not beautiful, though there was something about her which attracted
observation. Of middle height, she was fairly slender. Her eyes were
somewhat projecting, and her mouth was almost sullen when in repose. Her
manners were peculiar, combining boldness with timidity. Her address was
almost as familiar as a man's, so that it was easy to be acquainted with
her; yet a certain haughtiness and a touch of aristocratic pride made it
plain that she had drawn a line which none must pass without her
wish. When she was deeply stirred, however, she burst forth into an
extraordinary vivacity, showing a nature richly endowed and eager to
yield its treasures.
The existence which she now led was a curious one. She still visited her
husband at Nohant, so that she might see her son, and sometimes, when
M. Dudevant came to town, he called upon her in the apartments which she
shared with Jules Sandeau. He had accepted the situation, and with his
crudeness and lack of feeling he seemed to think it, if not natural,
at least diverting. At any rate, so long as he could retain her
half-million francs, he was not the man to make trouble about his former
wife's arrangements.
Meanwhile, there began to be perceptible the very slightest rift within
the lute of her romance. Was her love for Sandeau really love, or was
it only passion? In his absence, at any rate, the old obsession still
continued. Here we see, first of all, intense pleasure shading off into
a sort of maternal fondness. She sends Sandeau adoring letters. She is
afraid that his delicate appetite is not properly satisfied.
Yet, again, there are times when she feels that he is irritating and
ill. Those who knew them said that her nature was too passionate and
her love was too exacting for him. One of her letters seems to make
this plain. She writes that she feels uneasy, and even frightfully
remorseful, at seeing Sandeau "pine away." She knows, she avows, that
she is killing him, that her caresses are a poison, and her love a
consuming fire.
It is an appalling thought, and Jules will not understand it. He laughs
at it; and when, in the midst of his transports of delight, the idea
comes to me and makes my blood run cold, he tells me that here is the
death that he would like to die. At such moments he promises whatever I
make him promise.
This letter throws a clear light upon the nature of George Sand's
temperament. It will be found all through her career, not only that
she sought to inspire passion, but that she strove to gratify it after
fashions of her own. One little passage from a description of her
written by the younger Dumas will perhaps make this phase of her
character more intelligible, without going further than is strictly
necessary:
Mme. Sand has little hands without any bones, soft and plump. She is
by destiny a woman of excessive curiosity, always disappointed, always
deceived in her incessant investigation, but she is not fundamentally
ardent. In vain would she like to be so, but she does not find it
possible. Her physical nature utterly refuses.
The reader will find in all that has now been said the true explanation
of George Sand. Abounding with life, but incapable of long stretches of
ardent love, she became a woman who sought conquests everywhere without
giving in return more than her temperament made it possible for her to
do. She loved Sandeau as much as she ever loved any man; and yet she
left him with a sense that she had never become wholly his. Perhaps
this is the reason why their romance came to an end abruptly, and not
altogether fittingly.
She had been spending a short time at Nohant, and came to Paris without
announcement. She intended to surprise her lover, and she surely did so.
She found him in the apartment that had been theirs, with his arms about
an attractive laundry-girl. Thus closed what was probably the only true
romance in the life of George Sand. Afterward she had many lovers, but
to no one did she so nearly become a true mate.
As it was, she ended her association with Sandeau, and each pursued a
separate path to fame. Sandeau afterward became a well-known novelist
and dramatist. He was, in fact, the first writer of fiction who was
admitted to the French Academy. The woman to whom he had been unfaithful
became greater still, because her fame was not only national, but
cosmopolitan.
For a time after her deception by Sandeau, she felt absolutely devoid
of all emotions. She shunned men, and sought the friendship of Marie
Dorval, a clever actress who was destined afterward to break the heart
of Alfred de Vigny. The two went down into the country; and there George
Sand wrote hour after hour, sitting by her fireside, and showing herself
a tender mother to her little daughter Solange.
This life lasted for a while, but it was not the sort of life that
would now content her. She had many visitors from Paris, among them
Sainte-Beuve, the critic, who brought with him Prosper Merimee, then
unknown, but later famous as master of revels to the third Napoleon and
as the author of Carmen. Merimee had a certain fascination of manner,
and the predatory instincts of George Sand were again aroused. One day,
when she felt bored and desperate, Merimee paid his court to her,
and she listened to him. This is one of the most remarkable of her
intimacies, since it began, continued, and ended all in the space of a
single week. When Merimee left Nohant, he was destined never again to
see George Sand, except long afterward at a dinner-party, where the two
stared at each other sharply, but did not speak. This affair, however,
made it plain that she could not long remain at Nohant, and that she
pined for Paris.
Returning thither, she is said to have set her cap at Victor Hugo,
who was, however, too much in love with himself to care for any one,
especially a woman who was his literary rival. She is said for a time to
have been allied with Gustave Planche, a dramatic critic; but she
always denied this, and her denial may be taken as quite truthful. Soon,
however, she was to begin an episode which has been more famous than any
other in her curious history, for she met Alfred de Musset, then a youth
of twenty-three, but already well known for his poems and his plays.
Musset was of noble birth. He would probably have been better for a
plebeian strain, since there was in him a touch of the degenerate.
His mother's father had published a humanitarian poem on cats. His
great-uncle had written a peculiar novel. Young Alfred was nervous,
delicate, slightly epileptic, and it is certain that he was given to
dissipation, which so far had affected his health only by making
him hysterical. He was an exceedingly handsome youth, with exquisite
manners, "dreamy rather than dazzling eyes, dilated nostrils, and
vermilion lips half opened." Such was he when George Sand, then seven
years his senior, met him.
There is something which, to the Anglo-Saxon mind, seems far more absurd
than pathetic about the events which presently took place. A woman like
George Sand at thirty was practically twice the age of this nervous boy
of twenty-three, who had as yet seen little of the world. At first she
seemed to realize the fact herself; but her vanity led her to begin an
intrigue, which must have been almost wholly without excitement on her
part, but which to him, for a time, was everything in the world.
Experimenting, as usual, after the fashion described by Dumas, she went
with De Musset for a "honeymoon" to Fontainebleau. But they could not
stay there forever, and presently they decided upon a journey to Italy.
Before they went, however, they thought it necessary to get formal
permission from Alfred's mother!
Naturally enough, Mme. de Musset refused consent. She had read George
Sand's romances, and had asked scornfully:
"Has the woman never in her life met a gentleman?"
She accepted the relations between them, but that she should be asked
to sanction this sort of affair was rather too much, even for a French
mother who has become accustomed to many strange things. Then there was
a curious happening. At nine o'clock at night, George Sand took a cab
and drove to the house of Mme. de Musset, to whom she sent up a message
that a lady wished to see her. Mme. de Musset came down, and, finding a
woman alone in a carriage, she entered it. Then George Sand burst forth
in a torrent of sentimental eloquence. She overpowered her lover's
mother, promised to take great care of the delicate youth, and finally
drove away to meet Alfred at the coach-yard.
They started off in the mist, their coach being the thirteenth to
leave the yard; but the two lovers were in a merry mood, and enjoyed
themselves all the way from Paris to Marseilles. By steamer they went
to Leghorn; and finally, in January, 1834, they took an apartment in a
hotel at Venice. What had happened that their arrival in Venice should
be the beginning of a quarrel, no one knows. George Sand has told the
story, and Paul de Musset--Alfred's brother--has told the story, but
each of them has doubtless omitted a large part of the truth.
It is likely that on their long journey each had learned too much of
the other. Thus, Paul de Musset says that George Sand made herself
outrageous by her conversation, telling every one of her mother's
adventures in the army of Italy, including her relations with the
general-in-chief. She also declared that she herself was born within
a month of her parents' wedding-day. Very likely she did say all these
things, whether they were true or not. She had set herself to wage war
against conventional society, and she did everything to shock it.
On the other hand, Alfred de Musset fell ill after having lost ten
thousand francs in a gambling-house. George Sand was not fond of persons
who were ill. She herself was working like a horse, writing from eight
to thirteen hours a day. When Musset collapsed she sent for a handsome
young Italian doctor named Pagello, with whom she had struck up a casual
acquaintance. He finally cured Musset, but he also cured George Sand of
any love for Musset.
Before long she and Pagello were on their way back to Paris, leaving the
poor, fevered, whimpering poet to bite his nails and think unutterable
things. But he ought to have known George Sand. After that, everybody
knew her. They knew just how much she cared when she professed to care,
and when she acted as she acted with Pagello no earlier lover had any
one but himself to blame.
Only sentimentalists can take this story seriously. To them it has a
sort of morbid interest. They like to picture Musset raving and shouting
in his delirium, and then, to read how George Sand sat on Pagello's
knees, kissing him and drinking out of the same cup. But to the healthy
mind the whole story is repulsive--from George Sand's appeal to Mme.
de Musset down to the very end, when Pagello came to Paris, where his
broken French excited a polite ridicule.
There was a touch of genuine sentiment about the affair with
Jules Sandeau; but after that, one can only see in George Sand a
half-libidinous grisette, such as her mother was before her, with a
perfect willingness to experiment in every form of lawless love. As for
Musset, whose heart she was supposed to have broken, within a year he
was dangling after the famous singer, Mme. Malibran, and writing poems
to her which advertised their intrigue.
After this episode with Pagello, it cannot be said that the life of
George Sand was edifying in any respect, because no one can assume that
she was sincere. She had loved Jules Sandeau as much as she could love
any one, but all the rest of her intrigues and affinities were in the
nature of experiments. She even took back Alfred de Musset, although
they could never again regard each other without suspicion. George Sand
cut off all her hair and gave it to Musset, so eager was she to keep
him as a matter of conquest; but he was tired of her, and even this
theatrical trick was of no avail.
She proceeded to other less known and less humiliating adventures. She
tried to fascinate the artist Delacroix. She set her cap at Franz Liszt,
who rather astonished her by saying that only God was worthy to be
loved. She expressed a yearning for the affections of the elder Dumas;
but that good-natured giant laughed at her, and in fact gave her some
sound advice, and let her smoke unsentimentally in his study. She was
a good deal taken with a noisy demagogue named Michel, a lawyer at
Bourges, who on one occasion shut her up in her room and harangued her
on sociology until she was as weary of his talk as of his wooden shoes,
his shapeless greatcoat, his spectacles, and his skull-cap, Balzac felt
her fascination, but cared nothing for her, since his love was given to
Mme. Hanska.
In the meanwhile, she was paying visits to her husband at Nohant, where
she wrangled with him over money matters, and where he would once have
shot her had the guests present not interfered. She secured her dowry
by litigation, so that she was well off, even without her literary
earnings. These were by no means so large as one would think from her
popularity and from the number of books she wrote. It is estimated that
her whole gains amounted to about a million francs, extending over a
period of forty-five years. It is just half the amount that Trollope
earned in about the same period, and justifies his remark--"adequate,
but not splendid."
One of those brief and strange intimacies that marked the career of
George Sand came about in a curious way. Octave Feuillet, a man of
aristocratic birth, had set himself to write novels which portrayed
the cynicism and hardness of the upper classes in France. One of these
novels, Sibylle, excited the anger of George Sand. She had not known
Feuillet before; yet now she sought him out, at first in order to berate
him for his book, but in the end to add him to her variegated string of
lovers.
It has been said of Feuillet that he was a sort of "domesticated
Musset." At any rate, he was far less sensitive than Musset, and George
Sand was about seventeen years his senior. They parted after a short
time, she going her way as a writer of novels that were very different
from her earlier ones, while Feuillet grew more and more cynical and
even stern, as he lashed the abnormal, neuropathic men and women about
him.
The last great emotional crisis in George Sand's life was that which
centers around her relations with Frederic Chopin. Chopin was the
greatest genius who ever loved her. It is rather odd that he loved her.
She had known him for two years, and had not seriously thought of him,
though there is a story that when she first met him she kissed him
before he had even been presented to her. She waited two years, and in
those two years she had three lovers. Then at last she once more met
Chopin, when he was in a state of melancholy, because a Polish girl had
proved unfaithful to him.
It was the psychological moment; for this other woman, who was a
devourer of hearts, found him at a piano, improvising a lamentation.
George Sand stood beside him, listening. When he finished and looked up
at her, their eyes met. She bent down without a word and kissed him on
the lips.
What was she like when he saw her then? Grenier has described her in
these words:
She was short and stout, but her face attracted all my attention, the
eyes especially. They were wonderful eyes--a little too close together,
it may be, large, with full eyelids, and black, very black, but by no
means lustrous; they reminded me of unpolished marble, or rather of
velvet, and this gave a strange, dull, even cold expression to her
countenance. Her fine eyebrows and these great placid eyes gave her an
air of strength and dignity which was not borne out by the lower part of
her face. Her nose was rather thick and not over shapely. Her mouth was
also rather coarse, and her chin small. She spoke with great simplicity,
and her manners were very quiet.
Such as she was, she attached herself to Chopin for eight years. At
first they traveled together very quietly to Majorca; and there, just as
Musset had fallen ill at Venice, Chopin became feverish and an invalid.
"Chopin coughs most gracefully," George Sand wrote of him, and again:
Chopin is the most inconstant of men. There is nothing permanent about
him but his cough.
It is not surprising if her nerves sometimes gave way. Acting as sick
nurse, writing herself with rheumatic fingers, robbed by every one about
her, and viewed with suspicion by the peasants because she did not go
to church, she may be perhaps excused for her sharp words when, in fact,
her deeds were kind.
Afterward, with Chopin, she returned to Paris, and the two lived openly
together for seven years longer. An immense literature has grown around
the subject of their relations. To this literature George Sand herself
contributed very largely. Chopin never wrote a word; but what he failed
to do, his friends and pupils did unsparingly.
Probably the truth is somewhat as one might expect. During the first
period of fascination, George Sand was to Chopin what she had been to
Sandeau and to Musset; and with her strange and subtle ways, she had
undermined his health. But afterward that sort of love died out, and was
succeeded by something like friendship. At any rate, this woman showed,
as she had shown to others, a vast maternal kindness. She writes to him
finally as "your old woman," and she does wonders in the way of nursing
and care.
But in 1847 came a break between the two. Whatever the mystery of it may
be, it turns upon what Chopin said of Sand:
"I have never cursed any one, but now I am so weary of life that I am
near cursing her. Yet she suffers, too, and more, because she grows
older as she grows more wicked."
In 1848, Chopin gave his last concert in Paris, and in 1849 he died.
According to some, he was the victim of a Messalina. According to
others, it was only "Messalina" that had kept him alive so long.
However, with his death came a change in the nature of George Sand.
Emotionally, she was an extinct volcano. Intellectually, she was at
her very best. She no longer tore passions into tatters, but wrote
naturally, simply, stories of country life and tales for children.
In one of her books she has given an enduring picture of the
Franco-Prussian War. There are many rather pleasant descriptions of her
then, living at Nohant, where she made a curious figure, bustling about
in ill-fitting costumes, and smoking interminable cigarettes.
She had lived much, and she had drunk deep of life, when she died in
1876. One might believe her to have been only a woman of perpetual
liaisons. Externally she was this, and yet what did Balzac, that great
master of human psychology, write of her in the intimacy of a private
correspondence?
She is a female bachelor. She is an artist. She is generous. She is
devoted. She is chaste. Her dominant characteristics are those of a man,
and therefore, she is not to be regarded as a woman. She is an excellent
mother, adored by her children. Morally, she is like a lad of twenty;
for in her heart of hearts, she is more than chaste--she is a prude. It
is only in externals that she comports herself as a Bohemian. All her
follies are titles to glory in the eyes of those whose souls are noble.
A curious verdict this! Her love-life seems almost that of neither man
nor woman, but of an animal. Yet whether she was in reality responsible
for what she did, when we consider her strange heredity, her wretched
marriage, the disillusions of her early life--who shall sit in judgment
on her, since who knows all?
THE MYSTERY OF CHARLES DICKENS
Perhaps no public man in the English-speaking world, in the last
century, was so widely and intimately known as Charles Dickens. From
his eighteenth year, when he won his first success in journalism, down
through his series of brilliant triumphs in fiction, he was more and
more a conspicuous figure, living in the blaze of an intense publicity.
He met every one and knew every one, and was the companion of every
kind of man and woman. He loved to frequent the "caves of harmony" which
Thackeray has immortalized, and he was a member of all the best Bohemian
clubs of London. Actors, authors, good fellows generally, were his
intimate friends, and his acquaintance extended far beyond into the
homes of merchants and lawyers and the mansions of the proudest nobles.
Indeed, he seemed to be almost a universal friend.
One remembers, for instance, how he was called in to arbitrate between
Thackeray and George Augustus Sala, who had quarreled. One remembers how
Lord Byron's daughter, Lady Lovelace, when upon her sick-bed, used to
send for Dickens because there was something in his genial, sympathetic
manner that soothed her. Crushing pieces of ice between her teeth in
agony, she would speak to him and he would answer her in his rich, manly
tones until she was comforted and felt able to endure more hours of pain
without complaint.
Dickens was a jovial soul. His books fairly steam with Christmas cheer
and hot punch and the savor of plum puddings, very much as do his
letters to his intimate friends. Everybody knew Dickens. He could
not dine in public without attracting attention. When he left the
dining-room, his admirers would descend upon his table and carry off
egg-shells, orange-peels, and other things that remained behind, so that
they might have memorials of this much-loved writer. Those who knew him
only by sight would often stop him in the streets and ask the
privilege of shaking hands with him; so different was he from--let us
say--Tennyson, who was as great an Englishman in his way as Dickens, but
who kept himself aloof and saw few strangers.
It is hard to associate anything like mystery with Dickens, though
he was fond of mystery as an intellectual diversion, and his last
unfinished novel was The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Moreover, no one
admired more than he those complex plots which Wilkie Collins used
to weave under the influence of laudanum. But as for his own life, it
seemed so normal, so free from anything approaching mystery, that we can
scarcely believe it to have been tinged with darker colors than those
which appeared upon the surface.
A part of this mystery is plain enough. The other part is still
obscure--or of such a character that one does not care to bring it
wholly to the light. It had to do with his various relations with women.
The world at large thinks that it knows this chapter in the life of
Dickens, and that it refers wholly to his unfortunate disagreement with
his wife. To be sure, this is a chapter that is writ large in all of his
biographies, and yet it is nowhere correctly told. His chosen biographer
was John Forster, whose Life of Charles Dickens, in three volumes,
must remain a standard work; but even Forster--we may assume through
tact--has not set down all that he could, although he gives a clue.
As is well known, Dickens married Miss Catherine Hogarth when he
was only twenty-four. He had just published his Sketches by Boz, the
copyright of which he sold for one hundred pounds, and was beginning the
Pickwick Papers. About this time his publisher brought N. P. Willis
down to Furnival's Inn to see the man whom Willis called "a young
paragraphist for the Morning Chronicle." Willis thus sketches Dickens
and his surroundings:
In the most crowded part of Holborn, within a door or two of the Bull
and Mouth Inn, we pulled up at the entrance of a large building used
for lawyers' chambers. I followed by a long flight of stairs to an upper
story, and was ushered into an uncarpeted and bleak-looking room, with
a deal table, two or three chairs and a few books, a small boy and Mr.
Dickens for the contents.
I was only struck at first with one thing--and I made a memorandum of
it that evening as the strongest instance I had seen of English
obsequiousness to employers--the degree to which the poor author was
overpowered with the honor of his publisher's visit! I remember saying
to myself, as I sat down on a rickety chair:
"My good fellow, if you were in America with that fine face and
your ready quill, you would have no need to be condescended to by a
publisher."
Dickens was dressed very much as he has since described Dick Swiveller,
minus the swell look. His hair was cropped close to his head, his
clothes scant, though jauntily cut, and, after changing a ragged
office-coat for a shabby blue, he stood by the door, collarless and
buttoned up, the very personification of a close sailer to the wind.