Upon no woman of the century has the public fixed its eye with a more
eager interest and curiosity than upon Aurore Dudevant, known to the
world as George Sand.
The utmost heights of panegyric and adulation have been scaled in
describing her and her work; also the lowest depths of denunciation and
of calumny. Her admirers describe her as being not only the greatest
genius of her time, which perhaps few will dispute, but as being the
most magnificent and adorable of women as well; while her detractors can
find no language in which to express the depths of their loathing both
for her life and some of her works. As usual, a just estimate of such a
character as this will be found between the two extremes. She was
neither a monster nor a saint, but a woman of magnificent qualities and
of defects upon a corresponding scale. As with her life, so with her
works. Some are undoubtedly pernicious to an alarming degree, while the
influence of others cannot by any stretch of imagination be called bad.
The two kinds may perhaps be divided under the head of earlier and later
works. When the tumultuous feelings and wild visions of youth were
calmed by age, a new kind of literary product came forth. And her life
in its latter years was as quiet as her books, and ran as little against
the traditions and usages of mankind.
George Sand was born in 1804, and descended from Marshal Saxe, the
natural son of the King of Poland. This Marshal Saxe was one of the
bravest but most licentious men of his time,--a time not noted for its
domestic virtues. She was brought up in the country until fifteen years
of age, in the midst of the elegancies of an aristocratic home. But her
unbounded vitality called loudly for an out-of-door life, and she lived
the life of a boy, never wearying of its rude sports, and enjoying its
sometimes dangerous excitements. At the close of her fifteenth year she
was taken to the Augustine Convent in Paris, where she remained for
three years, and where she passed through a very intense religious
experience and came near becoming a nun. It is a curious piece of
speculation to try to imagine what her life as a nun would have been,
had this design been carried out. Would the prayers and litanies, the
penances and the fasts, have tamed her wild blood? Would her nature have
still asserted itself under the cap of the sister? would she have led a
revolt against authority within the church as she did without? Are there
any such fierce, tumultuous natures as hers to-day kneeling on stony
cloister floors? Can matins and vespers, the odors of incense, and the
sacred ceremonial of the church fill up for an ardent nature all that
the service of the world supplies? We shall never know; for the real
history of a faithful daughter of the church will never be written. The
story of the three years of George Sand's convent life is very charming,
full of variety and sincerity, and matchless in point of style; but it
is a fragment.
She came out of the convent a young woman knowing absolutely nothing of
real life. The object of all who have charge of young girls in France is
to keep them in perfect ignorance of the world. The safety that lies in
knowledge is utterly forbidden to them. They are supposed to be
children, and are watched over as such until a marriage can be arranged.
And this marriage, whatever it may be, is usually accepted by the girl
as an escape from a sort of slavery. She is always told that she may
only do the things she desires to do after marriage. And it is very
unusual for any girl to object to the wishes of her friends in this
matter. The whole system of marriage in France is so utterly abominable
that no other civilized land would tolerate it; and this sacrifice of
the young and ignorant is only one of its diabolical features. Aurore
Dudevant did not seem to object more than the rest. She was married, and
lived for eight years with her husband, becoming the mother of two
children.
She then left him and her estate of Nohant, and went up to Paris, taking
her two children with her. She sacrificed her personal fortune--which
was considerable--in doing so, and was obliged to earn her own living.
She tried various things in the artistic line before she essayed the
writing of books. At last with one grand bound she leaped before the
world in "Indiana." Of course she had written some things of small value
before this, but that wonderful book was really her introduction to the
world. And it brought the whole literary world to her feet. Thereafter
her friends were the first men of France. De Lamennais, Pierre Leroux,
Michel, Alfred de Musset, Chopin, Liszt, Delacroix, Beranger,
Sainte-Beuve, Gustave Planche, Mazzini, were her friends, her intimates,
or her lovers.
Alfred de Musset was the first who found favor with her heart, it
appears; and they were inseparably associated for about three years.
This brilliant young poet, so sceptical, so sad, so audacious, so
dissolute, was the first of this famous coterie of men to become madly
infatuated with George Sand,--but far from the last. It is asserted that
each in turn, and many more besides, were the victims of her luring
wiles. For many years the wildest stories were afloat concerning her and
her enchantments. And the fact that two or three of her most ardent
worshippers ended their lives for her sake only added to the interest
and the horror with which the world of respectability and morality
looked upon this strange woman. She had broken once for all with the
world of conventionality, and was free to follow whatever inclination
seized upon her, unrestrained by aught but conscience,--for we are far
from thinking that she ever parted permanently with that disagreeable
but useful monitor.
So she lived out her brief romance with De Musset, and, apparently
unmindful of his tragic end, entered upon a new epoch of her life with
that most remarkable modern musical genius, Chopin.
Poor Alfred de Musset has had the sympathy of all classes and conditions
of men, apparently, from that day to this. She tried to vindicate
herself in the affair by publishing a book entitled "Elle et Lui,"
"wherein she depicted the sufferings of an angelic woman, all
tenderness, love, and patience, whose fate was joined to that of a man
all egotism, selfishness, sensuousness, and eccentricity." How grandly
the woman suffered, and how wantonly the man flung happiness away, is
told with all the impassioned fervor of George Sand in her early
writings. The taste of the whole proceeding was revoltingly low, and no
more than matched by that of the rejoinder, which was made in a book
called "Lui et Elle," written by Paul de Musset after his brother's
death. In this book the picture is reversed: "a hideous woman is
portrayed, utterly selfish, dissolute, heartless; and her lover, who is
easily recognized as Musset himself, is described as having almost all
of the heroic virtues." Both books were thoroughly French,--thoroughly
execrable.
Chopin at first feared Madame Sand very much, and refused to be
presented to her; but as she persisted in her desire to make the
acquaintance of so fine and delicate a genius, they at last met, and the
fate of poor Chopin was at once sealed. He was consumed from the very
first by an absorbing passion, to which no other name but morbid
infatuation could be applied. Madame Sand herself describes it in
"Lucrezia Floriani" thus:--
"For it seemed as if this fragile being was absorbed and consumed
by his affection. . . . Others seek happiness in their attachments;
when they no longer find it, the attachment gently vanishes. But he
loved for the sake of loving. No amount of suffering was sufficient
to discourage him. He could enter upon a new phase, that of woe;
but the phase of coldness he could never arrive at. It would have
been indeed a phase of physical agony,--for his love was his life,
and, delicious or bitter, he had not the power of withdrawing
himself a single moment from its domination."
Chopin, suffering from severe sickness, was ordered to a warmer climate;
and in the fall of 1837 Madame Sand accompanied him to the Island of
Majorca, where she nursed him back to life, although his friends at the
time of his departure never thought to see him again, and although he
was dangerously ill for a long time after their arrival. This solitude,
surrounded by the blue waves of the Mediterranean, and shaded by groves
of orange, seemed fitted by its exceeding loveliness for the ardent vows
of youthful lovers, still believing in their naive and sweet illusions,
sighing for happiness in some desert isle. In this case it was the
refuge of those who had grown weary and disenchanted with life, but who
hoped in deep devotion to each other to find some solace for their
sadness. The memory of those days, like the remembrance of an entrancing
ecstasy which Fate grants but once in a lifetime to her most favored
children, always remained dear to the heart of Chopin. When he was
restored to health they returned to Paris, where their friendship was
continued for about eight years. She then severed her connection with
him. Liszt asks in regard to this, in his life of Chopin:--
"Has genius ever attained that utter self-abnegation, that sublime
humility of heart which gives the power to make those strange
sacrifices of the entire Past, of the whole Future; those
immolations as courageous as mysterious; those mystic and utter
holocausts of self, not temporary and changing, but monotonous and
constant,--through whose might alone tenderness may justly claim
the higher word devotion? Has not the force of genius its own
exclusive and legitimate exactions, and does not the force of woman
consist in the abdication of all exactions? Can the purple and
burning flames of genius ever float over the immaculate azure of a
woman's destiny?"