between Paris and Nohant. What beautiful summers when music and literature were in constant dialogue! Under Sand’s guidance, “Chopin who runs from success, Solange the quibbler, Bouli [Maurice] the child of nature,”153 Pauline and Louis Viardot, who soon had a little girl, and with them Sand’s childhood friends from Berry would spend hours eating, swimming in the Indre, amusing themselves with a few memorable pranks, for example, Sand’s maid-servant passing herself off as her mistress for some unwelcome visitors,154 or the imitations done by Chopin, who would mimic friends they had in common, musicians he knew, or even certain typically Polish characters.155 In addition to long walks through the Vallée-Noire, they also made a few short trips, on horseback or by carriage, to Gargilesse, Crozant, Chateaubrun, Dun-le-Palestel, Éguzon, or the ruins of the abbey of Fontgombault. Sand would sometimes read excerpts from the novels she was writing or Chopin would sit down at the piano. At night, when the house fell silent, she would go on writing for hours on loose-leaf paper or in notebooks of her own making. There was painting as well. Eugène Delacroix, “the greatest painter of the time,”156 who had been friends with Sand since painting his first portrait of her in 1833, would come down to see the “artists” in Berry. After having done the magnificent portraits of Sand and Chopin in 1838,157 a few pastels and pencil drawings,

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including one of Maurice lying on his belly and drawing, Delacroix painted a corner of the garden, and subsequently, on a canvas slip belonging to the mistress of the house, an Education of the Virgin at Nohant in 1842. He returned the following summer, in 1843, and did, in particular, studies of flowers.158 At Nohant, “a rustic nest where all the ranks are not yet mixed up enough for my own taste, and from which the prevailing social virtues are banished,”159 Sand’s old dream came true for a moment, the dream of a community of artists drawn together in every possible way, through taste, temperament, and political convictions, and living out of a common purse, as they had at the square d’Orléans. Consuelo most clearly springs from this passionate desire. The novel also illustrates an exceptional sensitivity to song and voice, plus a rare knowledge of music and its vocal repertory. Composed of memories and dreams, powerfully informed by meditations on philosophy and religion, music and politics, this masterpiece began appearing in installments in February 1842. It was dedicated to Pauline Viardot, “my dear Consuelo,”160 who directly inspired this portrait of a female artistic genius. Consuelo and its sequel, The Countess von Rudolstadt [La comtesse de Rudolstadt], take place between 1742 and 1755 in Enlightenment Europe. The heroine is a girl of humble origins, “with good Spanish blood,”161 whose exceptional musical gifts lead to a career as an opera singer. Written in four parts, the novel’s fresco begins in Venice, where Consuelo sings Pergolesi’s Salve Regina, and continues at the castle of the Giants in Bohemia where Albert von Rudolstadt, an inspired madman, falls in love with her; it also takes byways to Vienna, then to Berlin and Prague. After thousands of adventures, Consuelo finally meets up once again with Albert von Rudolstadt, who has never ceased to feel infinite love for her. Music is everywhere in the novel. People sing, are moved by the admirable voices of a few great artists of the time, compare the creations of the most famous composers, and the young Haydn has a brief role as the young woman’s mischievous traveling companion. At the end, with her husband and two children, Consuelo decides to go back out on the road: “Life is a voyage with life as its

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goal,”162 the narrative voice concludes on an optimistic note. “What talent, Christ almighty! what talent! that’s what I shout out, every now and then,”163 Flaubert wrote, rereading the novel in December 1866. In May 1846, when Chopin left for Nohant in order to finish up a few compositions, the tensions multiplied. For quite some time Sand had felt deeply disappointed by this romance, which had gradually become a heavy chain for her.164 To Albert Grzymala, in whom she had confided about her relationship with Chopin from the start, she wrote: “The disease gnawing at this poor creature’s mind and body has been killing me for a long time, and I see him going away without ever having been able to do him any good, since it is his restless, jealous, and testy love for me that is the main reason for his sadness. Seven years long I’ve lived like a virgin with him and the others. I’ve grown old prematurely, and even without any effort or sacrifice, since I was so weary of passion and incurably disillusioned.”165 The attitude of Sand’s children further complicated a situation they had known since childhood. Now twenty-two, Maurice meant to be the master of Nohant and scarcely tolerated Chopin’s (timid) interference in this matter. Solange, who was eighteen, had an ambiguous relationship with her mother’s companion: Chopin was obviously charmed by the girl whom her mother considered lazy and vindictive, as the letters addressed to her as “fatty” or “Mademoiselle Margot” had long demonstrated. Sand had asked Chopin to moderate his “exclusive and jealous passion”166 for her, to send away his Polish servant and to stop entertaining a few indelicate Polish guests at Nohant. Her socialist friends, worker-poets, compagnons or members of craftsmen’s associations, and various sympathizers were not Chopin’s favorites. Delacroix also complained about them. The publication, in March 1846, of Lucrezia Floriani did not help matters. As she would do elsewhere, Sand created a kind of auto-fiction where it is not hard to recognize a few members of her entourage. Weak and whimsical, Prince Karol who pursues the actress Lucrezia with his jealous love naturally brings Chopin to mind. Yet one has to believe Sand when, defending herself in Story

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of My Life for drawing (only) the portrait of Chopin, she asserts: “Nature does not draw the way art does, however realist it may be.”167 When Chopin left Nohant at the end of the summer, his relationship with Sand was at the point of death. In Paris he saw his students and musician friends with pleasure, including the cellist Auguste Franchomme for whom he composed a few uncommonly beautiful pieces for cello and piano. He met Jane Stirling, who would be his muse for the last three years of his life. Solange soon fell in love with a local squire from Berry, Fernand de Preaulx, and there was talk of marriage. In February 1847 Sand and her daughter posed in the Paris studio of the sculptor Auguste Clésinger, who, at the age of thirty-three, was enjoying a solid reputation. He made a quite beautiful bust of Sand and a molding of her arm, both of which are now at the Musée de la vie romantique in Paris. Solange fell in love with Clésinger, broke up with Preaulx in despair,168 and decided to marry the artist despite warnings from her mother and the unsavory information Sand had gathered about him. “Instead of a modest and sweet marriage, [Solange] has chosen a brilliant and scorching one,”169 remarked Sand, who feared that “pride plays a bigger role in her life than tenderness and devotion.”170 Yet to Maurice she confessed that Clésinger’s resoluteness, “that intense willpower, indefatigable and unfailing, astonishes and greatly pleases [me].”171 The wedding was celebrated at Nohant on 19 May, with the bride’s father present. Sand gave her daughter a generous dowry as well as the elegant Parisian house known as l’hôtel de Narbonne, 89 rue de la Harpe, where the young couple would live.172 Chopin did not attend the ceremony, but he supported Solange against her mother, despite his dislike for the sculptor. In July he wrote Sand a letter (destroyed) in which he criticized her attitude toward Solange and said he wanted to distance himself from Sand. She made a brief reply, expressing her astonishment at “this bizarre end to nine years of exclusive affection.”173 In the course of a short visit to Nohant from Solange and her husband in July 1847, a violent scene erupted. “A joker like Dumas, and like him deep in debt,”174 Clésinger proposed that his

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mother-in-law take out a mortgage on Nohant and give him some 24,000 francs that he needed to pay off debts. When she protested, he accused her of having made him think she was richer than she actually was and wound up threatening her with a gun. Maurice intervened when Clésinger punched her right in the chest. The priest and the painter Eugène Lambert, one of Maurice’s friends, also got in the act and tried to calm the sculptor down: “Can you imagine such scenes at Nohant, in my family, with my temperament, and those of Maurice, Augustine, and Lambert? in front of the priest, and with some of the servants forced to step in?”175 Sand asked one of her correspondents. The break was definitive; the couple left Nohant, never to return. It was a big shock. Sand found herself alone, once and for all separated from Chopin and at odds with a daughter whom she found most ungrateful. Plus, the wedding plans of her second cousin, Augustine Brault, came to an abrupt halt. Sand had got it into her head that she should marry first Maurice, then the painter Théodore Rousseau, who spending a few days at Nohant had painted something on this motif.176 When this plan came to naught, Sand blamed her daughter’s little schemes.177 “This year 1847,” she wrote to Guiseppe Mazzini, “[may be] the most troubled and painful in my whole life.”178 In a very long letter to Emmanuel Arago she retraced the history of her difficult relationship with her daughter, detailed the dreadful scene that had just taken place, and marveled at Chopin’s unfailing support of Solange, even though she had precipitated their breakup: “I know I was . . . the tenderest, the weakest, and the most good-natured [of mothers]. I worked like a slave to satisfy a taste for luxury that was certainly not mine. . . . I yielded to everything; I was her lady’s maid, her seamstress, her jockey, her hairdresser, her walking companion, going out, coming back in, staying home, paying, sewing, working day and night, being a slave to her whims, and never knowing how to refuse or punish.” Then, with regard to Chopin, she declared: “For me, good riddance! the chain is broken! Never succumbing to his narrow-minded and despotic spirit, but always chained by my pity and the fear of

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making him die of heartache, for nine long years I was brimming with life and bound to a cadaver.”179 To which Emmanuel Arago replied: “Solange really only loves herself; she sees things just in relation to herself, and wants nothing more than seeing everything going out from her and coming back to her. . . . For several years Chopin found her fascinating and gladly put up with things from her that would have exasperated him from anybody else. I saw, saw, really saw, that he had deep feelings for her. . . . What should you do? Nothing—What should you say? It’s bad for him, much more so than for you.—The chain was weighing on you: now it’s no more.”180 A year later, in March 1848, Sand ran into Chopin by accident, in the stairs to Charlotte Marliani’s apartment. He told her about the birth of little Jeanne Clésinger, who would die a few days later. Sand did not know a thing about it. After a harrowing concert tour in England in the spring of 1849 Chopin died in Paris on 17 October from tuberculosis, a disease from which he had suffered his whole life long. Auguste Clésinger made his death mask and took a molding of his hand, both of which are at the Musée de la vie romantique. Thanks to a collection organized by Delacroix, Solange’s husband also sculpted Chopin’s funerary monument at the Père-Lachaise cemetery. As Sand wrote to Pierre-Jules Hetzel, “This death has affected me deeply. . . . Up there or down in that other place . . . , he’ll remember that for nine years I looked after him better than most people look after their own son; that I sacrificed some excellent and honest relationships to his jealousy, his whims; that my heart suffered for loving him, during these nine years. . . . After which I no longer want anything to do with that bitter life full of duplicity, ingratitude, and revolting injustice.”181 Later on, in Story of My Life, Sand would draw a much more nuanced portrait of Chopin; the memory of the musician who was “modest by principle and sweet by habit, but . . . imperious by instinct and full of legitimate pride”182 opens and closes this great narrative of the self that she began writing in 1847. There she evokes “years of tenderness, trust, and gratitude that one hour of injustice or turmoil has not canceled out.”183 In a text dated 1841

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Sand found just the right words for Chopin’s exceptional talent as a performer and his genius as a composer: “And then the blue note sounds, and we are in the azure of a transparent night. . . . A sublime song rises in the air. The master knows just what he is doing. . . . He knows that music is a human impression and a human manifestation. It is a human soul thinking, a human voice expressing itself. It is man in the presence of his emotions, translating them by the feeling they inspire.”184

Combat Marked by Sand’s relationship with Chopin and her friendship with the opera singer Pauline Viardot, the 1840s put music at the heart of Sand’s life more clearly than at any other time. These were also years of combat that made Sand a true militant, and outside of this context her novels can be only superficially understood. In her writing Sand continued to express convictions directly inspired by Pierre Leroux, who was still her mentor—she dedicated Spiridion to him185—and by a resolutely social Catholicism. As Consuelo and many other Sand novels of the period bear witness, her political vocabulary remained deeply marked by a religious vision. “The voice of the people is the voice of God,”186 proclaimed Leroux in one of his slogans much appreciated by Christian Romanticism to which Victor Hugo and Lamartine adhered as well. Why did Sand never stop pleading for different political principles, a different form of government, a different society? First of all, an element of personal history, of which she was terribly proud: “As for me, there’s no bourgeois blood in my veins. I am the daughter of a patrician man and a Bohemian woman. . . . I’ll stand with the slave and the Bohemian woman, and not with kings and their henchmen.”187 She had a “great love for all humanity,” then a “feeling of human fraternity,” “the dream of a better society”188 for those whom she would henceforth call “the proletarians,” peasants, artisans, and workers, men and women. The words say it: while

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for Sand politics was reflection and strategy, that is, “ideology” in the wake of Rousseau and all those whom Pierre Leroux rallied around “socialism,” a term of his own invention, it is also affection, sympathy, compassion. Its guiding ideal was an old dream shared by the children of the Revolution, meaning equality hand in hand with fraternity. More and more preoccupied with independence and freedom of expression, Sand would found a literary review and help create an opposition newspaper in Berry. The press had begun to play a considerable role in people’s lives. When Émile de Girardin established La Presse in 1836, the first penny press daily, France was once and for all plunged into the era of mass media. The role that newspapers, big or “little,” played in spreading information and ideas kept growing and growing. Sand knew this, since she had cut her teeth on a little satirical paper and published most of her novels in installments in newspapers and magazines. Her relationship with the director of the Revue des Deux Mondes had been steadily running out of steam for some time. The reasons for this were directly related to Sand’s openly socialist politics, which François Buloz did not care to endorse in the Revue under his management. During the summer of 1841, as was her habit, Sand gave Buloz the manuscript of her new novel Horace. It took place in Paris at the beginning of the July Monarchy, with a few workers and students criticizing the government, deploring the massacre that had taken place in the rue du Cloître Saint-Méry, and calling for resistance. “Given the state of the nation and the work of secret societies, it would be unwise and perhaps culpable to throw the restive masses something so easy to exploit,”189 Buloz wrote to Sand. He proposed changes to the manuscript, which was nothing out of the ordinary, but he also suggested cutting certain passages. At first Sand could not believe it, and then she got furious. “I do not want to change it. No, a hundred times NO,”190 she replied. Soon she severed her contract with the Revue des Deux Mondes and broke off all dealing with Buloz. From this falling-out there emerged a project: creating a literary review less sympathetic to the Parisian intelligentsia and

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the government, freer in tone, and more open to social questions. To this end Sand first assessed her financial situation, then made contact with a few loyal friends, and wound up finding the necessary funds. Pierre Leroux, Louis Viardot, and Sand, “in agreement on everything as though we were one,”191 would be the directors. “This time finally, . . . I can unburden myself with the hope of being heard and not being a lone voice amid society’s hullabaloo,”192 she wrote to Scipion du Roure. The first issue of La Revue Indépendante appeared in November 1841, and it contained the first chapter of the novel that Buloz had refused, plus an article on proletarian poetry that Sand signed with the name of Blaise Bonnin, a fictional peasant from Berry who would make several other appearances later on. Proletarian poetry had been encouraged by the recent creation of journals such as La Ruche Populaire, L’Union, or L’Atelier. There men and women of humble origins published their poems and requested the patronage of men of letters of the time. The latter would advise them, help them find publishers, and sometimes write a preface to their works. Sand admired the poems of Charles Poncy, a bricklayer from Toulon with whom she would remain friends for the rest of her life, and she agreed to preface his publications. She also supported artisans and workers with the names Gilland, Magu, Reboul, Vinçart, and Adélaïde Bousquet. Her admiration for proletarian poetry fortified her views on the “naturally” poetic nature of “proletarians” and the “primitive” dimension of their talent. She asserted in her article on the subject: “Hégésippe Moreau . . . and many others have taught us that the people, the proletarians, have every kind of talent, all sorts of genius. How fortunate this country would be if it knew how to stimulate the greatest possible issue from all its children, according to the natural gifts of each and every one.”193 The case of Agricol Perdiguier, a carpenter from Avignon, compagnon du Devoir and the author of the Livre du compagnonnage [Book of Craftsmen’s Guilds] published in 1839, is not the same. With him Sand learned how craftsmen’s associations worked, and about their history and traditions. Her taste for secret societies, the Illuminati,

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the Freemasons, and the Carbonari, was rekindled. This inspired her to write the Companion of the Tour de France [Compagnon du tour de France], which appeared in 1840. With her hero, the carpenter Pierre Huguenin, who is in love with Yseult de Villepreux, she drew for the first time a worker’s portrait in a novel and declared in the preface: “A worker is a man just like any other . . . , and I’m really astonished this still astonishes some people. You don’t have to have the baccalaureat [national diploma required for entering the French university system] to know as much as everybody else with the diploma. . . . This so-called inferiority of race or sex is a prejudice that today doesn’t even benefit from the excuse of sincerity.”194 The novel did not get good reviews. Proponents of laissez-faire economics and supporters of Bonaparte criticized its didactic dimension and ideological biases, while Marie d’Agoult wrote an acidic review in La Presse. Horace, Sand’s next novel, did not fare any better, which made Balzac write, with a lot of exaggeration: “Nobody at all wants anything more by G[eorge] Sand since her last productions have come out. . . . The Companion of the Tour of France has been her death.”195 The first number of La Revue Indépendante was a great success, and at the end of 1841 Sand wrote to Théodore de Seynes: “My role as editor and also Leroux’s focus on the intellectual and spiritual side of things, but since this review has in the end been created by our feelings and opinions, we want it and our ideas to succeed. . . . I think we’ll manage to do something conscientious and serious that will bear fruit. My novels will only be the hype to pull in the idle strollers . . . , they’ll keep things going, and the primary goal of the review, which is to speak freely and openly to sympathetic souls, will be achieved if God is willing . Up to now the machine is running fine, and there are tons of subscribers.”196 The second thing on Sand’s agenda was to get an opposition newspaper going. This project was set in motion by a case that in July 1843 signaled her first political move, strictly speaking. A feeble-minded girl of fifteen in the care of the nuns of La Châtre had been deliberately abandoned out in the countryside; after wandering around for several weeks and falling victim to vagabonds,

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she was finally found, and it was clear that she was pregnant. Sand decided to lodge a protest straightaway in La Revue Indépendante, first, by writing an article signed Blaise Bonnin, accusing the Mother Superior of the institution where Fanchette had been placed as well as the administration that had covered for her; second, by publishing a short statement signed with her own name this time, in which she denounced the failings of the administration at all levels. Finally, Sand placed these texts in a brochure and put it on sale, with all the profits going to the girl’s benefit. Despite a swell of opinion in Fanchette’s favor, the crown prosecutor of La Châtre lifted all sanctions against the religious institution. Plus, in a letter that he asked La Revue Indépendante to publish, he accused Sand of turning the affair into a novel. She replied in no uncertain terms: “If Fanchette, already feeble-minded, has not gone mad . . . , if she is infected with the shameful wounds of debauchery and prostitution, whose fault is it? And there are no guilty parties? and your finding that there were no grounds for prosecution in this deplorable event is not clear proof to the contrary? . . . and I’ve been making a novel out of this? Ah! then you’re doing the same thing yourself! if that’s a reason for shame, drink it down.”197 During the Fanchette affair which she would recall in her novel Jeanne, published in 1844,198 Sand saw how difficult it was to express her ideas and to get them in print except through her own review. “Events of the same kind,” she observed, “and even more dreadful, are often repeated right in front of our eyes . . . , without . . . public indignation finding a means of complaint.”199 Convinced that Berry needed an opposition newspaper, she started collecting funds, finding collaborators, setting up a board of directors, and convincing a trustworthy printer to join in; she wound up accepting the help of Pierre Leroux and his brother, who were working as printers in nearby Boussac. Sand had perfectly clear ideas about what she wanted to do: “[I] love journalism, especially the provincial sort. There’s more loyalty, more independence, more of a future in it. . . . This mustn’t be Mr. So and So’s paper, even less George Sand’s. . . . It has to be the chorus of the sacred battalion, and that those who only read

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the paper participate in its philosophy just as much as those who write it; we’ll make a proclamation of all this at the start, using all the right words.”200 It was a done deal by 1 September 1844, when there appeared the first number of L’Éclaireur, Journal des Départements de l’Indre, du Cher et de la Creuse, printed at La Châtre, with the republican journalist Victor Borie as editor in chief. Two thousand francs per year were put to use for a weekly paper with twenty-five shareholders. The paper bluntly stated that it was created in opposition “to our local authorities who are now possessed of . . . revolting insolence and immorality.”201 In the third number Sand wrote an open letter “To the Founders of L’Éclaireur de l’Indre” in which she defined the relationship she meant to have with the paper and reaffirmed her faith in a society “founded on principles very different from those now governing society.”202 The Revolution of 1848 would be the end of L’Éclaireur, its last number appearing in July. La Revue Indépendante met the same fate. From this point on Sand had two forums of very different kinds for expressing her ideas. Literature and politics combined perfectly in her mind, and she was eager to put her talent and fame as an author to work in order to realize a passionate hope, the “dream of a better society,”203 with all it implied. Sand had a keen sense of history, with a vivid perception of the moment when change might become possible, plus a remarkable understanding that it takes time for mentalities to evolve. Since mentalities curb change rather than encouraging it, one could not, she thought, try to force fate at all costs. Often bold political moves grind to a sudden halt because the people who undertook them had misjudged people’s state of mind. While awaiting some rare conjuncture that might allow major changes to take place, one must still work to reform everything limiting the rights, too scarce, of some and promoting the power, too great, of others. In the article entitled “La politique et le socialisme”204 she wrote: “We agree to call politics an entirely material action exercised by society to modify and improve its institutions; socialism, an entirely scientific action exercised on people so that they want to reform social institutions.”

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Before the Revolution of 1848 Sand multiplied her support for all criticism of the existing government; she called for “democracy,”205 demanding respect and consideration for the proletarians, the life force of the nation, and most particularly for the peasants. Sand was one of the only writers of her generation who really knew the “milieu” that made up the greatest part of the population of France. It is quite enough to compare Balzac’s The Peasants [Les paysans] with Sand’s The Master Pipers [The maîtres sonneurs] to see everything separating a writer who tends to see peasants as nothing more than ignorant schemers and one who takes an interest in all the players on the rural scene, their habits and customs, their way of living and thinking. Blaise Bonnin had defended Fanchette in La Revue Indépendante. He would reappear in L’Éclaireur to explain why the peasants lived in such wretched conditions: I don’t know how it started, but with the Empire, the Restoration, and even more with the recent Revolution of 1830, feudalism, the tithe, serfdom, and even the corvée . . . , all that fell back on us. . . . Feudalism is the absolute power of the “haves” over the “have-nots.” Taxes are only for the benefit of the rich. . . . Serfdom is the state of our wretched lives, and it puts us at the mercy of the bourgeois usurer, the bourgeois farmer, the bourgeois or nonbourgeois proprietor; and the corvée is service in kind for the so-called public good!206

Formulated in “simple” words, Bonnin’s words indict daily hardships, governmental measures without any real effect, and the urgent need for education at the lowest levels of society. At the same time Sand was actively campaigning for “the nearly free distribution of good books,”207 a project that would be fine-tuned several times without ever amounting to anything. Were her readers fooled by this voice in male disguise and the new pseudonym of Blaise Bonnin? In L’Éclaireur de l’Indre Sand took care to specify: “The pseudonym concealing someone’s sex is no mystery for anyone who has paid some attention to what we’ve

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written. We do not acknowledge some innate superiority in the other sex; but we certainly have to acknowledge the consequences of the incomplete education we’ve received. . . . Nothing replaces, in the life of women, that fundamental education, that Minerva armed to the teeth that Diderot says springs out of the young high school graduate’s brain to combat his first impressions, his first errors.”208 And she added: “In our eyes, the cause of women and the cause of the people are strikingly similar, and that seems to make them stand together in solidarity.”209 Sand was not the only one to imagine a “natural” alliance between those whom society ignored, exploited, and mistreated. The Saint-Simonians thought the same thing, as well as a few others associated with 1840s socialism, Flora Tristan, for example. She connected with Sand in 1844 while starting her tour of France in hopes of creating the “workers’ union” she so wanted to see. In the midst of her travels she would die of exhaustion in Bordeaux. “She is an active woman, courageous, I think sincere, but brimming with pride and confidence in the infallibility of her socialist discoveries that are just childish nonsense,”210 Sand noted to one of her correspondents, regretting that the author of the Peregrinations of a pariah [Pérégrinations d’une paria] thought she had a monopoly on defending the “proletarian classes.”211 In the same period Sand was briefly in touch with Pauline Roland, a feminist socialist who collaborated on Pierre Leroux’s Revue Sociale and who would be deported to Algeria after the coup d’état of 1851.212 During these intellectually and politically productive years Sand did not stop turning out novels, far from it. She often said it was her nature to write novels and tell stories for fun, but not any old way, not just to entertain herself and her readers. The “mission” of the writer, whom Victor Hugo saw as a prophet, a visionary leading and enlightening the people, was to make all kinds of literature into a forum for expressing thoughts about society, its history and workings, and also about what would be needed to transform society. Sand’s novels are resolutely utopian, especially in this period. Stemming from her political convictions and not from some taste

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for fantasy and science fiction, this dimension of her work is based on careful observation of reality, without which there is no political thought. Consequently, there is no vague idealism, irrepressible naiveté, or nonchalant sentimentality in her novels, as some would later charge. Her objectives are clearly defined, her ambitions precisely laid out, and her reasons explained a hundred times over. All this is combined with a great narrative mastery, with its rebounds, pauses, surprises, and a gallery of “typical” characters—except that there is always a very well-educated young woman and a young man who is sensitive to the temperament of the woman who seems like his equal right from the start. This blending of utopian thought and realism gives her novels a particular intensity that resonates with the novels of Victor Hugo, Eugène Sue, Alphonse de Lamartine, or Alexandre Dumas fils when they tackle the “social question” and work it into their fiction. In January 1845, The Miller at Angibault [Le meunier d’Angibault] started appearing, despite various problems,213 in installments in La Réforme. Set in the Vallée-Noire, this work is reminiscent of Valentine and foreshadows the rustic novels. Through the conversations of Marcelle, an enlightened female aristocrat, Henri, a very well-educated manual laborer from Paris, and Master Louis, a wise and sensible miller, Sand condemns the prejudices linked to sex and social status. At the end, a utopian order has been achieved: the rich and the poor unite, the family comes back together and grows like a community; the evil ones, selfish aristocrats and greedy peasants, are punished. At the same time Sand delivers an excellent analysis of country ways, rural living conditions, the economic problems facing the miller as well as the peasants on whom his business depends. She does much the same the following year with The Devil’s Pool, conceived and written prodigiously fast: “I’ve finished my little novel, I did it in four days. . . . I did it a hundred times faster than I thought I could. It just came,”214 she announced to Anténor Joy, who was in charge of serials at the newspaper L’Époque. Dedicated to Frédéric Chopin, The Devil’s Pool recounts the love between two young peasants from Berry, Germain and Marie, who

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one night get lost in the woods and camp out at a spot known as “the Devil’s pool.” A hemp-beater tells their story at an evening gathering, just as Sand remembered from her childhood: “When the hemp-beaters came to crush [the hemp], . . . half the village wanted to listen to their stories, so they were given a place near the little door of the courtyard looking out on the square.”215 Sand used this model for various reasons: aesthetic—to invent a new style and a new form, political—to preach sexual and class equality, and ethical—to promote kindness and generosity. The language of the tale is plain, full of imagery, dotted with Berrichon dialect. Through these efforts of style whose simplicity masks truly great creativity, Sand meant to “translate” the “ancient and artless language of peasants from these parts.”216 The Devil’s Pool also stems from meditation on folk art and the natural artistic bent of peasants, most clearly expressed in their tales, songs and legends, dances and costumes. In the author’s apostrophe to the reader at the beginning of the tale, Sand redefines her poetics: Certain artists of our day . . . try their best to depict pain, abject poverty, Lazarus’s dung heap. This can be part of art and philosophy; but, by depicting poverty in such an ugly, debased way . . . have they reached their goal, and is the effect salutary, as they would wish it to be?

We believe that art has a mission of feeling and love, that

today’s novel ought to replace the parable and fable of primitive times. . . . Art is not a study of positive reality; it is a search for ideal truth.217

Once Germain and Marie are married, the novel returns to everyday life, ending with a description of the three-day celebrations that weddings in Berry used to be, an ethnographic approach indicating that period’s interest in such matters.218 There follows in 1847 Monsieur Antoine’s Sin [Le péché de monsieur Antoine], which in part reproduces the basic outline of The Miller of Angibault, where a young socialist falls in love with an

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aristocrat, but this time Sand expands her plea for profound reforms from society’s top to bottom. Thus, the hero, Émile Cardonnet, in conversation with M. de Boisguibault, attacks “aristocracy as well as money, big property-owners, the power of individuals, the slavery of the masses, Jesuitical Catholicism, so-called divine right, the inequality of rights and privileges, the base of constituted society, man’s domination of woman, considered a piece of merchandise in the marriage contract and a piece of property in the contract of public morality.”219 The following year these questions would be more than ever in the news.

“A Sort of Statesman”220 Who was George Sand at the beginning of 1848? A public figure, admired by some and harshly criticized by others for having joined forces with the “visionaries,” the socialists and republicans, and without making any secret about it. Sand had not only teamed up with them, but, thanks to the creation of La Revue Indépendante and then L’Éclaireur de l’Indre, she was one of their most active and effective advocates. She did not just keep up with what was happening on the social front, but also wrote novels where her characters discussed political concerns close to her heart. But let there be no mistake. Referring to Monsieur Antoine’s Sin, she observed to Jean Dessoliaire, a tailor and republican activist: “I’ve tried to bring up some serious problems in texts where the frivolous, altogether fantastical form lets the imagination go in search of an absolute ideal without any political drawbacks. . . . The characters just talk on and on, and nothing really matters, it’s like people chatting in front of the fireplace, trying to reckon with the present and the future.”221 Even if it is clear that her political activity influenced her literary career and that her convictions can be found, at least partially, in the words of her characters, Sand still did not confuse the two activities and considered them quite distinct: “A novel is not a treaty,”222 she concluded.

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In 1848, “Madame Sand,” as she was often referred to, was a forty-four-year-old woman with a penetrating gaze, forthright manners, and resolutely simple dress. She had been separated from her companion Chopin for a year and was living alone at Nohant with her son, who would soon turn twenty-five. He shared her political views and intellectual interests, and she often said he was her reason for life.223 Sand was also the mother of a twenty-one-year-old daughter who had married a few months earlier, and from whom she was estranged after a conflict that would never be resolved. As for her private life, she had not concealed from her friends how disillusioned, sad, and deeply discouraged she felt. The joyous optimism that reigns in most of her novels, the declarations of feeling as well as the call for a life that makes sense because of a strong, faithful, and definitive love, the depictions of family as an open association based on the model of the Fourierist phalanstery, where generations and social classes harmoniously mix together, all this had to seem like some fantastic notion, really quite far removed from her own existence. “Love and I haven’t been passing through the same gate for quite a while,”224 she wrote to Emmanuel Arago in 1846. The Revolution of 1848 has generated stories, personal accounts, and analyses galore. To have a precise view of a politically complex moment in which Sand was, for a few months in Paris, one of the privileged actors, one has to go back in history. A very active opposition made up of liberals, Bonapartists, republicans, and socialists wanted this revolution that was precipitated by economic crisis. Discontent with a “citizen-king” and the way he was governing the country had been simmering for years. These feelings had been fanned by a particularly dynamic press opposed to Louis-Philippe, and satirical newspapers constantly undermined the authority of “the pear”225 with tons of caricatures of the king and his ministers. “Someone imagines an ideal; people laugh and forgive him, saying: it’s beautiful, too beautiful. Then time marches on, things happen, and the ideal goes out of fashion,”226 Sand had written to Charles Poncy, the worker-poet whom she had taken under her wing. Then, at the end of February, all of a sudden, the famous

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ideal seemed about to become reality. After a few days of insurrection, barricades, and riots in Paris, Louis-Philippe abdicated. On 24 February the Second Republic was proclaimed, and a provisional government was set in place while a general election was being organized. Several reforms were announced right away: the death penalty for political crimes, slavery, censorship, and debtors’ prisons, these were all abolished. There would be universal suffrage—for men. On 1 March Sand arrived in Paris and moved into a little apartment at 8 rue de Condé, right near the Palace of Luxembourg. There she saw her republican and socialist friends, among them, Louis Blanc, Jean Reynaud, Étienne Arago, and Armand Barbès. The year before, while he was painting the ceiling of the library of the Palace of Luxembourg, Delacroix in his gallery of historical character had modeled Aspasia on Sand. A lovely nod to his artistic friend, a little prophetic sign. Sand soon had a pass from Ledru-Rollin giving her access to all the members of the government. On 4 March, pleased to see the calm reigning over the funerals for the victims of the recent riots, she summed things up for her cousin René de Villeneuve: There’s no reason to regret what we got rid of. Now we’re leaping into the unknown with faith and hope. . . . This republic will not repeat the mistakes and aberrations of the republic you knew [in 1793]. No party has that in mind. The proletarians have been sublimely courageous and gentle. The government is for the most part made up of pure and honest men. I went to make sure of that with my own eyes, since I’m closely associated with several of them. . . . We owe them [the proletarians] for not having let bloody battles go on and on, and the wealthy owe them for having inspired trust and calm in the poor. . . . Don’t stop loving me, even though I’m a republican.227

To her correspondents Sand hailed the advent of the “true republic”228 with enthusiasm, saying again and again that she totally identified with the masses starting on their way to democracy. A

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few days later she was back in Nohant. Maurice had just been elected mayor of the little town of Nohant-Vicq, a position that he would keep for just a few months, and Sand was eager to check that the electoral lists of the department of Indre had at least one candidate who was a worker and another who was a peasant. “This is a difficult pill to swallow for the bourgeoisie,” she noted, “and yet it’s not much at all for the proletarians.”229 She wanted to make sure that people in the countryside did not dismiss the sudden change of regime as some Parisian scheme with which they could not identify and that would be of no benefit to them. This was a tough task, and Sand knew it. Peasants in Berry were naturally suspicious, and the people with power had no intention of sharing it. Yet Sand’s positions were hardly of a sort to reassure moderates. Even if she took care to clarify in private that “the kind of communism preached up until now is not [mine],”230 the term had the same meaning for her as it did for the radical Left. Although she wrote in a text addressed “To the Wealthy” that she did not want to see conservatives waving the word around like a scarecrow, she still maintained that France “was called to be [communist] within a hundred years,”231 meaning perfectly egalitarian, and endowed with a form of government where all the social forces would work together in association.232 She also published several calls to the proletarians, inviting them to be courageous, determined, politically aware, and also to cast their votes: “The present, oh proletarians! you’ve found it: it’s the public forum, it’s liberty; it’s the republican form of government that must be maintained at all costs; it’s the right to think, to speak, to write; it’s the right to vote and to elect representatives, the source of all the other rights . . . ; it’s the right to live; it’s the only way of quickly working toward . . . the miracle of fraternal union that will destroy every false distinction and eliminate the very word of class from the book of a new and different humanity.”233 At the Ministry of Public Instruction Jean Reynaud got her a job writing pamphlets for the masses. The character of Blaise Bonnin was once again enlisted to spread ideas whose force resulted from their “simple” formulation. Speaking in the voice of a Berrichon

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peasant, Sand called for determination, but without impatience, and respect for the rules of democracy; she reminded everybody that the workers in Paris and the peasants were “two men with the same blood and the same heart”234 and that the capital of France could do nothing without support from the provinces.235 She was also entrusted with writing editorials for the official newspaper of the provisional government, the Bulletin de la République. For several weeks Sand contributed actively, albeit anonymously, to the Bulletin. “Here I am . . . doing the work of a statesman,” she wrote to Maurice. “I’ve already written two government circulars today, one for the Ministry of Public Instruction, and one for the Ministry of Internal Affairs.”236 She added: “What’s funny is that all this is addressed to mayors, and you’re going to receive through official channels instructions from your mother. Ah! ah! the Honorable Mayor! You’re going to do things right, and for a start, every Sunday you’re going to read your Bulletins de la République to all your National Guardsmen.”237 Then she started dreaming about another paper. With Louis Viardot’s help this time, she founded La Cause du Peuple with the collaboration of Victor Borie and Théophile Thoré, both staunch republicans.238 “Our home is the public forum, or the press, in short, the soul of the proletariat,”239 Sand repeated. The weekly paper began to appear on April 9, selling for twenty-five centimes, and it took a long time to set the type. There would be only three issues. In La Vraie République Sand also published a series of short articles stating her point of view on the events of the day, sometimes posing as a man or woman of humble origins. Very keen to report as closely as possible the opinions of the people she was defending, she urged them to make their demands known and to take part in political life. “Today,” she wrote in the diary she was keeping at the time, “everything has really changed! [The workers] are involved in politics because politics today relates to work, to workers’ lives.”240 Again at the request of Étienne Arago, who, like the revolutionaries of 1789, saw theater as the ideal means of promoting ideas, Sand had a prologue entitled The King Waits [Le roi attend] performed at the Théâtre-Français, which had been renamed the

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Théâtre de la République. While Louis XIV is kept waiting, which would have been most extraordinary, Molière is musing about monarchy and remarks: “What is a king? A man who has the power to do good, and only then does he stand out from other men.”241 After an imaginary dialogue with great playwrights of the past, Molière ends by saying that the genre of theater and the system of government both need to be changed. The first performance took place on 6 April, and it was free. The entire cabinet was in attendance; Pauline Viardot sang a Marseillaise of her own composition, and the actress Rachel performed the original national anthem. It was a great success. “The most beautiful thing about it was the audience, the workers scrubbed, calm, attentive, intelligent, sensitive, . . . more decent than the season-ticket holders of the Théâtre des Italiens or the Opéra,”242 Sand observed, more delighted by the demonstration of this “fraternal republic”243 that she had so earnestly desired than by her own success. The Bulletin de la République that appeared on 15 April generated a burst of indignation because of the editorialist’s radical opinions, and the political milieu knew just who she was. In this issue, number sixteen, Sand wrote that if the elections were too openly favorable to the bourgeoisie, their results should be tabled. It seemed hard for Sand not to try to stop conservative forces at any cost, even at the risk of jeopardizing the advent of democracy.244 The opposition press flew into a rage, moderate republicans took exception, the caricatures and attacks aimed at Sand multiplied.245 At Nohant a handful of conservatives threatened to break into her house and ransack it; Maurice, dismayed, reported this to his mother. In Paris the situation was becoming worrisome; people were seized with fear; the most insane rumors ran wild: “The National Guard is told that the suburbs are being pillaged; the suburbs hear that the communists are putting up barricades. True histrionics,”246 Sand wrote to her son, who was having trouble getting his town council to accept his views: “Would there be much merit in making revolution if everything were to go swimmingly and we could have success without batting an eye?”247 she asked.

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On 28 April Sand went to City Hall [l’Hôtel de Ville], where she waited to hear the results of the elections that had taken place on the 23rd. She felt reassured by the calm reigning in the streets where political clubs had spontaneously sprung up. The news about the election delighted her: “All the members of the Provisional Government have been elected. Lamartine . . . , Ledru-Rollin . . . , Louis Blanc . . . , Perdiguier was elected in Paris and in Avignon. I hope that Gilland [one of the worker-poets] was elected in his department. Étienne Arago and Barbès have been elected in theirs. I am waiting impatiently for the results from Indre. . . . In short, the Republic will hold its own. But there’ll be really quite a battle to wage, against the bourgeoisie.”248 In truth, it was in particular moderate republicans who had won the day. On 4 May, Richard Monckton-Milnes, an English member of Parliament passing through Paris, organized a “literary luncheon”249 in Sand’s honor. Lamartine, Mérimée, and Alexis de Tocqueville were among the invited guests. A staunch liberal, Tocqueville gives in his Recollections [Souvenirs] an extremely interesting analysis of the period between the first signs of the February Revolution and the fall, in October 1849, of Odilon Barrot’s ministry, of which he was himself a member. He left this description of the famous luncheon: Milnes put me beside Mme Sand; I had never talked to her; I even believe I had never seen her before (for I had not spent much time in the world of literary adventurers that she frequented). . . . I had great prejudices against Mme Sand, for I detest writing women, especially those who systematically disguise the weaknesses of their sex, instead of attracting our interest by showing themselves as they really are; despite this, I liked her. I thought her face looked rather heavy set, but her eyes were wonderful; . . . what especially struck me was finding in her something of the natural bearing of great minds. Indeed, her manners and language were truly simple, while she dressed with perhaps a bit of affected simplicity. . . . For a full hour we talked about public affairs, it being impossible to talk of anything else just then. Moreover, Mme

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Sand was a sort of statesman; what she told me really made an impression; for the first time I was relating directly and familiarly with a person who could and would tell me something about what was going on in our adversaries’ camp. . . . In great detail and with singular vivacity Mme Sand painted for me the state of the workers of Paris, their organization, number, and weapons, their preparations, thoughts, passions, and fearsome determination. I thought she was exaggerating, and she wasn’t; what went on later proved that quite well.250

Even though Tocqueville did not hide his prejudices against women or his great mistrust of the “Montagnards,” he nevertheless recognized that Sand really understood politics. Yet, as a woman, she had no legitimate basis for this. Having no right to vote, she could not aspire to any political office. A few determined women were dreaming of just that for an instant. In the paper that she ran, La Voix des Femmes, the Saint-Simonian Eugénie Niboyet urged Sand to run for the Chamber of Deputies with these words: “The representative around whom we rally is both man and woman: masculine in virility, feminine by God’s intention, by poetry, we mean Sand. . . . She has made herself a man through strength of mind, she has remained a woman by being a mother. Sand is powerful and frightens no one; she’s the one who must be called by the wish of all women for the vote of all men.”251 Women lose their femininity and become like men if they use their minds, or else they are doomed to be double, learned on the one hand and maternal on the other. This is what the feminist Niboyet thought, and it remained one of the most stubborn prejudices, one shared by both men and women. One of Alcide Lorenz’s caricatures in Le Miroir Drolatique sent the same basic message. There Sand is wearing a man’s suit, although the trousers, vest, and frock coat emphasize her womanly shape; she holds a cigarette in one hand (using tobacco seems an obvious sign of transgression); a few titles of novels can be seen on the left; two posters bear the words “Chamber of Deputies” and “Chamber of Mothers.” The caricature carries this ironical caption:

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Si de George Sand ce portrait Laisse l’esprit un peu perplexe, C’est que le génie est abstrait, Et comme on sait n’a pas de sexe.252

Sand’s answer to Eugénie Niboyet’s unexpected invitation appeared the same day in two newspapers directed by friends of hers, Louis Blanc’s La Réforme and Théophile Thoré’s La Vraie République. Her reply was brutal. Declaring that she did not know the ladies who were urging her to run, she hoped that “no elector would want to throw away his vote by yielding to the whim of writing [her] name on his ballot.”253 Yet the significance of the question had not escaped her. A few days later she addressed a long letter to the “members of the central committee” (the committee that nominated possible candidates on the left) in which she justified her refusal to aspire to any form of political power: Must women one day participate in political life? Yes, one day, I think so . . . , but is that day close at hand? No, I don’t think so, and for the condition of women to be so transformed, society must undergo a radical transformation. . . . For that to happen, won’t women have to intervene politically from this day forward in public affairs?—I dare reply that this must not be, the reason being that social conditions are such that women could not honorably and loyally fulfill a political mandate. Women being the wards and dependents of their husbands through marriage, it is absolutely impossible for them to present guarantees of political independence. . . . So it strikes me as nonsense, begging the pardon of the persons of my sex who thought it necessary to proceed in this manner, to begin where one ought to finish, in order to finish apparently where one ought to have begun.254

Sand wanted women to participate in politics, but not before they had gained civil rights. Political rights made no sense to her until the most perfect equality ruled the relationship between men and women in private. At that time, as Sand well knew, women

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of Saint-Simonian inspiration were calling for civil and political rights for all women. They were also refusing marriage and displaying a certain freedom in matters of sexual conduct. For her part, Sand categorically refused that “deplorable whim.”255 She defended marriage and the family, recalling her own experience only to denounce the slavery of the married woman who, physically and psychologically, did not belong to herself.256 She made equality the sine qua non of all other rights and insisted: “The mother of a family, a minor at the age of twenty-four, finds herself in a ridiculous and humiliating position”; as for the rights of men over their wives, she qualified them as “savage, atrocious, antihuman.”257 In a letter to Hortense Allart, politically close to the Doctrinals and the author of an essay entitled Women and Democracy in Our Time [La femme et la démocratie de nos temps], Sand returned to this point: “As for me, I have but one passion, the idea of equality. . . . But it’s a beautiful dream that I won’t see realized. . . . Men aren’t at that point. They are too resentful, too afraid, too petty.”258 Yet Sand was undoubtedly “a sort of statesman” and found herself treated as such. An anonymous caricature depicted her dressed as a musketeer, in profile, with her eyes bulging; in her hair she wore the revolutionary cockade like an ornament, this being a little wink at the famous portrait that Auguste Charpentier had painted of her in 1838. While she lunched with Alexis de Tocqueville, she also met with Alphonse de Lamartine several times. At the start she did not like the poet much and devoted a severe article to his Poetic Meditations [Recueillements poétiques] published in 1841.259 When, in January 1843, Lamartine expressed open hostility toward the policies of Louis-Philippe’s government and announced his plan to unify the Left, she hailed his determination and talents as an orator.260 Upon closer view, she would still judge him too concerned with himself, too convinced of his own superiority. After 1848 the author would strike her as a “ridiculous old Narcissus,”261 an “old schemer,”262 and she would refuse all collaboration with him. Behind a courteous facade the aristocrat from Burgundy was also quite wary of Mme Sand. Like Tocqueville, he was hostile

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to women who left the role that “nature” had assigned them. In his Conversations About Literature [Cours familier de littérature] Lamartine took to task the women who abandoned their children and forgot their saintly mission as mothers in order to go into politics. Sand, immoral and unnatural, had “lost her sex in the fray of genius,”263 he wrote. The same old stubborn argument resurfaces. The political climate was deteriorating day by day. On 15 May the radicals went for broke: the crowd marched into the Palais-Bourbon, and their leaders proclaimed the National Assembly dissolved. This aborted coup d’état led to a series of arrests. Barbès, Blanqui, and Raspail were put in prison. Forcefully disapproving the “deplorable madness” of her “friends in power,”264 Sand feared with good reason that this would harden the positions of the conservatives and the moderate republicans. Dejected, maligned by those who saw a connection between her radical positions and the actions of her friends, she returned to Nohant two days later. For Sand, the revolution was finished, and, for the time being, so was her political activity. As she explained to Hortense Allart, “You are afraid of the republic as I would want it, and I am sadly resigning myself to the republic that you want if the people without enlightenment or enthusiasm decide to make a new lease with the past. Unlike you, I do not worship individual talent to the point . . . of taking proper names as beacons. . . . I appreciate your Guizot’s talent, but I despise him; I read your Thiers with pleasure, but I don’t trust him to make a success of my idea [equality]; and as for my idea, I have devoted my life to it, and I know quite well that it will be the death of me.”265 Soon the specter of civil war gripped people’s minds. Paris was unsettled; the provinces were worried. On 23 June the government decided to dissolve the National Workshops that guaranteed wages for men on public work-sites. In the following days the capital was shaken by violent street battles. A state of siege was declared, and the minister of internal affairs, General Cavaignac, decided to quash the insurrection. More than 5,000 died, thousands were arrested, and a certain number of insurgents were deported to Algeria. From then on the socialists were in the minority, while the

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liberals and the moderate republicans prevailed. As Sand wrote to Charles Poncy, “I was first so overwhelmed with disgust leaving Paris, then with horror learning the dreadful news about the June Days that I got sick and felt brain-dead for several days. I’m on my feet again, but my soul will be forever crushed, for I no longer have any hope for my remaining time on earth.” At the end of the year Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was elected president of the Republic. “Let him frankly admit that he aspires to the throne, and France will see if she wants to reestablish the monarchy for the Bonaparte family,”266 Sand had written a short time before in La Réforme, judging him to be an “enemy of the republican form of government by system and conviction.”267 The candidate trounced his rivals, Cavaignac, Ledru-Rollin, Raspail, and Lamartine. This fine victory astonished everybody, even those who were not in principle against him: “Republicans, legitimists, demagogues, gave him their votes,” Tocqueville remembered, “for the nation was like a panic-stricken flock scattering aimlessly in all directions.”268 As far as Sand was concerned, this election was proof that it was not yet time for an egalitarian and fraternal republic. Yet she was convinced that the people would not long tolerate a “reactionary” leader empowered solely by collective fear. Once again in La Réforme she made this comment on the event: “This enormous majority in favor of the one who among all the parties represents the Republic the least, what does this prove? At first sight, the answer must apparently be this: the majority of the French are not republicans; and this will no doubt be claimed by the party of the reaction. Well, they will be wrong . . . ; the proletarians are republican even so, and it won’t be as easy as one thinks to take their sovereignty away from them.”269 There followed three difficult years of government during which freedom of expression was stifled and the opposition muzzled. To the great displeasure of Sand who was then in regular correspondence with Guiseppe Mazzini, one of the chief actors in the unification of Italy, France rushed to protect the Papal States from Garibaldi’s army. General Oudinot’s division reestablished papal sovereignty on 15 July 1849,

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an outcome that Sand judged “a thousand times sadder for France than for Italy.”270 On 2 December 1851 Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte dissolved the National Assembly and invited the French people to confirm his move by plebiscite. Sand was then in Paris, attending the rehearsals of her play, Victorine’s Wedding [Le mariage de Victorine], at the Théâtre du Gymnase. In the improvised diary that she kept for a few days, she analyzed the situation, observed what was going on in the streets, and noted: “I see the spirit of reaction like blind fate that has to be conquered through time and patience.”271 On 21 December, by an overwhelming majority, Bonaparte’s deeds were confirmed. The Second Republic was dead. Disillusioned, Sand wrote to Pierre-Jules Hetzel: “After all, once the fundamental laws of a republic have been violated, a coup d’état, or to be more precise, a throw of the dice is no longer so illegitimate. With the end of universal suffrage, the right of assembly, and freedom of the press, we weren’t really in a republic anymore, we were being governed by an oligarchy, and I don’t like oligarchies anymore than empires.”272 For a few months 1848 had realized the beautiful political ideal shared by Sand and her republican and socialist friends. The failure was particularly hard, and what followed only confirmed the fears of Sand, who, back at Nohant, kept a close eye on the nation and the strength of the Left. During this year a few family events also took place in the wings. Augustine Brault, the cousin whom Sand had come to see as her adoptive daughter, was married to André-Charles de Bertholdi. To help the young couple get settled, the “godmother” did not hesitate to go into debt. In February Solange delivered a little girl who lived only a few days, and the Clésinger couple ran into serious financial trouble and sold the hotêl de Narbonne that Solange had received as part of her dowry. While Sand’s son shared his mother’s political convictions, her daughter did not. In the course of a long letter explaining her money problems, Solange slipped these words in, sure to get her mother’s back up: “I don’t view the men currently in power as disinterested beings, as citizens devoted body and soul to the good

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of the country. I see famous actors, clever players who forget the whole of the play they’re performing in order to try to take center stage all alone. I confess, I don’t feel much enthusiasm for this republic.”273 In December 1848 Hippolyte Chatiron died of alcoholism, after having vegetated a while somewhere “between idiocy and madness.”274 Once Sand’s rambunctious playmate, and later on more inclined to go out hunting or off to the cabaret with Casimir Dudevant than to remind him of his responsibilities as a husband, “the child of the little house” occupied a strange place in the life of his half sister. His name often showed up in her letters: most often Sand criticized his behavior and pitied his wife for having to put up with a desultory husband, sometimes violent, and excessively fond of drink. In Sand’s letters to Hippolyte, she urged him to mend his ways, all the while assuring him of her unfailing support. During the unforgettable quarrel of July 1847 Hippolyte once again played an ugly part, intent on stirring up Solange’s resentment against her mother. It is clear that he had become much more of a burden than an anchor for his half sister and the people around him. He spent his whole life in an awkward position, being a member of the Dupin family and at the same time an outsider, forever a bastard. The next year one of Sand’s plays was a great success at the Odéon Theater. The actors who loved putting on plays in Sand’s parlor in Nohant inaugurated their new theater. After having talked to Prosper Mérimée, Sand managed to get Nohant-Vicq’s little medieval church with all its frescoes on the national register of historic places. Chopin was dead, Solange gave birth to a second little girl named Jeanne-Gabrielle, and the birth of this child brought Sand and her daughter closer together. In December 1849 two young men arrived in Nohant. The first was a German of commanding presence, a musician who was friends with Pauline Viardot and Hermann Müller-Strübing, of whom Sand seemed quite fond for a brief time. The second was the engraver Alexandre Manceau, one of Maurice’s friends. Thirty-one years old, this man with delicate features, a balding head, and a jolly, conciliatory temperament, would spend the rest

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of his life with the mistress of the house. Her lover, secretary, as well as faithful and diligent factotum, he could organize theater performances at Nohant as handily as trips to Paris or family excursions. Painstakingly recording the activities of the famous woman he loved, he kept diaries from 1852 on, noting day after day and in great detail the slightest doings of the person he invariably referred to as “Madame.” He would do this up to the time of his death.275 During the 1830s Sand had become a novelist and shown a lively interest in political and religious matters. She had separated from her husband and, while her two children were growing up, conducted her love affairs with great freedom. In the 1840s she stepped up the rhythm of her writing and raised her profile. The convictions that echoed through her novels were more markedly socialist, and her presence in the political arena more visible. Chopin’s genius had reigned a moment over Nohant while Maurice was working in Delacroix’s studio and when Solange married the sculptor Clésinger. Sand left behind difficult years during which she, resolutely an artist in her tastes and demeanor, had led all kinds of battles, in politics, literature, and her personal life. In the early 1850s the political battles met defeat, for Sand and all those who shared her views. She still had her “love for work, family, and seclusion,”276 Nohant, Maurice, Solange and her daughter, the friends who had always been there for her and in whose eyes she had nothing to be ashamed of, and, most of all, her immense talent as a storyteller. A thousand projects had taken shape and were now being realized, in novels and in plays, in which Sand was gradually coming to take an avid interest. Parlor theater and puppet theater occupied quite a place as well, mother and son working on them together. As for Alexandre Manceau, he was a thoughtful companion to a woman who knew what she was doing. It would be wrong to think that she was just subjugating a “child.” The obvious discretion of Manceau, of whom Auguste Lehmann penciled a beautiful portrait, cannot be interpreted as lack of character. In truth, they were bit by bit building a solid, mutually fulfilling relationship. Love of their own

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accord, generously given and received, as Sand had always wished. On 7 July 1850 she wrote these words to Pierre-Jules Hetzel: Yes, I’m doing well, and I’m very happy, very happy. I really believe this is the first time in my life that I am conscious of the fact and can just let myself go a bit selfishly. . . . Up to now I had always been so devoted in my affections that I didn’t even dream of asking myself if I was loving for my own pleasure. . . . I didn’t go looking for what I’ve found; maybe I’ve deserved it because I’ve lived so unhappily and so patiently. . . . But, my heavens, it’s so good to be loved and to be able to love totally. . . . I’m forty-six years old, I’ve got some gray hair, and that’s no problem. Older women are loved more than the young ones, I now know this for a fact. It’s not the person who has to last, it’s love. God willing, this one will last, for it is good!277

III

1852–1875 Continuities Just after the coup d’état of 2 December 1851 there were thousands of arrests; attempts at insurrection in the nation’s capital and the great provincial cities were nipped in the bud; and repression hit all levels of society—in particular, Edgar Quinet, Jules Michelet, and Adam Mickiewicz who were sacked from the Collège de France. Sentenced to prison for their political activities, several of Sand’s friends fled France. Pierre-Jules Hetzel took refuge in Brussels, where he remained until 1859, the year when amnesty was declared; Pierre Leroux went to England; Armand Barbès received a life sentence and went abroad as well; even though he was included in the amnesty, he would never return to France and died in Holland in 1870.1 Exiled by the decree of 9 January 1852 along with sixty-five opposition members of the Chamber of Deputies, Victor Hugo left Paris for Brussels and finally the Channel Islands. Enjoying greater visibility than anyone else, he would come to incarnate the opposition to the man he called “Napoléon le Petit” [“Napoleon the Small”]. As he warned in Matters of Observation [Choses vues], “M. Bonaparte should bear this in mind, he won’t get the better of us. . . . We republicans and exiles, we are duty incarnate. M. Bonaparte had better come to terms with it; we’ve waged war against him from the rostrum, we’ve waged war against him in the streets, we’ll wage war against him in the catacombs.”2 Far removed from Hugo’s circles, Sand, like Sainte-Beuve and Balzac, had scarcely expressed any admiration for the poet and

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playwright before this: “I read Ruy Blas [one of Hugo’s plays] out of curiosity,” she had written to Charlotte Marliani in 1839. “How stupid, absurd, insipid, and silly! More than ever pompous and trite!”3 Hugo’s strong resistance to Napoleon, whom he had at first supported, his subsequent exile, the publication of History of a Crime [Histoire d’un crime] and then Napoleon the Small [Napoléon le Petit] in 1852, kindled her interest and sympathy. At that point two of the period’s great authors joined together in unconditional support of resisters and exiles, in defense of a democratic and republican form of government. “Men are evil . . . ,” wrote Sand with regard to recent events. “The idea is good, and it will survive.”4 A few letters exchanged every now and then after 1855 attest to the relationship between the two authors, brimming with respectful and polite formulas, especially on the part of Hugo, who really knew how to turn a compliment and couch his congratulations in verse.5 Even so, Sand did not change her tune: “Lavish words touch me less than true feelings and clear ideas.”6 In 1863 she reviewed a book by Adèle Foucher-Hugo, Victor Hugo According to a Witness of His Life [Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie]; the rather ambiguous article scarcely concealed her feelings about the poet.7 “Hugo,” she wrote later on, “thinks he has breathed new life into language; he has only found ways to express his own genius.”8 During the Second Empire, Sand and Hugo paid homage to each other for essentially political reasons. Sand sometimes appreciated Hugo’s poetry, for instance, his Contemplations,9 although she still considered him “too much the surgeon of his century.”10 Hugo sometimes defended Sand in the press and earned her sincere gratitude.11 Joining together against their common enemies in less symbolic ways, such as paying each other a visit—even though Hugo invited Sand to come see him at Hauteville House12—that would never happen. Still there was respect, real respect, and neither one would try to conceal that fact. “Dear and great spirit, I love and venerate you,”13 the author of Les misérables declared to Sand. Sand managed to meet with Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in order to make personal pleas for republican friends of hers who had

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been sentenced to death, life in prison, or deportation to Algeria. She also pleaded with him by letter, not hesitating to send the prince a “pained supplication”14 in favor of those condemned to death or to appeal for leniency: “Order the release of all my compatriots from Indre. I have many friends among them, but let justice be done for every one.”15 She wrote again to Napoleon’s nephew: “I am not Mme de Staël. . . . If you don’t accept what people call my opinions (a terribly vague word for a mind’s dreams or a conscience’s meditations), I am at least certain that you won’t come to regret believing that my heart is honest and unselfish.”16 She was occasionally given a hearing and received the support of the Count d’Orsay and Prince Jérôme, the cousin of the man who would soon be proclaimed emperor. But more than ever Sand had to face harsh criticism from conservatives who could not pardon her interference in political matters, and from socialists as well. Her adversaries were delighted to add to the list of Mme Sand’s scandals the mad resolve that had seized her at the start of a revolution fortunately nipped in the bud, nor were they about to forgive the infamous Bulletin de la République, where she called for putting the election results on hold if necessary. Printed in the thousands, the pamphlets of Adolphe Chenu (Jérôme Paturot in Search of the Best of Republics [Jérôme Paturot à la recherche de la meilleure des républiques]) and Louis Reybaud (Les Montagnards de 1848) had scathing words for Sand. The caricatures of Tony Johannot and Honoré Daumier in Divorcing Women [Les divorceuses] poked fun at her unseemly ambition. In Les Contemporains, a series devoted to celebrities of the time, Eugène de Mirecourt hailed Sand’s talent in flattering terms, despite his disapproval of her politics: “Bear in mind, Madame,” he wrote, “progress is a slow-growing fruit. You are wrong to join with those who stubbornly attempt to hasten its ripening in a hothouse.”17 Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly sneered later on in The Bluestockings: “If you believe what she says, she’s nothing but a lovely dreamer, virginally pure of everything that she has been raked over the coals for. . . . She has genius, and she has innocence! Genius that we were so quick to buy! Innocence that we don’t buy!

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Now she has both. That’s just as true, by God! as saying that she never wrote Ledru-Rollin’s bulletins!”18 Without irony or insult, certain women took her to task for the same things. In France and elsewhere,19 Sand served as a model who encouraged women to write. One of Alcide Lorentz’s caricatures entitled “Woman of Letters at Work” [“Femme de lettres au travail”] bears this out. It shows an elegant young woman smoking a little clay pipe and holding a pen all the while contemplating an inkpot shaped like George Sand’s head; twenty-some volumes bearing Sand’s name are strewn across the floor. Her politics also met with mixed feelings. Alexandrine de Bawr, the author of several successful novels and plays, paid homage in My Memories [Mes souvenirs] to Sand’s great narrative talents, nonetheless concluding: “Would to God that, instead of making every effort to wage bitter war on every social principle, Mme Sand had devoted her golden pen to the happiness of her fellow creatures! How proud she would have made us to be women, and what gratitude she would have earned from her contemporaries!”20 While she was appealing to the government for moderation, Sand ran into “lots of unpleasantness”21 from the socialists and republicans who considered her dealings with Louis-Napoléon as betrayal. She wrote to Pierre-Jules Hetzel: “From far and wide everybody’s writing to me: You are compromising yourself, you’ve gone astray, you’re dishonoring yourself, you’re for Bonaparte! Appeal and win concessions for us, but hate the man who grants them . . . , that inspires me with profound contempt and disgust for partisan behavior, and I most gladly offer . . . my resignation from politics.”22 There were swarms of accusations and insults, and the press did not want to be left out. In September 1852 Sand asked Émile de Girardin if he would allow her to reply to all this in his newspaper La Presse: I hope you don’t think I get upset about literary criticism, but that you understand I have no wish to undergo more personal abuse. . . . It’s fine with me if journalists bring whatever political

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hatred into their criticism of my ideas, that’s what they have to do, but I don’t want them saying that I’m impertinent, haughty, or crazy. . . . Every Monday these gentlemen have an open forum of invective for spewing their bile, and I don’t know if I wouldn’t be shown the door the day I might want to reply in one paper to the insults made in another one. Would it be indiscreet to ask if it would be a bother for you to let me stick my head out your window to say two words to the folks passing by? . . . Your paper is the only one I read, . . . the only one where I feel I could lodge a personal complaint.23

Her request was immediately granted. Despite Sand’s bitter remarks about these difficult times where “one half of France had denounced the other” and in which “Paris was total chaos, and the provinces a tomb,”24 she still kept busy with literary projects of all kinds. Her fame had not diminished, she had more readers than before, and she would remain one of the great authors of the period for years to come. From a solely literary standpoint, 1848 probably looks more like a brief hiatus—for a few weeks Sand abandoned her many ongoing projects to deal with political matters exclusively and to act on some specific orders from the provisional government—rather than a real interruption. True, there is no doubt that her work bore the mark of a great hope, then profound disappointment, as we shall see. Yet it is important to note that everything that Sand would imagine and publish in the years after the revolution was already under way well before. Her writing reveals a steady rhythm of expansion and transformation, as two big book projects were about to show. The first is the publication of the rustic novels. When Sand published The Devil’s Pool in 1846—the very year that the Englishman William Thoms coined the term “folklore”—she had decided to set her “simple” stories in a Berrichon hamlet, thereby adapting the genre of veillée or after-supper tales traditionally associated with popular or children’s literature. Momentarily dreaming of putting her four rustic novels together in a volume entitled The Hemp-Beater’s Tales,25 she had imagined a peasant narrator telling

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things that he himself had seen. The preface to La petite fadette ends with these words: The hemp-beater, having supped well, and seeing to his right a big pitcher of white wine, to his left a pot of tobacco so that he could fill his pipe whenever he felt like it that evening, told us the following story:

Old Barbeau from La Cosse was doing pretty well, the proof

being his seat on the town council. He had two fields that fed his family and turned a profit to boot. He cut enough hay in his meadows to fill cart after cart, and except for the grass along the edge of the stream choked by the rushes, it was considered first-rate fodder in these parts.

Old Barbeau’s house was well built with a tile roof. The air

was wholesome up on the hill, and there was a garden with a good yield and a vineyard that would take a man six days to work. Down behind the barn he had . . .26

The love stories told by the hemp-beater are all quite similar. The inventive plots all wind up with weddings, the protagonists having overcome differences in rank and fortune to unite with their beloveds. In The Devil’s Pool a young servant marries a rich, widowed peasant; in La petite fadette, published in 1849 and dedicated to Armand Barbès, a very poor girl who is a bit of a fairy (fade in French) marries an identical twin from an affluent peasant family; in François the Waif [François le Champi], published as a volume the following year,27 a “child abandoned in the fields”28 marries the rich peasant woman who took him into her home, a novel loved by Marcel Proust as a child;29 in The Master Pipers, published in 1853 and made up of thirty-two veillées, the humble Brulette, who is first the girlfriend of Joset, a half-wit bagpiper, falls in love with Huriel, a woodcutter’s son, and becomes his wife at the end of the tale. This last novel, the most elaborate of the rustic novels, is Consuelo’s counterpart as far as music is concerned, but this time around Sand’s enthusiastic descriptions are devoted to folk music, with its inspired performers providing the impetus for the action.

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The prefaces to François the Waif and La petite fadette, both written in the form of dialogues, ask two questions: How can one make a literary depiction of “rustic and natural life”?30 What should one write now that the fine dream of an egalitarian society has faded? In the preface to La petite fadette Sand asserts, in the guise of a male writer: “After the dreadful June Days of 1848 I felt troubled and dismayed, down to the depths of my soul, by the storms outside and struggled to rediscover in solitude at least faith, if not tranquility. . . . I humbly confess that the certainty of a providential future cannot preserve an artist’s soul from the pain of living through a here and now that civil war has darkened and torn asunder.”31 In these hard times art acts like a balm, the poetry at its source being the only thing making it still possible to believe in an “ideal.” A bit later, Sand writes: “Let’s ever so gently celebrate such sweet poetry; let’s press it out, like the sap of a salutary herb on humanity’s wounds.”32 The prefaces also advance two premises, already formulated several times over: Sand’s interest in “primitive life” and the superiority of “primitive” art forms over all the others. “Certain Breton laments composed by beggars . . . prove that these simple souls had a more spontaneous and complete appreciation of truth and beauty than the souls of the most famous poets,” she writes in the preface to François the Waif.33 This interest in “primitive art” and, more extensively, in every manifestation of Berrichon country life stems from an exceptional focus on a way of life she had known from childhood.34 It also tallies with the curiosity shared by several artists of the period, such as Gérard de Nerval in his Songs and Legends of the Valois [Chansons et légendes du Valois], plus historians and the first ethnographers. Berry played a significant role in the great wave of conserving, archiving, and collecting every form of folk art. This interest, shared by Sand and many others, got going in Brittany during Napoleon’s Empire and kept on throughout the century. In 1842 Hippolyte-François Jaubert published his Vocabulary of Berry [Vocabulaire du Berry], followed in 1856 by his imposing Glossary of Dialects in Central France [Glossaire des parlers du centre de la France].

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Sand, who later on drew up a lexicon of Berrichon expressions for her own use,35 promptly congratulated him: For a long time I was thinking about doing a study of the grammar and syntax of our idiom, which I pride myself on knowing through and through, plus a dictionary. . . . I also believe that here [at Nohant] we speak pure Berrichon and the most primitive form of French. . . .

I owe you the sincerest praise for rehabilitating and giving

a new luster to our idiom, figures of speech, and some words, native inventions, whose subtlety eludes all translation. Fafiot, fafioter, berdin (I think it should be written bredin because we say beurdin, like peurnez, prenez, bourdouiller, bredouiller, deurser, dresser), give very fine nuances of irony, and I challenge the whole French Academy to find us the equivalent.36

In 1845 L’Éclaireur de l’Indre published Laisnel de La Salle’s Legends and Beliefs of Central France [Légendes et croyances du centre de la France]. Between 1851 and 1855 Sand published in L’Illustration five articles on customs in Berry (especially with regard to weddings, already described in The Devil’s Pool), but also on the specific character of the region and its inhabitants.37 “I was honored or rather gratified to hear sometimes . . . that I had been Berry’s Walter Scott,”38 she recalled, alluding to the great writer’s role in promoting the culture of Scotland. Sand applauded when in 1852 the minister of public instruction decided to collect folk songs. In the past she had invited Chopin and Pauline Viardot to do the same during a visit to Nohant, and she herself had noted on music paper the tunes of some Berrichon songs. She wrote, once again, in L’Illustration: “In our opinion it would be absolutely necessary to publish the musical score. In folk songs the words are so airy that they have no appeal when read, but if you hear them sung, they surprise, charm, or thrill you.”39 Still, as the true creator she was, Sand remembered, observed, and transformed. Characterized as rustic and primitive, the

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hemp-beater’s language is a remarkable work of style. Sand not only incorporated Berrichon expressions—there are about a hundred in La petite fadette: accoté, affener, agasse, amiteux, aumaille, bavousette, bouchure, brebiage, etc.—but also words found in Rabelais and Montaigne, a few deliberate solecisms, and some pure and simple lexical inventions. The syntax is spare, intentionally archaic, and the characters’ speech is sown with plant and animal metaphors. Deeply committed to verisimilitude, the portrait of Berry also displays some metamorphosis through literary creation. “There is no more truth,” Sand declared, “in reality made ugly than in a prettified ideal.”40 That sentence is a good summary of her aesthetics and the ideas she put forward in her letters to Champfleury, who published Miss Mariette’s Adventures [Les aventures de Mlle Mariette] in 1854. A fervent defender of Gustave Courbet, Champfleury was one of the first to make realism into “a war machine” for driving a great modern revolution in the arts. It is worth taking the trouble to understand Sand’s arguments. They demonstrate that her choices were perfectly conscious. A realist when describing the peasant world and an idealist when illustrating her political convictions in the novel, she was also convinced by the need for beauty: art transfigures reality, Sand repeated, and there’s no need to make it ignoble. No doubt such an aesthetic program means that she belonged to the Romantics, from whom the “realists” endeavored to set themselves apart. Yet, more fundamentally, it stems from a deep conviction, even an existential need. Sand, in Story of My Life, formulated it in these terms: Poetry is the condition of my existence, and everything that too cruelly kills the dream of things good, simple, and true, which alone sustain me against the horror of this century, is a torture that I try to dodge as much as possible.

Whenever I’ve had the freedom to choose how to be, I’ve

endeavored to idealize the reality around me and to make it a sort of fictive oasis where evil people and idlers would not be tempted to enter or to stay. A Golden Age dream, a mirage of

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rustic innocence, in art or poetry, has had me in its grip from earliest childhood and followed me into adulthood.41

In October 1858, under the title Country Legends [Légendes rustiques], Sand published another twelve Berrichon legends with resonant names such as The Foolish Stones [Les pierres-sottes], The Women Who Wash by Night [Les laveuses de nuit], The Leader of Wolves [Le meneu’ de loups], The Monk of Étang-Brisses [Le moine des Étangs-Brisses], and Hobgoblins [Les flambettes].42 She felt it was urgent to write them down before they were totally forgotten. As she wrote to Maurice, “These things get lost as peasants become enlightened, and it is good to save a few versions of this great poem of the supernatural from oblivion, fast upon us. Humanity fed on the supernatural for such a long time, and while country folks don’t know it, they are its last bards nowadays.”43 Maurice, nicknamed “Bouli,” who “want[ed] only to be a painter,”44 had shared his mother’s interest in Berrichon folklore for a long time. Since childhood he had been drawing pictures of Berry (and visitors to Nohant), and he went on capturing with the stroke of a pencil everything that struck his eye. With Sand’s enthusiastic recommendations, he gradually earned a reputation as an illustrator. The Berrichon countryside, peasants at work, oxen with all their trimmings, seasonal occupations, the music of bagpipes and hurdy-gurdies, the bourrée and other traditional dances, the cabbage festival, the fairgrounds, as well as the legends still being recounted became the subject of lots of drawings, many of which appeared in the press. Maurice, who had studied with Delacroix, also made oil paintings of the same subjects. At the Salon of May 1853 and again in 1857 he exhibited Berrichon Mule-drivers [Muletiers berrichons].45 Even though he was not uncommonly talented, Maurice shared the interests of his time. His productions were contemporary with Millet’s The Winnower [Le vanneur], Sheaf-Makers [Botteleurs], and Women Gleaning [Glaneuses]. (The resemblance between Sand’s “filthy peasants” and the Barbizon painter’s “innocent convicts” did not escape Huysmans, who considered them equally

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“contrived.”46) Maurice provided the artwork for his mother’s articles in L’Illustration as well as her Country Legends. The original wash drawings are hanging in the dining room at Nohant. Story of My Life is the second undertaking that kept Sand busy before and after the revolution. On the advice of Pierre-Jules Hetzel, she began writing her autobiography in April 1847. In December of the same year she confided to Charles Poncy: “I’ve taken on a long-term project entitled Histoire de ma vie. It’s a series of things remembered, professions of faith, and meditations. It will all be framed with fairly poetic and very simple details.”47 This was an extraordinary gesture. Aside from a few memoirs published by female aristocrats during the Restoration—for example, Félicité de Genlis’s Unpublished Memoirs on the Eighteenth Century and the French Revolution [Mémoires inédits sur le dix-huitième siècle et la Révolution française] in 1825—women had never launched into some great “story of myself” like Rousseau in his Confessions, Chateaubriand in his Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb [Mémoires d’outre-tombe] or Dumas in his Mémoires. (Stendhal’s unfinished autobiography, The Life of Henri Brulard [Vie de Henri Brulard], would not be known until the end of the century.) Her work had scarcely begun when Pierre-Jules Hetzel started seeking a publisher for this ambitious project. Initially thought to be as long as Lamartine’s eight-volume History of the Girondins [Histoire des Girondins], it would turn into a complicated production.48 While Sand was exchanging letters with René de Villeneuve to learn more about her family, the Revolution of February 1848 burst upon the scene. She dropped the project, starting it back up again on 1 June 1848, a few days after her return to Nohant. Chapter 8 of the second part is not silent on these recent events: If I had finished this book before the Revolution, I dare say it would have been something different, the book of a loner, a generous child, for I had only known humankind through the study of often exceptional individuals and whom I had always examined at leisure. Since the Revolution my eyes have campaigned through the world of facts, and that has made me another person.

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. . . So my book will be gloomy if I stick with my recent impressions. But who knows? time quickly marches on, and, when all is said and done, people are no different from me, meaning they get discouraged and cheer up again with great facility.49

In 1854 Émile de Girardin finally acquired the rights to Story of My Life for his newspaper. Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb had appeared in the same venue, at rather irregular intervals, between October 1848 and February 1850, followed by the Memoirs of Dumas starting in the summer of 1852, both of them devoting a few pages to Sand.50 Story of My Life started running in La Presse on 5 October 1854. In total, it was published in 138 installments, up through June 1855, and was such a huge success that people would rip the newspaper out of each other’s hands. A caricature of five men in top hats trying to read an issue held by a cap-wearing worker came out in Le Journal pour Rire, with the caption: “Great success for George Sand’s Story of My Life. A few enthusiastic and impatient fans even made a deal to see the printer’s proofs so they’d be the first to know.” At the end of October 1854 the Lecou publishing house started publishing the work in paperback as well. The complete first edition was twenty volumes long.51 When Sand began writing her autobiography, she told her friend Charlotte Marliani: “This is a history of my life (not CONFESSIONS). . . . It’s quite enough to tell my inner life (as an artist) and as an intellectual, without turning the public into my intimate confidant. My book will be serious and useful.”52 Story of My Life does not contradict this declaration. From the start Sand stresses the interest of each and every life and turns autobiography into a democratic activity, far from the haughty memoirs of aristocrats in the past: “You artisans who are beginning to understand everything, you peasants who are starting to learn how to write, don’t forget your dead ancestors any longer. Pass the lives of your fathers on to your children . . . ! The trowel and the billhook are emblems as beautiful as the horn, the tower, or the bell. . . . Write your stories, all you who have understood your life and searched your heart.”53

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Next she underscores the privileged place that “the inner life, the life of the soul, meaning the story of one’s own heart and spirit, . . . the personal impressions, the voyages or attempted voyages in the abstract world of mind and feeling,” will have in her autobiography.54 Finally, even if she devotes a few pages in the last chapter of Story of My Life to Chopin’s character, she doesn’t mean to provide any kind of detail about her private life: “Vis-à-vis the public, I have no right to the past experience of all the people whose lives have been linked with mine,”55 this she definitely wants to make clear. So she evokes her conflicts with Casimir Dudevant in a few lines and does the same for the event that attracted the most media attention, her affair with Alfred de Musset. Her curious family history, her grandmother, her tutor Deschartres and the impetuous Sophie, her maid and her half brother Hippolyte, her games with the peasant children of Nohant, her pranks at the convent of English Sisters along with Mary G***, came flooding back in lively fashion. Later on, her grandmother’s death, her wedding, the birth of her two children, her literary débuts, the personalities of Marie Dorval, Michel de Bourges, Balzac, Delacroix, and many others that she met in the course of her career, became the subject of particularly incisive portraits. No doubt, swept along by the indomitable will to be “a woman who writes,”56 Sand knew how to tell great stories, but she also knew, with rare acuity, how to analyze her hopes and fears, to express the pain that the long enmity between her mother and grandmother caused her, as well as the depression into which she fell, despite “Corambé’s” intervention, between the end of her adolescence and the first years of her literary life. “Nobody has gone further than you in these analyses,” Gustave Flaubert would write to her later on. “Story of My Life has tremendously profound pages on that score.”57 During the years between the end of the July Monarchy and the beginning of the Second Empire Sand took considerable interest in the distribution of her works and the means of making them available to all. Political and financial considerations underlay several ambitious publishing projects with Pierre-Jules Hetzel, a key figure for understanding her choices about books and editions.

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Having become a sort of literary agent for Sand before the Revolution of 1848, he was a sure and faithful friend, often her confidant for personal problems. Keeping a close eye on how the book market functioned, very creative in matters of publishing (having started as a publisher in 1843, he continued working in Brussels after the coup d’état), he helped Sand negotiate her contracts with directors of newspapers and journals and watched over her finances, specifically the income she could earn from her publications, and the strict observance of contractual agreements, with the help of the lawyer Gabriel Falampin on this point. Two publishing projects took shape through the years: the first being the broad distribution of certain of Sand’s works in an inexpensive format (“This will let us popularize works written in good part for the working classes, but read only by the bourgeoisie, thanks to the publishers’ stupid and aristocratic speculations”58); the second being the sale of her literary capital to a publisher who would take charge of its use, freeing Sand from repeated negotiations with various directors of serials or reviews, then various publishers (“That would deliver me from the details of business, and I’d invest my money”59). The first project came to a successful conclusion in September 1851 when three publishers, Blanchard, Hetzel, and Marescq, agreed, despite various problems, to publish her Illustrated Works [Œuvres illustrées].60 Printed on large sheets of paper with two columns in small fonts, each volume cost twenty centimes, like the recently created “penny dreadfuls.” For each novel Sand composed a new preface or note. Hetzel decided to entrust the illustrations, all wood engravings, to Tony Johannot, much appreciated in the profession. Despite that, Sand managed to get “Mauricot”61 hired as Johannot’s associate and then, after the latter’s death in 1852, as the sole illustrator, notwithstanding the publisher’s and engravers’ clear reservations about Maurice’s designs, whose faint strokes would be difficult to reproduce. Nine volumes, each one containing several novels and short stories, would appear between 1851 and 1856. Along with those of Balzac, Hugo, and Sue, Sand’s volumes had the biggest print runs, 20,000 copies on average.62

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In just fifteen years, thanks to a series of technical innovations and fierce competition between the publishers Gervais Charpentier, Michel Lévy, and Louis Hachette, the price of books had gone down considerably. Meanwhile, readership was increasing and becoming markedly more diversified. Determined to take advantage of this little revolution in publishing, Sand resolutely stepped into “industrial” literature so reviled in certain sectors. Above and beyond the project of her Illustrated Works, she signed contracts with the publisher Lecou to make her work available in the so-called Charpentier format, the ancestor of paperbacks, without any illustrations this time, as well as with Louis Hachette for the sale of certain titles in the brand-new “Railroad Library” [“Bibliothèque des chemins de fer”], another way to assure the broad distribution of her novels. At the beginning of the 1850s Sand was also trying to trade on and protect the capital that her work represented, for she was afraid that after her death Maurice and Solange, who did not get along, might liquidate her estate and wind up damaging their positions in such an operation.63 The letters to Émile Aucante, Sand’s intermediary with Parisian publishers, demonstrate endless strategies for ensuring both her liberty as an author and the market value of her existing body of work, “manuscripts, . . . novels, plays, in short, everything.”64 Walter Scott had lost everything after his publisher went bankrupt, and Sand did not intend to suffer the same fate and to be forced “to work herself into a stupor.”65 In 1855, after several attempts to deal with “the huge question of literary property,”66 Michel Lévy, then the biggest mainstream publisher in Paris, proposed publishing Sand’s work in two inexpensive series. Five years later, a contract made him Sand’s designated editor for the rest of her career. Keeping up with developments in newspaper and book publishing and determined to keep her place there, Sand was a remarkable businesswoman. Hoping to make good use of the money she had worked hard to earn, she also acted as the head of her household, eager to bequeath to her children what she had acquired as a writer.

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The Performing Arts On the occasion of the first performance of the Devil in the Family [Démon du foyer] Sand wrote to Émile de Girardin: “At the age of forty-eight I’m starting a new career: theater. People don’t want me to have a place there, but I want it, and I’m going to have it.”67 This remark has to be read in a context of controversy and failure. The coup d’état of December 1851 had interrupted the performances of Victorine’s Wedding at the Théâtre du Gymnase. In March 1852 Sand’s comedy, Pandolphe’s Vacation [Les vacances de Pandolphe] had next to no success with the public, even though it was inventive and funny. Then Sand tried an “Italian comedy in a Watteau setting,”68 and it too was a failure. The critics obviously had a hard time reconciling Sand’s politics during the Revolution of 1848 with comedies of the sort that owed a lot to Molière, Marivaux (the plays involving servants and peasants), and Sedaine.69 Theater was then considered one of the most popular forms of entertainment, exciting dreams of money and success for others besides well-known playwrights. From Stendhal to Zola, nearly all the men of letters wanted to write for the stage. Few women of the time, except for Sand, Virginie Ancelot, Delphine de Girardin, Mélanie Waldor, and Alexandrine de Bawr, wrote plays, and that was because of the way that plays were produced. There was nothing simple about the theater world. It was hard to attract and keep an audience. The audiences, by turns severe or good-natured, attentive or indifferent, had grown considerably more diverse, and there were more and more theaters in Paris. Musset’s Night in Venice [La nuit vénitienne] and Hugo’s The Burgraves [Les Burgraves] had been failures; Flaubert’s The Candidate [Le candidat] flopped, and so did Zola’s adaptation of Thérèse Raquin. Sand made her first foray into theater in April 1840 when Cosima or Hatred in Love [Cosima ou la haine dans l’amour], a five-act drama, opened at the Théâtre-Français with Marie Dorval in the starring role. It had a short run, only seven performances. Sand, who had already written several novels “in dialogue form,” claimed at the time that she had been “made to go where she didn’t want

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to go,”70 in other words, that she had been persuaded to put on a play that was not really meant for the stage. Nine years later she tried again. This time she wrote an adaptation of François the Waif for the stage, and it was performed at the Théâtre de l’Odéon and directed by Pierre Bocage. “A witty little thing,” that’s what Sand called her “pastoral in three acts,”71 with the beginning of the plot rewritten. She also brightened it up with some “little Berrichon melodies,”72 much to the audience’s liking, that she had personally transcribed. Her friend François Rollinat, who attended the play on 24 November 1849, wrote to her: “Champi is a huge success: the audience was moved, they laughed and they cried. . . . It’s not so much socialist talk that makes it a complete success, but . . . the play’s charm and matchless simplicity.”73 Sand’s comic plays owe a lot to the commedia dell’arte and its avatars in the Théâtre-Italien. There she found what she especially liked, “a study of real character types,”74 as she explained in the preface to Maurice’s book, Masks and Clowns [Masques et bouffons], with its fine illustrations. With this she mixed in classical references, most obviously Molière, whom she always greatly admired—he had the main role in The King Awaits [Le roi attend] and was the subject of a play performed at the Théâtre de la Gaîté in May 1851.75 Sand’s dramas, on the other hand, were inspired by “bourgeois” drama from the end of the eighteenth century and Romantic melodrama. In any case, all her plays displayed her political convictions, especially with regard to the condition of women. Sometimes the concoction looks rather curious. Sand’s theater was not just a question of genre, but also of geography. Sand’s plays were set in Berry or often Italy. The Devil in the Family, for instance, takes place in “a little villa near Milan.”76 Villageoiserie or “village thingamabob,” that’s what Sand called a “dramatic and comic”77 play like François the Waif that made the audience laugh and cry and brought to the Paris stage the way people lived and talked in Nohant and nearby hamlets. So too Claudie, which opened in January 1851 at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, with Bocage playing the role of Old Rémy, an eighty-year-old man bringing in the harvest, and The Winepress

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[Le pressoir], which opened in September 1853 at the Théâtre du Gymnase.78 Claudie was a resounding success and would be performed again in 1926 at the Comédie-Française, while the second, praised by the critics, was not greatly appreciated by the public. In any case, Sand wanted her plays to educate the audience, the often edifying moral leaving no doubt about the author’s intentions. Sand probably did not have a true theory of theater, as Diderot and Hugo did.79 Yet her ideas about theater are often expressed in the prefaces to her published plays, in the general preface to the three-volume set of plays published by Lévy in 1866, her correspondence, and numerous passages from her novels, especially when they are about theater. In 1851 The Castle in the Wilderness [Le château des désertes] puts a troupe of amateur actors on stage, and Sand acknowledged that she wanted “to stir up some ideas about theater.”80 There are more similarities than differences between theater and novels, as is shown by the way they echo each other. Then again most of Sand’s plays were adapted from her novels, with a simplified plot and dialogues revised for the stage. Going from the manuscript to opening night was no small affair, as Sand soon found out. The ink would be scarcely dry when she had to connect with a theater director and try and interest him in her play. Next, the two of them had to go over the contract point by point and come to agreement about the author’s royalties, the length of the run, the conditions relating to the noncompetition clause. Finally, the opening date had to be scheduled after taking into account the programming calendar and the actors’ availability. After all that, the rehearsals could start, at the Théâtre du Gymnase directed by Adolphe Lemoine-Montigny, or the Théâtre de la Gaîté, the Vaudeville, the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, or the Odéon.81 As Sand observed, “People . . . generally believe that every movement and intonation is freely improvised at the time of performance. They don’t know that the long and painstaking work of rehearsals aims to imprison the actor, to tie him down to the conventions of his role with automatic precision.”82 When rehearsals began, Sand usually left Nohant for Paris—as discreetly as possible.83 Leaving nothing to chance, she would make

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her views clear on the staging, decor, lighting, costumes, and props. On this last point, she would give precise details by letter, along with designs, sometimes with Maurice’s help. On 15 November 1849, a few days before the opening of François the Waif, she wrote to Bocage: Dear friend, I’m sending you the bonnets and necessary instructions, for your ladies. The chair is shown in the design, Madeleine’s costume, that Maurice sent you. It’s a wooden armchair with leather or straw trimmings and little canvas cushions. In Berry there is nothing particular or special about these old pieces of furniture. . . . The footstool is part of the armchair and rolls along with it. . . . 

General remarks about women’s bonnets.



All the bonnets have to be held up by a stitched underpiece,

just like the one I’m sending you. Between the underpiece and bonnet there’s got to be a headband of the same size and shape in white or black silk for mourning, in pink or pale blue satin for dressy occasions. . . . Don’t take the done-up bonnet apart without paying close attention to how it was put together. Everything is in the way the chinstraps are tied. . . . Mariette shouldn’t have any lace in the first act, but there is no need to have her chinstraps tied back, that’s especially for widows.84

While true-to-life costumes were important for Sand, she also kept a watchful eye on the music, especially the Berrichon melodies for the rustic plays. She even composed the final rondeau for Pandolphe’s Vacation.85 Anxious to be true to the region down to the slightest details, she took great pains with the little particulars that give an impression of authenticity. In so doing, she created “regionalist” theater, and if today it strikes us as quaint, that is no doubt because of her political resolve to show the lower classes, villagers or peasants, as fundamentally good and generous. She knew a good number of actors and kept a close eye on casting. In her opinion, Frédéric Lemaître, Pierre Bocage, and Bouffé were among the best, along with Rachel, Rose Chéri, and Sylviane

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Arnould-Plessy.86 She also liked the Bertons, father and son, and kept in touch with the children of Marie Dorval who were also on the stage. The Winepress was written, she wrote, “for Geoffroy, Lesueur, Lafontaine, Bressant, and Dupuis, . . . I see them in these roles.”87 Master Favilla [Maître Favilla], performed at the Odéon in 1855, was dedicated to the actor Antoine Rouvière, who had the starring role. As Sand knew, an actor is a physique and a voice—tone, diction, and sometimes an accent—a particular way of moving on stage, gesturing, and expressing emotion; it is also a form of “intelligence” that can, as in the case of Marie Dorval, have “amazing psychological depth with subtle and profound observations.”88 True “art” is not the same thing as “artifice,”89 she insisted. The most important thing is to play it right and therefore stay “in character.”90 On opening night Sand always held her breath: “A performance will always be a roll of the dice . . . if your artistic conscience is without reproach, you can stay very calm and take bad luck with tons of philosophy.”91 Applauded or booed, the play would run for days, weeks, or months, during which Sand would be pleased or put out by its critiques. Sometimes she would rethink certain lines and draw up a list of changes for the theater director: “This would only take you and your fine actors fifteen minutes,”92 she noted in a letter to Bocage about François the Waif. Once she had become a playwright, Sand still enjoyed going to the theater. In years past she had admired Marie Dorval in her few great roles in Romantic plays; she even applauded Pauline Viardot in numerous operas. She gladly attended the plays of her friends—Alexandre Dumas fils, Paul Meurice, and Auguste Vacquerie, with all of whom she had a correspondence—but also many other resounding or minor successes of the time. Yet she did not owe her excellent knowledge of all the theater trades just to the actors she knew and her powers of observation. It was also the product of her long-standing practice of parlor theater starting at Nohant in December 1846. In the beginning it was just family entertainment, various pantomimes with musical accompaniment. As Sand explained to Emmanuel Arago,

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Every evening I have a ballet to compose. We put on the right costumes; I am the orchestra leading the pantomime on the piano, with various tunes ad libitum such as Malbrough s’en va-t-en-guerre, J’ai du bon tabac, Au clair de la lune, etc., etc. The actors are Maurice, Lambert, Titine [Augustine Brault], and Fernand [de Preaulx, Solange’s fiancé]. Solange, not wanting to budge, is the audience; I’m the orchestra, the poet, the prompter, the director, the stage manager, etc. . . . Every evening we put on a new play. I write it over dessert; we learn our parts over coffee. We get our costumes on at ten, which is the most time-consuming and the most fun; the play is performed at midnight; then we have a late supper and go to bed at two.93

Even though this kind of entertainment was the delight of eighteenth-century châteaux, the one-woman orchestra’s powers of invention were still remarkable, like her love of disguise and role-playing that this activity naturally invited. Playing at being someone else by momentarily donning the appropriate costume, in addition to doing everything else simultaneously—here, all the trades and crafts associated with the stage and then exercised exclusively by men—all this obviously stems from a powerful injunction that resonates throughout the whole of Sand’s life. The theater at Nohant started rather informally: at first they entertained themselves in the evening with mimes, especially Chopin’s; then came the more or less improvised playlets and pantomimes with musical accompaniment—Maurice and his friend Eugène Lambert,94 whom Sand met in Delacroix’s studio and who soon became like an adoptive son to her, were glad to get involved. Next came the sketches, with greater demands for the amateur actors and more ambitious plans from the stage manager. In 1850 Sand redesigned the ground floor of the château at Nohant, knocking down the wall between Casimir’s old bedroom and the storage room and setting up a real stage with wings, scenery, and a curtain, plus enough space for several rows of seats out in front. A loft, accessible by a little wooden staircase, served as a dressing room for the actors.

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A real miniature theater, the Nohant playhouse seemed like the ideal place for trying out a scene or a line, testing a comic or poignant situation, gauging the challenges of a certain role. It became a laboratory for the plays that would be performed in Paris. As Sand explained to Solange, Sometimes I say to hell with my plays because out of every two weeks they take up two or three days that I’d prefer to devote to work. . . . But . . . I’ve found our theater useful, and it’s given me rather good notions, maybe not about scene arrangement, but about situations the audience may find especially interesting or funny. That’s what I think, in any case, and I believe our improvisation method is a fine way of preparing. I let Maurice do nearly all the plays, just giving him a hand when he gets himself in a real mess. . . . A scene tucked in the right place and with the right words has a charming effect, and the actors are all amazed that it seems so effortless. You just can’t imagine the progress we’ve made here and how things are now coming together so well.95

Most of Sand’s plays that were performed in theaters in the 1850s were first staged at Nohant. Aside from Sand, the troupe was Manceau, Maurice, and Lambert, plus some old friends and houseguests, Charles Duvernet, Victor Borie, and the painter Léon Villevieille. The household help was glad to get involved, for example, Marie Caillaud. Like Sand, they all enjoyed putting on costumes, wigs, and makeup. Maurice made a pen drawing of actors dated January 1850 in which twenty-odd people are gathered around a table. Sand is at the center of the group, with Manceau standing to her left. The caption reads: “From the start Manceau poses as the director of the Nohant troupe. The rules are read, to which many loud complaints are heard.”96 The amateurs sometimes got help from seasoned actors, like Pierre Bocage or somebody else from Paris. This was the case when Victorine’s Wedding, imagined as a sequel to Sedaine’s The Philosopher in Spite of Himself [Le philosophe malgré lui] was being written. Lacking someone to “play a nice short little part,”97 Sand

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wrote to Pierre-Jules Hetzel: “Find us a little student from the Conservatory, not ugly, nice, unassuming, good-natured, who’ll come give us a hand or earn a few pennies, as he wishes, and who in any case will just like coming along for the ride. . . . You know how we put on our plays, in a very homey way that doesn’t require actors, rather a kind of calm on-stage group reading. . . . You come along too if you’re free; we want to put the play on from the 15th to the 20th of this month [September]. All the costumes, wigs, rouge, etc. that he may need are here.”98 Even though he wasn’t the head of the troupe, Maurice was nevertheless the kingpin of Nohant’s parlor theater. With help from Eugène Lambert, he built traditional decors painted in tempera. Plus, he assisted his mother in each stage of a new play’s production, from writing the sketch up through the first performance. He also elaborated lots of original costumes with her, as one can see in two albums of his watercolors at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The theater was not just a laboratory for the plays performed in Paris. It had its own repertory as well. Most of the manuscripts we now possess were written by Sand,99 but Maurice occasionally corrected or modified his mother’s scenarios. As Sand explained, “Often I do nothing more than arrange the order of the scenes that they [the actors of the troupe] ask me to play and help make their own ideas feasible. It’s a genre where the author completely disappears, theater where everybody is an author.”100 Fewer in number, Maurice’s sketches put to use the most traditional dramatic devices; Sand occasionally intervened in order to fix a monologue or to suggest some stage directions. Maurice loved stories about bandits, fantastic dramas, rustic comedies directly inspired by life at Nohant, comic scenes in a make-believe setting in Italy or the Orient. Maurice’s sole purpose was to have a good time and to give the audience a good laugh. People familiar with Nohant, “guests” and denizens of the village, made up a heterogeneous audience that sometimes reached fifty or more. They received an invitation with the heading “Theater of Nohant” and the title of the play to be performed as well as a

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seat number. Maurice was responsible for the little theater bills calligraphed on blue or grayish-brown paper. One of them read: Nohant Mlle Ida’s Return to the Stage 5 October 1856 don’t play with fire!! [il ne faut pas jouer avec le feu!! ] drama in two scenes101

In 1865 Sand wrote a preface for an edition of five plays entitled Theater of Nohant [Théâtre de Nohant]. The first play, The Hobgoblin [Le drac], a charming fantasy about a phantom, was dedicated to Alexandre Dumas fils. She wrote: “You came and loved that way of telling a dream and acting it out for a family reunion, a little bit like telling stories about yourself in front of the fire. So I dare publish this play, and putting it under the protection of your indulgence, I dedicate it to you, . . . as to a fine friend whose sense of aesthetics accepts and understands all artistic license without being the least pedantic.”102 A true collective undertaking, the theater of Nohant was less improvisation than a sort of experimental theater whose entertainment value must not be underestimated, for example, Plutus, dedicated to Alexandre Manceau and starting off with a wacky dialogue between Aristophanes and Mercury. They of course tried out plots and lines for the stage in Paris, but they all had fun, loads of it, with fantasy plays imitating various subjects and mimicking the way real theater was performed. It was obviously a game, but a complex game in which certain actors were not amateurs, where Sand, as the stage manager, often on stage as one can see in Maurice’s watercolors, was not just writing for fun, where the people close to her, all of them “artists” in some sense or other, showed remarkable invention in making scenery, costumes, and parodies of what goes on in the theater. There was another sort of theater that Maurice started concocting at the close of 1847. As Sand recalled in The Puppet Theater of Nohant [Le Théâtre de marionnettes de Nohant], “For the first time, with help from Eugène Lambert, and no audience aside from

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Victor Borie and me, Maurice set up a puppet stage in our old parlor. . . . There were just the four of us at home: two of us devoting ourselves to making the long winter evenings an enchantment for the two others.”103 Maurice’s first little puppet stage was “a chair with its back to the audience and the two kneeling puppeteers hidden behind a huge drawing portfolio and a towel”; and the puppets were nothing more than “two sticks smoothed down just a bit and wrapped in rags.”104 Yet, because of the success of the hilarious, inventive scripts, the puppets and their little stage soon improved. After a hiatus of a few months in 1848, the puppet theater started back up again. Now there were seventeen puppets. By 1854 Maurice had a real puppet theater set up on the right-hand side of the parlor theater. The stage, with particularly ingenious mechanical engineering, let the puppets be manipulated in more and more complex ways. There were performances one after the other, as shown by Sand’s notebook entitled “Archives of Maurice Sand’s Puppet Theater” [“Archives du théâtre de marionnettes de Maurice Sand”]. All the productions were written down with the title, author, puppeteers, and date of the performance: 1854 April

Oswald the Scotsman (comedy)

Scenarios by Maurice



Sand

[Oswald l’Ecossais]

Interpreted by



Maurice and Lambert



Roccoforte (comedy)



Yseult de Vivonne (drama)



Elfrida the Jewess

[Elfrida la juive] 14 August

A Woman and an Overnight Bag Scenarios par Maurice

[Une femme et un sac de nuit] Interpreted by

(comedy)

15 August

Richard XXII (comedy)

Maurice-Thiron(?)

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18 August

Arthur I (drama)

20 August

The Ruins of Niewsedel Scenarios by Maurice

[Les ruines de Niewsedel] Interpreted by

(drama in 3 acts)

Maurice and Lambert

23 September Cucumber with a Hat [Combrillo di sombrero]

(drama in 2 acts)

27 September The Green Bean Inn

Scenario by Maurice

[L’Auberge du Haricot Vert]

Interpreted by



Maurice and Victor

(comedy)



Borie

The puppet theater was inspired by the same things as the parlor theater and some of the plays produced in Paris: fantasy, the commedia dell’arte, Shakespeare, and Tirso de Molina. In this way the three kinds of theater, from the noblest to the simplest, from the most serious to the most comical, echoed back and forth and blended into one another. A dizzying carnival mirror of reality, the art of the spectacle, of illusion took on many forms. As Sand observed, “On stage the puppets obey the basic laws of theater. It is always the architectural temple, immense or microscopic, where desires and passions make their moves. There is no philosophical difference between the Grand-Opera and the puppet shows on the Champs-Elysées. Faust’s Mephisto is the same Satan as Punch’s devil with his little horns.”105 Through the years the puppets grew in sophistication and number. While some were sculpting the heads of puppets needed for new scenarios, and others were working on costumes and props, one of the “workers” in this extraordinary studio would read to them out loud.106 Maurice would whittle expressive little faces of men and women from the wood of a linden. Lambert would paint them, covering their heads with straw, horsehair, or real human hair; their eyes were two enamel tacks. Next they had to get the right costume for their sex and role. The attics of Nohant contain lots of big dressers with labels written in Sand’s hand: “ribbons,”

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“buttons,” “headgear,” “hats,” and still others testify to the many kinds of sewing and tinkering projects under her supervision. She herself made “quite a few military uniforms, medieval costumes, and finally clothes to be worn at the court of Louis XV or XVI embroidered ad hoc in silk, chenille, gold or silver thread, and velvet” and felt “rightly proud” of the female puppets’ undergarments, “chemises, slips, and ruffs of all sorts.”107 Decors, props, furniture, nothing was left to chance in this miniature theater. The lighting required a lot of skill: the puppeteers’ desire to represent day, night, the sun, the stars, the light of the moon, called for real technical genius. Balandard, the outspoken clown at the center of many scenarios, gradually turned into the main figure of the puppet shows. All around him were puppets representing all manner of social rank and position, aristocrats, bourgeois, servants, peasants, clerics, convicts, and some fantastic figures. Certain recurring characters had names, such as Captain Vachard, the fairy Azote, Brother Riboulard, and Sister Céleste; the stories were modified according to their appearances. A great many of the puppets are now on display in the stables of the château de Nohant.

Joys, Sorrows, and Worries The 1840s were marked by music and the great figure of Chopin. Strong political convictions led Sand to take an active role in the initial phases of the Revolution of 1848. In the following decade, she did not abandon politics but retreated back into writing. The author of François the Waif was above all a strong voice for the opposition, criticizing, protesting, or encouraging in the press. The years of repression following “Louis-Napoleon’s 18th Brumaire,”108 as Karl Marx called it, scarcely allowed anything else. Her life turned more toward all sorts of artistic, sewing, and tinkering projects. People with great talent or little worked together without giving a thought to any hierarchical organization of function or ability. With its in-house stage and puppet theater

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Nohant became a fantastic workshop where each person could happily pursue his chosen activity. This was Sand’s way of fulfilling her dream of a community of artists living together in peace and harmony. Chopin left, then died. The man who came to share Sand’s life was fourteen years her junior, scarcely older than Maurice, and like him a painter and engraver. In the household’s daily activities he was another man, dynamic and hardworking, who soon came to be more of a husband to Sand than Chopin, who did nothing but music. Alexandre Manceau began managing Nohant, scrupulously carrying out his tasks, which were formerly the responsibility of Casimir, who did a pretty good job, selling a field here and buying a piece of land there, in order to streamline the estate.109 The enterprising young artist of course got involved in the theater activities: he acted and sometimes helped write the sketches; he managed the theater, setting up the ingenious stage-lighting and the ambitious decors for which he supervised, in the fall of 1856, the “carpenters, painters, and woodworkers, from morning till night.”110 An avid entomologist, he collected rare species and promptly got the whole family interested in caterpillars, butterflies, and insects. He drew two very beautiful portraits of Sand. She particularly liked the one he drew with a pencil that had once belonged to Thomas Couture. He painstakingly recorded in a diary each day’s activities and Sand’s progress on plays and novels, often read aloud in the evening to the family and friends. When he was away, Sand stepped in for him, since she recognized the importance of this detailed register of everybody’s activities, not just her own. The diaries read like a ship’s log about life at Nohant and the comings and goings of all its inhabitants. Manager and secretary, engraver and handyman, Manceau was discreet, but he was not self-effacing in his discretion. Wanting to maintain his financial independence, he kept on drawing and engraving,111 which gave him an income that he meant to put to good use. Every year he exhibited at the Paris Salon, all the while working as a book illustrator; he occasionally engraved

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some of Maurice’s drawings as illustrations for Sand’s works. Sand said very little about this relationship, which seems to have very quickly found its footing. Yet it appears that the understanding between Alexandre and Aurore (“Manceau” and “Madame,” as they decorously referred to each other in the diaries and their correspondence) was profound, as will be shown by the rest of the story. The men that Sand loved all had a certain physical resemblance. In the drawings we have of them, they look fragile, slight, and a bit reserved, a little like Sand herself. Their age? Sand often repeated that she needed youthful enthusiasm to avoid sinking into bitterness and worry, even if that meant always being a bit, “by instinct and inclination,”112 the mother of the men that she loved. As she recalled in Story of My Life, “I like daydreaming, meditation, and work; but beyond a certain point, I get gloomy because my thoughts turn somber, and if I’m forced to see reality in its sinister aspects, one of two things happens: either my soul surrenders or fun comes to the rescue. . . . I have an absolute need of true, healthy fun.”113 Sand’s maternal disposition, often evoked, was characterized by great generosity, unfailing devotion, exceptional foresight and provision, a certain taste for authority. In her intimate relationships, however, the word “child” seems most appropriate. Sand herself recognized this: “What can one do to gladden the hours that people spend together day after day? Talking politics generally keeps men busy, women like talking about clothes. I am neither man nor woman in that respect; I’m a child. While I’m working on something that delights my eyes or taking a walk that busies my legs, there has to be an exchange of vitality going on around me so that I don’t feel the emptiness and horror of the human condition.”114 Sand looked for men like her, children at heart no doubt, but children like her. With them she meant to live free, to create and travel, in a fine “exchange of vitality.” That was the scenario for the beginning of her literary career with Jules Sandeau and her Berrichon friends, also the scenario she imagined in her Traveler’s Letters, where she introduced herself as a “wandering schoolboy,”115 delighted to be out and about as well as independent. This fantasy relationship with the opposite sex would stick with her for a long time.

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It was the same old story with Manceau, and (almost) nothing had changed over the years. The young engraver was scarcely older than Chopin when he and Sand had met; he was the age of most of the men she had known up until then. Portrait of the lover as an eternally young man? “The individual named G[eorge] Sand”116 must have (also) wanted Alexandre to become a brother, a chum, a fellow traveler, an artist, as she was. Sand would walk with Manceau through the countryside. Since childhood she had been an excellent walker and loved hiking. Imported from England, this new leisure-time activity did not mean walking to get somewhere for some particular reason, to the fields or the next village to hire somebody or sell some livestock, but walking for the pleasure of being out in the open and enjoying the landscape. Local tourism was starting up and changing the way people looked at rural life. Sometimes with a carriage following behind, often with a guest, Sand and her companion would walk to villages around Nohant, to Briantes, Sarzay, Saint-Chartier, Neuvy-Saint-Sépulchre, La Motte-Feuilly, Sainte-Sévère, and also to Crevant and the lead mines at Urciers. They would admire a village sitting high on a hill, a chateau, or a particularly “picturesque” farm, then visit a Romanesque church with its frescoes or some natural curiosity. Eugène Grandsire, another of Maurice’s painter friends, sketched “Madame” in her walking costume, a long dress buttoned up to the neck and a broad-brimmed hat with an ample veil to protect her face from insects as well as the sun.117 We also have a few drawings of their excursions in the valley of the Creuse, later published in Le Monde Illustré. During the summer of 1857 the hikers discovered the Creuse valley and the little village of Gargilesse, “which, in this season, is a paradise on earth.”118 As she wrote to Maurice, then away in Paris, We just got back [to Nohant] this evening, not too tired, despite ten some leagues [around forty kilometers] on foot in two days under a tropical sun, proof being that Manceau caught an African butterfly and another from the south of France, Algira and

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Gordius. . . . From Châteaubrun to Gargilesse there is a lovely walk along the banks of the Creuse. Four hours of bushwhacking, that’s quite a lot. . . . It’s an enchanting area and one that had remained unknown to us, despite all the walking we do. . . . I was really sorry you weren’t there, but we’re fantasizing about a little cottage there.119

By May of the next year it was a done deal. With his savings Manceau bought a tiny house that Sand laughingly called “Villa Algira” or “Villa Manceau.” It had two little rooms, one upstairs and one down with steep open stairs in between, a cellar, a huge sloping roof, and a miniscule garden, also with a stiff slope. Meals were taken at the nearby inn, and they merrily made the best of the humblest furnishings: “The little house consisting of two exceedingly clean rooms, iron bedsteads, straw-bottomed chairs with whitewood tables is attached to other houses that look just the same but less clean, lived in by local peasants. . . . For them I’m not the lady of the manor, but an Auvergnate, neither male nor female, meaning a stranger who is not from here, but who likes being here all the same.”120 While Sand worked in the little room reserved for her, her companion shared his interest in insects with the village children: “We’re in Gargilesse, my Bouli, and the weather isn’t good. . . . Fortunately the little house is well sealed and very livable, no matter the weather, and I work inside when it rains. . . . All the children are out looking for caterpillars and often turn up with interesting things. Manceau classifies them and gives out rewards according to the find, nothing if the caterpillar hasn’t been brought in fresh and healthy wrapped in a leaf, nothing if it’s ordinary. One fine day the whole village will be part of the Entomology Society.”121 Manceau spared no effort to make his “little house” comfortable and to accommodate guests if necessary. As Sand observed, once again in a letter to Maurice, There’s no way to stop him from fixing his place up much more for our benefit than for his. He’s turning it into a ship’s cabin and

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measuring each centimeter so that everybody will have his own gear, nail, pot, a place for each boot, etc., etc. . . . So he indulges his two passions, dedication and doodads. I say this to console myself for seeing him so stubbornly spending his meager profits. . . . I’ll have you know that Manceau went for a swim in the Creuse. . . . On Sundays everybody’s in the water, swimming and fishing. Little kids and some of the women go swimming too. Here the women work more than the men, more big differences from things in our neck of the woods.122

Sand greatly enjoyed this new kind of dwelling and the customs of this rugged area so different from Nohant. “This higgledy-piggledy village life in all its true rusticity strikes me as much more normal than life in a château,”123 she declared to Solange. She and Manceau would often go to Gargilesse for short visits. Walks Around a Village [Promenades autour d’un village] came out in 1859 along with the illustrated edition of the rustic novels.124 There she described her walking tours in the area and the discoveries to which they led, also commenting on the new vogue for picturesque rural scenes and the debates about realism, a new and fashionable aesthetic: “Today art loves and sees everything naïve, even a broken-down wheelbarrow with an urn lying on its side makes for a painting on the blond manure where a rooster is strutting proudly as though on a purple carpet. . . . As for me, feeling that everything depends on the artist, that is all I can understand about the word ‘realism.’”125 Maurice was still a bachelor. Sand had hoped he would marry his cousin Augustine Brault, but to no avail. After that she kept watch, often urging her son not “to fall for”126 some pretty little face in Paris and trying to get art dealers interested in his drawings, engravings, and paintings. “Come back as soon as you can. That’s my refrain,”127 she never failed to write as soon as he left Nohant. “Bouli” endeavored to make his mark, but without any great results. He tried for a government commission, copying paintings, if need be, and sent work to the Salons. Delacroix, who was known not to look out much for his students, seemed indifferent to him, which

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Maurice regretted; and his mother appealed to Delacroix “most urgently,”128 but apparently without much success. In 1855, when both Manceau and Lambert were showing work at the Salon that was part of the first Universal Exhibition in Paris, Maurice felt discouraged: none of his pieces had been accepted. Sand urged him to persevere and be patient. Her letters to her friends did not hide that she was eager to find a wife for her “dear darling.”129 She was looking for “a good-hearted girl, happy to be a bit spoiled, and endowed with the means to enlarge the family one day.”130 With Jules Boucoiran, who had been Maurice’s tutor, she got down to brass tacks in February 1857: Maurice has decided to get married, and he’s looking for a wife. He hasn’t yet met the right one, and I’m asking you, . . . who have taught the best young people around, if you know of an eligible party who would suit him in mind and means.

Here’s his financial situation. When he marries, I can give

him a dowry of 200,000 f. of good land. His father promises him a dowry of 50,000 f. . . . After I’m gone, Nohant will provide at least 200,000 f. to be split between Maurice and his sister. Plus, my literary estate represents a very good source of capital. After M. Dudevant’s death, there will also be more than 100,000 f. (he says) to be split.

. . . Maurice’s . . . painting also brings in some cash and guar-

antees him a living. . . . He is nice, as you know, sensible, never having been in trouble, a good son, and sure to be a good father, for he adores children. . . . He’s thirty-three at this point, but nobody wants to believe it, since he looks so young.

If you know of a young person who more or less meets these

conditions, with a pleasant face, good and reliable character, domestic inclinations . . . plus the appropriate means . . . , Maurice would pay you a visit. We don’t much care about the family’s status and business, as long as they come by their wealth honorably and the parents don’t require long stays far from Paris . . . and far from me, as all summer long I’ll provide bed, board, all the comforts and indulgences that it is nice to give one’s children. . . .

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[Maurice] is healthy, and he has a fine pedigree. His future

wife would have to have good blood as well so that we could hope for fine, adorable children.131

How far removed these calculations are from the novels where love bursts upon the scene in one fell swoop for two penniless youngsters who are a perfect match in heart and spirit! When two years later she learned that Maurice had fallen in love with a girl of sixteen, Sand asked Émile Aucante to make inquiries about her parents, affluent merchants in rue Poissonnière in Paris. Despite Maurice’s wish to marry “a very young woman,” she was apprehensive about the girl’s “irresolute character.”132 Sand had already entered into all kinds of financial arrangements when she learned that Clothilde’s parents were not married. Then all the wedding planning ground to a halt.133 In keeping with the etiquette of her time, Sand acted like an aristocrat with an inheritance to protect, something that she nevertheless tried to forget, and something that she condemned in her books as well. Without any hesitation she claimed the right to intervene in the personal affairs of the man to whom she had given her name. “[Maurice] is always my steadfast consolation,”134 she liked to say again and again. The little community of Nohant was then mainly men. Sand managed everybody’s activities, sleeping in the morning, sewing or walking in the afternoon, composing sketches and reading aloud to others in the evening when there wasn’t some kind of performance. At the end of the evening she would retire to her room on the second floor to write to an ever greater number of correspondents and to continue the novel abandoned the night before. The house grew quiet, darkness enveloped the garden, and there was no sound from the handful of cottages in the village of Nohant. Manceau would have prepared what she needed: paper, trimmed pens, blue ink, cigarette paper, tobacco, and a glass of sugar water. By candlelight and then oil lamps Sand would start writing with the amazingly single-minded concentration that she always seems to have possessed. For her, writing did not compete with living her life; she had no need to choose one over the other, like Balzac and

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later on Flaubert. Creation seems to have been the high point of the day, and Sand made it go on a good part of the night. Since 1832 she had been writing very fast, always “all fired up”135 from her last novel, sometimes saying there was “no longer time to eat and sleep”136 when the newspaper was expecting the next installment or the publisher the corrected proof. Even so, she did not just write down whatever entered her head, without correcting or crossing things out, as some critics readily maintained, eager to contend that she carried on in a typically feminine way.137 In fact, her archived manuscripts show numerous corrections, with whole passages rewritten or thrown out, with chapters sometimes revised or substantially changed. Suggestions from close friends, advice from publishers as to titles, chapter divisions, or the length of the entire piece also led to all kinds of revisions. There is nothing “natural” about Sand’s writing; it was instead the result of constant and considerable work along with a remarkable mastery of the whole production process, from the manuscript to the book. In May 1856, “with a hand broken and cramped with exhaustion,”138 she managed to change her penmanship by patiently doing exercises for weeks on end. She adopted an “up and down” style that allowed her to write “much faster without too many smears”139 and to estimate more accurately the number of printed pages her manuscripts would yield, which was the subject of endless calculations in her correspondence with publishers. While she was “killing herself with work,”140 she would sometimes dream of giving up writing for walking, gardening, or reading. As she wrote to Pierre Bocage in 1854, “I confess that books don’t give me half the pleasure the spade does and that I’d like to have money or no responsibilities, which would amount to the same thing. Then I’d like to forget that I was once an author and plunge into living in the body, with an inner life of daydreams, contemplation, and a bit of reading of my choice . . . . That’s my dream.”141 A while later she acknowledged: “I always want to be somewhere else. For me, that means a little place where I would get a rest from all my dealings, every worry, every boring relationship, every domestic problem, all responsibility for my own existence.”142 From then on, writing

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novels sometimes felt like a limitation on her personal freedom, the need to earn enough for the whole household yoking her to endless, exhausting work. Sand was earning quite a bit of money.143 Her land brought in relatively little (between 7,000 and 9,000 francs a year, some 10,000 euros), but she earned substantial income from her novels, essays, and articles in the press, their republication in book form and many reeditions in all sorts of formats, plus the performance of her plays. With Balzac and Hugo, she was one of the best-paid authors of her time, although Eugène Sue remained at the top of the list for a long time. Yet she had lots of expenses and few savings. As she confessed in a letter to the banker Édouard Rodrigues, “I’ve spent my whole life never gratifying myself, writing when I would have preferred to dream, staying put when I would have preferred running around, sordidly scrimping on certain totally personal needs, certain luxurious bathrobes and slippers . . . ; not indulging my guests’ taste for fine food, not going to theaters, concerts, art exhibits, living like a hermit, even though I love life’s hustle and bustle and traveling around.”144 Maintaining a huge household at Nohant with the help of several servants for the kitchen, house, garden, and stables, Sand was always ready to feed anyone who showed up and sometimes welcomed friends, their spouses, and children for several days or weeks at a time. In Paris she kept a pied-à-terre with a yearly lease, first at 3 rue Racine, then at 97 rue des Feuillantines (now rue Claude-Bernard), that the widow Martine looked after. In addition to supporting Maurice, who had his own servant, and her daughter, to whom she paid an allowance, she also provided for Augustine Bertholdi’s household, paid for the services of her agent Émile Aucante, and gave generously to old friends and needy inhabitants of Nohant. Her endless negotiations with publishers, with all their discussions, hassles, and disagreements, are the clearest proof of the close eye she kept on her income. She painstakingly championed high standards of work145 and also worried about getting a good return on her literary capital. In her eyes, the main object of money was to

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assure one’s independence and to allow for all sorts of generosity. In her novels, no matter what her character’s class or status might be, every one of them got money by honest means and never failed to discuss its relative importance. Money was meant to be earned, then shared, spent for the common good, and not socked away. Nor was it to be the driving force of existence, as it was for Balzac, who saw money as the “only modern God.”146 The birth of little Jeanne in 1849 brought Solange back closer to her mother. The relationship between mother and daughter picked up again bit by bit, but not without wariness on both their parts. As Sand wrote to Pierre-Jules Hetzel, “My daughter showed up out of the blue last Friday, and she left this morning. She came alone with her daughter and maid, embraced me tenderly enough but with too much composure, neither giving me nor asking for any word of explanation about the past. .  .  . I was unnaturally cool and severe with her. She was more submissive and contained than usual: frivolous and underhanded, loving no one and a heart totally devoid of conscience. . . . Besides that, quite gracious and silver-tongued for the moment . . . , not good, alas! no, not at all.”147 A few letters were exchanged after Solange went back to Paris, and Sand even ventured to encourage her daughter to write.148 “I wonder,” she nevertheless noted, “if [Solange] is not a dream . . . , the shadow of something to which I thought I gave birth, but half remained in the world of dreams.”149 In the spring of 1852, Solange’s relationship with her husband, “each one being as unfair and faithless as the other,”150 showed signs of indubitable deterioration, even if they had both turned their attention elsewhere. Solange and Jeanne came to stay at Nohant several times in the following months. In August Solange left her daughter with Sand for a few weeks so that she could take care of some pressing matters. The vivacity of little “Nini,” the way she clowned around while helping with the gardening or learning to embroider delighted her grandmother and the people close to her. Anxious to spare the little girl her parents’ quarrels and dissipated lifestyle, Sand soon envisaged getting legal custody, thereby repeating her grandmother’s gesture toward her.

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In December 1854 the couple officially separated. Irritated to see his mother-in-law’s influence on his wife and daughter, the sculptor put the child in a Parisian boarding school while the court decided her fate. When Sand was officially awarded custody a few days later, tragedy struck. During the night of 13–14 January 1855 Jeanne died of scarlet fever. She was not yet six. The diary reads: Sunday 14 January [written in Manceau’s hand]. . . . Around ten [in the evening] an express messenger from Châteauroux brought a telegram announcing that poor little Nini’s suffering had come to an end. . . . Madame is devastated and so is everybody else.

Monday 15 [written in George Sand’s hand]. A dead day. I

went twice to the cemetery, first to mark out the grave and then to see if it was ready. . . . I talked with Maurice who is terribly demoralized by all these sorrows. Manceau left this morning for Châteauroux . . . where he’ll wait for Solange and Nini!151

On 17 January Sand wrote to Adolphe Lemoine-Montigny: “My friend . . . , I’m making a great effort to write to you. Yesterday, alongside my grandmother and my father, we buried our dear little Jeanne, who died at her boarding school of poorly treated scarlet fever and in the wake of six months of malaise and perhaps grief. . . . I won’t say how dreadful I’m feeling. . . . Anyway, today I just couldn’t find the words. It has made my poor daughter a bit crazy. . . . Maurice is shattered. . . . Manceau’s heart is broken, like mine; he so loved this little girl, waiting on her hand and foot like a maid!”152 Sand drew a number of portraits of the little girl from memory, the only remaining souvenirs of her existence. All winter long, “ill with a great sorrow,”153 she expressed her deep pain to her correspondents and retraced the unspeakable attitude of her son-in-law whom she held responsible for Jeanne’s death. “I had arranged my life for her,” she wrote to Ida Dumas, “and it’s hard to take it back for my own use.”154 In Paris Solange tried to distract her pain in the social whirl, regularly sending her mother juicy reports about her dinners and evening parties, without mentioning the names of

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the men swirling around a very pretty young woman, the daughter of a very famous woman. On 11 March 1855 Sand, along with Maurice and Manceau, left Nohant for a “little jaunt through Italy”155 until the end of May. Keeping a close eye on expenses at Nohant, she left precise orders with Sylvain Brunet, her coachman: Keep 1 rooster and 12 young hens. No more than one bushel of grain per month.

Get bran bread in La Châtre for Jacques [a manservant].



If the puppy follows old Marie, let her go, but if she sticks

around the house, give her away.

Give Henri [Sylvain’s brother] the keys to the winepress,

cellar, storage room, haylofts, and bakery.

Don’t do any laundry. If you need a few dish towels or clean-

ing rags, Henri’s mother will wash them, and I’ll pay her.

Don’t fire up the ovens.



When the tenant farmers bring in their cartloads, I’ll pay

them. They won’t be fed since there won’t be any cooking while I’m away. . . .

Tell Henri to hitch up the climbing vine in the garden with

the poles cut from the little grove. . . . He should turn over the rest of the garden plots and seed them with alfalfa and oats.156

And so on and so forth. This time, she was headed to Rome, first taking the train to Marseilles, then after some visits in that area, they would go by sea to Genoa, Livorno, Pisa, finally Civitavecchia. On 19 March they reached the Eternal City. The painter Gustave Boulanger who was staying at the Villa Medicis gave them a tour of Rome. Sand’s first impressions were not very positive. As she wrote to Solange, “The first day here was a great disillusion for us. The road from the sea to Rome’s gates is a dreadful desert. The modern city is so ugly compared with the old part that you first think you’ve been fooled, since the old city, all hemmed in and smothered by the new constructions, is at first invisible.”157

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When Maurice fell ill, she soon decided to leave Rome for the countryside, namely, Frascati: “Since Rome is the hugest and most tiresome thing in the world to visit and look at, and life odious in a room at an inn, we left the splendors of Holy Week just when the whole universe was rushing in. We’ve found a place in Frascati . . . , for a modest price the ground floor of the Piccolomini villa. A palace, no less, but what a palace! Frescoes everywhere and no furniture anywhere, quite a lot of fleas, in short, this part of Italy and Majorca are much the same.”158 They started sightseeing again, but to no avail. Sand loved traveling through the beautiful Roman countryside with mountains off in the distance—as she wrote, “It’s paradise”159—but she did not have much taste for ruins, palaces, museums, and churches: It’s curious, beautiful, interesting, amazing, but it’s too dead. . . . You’d have to live inside it all, with concentration of mind, fantastic memory, and extinguished imagination. . . . When you’ve spent several days looking at urns, tombs, crypts, columbaria, you long to get out a bit and set your eyes on nature. But in Rome nature means torrents of rain that go on and on until all of a sudden there’s overwhelming heat and bad air. The city is foul with ugliness and filth! It is La Châtre, only a hundred times bigger; for it’s immense and decorated with old and new monuments that knock you over the head at every step, without giving you an ounce of pleasure, since they’re all smothered and spoiled by heaps of misshapen and wretched buildings.160

On this last point she was not alone: most of the French visitors at that time noted the papal city’s deplorable neglect. On 23 April Maurice, Manceau, and Sand took a carriage to Florence and started sightseeing again. “A pleasant stay for people who like cities,” observed Sand, who nevertheless appreciated that Florence was “completely civilized,”161 a welcome contrast from Rome. Next they went by train to Lucca and La Spezia, “a tranquil and lovely spot, . . . very good for walking”:162 “Today we’re out and about in the countryside, tramping through ravines and climbing all over

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without getting our feet wet. I’m sitting on some warm sandy soil covered with flowers; more white heather, superb wild orchids, rosemary, and a host of other superb plants whose names I don’t know.”163 It is clear that “Madame” continued to prefer the beautiful countryside and the great outdoors to the cities with all their churches and museums—her impression of Rome was still lingering on.164 In Genoa Maurice, who made a number of drawings of the trip, left Manceau and his mother for Milan. The two of them took a boat to Marseilles, then the train to Paris where they spent a few days seeing old friends. Sand wanted to look elegant and asked her maid to send her “gray- and violet-striped watered silk dress with the bodice and one or two embroidered collars to wear with this high-necked dress.”165 They returned to Nohant on 29 May. As soon as the travelers were back home, they set to work with even greater intensity, having lots of projects under way: articles, novels, and plays. In August Sand briefly entertained a few guests, including Sylviane Arnould-Plessy, a famous actress who was the mistress of Prince Jérôme Napoléon, a young actress named Bérengère (she had played in The Winepress) as well as Émile de Girardin, recently widowed. The following summer Solange, “terribly ill,”166 spent several weeks at Nohant. Distressed to see the state her daughter was in, Sand briefly considered taking her to the waters, then changed her mind. After growing suspicions and a few sharp exchanges, their relationship was once again fraught. Soon Sand accused Solange of slandering her in front of old friends. “My world’s worst enemy is my daughter. How jolly!”167 she wrote to Émile Aucante. When Solange told her mother about her money problems, Sand replied: Here I am fifty-five years old, and I can no longer renew the strength that nature will no doubt soon refuse me. I’ve got no investments; it was never possible to save anything. I’d have had to retire into a little corner and live absolutely alone, never going out and putting money aside. . . . You should live simply or learn to work. To anything anyone ever says to you, you reply that

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it’s impossible. So what do you want me to come up with for you, poor child? . . . My only advice is this: both privation and work require a strong will, and when you say how boring, I’ve got nothing more to say.168

In the 1850s the business and vicissitudes of her private life found a greater echo in Sand’s novels. Two of her novels were directly inspired by the theater of Nohant, The Castle in the Wilderness, published in 1851, and The Snowman [L’homme de neige], published in 1859. The second, appearing in installments in the Revue des Deux Mondes, signaled Sand’s reconciliation with its director, François Buloz. Dedicated to Maurice, the novel takes place in Sweden at the end of the eighteenth century—Sand did some required reading on the subject, just enough to sprinkle the tale with bits of “local color.” The protagonist of this novel is a young puppeteer named Christian Waldo, and it is an ideal way to show off everything that can be done with these “little actors.”169 Attentive to the problems of blended families, Sand treated the difficulties of relationships across the generations, between mothers, daughters, and adoptive daughters in other novels in the same period—for example, in Mont-Revêche, in 1853, and The Goddaughter [La filleule], which came out as a book the same year. For a time she had stopped dreaming of utopian families, showing instead the odd misadventures of demanding young women and distraught fathers and mothers. Written after Sand returned from Italy, La Daniella was published in 1857. A blend of diary and letters sprinkled with Italian words,170 the novel recounts the adventures of a young painter in Rome, Jean Valreg. In some respects, it is the exact opposite of Germaine de Staël’s Corinne ou L’Italie, which had appeared some fifty years earlier. The criticism of the way the Papal States were governed is much harsher, and the book shows singularly lukewarm enthusiasm for Rome and its ruins.171 Very much opposed to Napoléon III’s support of the pope, Sand, who was friends with Mazzini and Garibaldi, had no desire to keep quiet about the papal administration’s neglect, the prelates’ arrogance, and the great

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economic and spiritual poverty of Rome’s inhabitants. As Victor Hugo wrote to her from Guernsey, “Daniella is a great and beautiful book. . . . I won’t discuss the politics of it, for the only things I could write about Italy would be impossible to read in France, and they’d probably prevent my letter from reaching you. I’m talking to you, an artist, about the work of art; as for the great aspirations to liberty and progress, they are ineffably part of your nature, and poetry like yours is always a breath of the future. The revolution is light, and what are you if not a lantern?”172 Everybody did not have the same opinion, far from it. Political divisions, of course, surfaced in the many critiques of the novel’s political and aesthetic ideas. Concerned about the tone Sand dared take vis-à-vis a country allied with France, the minister of the interior sent a warning to La Presse, the newspaper publishing La Daniella in installments. A year later Sand would openly support the cause of Italian reunification by publishing two articles, “The War” [“La guerre”] and “Garibaldi,” that would later circulate as brochures. After a novel in the form of a dialogue between peasants and animals, The Devil Afield [Le diable aux champs], and a fantasy novel, The Green Ladies [Les dames vertes], Sand in 1858 published an excellent novel set during the reign of Louis XIII and reflecting that period’s mind-set, The Handsome Gentlemen of Gilded-Wood [Les beaux messieurs de Bois-Doré], which mainly takes place at the château of Briantes, near Nohant. As Sand explained to Charles-Edmond, “Historical novels promise serious things, important characters, narratives of great events. That’s not what I’m doing. . . . I’m working from my point of view, and I’ve tried hard to be historically accurate down to the slightest details about the time’s customs, ideas, and manners. Everything in my fable is rigorously exact.”173 This was a rare undertaking for Sand, whose novels could assume a remarkable number of different shapes. Drawing a living portrait of the condition of workers in the paper and cutlery industry in the city of Thiers, The Black City [La ville noire] appeared in 1861, the same year as Le marquis de Villemer. After the novels of social commitment of the 1840s and the rustic novels,

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Sand managed to work other forms and subjects into her novels, always with great creative energy and invention. Was she a realist? Obviously, that label does not seem to fit either her work or the work of the young authors of the time, as she explained to Ernest Feydeau, who had just sent her his novel Fanny, “People have taken upon themselves to baptize your way of writing and Flaubert’s as realism, I don’t know why. . . . Calling it realism isn’t right because art is complex, infinite. The artist creates reality in himself, his own reality, and not anybody else’s.”174 She had already made similar remarks, in particular to Champfleury, and they would resurface again and again in the following years. Above and beyond her desire to define a very personal relationship to art and the reality it tries to render, Sand showed great liberty in her fiction, moving with ease from novels of social commitment to fantasy novels, from historical novels to novels analyzing family relationships, or to novels drawing on all these different types. Her narrative bag of tricks was characterized by the amazing composite of genres she would illustrate throughout her career, endlessly modifying the settings, milieus, time periods of her characters, and recycling old letters and diaries in ways that suited her particularly well. Often preferring the first person, she brought the writing of novels and letters closer together, and the many articles that she continued to publish frequently took the form of open letters. From that point on, the artist’s approach seemed less constrained by distinctions between literary genres. No matter what kind of text she wrote, the approach was immediately and unmistakably hers.

Family Affairs Physically, George Sand had changed. In January 1853, nearing the age of forty-nine, she announced to Pierre-Jules Hetzel “her climacteric,” “exhausting bouts of sweating,”175 and constant fatigue. Her slim silhouette had turned stocky, her face was thicker, and her hair was gray in spots. Pencil drawings, pastels, lithographs,

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and portraits in ink and watercolors throughout the volumes of her letters show sure signs of age. Except for an occasional remark about her stamina, considerable up to that point, she did not seem to attach much importance to all this, continuing “to laugh and race around the countryside like a youngster.”176 In Paris on her way back from Italy, she ordered a corset with “much more substantial stays”177 than those she had originally planned. She bundled herself more tightly, squeezing her bulges and concealing her extra pounds in more voluminous, high-collared dresses without much of a waist, in keeping with current fashion. Sand no longer showed her arms, shoulders, or cleavage. Trousers were fine for youth, with all its whims and yearnings for independence. Now independence was in her head and pen. Her wardrobe, on the other hand, had become as staid as could be. Now Sand gave more thought to her wardrobe. Everything required careful consideration, the material, the color, the cut of the dress to be made, any decoration such as lace, guipure, braid, or embroidery. Solange in particular was entrusted with her shopping in Paris, and Sand would say precisely what she wanted, for example: “I’m choosing . . . on your recommendation, . . . the little gray- and black-striped material at 8 f. a meter, wide bolt, from the Chevaux Aubertot shop. Send me what I need, and then a bit more in case of accident, of the gray silk for the bodice lining, plus the velvet for the trim, and in your letter draw me a little sketch of the look you recommend.”178 Another example: “The swatch I’m sending you is from the shop on the Chaussée d’Antin. It costs around 56 f. for 12 meters. But I find it’s a bit dark. But if you think it’s good, that’s fine with me. In this lot I really liked the material with the yellow and black checks. . . . Don’t forget the lining. . . . The reason for this dress is to have something very simple for mornings in Paris, or in town if I’m on a trip.”179 On 27 October 1852, in his studio on quai de l’Horloge in Paris, the photographer Pierre-Amboise Richebourg welcomed the author and her son, Maurice, who had come to have themselves “daguerreotyped.” On 6 December the portraits arrived in Nohant: “We have received the photographs of Madame,” Manceau noted

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in the diary, “but they’re so horribly ugly we threw everything in the fire. Memory is more faithful than such realities.”180 A tough lesson to see oneself for the first time “as she really was,” after so many portraits done by artists, major and minor! Sand thought she had destroyed these portraits,181 but she was not reckoning with the specifics of the new invention of photography, first appearing in 1839, or with the intervention of Félix Nadar, engraver, illustrator, and brilliant jack-of-all-trades. Ten years later, one of the portraits destroyed in the past resurfaced. In his huge studio in the boulevard des Capucines, Nadar salvaged Richebourg’s proofs.182 He chose one, printed it out, then did some revisions. Next he printed the portrait in a visiting card format and put them up for sale. Sand was a celebrity, as he had known for a long time,183 and this guaranteed the success of the operation. When Sand received letters asking her to sign this daguerreotype that she thought to have destroyed, she was flabbergasted. Despite Nadar’s photo editing, she hardly looks her best: in a black dress with a white lace collar, her body jammed down in chair, she turns a glum eye to the camera. She soon contacted Nadar and set a date for a new sitting. On 4 and 5 March 1864 Sand went to Nadar’s studio and returned on 9 March. For these sittings—very long at that time, given the exposure time for collodion plates—she wore three different outfits: a dress of black watered silk with braid, a plaid dress with a lacy bow at the neck, and a black- and white-striped dress with a burnoose-like collar. She sported lovely gold pendant earrings, and her hair was crimped with a curling iron, with a very visible part down the middle. In her striped dress Sand posed more than twenty times, by turns standing, with her elbow on a column, sitting full face, partially turned away, or in profile. Substantially retouched—Nadar erased the shadows under her eyes and her wrinkles, smoothed out the neck and the lower chin—these portraits were widely distributed, first in visiting card format, sometimes with Sand’s signature, and later as postcards. “My children are delighted by my photos, and they thank you for having taken them,” Sand wrote to Nadar on 24 March 1864. “So destroy Richebourg’s dreadful photograph.”184

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A little while later Nadar drew a playful lithograph glorifying Sand, who had become a true friend of his. Around one of the photo portraits he had just taken, he arranged seven vignettes summarizing her life as one often sees in a traditional representation of the lives of the saints.185 The eighth vignette forms a broad banner at the bottom of the lithograph and bears the title “In the armchairs of the French Academy.” Sand’s novels are piled on the chairs of the bicorn-bearing Academicians who look obviously stunned by this “occupation.” When they were not talking about clothes, the relationship between Solange and her mother remained difficult. The young woman never failed to ask for money. Sand suspected that she was carrying on an expensive affair with one of the young men always hovering around her. When Solange informed her of her plans to visit Nohant, even to move to Berry, Sand gave her this categorical reply: I am against . . . your coming here in September or October. I feel and want to feel too much antipathy for certain people you’ve mentioned, and I have no desire to see them together with you. . . . The same goes for your attempting to buy property near me, and if you’re going to Châteauroux for that reason, I urge you to drop the idea for your own good. I am no fan of surprises. . . . I mean not to know how you arrange your private life, and to keep it that way, I do not want you living anywhere near Nohant.186

After that letter Solange decided to break things off completely with her mother. Sand nevertheless went on paying her allowance until October 1865 when her fears became firm beliefs: Solange was selling her favors. As she explained to Charles Poncy, If [Solange] were just flirtatious, fickle, seductive, or whimsical, I would scold her and put up with the harm she’s doing herself. But she is no madcap, but rather a depraved soul. She’s sleeping around and taking money for it. . . . She has an allowance of

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3,000 francs and she doesn’t work. . . . She needs at least 20,000 francs a year to live as she does; where does she get the money? Now I know only too well what everybody knows. . . . As for me, I don’t tolerate prostitution, and it’s all over between me and a person who has gone down that road, laughing, holding her head up high, with . . . a name she ought to have respected and enough money to lead a quiet, studious, and ordinary life with dignity.187

Sand judged her daughter’s life by her own life’s measure. While she was very free in her romantic involvements, she never wanted to depend on anyone for money. Quite the other way around, the men that she loved lived, in part, off money earned by Sand. She had never been able to conceive of anything aside from a relationship between artists who shared their creative endeavors, in literature, music, or painting, making for some kind of equality in her eyes and guaranteeing similar tastes. Solange’s behavior struck her as altogether common, cowardly, and immoral. The two women would remain on bad terms for a long time: Sand held her tongue; her daughter went abroad.188 With her son things were very different. In March 1861 Maurice was awarded the Legion of Honor.189 He was about to turn thirty-seven. Thanks to his mother, he was proud to be friends with Prince Jérôme. After a brief stay in Algeria, on 23 June he boarded the prince’s yacht and headed for America. “I’m shushing all the frailties of a mother’s heart,”190 Sand wrote to him before worrying about how much the trip would cost. After Spain, Portugal, the Azores, and Newfoundland, they arrived in New York on 28 July: Your letters inspire me with calm and courage. What a lot of things you’ll wind up seeing! and what things to tell me! I don’t much like the fog you wander around in for five or six days at a time! Well, there has to be some of that in your travel adventures! What a collection of memories for you, and I hope you’re keeping a diary, so that you can remember them in order and give me a clear account of everything. I am following you on a map, but how much nicer it will be when you’re here to show me your route.191

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On 12 October Maurice was back in Nohant, “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, after a little jaunt of more than 6,000 leagues,” while Sand declared herself “utterly overcome with relief.”192 Having taken his mother’s advice, Maurice had kept a diary and upon his return launched into writing up his adventures. Six Thousand Leagues at Full Steam [Six mille lieues à toute vapeur] was published in 1862 by Michel Lévy, with a preface by Sand. The joint artistic endeavors got going again with renewed vigor, and their interest in botany, entomology, and mineralogy sent them on endless hikes in the surrounding countryside. Sand found a new adoptive son in Alexandre Dumas fils, a young and talented playwright who soon began participating in the parlor theater sketches and working with her on adapting some novels to the stage. He also acted some parts, and each time this “pretty, pretty child”193 set out for Paris, Sand would call him back to Nohant. She added to her phalanstery of artists the young Édouard Cadol, who was starting out as a playwright, and the painter Charles Marchal, twenty-one years her junior, who left a lovely pencil portrait of Sand dated 1861. As she wrote to Alexandre Dumas fils, “Marchal makes me happy. We have the tenderest of feelings for each other, now I’m his cousin, God knows why. I call him my darling. But this evening we quarreled. He threatened to break my glasses, and I retorted that I’d make him eat them, and he’s very funny, very entertaining, and basically very good-hearted, excellent.”194 This sounds more like a puppet show than some confession about an affair. Did Sand really feel anything more than rather exuberant affection for the painter, a sentiment she often evoked in comic mode? Did she later become his mistress?195 Maybe the artist who was photographed at the time by Bingham in a flattering pose, with mustache and goatee, his left hand on the lapel of his jacket, managed to win her love. In any case, she continued to surround herself with young men, big children whom she appreciated because they were funny, talented, and loved being alive. True, she made Augustine de Bertholdi her adoptive daughter, if not as a substitute for her own daughter; she was fond of the young actress Bérengère, whom she took traveling, and Marie Caillaud, who showed real talent as

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an actress, even though she worked as a maid, but Sand continued to prefer the company of men: none of these women was really an artist, and none possessed that rollicking good humor that only “the guys” enjoy together. Soon thereafter Sand’s joy knew no bounds. On 17 May 1862 Maurice was married! At the age of thirty-nine he wed the daughter of the engraver Luigi Calamatta, Lina, who was twenty. The families had known each other for a long time, given that the artist had engraved one of Sand’s portraits years before, and everything was quickly arranged. The father, of rather modest means, would spend six months a year with his daughter at Nohant. The bride and groom seemed delighted with each other. Nadar did their portrait. Maurice, who was going gray, sported a bow tie, with a gold watch chain conspicuously decorating his waistcoat, making him look more like a country squire than a puppeteer; Lina, leaning on a little pedestal table, grassotta, with a head of full, dark hair and prominent eyes, struck the nonchalant pose of the good child that everybody wanted her to be. Her future mother-in-law wrote: “The child is a purebred little Roman, nera, nera, as the song goes, frizzy, darling, clever, with a charming voice, a classic physiognomy. She is lovable and sincere; I’m just crazy about her. Of all the girls we’ve seen, she’s the one I liked best. . . . At last, the future is smiling at us.”196 The following July all of Sand’s wishes were fulfilled. As she wrote to Alexandre Dumas fils, “Marc Antoine Sand was born this morning, on Bastille Day. He is big and strong, and he gazed at me carefully, deliberately as I gathered him up all warm and cozy in my apron. . . . We put him in a bath of Bordeaux wine where he wriggled around happy as could be. This evening he is nursing voraciously, and his nurse, none other than his little mother, is happy as a lark. . . . Papa Maurice cried like a baby and so did Papa Calamatta at the sight of the sturdy little brat.”197 Family, the role of women, maternal feeling? On these points Sand had often expressed views, and she recognized how traditional they were: “Women can certainly, at given times, fill a social and political role with inspiration, but not a function that deprives them

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of their natural mission: the love of family. People have often told me my ideal of progress was backward, and there is no doubt that in the matter of progress the imagination can welcome all kinds of things. But is the heart destined to change? I don’t think so, and I see women as forever slaves to their own hearts and innards. I’ve written that time and time again, and I’m still of the same opinion.”198 There is no denying that Sand was fiercely attached to the ideal of equality between men and women, but apparently more for herself and the protagonists of her novels. For that matter, she never drew a line, as did, for instance, Marie d’Agoult, between femininity and the “natural mission” of motherhood. Sand considered feminine attributes, both good and bad, as essences that she saw (partially) lacking in herself, a novelist writing under a man’s name. It is obviously not easy to break free of stereotypes that have for centuries been based on ideas of “nature.” Sand’s contradictions on the subject, despite the fact that she was able to find words to paint the enslavement of married women and call so forcefully for their civil rights, prove this point and invite further consideration. Happiness was unfortunately fleeting, and the next two years were particularly trying. For some time Maurice had been showing Manceau thinly disguised hostility. The tension mounted after his wedding and then the birth of his son. Now he was the head of the family and the master of Nohant; at least, that was how he felt. In November 1863 things became even more heated, ugly things were said, so much so that Maurice came out and quite simply demanded that his mother’s companion leave Nohant, where he had been living for the last fourteen years. Sand then made an unexpected move, saying she would leave Nohant and go live for a while with Manceau at some place not far from Paris. As Manceau noted in the diary, “I’ve been told I am free to go by the next Feast of Saint John [June 24]. . . . So I’m going to be free again and if I want to love and devote myself once again, since that is what makes me happy, I’ll be able to do so in complete freedom.”199 Would Sand really leave Nohant? That was hardly imaginable. Sand seems to have dealt with the most pressing matters first, mixing reasons of the heart with practical and financial

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considerations. It was too expensive to live comfortably in Paris, but it would be good to be near Paris in order to monitor theater rehearsals and performances, including Manceau’s.200 Moreover, it seemed necessary to leave the young couple freer in their movements and to let Maurice manage the property that would one day be his. Finally, Manceau had for some time been suffering from some worrisome symptoms that brought to mind those of Chopin near the end of his life. He kept losing weight, coughed endlessly, and seemed twice his age. In the portrait that Nadar made in 1864, Manceau, his elbow leaning on a thick book on a pedestal table, had the sad look of a worn-out man. So they separated, but saying they would often be back in Nohant for a couple of weeks. A few months later, in March 1864, Alexandre Manceau bought a “little out-of-the-way house, low down at the far end of town,”201 with a garden, in Palaiseau, which then had train service to Paris. As Sand explained, “We’re going to settle down close to Paris to take care of theater work and other things that will be easier to do here where we are. We’ve got Nohant on a good footing for the future so that we can be together there for a season every year. This is neither a departure nor an abandonment of the area nor a separation of the family, but an arrangement that makes it easier to live and move about because we also want to do some traveling next year.”202 In Paris Sand left rue Racine for a modest apartment in rue des Feuillantines, and Manceau worked hard to “clear the place out.”203 Nadar paid her a visit in these “student quarters” and left “heavyhearted,” finding the apartment and its Moorish decoration so shabby.204 News kept coming from Nohant, and Sand replied by long letters detailing what she was doing, her theatergoing, the success of some playwrights, the “flops” of others, the rehearsals of her own plays. She missed “Cocoton,” for whom she would be the godmother at a Protestant baptism. Manceau sent his “regards and best wishes.”205 Sand started looking at her accounts and her son’s: “I think that to stay at Nohant within your budget your expenses must not

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exceed your income and that Lina’s dowry plus Mauricot’s work has to pay for the little jaunts and traveling that you want to do, all quite feasible once Cocoton is weaned, meaning next fall.”206 When the works of Eugène Delacroix were put up for sale after his death in 1863, Sand pointed out to her son that “the flower painting will probably fetch a good price”:207 “If you want to sell, now’s the time. . . . I’d like to hang on to the Centaure, for as long as I live. It was his last gift, and the Confession de Giaour was his first. There are still the Saint Anne, the Fleurs, the Cleopâtre, 2 Lélia, the Chasse au lion, the Carrières, several sketches, horses, corners of the garden, rough drawings, a watercolor lion, Mickiewicz’s portrait, etc.”208 What marvelous works! Were her financial needs so pressing? Just then Sand was asking lots of people she knew for money and demanding a raise from the director of the Revue des Deux Mondes. She convinced the banker Édouard Rodrigues to help her out, and she would sell him L’éducation de la Vierge, which Delacroix painted during one of his stays at Nohant. As for Maurice, he decided to sell all the works of Delacroix in his possession, but it was not easy, nor did he realize the expected profits. In early June 1864 Maurice, Lina, and their son left Nohant for Guillery in order to introduce the young Marc-Antoine to Baron Dudevant. Encouraged by Sand, this move was not altogether without ulterior motives. She was in fact afraid that Casimir would leave his few remaining assets to the daughter he had had with his servant-mistress, which he in fact did the following year, designating the seventeen-year-old Rose Dalias as his “sole beneficiary.” She begged Maurice to find an opportunity to clear up this matter with his father, but he had other things to worry about: a few days after their arrival, the baby fell violently ill with dysentery. “No fruit, no fruit, for a very long time,”209 his grandmother promptly advised by letter. The child grew weaker, with Maurice and Lina watching over him day and night, and everybody’s anxiety growing. The telegrams to Palaiseau one day after another do not mention any sign of improvement. Sand wound up taking the train to Agen and racing “breathlessly”210 to Guillery. She arrived too late on 22 July:

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little Marc-Antoine had died the day before, in a final bout of fever. He was buried in the village cemetery. As Sand wrote to Maurice and Lina, “I weep asleep in my bed, out walking, at work, and half the time without a thought in my head, as though I’d become a moron. We have to let nature take its course. . . . But don’t let bitterness get the upper hand, my poor children. . . . We will love, we’ll suffer, we’ll hope and fear, we’ll know joy and terror, in a word, we’ll go on with our lives, because that’s how life is, a terrible mix of things.”211 In the fall Sand contemplated spending a few weeks at Nohant and talked about money again. She had no intention of burdening the young couple’s budget and said as much to Lina: Since we can’t divvy up our food in the kitchen, for Manceau and me I’ll give you an amount of money equal to what you spend on the two of you. No meat for me, but I eat sweet things, which will balance that out. As for Manceau, he certainly doesn’t eat more than Mauricot. . . . I’ll have Sylvie look after me and help Marie [Caillaud] in the kitchen. I’ll pay her on my own, by the day. Then Marie won’t have any extra work. I can buy my own candles, but for oil, wood, and coal, I’ll contribute half. . . . If I lived on Nohant’s income, it would only get smaller, and that’s what I don’t want.212

With Manceau she spent six weeks in Berry, vainly trying to lift people’s spirits by writing plays for the little theater. Endeavoring to distract Maurice from his grief, she did not spare his pain while he was trying to write a novel entitled Raoul de La Châtre, a medieval fantasy a bit on the bawdy side.213 This was a second novel for Maurice, who had published Callirhoé as a serial in the Revue des Deux Mondes in the spring of 1863 and then as a book with Michel Lévy, who also published his mother’s novels. Despite good reviews, the novel was rather a flop. After reading and revising the manuscript, then correcting the proofs, Sand was pleased to see the book come out. She promptly asked all the critics she knew to review it: “Give this man whom you knew as a child, who has

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always been my heart’s delight, a bit of the generosity you showed me when I was starting out,”214 she wrote to Sainte-Beuve. Then she did everything possible to convince Maurice to adapt his novel to the stage. Under the title The Woman from Brabant [La Brabançonne] he tried writing “a melodrama,”215 according to Sand. Thereupon she again set to work, imagining the cast, the theater, rehearsals, delighted to see, after all their hard times, “Lina all involved in running her fine house, Maurice writing . . . today a drama, then a novel, and doing science in his free time.”216 Still, in early 1865, she was worried about the health of “good old Manceau.”217 For two years her companion had not been well, coughing a little or a lot depending on the moment. At the age of forty-seven the engraver had caught tuberculosis. At the time there was no cure for it, and its symptoms were often confused with nonfatal diseases. For a few months Manceau was “all sickly and suffering,”218 growing weaker every day. As Sand noted, Manceau’s health seriously deteriorated this winter, and there’s no sign of improvement this spring. . . . This constant cough wears him out, and his general condition is quite compromised. He has abundant night sweats, little sleep, no appetite, no strength, shortness of breath, feelings of suffocation, skin that’s always burning hot, . . . fits of coughing and spitting every hour and sometimes all the time. . . . I’ve come to fear every kind of medicine for him and no longer feel any trust or hope in anything.

I’ll soldier bravely on, but my heart is dying.219

“I’m always sad and fearful,”220 she kept writing to Maurice. In May she was amazed that a new doctor whom Manceau saw in Paris did not see his case for what it was, that of a man with little time left. Strange treatments were tried, “mitigated” oxygen, chinchona wine, camphorated lotions (the “Raspail” brand), a diet of little balls of raw meat along with alcoholic drinks.221 Nothing did any good, of course. Manceau kept wasting away in front of his companion’s eyes. “I work near him without budging, not going out for anything

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more than a turn in the garden,”222 Sand noted in June. On 5 July she quietly celebrated her sixty-first birthday. In Palaiseau Manceau hardly said a word any longer. He stopped taking any interest in the letters that arrived for “Madame” and “live[d] all alone now.”223 Sand wrote to Francis Laur: “He’s the best of men, the most devoted, the noblest heart. It is horrible to witness his death throes, and it calls up every bit of strength, willpower, and belief residing in the soul.”224 “The days go on like a nightmare”225 up to the time of Manceau’s death on 21 August. As she wrote to Maurice, “Our poor friend’s sufferings are over. . . . When we tried to wake him at five o’clock for his medicine, he tried to talk, but it was incoherent as in a dream. . . . He died without knowing it and without seeming to suffer. I thank God, in the midst of my grief, for having spared him the horrors of the last moments. It took him four or five months to die, and that’s quite enough. . . . I am totally heartbroken, but after dressing and laying him out myself, I still have the will not to cry.”226 Her grief was profound, and the letters, so discreet for so many years, become more eloquent about the nature of their relationship. Sand acknowledged having lost “the admirable companion who had been part of [her] life for fifteen years, this devoted supporter of [her] old age.”227 He was buried in the Palaiseau cemetery where she had gone to choose “a lovely spot”228 for him. After the burial (without any church service), Sand returned alone to Palaiseau: “What silence in that little room that I used to tiptoe into at every hour of the day and night. I think I can still hear that heartrending cough.”229 By 28 August she was back in Nohant. She spent the fall going back and forth between Paris, Palaiseau, and Nohant, trying to sort out Manceau’s rather messy affairs. Worry added to her grief, especially when Sand came to understand that Manceau, as prodigal with his loved ones as he was clumsy with his finances, had “tossed hand over fist”230 everything she had earned from her triumphs on stage. The little house in Gargilesse had been sold to Maurice in 1864, subject to Sand’s usufruct. The house in Palaiseau, which Manceau half owned, would be sold in 1869. Manceau’s will designated Maurice as his sole beneficiary.

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A few months later, on 10 January 1866, Lina gave birth to a little girl who would be named for her grandmother. Things were looking up. The house at Nohant seemed to come back to life. Sand felt hopeful again, comparing herself to “an old box tree all covered with knots and scars that keeps on growing.”231 Two years later, on 11 March 1868, a second baby girl was born to Lina at Nohant. Maurice and his mother were in Paris when they received word of the birth, due the following month. Sand immediately spread the news far and wide, along with a portrait of little Gabrielle: “Very dark like Lolo [Aurore], with big dark eyes like Lolo, she’s Lolo number two.”232 With Prince Jérôme in attendance, Aurore and Gabrielle were baptized as Protestants in December: “Maurice’s idea . . . [he] doesn’t want any persecution or Catholic influence around his daughters,”233 the grandmother clarified. Now Maurice’s and Lina’s little family was all there, and the fundamental components of George Sand’s final years were in place. In 1867 she returned to Nohant for good, though still keeping a pied-à-terre in Paris. She left her previous apartment for a mezzanine in a brand-new building, 5 rue Gay-Lussac, where she rented, as was her habit. This time the apartment was decorated more in keeping with the fame of the mistress of the house.234

“My Little Ideal: A Place to Work in Peace”235 The times of family conflict, internecine quarrel, and great sorrow were now over. Those had been difficult years, and every now and then Nohant had seemed less harmonious than the mistress of the house worked to make people think, particularly in her letters, a mirror that of course distorted day-to-day reality. Artists of meager talent, plus a handful of scrounging playwrights and republican journalists living off the inexhaustible Sand, the strange inertia of Maurice more in a hurry to earn a living for himself than to settle down in a stable relationship, without mentioning his jealousy of Manceau, are the flip side of a lovely picture of Nohant, a beehive of activity around “Madame,” where they all spent afternoons

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searching for rare plants, animals, and insects, evenings performing shows, until the wee hours when it was time to “pull out the pickax,” as Sand called her nightly writing time. There was still a constant round of visitors, and of course not everybody had the same opinion about life at Nohant. “Beautiful house, lovely life, simple, close-knit, cordial, with everybody independent and having a companionable tone,”236 observed Eugène Fromentin, who at Nohant put the finishing touches on Dominique, which he would dedicate to her. “A great mind, a most excellent heart,”237 he again said of his hostess. Théophile Gautier, for his part, related to the Goncourt brothers: “Mme Sand shows up, looking like a sleepwalker, and dozes through the entire lunch. After lunch, people go to the garden and play jacks, which makes her come to. She sits down and starts chatting. At that hour people generally talk about how to pronounce things: for example, d’ailleurs [“besides”] and meilleur [“better”]. But the tantalizing conversation is scatalogical jokes. . . . Just now, they aren’t doing anything but mineralogy. Everybody has a hammer; they never go out without one.”238 Even though she often complained about being all worn out and claimed she no longer wanted to write “idle fiction, meaning . . . more or less successful novels,”239 it is still true that the last years of Sand’s literary career were full of intense activity. These years, like earlier ones, were marked by a series of flops and hits on stage, of successful novels and occasional controversies. In 1863 Sand decided to write a book “against the confessional.”240 Revolving around a freethinking young man who refuses, after a fair amount of dither and delay, to marry a Catholic woman, the novel rips into the sacrament of penitence.241 Openly anticlerical, Mademoiselle La Quintinie caused an uproar. Théodore de Banville, Charles Baudelaire, and Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly could not inveigh enough against this “nebulous and declamatory book.”242 It was all right for Sand to give her novels country or socialist accents, but when she dared attack religion, denouncing the abuses of some and the naiveté of others, that seemed inexcusable. The Vatican’s reaction was swift: Sand’s entire work was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum that December.

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In March 1864 Sand put on an adaptation of her novel Le marquis de Villemer at the Odéon Theater. At her request Dumas fils had given Sand a hand with the script. The first performance of this sentimental egalitarian drama roused unexpected enthusiasm. Shouting “Vive George Sand, vive Mademoiselle la Quintinie, down with the priests,”243 the students of the Latin Quarter hailed Sand’s success. The same thing happened all over again at the following performances, with people shouting and singing at the top of their lungs: “The Jesuits are done for! Where do you come from, you men in black?244 . . . Vive La Quintinie, vive George Sand, vive Villemer.”245 In the midyears of the Second Empire George Sand always appeared as a leader of the opposition and a controversial figure. Her political convictions as well as her feminist views, her aesthetics, which some found outdated in the name of realism, the way she tackled the literary establishment—in particular, when in 1863 she came out with a pamphlet entitled Pourquoi les femmes à l’Académie? [Why Should There Be Women in the French Academy?]246—continued to arouse a good deal of criticism but also real affection. Her relationship with Gustave Flaubert is the best proof of that. The two writers met in Paris at one of those dinners for men of letters and other prominent figures at Magny’s restaurant, rue de la Contrescarpe-Dauphine—now rue Mazet—in the sixth arrondissement. Sainte-Beuve, who started these dinners, wanted the formula to go on and on.247 At the age of forty-six Flaubert was known as the author of Madame Bovary, which owed a good part of its success to the scandalous trial following its publication.248 He published Salammbô in 1862, Sand being one of the rare critics to hail this singular work, and then set about writing a new version of Sentimental Education [L’éducation sentimentale]. Sand, a bit intimidated during her first dinner at Magny’s, liked Flaubert straightaway for his modesty. The Goncourt brothers noted in their diary: “Mme Sand came to dinner today at Magny’s. She was there, next to me, with her lovely and charming head that, with age, looks a bit more like the typical female mulatto with every passing day. She looks around, intimidated, at everybody, shooting these words in Flaubert’s ear: “You’re the only one here who doesn’t

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make me nervous!” She listens, keeps her mouth shut, sheds a tear for one of Hugo’s plays in verse, the phony sentimentality of it all. . . . What strikes me about this woman-writer are her wonderfully delicate little hands, lost, almost hidden in lace cuffs.”249 There began a relationship, mainly in the form of letters, between Sand and Flaubert, and its quality was most unusual. They soon found their tone, somewhere between farce and complaint— which occupies a lot of space in Flaubert’s letters. For sure, “the walking-novel” [“l’homme-roman”250] was nothing like his “darling master,” [“chère maître”],251 but Sand nonetheless took infinite pleasure explaining her opinions about life and literature to the man whom she soon came to call her “dear troubadour.”252 Flaubert admitted that he did not expect much of life; but he considered literature so important that it eclipsed everything else. While Sand was composing Mademoiselle Merquem, she wrote to him in January 1869: “I’ve got time. I’m writing the little novel I do every year, when I’ve got an hour or two a day for it. I don’t mind not being able to think about it. That helps it ripen.”253 While he was writing Sentimental Education, Flaubert explained: “I spent a week in Paris tracking down tedious bits of information. . . . I’ve just reread my outline. I’m horrified by everything I’ve got to write, or rather I’m so disgusted I could throw up! It’s always the same old thing when I get back down to work. That’s when I just can’t stand it any longer!”254 Even if certain passages in the correspondence of Sand and Flaubert seem like a dialogue of the deaf, their exchanges are extraordinarily frank and lucid. Unparalleled in the literature of the time, a real friendship slowly developed between them, and it was reinforced by several visits that Sand made to Croisset, and Flaubert to Nohant. At the end of August 1866 Sand paid her first visit to Flaubert’s country home a few kilometers outside of Rouen. There he introduced Sand to his mother and his niece Caroline with whom he lived and also read her a few pages from The Temptation of Saint Antoine [La tentation de saint Antoine]. The hospitality was warm, the literary discussions infinite, the bed and meals excellent. “I’m happy as a pig in clover,”255 Sand noted in the diary. In November

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she returned to Croisset for a few days. After she left, Flaubert wrote: “I’ve been discombobulated since you left. . . . Under what constellation were you born to possess qualities so varied, numerous, and rare! I don’t know how I feel about you, but I have for you a particular tenderness, something that I’ve never felt for anyone else up until now. We get along well together, don’t you think? It was nice.”256 Flaubert went to Nohant for the first time in December 1869. “What good and lovely people you all are!” he declared back home. “Maurice seems to me the happiest of men. And I can’t help envying him, there you have it!”257 He went back for a few days in April 1873 with Ivan Turgenev. After they left, Sand wrote in the diary: “One lives with people’s character more than their intelligence and grandeur. My dear Flaubert has worn me out, left me stiff and sore. . . . He’s a fine man, but his personality is just too exuberant.”258 Sand’s correspondence with Flaubert over the last ten years of her life is a wonderful digest of what she was doing and thinking. Everything is there; the justification of her political and aesthetic choices, the novels (that she sent to Flaubert with her autograph), the plays (he went faithfully to all the openings), articles on all sorts of subjects (sometimes addressed to the “troubadour”), stories about short trips, family doings, plus the health problems of some and the death of others, old cherished friends whose disappearance left her feeling forlorn:259 “We have so many departed in our hearts!” Flaubert replied. “Every one of us carts around his own necropolis.”260 Sand dedicated to Flaubert The Last Love [Le dernier amour], which first appeared in 1866 in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the Goncourt brothers sniggered about it. In 1868 she published Mademoiselle Merquem, set in a little fishing village in Normandy; the heroine was a learned young woman who acted as the godmother of a little utopian community. Sand drew on her memories of her visits to Flaubert for descriptions of the coast, and she even managed to slip into her novel a few lines from Salammbô. She briefly mentioned new houses going up in Yport and Étretat, “a new seaside resort”261 recently designed for Parisians.

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In 1869 Flaubert published Sentimental Education. The critics were harsh: the impersonal narrative voice and overly long descriptions were the most excoriated problems. “What a bore!”262 Francisque Sarcey concluded along with a chorus of journalists. Flaubert was dismayed. Sand promised him an article as soon as she could and did her best to comfort him: “One frog starts croaking, and all the others join in,”263 she reminded him; “getting lambasted like that is the inescapable consecration of great merit.”264 Even if she wasn’t in favor of the famous impersonality dear to Flaubert, she considered Sentimental Education high above the books of the time, “a beautiful book, as forceful as the best of Balzac and more real, meaning more faithful to the truth through and through.”265 Evaluating the works of one’s contemporaries in terms of their posterity is a difficult exercise. Sand admired some and criticized others, sometimes wrongly, at other times with astonishing foresight. As she became more and more famous, she received more and more books from authors, and by the end of her career, most of the novels being published. Most often she found the time to have a good look and reply to the men and women who sent them to her, especially if it was their first publication. Occasionally she would publish a critique in one of the journals or literary reviews on which she collaborated. Still, on the whole, she was no Sainte-Beuve in petticoats.266 She would hail the publications of the authors she respected, for example, Louis Blanc, Jules Michelet,267 and later on Gustave Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Eugène Fromentin, or Ernest Renan. She also wrote on authors that she liked, Fenimore Cooper and his The Last of the Mohicans, and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Moreover, when asked by publishers, she wrote prefaces for re-editions of Shakespeare, Goethe, Senancour, and Rousseau, from whose novels she often drew her inspiration. Sand does not seem to have taken a particular interest in works by women.268 On the other hand, while she did not much like Flora Tristan, she grew bit by bit closer to Hortense Allart, whom she had first considered a model “woman-author.” “All our women’s stories are first cousins,”269 Sand wrote to her. She also paid

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a fine tribute to Delphine de Girardin after her death in 1855,270 even though she would never have dreamed of poking fun at her situation as a woman writer as Delphine had done in the comical preface to Monsieur de Balzac’s Cane [La canne de M. de Balzac]. As for Marie d’Agoult, Sand had broken things off quite a while back when the beautiful countess, already separated from Liszt for several years, opened a salon in Paris during the Second Empire where she entertained moderate opponents of the regime in power. In February 1868 Sand spent three weeks in Bruyères, on the Riviera, at the house of Juliette Adam, a literary woman and salonnière who had married a leftist member of the Chamber of Deputies, and then paid a visit to her old friend Charles Poncy in Toulon. This was her second time in southern France. In the spring of 1861 she had already gone down there to recover from a bout of typhoid fever, renting a house in Tamaris and spending several weeks with Manceau, Maurice, who made a lovely album of drawings of the stay, and her maid, Marie Caillaud. “I feel the same way about this part of France,” she wrote to her friend Henry Harrisse. “It is pompous and not personable like the North; the sun burns, and the wind goes right through you. Its perennials are harsh, and I prefer a little crick in Berry with its moss and watercress to these torrents where nothing trickles or blooms.”271 On the Mediterranean coast Sand crossed paths with Solange, then residing in Cannes. The mother and daughter were still at odds, even if they exchanged letters every now and then, in particular about Solange’s projected novels, with Sand forbidding her to use her pseudonym for any publications.272 On the way back Sand spent several days in Paris. She went to the Salon and admired the paintings of Corot, Daubigny, and Fromentin. Despite her good opinion of Marchal and Lambert, she thought Courbet’s The Beggar’s Alms [L’aumône d’un mendiant] was “enough to make you die laughing,”273 and it is true that the works of the painter from Ornans did not generally arouse much enthusiasm at that time. In October she was back in Paris for the stage adaptation of Cadio, which gave her a lot of trouble. The success of Le marquis de Villemer was not to be repeated, and the play ran for only a few days.

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In May 1869 Nadar did a new series of portraits. Sand looked heavier, and she wore a curious snood over her hair as well as a dress with lace decorations and an openwork shawl over her shoulders. For the last sitting, in the spring of 1870, when she was sixty-five, Sand wore a dark dress with an apron and two rows of flounces above the hem. On her head she sported a little black veil. Nadar had her pose in front of a painted forest decor, with one hand on a sort of wooden fence. Though this was in keeping with the period’s taste, it did little for the model. Sand wrote to Flaubert early in the year 1869: The person named G. Sand is in good health, savoring the wonderful winter in Berry, gathering flowers, pointing out interesting botanical anomalies, sewing dresses and coats for his daughter-in-law, costumes for puppets, cutting out stage decors, dressing dolls, reading music, but especially spending hours with little Aurore, who is an amazing little girl. There is no one more serene and happy in the household than this old retired troubadour who every now and then sings his little love song to the moon, without much worrying about singing well or making a mess of it as long as he can express the motif trotting around in his head, and who otherwise spends his time merrily lazing around. This wan character gladly loves you with all his heart, never spending a day without thinking of the other old troubadour, imprisoned in his solitude like a furious artist, disdaining all the pleasures of this world, an enemy of the magnifying glass [for botanical use] and its delights. We have, I think, the most different ways of working of any two people ever.274

Yet her health was no longer very good. She often had no zest, drive, or energy. The busy mistress of Nohant stopped bustling around: her back, throat, eyes, kidneys, stomach, and intestines gave her trouble. She often confessed to Flaubert that she frequently felt “rickety”275 and was consulting with a few of her doctor friends by mail. She had changed her diet, given up “real meat,” and ate little: “At lunch I have two eggs in an omelet or sunny-side

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up, along with a cup of coffee. At dinner, a bit of chicken or veal and some vegetables. . . . I down cider with enthusiasm, no more champagne!”276 Aside from that, there was nothing but “the tranquility of virtue, . . . a state of forced inoffensiveness, consequently without merit, but pleasant and nice to savor.”277 Her novels continued to appear at a good clip. After Tamaris in 1862, inspired by her first visit to southern France, A Girl’s Confession [La confession d’une jeune fille], in 1865, returned to the problem of difficult family relationships. Laura, published in the same year, is a charming and somewhat fantastic composition based on geology and mineralogy. The links between things that momentarily piqued her curiosity or inspired long-term worry were still present and would continue into future novels. In the autumn of 1869 Sand enjoyed a brief jaunt to the Ardennes, which would become the setting of her controversial novel All the Same [Malgré-tout]. In the spring of the following year she published a diptych on the theater world, Rolling Stone [Pierre qui roule] and Handsome Laurence [Le beau Laurence]: a young man dreaming of becoming an actor decides to go follow a troupe of itinerant actors, which gives rise to a series of insightful observations about the acting profession and the matter of interpretation. On 19 July 1870, after months of saber-rattling and threats from both sides, France declared war on Prussia. Sand immediately wrote to her “troubadour” to ask: Are you in Paris, in the midst of all these troubles? What a lesson for the nations who want absolute masters! France and Prussia cutting each other’s throats for reasons they don’t understand! This is a great disaster for us, and how many tears will be shed by the time this is over, even if we win! All we see is poor peasants crying over their children who are leaving. The police are taking away the ones that stay behind and treating them dreadfully! What a mess, what confusion in this military administration that was absorbing everything and meant to swallow every little bit! Is this horrible experience of war finally going to prove to the world that war has to be stopped or civilization will perish?278

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Flaubert was in Croisset, fraught and fulminating: I’m amazed to feel such anguish. And I’m wallowing in a bottomless pit of gloom, despite my work, despite the good Saint Antoine [the novel he was writing, La tentation de saint Antoine], who should be diverting me. . . . The war is to blame for lots of this. It seems to me that we’re plunging into darkness?

So that’s natural man for you! Now cook up some theories!

Crow about Progress, Enlightenment, the level-headed Masses, and the sweet-tempered French. I can assure you that anyone preaching peace here would get knocked over the head. . . .

Ah! we writers! Humanity is far from our ideal! And our

immense error, our fateful error, is to believe that humanity is just like us and to want to deal with them accordingly.279

Soon the population was asked to contribute to the Relief Fund for the Wounded, to which Sand twice gave generously. Flaubert, on the other hand, worked as a nurse at Rouen’s general hospital. “If they lay siege to Paris, I’ll go take up arms. My gun is all ready,”280 he asserted. The defeat at Sedan on 1 September 1870 left France dumbfounded. The emperor surrendered to the Prussians, and the Second Empire ended in a debacle. The Republic was declared in Paris on 4 September “without a shot being fired! An immense feat, unique in the history of the nations!”281 as Sand enthusiastically noted in the diary. Flaubert, on the other hand, felt rotten: “I look at myself and see nothing but a has-been. . . . You can’t write any longer when your self-respect is gone. I ask for just one thing, and that’s death, for some peace and quiet.”282 An epidemic of smallpox having broken out at Nohant, Maurice and family left for Saint-Loup, some forty miles to the south, in Creuse. Sand joined them there, and then they went together to the château of Boussac to stay “with some good friends.”283 A few days later they were back in La Châtre, now as guests of the Duvernets. Maurice preferred not being too far away from Nohant. Down in Berry it was hard to get news about

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the advancing enemy troops and the armies. People were reduced to little bits of information gleaned from the papers, news from letters, or pure conjecture. Where were the Germans? What about the army of the Loire? Was it true that Prussian helmets had been seen in Issoudun? Finally, in early November, when it seemed less likely that the Prussians would invade the surrounding area, Sand and her family decided to return to Nohant. A detailed account of these weeks, with many telling remarks, was published under the title A Traveler’s War Diary [Journal d’un voyageur pendant la guerre].284 On 5 September, right after the defeat at Sedan, Sand published in Le Temps an open letter entitled “Letter to a friend,” Flaubert being the recipient. There her tone was once again that of a radical socialist: she summoned the government to explain the defeat, to account for the chaos in which the country was plunged, and to take measures against those who had betrayed the public trust. To Prince Jérôme, taken aback by such declarations, she clarified: “Haven’t I been a republican in principle ever since I was born? Isn’t the republic an ideal that has to become a reality one day or another all over the globe? The questions of when and how are matters of politics, and I am no judge of such things, I wouldn’t know how to go about it; but the Republic being proclaimed without bloodshed is a great step forward in the history of ideas. It proves the strength of the idea, and when a great resolution of the masses makes an idea prevail, one has to go along with it.”285 On 28 January 1871 the armistice was signed. Thiers was named as chief executive of the Republic whose seat had retreated down to Bordeaux, and he was given the responsibility of negotiating with Bismarck. The conditions imposed on the defeated nation were harsh: the treaty of 26 February provided that France would cede Alsace and Lorraine and pay a war indemnity of 5 billion francs. Yet the worst was still to come. On 18 March Paris rebelled against the government, and on the 28th the Commune was declared. Sand vehemently disapproved of this insurrection of the extreme Left, viewing it as the work of a “party of hotheads” “merrily leaping into the abyss.”286

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On 21 May the government troops launched an assault against the Communards who had been holding Paris for two months. After the troops entered Paris, there was a week of fierce combat while their opponents tried to slow their advance by setting fire to public buildings and private houses. On 28 May the Commune was over, and particularly brutal repression followed. Thousands were summarily shot. “The stench of dead bodies disgusts me less that the noxious fumes of egotism from every mouth,” wrote Flaubert who arrived in Paris on 11 June. “The sight of these ruins is nothing in comparison to the immense idiocy of Paris!”287 Sand once again took a stand that irked her old friends who had allied themselves with the Republic. While she adamantly condemned the terrible repression inflicted by the government’s troops (as did Hugo, who offered to put up Communards who had fled to Brussels, where he himself took refuge after a brief return to Paris), she could not find words harsh enough to chastise the madness into which a handful of lunatics had plunged the capital as well as the entire nation. Her epistolary dialogue with Flaubert left her unsatisfied, so she wrote him another open letter in Le Temps, which really annoyed him. “Let’s have another go at it,”288 he nonetheless wrote to her some time later. Their correspondence resumed, with long letters going back and forth, Flaubert defending the thesis of the government of the less bad, and Sand continuing to plead for the people: “I feel for humanity,” she repeated. “I want them to be good because I don’t want to isolate myself from them; because they are me; because the harm they do themselves hurts my heart.”289 Life at Nohant went on as before, more than ever familial. While Maurice was ill, Sand wrote to Flaubert: “He is the life and soul of the house. When he is down, we all are dead, mother, wife, and daughters. . . . The five of us feel passionately about each another, and sacro-saint literature, as you call it, only comes in second for me.”290 It is plain to see that at age sixty-seven Sand had found peace living with the family at Nohant under Maurice’s tutelage. He was the only master from then on, much to the annoyance of Solange, who considered him “clotted and congealed in the passion and personality of ownership.”291 As Sand explained to Flaubert,

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I’ve now reached a philosophical state of a most satisfying serenity, and it’s no exaggeration to say that no matter how nasty or indifferent somebody might be to me, I don’t really care anymore, nor does it prevent me from being happy in nonliterary pursuits and also writing with pleasure and working with joy. . . .

I’ve had enough compliments in my life, back when people

were busy with literature. . . . As for money, I’ve earned enough to be rich. If I’m not rich, it’s because I didn’t really care to be, what I earn with Lévy is enough. . . . I’d like to do nothing but botany, that would be paradise on earth. But I mustn’t, that would be good for just me.292

So Sand went on adapting her novels to the stage—in June 1872, it was Mademoiselle La Quintinie’s turn293—and publishing new novels, Francia and Césarine Dietrich, as well a volume of miscellaneous pieces, Impressions et souvenirs. In December 1872 Nanon began appearing in installments in the Revue des Deux Mondes. In this novel the female protagonist tells the tale of her life from the day when she, a poor little peasant girl who owned just one sheep, met a boy, Émilien de Franqueville, whose family destined him to the church. Particularly well told, this story mainly takes place during the Revolution. It gave Sand the opportunity to think about history and the use of violence in times of revolution and the great political upheavals that the peasants, for her the lifeblood of the nation, had lived through.294 With Nanon, she portrayed an exceptional female character endowed with “the best qualities of the two sexes,”295 courageous and gentle, determined and naturally maternal. That was her ideal woman, her ideal man as well, since the young Émilien shows great strength of character as well as real sensitivity. Nanon offers an admirable synthesis of all the political, moral, and aesthetic values that carried Sand along through her literary career. “So everything is not dead!” exclaimed her faithful friend Flaubert after reading the novel. “There is still Beauty and Goodness in the world. You’ve edified me and filled me with wonder! There you have it.”296

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At Nohant, a few visits with old friends, the Viardots and their children, Turgenev, the Lamberts, Alexandre Dumas fils; in Paris, every now and then, a visit to the Art Salon, a few evenings at the theater, errands at the Bon Marché department store for her granddaughters (“6 pairs of pantaloons, 6 slips, 6 chemisettes”297), plus supplies for the puppet theater and its expanding production; the sketches were taking a new shape around the figure of Balandard, with a greater number of puppets and stage devices dreamed up by Maurice. Aurore is already a person and charming company. She monopolizes me for her own advantage, and that gives me the most sustained and intense happiness. . . . Maurice does a thousand crazy things for his daughters who adore him, but that doesn’t stop him from slaving over natural history. Lina is still the pride and joy of the house. Every possible quality and grace!298

The little girls were growing up. Their parents and grandmother took care of their schooling for the time being. Sand compared the methods for learning reading and arithmetic; she deplored the lack of stories for small children and, except for the same old fables of La Fontaine, the few poems that she could ask them to memorize.299 In keeping with the venerable tradition that made women, nannies, mothers, and grandmothers the creative heirs of Mother Goose, she told the girls stories. In December 1874 she published a children’s story in Le Temps, The Wings of Courage [Les ailes du courage]. She was familiar with the genre, having already explored it several times, in particular in A True Dimwit’s Story [Histoire du véritable gribouille], published in 1850 and so loved by André Gide.300 She wrote other children’s stories the following year and published them in a volume, A Grandmother’s Tales [Contes d’une grand-mère], in 1873. Just then children’s literature, which had first come into existence in France in the previous century, was a roaring success, and the works of the Countess de Ségur, published in the celebrated “Bibliothèque Rose” created by Louis Hachette during the Second Empire, were always listed as best sellers.

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Sand continued to receive books and manuscripts from fledgling authors, patiently answering their letters, advising, explaining, and repeating: “Art for art’s sake, these are idle words. Art for truth, art for the beautiful and the good, that’s the religion I’m after.”301 She pressed on with her “theater drudgery,”302 most often adapting novels to the stage, and not always seeing them produced. She wrote to Flaubert after the flop of her play The Candidate [Le candidat]: “Theater offers a perspective in which a real rosebush makes no impression; you need a painted one and furthermore, . . . it’s got to be in glue-bound distemper, a kind of trick. . . . Unless you’re Molière and have a very neat center stage to paint, you botch it up eighteen out of twenty times. No matter. You’re philosophical . . . , you quickly get used to this battle at point-blank range, and you carry on until you hit the adversary, the audience, the beast.”303 She scarcely referred to politics any longer. Every now and then, in an article or a letter, to Flaubert or some other old friend, Sand would hark back to her abiding convictions. The diary mentions political doings of the day but generally without any commentary: “I find politics pathetic,” she contented herself with saying to Charles-Edmond, “and my granddaughters are my only consolation.”304 In July 1873 Solange moved into the château of Montgivray that had once belonged to Hippolyte Chatiron’s wife. “For the time being we are on good terms,” Sand wrote to Eugène Lambert and his wife, “but I cannot consider this move without fearing new troubles to come. Montgivray could very well turn into the Château of Shame.”305 After an exchange of polite letters and a reinstatement of her allowance, Solange once again set foot in Nohant. She sent her mother the manuscript of a second novel, Carl Robert, which Sand proposed to the director of the newspaper Le Temps, where Sand published two texts a month: “Next to Paul Féval,” she wrote, “I think . . . this delicate and refined novel would be a wonderful success.”306 Charles-Edmond turned it down, just as François Buloz, the director of the Revue des Deux Mondes, had turned down Maurice’s manuscript Le coq aux cheveux d’or [The

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Golden Rooster] a few years before.307 Obviously the two men did not hold the productions of Sand’s children in high esteem. Sand sketched her granddaughters out walking and in early 1874 tried her hand at dendrites or dendritic painting: one or two spots of watercolor are dropped on a sheet of paper that is then pressed down on very absorbent paper; once the paint has dried, the shapes thus produced are touched up with watercolors or ink. Little by little she made “progress”308 and enjoyed daydreaming in front of these small paintings with sumptuous colors and strange tree-like designs. “This technique is the only distinguishing feature of my little messes, and that’s what makes them look a bit unusual.”309 Sand soon got the idea of putting these “little watercolors signed with [her] name” up for sale to fatten up “[her] granddaughters’ piggy bank.”310 In fact, Sand, with Maurice’s help, created an amazingly original body of artwork, rarely gathered together and displayed.311 In early May 1875 Michel Lévy, who had been Sand’s publisher for twenty years, died, and this greatly affected her. Sand had envisaged publishing her complete works with him, and this project was on the point of fruition. The contract had been signed, and a general preface inspired by the preface to Balzac’s The Human Comedy had been written. When Michel Lévy’s brother took over the business, the name changed and became Calmann-Lévy. The projected complete works of Sand fell by the wayside. “It’s a great loss for my financial security,” Sand wrote to her agent, Émile Aucante, “and it’s even more painful for my heart.”312 Soon thereafter a young Belgian scholar, bibliophile, and collector of handwritten manuscripts, Charles de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, made contact with Sand. He met her in Paris in June 1875 and proposed to help her organize her works and make a complete inventory of them. Sand set to work immediately, gathering together the manuscripts in her possession, asking directors of magazines and publishers with whom she had worked for others; she ordered, inventoried, and reread most of her published works and those still in manuscript. She also imagined writing prefaces for the works that had appeared without one and dedicating those

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of her works that had not been addressed to any particular person thus far. At some point Sand envisaged starting the project of her complete works all over again, this time according to Lovenjoul’s “fine ideas.”313 Soon the exercise took on the appearance of an immense retrospective: the whole of Sand’s activity as a writer from its first stirrings far back in time, nearly half a century earlier, rising bit by bit before her eyes.

1876

“My son, I welcome . . . your embrace and return it with all my might, which is not much, since I’m now pretty old, but I’ve still got a good heart and a tranquil mind, meaning I’m very fond of you now and forever.”1 Sand wrote these words to Alexandre Dumas fils on 1 January 1876. At the age of seventy-one she was replying, as she had done every other year, to all the mail generated by the holidays. On 2 January she wrote to Juliette Adam, Émile Aucante, Jeanne Bondois, Doctor Favre, Nancy Fleury, Valérie Fould, Henry Harrisse, George Lambert, Léonie Maulmond, Edme Simonnet, Marguerite Thuillier, Édouard Cadot, Sylviane Arnould-Plessy, Doctor Darchy, Gustave Flaubert, and Eman Martin to thank them for their good wishes; and she wrote more the next day. Who were all these people? Close friends, old friends, doctors, lawyers, writers, artists, men and women, socialists or not, were among Sand’s usual correspondents in her last months. A few weeks before, Sand had sent Flaubert a letter in which she once again stated her views about literature and insisted that authors should not hide their own convictions from their readers. This was an old debate between the “troubadours,” and in this letter and the exchanges it generated between the end of 1875 and the first months of 1876 it began to look like a last will and testament: You’re going to pull out the pickax again? Me too, since Flamarande, I’ve done nothing but fiddle around. . . .

What kinds of things will we do? You, for sure, are going to

bring folks desolation while I offer them consolation. I don’t know what determines our lots in life. You watch things go by, criticize, and abstain from comment in what you write. You just represent things while very carefully, systematically hiding your

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own feelings. Yet people see these feelings just fine through what you say, and you make your readers sad. I, on the other hand, want to make them less unhappy. I cannot forget that my personal victory over despair has come from my will and a new way of understanding that is just the opposite of my old perspective.

I know you disapprove of personal ideas intervening in lit-

erature. Are you right? . . . It’s impossible to have a philosophy in your soul without it showing. I don’t have any literary advice for you or anything to say about the writer friends you mention. I’ve even told the Goncourt brothers everything I think. . . . Only I think they’re lacking, and you especially, a broad and clearly delineated view of life. Art is not just painting. Besides, real painting is full of soul, and that’s what moves the brush. Art is not just criticism and satire. Criticism and satire paint just one side of the truth. I want to see people the way they are. They aren’t good or bad. They are good and bad. But there is something more, nuance, nuance, and for me that’s the point of art.

I think your school [realism] doesn’t care about the substance

of things, it stays too much on the surface. Seeking nothing but form, it sells substance short.2

Here Sand expressed some thoughts about aesthetics and ethics that bring to mind her exchanges with Balzac in times past. The failure of Sentimental Education, a novel that she still considered “so well done and so solid,”3 made her think that it was more than ever necessary to revitalize literature with a more extensive philosophy and not to make any secret about the driving force of the whole work. That was her conception of literature throughout her whole career. Sand preached and kept on preaching the writer’s responsibility, in the name of a mindful solidarity with others and the world.4 Mocking, denigrating, insulting for the sake of “truth” or some literary program striving for “scientific” status, do not, she thought, do people justice. They are rarely saints, rarely total villains. Literature has to draw a nuanced portrait of things. Flaubert probably went on trying to convince his correspondent that his literary ambitions were of another sort:

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I seek Beauty above all, something that my companions are lukewarm about. I see their indifference while I’m consumed with admiration or horror. Sentences that they think ordinary make me swoon. . . . I try to think well so that I can write well. But writing well is my aim, and I don’t hide it.

I’m lacking “a broad and clearly delineated view of life.” How

very right you are! but I ask you, how could things be otherwise? . . . The words Religion and Catholicism on the one side, and Progress, Fraternity, Democracy on the other, no longer satisfy the spiritual needs of the moment. The brand new dogma of Equality that Radicalism preaches has been proven wrong by Physiology and History.5

To which Sand replied: “Everybody starts off from a certain point of view, and I respect that freedom of choice. I can sum up my own in a few brief words: . . . see as far as possible, good, evil, nearby, around, over there, everywhere; take note of the endless gravitation of all things tangible and intangible toward the inexorability of what is good, decent, true, beautiful.”6 This “lesson” to Flaubert attests to her steadfast belief in progress—moral and material, individual and collective. This he quite understood and summed up in the following terms: “You, from the very start, in everything you do, you ascend to the heavens, and from there you come back down to earth. You start out from things a priori, from theory and the ideal. That’s why you’re indulgent with regard to life, serene, and, truth be told, magnanimous. As for me, a poor old bugger, I am stuck down on earth with soles of lead, everything moves me, rips me apart, ravages me, and I try hard to take to the air.”7 Shortly thereafter, as though nonetheless acquiescing to his old friend, Flaubert started writing A Simple Heart [Un cœur simple] in which Sand should have recognized, he said, her “immediate influence.”8 This was the moving homage that the author of Madame Bovary offered “Old Lady Sand.” Unfortunately, she would never read these words. A new novel, The Percemont Tower [La tour de Percemont], was published in a volume. Here Sand tried, too obviously in the eyes

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of certain critics, to illustrate her “values.” Yet her faithful friend Flaubert claimed to be “extremely”9 fond of it. This novel was accompanied by another narrative, Marianne. Later on, there would be a few articles, in particular about puppets, in Le Temps, while the Théâtre-Français would put on a new production of Victorine’s Wedding. Sand also started Albine Fiori, returning to the epistolary novel and imagining, needless to say, a heroine endowed with “lively ingenuity,” and this unfinished novel would be published in 1880, in La Nouvelle Revue, directed by Juliette Adam. Every bit of Sand’s talent is once again right there—from the very start in the tone, in the style, crisp and without any frills, in the plot, briskly set in motion, in the way the characters ask themselves questions about their lives and the relationships they’ve entered into with varying degrees of happiness.10 Dated 18 May 1876, her last article in Le Temps was a critical review of Renan’s Philosophical Dialogues and Fragments [Dialogues et fragments philosophiques]. She observed: “If you say it’s a lovely book, you’re saying what all of M. Renan’s readers think. But let’s say as well that it’s a good book; . . . that it brings us back to common sense, all the while developing more and more our sense of the ideal. . . . Isn’t that really the great, the true problem? Don’t we need to escape once and for all from the illusions of the past, yet still have faith and reverence for the sacred truths without which we confuse ideas and facts, thereby losing the notion of the great synthesis?”11 This question is the last formulation of a debate that Sand never let go stale: the need to keep moving forward does not mean no longer being faithful to what she holds as “ideal,” the deep yearning for justice and progress, equality as well, at the center of her way of thinking because her way of thinking was political. As for the rest, the daily routine at Nohant went on as usual. Ever happier, Sand lived there as part of the family, as in a pastoral:12 “My present life would be of mediocre interest for biographers, since it’s always the same thing: toiling away with the pickax amid my babbling granddaughters. Aurore’s lessons, dominoes and card

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games with Plauchut, marionettes with Maurice on days when we’re not working.”13 When imagining things with puppets, Sand would not let herself be outdone. She kept on inventing scenarios, Balandard in the Orient [Balandard en Orient], then Balandard the Candidate [Balandard candidat], and working on costumes and props. She wrote to one of her correspondents, begging her to go to the Temple district in Paris to buy a few things: “Please pick out some flashy material, ribbons, brightly colored things, sequined gauze, in short, whatever frippery you can find for our deluxe extravaganzas. Jewelry too, we’ve never got enough, scarves or wide oriental belts, all that stuff makes for a great effect in our theater.”14 Her wholehearted desire to participate in family activities while reserving her writing labors for the wee hours of the morning had already put her much in the public eye. People were always making requests: the authors of the Galerie Contemporaine Littéraire et Artistique asked for a biographical note and a portrait. She recommended an old friend, the republican journalist Edmond Plauchut for the text, Placide Verdot for the photography. A few months earlier the photographer from Châteauroux went to Nohant to take pictures of the house, inside and out, the garden, the granddaughters in their little aprons on the back steps, their grandmother under a sun umbrella with Plauchut and the puppets.15 Dozens of these photographs were printed, and some were reproduced in the press. Despite “the new layer of old age making [her] more beautiful,”16 Sand was particularly happy with a portrait that she sent to a few faithful friends. It was her last known portrait, half length, with a headband hiding some curls of artificial hair.17 Soon after she got her own camera, and it is not known if she ever had occasion to use it. Her letter writing kept up a brisk rhythm, occupying a good part of the time she devoted to writing. Sand confessed to Louis Ulbach in 1869: I write easily and with pleasure, it’s my recreation, since I have an enormous number of letters to write, and that’s work. If people

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only had to write to their friends! But there are so many touching or preposterous requests! Whenever possible, I reply. . . . All that, along with the personal business that sometimes needs tending, amounts to some ten letters a day. It’s a scourge, but who doesn’t have one? Once I’m dead, I hope to go to a planet where nobody knows how to read or write. It will have to be near perfect to have no need of that.—In the meantime, things should really be different on this one.18

One after the other, Sand requested the support of the minister Philippe de Chennevières, pleaded with her maid to go buy a big porcelain doll for Gabrielle, tried to place articles that Maurice had written as well as little puppet plays; she wrote thank-you notes for the books sent to her (Les Danicheff by Alexandre Dumas fils, Jack by Alphonse Daudet, Madame Carvelet by Émile Augier), for a bouquet of flowers or a hamper of oysters. Time and time again she encouraged young writers who sent her their manuscripts, all the while letting them know how hard it was to get published; she urged them especially to write well. To one, Henri Amic, she wrote: “I’ve told you before, and I’ll tell you again that you’ve got to suck from all the flowers in the meadow to make a bit of honey. You think it’s enough to think and seek advice.—No, that’s not enough. You have to have lived and gone searching high and low. You have to have been through a lot, you have to have loved, suffered, waited, always toiling away!”19 On 28 May 1876 Sand confessed to Marguerite Thuillier that she was “suffering a great deal from a chronic intestinal problem.”20 The same day she gave a detailed report to Henri Favre, a doctor in Paris with whom she was on excellent terms: “Having had almost no bowel movements for more than two weeks, I am wondering where I’m headed and if I oughtn’t expect a sudden departure one of these days. . . . I’m not one to get all worked up about undergoing a general law and to revolt against the universal scheme of life but . . . if I had a day or two between crises, I’d go to Paris so that you could help me carry on a bit longer, for I feel I can still do some good for my family.”21 Two days later she wrote

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another letter to her great-nephew Oscar Cazamajou: “My time is up, and I’m not sad about what may happen. I think everything is fine, living and dying, it’s dying and living better and better.”22 These are the last words she put down on paper, and this was the last letter she addressed to anyone. Sand’s health, “lousy” for several months, took a brutal turn for the worse. She would live only a few more days. There is a lot of information about what she went through in the following week. Never losing sight of the importance of the event, everybody who witnessed Sand’s last moments or had communication from people close to her left their impressions in letters and remembrances.23 On 30 May two doctors from La Châtre confirmed the verdict given by Sand’s old friend, Dr. Gustave Papet, who had gone to her bedside: “She’s doomed!”24 Three other doctors were nevertheless brought in from Paris. Sand was suffering from an intestinal blockage most likely caused by cancer. By moments her pain was so intense that her screams could even be heard in the garden. The doctors seemed not to worry much about this unbearable torture, or at least they couldn’t do anything about it. On 2 June they decided to administer an enema of a large quantity of seltzer water. This afforded her no real relief, and it was too late to operate. Sand screamed and screamed in pain and called for death to deliver her. In her lucid moments she obviously felt ashamed to uncover the plump little body of a seventy-one-year-old woman with its swollen, stinking belly. She asked that Maurice and her granddaughters not be allowed in her room. At night her daughter, Solange, a doctor, and a maid stayed at her bedside. They would change her position on a regular basis, offer her something to drink, refresh her with cold compresses. In the morning her daughter-inlaw, Lina, would take over, with the help of her two great-nephews, René Simmonet and Oscar Cazamajou, one being Hippolyte Chatiron’s grandson and the other, Caroline Delaborde’s grandson, both of whom Sand considered full members of the family. On 7 June Sand asked to see Aurore and Gabrielle and mumbled a few fond words to them before they were led away. Early

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the next morning the death throes began, her eyes staring into space, and her breathing becoming more and more labored. Lina, Solange, René, and Oscar were kneeling at the foot of her bed with Doctor Favre. Maurice was sleeping. Sand muttered something that sounded like: “Laissez verdure” or “Let greenery.”25 A few hours later she was no more. When her son learned that his mother had died, he said again and again amid his sobs: “Our life is over!”26 Solange washed her mother’s body, dressed her, cut a few locks of her hair, and covered her face with a veil. Decomposition set in fast, and the body was soon covered in flowers. Lina and Maurice had quite a disagreement on the terms of the death announcement. He insisted on including the title of Baroness for his mother and those of Baron and Knight of the Legion of Honor for himself; his wife was violently opposed.27 Maurice won. It was announced that “Madame George Sand, Baroness Dudevant, née Dupin” had died. Recorded at the municipal offices of Nohant-Vicq, the death certificate was worded as follows: “In the year eighteen hundred seventy-six, on the eighth day of the month of June, . . . Oscar Charles Mammès Cazamajou . . . and René Hippolyte Simmonet . . . came to declare that today at ten o’clock in the morning, Madame Lucile Aurore Amantine Dupin (known as George Sand), aged seventy-one years old, without any known profession, . . . widow of the late François Baron Dudevant, daughter of the late François Élisabeth Dupin and Antoinette Sophie Victoire Delaborde, died in her château of Nohant, her primary residence, located in this commune.”28 How ironic! One of the most important literary figures of the century, one of the women who had fought the hardest for her own independence and for the equality of the sexes, was reduced solely to her civil status as a daughter and widow (of a baron), and declared “without any known profession.” Servants and close friends visited the death chamber on 8 and 9 June. The burial took place on Saturday 10 June. From Paris there arrived Gustave Flaubert, Alexandre Dumas fils, Prince Jérôme Napoléon, Renan, Paul Meurice, Édouard Cadol, Calmann-Lévy, Henry Harrisse, and Eugène Lambert, along with a handful of

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journalists sent by Le Figaro and Le Bien Public. People from the village gathered along the short route from the château to the entrance of the little church of Nohant. It had been raining for several days, and the roads were full of mud. Carried by four peasants in their smocks, the coffin was led in by a choirboy carrying a cross, a few others holding candles, the cantor and parish priest; the straps of the pall were held by Sand’s great-nephews, Prince Napoléon and Dumas fils. “It looked like a chapter out of one of her books,”29 Flaubert wrote after his return to Croisset. A wood engraving by Frédéric Lix, published in L’Illustration, immortalized the scene. At the cemetery next to the château, Ernest Périgois, a childhood friend who had been elected to the council for the Indre, spoke to the mourners (much too lengthily, according to everybody there); then Paul Meurice read a few words written by Victor Hugo that began: “I weep her death and hail her immortality.” “These set phrases . . . didn’t have much effect,”30 Henry Harrisse would recollect. Prince Napoléon and Dumas fils wound up not giving their prepared remarks. Renan wrote: Her funeral was as it ought to have been. [Sand] is buried in a corner of a country cemetery, at the foot of a beautiful cypress. Everybody from the surrounding countryside was there, everybody was in tears. People had the good sense not to upset the simple women who came to pray for her, wearing their bonnets and carrying their rosaries. The coffin covered with flowers, carried by peasants, had to go through the church. As for me, I would have been sorry to pass by the entrance of the church sheltered by huge trees without setting foot inside.31

The Catholic author did not hide his pleasure in seeing a religious ceremony that surprised many of Sand’s friends. The hostility that Sand had expressed for Catholicism in Mademoiselle La Quintinie was no secret to anyone. Sand had wished Maurice to marry in a civil ceremony, followed by a Protestant religious ceremony, and she also wanted Protestant baptisms for her

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granddaughters. For Manceau, she had arranged a civil burial. Yet, even though she did not conceal her feelings about the Catholic clergy and the temporal power of the Roman church, she never stopped asking if it was necessary to believe in God. A few months before her death, on 9 July 1875, she reasoned in Pascalian terms: “No science, no experiment, no calculation, can prove the existence of God; yet at the same time no calculation, no experiment, and no science can prove that God doesn’t exist. . . . And since the most enlightened reason is absolutely free to search for faith, let’s look to God, meaning superior wisdom, infallible justice. Our hearts feel this need, and, all by themselves, they act as proof enough for us.”32 And she added: “Yes, we’ll see our loved ones who have gone on before, no matter where and how? It was given to us to cherish them; it is owed to us to meet up with them again.”33 It was Solange who decided to give her a Catholic burial. Against the advice of Maurice and Lina as well as Sand’s republican and freethinking friends, especially Plauchut, she would not hear of her mother being unceremoniously placed in the family vault in the Nohant cemetery. Doctor Favre was sent over to the Nohant priest to ask him to celebrate the funeral mass.34 Judging the matter delicate, Solange dispatched a message to the Archbishop of Bourges, Monsignor de La Tour d’Auvergne. He remembered perfectly well the various declarations made by this woman “immoral” in all respects, and was fully aware that her entire works had been placed on the Index, but he did not want to risk a scandal by saying no. He authorized a simple religious service with the Nohant priest as the sole celebrant. Sand was buried near her father, grandmother, and granddaughter Jeanne. Her tomb was later decorated with a mausoleum in the form of a sarcophagus with her name, her dates of birth and death inscribed on a plaque. Nothing has changed since then. The conflicts about the wording of Sand’s death announcement and the kind of funeral she should have resurfaced at the reading of her will at the offices of the notary Moulin at La Châtre. Sand confirmed the provisions made in an earlier will, dated 1847, bequeathing most of her estate to her son, Maurice, to the

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detriment of her daughter, Solange. This will had been drawn up shortly after the violent scene in July 1847 with her son-in-law, Jean-Baptiste Clésinger. Convinced of her daughter’s selfishness and the disreputable intentions of Solange’s husband, Sand had decided to disinherit them. She had not changed her mind while drawing up her second will. “Thirty years of inexorable wrath!”35 Solange wrote in a letter to Charles Poncy just after learning the contents of the two wills. Maurice tried to be accommodating, without success. Aside from the manuscripts and literary property that remained undivided, he inherited nearly all his mother’s assets, meaning the château of Nohant “with its land, furniture, and buildings,” several fields and the domain of Chicoterie, fifty-eight hectares “with their livestock and all their holdings.”36 For Solange, Sand held in reserve the domain of Porte, with an area of some sixty hectares. In case Maurice’s share exceeded what was authorized by law, the will further specified that he would give his sister a “cash compensation” of 53,000 francs.37 Her preferences could not have been more clearly stated. It was plain to see that the heirs of Madame Sand were Maurice, his wife, Lina, their daughters, Aurore and Gabrielle. What motivated Sand to dispossess her daughter like this? A cluster of feelings going from disappointment to resentment and probably reaching far back into the past, perhaps to the circumstances of Solange’s birth, plus the very generous dowry that she had given Solange at the time of her wedding.38 Very early on, Sand’s letters mention the little girl’s unmanageable character, her whims and mood swings. As an adolescent, Solange defied her mother; she charmed Chopin, then, impulsively married an artist whose irascibility was no secret to anyone. After the unforgettable quarrel of 1847, Nini’s death in 1855, and their relationship having been several times severed and laboriously resumed, Solange got increasingly caught up in her proud role as the forsaken daughter. Yet Sand, who generally addressed peremptory letters to her, seemed not to attach much importance to her real misfortunes: Solange lost the two children she had with Clésinger, finally

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separated from a brutal, extravagant husband, suffered endless money problems, remedied them as she could, threw herself into love affairs without any tomorrow, and saw her ambitions as a writer come to naught.39 After Sand’s death, condolences flooded into Nohant along with letters of sympathy addressed to the family. Gustave Flaubert wrote to Maurice: “Several centuries from now—hearts just like ours will beat faster because of hers! People will be reading her books, which means her ideas will give substance to their dreams.”40 To Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, a book-loving spinster who corresponded with Sand as well, he declared: “You had to know her as I did to recognize how very feminine this great man was, the immense quantity of tenderness that this genius possessed. She’ll remain one of France’s luminaries and a matchless glory.”41 That is not how things would turn out. Sand’s work soon entered a kind of purgatory: except for her rustic novels, for a long time considered literature for children and reserved for academic prizes and Christmas presents (Marcel Proust’s grandmother gave him books of Sand for the holidays), most of her novels were not republished after her death and soon fell into oblivion. Realist authors, Zola but also Huysmans or Maupassant, later Bourget or Jules Renard, spoke in one voice: Romantism is over, and Sand’s work, branded as “idiotically idealistic,”42 deserves to be forgotten. As for Proudhon, he railed against Sand for a “systematic depreciation of the male sex”43 and then concluded: “The free woman . . . is a myth.”44 Teachers, priests, and mothers went on fearing the pernicious influence of novels that applauded girls for their independent minds and spirits: there were very few texts by Sand in books for “young people.”45 “Better suited to reflecting rather than producing ideas,” Sand was altogether “subjected to impulsions of sympathy and imagination,”46 Gustave Lanson averred in 1895 in his Histoire de la littérature française. Even so, France celebrated the author’s centenary in 1904. A statue of George Sand sculpted by François Sicard was placed in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, twenty years after the first statue, by Aimé Millet, had been erected at La Châtre. At the same

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time, the distribution of postcards with Nadar’s portraits of George Sand, photos of Nohant and Gargilesse, various places thought to have inspired certain novels as well as tableaux vivants illustrating novels set in Berry attested to the broad popular and regional interest in the author and her works. Elsewhere, in most of the countries of Europe, in Russia and the United States, her work was known in translation and given an enthusiastic welcome, since Sand’s name was of course associated with struggles in support of women and the underprivileged. Sand took her place in the Pantheon of the great talents of all the nations: Bettina von Arnim, Heinrich Heine, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, William Thackeray, the Brontë sisters, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and many more paid her homage. Sand’s life, on the other hand, became a legend. Her biographers early on loved juxtaposing the woman of many love affairs with the serene grandmother, “the good lady of Nohant,” a bit as if Nadar’s photos were the flip side of Delacroix’s fine portraits. These puerile dichotomies miss the truth. In Sand’s life there were many fewer lovers than people liked to insist so as to disparage her, at the same time much less frigidity than one of her first biographers, André Maurois, liked to imagine in Lélia ou la vie de George Sand. There is much more sensuality, utopian idealism, and “romantic” spirit, much more intelligence, generosity, concern for others, and conviction, much more suffering as well, of all sorts, that only great force of character allowed her to face without being overcome by bitterness. Finally, then and still now, there is much more talent, considerable and multifaceted, than literary historians, obviously frightened of women geniuses, have wanted to acknowledge. As for the question of sexual difference, the way it works, and the possibility of getting beyond it, the woman who became “George Sand” gives in the books she wrote a series of original answers, always mindful not to get trapped in preconceived and faulty notions. Through the history of her life and novels, the entire social edifice, with all its rules for the relations of gender

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and class in the nineteenth century, is challenged and remade in a utopian spirit, in the name of liberty and equality. For those who wish to understand, there remain her substantial books, their intentions as complex as the mind that gave them life: novels and short stories, plays, political writings, autobiographical texts, plus an immense correspondence. It is all this all mixed together that has to be explored in order to grasp something of the life of an extraordinary personality. She is dead, now she is literature.

Notes

Introduction 1. “Obsèques de George Sand,” in Œuvres complètes (Paris: J. Hetzel et A. Quentin, 1844), 45:388. 2. Léon Daudet, Souvenirs et polémiques, ed. Bernard Oudin (Paris: Laffont, “Bouquins,” 1992), 1229. 3. [Translator’s note] Monsieur Prudhomme, a character invented by the nineteenth-century caricaturist Henry Monnier, was a mediocre and conceited bourgeois who loved making pompous, solemn, and ultimately silly pronouncements. 4. Émile Zola, “George Sand,” in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1966), 12:397. 5. Guy de Maupassant, “George Sand d’après ses lettres,” in Chroniques (Paris: UGE 10/18, 1980), 2:58. 6. Jules Barbey, d’Aurevilly, “Madame Sand,” in Littérature épistolaire (Paris, [1882]), 372. 7. Honoré de Balzac, Lettres à Madame Hanska, ed. Roger Pierrot (Paris: Laffont, “Bouquins,” 1990), 1:443, 2 March 1838. 8. Alexandre Dumas, Mes mémoires, ed. Claude Schopp et al. (Paris: Laffont, “Bouqins,” 1989), 2:990 (Dumas dedicates a whole chapter to Sand in 1832). 9. Gustave Flaubert and George Sand, Correspondance [Flaubert-Sand Corr.], ed. Alphonse Jacobs (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), 196, 19 September 1868. 10. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 521, 6 February 1876. 11. “Lettres de George Sand et d’Hippolyte Taine,” Revue des Deux Mondes 13 (January 1933): 345. 12. George Sand, Correspondance [Corr.], ed. Georges Lubin (Paris: Garnier, 1968), vol. 4, ca. 2 July 1838, to Honoré de Balzac.

1832 1. Histoire de ma vie [HMV], ed. Martine Reid (Paris: Gallimard, “Quarto,” 2004), 504. 2. HMV, 503. 3. Corr., 1:817, to Jules Boucoiran. 4. Corr., 1:814, 25 February 1831, to Alexis Duteil. 5. “I wrote the majority of the few things published under the name of J. Sand,” she would later acknowledge in a letter to François Buloz dated 26 June 1834 (Corr., 1:642).

Notes to Pages 10–21  213 6. HMV, 1198. 7. HMV, 1198–99. 8. Indiana, ed. Béatrice Didier (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio classique,” 1984), 49. 9. Indiana, preface from the 1832 edition, 37. 10. As for Sand before Indiana, we now have much better information. See the first two volumes of Œuvres complètes, ed. Yves Chastagneret (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008). 11. Corr., 1:801, 12 February 1831. 12. HMV, 1218. 13. HMV, 876. 14. HMV, 1218. 15. Sand received letters begging her to establish her kinship with the assassin, who had become a national hero (HMV, 1218). 16. Corr., 21:311, 17 January 1869, to Gustave Flaubert. 17. Corr., 2:120. 18. HMV, 1219–20.

I: 1804–1831 1. According to an old copy of her birth certificate, reproduced by Georges Lubin, in Œuvres autobiographiques [ŒA] (Paris: Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 1980), 1:1236. 2. HMV, 501. 3. HMV, 91. 4. Georges Lubin, Album Sand (Paris: Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 1973), 11–12. 5. HMV, 60. 6. This is how Sand recalled learning about her half brother: “My grandmother said to me: ‘This is Hippolyte. Now kiss, children.’ We kissed without asking any further questions, and I spent years with him not knowing that he was my brother” (HMV, 614). In her letters to her son Mme Dupin only referred to him as the one “from the little house.” 7. HMV, 768. 8. Sand left a detailed portrait (HMV, 582–85) of this ugly man with “terribly prosaic tastes.” 9. Cf. Elizabeth Harlan, George Sand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), chap. 6. 10. HMV, 513. 11. HMV, 565. 12. HMV, 579. 13. HMV, 581. 14. For the modifications made by Sand in her edition of these letters, see HMV, 37–38 (the originals are kept at the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris). 15. HMV, 598. 16. HMV, 599. 17. HMV, 605.

214  Notes to Pages 21–30 18. This letter, dated Madrid, 12 June 1808 (HMV, 606), was kept in an envelope on which Sand had later written in blue ink “my father’s last letter to his mother.” The letter shows evidence that it was read several times by candlelight. 19. HMV, 614. 20. HMV, 606. 21. HMV, 617. 22. HMV, 621–23. 23. HMV, 624. 24. HMV, 757. 25. HMV, 630. 26. HMV, 630. 27. HMV, 631. 28. HMV, 1053. 29. Promenade dans le Berry: Mœurs, coutumes, légendes, ed. Georges Lubin (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1992), 29. 30. Valentine (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1869 [1832]), 2 (preface of 27 March 1852). 31. For Sand’s properties, see Pierre Remérand, “George Sand sur ses terres de Nohant,” in George Sand: Une Européenne en Berry (Châteauroux-La Châtre: Le Blanc, 2004), 215–31. 32. For more details, see Nicole Patureau, Nohant (Éditions Ouest-France, 1995) and Anne-Marie de Brem, La maison de George Sand à Nohant (Paris: Éditions du Patrimoine, 1999). 33. HMV, 661. 34. HMV, 661. 35. HMV, 649–50. 36. HMV, 660. 37. HMV, 661. 38. “In the same period my grandmother started teaching me music. . . . She was still a wonderful singer; . . . when she shut herself away in her room to reread some old opera . . . , I would go into real ecstasy. Sitting on the floor under the old harpsichord . . . I would have spent my whole life there. . . . She taught me the principles of music, and so clearly that it didn’t seem all that hard. Later on, when I had regular music teachers, I couldn’t understand a single thing any longer, and I got disgusted, thinking I wasn’t cut out for music. But since then I’ve really felt that had my grandmother been my only teacher, I would have become a musician, for I was well organized for that, and I understand beauty, which, in this art, makes a real impression on me and carries me away more than all the others” (HMV, 649–50). 39. HMV, 85. 40. HMV, 88. 41. HMV, 1142. 42. HMV, 721. 43. HMV, 720. 44. HMV, 721. 45. HMV, 784.

Notes to Pages 30–40  215 46. “My old parish priest amused himself by teaching me a thing or two, and I learned the rest by trying to read a bit in the gazettes that our former lord and master lent him,” Blaise Bonnin, Sand’s imaginary peasant, would recall later on (“Lettre d’un paysan de la Vallée-Noire écrite sous la dictée de Blaise Bonnin,” in Politique et polémiques, ed. Michelle Perrot [Paris: Belin, 2004], 142). 47. HMV, 773. 48. HMV, 784. 49. Corr., 5:827, December 1842. 50. HMV, 840. 51. HMV, 826. 52. HMV, 833. 53. HMV, 839–40. 54. HMV, 858. 55. HMV, 785. 56. HMV, 785. 57. HMV, 645. 58. HMV, 630. 59. HMV, 702. 60. Corr., 1:13. 61. Corr., 1:14–15. 62. HMV, 854–55. 63. HMV, 859 and 864. 64. HMV, 861. 65. HMV, 861. 66. HMV, 869. 67. HMV, 873. 68. HMV, 876. 69. HMV, 876. 70. HMV, 885. 71. Collection Sand, 621 590. 72. Corr., 1:22, ca. 2 or 3 July 1818. 73. HMV, 889. 74. HMV, 844. 75. HMV, 814. 76. HMV, 1243. 77. HMV, 1242. 78. HMV, 814. 79. HMV, 1242. 80. HMV, 813. 81. HMV, 1242. 82. HMV, 934. 83. HMV, 934. 84. This painting has not been identified; the attribution is probably erroneous. 85. HMV, 934. 86. HMV, 940.

216  Notes to Pages 40–49 87. HMV, 940. 88. Alfred de Musset, La confession d’un enfant du siècle, preface by Claude Roy (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio classique,” 1973), 173. 89. HMV, 950. 90. HMV, 982. 91. HMV, 983. 92. Corr., 1:24, 15 November 1818. 93. HMV, 1001. 94. HMV, 994. 95. HMV, 994. 96. Corr., 1:33, August or September 1820, to Émilie Wismes. 97. Corr., 1:33–34; the words in italics were in English in this letter and the next one. 98. Corr., 1:35. 99. Corr., 1:130, 30 January 1823, to Émilie de Wismes. 100. Georges Lubin has published or attested 17,884 letters (Corr., vols. 1–24), plus 1,000 others in vol. 25 and 150 more in vol. 26 (Tusson: Du Lérot, 1995). Thierry Bodin has published 457 more letters (Lettres retrouvées [Paris: Gallimard, “Blanche,” 2004]). 101. HMV, 1005. 102. HMV, 1007. 103. HMV, 1007. 104. HMV, 1015. 105. HMV, 1015. 106. HMV, 1027. 107. HMV, 1035. 108. This text has been retitled as “Quelques réflexions sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau” in George Sand critique (1833–1876), ed. Christine Planté (Tusson: Du Lérot, 2006), 145–62. See as well the recent edition of a heretofore unpublished manuscript dating from 1863, Mémoires de Jean Paille, subtitled “Étude sur J.-J. Rousseau (époque de sa mort),” in George Sand Studies 29–30 (2010–11): 17–129. 109. In a letter to Gustave Flaubert on 25 October 1871 (Corr., 22:595), Sand recalled how she would use what she had been reading to consolidate her political positions bit by bit. 110. Corr., 1:69, July 1821. 111. HMV, 1053. 112. HMV, 1214. 113. Corr., 1:74, 18 November 1821, to Mme Maurice Dupin. 114. Corr., 1:79. 115. HMV, 1066. 116. HMV, 1067. 117. HMV, 1068. 118. HMV, 1114. 119. HMV, 1159. 120. HMV, 117.

Notes to Pages 49–61  217 121. Corr., 1:104, 30 January 1823, to Émilie de Wismes. 122. HMV, 1125. 123. Corr., 1:118, November 1823, to the Vicomtesse de Cornulier. 124. Corr., 1:115, 4 November 1823. 125. HMV, 1206. 126. HMV, 1126. 127. HMV, 1135. 128. Corr., 2:15, 27 January 1832, to Charles Meure. 129. Corr., 2:30, 7 February 1832, to Émile Regnault. 130. Corr., 1:146, 19 August 1824. 131. HMV, 1144. 132. HMV, 1144. 133. HMV, 1148. 134. Sand incorporated most of her diary in Histoire de ma vie. (Cf. here HMV, 1147.) 135. Corr., 1:162, 28 August 1825. 136. Corr., 1:195, 17 October 1825. 137. Corr., 1:245, 10 November 1825. 138. Corr., 1:247, 11 November 1825. 139. Corr., 1:291–92. 140. HMV, 1147. 141. Francine Maillet is the only biographer of Sand who doesn’t lend credence to this affair (George Sand [Paris: Grasset, 1995], 84). 142. HMV, 1174. 143. Corr., 3:60, 16 October 1835, to François Rollinat. 144. Cf. Corr., vol. 7, the letters of May 1847; and Joseph Barry, Infamous Woman: The Life of George Sand (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977). 145. Corr., 1:470, 1 November 1828. 146. Corr., 1:507, 6 February 1829, to Mme Périgois. 147. Corr., 1:510, 7 February 1829, to Charles Meure. 148. Corr., 1:624–25, 30 April 1830.

II: 1832–1851 1. HMV, 1252. 2. Corr., 2:118, 6 July 1832, to Laure Decerfz. 3. Corr., 2:88 (note), 21 May 1832. 4. Quoted by Béatrice Didier in her notes on Indiana, 361. 5. HMV, 1232. 6. HMV, 1233. 7. HMV, 1239. 8. Zola, “George Sand,” 389. 9. Cf. Balzac, Lettres à Madame Hanska, vol. 1 (letters from the winter of 1838). 10. Corr., 2:193, 20 December 1832. 11. HMV, 1259.

218  Notes to Pages 61–66 12. Corr., 2:369 (note), 18 July 1833. 13. Journal d’un poète, quoted by José-Luis Diaz in Le roman de Venise (Arles: Actes Sud, “Babel,” 1999), 29. This volume is a collection of all the letters, diaries, and newspaper articles that appeared during Sand’s affair with Musset. The quotations from their correspondence come from this volume. 14. Corr., 2:370, 18 July 1833. 15. See “Sketches and Hints,” in ŒA, 2:609; and HMV, 1296–321. 16. Corr., 2:637, 25 June 1834, to Émile Paultre. 17. Corr., 2:375, 24 July 1833, to Sainte-Beuve. 18. “A talent of distinction, but an effeminate dandy and a soul without honesty,” Charles Didier noted in his Diary, while “Mme Dudevant” struck him as “a bit dry and unsociable” (Roman de Venise, 30). 19. Corr., 2:56–57. 20. Corr., 2:562, 15 April 1834. 21. HMV, 1298. 22. Corr., 1:817, 4 March 1831, to Jules Boucoiran. 23. “So I love men more than women, and I say so without malice, quite convinced that nature’s aims are logical and complete, that the gratification of our passions is just a limited and accidental aspect of the attraction of one sex for the other, and that outside of any physical relationship souls are always seeking a kind of intellectual and emotional alliance where each sex complements the other” (HMV, 1298). 24. Corr., 2:374, 24 July 1833, to Sainte-Beuve. 25. HMV, 1180. 26. This song is reproduced in Roman de Venise, 81–87. 27. Roman de Venise, 54–55. 28. Roman de Venise, 63–64: “Here you are back again, in my starry nights, / Beautiful angel with eyes of blue and heavy eyelids, / Love, my supreme good, and one that I had lost. / . . . / Never has a lover loved, dying on his mistress, / Drunk in two darker eyes your celestial intoxication— / Nor ever kissed a more beautiful forehead.” 29. Most of his drawings belong to the collection Spoelberg de Lovenjoul at the Bibliothèque de l’Institut. The last one, reproduced in HMV, 1547, belongs to Diana Vierny. 30. This drawing is reproduced in HMV, 1548. 31. HMV, 1281. 32. “With thoughts of melancholy / you must not torment yourself.” 33. “Toi qui me l’as appris, tu ne t’en souviens plus / De tout ce que mon cœur renfermait de tendresse, / Quand, dans la nuit profonde, ô ma belle maîtresse, / Je venais en pleurant tomber dans tes bras nus ! / La mémoire en est morte, un jour te l’a ravie / Et cet amour si doux, qui faisait sur la vie / Glisser dans un baiser nos deux cœurs confondus, / Toi qui me l’as appris, tu ne t’en souviens plus” (Le roman de Venise [The Novel of Venice], 237, 30 April 1834). [You who taught me this, you no longer remember All the tenderness in my heart, When, in deepest night, o my lovely mistress, I would come crying and fall into your bare arms! The memory of this is dead, one day stole

Notes to Pages 66–71  219 it away from you. And this love so sweet, that made our two hearts slip into one embrace in life, You who taught me this, you no longer remember it.] 34. ŒA, 2:646. 35. “If you don’t mind dressing as a man, your incognito would be assured, and you would avoid all the nasty thoughts that could be entertained about the sleeping arrangements of a girl and boy traveling alone together,” the young composer told her. Later on, when their deception came to light, a priest exclaimed, “Dressing as a man. It’s an abomination to dress like a man. In the Bible there is a verse that condemns to death any man or woman guilty of abandoning the clothing of their sex” (Consuelo, ed. Léon Cellier and Léon Guichard [Paris: Gallimard, “Folio classique,” 2004], 2:121 and 222, respectively). 36. These handwritten memoirs were deposited at the Biblioteca Marciana of Venice under the title “Da Parigi a Genova.” Translated by Paul Mariéton, they were published in 1897 under the title Une histoire d’amour. 37. Roman de Venise, 331, 23 August 1834. 38. ŒA, 2:1498. 39. Cf. “Journal intime,” in ŒA, 2:953. 40. There remained only a lithograph, reproduced over and over again, of this portrait of Sand with short hair and a downcast expression. The orginal was believed lost, but it was in fact in a private collection. It has recently been put on exhibit at the Musée Delacroix in Paris. 41. Corr., 3:268, 10 February 1836, to François Buloz. 42. Corr., 3:399, 25 May 1836, to Marie d’Agoult. 43. Cf. “Réception, critique et polémique,” in Elle et lui, ed. Thierry Bodin (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio classique,” 2008), 292–327. See as well Sand’s letters to Sainte-Beuve and Émile Aucante (Corr., 16:243–49, 20 January 1861, and 293–95, 10 February 1861, respectively). 44. Roman de Venise, 236. 45. See the letter to Émile Aucante, 10 March 1864 (Corr., 18:311–14). The “erotic” letter circulating on the internet is a crude hoax. 46. Corr., 2:879–80, 6 May 1835. 47. HMV, 1219. 48. Corr., 3:490, 18 July 1836. 49. Corr., 3:273–74, 11 February 1836, to Adophe Guéroult. 50. Corr., 3:77–79, 22 October 1835. 51. Corr., 3:228, early January 1836, to Marie d’Agoult. 52. Corr., 3:229–30. 53. Corr., 3:304, 5 March 1836. 54. In fact, in the spring of 1838, Casimir Dudevant would try to get his children back and to revisit the question of common property (cf. Corr., 4:409–10, end of May 1838, to Caroline Cazamajou, and 426–28, end of May 1828, to Charlotte Marliani). In September 1838 Casimir abducted Solange and then returned her to her mother. This time the separation was definitive. 55. Corr., 3:370, 15 May 1836, to Franz Liszt. 56. Corr., 3:38–39, 20 September 1835.

220  Notes to Pages 71–78 57. Biographie des femmes auteurs contemporaines (Paris: Armand-Aubrée, 1836), 439. 58. Corr., 3:359, 9 May 1836. [Translator’s note: The awful word is surely “Putain,” “prostitute or whore.”] 59. Corr., 3:657, 21 January 1837. 60. HMV, 1403. 61. Corr., 3:304, 5 March 1836, to Sosthène de La Rochefoucauld. 62. HMV, 1411. 63. Cf. Corr., 3:623. 64. Corr., 3:712–13, 28 February 1837. 65. Corr., 5:486, 20 (?) March 1844, to Alphonse Fleury. 66. HMV, 1417–18. 67. HMV, 1411. 68. See the answer to the New Year’s greetings that the Saint-Simonian family of Paris sent to Sand (Corr., 3:325–29, 2 April 1836). 69. Corr., 3:328. 70. Corr., 3:72, ca. 20 October 1835. 71. Corr., 4:16 (1837?), to Luc Desage. 72. “It is strange,” she observed, “to see at this conjuncture in our moral and political life that we are bragging [about making the Arabs a people as honest as ourselves]!” (Corr., 3:72, ca. 20 October 1835, to Adolphe Guéroult). 73. Mauprat, ed. Jean-Pierre Lacassagne (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio classique,” 1981), 431. 74. In the twelfth letter in her A Traveler’s Letters [Lettres d’un voyageur] (ŒA, 1:936–43), Sand replied to M. Nisard, who had made this accusation. She defended therein the institution of marriage. Her arguments are worthy of consideration, and she would go back over them a number of times elsewhere. 75. Corr., 4:527–28, 18 August 1836, to Sophie Kramer. 76. Mémoires, souvenirs and journaux de la comtesse d’Agoult, ed. Charles F. Dupêchez (Paris: Mercure de France, “Le temps retrouvé,” 2007), 403–4. 77. “The loveliest thing I saw at Chamonix was my daughter. . . . Her long blond hair floated in airy curls down her strong, supple back that nothing could tire, not the forced clip-clop of the mules, . . . nor the rocky terraces that we had to climb for hours. . . . Her brother was not so vigorous or bold. Sweet and tender, he recognizes and instinctively reveres his sister’s superiority. . . . ‘She’ll make you proud,’ he often says to me, ‘but I’ll make you happy’” (“Lettres d’un voyageur,” in ŒA, 2:902–3). 78. “Entretiens journaliers,” in ŒA, 2:979–1018. 79. ŒA, 2:981. 80. ŒA, 2:989. 81. Musée de La Châtre (reproduced in HMV, 1554). 82. Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique, ed. Pierre Brunel (Geneva: Slatkine, “Fleuron,” 1996), 75–76. 83. Rondo op. 5, no. 3. 84. Franz Liszt, Chopin (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1977), 232. 85. Corr., 3:291, 26 (?) February 1836.

Notes to Pages 78–85  221 86. Corr., 4:799 and 803, 26 November 1839. 87. “[George Sand] really encouraged me to write. . . . She developed in me a love of nature and a poetic sense of things, and her praise rid me of some of the distrust I felt for myself. . . . She made me study and fathom the mysteries of my own heart much more than I had done; she helped me know and analyze myself” (Mémoires, souvenirs et journaux de la comtesse d’Agoult, 404). 88. Corr., 4:17, end of April? beginning of May? 1837, to Frédérick Girerd. 89. Corr., 3:564, ca. 15 October 1836. 90. Corr., 3:58, 16 October 1835, to François Rollinat. 91. De l’égalité, ed. Bruno Viard (Geneva: Slatkine, “Fleuron,” 1996), 126. 92. “Mon cœur mis à nu,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 1961), 1280. 93. “A monster unaware of her whorishness, egotism, and ferociously good-hearted inanity,” according to Edmond and Jules de Goncourt in their Journal (ed. Robert Ricatte [Paris: Laffont, “Bouquins,” 1989], 2:1098, 25 August 1884). 94. Balzac, Lettres à Madame Hanska, 1:441, 2 March 1838. 95. Balzac, Lettres à Madame Hanska, 1:442. 96. Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet, ed. Martine Reid (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1996), 263. 97. Corr., 5:602–3, February 1842. 98. “I’ve just read the preface to La comédie humaine. Twenty-six pages long, and these twenty-six pages gave me more trouble than a whole book” (Lettres à Madame Hanska, 1:594, 13 July 1842). See Sand’s 1853 article on Balzac in George Sand critique, 431–44. 99. In addition to this letter to Liszt (Corr., 3:371, 15 May 1836), Sand relayed in the tenth missive of her Lettres d’un voyageur how moved she was by the organist playing some variations on the first measures of Mozart’s Dies irae (in a church in Fribourg [ŒA, 2:913ff.]). 100. Corr., 3:476, 10 July 1836. 101. HMV, 650. 102. In this letter of 5 March 1849 to Pauline Viardot (Corr., 4:63), Sand also detailed how she, alone at Nohant, no longer with Chopin, far from concert halls and the Opera, managed to “hear” the music she loved. 103. “Lettres d’un voyageur,” in ŒA, 2:801. 104. HMV, 852. 105. HMV, 55. 106. Érard invented the pedals and the double escapement or repetition action. This last innovation allowed a greater virtuosity—the hammer striking the string can be set in motion as often and as quickly as one wishes. 107. Corr., 4:429, end of May 1838. 108. HMV, 1492. In 1839 Sand dedicated a few pages to him in her “Essai sur le drame fantastique—Goethe, Byron, Michiewicz,” reprinted in Autour de la table (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1862), 111–95. 109. Corr., 4:434. 110. Corr., 4:437. 111. Liszt, Chopin, 248.

222  Notes to Pages 85–89 112. Corr., 4:511, 1 November 1838, to Albert Grzymala. 113. Corr., 4:511, 1 November 1838, to Albert Grzymala. 114. Corr., 4:522, 14 November 1838, to Charlotte Marliani. 115. Corr., 4:710, 2 July 1839. 116. Un hiver à Majorque, in ŒA, 2:1048. 117. See Carlota Vicens-Pujol, “La réception d’Un hiver à Majorque en Espagne,” in Un été à Majorque, by Llorenç Villalonga, trans. Marie-France Borot (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2008), 247–59. 118. These pieces were the mazurka known as the Palmian (op. 41, no. 2) and the ballad (op. 38, no. 2), according to Sylvie Oussenko, Chopin (Paris: Eyrolles, 2009). 119. Corr., 4:537, 28 December 1838, to Charlotte Marliani. 120. Corr., 4:531, 14 December 1838, to Charlotte Marliani. 121. Corr., 4:553–54, 20 January 1839, to Alexis Duteil. 122. Corr., 6:847, 22 April 1845, to René de Villeneuve. 123. Un hiver à Majorque also contains queries and criticisms about monastic life. “One can understand the incommensurable tedium of this monk who can no longer appreciate nature’s loveliest spectacles, who takes no pleasure in them, because he has no companion with whom to share his enjoyment; the brutal sadness of this penitent who no longer suffers from anything except cold and heat, like a plant; and the deadly inner chill of this Christian that nothing can bring back to life, whose ascetic spirit cannot be invigorated by anything. Doomed to eat, work, suffer, and pray in solitude, he needs just one thing, to escape this dreadful prison” (ŒA 2:1136). 124. Corr., 4:531, 14 December 1838, to Charlotte Marliani. 125. “I’ve been sick as a dog these last two weeks. I caught cold despite a temperature of nearly sixty-five, roses, orange, palm, and fig trees. Three doctors—the most famous on the island—examined me. One sniffed my sputum, another pounded on me to see from where I was coughing, the third palpated me while listening to my cough. The first said that I was going to croak, the second that I was in the process of croaking, the last that I had already croaked” (letter of 15 November 1838 to Julian Fontana, quoted in Oussenko, Chopin, 81–82). 126. Corr., 4:560, 22 January 1839, to Charlotte Marliani. 127. Un hiver à Majorque, in ŒA, 2:1160. 128. Corr., 4:569, 15 February 1839, to Charlotte Marliani. 129. Lettres retrouvées, 36, 13 April 1839. 130. Album Sand, 99. 131. Lettres retrouvées, 37, 13 April 1839, to Albert Grzymala. 132. Jean Zyska, Gabriel (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1876), 163. 133. Correspondance, ed. Roger Pierrot (Paris: Garnier, 1966), 4:476, 18 July 1842. 134. During this time Chopin composed a scherzo (op. 39, no. 3), the famous funeral march (Sonata in B-flat Minor, op. 35), four mazurkas (op. 41), and two nocturnes (op. 37). 135. Corr., 4:663, 3 June 1839, to Charlotte Marliani. 136. Corr., 4:726, 24 July 1839, to Charlotte Marliani.

Notes to Pages 89–94  223 137. Corr., 4:677, 12 June 1839, to David Richard. 138. Corr., 5:263, the second half of March 1841. 139. Lettres retrouvées, 39, 8 (?) November 1839. 140. Balzac, Lettres à Madame Hanska, 1:527, 15 March 1841. 141. Corr., vol. 4, 15 July 1839, to Charlotte Marliani. 142. Sand unfortunately destroyed Chopin’s letters to her. Chopin, on the other hand, carefully preserved Sand’s letters to him. His sister became their custodian after Chopin’s death, and through a friend’s intermediary she finally entrusted them to Alexandre Dumas fils in 1851. He committed the indiscretion of reading them, then gave them back to Sand, who let him understand that she destroyed the letters because of their many complaints about Solange: “Now you know what maternal tenderness filled nine years of my life. . . . But the secret side of this correspondence, now you know that as well. It is not terribly serious, but it would have pained me to see people commenting on it and making exaggerations” (Corr., 10:455, 7 October 1851). For more details, see Barry, Infamous Woman, 311–12 (Barry sees Chopin’s distance from Sand as the consequence of his repressed homosexuality [242–43]). 143. Corr., 4:763, 29 August 1842, to David Richard. 144. Corr., 6:286, 18 November 1843. 145. Corr., 5:282–83, 18 April 1841, to Pauline Viardot. 146. For this concert Chopin played his Scherzo no. 3 (op. 39), two polonaises (op. 40), the Ballade in F Major, and the mazurkas (op. 41). 147. Corr., 5:290–91, 26 April 1841. 148. According to Sand, the concert was “as beautiful, as brilliant, and as lucrative as last year’s, . . . which proves how much people want to hear the most perfect and the most exquisite of musicians” (Corr., 5:607, 4 March 1842, to Hippolyte Chatiron). 149. On this exceptional relationship, see the preface to the Lettres inédites de George Sand et de Pauline Viardot (1839–1849), ed. Thérèse Marix-Spire (Paris: Nouvelles éditions latines, 1959). 150. La mare au diable, ed. Léon Cellier (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio classique,” 1973), 40–41. 151. Consuelo, 23. 152. HMV, 1489. See as well Corr., 5:743–44, 4 August 1842, to Marie de Rozières. 153. Lettres retrouvées, 54, 11 (?) August 1844, to Pauline Viardot. 154. Liszt was the first to have concocted an amusing tale out of this in his Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique, 78ff. 155. HMV, 1495. 156. HMV, 1322 (the fifth chapter of the fifth part is dedicated to him). 157. In this double portrait Sand is contemplating Chopin at the piano. The two portraits were nevertheless cut up by the painting’s first owner and separated. Sand’s portrait is at the Ordupgaard Museum (in Charlottenlund, Denmark), and Chopin’s at the Louvre. 158. Cf. Arlette Sérulaz, “Amie et sœur bien chère . . . ,” in George Sand: Une nature d’artiste, ed. Jérôme Godeau (Paris: Association Paris-Musées, 2004), 75–85; and in the same volume, Vincent Pomarède, “ . . . ‘il parle mieux que je

224  Notes to Pages 94–99 n’écris’ . . . À propos de George Sand et d’Eugène Delacroix,” 87–95. See as well the letter of 5 January 1853 where Sand draws up the list of Delacroix’s works in her possession (Corr., 11:534–37, to Théophile Silvestre). 159. Lettres retrouvées, 54, 11 (?) August 1844, to Pauline Viardot. 160. Corr., 5:765, 29 August 1842, to Pauline Viardot. 161. Consuelo, 13. 162. La comtesse de Rudolstadt (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio classique,” 2004), 579. 163. “I picked up Consuelo that I had already devoured in the Revue Indépendante. I find it once again charming.” Flaubert-Sand Corr., 112, 27 December 1866. 164. Sand had noted for Delacroix: “We carry our yoke with the patience of our oxen, Chopin with his poor health, to which he is resigned, Maurice with his temperament of a newborn in swaddling clothes, me with my mountain of rock that has become part of my person since it’s been weighing on me so long. . . . My ideal is no longer in reality. . . . Meanwhile, I write novels because that’s a way of living outside of myself” (Corr., 6:219, 13 August 1843). 165. Corr., 7:700–701, 12 May 1847. 166. Corr., 6:915, 12 or 13 November 1843, to Ferdinand François. 167. HMV, 1497. See also the letter to Hortense Allart dated 22 June 1847 (Corr., 7:756–59). 168. See Sand’s letter from the beginning of May 1847 (Corr., 7:672–76). 169. Corr., 7:663, 18 April, to Charles Poncy. 170. Corr., 7:647, 5 April 1847, to Charles Poncy. 171. Corr., 7:660, 16 April 1847. 172. Corr., 8:24, 18–28 July 1847, to Emmanuel Arago. 173. Corr., 8:55, 28 July 1847 (her last letter to Chopin). 174. Corr., 8:9, mid-July 1847, to Emmanuel Arago. 175. Corr., 8:8, mid-July 1847, to Emmanuel Arago. 176. Regarding the work he produced at Nohant, an oil painting representing a woman from Berry and a few drawings, see George Sand: Une nature d’artiste, the catalogue of the exhibit for the bicentenary of Sand’s birth at the Museé de la vie romantique, 131–35. 177. On this matter, see Sand’s letters to her friends and Théodore Rousseau at the time. Rousseau may have been the victim of an indiscretion: Maurice was perhaps Augustine’s lover; see as well her letter of 9 October 1847 to Pauline Viardot (Lettres retrouvées, 68–72). 178. Lettres retrouvées, 56, 28 July 1847. 179. Lettres retrouvées, 21 and 47–48, respectively, 18–26 July 1847. 180. Cf. Corr., 8:49. Solange wrote pages about Chopin dated 1896. Censured with scissors by Aurore Sand, who admitted as much, these pages are conserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (a few excerpts are available online). 181. Corr., 9:320–21, 5 October 1849. 182. HMV, 1497. 183. HMV, 1502. 184. Impressions et souvenirs (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1896), 96–97.

Notes to Pages 99–106  225 185. In 1843 Pierre Leroux had set up a print shop in Boussac where his family and those of his brothers were employed, about twenty people all together. A poor manager, Leroux invented a typesetting machine that he would never manage to make profitable. For such reasons his means of existence came essentially from the money given to him by his friends, Sand in particular. She finally tired of his steady requests for money and the way he would modify his political ideas to fit the circumstances (cf. Corr., 8:166, end of November 1847, to Charlotte Marliani). Leroux would be elected to the National Assembly in 1848. After 1851 he went into exile in England. 186. Quoted by Michelle Perrot in her introduction to Politique et polémiques, 18. 187. Corr., 6:487, 20 (?) March 1844, to Alphonse Fleury. 188. Corr., 5:365, July 1841, to Charlotte Marliani. 189. Corr., 5:456, 10 October 1841 (the date of Sand’s reply has been lost). 190. Lettres retrouvées, 47, 9 October 1841, 191. Corr., 5:550, 28 December 1841, to Théodore de Seynes. 192. Corr., 5:568, 15 January 1842. 193. A few years after having written this article (“Les poètes populaires,” republished in George Sand critique, 171), Sand recognized that it was no longer necessary to defend proletarian poets, “some having proved that they did not deserve attention, the others having started versifying quite as well as the gentlemen” (Corr., 11:543, 13 January 1853, to Frédéric Girerd). 194. Le compagnon du tour de France, ed. Jean-Louis Cabanès (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2004), 37–38 (preface of 1851). 195. Balzac, Lettres à Madame Hanska, 654, 19 March 1843. 196. Corr., 5:550–51, 28 December 1841. 197. Corr., 5:97. 198. On this point, see Pierre Laforgue’s preface to Jeanne (Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire: Christian Pirot, 2006), 44. 199. Corr., 6:385, 18 January 1844, to Auguste Richard de Lahautière. 200. Corr., 6:435–36, 15 February 1844, to Charles Duvernet. 201. Corr., 6:385, 18 January 1844, to Auguste Richard de Lahautière. 202. “Lettre d’introduction” [Éclaireur, 1 September 1844], in Politique et polémiques, 119. 203. Politique et polémiques, 119. 204. Politique et polémiques, 166. 205. This is the last word of her article of 6 December 1844 (“Réponse à diverses objections,” in Politique et polémiques, 196). 206. “Lettre d’un paysan” [5 and 12 October 1844], 143. 207. Corr., 6:488, 20 (?) March, to Alphonse Fleury. 208. Corr., 6:189. 209. Corr., 6:189. 210. Corr., 6:509, 2 July 1844, to Jules Boucoiran. 211. Corr., 6:509, 2 July 1844, to Jules Boucoiran. 212. The Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris has a few unpublished letters that Pauline Roland wrote to George Sand.

226  Notes to Pages 107–112 213. Volume 4 of Sand’s correspondence details the many problems Sand had publishing this novel: quarrels with various directors of reviews and newspaper editors, the need to write fast, problems with the contract, and the format of the novel, etc. (cf. Le meunier d’Angibault, ed. Béatrice Didier [Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1985], 393–98). 214. Corr., 7:151–52, 1 November 1845. 215. HMV, 837. 216. La mare au diable, 153. 217. La mare au diable, 31 and 33, respectively. 218. Sand also devoted an article to the Iowa Indians who visited Paris in 1846. Cf. “Relation d’un voyage chez les sauvages de Paris,” reprinted in Le diable à Paris, ed. Jacques Seebacher (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2004, 35–73). This article is about two open letters in which Sand wondered aloud about the destiny of Indians, torn “between the necessity of dying of poverty and that of becoming initiated into our imperfect civilization” (41). Her letters are illustrated with drawings by Maurice Sand. 219. Le péché de monsieur Antoine, ed. Jean Courrier and Jean-Hervé Donnard (Meylan: Éditions de l’Aurore, 1982), 180. 220. Alexis de Tocqueville, Souvenirs, preface by Fernand Braudel (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio classique,” 1978), 211. 221. Corr., 7:685, 2 November 1848. 222. Corr., 7:685, 2 November 1848. 223. “I can tell you that without Maurice . . . I know that I would bid good riddance to my life” (Corr., 8:17, 25 July 1848, to Marie de Rozières). See as well, in Histoire de ma vie, the table of contents of the eighteenth chapter of the last part where there is a section entitled “My Son Is My Consolation for Everything.” 224. Corr., 7:561, 9 December 1846. 225. The caricaturist Charles Philipon, during his first trial in 1831, was the first to represent the king as a pear. The image would be often used in subsequent years. 226. Corr., 7:187, 24 October 1845. 227. Corr., 8:316–17, 4 March 1848. 228. Corr., 8:340, 13 March 1848, to Ferdinand François. 229. Corr., 8:333, 9 March 1848. 230. Corr., 11:339, 6 September 1852, to Émile de Girardin. 231. Sand clarified her thought in other texts besides Politique et polémiques (232). In “Le père communisme, à Théophile Thoré,” a letter that appeared in La Vraie République on 17 May 1848 (469–75), she defined the term and the ways her adversaries used it. In the same period she addressed an open letter to Karl Marx that was published in a German newspaper, as well as several letters to Bakunin. 232. “I am communist the way one was Christian in 50 A.D.,” she specified to Pierre Bocage. “For me it represents the ideal of progressive societies, the religion that will live a few centuries from now. So I cannot associate myself with any current form of communism, since they are all rather dictatorial and think they can be instituted without the help of customs, habits, and

Notes to Pages 112–118  227 convictions. No religion can be instituted by force. We are getting there slowly and naturally, by the principle of association” (Corr., 10:345, 30 (?) June 1851). 233. Politique et polémiques, 241. 234. Politique et polémiques, 277. 235. For the complete set of the texts signed as Blaise Bonnin, see Politique et polémiques, 253–89. 236. Corr., 8:359, 23 March 1848. 237. Corr., 8:359, 23 March 1848. 238. A few foreigners, including Eliza Ashurst, the daughter of an English feminist reformer who translated several of Sand’s novels, also lent a hand to this venture (Corr., 8:436–38). 239. Corr., 8:372, 28 March 1848, to Charles Poncy. 240. “Souvenirs de mars-avril 1848,” in ŒA, 2:1190. 241. Théâtre complet [Théâtre] (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1866), 1:134. 242. Corr., 8:389, 7 April 1848, to Maurice Sand. 243. Corr., 8:527, 29 June 1848, to Augustine Brault. 244. On her “moral responsibility” for the text of this letter, Corr., 8:585, 6 August 1848, to Frédéric Girerd. On these positions with regard to some “totalitarian” regime, Sand explained herself again in a long letter to Pierre-Jules Hetzel dated 29 December 1851 (Corr., 10:612–17). 245. See Bertrand Tillier, George Sand chargée (Tusson: Du Lérot, 1993), 22–26, and, more generally, La caricature entre République et censure: L’imagerie politique en France de 1830 à 1880; Un discours de résistance? ed. Philippe Régnier (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1996). 246. Corr., 8:421, 18–19 April, to Maurice Dudevant. 247. Corr., 8:429, 21 April, to Maurice Dudevant. 248. Corr., 8:435, 28 April 1848, to Maurice Dudevant. 249. De Tocqueville, Souvenirs, 209. 250. De Tocqueville, Souvenirs, 210–11. 251. Corr., 8:391 (in a note). 252. “If this portrait of George Sand / Leaves the mind a bit perplex, / It’s because genius is abstract, / And as one knows has no sex.” 253. Corr., 8:392. 254. Corr., 8:401, mid-April 1848. 255. Corr., 8:402. 256. Wanda, the mother of Albert de Rudolstadt, had already made an eloquent indictment on this subject (cf. La comtesse de Rudolstadt, 388ff.). 257. Corr., 8:404. 258. Corr., 8:507, 12 June 1848. 259. “He understands, therefore he feels; he feels, therefore he loves; he loves, therefore he acts. But what is the source of all these innumerable contradictions, this pointless eclecticism, all this fruitless agitation? . . . They result from an innate, insurmountable frivolity, that sweeps him away after a love letter, a butterfly, a gentle breeze, or something less, a public honor or some instant success, all in the midst of his philosophical and religious meditations. . . . Just read his preface; it is a masterpiece of grace, poetry, incoherence, and puerility. He talks about nothing but himself” (“Lamartine

228  Notes to Pages 118–126 utopiste” [December 1841], in Questions d’art et de littérature, ed. Henriette Bessis and Janis Glasgow [Paris: Des Femmes, 1991], 132). 260. “So here you are, the leader of the opposition,” Sand wrote to him. “You’ve felt the voice of the century’s ideas and thoughts in you. . . . Onward, onward, that’s all that the people who feel the admirable sincerity of your voice resonating in their own breast can say to you, with joy, confidence, and respect” (Corr., 6:21, 29 January 1843). 261. Corr., 9:658, 10 August 1850, to Pierre-Jules Hetzel. 262. Corr., 10:221, 16 April 1851, to Pierre-Jules Hetzel. 263. Cours familier de littérature (Paris, 1869), 26:92. See as well George Lubin, “Lamartine et George Sand,” in Lamartine: Colloque du centenaire, ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Flammarion, 1971), 209–20. 264. Corr., 8:457, 16 May 1848, to Emmanuel Arago. 265. Corr., 8:508, 12 June 1848. 266. Corr., 8:717, 1 December 1848. 267. Corr., 8:717, 1 December 1848. 268. De Tocqueville, Souvenirs, 208. 269. “À propos de l’élection de Louis Bonaparte à la présidence de la République,” in Politique et polémiques, 566. 270. Corr., 9:227, 24 July 1849, to Guiseppe Mazzini. 271. “Journal de novembre–décembre 1851,” in ŒA, 2:1199. 272. Corr., 10:614, 29 December 1851 (for a complete analysis of the situation, see the other letters addressed to Hetzel). 273. Cf. Corr., 8:345, 20 March 1848. “My daughter . . . blithely sails through everything with a cold heart and lively wit. . . . A strong creature, but incomplete,” Sand later notes in her “Journal de novembre–décembre 1851,” in ŒA, 2:1202. 274. HMV, 1502. 275. Cf. Agendas, ed. Anne Chevereau (Paris: Touzot, 1990–93), 6 vols. On this long relationship, see the excellent work of Évelyne Bloch-Dano, Le dernier amour de George Sand (Paris: Grasset, 2010), which follows up on Anne Chevreau’s Alexandre Manceau: Le dernier amour de George Sand (Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire: Christian Pirot, 2002). 276. Corr., 8:615, 6 October, to René Vallet de Villeneuve. 277. Corr., 9:608–9.

III: 1852–1875 1. Cf. George Sand and Armand Barbès, Correspondance d’une amitié républicaine (1848–1870), ed. Michelle Perrot (Lagarde-Firmacon: Éditions Le Capucin, 1999). 2. “Semences jetées de l’exil,” in Choses vues, ed. Hubert Juin (Paris: Gallimard, “Quarto,” 2002), 801. 3. Corr., 4:617, 25 March 1839. 4. Corr., 10:615, 29 December 1851, to Pierre-Jules Hetzel. 5. Cf. George Sand and Victor Hugo, Correspondance croisée, ed. Danielle Bahiaoui (Nîmes: HB Éditions, 2004).

Notes to Pages 126–130  229 6. Corr., 11:385, 29 September 1852, to Charles Poncy. 7. “Victor Hugo,” in Questions d’art et de littérature, 305–9. The commentary concerning the new production of Lucrèce Borgia in 1870 was not written by Sand (369–75). 8. Corr., 22:607, 3 November 1871, to Alexandre Dumas fils. 9. Corr., 13:627–28, 24 May 1856, to Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Sand expressed her admiration in an article, for which Hugo thanked her on 30 June 1856 (Sand and Hugo, Correspondance croisée, 78–80). 10. “He is too much the surgeon of his century,” she wrote after reading Actes et paroles pendant l’exil. “He does nothing but talk about his woes, his illnesses, his faults. People get sicker with a healer who scares and upsets them” (Corr., 24:442, 13 November 1875, to Charles-Edmond). 11. Corr., 25:675, 1 February 1860. 12. “Guernsey can stretch out a hand to Nohant,” Hugo remarked (Sand and Hugo, Correspondance croisée, 79, 30 June 1856). 13. Sand and Hugo, Correspondance croisée, 92, 21 August 1859. 14. Corr., 10:712, 12 February 1852, to Prince Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. 15. Corr., 10:730–31, 20 February 1852. 16. Corr., 10:659–61, 20 January 1852. 17. Les contemporains (Paris: J.-P. Roret et Cie, 1854) (without volume numbering), 95. 18. “Mme George Sand jugée par elle-même,” republished in Les bas-bleus (Paris and Brussels: Société générale de librairie catholique, 1878), 61. “The success (and especially Mme Sand’s publishers) seems to prevent this gentleman from sleeping,” Solange ironically comments in one of her letters, nevertheless agreeing with Barbey on certain points: “that obstinate claim to candor in literature and ingenuousness in matters of morality” (letter of 12 October 1862, excerpts reproduced in the sales catalogue for the Georges Lubin collection, Catalogue de la vente Drouot [Paris: Drouot, 7 November 2000], 22). 19. During the first months of 1852 Elizabeth Barrett-Browning along with her husband paid George Sand several visits. Her correspondence contains stories about them (see Barry, Infamous Woman, 316–19). She dedicated several poems to Sand. 20. Mes souvenirs (Paris: Passard, 1853), 13–14. 21. Corr., 10:733, 22 February 1852, to Pierre-Jules Hetzel. 22. Corr., 10:737, 22 February 1852. 23. Corr., 11:338–39, 6 September 1852. 24. Corr., 10:734 and 735, respectively, 22 February 1852, to Pierre-Jules Hetzel. 25. The project, already mentioned in The Devil’s Pool, is explicitly formulated at the end of the preface to La petite fadette, ed. Martine Reid (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio classique,” 2004), 250. 26. La petite fadette, 251 and 37, respectively. 27. The text first appeared as a serial in the Journal des Débats from October 1847 to March 1848; the play based on the novel was a great success in November 1849.

230  Notes to Pages 130–136 28. François le Champi, ed. André Fermigier (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio classique,” 1976), 55. 29. Cf. Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio classique,” 1985), 54–57. 30. François le Champi, 42. 31. La petite fadette, 33 (preface of 1851). 32. La petite fadette, 249 (preface of 1848). 33. Sand continues: “And what about music? Don’t we have wonderful melodies in this neck of the woods [Berry]? As for painting, that they don’t have; but they’ve got it in their language, a hundred times more expressive, energetic, and logical than our literary language” (François le Champi, 47–48). 34. Cf., in addition to the vintage work of Marie-Louise Vincent (La langue et le style rustique de George Sand dans les romans champêtres [Paris: Champion, 1916]), Daniel Bernard, “George Sand pionnière de l’ethnographie,” in George Sand: Une Européenne en Berry, 120–49. 35. This text is conserved at the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris and was published by Monique Parent in the Bulletin de la Faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg, April–June 1954. 36. Corr., 5:678 and 680, respectively, between 18 and 28 May 1842. 37. “There is nothing striking about Berry,” as Sand explains in the first article. “The land and the people don’t leap out at you because of anything picturesque or remarkable. It’s the country of calm, level heads. All the people and plants there are quiet, patient, slow to ripen” (Promenade dans le Berry, 28; the volume contains the five articles that appeared in L’Illustration and the Légendes rustiques). 38. Promenade dans le Berry, 27. 39. Promenade dans le Berry, 82. 40. François le Champi, 50. 41. HMV, 1129. 42. They are reproduced in Promenade dans le Berry, 119–223. 43. Corr., 15:23, 1 August 1858. 44. Corr., 8:615, 6 October 1848, to René Vallet de Villeneuve. 45. In Le Monde Illustré a critic hazarded this comment: “Monsieur Maurice Sand was swaddled in his mother’s suave and grandiose imagination. This worthy son will paint what she writes” (Corr., 14:413, 3 August 1857). Sand recopied this remark in a letter to Maurice. 46. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Certains (Paris: UGE, 1975), 412. 47. Corr., 8:188, 14 December 1847. 48. For the history of this publication, see HMV, 35–37. 49. HMV, 502. 50. Cf. Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, ed. Maurice Levaillant, vol. 4 (Paris: Flammarion, 1982), 550–56. “I won’t say a thing about the praise M. de Chateaubriand, our late master, as one says in artistic circles, saw fit to give me. I haven’t read it, since I don’t read La Presse,” Sand wrote to René de Villeneuve (Corr., 9:622, 14 July 1850). In Vie de Rancé Chateaubriand had already devoted a paragraph to Sand where, in quite the same way, his compliment was mixed with reproach (cf. Corr., 7:160, 7 October 1845, to Charlotte

Notes to Pages 136–140  231 Marliani). As for Dumas, he counted on writing a few pages about Sand in his Mémoires and asked about her life: “I would find it impossible to give you a short summary of a life that seems to me three or four centuries long, and this life, quiet and monotonous in appearance, doesn’t sound enough like a novel for you to have to hear about it,” she replied before telling him that she too was writing her memoirs (Corr., 11:473, 23 November 1852). Cf. Mémoires, 2:989–94. 51. It contained a few more details about the first writers of autobiography requested by the readers of the newspaper installments, plus her homage to Armand Barbès that Girardin, out of an abundance of caution, decided not to publish in the columns of his paper (see HMV, 1480–83). 52. Corr., 8:207, 22 December 1847. 53. HMV, 64–65. 54. HMV, 47. 55. HMV, 1192. 56. Corr., 3:359, 9 (?) May 1836 (in one of Maurice’s letters to his mother). 57. Flaubert adds, in his letter of 23–24 February 1869 (Flaubert-Sand Corr., 219): “What I say is true, since the minds the furthest away from yours are flabbergasted by them.” 58. Corr., 10:151, 16 March 1851, to Charles Poncy. 59. Corr., 11:729, 10 June 1853, to Émile Aucante. 60. See the long letters to Pierre-Jules Hetzel in 1850 and 1851 in which Sand discussed bit by bit the proposals, their estimated income, the contracts, etc. See as well the agreement signed by Sand, her act of association with Hetzel, as well as several agreements with minor modifications (Corr., 10:125–28, 5 March 1851; 134–36, 10 March 1851). 61. Corr., 9:832, 7 December 1850, to Maurice Sand. 62. Cf. Jean-Yves Mollier, “George Sand et les prémices de la culture de masse,” in George Sand: Littérature et politique, ed. Martine Reid et Michèle Riot-Sarcy (Nantes: Éditions Pleins feux, 2007), 165–74, on this question. 63. “When I die, I fear that if my inheritors have to liquidate their shares in my estate, the problem of dividing it up and assessing the appreciated value will hamper use of the property. I’ve been told that in such cases the court would force a sale to the highest bidder and that the estate could, depending on the circumstances, fall far below its value, to the detriment of my children” (Corr., 11:729, 10 June 1853, to Émile Aucante). 64. Corr., 11:728. 65. Corr., 11:728. 66. Corr., 11:742, 12 (?) June 1853, to Émile Aucante. 67. Corr., 11:338, 6 September 1852. 68. Corr., 10:649, 16 January 1852, to Adolphe Lemoine-Montigny, director of the Théâtre du Gymnase. 69. “You’ll be amazed,” Sand wrote to Lemoine-Montigny, “that I’ve written a comedy . . . and what is strange, I tried to make it sad and just couldn’t. And yet I’m nearly dying” (Corr., 10:652). See also the preface to the play, where Sand says that she was anxious to avoid “personal criticism” (Les vacances de Pandolphe, in Théâtre, 2:90).

232  Notes to Pages 141–146 70. Corr., 5:37, ca. 26 April 1840, to Jules Janin. 71. Corr., 9:348, 21 November 1849, to Rozanne Bourgoing. 72. Corr., 9:372, 8 December 1849, to Jean-Baptiste Lassus. 73. Corr., 9:357. 74. Sand wrote: “The commedia dell’arte is not just the study of grotesque and silly things. . . . It is most especially a study of real character types, from the furthest reaches of antiquity up to now” (preface to Masques et bouffons by Maurice Sand [Paris: Michel Lévy, 1860], 6). 75. Dedicated to Alexandre Dumas, Molière, an interesting reflection on the couple formed by Jean-Baptiste and his wife, Armande, was only performed a few times. See the long preface written for the Lévy edition of 1866 where Sand attempts to analyze the reasons for her play’s failure (Théâtre, 1:313–24) and the letter of 16 March 1851 (Corr., 10:146–48, to Pierre-Jules Hetzel). Later, in 1864, Nadar photographed Sand dressed as Molière (huge wig, velvet drape over her shoulders). 76. Théâtre, 2:199. 77. Corr., 11:552, 16 January 1853, to Pierre-Jules Hetzel. 78. In the preface Sand revisited her desire to stage villagers and not peasants and explained the difference (Théâtre, 2:265–67). 79. On this question, see the excellent synthesis made by Olivier Bara in Le sanctuaire des illusions: George Sand et le théâtre (Paris: Presses de Paris-Sorbonne, 2010). 80. Le château des désertes (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1854 [1851]), dedication, 3. 81. In 1852 Sand expressed her repugnance for the Théâtre-Français, where the plays were submitted to a committee of readers whose political opinions she had come to fear. 82. “Le Théâtre des marionnettes de Nohant,” in ŒA, 2 :1251. 83. “Don’t tell anybody, not even your nightcap, that I’m going to Paris,” she wrote to her daughter. “You know that this draws thousands of folks, unknown, little known, misunderstood, out of their dens. With manuscripts in their pockets, they all find out where I am with unfathomable skill” (Corr., 10:235, 26 April 1851, to Solange Clésinger). 84. Corr., 9:357–58. 85. “Embrassons-nous, mignonne / Jeunesse passera” (see Théâtre, 2:197). 86. Théâtre, 3:225 (preface to Maître Favilla). 87. Corr., 11:545, 13 January 1853, to Adolphe Lemoine-Montigny. 88. HMV, 1298. 89. Le château des désertes, 19. 90. Corr., 13:80, to Sarah Félix. 91. Théâtre, 1:6. 92. Corr., 9:368, 4 (?) December 1849. 93. Corr., 7:559–60, 9 December 1846. 94. Having arrived at Nohant in 1844, Eugène Lambert, nicknamed “Lambrouche,” spent ten years there before going back to Paris and getting married. He left a few paintings of Nohant, some still lifes and portraits of dogs and cats (George Sand: Une nature d’artiste, 126–27). 95. Corr., 10:132, 10 March 1851.

Notes to Pages 146–156  233 96. Lubin, Album Sand, 147. 97. Corr., 10:421, 8 September 1851, to Pierre-Jules Hetzel. 98. Corr., 10:421–22. 99. The Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris has quite a good number; the libraries of La Châtre and Châteauroux also have a few in their collections; others are privately owned. 100. Corr., 14:539, end of November 1857, to Maria-Laetitia de Solms. 101. Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP), Fonds Sand H 407/2. 102. Théâtre de Nohant (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1865), 6. 103. “Le Théâtre de marionnettes de Nohant,” in ŒA, 2:1251. 104. “Le Théâtre de marionnettes de Nohant,” 1253. 105. “Le Théâtre de marionnettes de Nohant,” 1251. 106. On the eve of the Revolution of 1848 they listened to Lamartine’s L’histoire des Girondins, and it made them want to hear revolutionary clamor right on the stage of the little marionette theater. 107. “Le Théâtre de marionnettes de Nohant,” 1262. 108. Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup d’état in 1799 took place on the date of 18 Brumaire in the revolutionary calendar (November 9); the coup d’état of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, his nephew, took place on 2 December 1851. 109. Pierre Remérand, “George Sand sur ses terres de Nohant,” in George Sand: Une Européenne en Berry, 216–18. 110. Corr., 14:37, 3 September 1856, to Ida Dumas. 111. Sand tried several times to support him in his work, in particular by appealing to artists that she knew (see, for example, her letters to Horace Vernet, in May 1855, Corr., 13:157ff.). 112. HMV, 1129. 113. HMV, 1128. 114. HMV, 1128–29. 115. ŒA, 2:646. 116. Corr., 21:311, 17 January 1869, to Gustave Flaubert. 117. Corr., 14:xxiii. 118. Corr., 14:389, 27 June 1869, to Maurice Sand. 119. Corr., 14:389–90. 120. Corr., 14:773, 16 June 1858, to Solange Clésinger. 121. Corr., 14:734–35, 24 May 1858, to Maurice Sand. 122. Corr., 14:411–12, 30 July 1857, to Maurice Sand. 123. Corr., 14:773, 16 June 1858. 124. Sand blew up when she saw how the volume had been printed (see Corr., 16:686, 6 February 1869, to Émile Aucante). 125. Promenades autour d’un village, ed. Georges Lubin (Tusson: Christian Pirot, 1992), 33, with illustrations by Grandsire, Manceau, Maurice Sand, and Jules Véron. 126. “Don’t go falling for Mina; she is charming, but a little quibbler who only wants to marry a big name and a big fortune, and she’d also take you for a ride” (Corr., 11:673, 26 April 1853, to Maurice Sand). 127. Corr., 13:155, 23 May 1855.

234  Notes to Pages 157–165 128. Corr., 14:345, 20 April 1857. 129. Corr., 14:385, 23 June 1857, to Maurice Sand. 130. Corr., 14:103, 26 November 1856, to Frédéric Girerd. 131. Corr., 14:245–46, 29 February 1857. 132. Corr., 15:410, 11 May 1859, to Émile Aucante. 133. See the letter of 2 July 1859, to Émile Aucante (Corr., 15:447–48). 134. Corr., 12:436, 26 May 1854, to Augustine de Bertholdi. 135. Corr., 6:597, 11 August 1844, to Marie de Rozières. 136. Corr., 6:600, 12 August 1844, to Pierre-Jules Hetzel. 137. Zola was the first to think this, berating Sand for setting down to work “without an outline, notes, or documents of any sort” (“George Sand,” 401). Many others would follow suit. 138. Corr., 15:429, 21 May 1859, to Pauline Viardot. 139. Corr., 15:429. 140. Corr., 10:543, 13 November 1851, to Pierre-Jules Hetzel. 141. Corr., 12:128, 12 January 1854, to Pierre Bocage. 142. Corr., 14:17, 23 July 1856, to Charles Poncy. 143. On this matter, see the issue of Revue de l’Association LES AMIS DE GEORGE SAND edited by Les Amis de George Sand entitled “George Sand et l’argent” (no. 33, 2011), with an introduction by Michelle Perrot. 144. Corr., 17:373–74, 12 January 1863. 145. “The love of hard work, those are a peasant’s simple and profound words, upon which every man and woman can comment without any risk of finding the rule of serfdom in the last analysis. On the contrary, that’s how our destiny eludes the rigorous law of man exploited by man” (HMV, 1122). 146. Balzac, Eugénie Grandet, 93. 147. Corr., 10:66, 6 February 1851. 148. Corr., 10:414, 29 August 1851, and 428–31, 15 September 1851. 149. Corr., 10:414, 29 August 1851, and 428–31, 15 September 1851. 150. Corr., 10:790, 13 March, to Pierre-Jules Hetzel. 151. Agendas, 1:247–48. 152. Corr., 13:27–28. 153. Lettres retrouvées, 155, 25 February 1855, to an unidentified correspondent. 154. Corr., 13:131, 28 April 1855. 155. Corr., 13:107, 11 March, to René Vallet de Villeneuve. 156. Lettres retrouvées, 154–55, 24 February 1855 [?]. 157. Corr., 13:110, 19 and 21 March 1855. 158. Corr., 13:113–14, 1 April 1855, to Solange Clésinger. 159. Corr., 13:118, 2 April 1855, to Eugène Lambert. 160. Corr., 13:117–18, 2 April 1855, to Eugène Lambert. 161. Corr., 13:134, 4 May 1855, to Solange Clésinger. 162. Corr., 13:133, 2 April 1855, to Eugène Lambert. 163. Corr., 13:133. 164. “You want to see the splendors of the papacy?” Sand asked her friends the Périgois in 1861. “You’ll see three poorly costumed spear-carriers and a bunch of dreadful Germans who are supposedly Swiss; they have rags for costumes, and Saint Peter’s stinks of their feet. Ugh! I wouldn’t give two cents

Notes to Pages 165–171  235 to see that miserable masquerade again. But the monuments, statues, and paintings, fine. Only it takes a year to see everything without getting sick, since the first weeks are nothing but vertigo and headaches.” Corr., 16:242–43. 165. Corr., 14:143, 17 May 1855, to Joséphine Caillaud. 166. Corr., 14:16, 23 July 1856, to Charles Poncy. 167. Corr., 15:129, 30 October 1858. 168. Corr., 15:419–20, 14 (?) May 1859. 169. L’homme de neige, ed. Martine Reid (Arles: Actes Sud, “Babel,” 2005), 361. 170. Sand confessed to one of her Italian correspondents, Michele Accursi: “I didn’t ever learn this beautiful language, and I’ve forgotten the little I knew (Lettres retrouvées, 114, 24 May 1852). 171. “There was a time during the Empire,” Sand recalled in one of her letters from Italy, “when one would sit on the fragment of a column to meditate on the ruins of Palmyra; it was the fashion, and everybody meditated. So much so that it became extremely tiresome, and people now prefer to live” (Corr., 13:117, 2 April 1855, to Eugène Lambert). 172. Sand and Hugo, Correspondance croisée, 85, 12 April 1857. 173. Corr., 14:379, 13 June 1857. 174. Corr., 15:479–80, 16 August 1859. 175. Corr., 11:551, 16 January 1853. 176. Lettres retrouvées, 207, 26 November 1860 [1861 (?); Sand, born in July 1804, says in this letter that she was fifty-seven], to Ernest Feydeau. 177. Corr., 13:149, 23 May, to Mme ***. 178. Corr., 13:671, 30 January 1860 (the text contains a drawing). 179. Corr., 13:676, 2 February 1860. 180. Agendas, 1:72, 6 December 1852. 181. Corr., 11:556, 16 January 1853, to Pierre-Jules Hetzel. 182. On the matter of the relationship between Sand and Nadar, see Claude Malécot, George Sand, Félix Nadar (Paris: Monum, 2004), and the pages that she devotes to the portraits of Sand in George Sand: L’œuvre-vie, ed. Martine Reid (Paris: Bibliothèques Éditions, 2004), 114–17. 183. Published in 1854, the first lithograph of the “Nadar Pantheon” gathered together 254 famous people, placed one behind the other in single file. The cortege, brought up in the rear by Victor Hugo, marches toward, in the bottom left of the page, a larger bust placed on a column, and that is Sand. Thanks to this ingenious arrangement, Nadar highlights her exceptional place in literature. He also dedicated his first collection of autobiographical reflections to Sand, Quand j’étais étudiant, published in 1856. 184. Corr., 18:332–33. 185. The vignettes had the following captions: “Descended from Augustus II, King of Poland” (a little girl runs down the steps of the throne), “Baroness Dudevant” (she is bored, her husband looks out the window), “George Sand, literary genius (she holds out in front of herself a copy of Indiana as big as she is), “First novels,” “Modern writers next to George Sand” (she is a good head taller than them), “In 1848,” “Theater,” “At Nohant, making jam.” This composition is reproduced in HMV, 1603. 186. Corr., 16:585, 29 September 1861.

236  Notes to Pages 172–178 187. Corr., 19:458–59, 14 October 1865. 188. In the following years Solange went first to Italy, then to Algeria in 1864; a few years later she was in Constantinople with her lover Wacyf Pacha, with whom she had a daughter, Nazli. Five photographs of her are mentioned in the sales catalogue of George Lubin’s collection, 34. 189. With this in prospect, Sand on 15 March 1860 sent Alfred Arago, inspector general of fine arts, a short intellectual biography of her son (Corr., 15:733, 15 March 1860). 190. Corr., 16:459, 26 June 1861. 191. Corr., 16:515, 11 August 1861, to Maurice Sand. 192. Corr., 16:594, 13 October 1861, to Alexandre Dumas fils. 193. Corr., 16:575, 16 September 1861, to Alexandre Dumas fils. 194. Corr., 16:605, 19 October 1861, to Alexandre Dumas fils. 195. Certain biographers, Joseph Barry among them (Infamous Woman, 326), think so, evoking a few meetings in Paris and a trip to Gargilesse (see Corr., 18:532, 12 September 1864). The letters that we possess have a joking tone that is consistent with the group activities of Nohant. This tone is also found in other letters, to Flaubert in particular. 196. Corr., 17:49–50, 30 April 1852, to Alexandre Dumas fils. 197. Corr., 17:715–16, 14 July 1863. 198. Corr., 18:629, 23 December 1864, to Édouard de Pompéry. See as well the letter to Lina in which she celebrates “maternal instinct” (Corr., 19:218– 19, 28 May 1865). 199. Agendas, 3:147. 200. Corr., 18:563, 17 October 1864, to Maurice and Lina Sand. 201. Lettres retrouvées, 225, 3 July 1864, to Adolphe Joanne. 202. Corr., 18:331, 24 March 1864. 203. Corr., 18:358, 15 April 1864, to Alexandre Dumas fils. 204. In Les droits de l’homme of June 1876 he gave the following description: “The furnishing in nasty Algerian rep was more than modest. As the main feature, a decorator had put up against the walls some of those abominable sideboards made of Arab cut-outs. In atrocious taste, slapped with blue, red, and yellow paint and dressed up with phony gilding, they displayed two or three pieces of Kabyle pottery as heavy and ugly as possible. A little ostrich-egg lamp . . . was hanging from the ceiling like a centerpiece, with poorly justified pretension” (quoted in Corr., 18:652). 205. Corr., 18:242, 30 January, to Maurice Sand. 206. Corr., 18:254, 9 February 1864, to Maurice Sand. 207. Corr., 18:266, 18 February 1864, to Maurice and Lina Sand. 208. Corr., 18:274–75, 23 February 1864, to Maurice and Lina Sand. 209. Corr., 18:437, 10 July 1864, to Maurice Sand. 210. Corr., 18:455, 24 July 1864, to Ludre-Gabillaud. 211. Corr., 18:460, 25 July 1864, to Maurice and Lina Sand. 212. Corr., 18:584–85, 24 October 1864. 213. The correspondence deals with this matter during the entire fall of 1864. See in particular the letter in which Sand urges her son to do “as she does” (Corr., 18:583–84, 24 October 1864).

Notes to Pages 179–182  237 214. Corr., 19:67, 29 and 31 January 1865. 215. Corr., 19:26, 11 January 1865, to Augustine de Bertholdi. At this time, a “melodrama” did not mean what it does now, but a play interspersed with songs and orchestral music. 216. Corr., 19:14, 4 January 1865, to Jules Boucoiran. 217. Corr., 19:105, 19 February 1865, to Jules Boucoiran. 218. Corr., 19:174, 18 April 1865, to Édouard Rodrigues. 219. Corr., 19:186, 26 April 1865. 220. Corr., 19:223, 1 June 1865, to Maurice Sand. 221. The diet is detailed in a letter dated 10 July 1865 (Corr., 19:295–96). 222. Corr., 19:251, 19 June 1865, to Pastor Alexis Muston. 223. Corr., 19:305, 15 July 1865. 224. Corr., 19:288, 8 July 1865, to Francis Laur. 225. Corr., 19:315, 21 July 1865, to Francis Laur. 226. Corr., 19:360–61, 21 August 1865, to Oscar Cazamajou. 227. Corr., 19:369, 22 August 1865, to Oscar Cazamajou. 228. Corr., 19:370, 22 August 1865, to Oscar Cazamajou. 229. Corr., 19:371, 22 August 1865, to Maurice Dudevant. 230. Corr., 19:422, 23 October 1865, to Charles Poncy. 231. Corr., 19:665, 25 January 1866, to Charles Marchal. 232. Corr., 20:723, 14 March 1868, to Juliette Adam. 233. Corr., 20:234, 20 November 1868, to Gustave Flaubert. 234. In an article appearing in the Figaro of 24 December 1932, Aurore Sand remembered her grandmother’s apartment in these terms: “The living room was decorated with a few objects of great beauty. The magnificent painting that Eugène Delacroix had bequeathed to George Sand, La nuit de Valpurgis, . . . a lovely crucifix of Rubens, a few other masterpiece paintings, Chinese bronzes and old porcelain. The Louis XIV armchairs with finely embroidered upholstery . . . , a big Louis XV writing table that I gave to the Musée Carnavalet [now all in the Musée de la vie romantique] was placed between the two windows. . . . A few pretty chairs and a lovely Renaissance buffet completed the furnishings. A huge pale rug on the floor, heavy curtains at the windows, and a chandelier on the ceiling, while in the hallway there was hanging an ostrich egg suspended in a mesh of gold and silk that Maurice brought back from Africa” (quoted in Corr., 20:859–60). 235. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 116, 11 January 1867. 236. Correspondance d’Eugène Fromentin, ed. Barbara Wright (London and Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1995), 2:1244, 13 June 1862. 237. Correspondance d’Eugène Fromentin, 2:1244, 13 June 1862. 238. Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, Journal, 1:1008, 14 September 1863. 239. Corr., 18:329, 22 March 1864, to Albert Damas-Hinard. 240. “Don’t think for a minute that I can sugarcoat or dodge the basic issue. This book means to be against the confessional. It’s the starting point and the conclusion” (Corr., 17:449, 12 February 1863, to François Buloz). 241. Sand explains herself on this point in the preface: “We live,” she writes, “in a labyrinth of ambiguities, individual commentaries, sanctimonious fantasies, contradictions, public practices, obscurities, fervent declamations, and

238  Notes to Pages 182–186 perfidious innuendos” (Mademoiselle La Quintinie, 4th ed. [Paris: Michel Lévy, 1866], x). The novel is also a reply to Sibylle, Octave Feuillet’s novel written in defense of Catholicism, which had just appeared. 242. “Madame Sand,” in Les œuvres et les hommes, vol. 24 (1908), 173. 243. Corr., 18:288, 1 March 1864, to Maurice and Lina Sand. 244. [Translator’s note] This line comes from an anticlerical poem by Pierre-Jean de Béranger, “Les Révérends Pères,” that appeared in 1819. 245. Corr., 18:290–91, 1 March 1864, to Maurice and Lina Sand (italics in the original letter). 246. “The French Academy,” Sand wrote after gossip had it that she was going to stand for a seat, “is a bit of useless grandeur and henceforth stands before us like an extinguished lamp” (George Sand critique, 583–600). 247. “Today I dined for the first time at Magny’s with my little chums,” Sand wrote to her son. “There was Gautier, Saint-Victor, Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, Bertholet, the famous chemist, Bouilhet, the Goncourts, etc. Taine and Renan weren’t there. . . . I was welcomed with open arms. . . . They are all very smart, but paradoxical and proud, except for Bertholet and Flaubert, who don’t talk about themselves” (Corr., 19:710–11, 13 February 1866). 248. These words, “To Madame Sand, an expression of respect from an unknown, Gustave Flaubert,” are inscribed at the front of the copy of Madame Bovary sent to Sand. 249. Journal, 2:8, 12 February 1866. 250. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 102, 29 November 1866, Flaubert to Sand. 251. [Translator’s note] Here Flaubert is deliberating linking a feminine adjective with a masculine noun. 252. An allusion to an Empire-Troubadour-style clock that they admired during one of Sand’s trips to Normandy. Both Sand and Flaubert made generous use of the term. 253. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 213, 17 January 1869. 254. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 214, 2 February 1869. 255. Agendas, 3:383, 28 August 1866. 256. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 91–92, 12–13 November 1866. 257. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 264, 30 December 1869. 258. Agendas, 5:128, 19 April 1873. 259. This was especially the case when François Rollinat died. Sand once called him “mon Bouilhet,” with reference to Flaubert’s very dear friend (Flaubert-Sand Corr., 295, 20 May 1870). 260. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 91, 12–13 November 1866. 261. Corr., 18:489, 7 August 1864, to Prince Napoléon. 262. In the 4 December issue of Gaulois, quoted in Flaubert-Sand Corr., 256. 263. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 259, 14 December 1869. 264. Sand added in this letter of 19 December 1869 (Flaubert-Sand Corr., 261): “Just tell yourself that those who haven’t received such treatment are worthy candidates for the Academy.” 265. After this letter of 30 November 1869 (Flaubert-Sand Corr., 254), Sand wrote to Flaubert a few weeks later, relaying what was said about him in family discussions: “[Flaubert] can be compared to Victor Hugo at least as

Notes to Pages 186–191  239 much as Balzac, but he’s got the taste and discernment that Hugo lacks, and he is an artist, and Balzac wasn’t.—So does that mean that he is more than either of them?” 266. “[Sainte-Beuve],” according to Sand, “will be judged the greatest of critics. The others are artists or idiots” (Flaubert-Sand Corr., 213, 17 January 1869). 267. Reading La mer [The Sea], which had been sent to her, Sand observed to her friends the Périgois: “It’s quite lovely, with his usual faults and inability to say anything about women without lifting her skirts up over her head” (Corr., 16:242, 20 January 1861). 268. When Caroline Marbouty sent Sand her novel Ange Spola, she thanked her, saying, “This is no ordinary novel, and out of the 500 or 600 women’s novels that I’ve paged through in the last ten years, it is one of three or four that I’ve been able to read through to the end” (Corr., 6:143, 18 May 1843). Later on she would encourage Amélie Bosquet, who was in contact with Flaubert. 269. Corr., 10:349, early July 1851. 270. “Delphine de Girardin,” in George Sand critique, 491–97. 271. Corr., 20:719, 25 February 1868. 272. With her mother’s publisher Solange Clésinger-Sand came out with Jacques Bruneau in the fall of 1870 (Sand, who had read the manuscript, considered it “quite original but impossibly written” [Corr., 21:438, 30 April 1869, to Maurice Sand]). Solange tried again with Carl Robert in 1887. Neither novel had any success. 273. Corr., 20:804, 7 May 1868, to Lina Sand. 274. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 212–13, 17 January 1869. Here, as she often does, Sand refers to herself as a man, using masculine pronouns and adjective agreements. 275. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 275, 15 February 1870. 276. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 179, 21 May 1868. 277. She wrote in her letter of 20 May 1870 (Flaubert-Sand Corr., 295): “Not yet old age, or rather what is normally old age, the tranquility . . . of virtue, the thing that everybody pokes fun at and that I say in fun, but it corresponds, by an emphatic and stupid word, to a state of forced inoffensiveness, consequently without merit, but pleasant and nice to savor. It’s a matter of making it useful to art when you believe in it, to the family and friendship as well when you sacrifice to it.” 278. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 307, 7 August 1870. 279. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 305–6, 3 August 1870. 280. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 309, 17 August 1870. 281. Agendas, 4:298, 5 September 1870. 282. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 313–14, 10 September 1870. 283. Corr., 22:195, 3 October 1870, to Jules Boucoiran. 284. See Michelle Perrot’s preface to the reedition of this text (Paris: Le Castor Astral, 2004). 285. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 218–19, 25 November 1870. 286. Corr., 22:349, 24 March 1871, to Edmond Plauchut.

240  Notes to Pages 192–196 287. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 336. 288. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 354, 12 October 1871. 289. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 357, 25 October 1871. 290. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 375, 28–29 February 1872. 291. Solange added: “Ah! I’m certainly over the impossible but endlessly cherished dream of ever living with my mother. No, even if I were offered Saint Mark’s in Venice, Saint Peter’s in Rome along with Saint Sophia’s in Constantinople, I would never put up with living with my brother and his well-matched other half!” (letter of 3 October 1870, Catalogue de la vente Drouot, 22–23). 292. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 412–13, 8 December 1872. 293. See the letter to the actor Francis Berton, Corr., 23:184–85, 9 August 1872. 294. In Nanon (ed. Nicole Savy [Arles: Actes Sud, “Babel,” 2005], in particular 271–77), Sand commented on recent events under the guise of judgments on the revolution. 295. Nanon, 270. 296. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 407, 26 November 1872. 297. Corr., 23:47, 22 April 1872, to Lina Sand. 298. Corr., 23:366, 2 January 1873, to Charles Poncy. 299. See her letter to the young poet Maurice Rollinat, Corr., 14:26–28, 18 April 1874. 300. See Gide’s Si le grain ne meurt [If it die] (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio,” 1972), 60–61. 301. Corr., 23:29, 19 April 1872, to Alexandre Saint-Jean. 302. Corr., 23:67, 1 May 1872. 303. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 461, 3 April 1874. 304. Corr., 23:557, 26 July 1873. 305. Corr., 23:555–56, 1 September 1873. 306. Corr., 23:570, 6 September 1873. 307. After that Sand again broke things off with Buloz. See the letter of 23 October 1865, where she declared: “I’m going to throw my novel [the one that she was writing for the Revue des Deux Mondes] into the fire. I’ll only work for the stage and with Maurice alongside me, farewell to the magazine” (Corr., 19:477). “Oh! the Revue des Deux Mondes,” Sand later wrote to Juliette Adam, “it’s as balky and finicky as can be! They know as much about literature as I do about geometry, but they pretend to disdain everything, to have opinions, taste, and matchless purism. I’ve brought or sent them lovely, exquisite things; they’ve made no bones about shutting the door to these newcomers, only to usher in some old chestnuts” (Corr., 23:673, 17 January 1874). 308. Corr., 23:691, 27 February 1874, to Edmond Plauchut. 309. Corr., 24:87–88, 11 August 1874. 310. Corr., 24:94, 21 August 1874, to Joachim Nabuco. 311. Christian Bernadec’s George Sand: Dessins et aquarelles (Paris: Belfond, 1982) contains numerous reproductions of her dendrites. They were part of her collection of writers’ drawings, scattered after her death. A few of them (reproduced in the section “Vie et œuvre” in Histoire de ma vie) belonged to

Notes to Pages 196–204  241 Dina Vierney. The Sand collection at the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris also has a certain number of them, with the rest being in private collections. These works have not been inventoried. 312. Corr., 24:260, 7 May 1875. 313. Corr., 24:517, 21 January 1876, to Charles de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul.

1876 1. Corr., 24:491 (the letter has a slip of the pen corrected by Martine Reid). 2. Corr., 24:5, 18 and 19 December 1875. 3. Corr., 24:5. 4. “We have self-evident duties only to ourselves and our fellow creatures. What we destroy in ourselves, we destroy in them. When we are degraded, they are degraded; when we fall, we drag them down; we owe it to them to remaining standing lest they fall” (Corr., 24:510, 12 January 1876). 5. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 514, ca. 31 December 1875. 6. Corr., 24:510, 12 January 1876. 7. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 521, 6 February 1876. 8. “You’ll see by my Histoire d’un cœur simple, and you’ll recognize your immediate influence there, that I’m not as stubborn as you think. I think you’ll like the moral slant, or rather the human underpinning of this little piece!” (Flaubert-Sand Corr., 533, 29 May 1876). When it was published, in 1877, Flaubert repeated to Maurice Sand that the tale was written “just for [his mother], just for her pleasure” (letter of 29 August, in Correspondance, ed. Yvan Leclerc [Paris: Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”], 5:282). 9. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 523, 18 February 1876. 10. “One of George Sand’s talents,” as Gustave Lanson observed, “. . . is this: she doesn’t imprison her characters in formulas: she keeps them fluid, unfinished, capable of more development and greater complexity; thus . . . she imitates more exactly the endless becoming of life” (Histoire de la littérature française, 12th ed. [1895; Paris: Hachette, 1912], 999). 11. George Sand critique, 752. 12. Corr., 24:529, 9 February 1876, to Jules Lermina. 13. Corr., 24:528, 9 February 1876, to Eugène Clerh. 14. Corr., 24:533, 13 February 1876, to Joséphine Borget. 15. See Juliette Adam’s letter of 11 July 1875, Corr., 24:337–38. 16. Corr., 24:345, 17 July 1875, to Joseph Dessauer. 17. This photo is reproduced in Corr. 24:xvii. 18. Corr., 21:711–12, 26 November 1869. 19. Corr., 24:582, 24 March 1869. 20. Corr., 24:635. 21. Corr., 24:637–38. 22. Corr., 24:639, 30 May 1876. 23. See the annexes in Corr., vol. 24 and the references given by Georges Lubin. 24. Corr., 24:659.

242  Notes to Pages 205–209 25. On this point the witnesses disagree (cf. Corr., 24:661). 26. Corr., 24:662. 27. See the letters reproduced in footnotes in volume 24 of Sand’s Correspondance (650–51). 28. Corr., 24:647–48. 29. Correspondance, ed. Jean Brunet and Yvan Leclerc, vol. 5 (Paris: Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 2007), 57, 19 June 1876, to Mme Roger des Genettes. 30. Corr., 24:671. 31. Lubin, Album Sand, quoted on 219–20. 32. Corr., 24:347, to Simon Lebrun. 33. Corr., 24:347. 34. The episode is recounted in the letter he wrote from Nohant to a friend who remained in Paris (Corr., 24:652–53). 35. Unpublished letter of 13 June 1875 (former collection Dina Vierny). 36. “Last will and testament of George Sand,” Corr., 24:644–45. 37. Corr., 24:645. 38. Sand considered that she had given Solange half her fortune when she turned over to her daughter the hôtel de Narbonne in Paris (cf. Lettres retrouvées, 68, 9 November 1847, to Pauline Viardot). 39. The rest of Solange’s life was not easy. When Solange, designated rather cavalierly as “Clésinger’s wife,” was invited in 1888 to a ball organized by the wife of the subprefect of La Châtre, she replied: “The passing years, the uncivilized ways of the country, and a life of very gloomy solitude have made me better able to dig up a potato patch than to exchange lighthearted gallantries by candlelight” (letter reproduced in La Lettre d’Ars, no. 54 [October 2011], 10). She died in 1899. 40. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 5:62, 25 June 1876, to Maurice Sand. 41. Flaubert-Sand Corr., 5:51–52, 17 June 1876, to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie. 42. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Certains (Paris: UGE, 1975), 412. 43. P.-J. Proudhon, “Madame George Sand,” in Les Femmelins (Paris: Nouvelle Libraire nationale, 1912), 97. 44. Proudhon, “Madame George Sand,” 105. 45. “George Sand is undoubtedly the writer who for thirty years perverted the most minds and blighted the most hearts, and we can call her, along with one of her most enthusiastic panegyrists, the most powerful destroyer of them all,” declared without hesitation J. Duplessis, the author of the Trésor littéraire des jeunes personnes, printed by the Catholic publisher Armand Mame of Tours, France, in 1883. 46. Lanson, Histoire de la littérature française, 996.

Bibliography

Texts of George Sand from Éditions Gallimard, Paris Le château de Pictordu. Edited by Martine Reid. Coll. “Folio 2 €.” 2012. Consuelo, followed by La comtesse de Rudolstadt. Edited by Léon Cellier and Léon Guichard. Coll. “Folio classique.” 2004. Elle et lui. Edited by Thierry Bodin. Coll. “Folio classique.” 2008. François le Champi. Edited by André Fermigier. Coll. “Folio classique.” 1976. Histoire de ma vie. Edited by Martine Reid. Coll. “Quarto.” 2004. Indiana. Edited by Béatrice Didier. Coll. “Folio classique.” 1984. Lélia. Edited by Pierre Reboul. Coll. “Folio classique.” 2003. Lettres d’une vie. Edited by Thierry Bodin. Coll. “Folio classique.” 2004. Lettres retrouvées. Edited by Thierry Bodin. Coll. “Blanche.” 2004. Les maîtres sonneurs. Edited by Marie-Claire Blanquart. Coll. “Folio classique.” 1979. La mare au diable. Edited by Léon Cellier. Coll. “Folio classique.” 1973. Mauprat. Edited by Jean-Pierre Lacassagne. Coll. “Folio classique.” 1984. Musset, Alfred de, and George Sand. “Ô mon George, ma belle maîtresse . . .” (correspondence). Edited by Martine Reid. Coll. “Folio 2 €.” 2010. Œuvres autobiographiques. Edited by Georges Lubin. 2 vols. Coll. “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.” 1970–71. Pauline. Edited by Martine Reid. Coll. “Folio 2 €.” 2007. La petite fadette. Edited by Martine Reid. Coll. “Folio classique.” 2004.

Works of George Sand from Other Sources Agendas. Edited by Anne Chevereau. 6 vols. Paris: Touzot, 1990–93. Autour de la table. Paris: Michel Lévy, 1862. Le château des désertes. Paris: Michel Lévy, 1854. Le compagnon du tour de France. Edited by Jean-Louis Cabanès. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2004. Le diable à Paris. Edited by Jacques Seebacher. Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2004. Gabriel. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1867. George Sand avant “Indiana.” In Œuvres complètes, edited by Gilles Chastagneret. 2 vols. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008. George Sand critique (1833–1876). Edited by Christine Planté. Tusson: Du Lérot, 2006. L’homme de neige. Edited by Martine Reid. Arles: Actes Sud, “Babel,” 2005. Impressions et souvenirs. Paris: Michel Lévy, 1873.

244 Bibliography Jeanne. Edited by Pierre Laforgue. Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire: Christian Pirot, 2006. Journal d’un voyageur pendant la guerre. Edited by Michelle Perrot. Paris: Le Castor Astral, 2004. Le meunier d’Angibault. Edited by Béatrice Didier. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1985. Nanon. Edited by Nicole Savy. Arles: Actes Sud, “Babel,” 2005. Le péché de monsieur Antoine. Edited by Jean Courrier and Jean-Hervé Donnard. Meylan: Éditions de l’Aurore, 1982. Politique et polémiques (1843–1850). Edited by Michelle Perrot. Paris: Belin, 2004. Promenade dans le Berry: Mœurs, coutumes, légendes. Edited by Georges Lubin. Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1992. Questions d’art et de littérature. Edited by Henriette Bessis and Janis Glasgow. Paris: Des Femmes, 1991. Théâtre complet. 3 vols. Paris: Michel Lévy, 1866. Théâtre de Nohant. Paris: Michel Lévy, 1865.

George Sand’s Letters and Correspondence Correspondance. Edited by Georges Lubin. 25 vols. Paris: Garnier, 1966–91. Tusson: Du Lérot, 1995. D’Agoult, Marie, and George Sand. Correspondance. Edited by Charles F. Dupêchez. Paris: Bartillat, 1995. Flaubert, Gustave, and George Sand. Correspondance. Edited by Alphonse Jacobs. Paris: Flammarion, 1981. Lettres inédites de George Sand et de Pauline Viardot (1839–1849). Edited by Thérèse Marix-Spire. Paris: Nouvelles éditions latines, 1959. Sand, George, and Armand Barbès. Correspondance d’une amitié républicaine (1848–1870). Edited by Michelle Perrot. Lagarde-Firmacon: Éditions Le Capucin, 1999. Sand, George, and Victor Hugo. Correspondance croisée. Edited by Danielle Bahiaoui. Nîmes: HB Éditions, 2004.

Biographies and Critical Works Bara, Olivier. “Le sanctuaire des illusions”: George Sand et le théâtre. Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2010. Barry, Joseph. Infamous Woman: The Life of George Sand. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977. Bernadec, Christian. George Sand: Dessins et aquarelles. Paris: Belfond, 1982. Bloch-Dano, Évelyne. Le dernier amour de George Sand. Paris: Grasset, 2010. Boisdeffre, Pierre de. George Sand à Nohant. Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire: Christian Pirot, 2000. Brem, Anne-Marie de. George Sand: Un diable de femme. Paris: Gallimard, “Découvertes,” 1997. Chevereau, Anne. Alexandre Manceau: Le dernier amour de George Sand. Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire: Christian Pirot, 2002.

Bibliography  245 Didier, Béatrice. George Sand écrivain: “Un grand fleuve d’Amérique.” Paris: PUF, 1998. Hamon, Bernard. George Sand et la politique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. ———. George Sand face aux Églises. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005. Harlan, Elizabeth. George Sand. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Jack, Belinda. George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large. New York: Random House, 1999. Karénine, Wladimir. George Sand: Sa vie et ses œuvres. 4 vols. 1899–1926. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 2000. Lubin, Georges. Album Sand. Paris: Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 1973. Maillet, Francine. George Sand. 1976. Enl. ed. Paris: Grasset, 1995. Margerie, Diane de. Aurore et George. Paris: Albin Michel, 2004. Maurois, André. Lélia ou la vie de George Sand. Paris: Hachette, 1952. McCall Saint-Saëns, Anne E. De l’être en lettres: L’autobiographie épistolaire de George Sand. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. Mon cher George: Balzac et Sand, histoire d’une amitié. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, presented at the Musée Balzac à Saché in 2010. Paris: Gallimard, 2010. Naginski, Isabelle. George Sand: Writing for Her Life. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Reid, Martine. Signer Sand: L’œuvre et le nom. Paris: Belin, 2003. ———, ed. George Sand: L’œuvre-vie. Paris: Bibliothèques Éditions, 2004. Reid, Martine, and Michèle Riot-Sarcey, eds. George Sand: Littérature et politique. Nantes: Éditions Pleins feux, 2007. Tillier, Bertrand. George Sand chargée ou la rançon de la gloire! Tusson: Du Lérot, 1993. ———. Les marionnettes de Maurice et George Sand. Paris: Hermé, 1998. Vincent, Marie-Louise. La langue et le style rustique de George Sand dans les romans champêtres. Paris: Champion, 1916.

Films Documentaries Au cœur de la terre de George Sand. Directed by Pascal Champsion. 1997. Balade au pays de George Sand: Découvrir la Vallée-Noire. Directed by Claude-Olivier Darré. 1996. Chopin, Delacroix, George Sand. Directed by Jean Douchet and Jean-Pierre About. 1969. Frédéric Chopin au pays de George Sand. Directed by Jean-Paul Carrère. 1999. George, qui? Directed by Michèle Rosier. 1973. George Sand. Directed by Pierre Philip. 1975. George Sand (1804–1876). Directed by Renaud de Dancourt and Jean-Marie Carzou. 1994. George Sand et Frédéric Chopin: Parcours d’une liaison célèbre. Directed by Claude-Olivier Darré, 2001.

246 Bibliography George Sand, “Nohant, c’était le paradis.” Directed by Jacques de Casembroot. 1964. George Sand: Une femme libre. Directed by Gérard Poitou-Weber. 1994. Mémoire de maisons mortes, “Nohant, demeure de George Sand.” Directed by Paul Gilson. 1981. Le merveilleux théâtre de George Sand. Directed by Claude-Olivier Darré. 1995. Les Pierres-Jaumâtres, Toulx-Sainte-Croix: Le parc de Boussac, Jeanne de George Sand. Directed by Patrick Séraudie, 1993. Le premier amour de George Sand. Script written by Hervé Baslé, directed by Pierre Dumayet, 1981. Sand . . . George en mal d’Aurore. Directed by Françoise-Renée Jamet and Laurent Morocco. 2003. Adaptations of Novels and Fictional Biographies for Cinema and Television Les amants de Venise. Film directed by Georges Rebillard. 1969. Les beaux messieurs de Bois-Doré. Film for television directed by Bernard Borderie. 1976. Le compagnon du tour de France. Film directed by Pierre Dumayet and Robert Bober. 1982. Les enfants du siècle. Film directed by Diane Kurys. 1999. George et Fanchette. Film directed by Julien Cheminade. 2007. Lélia ou la vie de George Sand. Film for television directed by Henri Spage based on André Maurois’s biography. 1968. La mare au diable. Film for television directed by Pierre Cardinal. 1972. Mauprat. Film directed by Jean Epstein (with Luis Buñuel). 1926. Mauprat. Film for television directed by Jacques Trébouta. 1972. La note bleue. Film directed by Andrzej Zulawski. 1991. La petite fadette. Film for television by Jean-Paul Carrère. 1963. La petite fadette. Film for television by Richard Bohringer. 2004. Song Without End. Film directed by George Cukor. 1959. La ville noire. Film directed by Jacques Tréfouel. 1981.

Index

actors, 143–44 Adam, Juliette, 187, 201 Agoult, Marie d’, 76–79, 102, 175, 187 pseudonym, 13, 79 ailes du courage, Les. See Wings of Courage, The Ajasson de Grandsagne, Stéphane, 53–54 Albine Fiori, 201 Allart, Hortense, 118, 119, 186 All the Same, 189 André, 68 Arabella. See Agoult, Marie d’ Arago, Emmanuel, 90, 144 Arago, Étienne, 113, 115 “Archives of Maurice Sand’s Puppet Theater” (“Archives du théâtre de marionnettes de Maurice Sand”), 149–50 Arnould-Plessy, Sylviane, 143–44, 165 Atelier, L’, 101 Aucante, Émile, 139, 158, 160, 196 Aujourd’hui, Journal des Ridicules, 60 aumône d’un mendiant, L’. See Beggar’s Alms, The autobiography. See Story of My Life aventures de Mlle Mariette, Les. See Miss Mariette’s Adventures Balandard in the Orient (Balandard en Orient), 202 Balandard the Candidate (Balandard candidat), 202 Balzac, Honoré de, 58–59, 79, 80–81, 83, 89–90, 105 on Sand’s work, 88, 102 Banville, Théodore de, 182 Barbès, Armand, 72, 115, 119, 125

Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules, 127–28, 182 bas-bleus, Les. See Bluestockings, The Baudelaire, Charles, 80, 182 Bawr, Alexandrine de, 128 Bazouin, Aimée, 43, 51 Bazouin, Jane, 43, 51, 55 Béatrix, 79, 81 beau Laurence, Le. See Handsome Laurence beaux messieurs de Bois-Doré, Les. See Handsome Gentlemen of GildedWood, The Beggar’s Alms, The, 187 Believer’s Words, A, 72 Bérengère (actress), 165, 173 Berrichon dialect, 27, 108, 132–33 Berrichon Mule-drivers, 134 Berry, France, 31–32, 77, 107, 112, 190–91, 231 n. 37 and folk art, 131–33, 231 n. 33 Bertholdi, André-Charles de, 121 Bertholdi, Augustine de, 160, 173 Berton, Francis, 144 Berton, Pierre, 144 “Bibliothèque des chemins de fer.” See “Railroad Library” “Bibliothèque Rose,” 194 Bien Public, Le, 206 Biography of Contemporary Women Authors (Biographie des femmes auteurs contemporaines), 71 birds, 83 bisexuality, 63, 218 n. 23 Black City, The, 167 Black Valley, 25 Blanc, Louis, 115 Blanqui, Louis Auguste, 119 bluestockings, 8

248 Index Cauvière (doctor), 88 Cavaignac, Louis-Eugène, 119–20 Césarine Dietrich, 193 Chamber of Deputies, 71, 116 Chamonix, France, 76 Champfleury (pseud. Jules-FrançoisFélix Fleury-Husson), 133 Chansons et légendes du Valois. See Songs and Legends of the Valois Charivari, Le, 60, 83 Charpentier, Gervais, 139 Charpentier format, 139 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 135–36, 231 n. 50 château de Nohant, 25–26, 43, 45, 49–50, 88, 238 n. 234 as community, 93–94, 158, 181– 82, 201–2 management, 163, 178 theater, 145–46, 149, 151, 202 château des désertes, Le. See Castle in the Wilderness, The Chatiron, Hippolyte, 32, 42–43, 51 childhood, 18, 21, 24, 29, 213 n. 6 (pt. II) death, 122 Chatiron, Mademoiselle (Hippolyte’s mother), 18 Chenu, Adolphe, 127 Cadio, 187 Chéri, Rose, 143 Cadol, Édouard, 173, 205 children’s literature, 194 Caillaud, Marie, 146, 173–74 Chopin, Frederick, 78, 84–93, 96, 152 Calamatta, Lina. See Sand, Lina compositions, 86–87, 88, 223 n. Calamatta, Luigi, 174 134 Callirhoé, 178 death, 98 Calmann-Lévy, Kalmus, 196, 205 early life, 83–84 Candidate, The (Le candidat), 140, 195 health, 85, 86, 87–89, 95 canne de M. de Balzac, La. See Monsieur performances, 84, 91–92, 224 n. de Balzac’s Cane 146, 224 n. 148 Canning, Reverend Mother, 35 Capo de Feuillide, Jean-Françcois, 64 Choses vues. See Matters of Observation Civil Code, 8–9 Carlists, 85 class, 71, 73, 99–100, 112 Carl Robert, 195 Castle in the Wilderness, The, 142, 166 Claudie, 141–42 Clésinger, Auguste, 96–97, 98, 161–62 Catholic Church, 9. See also Vatican Clésinger, Jean-Baptiste, 208 Catholicism, 38, 40, 181, 206–7 Clésinger, Jeanne-Gabrielle “Nini,” social, 72, 99 122, 161–62 Cause du Peuple, La, 113 Bluestockings, The, 2, 60, 127–28 Bocage, Pierre (pseud. PierreFrançois Touzé), 79, 141, 143, 146 Bonaparte, Jérôme-Napoléon, 127, 165, 205–6 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon, 120, 121, 126–27 Bonnin, Blaise. See under Sand, George: pseudonyms Book of Craftsmen’s Guilds, 101 Borie, Victor, 104, 113, 146, 149 Bosquet, Amélie, 240 n. 268 Botteleurs. See Sheaf-Makers Boucoiran, Jules, 157 Bouffé, Hugues, 143 Boulanger, Gustave, 163 bourgeoisie, 112, 114, 115, 138 Bourges, Michel de. See Michel, Louis “de Bourges” Brabançonne, La. See Woman from Brabant, The Brault, Augustine, 97, 121 Brunet, Sylvain, 163 Bulletin de la République, 113, 114, 127 Buloz, François, 59–60, 100, 166 Burgraves, The (Les Burgraves), 140

Index  249 Clésinger-Sand, Solange, 54, 87, 165–66, 207, 208–9, 243–44 nn. 38–39 and Chopin, 95, 96–97 disinheritance, 208 education, 89 estrangements, 97–98, 171–72 marriage, 96 on politics, 121–22 rapprochements, 161–63, 195 and writing, 195, 240 n. 272 Clothilde (Maurice Sand’s fiancée), 158 Coeur simple, Un. See Simple Heart, A Colette, Gabrielle-Sidonie, 11 Collège de France, 125 Comédie-Française, 142 commedia dell’arte, 141, 233 n. 74 commissaire, Le, 7 Commune, 191–92 communion, 38 communism, 112, 227 nn. 231–32 Companion of the Tour de France (Companion of the Tour de France), 102 comtesse de Rudolstadt, La. See Countess von Rudolstadt, The confession d’une jeune fille, La. See Girl’s Confession, A Confession of a Child of the Century, The, 50, 67 Conspiracy in 1537, A (conspiration en 1537, Une), 65 Consuelo, 66–67, 92, 94–95, 99 Contemporains, Les, 126, 127 Contes d’une grand-mère. See Grandmother’s Tales, A contrebandier, Le. See Smuggler, The convent of English Augustinian Sisters, 35–42 Conversations About Literature, 119 Cooper, James Fenimore, 186 coq aux cheveux d’or, Le. See Golden Rooster, The Corambé (religious figure), 38–39 Corinne ou L’Italie, 166 correspondence, 43–44, 198, 202–3

on family, 89, 97–98, 157–58 with family, 33, 162, 165 financial, 160 with Flaubert, 184–85, 188, 189– 90, 192–93, 198–200 literary, 110, 135, 136, 167 on love, 84, 110, 124 on lovers, 91–92, 95, 97–98, 180 with lovers, 52–53, 68, 223 n. 142 political, 74–75, 102, 111, 117–21, 126, 128–29 on theater, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148 on travels, 87–88, 164–65, 187 Cosima or Hatred in Love (Cosima ou la haine dans l’amour), 140 Cottin, Sophie, 8 Countess von Rudolstadt, The, 94 Country Legends, 14, 134 County Muse, The, 81 coup d’état of 1851, 125–27 couperies, Les. See Cuttings Courbet, Gustave, 187 Cours familier de littérature. See Conversations About Literature Croquis musicaux, 83 cross-dressing, 9–10, 37, 46, 60, 68, 219 n. 35. See also Sand, George: dress Custine, Astolphe de, 84 Cuttings, 6 Daily Chats with the Very Learned and Very Clever Doctor Piffoël Professor of Botany and Psychology, 76–77 Dalias, Rose, 177 dames vertes, Les. See Green Ladies, The Danhauser, Josef, 82 Daniella, La, 166–67 Daumier, Honoré, 2, 60, 83, 127 Delaborde, Caroline, 18, 23 Delaborde, Sophie-Victoire. See Dupin, Sophie Delacroix, Eugène, 63–64, 67, 89, 93–94, 111, 156–57, 177 Delatouche, Henri, 6–7, 12, 14, 58

250 Index De l’individualisme et du socialisme. See Regarding Individualism and Socialism Démon du foyer. See Devil in the Family dendrites, 196, 242 n. 311 depression, 47, 49–51 “Depression,” 73 dernier amour, Le. See Last Love, The dernière Aldini, La. See Last Aldini, The Deschartres, Jean-Louis-François, 21–22, 23–24, 27–29, 42, 45, 46–48 Dessoliaire, Jean, 110 Devil Afield, The, 167 Devil in the Family, 140, 141 Devil’s Pool, The, 107–8, 129, 130 diable aux champs, Le. See Devil Afield, The Dialogues et fragments philosophiques. See Philosophical Dialogues and Fragments diaries, 51–52, 113, 121, 152, 162 Didier, Charles, 79 divorce, 8–9, 73 Divorcing Women (Les divorceuses), 127 Dominique, 182 Dorval, Marie, 61, 63, 144 drac, Le. See Hobgoblin, The drama. See plays; theater Duchesse de Langeais, La, 83 Dudevant, Aurore. See Sand, George Dudevant, Casimir, 5, 48–50, 51–54, 69, 177, 220 n. 54 Dudevant, Maurice. See Sand, Maurice Dudevant, Solange. See ClésingerSand, Solange Dumas, Alexandre, fils, 80, 148, 173, 198, 205–6, 223 n. 142 Dumas, Alexandre, père, 135–36, 231 n. 50 Dupin, Amantine-Aurore-Lucile. See Sand, George Dupin, Louis, 20–21 Dupin, Marie-Aurore, 17–19, 22, 37, 38, 41–43, 44–45

custodianship, 23–24, 26–27, 33–34 death, 48 estate (see château de Nohant) Dupin, Maurice, 16–21, 29 Dupin, Sophie, 16–21, 23, 32–34, 48 Dupin de Francueil, Louis-Claude, 17 Duvernet, Charles, 146 Éclaireur de l’Indre, L’, 104, 105, 132 education, 30, 40 éducation sentimentale, L’. See Sentimental Education egalitarianism, 73, 100, 117–18, 119, 201 elections, 112, 114–15, 120 Elle et lui. See She and He Émile, 80 Encyclopedia nouvelle. See New Encyclopedia entomology, 152, 155 Érard, Sébastien, 83, 222 n. 106 “Espérance.” See “Hope” Essai sur la liberté. See Essay on Liberty Essay on Liberty, 79 Eugénie Grandet, 81 Family Germandre, The (famille de Germandre, La), 24–25 Fanchette (abandoned girl), 102–3 Fanny, 168 Favre, Henri, 207 feminism, 106, 116, 183 femme auteur, La. See Woman Author, The “Femme de lettres au travail.” See “Woman of Letters at Work” femme et la démocratie de nos temps, La. See Women and Democracy in Our Time Feydeau, Ernest, 168 Figaro, Le, 6, 206 filleule, La. See Goddaughter, The flambettes, Les. See Hobgoblins Flaubert, Gustave, 140, 183–86, 190, 192, 205–6 on Sand’s work, 95, 137, 209

Index  251 See also correspondence: with Flaubert Florence, Italy, 164 folk art, 108, 131 folklore, 14, 92, 129, 132, 134 folk songs, 132, 141 Fontainebleau, France, 65 Foolish Stones, The, 134 Foucher-Hugo, Adèle, 126 Fourierists, 71 Franchomme, Auguste, 96 Francia, 193 François the Waif (François le Champi), 130, 131, 141 Franco-Prussian war, 189–91 Frascati, Italy, 164 Fromentin, Eugène, 182 Funeral March, 88

Grandmother’s Tales, A, 194 Grandsire, Eugène, 154 Green Ladies, The, 167 Grzymala, Albert, 84 Guéroult, Adolphe, 68, 74 “guerre, La.” See “War, The”

Hachette, Louis, 139, 194 Handsome Gentlemen of Gilded-Wood, The, 167 Handsome Laurence, 189 Hanska, Ève, 59 Harrisse, Henry, 205–6 Helen, Sister (nun), 41 Hemp-Beater’s Tales, The, 129 Hetzel, Pierre-Jules, 121, 124, 125, 128, 135, 137–38 hiking, 154–55 Histoire de la littérature française, 209 Histoire de ma vie. See Story of My Life Gabriel, 88 Histoire d’un crime. See History of a Gargilesse, France, 154–56 Crime “Garibaldi,” 167 Histoire du véritable gribouille. See True Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 120, 166 Dimwit’s Story, A Garnier-Pagès, Louis-Antoine, 72 Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution Gauthier-Villars, Henri, 11 française. See Parliamentary Gautier, Théophile, 82–83, 182 History of the French Revolution gender, 88, 106, 116, 210–11 History of a Crime, 126 duality of, 63, 87, 119, 153, 155, hiver à Majorque, Un. See Winter in 188, 210, 240 n. 274 Majorca, A childhood, 22–24 Hobgoblin, The, 148 literary, 68–69, 71, 77, 175 Hobgoblins, 134 and politics, 74 homme de neige, L’. See Snowman, The Genlis, Félicité de, 135 “Hope,” 73 Gilland (worker-poet), 115 Horace, 79, 100–101 Gillebrand, Mary, 14, 36–37 hôtel de Narbonne, 96, 121 Girardin, Delphine de, 72, 187 Girardin, Émile de, 100, 128, 136, 165 Hugo, Victor, 1–2, 125–26, 140, 167, 192, 206 Girl’s Confession, A, 189 Human Comedy, The, 81, 196 Glaneuses. See Women Gleaning Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 134 Globe, Le, 73 Glossary of Dialects in Central France (Glossaire des parlers du centre de idealism, 133–34, 200, 201, 210–11 la France), 131 Illustrated Works, 138 Goddaughter, The, 166 Illustration, L’, 132 Godmother, The, 55 imagination, 37, 38–39 Golden Rooster, The, 196 Impressions et souvenirs, 193 Goncourt brothers, 80, 183–84

252 Index Laverdure, Pierre. See Chatiron, Hippolyte laveuses de nuit, Les. See Women Who Wash by Night, The Leader of Wolves, The, 134 Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre-Auguste, 72, Jacobinism, 74 111, 115, 120 Jacques, 50, 68 Légendes rustiques. See Country Legends Janin, Jules, 71 Legends and Beliefs of Central France Jaubert, Hippolyte-François, 131 (Légendes et croyances du centre Jeanne, 103 de la France), 132 Jérôme, Prince. See Bonaparte, Lehmann, Auguste, 123 Jérôme-Napoléon Lélia, 14, 50, 63–64, 68–69, 87 Jérôme Paturot in Search of the Best Lélia ou la vie de George Sand, 210 of Republics (Jérôme Paturot à Lemaître, Frédéric, 143 la recherche de la meilleure des Lemoine-Montigny, Adolphe, 142 républiques), 127 Leone Leoni, 68 Johannot, Tony, 127, 138 Leroux, Pierre, 72–73, 80, 99, 101, Journal des Goncourt, 80 103, 125, 225 n. 185 Journal d’un voyageur pendant la guerre. Leroy, Zoé, 52 See Traveler’s War Diary, A letters. See correspondence Journal pour rire, Le, 136 Letters from Two Young Brides, 81 Joy, Anténor, 107 Letters of a Bachelor in Music, 77 J. S. See under Sand, George: Letters to Marcie (Lettres à Marcie), pseudonyms 72–73 July Revolution, 56, 71 Lettres de deux jeunes mariées. See June Days, 118–19, 131 Letters from Two Young Brides June Rebellion, 71 Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique. See Letters of a Bachelor in Music King Waits, The, 113–14, 141 Lettres d’un voyageur. See Traveler’s Kotzebue, August von, 14 Letters La Bigottière, Henriette de, 31 Lévy, Michel, 139, 178, 196 Life of Henri Brulard, The, 135 La Châtre, France, 54, 102–3 Liset (childhood friend), 30 Lacoux, Monseiur (tutor), 42 Liszt, Franz, 76–79, 91 Laisnel de La Salle, Alfred, 132 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 115, 118–19, Livre du compagnonnage. See Book of Craftsmen’s Guilds 120 Lix, Frédéric, 206 Lambert, Eugène, 97, 145–48, 150, Lorentz, Alcide, 116, 128 157, 233 n. 94 Louis-Philippe I, 91, 110–11 Lamennais, Félicité de, 72–73 Lucie (aunt), 16 Lanson, Gustave, 209 Lucrezia Floriani, 95–96 La Spezia, Italy, 164–65 Lycée Henri-IV, 71 Last Aldini, The, 81 Last Love, The, 185 Madame Bovary, 183 Last of the Mohicans, The, 186 La Tour d’Auvergne, Hugues de, 207 Mademoiselle La Quintinie, 182–83, 193 Laura, 189 Index Librorum Prohibitorum, 182, 207 Indiana, 11–12, 13, 50, 57 Indians, 226 n. 218

Index  253 Mademoiselle Merquem, 184, 185 Madrid, Spain, 20–21 Magny’s restaurant, 183 Maître Favilla. See Master Favilla maîtres mosaïstes, Les. See Master Mosaic Makers, The maîtres sonneurs, Les. See Master Pipers, The Majorca, Spain, 85–87 Malgré-tout. See All the Same Mallefille, Félicien, 79, 84, 85 Manceau, Alexandre, 122–24, 146, 152–56, 175–76, 178–80, 207 Manon Lescaut, 68 Marbouty, Caroline, 240 n. 268 Marchal, Charles, 173 mare au Diable, Le. See Devil’s Pool, The mariage de Victorine, Le. See Victorine’s Wedding Marianne, 201 Marliani, Madame (Parisian hostess), 93 marquis de Villemer, Le, 183, 187 marquise, La, 59 marraine, La. See Godmother, The marriage, 51, 73, 80–81, 117–18, 175 in fiction, 9, 11, 75 Married Life, 60 Marseilles, France, 88 Masks and Clowns (Masques et bouffons), 141 Master Favilla, 144 Master Mosaic Makers, The, 81 Master Pipers, The, 105, 130 matinée chez Liszt, La. See Morning with Liszt Matters of Observation, 125 Mauprat, 74–75 Mauricot. See Sand, Maurice Maurois, André, 210 Mazzini, Guiseppe, 120, 166 Mémoires, 135–36, 231 n. 50 Mémoires d’outre-tombe. See Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb Mémoires inédits sur le dix-huitième siècle et la Révolution française.

See Unpublished Memoirs on the Eighteenth Century and the French Revolution memoirs, 135 Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb, 135–36 meneu’ de loups, Le. See Leader of Wolves, The Mérimée, Prosper, 62, 115, 122 Mes souvenirs. See My Memories meunier d’Angibault, Le. See Miller at Angibault, The Meurice, Paul, 205–6 Michel, Louis “de Bourges,” 69, 72, 79 Michelet, Jules, 125 Mickiewicz, Adam, 84, 125 Miller at Angibault, The, 107, 108 Millet, Aimé, 209 Millet, Jean-François, 134–35 mineralogy, 182, 189 Ministry of Internal Affairs, 113 Ministry of Public Instruction, 112 Mirecourt, Eugène de, 127 Miroir Drolatique, Le, 116 Miss Mariette’s Adventures, 133 Moeurs conjugales. See Married Life moine des Étangs-Brisses, Le. See Monk of Étang-Brisses, The Molière (pseud. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 113, 141 Monckton-Milnes, Richard, 115 Monde, Le, 72 Monde Illustré, Le, 154 Monk of Étang-Brisses, The, 134 Monsieur Antoine’s Sin, 108–9, 110 Monsieur de Balzac’s Cane, 187 Montagnards de 1848, Les, 127 Montferrand, Alfred de, 70–71 Mont-Revêche, 166 Moreau, Hégésippe, 101 Morning with Liszt, 82 Moscheles, Ignaz, 91 motherhood, 119, 175 Muletiers berrichons. See Berrichon Mule-drivers Murat, Joachim, 20

254 Index Papal States, 120–21, 166 Papet, Gustave, 204 Paris, France, 19–20, 48, 89–90, 114–15, 176 and Commune, 191–92 and Revolution of 1848, 119 Parliamentary History of the French Revolution, 74 Paroles d’un croyant. See Believer’s Words, A patronage, 101 Nadar, Félix, 170–71, 174, 188, 236 Paul et Virginie, 11 n. 183 paysans, Les. See Peasants, The Nanon, 193 peasants, 31–32, 92, 105, 112–13, Napoleonic Code, 70 134–35, 206 Napoleonic Wars, 20 in fiction, 107–8, 130, 143, 193 Napoléon III, 166 Peasants, The, 105 Napoleon the Small (Napoléon le Petit), péché de monsieur Antoine. See Monsieur 126 Antoine’s Sin Nerval, Gérard de, 131 Percemont Tower, The, 200–201 New Encyclopedia, 73, 89 newspapers, 100, 103–4, 113, 128–29, Perdiguier, Agricol, 90, 101, 115 Peregrinations of a pariah 136 (Pérégrinations d’une paria), 106 Niboyet, Eugénie, 116–17 Périgois, Ernest, 206 Night in Venice, 140 Petite Fadette, La, 32, 50, 130, 131 Nohant, France, 18, 21–22, 25–26, 31–32, 46–47, 158, 175. See also Philipon, Charles, 227 n. 225 Philosopher in Spite of Himself, The château de Nohant (philosophe malgré lui, Le), 146 Nohant-Vicq, 112, 122 Philosophical Dialogues and Fragments, Nouvelle Revue, La, 201 201 novels photography, 169–71, 188, 202 epistolary, 68, 201 pianos, 83, 222 n. 106 gothic, 63, 74 Pierre qui roule. See Rolling Stone Restoration period, 8 pierres-sottes, Les. See Foolish Stones, romances, 11 The thrillers, 74 nuit vénitienne, La. See Night in Venice Pierret (Sophie Dupin’s companion), 18, 20 Planche, Gustave, 64 Odéon. See Théâtre de l’Odéon Œuvres illustrées. See Illustrated Works Plauchut, Edmond, 207 plays, 113, 121–22, 126, 140–42, 183, Opus 28, 86 187, 193 orientalism, 73 morality, 41, 43 Orsay, Alfred d’, 127 Pleyel, Camille, 83, 86–87 Oudinot, Charles, 120 Plutus, 148 Poetic Meditations, 118 Pagello, Pietro, 66–67 poetry, proletarian, 101, 226 n. 193 Palaiseau, France, 176, 180 Pandolphe’s Vacation, 140 muse du département, La. See County Muse, The music, 82–83, 92, 94, 99, 130, 143, 214–15 n. 38. See also Chopin, Frederick: compositions; folk songs musiciens de Paris, Les, 83 Musset, Alfred de, 62–68, 140 My Memories, 128

Index  255 politics, 71–75, 99–100, 109–15, 116–21, 167 and Commune, 191–92 and 1851 coup d’état, 126–29 retreat from, 195 and Revolution of 1848, 104–6 “politique et le socialisme, La,” 104 Poncy, Charles, 101, 110, 120, 135, 187 Pontcarré, Pauline de, 43 Pourquoi les femmes à l’Académie? See Why Should There Be Women in the French Academy? Preaulx, Fernand de, 96 Preludes, 86 Prémord, Abbot, 45 Presse, La, 72, 100, 167 pressoir, Le. See Winepress, The primitive art. See folk art proletarian poetry. See poetry, proletarian proletarians, 99, 101, 111, 112 Promenades autour d’un village. See Walks Around a Village Protestantism, 45, 175, 181, 206–7 Proust, Marcel, 130, 209 pseudonyms, 13, 79, 105–6. See also under Sand, George publishing, 6–7, 137–39, 186, 196–97, 225 n. 185 puppets, 148–51, 194, 202 Puppet Theater of Nohant, The, 148–49 Pyrenees, 51–52 Quinet, Edgar, 125 Rachel (actress), 114, 143 “Railroad Library,” 139 Rainteau, Marie, 17 Raoul de La Châtre, 178 Raspail, François-Vincent, 119, 120 realism, 133, 156, 168, 183, 199, 209 Recollections, 115 Recueillements poétiques. See Poetic Meditations Réforme, La, 107, 117, 120

Regarding Individualism and Socialism, 73 Relief Fund for the Wounded, 190 religion, 71, 72, 181, 182–83, 207 dedication to, 39–42 in early life, 19, 38 and imagination, 38–39 in Majorca, 86–88 study of, 45 See also Catholicism; Protestantism Renan, Ernest, 201, 206 republicanism, 191 Revolution of 1848, 104, 110–11, 119–20, 135–36 Revue des Deux Mondes, 60, 74, 76, 100, 166, 242 n. 307 Revue et Gazette Musicale, 91 Revue indépendante, La, 101, 102, 103, 104 Revue Sociale, 106 Reybaud, Louis, 127 Reynaud, Jean, 73, 112 Richebourg, Pierre-Amboise, 169–70 Robert the Devil (Robert le diable), 83 Rodriques, Édouard, 160, 177 roi attend, Le. See King Waits, The Roland, Pauline, 106 Rolling Stone, 189 romances. See under novels Roman Republic, 120–21 romans noirs. See novels: thrillers romanticism, 30–31, 133, 209 Christian, 99 Romantics, 50, 133 Rome, Italy, 163–64, 166–67, 236 n. 164 Rondo fantastique, 77 Rose and Blanche, or the Actress and the Nun (Rose et Blanche ou La comédienne et la religieuse), 7 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 17, 46 Rousseau, Théodore, 97 Rouvière, Antoine, 144 Roux, Prosper-Charles, 74 Ruche Populaire, La, 101 Ruy Blas, 126

256 Index Sainte-Beuve, Augustin, 7, 58, 64, 179, 183 Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, 11 Saint-Simonians, 71, 73–74, 106 Salammbô, 183 Sand, Aurore, 181, 194 Sand, Gabrielle, 181 Sand, George autobiography (see Story of My Life) burial, 205–7 childhood, 16, 18–25, 27, 29, 31–35, 137 death, 205 dress, 9–10, 46, 60, 68, 154, 165, 169–70 education, 29–30, 35–38 estate (see château de Nohant) finances, 137–38, 157, 160–61, 163, 165, 172, 176–78 health, 188–89, 203–5, 223 n. 125 and love, 79, 84–85 marriage, 49 and men, 153–54, 173–74 obituary, 205 pseudonyms, 12–15, 68–69 Bonnin, Blaise, 101, 103, 105, 112–13, 214 n. 46 J. S., 7 Sand, J., 7, 12, 213 n. 5 reputation contemporary, 70–71, 80, 116, 127, 209, 245 modern, 2–3, 60, 210–11 will, 207–8 writing method, 45, 87, 93, 158– 59, 182 Sand, J. See under Sand, George: pseudonyms Sand, Karl-Ludwig, 14 Sand, Lina, 174, 177–79, 181 Sand, Marc-Antoine, 174, 177–78 Sand, Maurice, 97, 156–58, 162, 172–73, 175–78, 192 and art, 77, 85, 88–89, 92, 134–35, 138 childhood, 49

and Chopin, 95 education, 71, 89 inheritance, 207–8 marriage, 174 and theater, 145–51 and writing, 141, 178–79, 195 Sand, Solange. See Clésinger-Sand, Solange Sandeau, Jules, 5–7, 56, 59 Sarcey, Francisque, 186 Saxe, Maurice de, 17 Scott, Walter, 139 Second Republic, 111 secret societies, 101–2 Sedaine, Michel-Jean, 146 Ségur, Countess de, 194 Sentimental Education, 183, 184, 186, 199 Sèze, Aurélien de, 52–53 Sheaf-Makers, 134 She and He, 68 Sicard, François, 209 Signol, Alphonse, 7 Simon, 71, 78 Simple Heart, A, 200 Six Thousand Leagues at Full Steam (Six mille lieues à toute vapeur), 173 Smuggler, The, 77 Snowman, The, 166 socialism, 71, 72, 73, 100, 106, 191 social justice, 71–72 Soirées parisiennes, 83 Songs and Legends of the Valois, 131 Souvenirs. See Recollections Spain, 85–87 Spiridion, 64, 87, 99 “Spleen.” See “Depression” Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, Charles de, 196–97 Staël, Germaine de, 166 Stendhal (pseud. Marie-Henri Beyle), 66, 82, 135 Stern, Daniel. See Agoult, Marie d’: pseudonym Stirling, Jane, 96

Index  257 Story of My Life, 5, 14–15, 95–96, 133–34, 135–37 on childhood, 16, 19, 22–23, 31–32, 34–35 on dress, 10 on early career, 60–61, 68–69 on heredity, 18–19 on imagination, 39 on lovers, 98–99 on politics, 73 on pseudonyms, 12, 14–16 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 186 Sue, Eugène, 160 Tamaris, 189 Temps, Le, 191, 201 Temptation of Saint Antoine, The (La Tentation de Saint-Antoine), 184, 190 Teverino, 83 theater, 113, 140–44, 179, 189, 195 parlor, 123, 144–48, 173 puppet, 148–51, 194, 202 See also plays Theater of Nohant, 148 Théâtre de la Gaîté, 141 Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, 141 Théâtre de la République, 113–14 Théâtre de l’Odéon, 122, 141, 183 Théâtre de marionnettes de Nohant, Le. See Puppet Theater of Nohant, The Théâtre de Nohant. See Theater of Nohant Théâtre du Gymnase, 121, 142 Théâtre-Français, 201 Thérèse Raquin, 140 Thiers, Adolphe, 191 Thoré, Théophile, 113 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 115–16, 120 “To the Wealthy,” 112 Tour de Percemont, La. See Percemont Tower, The Traveler’s Letters, 72, 76–77, 83, 153 Traveler’s War Diary, A, 191 Tristan, Flora, 106, 186

True Dimwit’s Story, A, 194 Turgenev, Ivan, 185 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 186 Union, L’, 101 Unpublished Memoirs on the Eighteenth Century and the French Revolution, 135 Ursule (childhood friend), 22, 24, 29, 30 utopianism, 106–7, 185, 211 Vacances de Pandolphe, Les. See Pandolphe’s Vacation Valentine, 13, 59 Valldemosa, Spain, 85–86 Vallée-Noire. See Black Valley vanneur, Le. See Winnower, The Vatican, 72, 182 Venice, Italy, 65–66 Verrière, Mademoiselle de. See Rainteau, Marie Viardot, Louis, 92–93, 101, 113 Viardot, Pauline, 92–93, 114, 144 Victor Hugo According to a Witness of His Life (Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie), 126 Victorine’s Wedding, 121, 146, 201 Vie de Henri Brulard. See Life of Henri Brulard, The Vie de Rancé, 231 n. 50 Vigny, Alfred de, 61, 82 Villa Algira, 155–56 villageoiseries, 141–42 Villeneuve, René de, 44, 48, 111 ville noire, La. See Black City, The Villevieille, Léon, 146 Vocabulary of Berry (Vocabulaire du Berry), 131 Voix des Femmes, La, 116 Vraie République, La, 113, 117 Walks Around a Village, 156 “War, The,” 167 Why Should There Be Women in the French Academy?, 183 Winepress, The, 141–42

258 Index Wings of Courage, The, 194 Winnower, The, 134 Winter in Majorca, A, 85, 87 Wismes, Émilie de, 43 Wodzinska, Maria, 84 Woman Author, The, 81 Woman from Brabant, The, 179 “Woman of Letters at Work,” 128 women and politics, 116–19 prejudice against, 2–3, 8, 88 rights of, 106, 117–18

role of, 174–75 status of, 8–9, 47, 72–73, 79–80, 106, 117 as writers, 7–9, 13, 115, 128, 186–87, 240 n. 168 See also feminism; gender Women and Democracy in Our Time, 118 Women Gleaning, 134 Women Who Wash by Night, The, 134 Zola, Émile, 59, 140