Love causing the rivality of Rome and Carthage to leap from the flame
of his torch, lighting with his own hand the funeral pile, whose
blaze the fugitive Eneas perceives upon the waves,--is altogether
another thing than the promenade of a dreamer in the woods, or the
disappearance of a libertine who drowns himself in the sea. Madame
Sand will, I trust, yet associate her talents with subjects as durable
as her genius.
Madame Sand can only be converted by the preaching of that missionary
with bald forehead and hoary beard, called Time. A voice less
austere meanwhile enchains the captive ear of the poet. In fact, I
am persuaded that the talent of Madame Sand has some of its roots in
corruption; in becoming modest she would become commonplace. It would
have been otherwise had she always remained in that sanctuary not
frequented by men; her power of love, restrained and concealed beneath
the virginal fillet, would have drawn from her heart those decent
melodies which belong at once to the woman and the angel. However that
may be, audacity of ideas and voluptuousness of manners form a spot
not before cleared up by a daughter of Adam, and which, submitted to
a woman's culture, has yielded a harvest of unknown flowers. Let us
permit Madame Sand to produce these perilous marvels till the approach
of winter; she will sing no more _when the North wind has come_.
Meanwhile, less improvident than the grasshopper, let her make
provision of glory for the time when there will be a famine of
pleasure. The mother of Musarion was wont to repeat to her child:
"Thou wilt not always be sixteen; will Choereas always remember his
oath, his tears and his caresses?"
For the rest, women have often been seduced, and as it were carried
off, by their own youth, but toward the days of autumn, restored
to the maternal hearth, they have added to their harps the grave
or plaintive chord on which either religion or unhappiness finds
expression. Old age is a traveler in the night time; the earth is
hidden from sight and he can see nothing but the heavens shining above
his head.
I have not seen Madame Sand dressed in men's clothes or wearing the
blouse and the iron-shod staff of the mountaineer. I have not seen her
drinking from the cup of bacchanals and smoking indolently reclining
on a sofa like a sultana,--natural or affected eccentricities which
for me could add nothing to her charms or her genius.
Is she more inspired when she causes a cloud of vapor to rise from
her mouth about her hair? Did Lelia escape from the head of her mother
through a burning mist, as Sin, according to Milton, proceeded from
the head of the glorious and guilty archangel amid a whirlpool of
smoke? I know not what passes in the sacred courts; but here below
Neamede, Phila, Lais, Gnathene, the witty Phryne, the despair of the
pencil of Apelles, and the chisel of Praxiteles, Leëna, beloved of
Harmodias, the two sisters named Aphyes, because they were small and
had large eyes, Dorica, the fillet of whose locks and embalmed robe
were consecrated in the temple of Venus,--all these enchantresses knew
only the perfumes of Arabia. It is true that Madame Sand has on her
side the authority of the Odalisques and the young Mexicans who dance
with cigars between their lips.
What effect has Madame Sand had upon me, after the few gifted women,
and many charming women whom I have known--after those daughters of
the earth, who like Madame Sand said with Sappho: "Come, Mother of
Love, to our delicious banquets, fill our cups with the nectar of
roses?" As I have placed myself now in fiction and now in reality, the
author of Valentine has made on me two very different impressions.
As for fiction, I do not speak of it, for I ought no longer to
understand its language; as for reality, a man of grave age,
cherishing the notions of propriety, attaching as a Christian the
highest value to the timid virtue of woman. I know not how to express
my unhappiness at such a mass of rich endowments bestowed on the
prodigal and faithless hours which are spent and vanish.
* * * * *