GEORGE SAND.

"Deduci superbo

Non humilis mulier triumpho."

These words are applied by Horace to the great Cleopatra, whose heroic

end he celebrates, even while exulting in her overthrow. We apply them

to another woman of royal soul, who, capitulating with the world of her

contemporaries, does not allow them the ignoble triumph of plundering

the secrets of her life. They have long clamored at its gates, long

shouted at its windows, in defamation and in glorification. Ready now

for their admission, she lets the eager public in; but what they were

most intent to find still eludes them. In the "Histoire de ma Vie" are

the records of her parentage, birth, education. Here are detailed the

subtile influences that aided or hindered Nature in one of her most

lavish pieces of work; here are study, religion, marriage, maternity,

authorship, friendship, travel, litigation: but the passionate loving

woman, and whom she loved, are not here. To the world's triumph they

belong not, and we honor the decency and self-respect which consign them

to oblivion. Nor shall we endeavor to lift the veil which she has thus

thrown over the most intimate portion of her private life. We will not

ask any _Chronique Scandaleuse_, of which there are plenty, to supply

any hiatus in the _dramatis personae_ of her life. We shall take her as

she gives herself to us, bringing out the full significance of what she

says, but not interpolating with it what other people say. For she has

been generous in telling us all that it imports us most to know.

The itching curiosity of the spiteful or the vicious must seek its

gratification at other hands than ours: we will not be its ministers.

With all this, we are not obliged to shut our eyes to the true

significance of what she tells us, or to assume that in the account

she gives us of herself there is necessarily less self-deception than

self-judgment generally exhibits. If she mistakes the selfish for the

heroic, exalts a gratification into a duty, and preaches to her sex as

from the standpoint of a morality superior to theirs, we shall set it

down as it seems to us. But, for the sake of manhood as well as of

womanhood, we would not that any mean or malignant hand should endeavor

to show where she failed, and how.

Was she not to all of us, in our early years, a name of doubt, dread,

and enchantment? Did not all of us feel, in our young admiration for

her, something of the world's great struggle between conservative

discipline and revolutionary inspiration? We knew our parents would not

have us read her, _if they knew_. We knew they were right. Yet we read

her at stolen hours, with waning and still entreated light; and as we

read, in a dreary wintry room, with the flickering candle warning us

of late hours and confiding expectations, the atmosphere grew warm and

glorious about us,--a true human company, a living sympathy crept near

us,--the very world seemed not the same world after as before. She had

given us a real gift; no criticism could take it away. The hands might

be sinful, but the box they broke contained an exceeding precious

ointment.

At a later day we saw these things rather differently. The electric

intoxication over, which book or being gives but once to the same

person, its elements were viewed with some distrust. Passing from ideal

to real life, as all pass, who live on, we shook our heads over the

books, sighed, ceased to read them. Grown mothers ourselves, we quietly

removed them as far as possible from the young hands about us, and would

rather have deprived them of the noble French language altogether than

have allowed it to bring them such lessons as Jacques and Valentine.

Yet we retain the old love for her; the world of literature still seems

brighter for her footsteps; and should we live to learn her death, tears

must follow it, and the sense of void left by the loss of a true friend,

noble and loyal-hearted, if mistaken. With this confession of sympathy

with the woman, we begin the critical consideration of the memoirs of

herself she has given to the world.

These memoirs begin at the earliest possible period, including the lives

of her parents and grandparents. The latter were illustrious on

one side, obscure on the other. She tells us that by her paternal

grandmother she was allied to the kings of France, and by her maternal

grandfather to the lowest of the people. The grandmother in question

was the natural daughter of the famous Maréchal de Saxe, recognized and

educated, but finally left with slender resources, and married to M.

Dupin de Francueil, an accomplished person of good family and fortune,

greatly her senior. To him she bore one child, a son named Maurice,

after the great soldier. As might have been expected, her widowhood was

early and long, for her aged partner soon dropped from her side, beloved

and regretted. George tells us that her grandmother was wont to insist

that an old man can be more agreeable in the marital relation than a

young one, and that M. Dupin de Francueil, elegant, accomplished,

and devoted to her happiness, had in his life left nothing for her

imagination to desire or her heart to regret.

As this lady is one of the heroines of the "Histoire de ma Vie," we

cannot do it justice without lingering a little over her portraiture.

She is described as tall, fair, and of a Saxon type of beauty. Her

manners would seem to have been _de haute école_, and her culture was

on a large and noble scale. Austere in her morals, her faith was the

deistic philosophy of the ante-revolutionary period; but, like other

people of noble mind, instead of making doubt a pretext for license, she

brought up virtue to justify the latitude of her creed, that the solid

results of conscience should entitle her to the free interpretation of

doctrine. She was chaste, benevolent, and sincere. Her mother had been a

singer of merit and celebrity, and she, the daughter, had both inherited

her musical talent, and had received one of those thorough musical

educations which alone make the possession of the art a pleasure and

resource. It must often occur to those who hear our young ladies sing

and play, that the accomplishment is little valued by them, save as an

outward social adornment.

Hence those ambitious and perfectly uninteresting performances with

which we are constantly bored in the fashionable musical world. It is

self-love which gives us those flat, empty _adagios_, those cold,

keen runs and embellishments. Love of the art has more modesty in the

undertaking, and more warmth in the execution. George says that she

has heard all the greatest singers of modern times, but that her

grandmother, in her old age, singing fragments of the operas of her own

time in a cracked and trembling voice, and accompanying herself on an

old harpsichord with three fingers of a palsied hand, always remained to

her a type of art above all others.

The first volume of these memoirs gives interesting notice of the

friendships which surrounded Madame Dupin during her married life. These

embraced various celebrities, historical and literary. Her husband was

the congenial friend of the best minds of the day, and was able, among

other things, to procure her the difficult pleasure of an interview

with Jean Jacques Rousseau, then living near her in great spleen and

retirement. We cannot do better than to give the relation of this in

her own words, as preserved by her grand-daughter. It is highly

characteristic of the parties and of the times.

"Before I had seen Rousseau, I had read the 'Nouvelle Héloïse' in one

breath, and at the last pages I found myself so overcome that I wept and

sobbed. My husband gently rallied me for this; but that day I could only

cry from morning till evening. During this, M. de Francueil, with the

address and the grace which he knew how to put into everything, ran to

find Jean Jacques. I do not know how he managed it, but he carried him

off, he brought him, without having communicated to me his intention.

"I, unconscious of all this, was not hastening my toilet. I was with

Madame d'Esparbès de Lussan, my friend, the most amiable woman in

the world, and the prettiest, _though she squinted a little, and was

slightly deformed._ M. de Francueil had come several times to see if I

was ready. I did not observe any marks of haste in my husband, and did

not hurry myself, never suspecting that he was there, the sublime Bear,

in my parlor. He had entered, looking partly foolish and partly cross,

and had seated himself in a corner, showing no other impatience than

that about dinner, in order to get away very soon.

"Finally, my toilet finished, and my eyes still red and swollen, I go

to the parlor. I see a little man, ill-dressed and scowling, who rose

clumsily, who _chewed out_ some confused words. I look, and I guess who

it is,--I try to speak,--I burst into tears. Francueil tries to put

us in tune by a pleasantry, and bursts into tears. We could not say

anything to each other. Rousseau pressed my hand without addressing me a

single word. We tried to dine, to cut short all these sobs. But I could

eat nothing. M. de Francueil could not be witty that day, and

Rousseau escaped directly on leaving the table, without having said a

word,--displeased, perhaps, with having found a new contradiction to

his claim of being the most persecuted, the most hated, and the most

calumniated of men."

The simplicity of this narration justifies its quotation here, as

illustrative of the taste and manners that prevailed a hundred years

ago. The lively emotion provoked by the "Nouvelle Héloïse" is scarcely

more foreign to our ideas and experience than the triangular fit of

weeping in the parlor, and the dinner, silent through excess of feeling,

that followed it.

M. Dupin de Francueil lived with great, but generous extravagance, and,

as his widow averred, "ruined himself in the most amiable manner in the

world." He died, leaving large estates in great confusion, from which

his widow and young son were compelled to "accept the poverty" of

seventy-five thousand livres of annual income,--a sum which the

Revolution, at a later day, greatly reduced. Till its outbreak, Madame

Dupin lived in peace and affluence, though not on the grand scale of

earlier days,--devoting herself chiefly to the care and education of her

son, Maurice, in which latter task she secured the services of a young

abbé, who afterwards prudently became the _Citizen_ Deschartres, and who

continued in the service of the family during the rest of a tolerably

long life. This personage plays too important a part in the memoirs to

be passed over without special notice. He continued to be the faithful

teacher and companion of Maurice, until the exigencies of military life

removed the latter from his control. He was also the man of business of

Madame Dupin, and, at a later day, the preceptor of George herself, who,

with childish petulance, bestowed on him the sobriquet of _grand homme_,

in consequence, she tells us, of his _omnicompétence_ and his air of

importance. "My grandmother," she says, "had no presentiment, that, in

confiding to him the education of her son, she was securing the tyrant,

the saviour, and the friend of her whole remaining life." We would

gladly give here in full George's portrait of her tutor; but if we

should stop to sketch all the admirable photography of this work, our

review would become a volume. We can only borrow a trait or two, and

pass on to the consideration of other matters.

"He had been good-looking; but I am sure that no one, even in his best

days, could have looked at him without laughing, so clearly was the word

_pedant_ written in all the lines of his face and in every movement of

his person. To be complete, he should have been ignorant, _gourmand_,

and cowardly. But, far from this, he was very learned, temperate, and

madly courageous. He had all the great qualities of the soul, joined

to an insufferable disposition, and a self-satisfaction which amounted

almost to delirium. But what devotion, what zeal, what a tender and

generous soul!"

In the intervals of his necessary occupations he studied medicine and

surgery, in the latter of which he attained considerable skill. In the

many subsequent years of his country life, he made these accomplishments

very useful to the village folk. No stress of weather or

unseasonableness of hours could detain him from attending the sick, when

summoned; but being obliged, as George says, to be ridiculous as well as

sublime in all things, he was wont to beat his patients when they were

bold enough to offer him money for their cure, and even made missile

weapons of the poultry and game which they brought him in acknowledgment

of his services, assailing them with blows and harder words, till they

fled, amused or angry. Maurice, his first pupil, was a delicate and

indolent child, and showed little robustness of character till his early

manhood, when the necessity of a career forced him into the ranks of the

great army.

The first threatenings of the Revolution found in Madame Dupin an

unalarmed observer. As a disciple of Voltaire and Rousseau, she could

not but detest the abuses of the Court; she shared, too, the general

personal alienation of the aristocracy from the _German woman_, as they

called Marie Antoinette. She admired, in turn, the probity of Necker and

the genius of Mirabeau; but the current of disorder finally found its

way to her, and swept away her household peace among the innumerable

wrecks that marked its passage. Implicated as the depository of some

papers supposed to be of treasonable character, she was arrested and

imprisoned in Paris, her son and Deschartres being officially separated

from her and detained at Passy. The imprisonment lasted some months, and

its tedium was beguiled by the most fervent love-letters between the boy

of sixteen and his mother. The sorrow of this separation, George says,

metamorphosed the sickly, spoiled child into a fervent and resolute

youth, whose subsequent career was full of courage and self-denial. Of

the Revolution she writes:--

"In my eyes, it is one of the phases of evangelical life: a tumultuous,

bloody life, terrible at certain moments, full of convulsions, of

delirium, and of sobbing. It is the violent contest of the principle of

equality preached by Jesus, and passing, now like a radiant light, now

like a burning torch, from hand to hand, to our own days, against the

old pagan world, which is not destroyed, which will not be for a long

time yet, in spite of the mission of Christ, and so many other divine

missions, in spite of so many stakes, scaffolds, and martyrs. What is

there, then, to astonish us in the vertigo which seized all minds at

the period of the inextricable _mêlée_ into which France precipitated

herself in '93? When everything went by retaliation, when every one

became, by deed or intention, victim and executioner in turn, and when

between the oppression endured and the oppression exercised there was

no time for reflection or liberty of choice, how could passion have

abstracted itself in action, or impartiality have dictated quiet

judgments? Passionate souls were judged by others as passionate, and the

human race cried out as in the time of the ancient Hussites,--'This is a

time of mourning, of zeal, and of fury.'"

The tone of our author concerning this and subsequent revolutions which

have come within her own observation is throughout temperate, hopeful,

and charitable. The noblest side of womanhood comes out in this; and

however her fiery youth might have counselled, in the pages now under

consideration she appears as the apologist of humankind, the world's

peacemaker.

George loves to linger over the details of her father's early life.

They are, indeed, all she possesses of him, as she was still in early

childhood when he died. So much and such charming narrations has she

to give us of his military life, his musical ability, his courage and

disinterestedness, that she herself does not manage to get born until

nearly the end of the third volume, and that through a series of

concatenations which we must hastily review.

The imprisonment of Madame Dupin was not long; after some months of

detention, she was allowed to rejoin her son at Passy, and the whole

family-party speedily removed to Nohant, in the heart of Berry, which

henceforth figures as the homestead in the pages of these volumes. But

Maurice is soon obliged to adopt a profession. His mother's revenues

have been considerably diminished by the political troubles. He feels in

himself the power, the determination, to carve out a career for

himself, and gallantly enters, as a simple soldier, the armies of the

Republic,--Napoleon Bonaparte being First Consul. Although he soon saw

service, his promotion seems to have been slow and difficult. He was

full of military ardor, and laborious in acquiring the science of his

profession; but there were already so many candidates for every smallest

distinction, and Maurice was no courtier, to help out his deserts with a

little fortunate flattery. He complains in his letters that the tide has

already turned, and that even in the army diplomacy fares better than

real bravery. Still, he soon rose from the ranks, served with honor on

the Rhine and in Italy, and became finally attached to the _personnel_

of Murat, during the occupation of the Peninsula. His title of grandson

of the Maréchal de Saxe was sometimes helpful, sometimes hurtful. In the

eyes of his comrades it won him honor; but Napoleon, on hearing his high

descent urged as a claim to consideration, is said to have replied,

brusquely,--"I don't want any of those people." In his letters to

his mother, he recounts his adventures, military and amorous, with

frankness, but without boasting; but his confidences soon become very

partial, and before she knows it the poor mother has a dangerous rival.

We will let him give his own account of the origin of this new relation.

"You know that I was in love in Milan. You guessed it, because I did not

tell you of it. At times I fancied myself beloved in return, and then I

saw, or thought I saw, that I was not. I wished to divert my thoughts; I

went away, desiring to think no more of it.

"This charming woman is here, and we have hardly spoken to each other.

We scarcely exchanged a look. I felt a little vexation, though that is

scarcely in my nature. She was proud towards me, although her heart is

tender and passionate. This morning, during breakfast, we heard distant

cannon. The General ordered me to mount at once, and go to see what it

was. I rise, take the staircase in two bounds, and run to the stable.

At the very moment of mounting my horse I turned and saw behind me this

dear woman, blushing, embarrassed, and casting on me a lingering look,

expressive of fear, interest, love."

This fatal look, as the experienced will readily conceive, did the

business. The young soldier dreamed only of a love affair like twenty

others which had made the pastime of his oft-changing quarters; but this

"dear woman," Sophie Victoire Antoinette Delaborde, daughter of an old

bird-fancier, was destined to become his wife, and the mother of his

daughter, Aurore Dupin, whom the world knows as George Sand. The

circumstances of her youth had been untoward. She was at this period

already the mother of one child, born out of marriage, and seems to have

been making the campaign of Italy under the so-called protection of some

rich man, whose name is not given us. This protection she hastened to

leave, following thenceforward with devotion the precarious fortunes

of the young soldier, and gaining her own subsistence, until their

marriage, by the toil of the needle, to which she had been bred. Of

course, Maurice's confidences to his mother under this head soon cease.

An amour with a person in Victoire's position could be admitted; but

a serious, solid affection, leading to marriage, this would break his

mother's heart, and indeed not without reason. The reader must remember

that this is a chapter out of French society, on which account we

suppress all hysterical comment upon a state of things universally

received and acknowledged therein. Maurice's trivial, and _we_ should

say, unprincipled pursuit of Victoire would be considered perfectly

legitimate in the sphere which made the world to him. The sequel,

perhaps, would not have been considered differently here and there; for,

however we may recognize the sacredness of true affection, a marriage

so unequal and with such sinister antecedents would be regarded in all

society with little approbation, or hope of good. His mother soon grew

alarmed, as various symptoms of an enduring and carefully concealed

attachment became evident to her keen observation. In the years that

followed, she left no means untried to break off this dangerous

connection;--her remonstrances were by turns tender and violent,--her

reasonings, no doubt, in great part just; but Maurice defended the woman

of his choice from all accusations, from every annoyance, on the ground

of her devoted and honorable attachment to him. After four years of

continued trouble and irresolution, in which, George tells us, he had

again and again made the endeavor to sacrifice Victoire to his mother's

happiness, and after the birth of several children, who soon ceased

to live, he wedded her by civil rite. The birth of his daughter soon

followed. "And thus it was," says George, "that I was born legitimate."

"My mother had on a pretty pink dress that day, and my father was

playing some _contredanses_ on his faithful Cremona (I have it yet, that

old instrument by the sound of which I first saw the light). My mother

left the dance and passed into her own room. As she went out very

quietly, the dance continued. At the last _chassez all round_, my Aunt

Lucy went into my mother's room, and immediately cried,--

"Come, come here, Maurice! You have a daughter!"

"She shall be named Aurore, for my poor mother, who is not here to bless

her, but who will bless her one day," said my father, receiving me in

his arms.

"She was born in music and in pink," said my aunt. "She will be happy."

Not eminent, perhaps, has been the realization of this augury.

The young couple were so poor, at this moment of their marriage, that a

slender thread of gold was forced to serve for the nuptial ring; it was

not until some days later that they were able to expend six francs in

the purchase of that indispensable ornament. The act once consummated,

Maurice gave himself up to some hours of bitter suffering, made

inevitable by what he considered a grave act of disobedience against the

best of mothers. His conscience, however, on the whole, justified

him. He had obeyed the Scripture precept, forsaking the old for the

inevitable new relation, and surrounding her who was really his wife

with the immunities of civil recognition. The marriage was concealed for

some months from his mother,--who at a subsequent period left no stone

unturned to prove its nullity. The religious ceremony, which Catholicism

considers as the indissoluble tie, had not yet been performed, and

Mme. Dupin hoped to prove some informality in the civil rite. In

this, however, she did not succeed, and after long resistance, and

ill-concealed displeasure, she concluded by acknowledging the unwelcome

alliance. It was the little Aurore herself whose unconscious hand

severed the Gordian knot of the family difficulties. Introduced by a

stratagem into her grandmother's presence, and seated in her lap as the

child of a stranger, the family traits were suddenly recognized, and the

little one (eight months old) effected a change of heart which neither

lawyer nor priest could have induced. St. Childhood is fortunately

always in the world, working ever these miracles of reconciliation.

George speaks with admirable candor of the inevitable relations between

these two women. She does full justice to the legitimacy of the

grandmother's objections to the marriage, and her fears for its result,

which were founded much more on moral than on social considerations. At

the same time she nobly asserts her mother's claim to rehabilitation

through a passionate and disinterested attachment, a faithful devotion

to the duties of marriage and maternity, and a widowhood whose sorrow

ended only with her life. She says,--"The doctrine of redemption is the

symbol of the principle of expiation and of rehabilitation"; but she

adds,--"Our society recognizes this principle in religious theory,

but not in practice; it is too great, too beautiful for us." She says

farther,--"There still exists a pretended aristocracy of virtue, which,

proud of its privileges, does not admit that the errors of youth are

susceptible of atonement. This condemnation is the more absurd, because,

for what is called the World, it is hypocritical. It is not only women

of really irreproachable life, nor matrons truly respected, who are

called upon to decide upon the merits of their misled sisters. It is not

the company of the excellent of the earth who make opinion. That is all

a dream. The great majority of women of the world is really a majority

of _lost women_." We must understand these remarks as applying to French

society, in respect even of which we are not inclined to admit their

truth. Yet there is a certain justice in the inference that women

are often most severely condemned by those who are no better than

themselves; and this insincerity of uncharity is far more to be dreaded

than the over-zeal of virtuous hearts, which oftenest helps and heals

where it has been obliged to wound.

At the risk of unduly multiplying quotations, we will quote here what

George says of her mother in this, the flower of her days. At a later

day, the ill-regulated character suffered and made others suffer with

its own discords, which education and moral training had done nothing to

reconcile. The manly support, too, of the nobler nature was wanting,

and the best half of her future and its possibilities was buried in the

untimely grave of her husband. Here is what she was when she was at her

best:--

"My mother never felt herself either humiliated or honored by the

company of people who might have considered themselves her superiors.

She ridiculed keenly the pride of fools, the vanity of _parvenus_, and,

feeling herself of the people to her very finger-ends, she thought

herself more noble than all the patricians and aristocrats of the earth.

She was wont to say that those of her race had redder blood and larger

veins than others,--which I incline to believe; for, if moral and

physical energy constitute in reality the excellence of races, we cannot

deny that this energy is compelled to diminish in those who lose the

habit of labor and the courage of endurance. This aphorism is certainly

not without exception, and we may add that excess of labor and of

endurance enervates the organization as much as the excess of luxury and

idleness. But it is certain, in general, that life rises from the bottom

of society, and loses itself in measure as it rises to the top, like the

sap in plants.

"My mother was not one of those bold _intrigantes_ whose secret passion

is to struggle against the prejudices of their time, and who think to

make themselves greater by clinging, at the risk of a thousand affronts,

to the false greatness of the world. She was far too proud to expose

herself even to coldness. Her attitude was so reserved that she passed

for a timid person; but if one attempted to encourage her by airs of

protection, she became more than reserved, she showed herself cold and

taciturn. With people who inspired her with respect, she was amiable and

charming; but her real disposition was gay, petulant, active, and, above

all, opposed to constraint. Great dinners, long _soirées_, commonplace

visits, balls themselves, were odious to her. She was the woman of the

fireside or of the rapid and frolicking walk; but in her interior, as in

her goings abroad, intimacy, confidence, relations of entire sincerity,

absolute freedom in her habits and the employment of her time, were

indispensable to her. She, therefore, always lived in a retired manner,

more anxious to avoid unpleasant acquaintances than eager to make

advantageous ones. Such, too, was the foundation of my father's

character, and in this respect never was couple better assorted. They

were never happy out of their little household. And they have bequeathed

me this secret _sauvagerie_, which has always rendered the [fashionable]

world insupportable to me, and home indispensable."

In referring back to these volumes, we are led into continual loiterings

by the way. The style of our heroine is so magical, that we are

constantly tempted to let her tell her own story, and to give to the

gems of hers which we insert in these pages the slightest possible

setting of our own. But it is not our business to anticipate for any one

a reading from which no student of modern literature, or, indeed, of

modern mind, will excuse himself. We must give only so much as shall

make it sure that others will seek more at the fountain-head; but for

this purpose we must turn less to the book, and trust for our narration

to a sufficiently recent perusal still vividly remembered.

Aurore could scarcely have passed out of her third year when she

accompanied her mother to Madrid, where her father was already in

attendance upon Murat. She remembers their quarters in the palace,

magnificently furnished, and the half-broken toys of the royal

children, whose destruction she was allowed to complete. To please his

commander-in-chief, her father caused her to assume a miniature uniform,

like those of the Prince's aide-de-camps, whose splendid discomfort she

still recalls. This would seem a sort of prophecy of that assuming

of male attire in later years which was to constitute a capital

circumstance in her life. The return from the Peninsula was weary and

painful to the mother and child, and made more so by the disgust with

which the Spanish roadside bill-of-fare inspired the more civilized

French stomach. They were forced to make a part of the journey in wagons

with the common soldiery and camp-retainers, and Aurore in this manner

took the itch, to her mother's great mortification. Arrived at Nohant,

however, the care of Deschartres, joined to a self-imposed _régime_ of

green lemons, which the little girl devoured, skins, seeds, and all,

soon healed the ignominious eruption. Here the whole family passed some

months of happy repose, too soon interrupted by the tragical death of

Maurice. He had brought back from Spain a formidable horse, which he had

christened the _terrible_ Leopardo, and which, brave cavalier as he was,

he never mounted without a certain indefinable misgiving. He often said,

"I ride him badly, because I am afraid of him, and he knows it."

Dining with some friends in the neighborhood, one day, he was late in

returning. His wife and mother passed the evening together, the first

jealous and displeased at his protracted absence, the second occupied in

calming the irritation and rebuking the suspicions of her companion. The

wife at last yielded, and retired to rest. But the mother's heart, more

anxious, watched and watched. Towards midnight, a slight confusion in

the house augmented her alarm. She started at once, alone and thinly

dressed, to go and meet her son. The night was dark and rainy; the

terrible Leopardo had fulfilled the prophetic forebodings of his rider.

The poor lady, brought up in habits of extreme inactivity, had taken but

two walks in all her life. The first had been to surprise her son at

Passy, when released from the Revolutionary prison. The second was to

meet and escort back his lifeless body, found senseless by the roadside.

We have done now with Aurore's ancestry, and must occupy our remaining

pages with accounts of herself. Much time is given by her to the record

of her early childhood, and the explanation of its various phases. She

loves children; it is perhaps for this reason that she dwells longest on

this period of her life, describing its minutest incidents with all the

poetry that is in her. One would think that her childhood seemed to

her that actual flower of her life which it is to few in their own

consciousness. Despite the loss of her father, and the vexed relations

between her mother and grandmother which followed his death, her

infancy was joyous and companionable, passed mostly with the country

surroundings and out-door influences which act so magically on the

young. It soon became evident that she was to be confided chiefly to her

grandmother's care; and this, which was at first a fear, soon came to be

a sorrow. Still her mother was often with her, and her time was divided

between the plays of her village-friends and the dreams of romantic

incident which early formed the main feature of her inner life. Already

at a very early age her mother used to say to those who laughed at the

little romancer,--"Let her alone; it is only when she is making her

novels between four chairs that I can work in peace." This habit of

mind grew with her growth. Her very dolls played grandiose parts in her

child-drama. The paper on the wall became animated to her at night, and

in her dreams she witnessed strange adventures between its Satyrs and

Bacchantes. Soon she imagined for herself a sort of angel-companion,

whose name was Corambé. His presence grew to be more real to her than

reality itself, and in her quiet moments she wove out the mythology of

his existence, as Bhavadgheetas and Mahabraatus have been dreamed. In

process of time, she built, or rather entwisted, for him a little shrine

in the woods. All pretty things the child could gather were brought

together there, to give him pleasure. But one day the foot of a little

playmate profaned this sanctuary, and Aurore sought it no more, while

still Corambé was with her everywhere.

Although she seems to have always suffered from her mother's

inequalities of temper, yet for many years she clung to her, and to the

thought of her, with jealous affection. The great difference of age

which separated her from her grandmother inspired fear, and the grand

manners and careful breeding of the elder lady increased this effect.

When left with her, the child fell into a state of melancholy, with

passionate reactions against the chilling, penetrating influence,

which yet, having reason on its side, was destined to subdue her. "Her

chamber, dark and perfumed, gave me the headache, and fits of spasmodic

yawning. When she said to me, '_Amuse yourself quietly_,' it seemed

to me as if she shut me up in a great box with her." What sympathetic

remembrances must this phrase evoke in all who remember the _gêne_ of

similar constraints! George draws from this inferences of the wisdom of

Nature in confiding the duties of maternity to young creatures, whose

pulses have not yet lost the impatient leap of early pleasure and

energy, and to whom repose and reflection have not yet become the primal

necessities of life. This want of the nearness and sympathy of age

she was to experience more, as, by the consent of both parties,

her education was to be conducted under the superintendence of her

grandmother, from whom the mother derived her pension, and whose estate

the child was to inherit. The separation from her mother, gradually

effected, was the great sorrow of her childhood. She revolted from it

sometimes openly, sometimes in secret; and the project of escaping and

joining her mother in Paris, where, with her half-sister Caroline,

they would support themselves by needle-work, was soon formed and

long cherished. For the expenses of this intended journey, the child

carefully gathered and kept her little treasures, a coral comb, a ring

with a tiny brilliant, etc., etc. In contemplating these, she consoled

many a heartache; as who is there of us who has not often effectually

beguiled _ennui_ and privation by dreams of joys that never were to have

any other reality? The mother seems to have entered into this plan only

for the moment; it soon escaped her remembrance altogether, and the

little girl waited and waited to be sent for, till finally the whole

vision faded into a dream.

Deschartres, the tutor of Maurice, and of Hippolyte, his illegitimate

son, became also the instructor of the little Aurore. With all her

passion for out-door life, she felt always, she tells us, an invincible

necessity of mental cultivation, and perpetually astonished those

who had charge of her by her ardor alike in work and in play. Her

grandmother soon found that the child was never ill, so long as

sufficient freedom of exercise was permitted; so she was soon allowed to

run at will, dividing her time pretty equally between the study and the

fields. Thus she grew in mind and body from seven to twelve, promising

to be tall and handsome, though not in after-years fulfilling this

promise; for of her stature she tells us that it did not exceed that of

her mother, whom she calls a _petite femme_,--and of her appearance

she simply says that in her youth "with eyes, hair, and a robust

organization," she was neither handsome nor ugly. At the age of twelve,

a social necessity compelled her to go through the form of confession

and the first communion. Her grandmother was divided between the

convictions of her own liberalism, and the desire not to place her

cherished charge in direct opposition to the imperious demands of a

Catholic community. The laxity of the period allowed the compromise to

be managed in a merely formal and superficial manner. The grandmother

tried to give the rite a certain significance, at the same time

imploring the child "not to suppose that she was about to _eat her

Creator_." The confessor asked none of those questions which our author

simply qualifies as infamous, and, with a very mild course of catechism

and slight dose of devotion, that Rubicon of maturity was passed. Not

far beyond it waited a terrible trial, perhaps as great a sorrow as the

whole life was to bring. Aurore's diligence in her studies was marred

by the secret intention, long cherished, of escaping to her mother, and

adopting with her her former profession of dress-maker. Having one day

answered reproof with a petulant assertion of her desire to rejoin her

mother at all hazards, the grandmother determined to put an end to such

projects by a severe measure. Aurore was banished from her presence

during a certain number of days. Neither friend nor servant spoke to

her. She describes naturally enough this lonely, uncomforted condition,

in which, more than ever, she meditated upon the wished-for return to

her mother, and the beginning with her of a new life of industry and

privation. Summoned at last to her grandmother's bedside, and kneeling

to ask for reconciliation, she is forced to stay there, and to listen

to the most cruel and literal account of her mother's life, its early

errors, and their inevitable consequences.

"All that she narrated was true in point of fact, and attested by

circumstances whose detail admitted of no doubt. But this terrible

history might have been unveiled to me without injury to my respect

and love for my mother, and, thus told, it would have been much more

probable and more true. It would have sufficed to tell all the causes of

her misfortunes,--loneliness and poverty from the age of fourteen years,

the corruption of the rich, who are there to lie in wait for hunger and

to blight the flower of innocence, the pitiless rigorism of opinion,

which allows no return and accepts no expiation. They should also have

told me how my mother had redeemed the past, how faithfully she had

loved my father, how, since his death, she had lived humble, sad, and

retired. Finally, my poor grandmother let fall the fatal word. My mother

was a lost woman, and I a blind child rushing towards a precipice."

The horror of this disclosure did not work the miracle anticipated.

Aurore submitted indeed outwardly, but a spell of hardness and

hopelessness was drawn around her young heart, which neither tears nor

tenderness could break. The blow struck at the very roots of life and

hope in her. Self-respect was wounded in its core. If the mother who

bore her was vile, then she was vile also. All object in life seemed

gone. She tried to live from day to day without interest, without hope.

From her dark thoughts she found refuge only in extravagant gayety,

which brought physical weariness, but no repose of mind. She, who

had been on the whole a docile, manageable child, became so riotous,

unreasonable, and insupportable, that the only alternative of utter

waste of character seemed to be the discipline and seclusion of

the convent. She was accordingly taken to Paris, and received as a

_pensionnaire_ in the Convent des Anglaises, which had been, in the

Revolution, her grandmother's prison. To Aurore it was rather a place of

refuge than a place of detention. The chords of life had been cruelly

jarred in her bosom, and the discords in her character thence resulting

agonized her more than they displeased others. As for the extraordinary

communication which had led to this disorder of mind, we do not

hesitate, under the circumstances, to pronounce it an act of gratuitous

cruelty. Of all pangs that can assail a human heart, none transcends

that of learning the worthlessness of those we love; and to lay this

burden, which has crushed and crazed the strongest natures, upon the

tender heart of a child, was little less than murderous. Nor can

the motive assigned justify an act so cruel; since modern morality

increasingly teaches that the means must justify themselves, as well as

the end. In spite of these odious revelations, the child felt that her

love for her mother was undiminished, and a pitying comprehension of the

natural differences between the two nearest to her on earth slowly arose

in her mind, allowing her to do justice to the intentions of both.

Aurore wandered at first about the convent with only a vague feeling

of loneliness. The young girls, French and English, who composed its

classes, surveyed her in the beginning with distrust. Soon the youngest

and wildest set, called _Diables_, accorded her affiliation, and in

their company she managed to increase tolerably the anxieties and

troubles of the under-mistresses.

She was early initiated into the _great secret_, the traditionary legend

of the convent. This pointed at the existence, in some subterranean

dungeon, of a wretched prisoner, or perhaps of several, cut off from

liberty and light; and to _deliver the victim_ became the object of a

hundred wild expeditions, by day and by night, through the uninhabited

rooms and extensive vaults of the ancient edifice. The little ladies

hoarded with care their candle-ends,--they tumbled up and down ruinous

staircases, listened for groans and complaints, tried to undermine walls

and partitions, fortunately with little success. The victim was never

found, but her story was bequeathed from class to class, and her

deliverance was always the object and excuse of the _Diables_.

After much time wasted in these pursuits, attended by a mediocre

progress in the ordinary course of study and what the French call

_leçons d'agrément_, and we accomplishments, a critical moment came for

Aurore. She was weary of frolic and mischief,--she had tormented the

nuns to her heart's content. She knew not what new comedy to invent. She

thought of putting ink in the holy water,--it had been done already; of

hanging the parrot of the under-mistress,--but they had given her so

many frights, there would be nothing new in that. She saw, one

evening, the door of the little chapel open;--its quiet, its exquisite

cleanliness and simplicity attracted her. She had followed thither to

mock at the awkward motions of a little hunch-backed sister at her

devotions,--but once within she forgot this object. A veiled nun was

kneeling in her stall at prayer,--a single lamp feebly illuminated the

white walls,--a star looked in at her through the dim window. The nun

slowly rose and departed. Aurore was left alone. A calm, such as she had

never known, took possession of her,--a sudden light seemed to envelop

her,--she heard the mystical sentence vouchsafed to Saint Augustin:

"_Toile, lege!_" Turning to see who whispered it, she found herself

alone.

"I cherished no vain illusion. I did not believe in a miraculous voice.

I understood perfectly the sort of hallucination into which I had

fallen. I was neither elated nor frightened at it. Only, I felt that

Faith was taking possession of me, as I had wished, through the heart. I

was so grateful, in such delight, that a torrent of tears inundated my

face. 'Yes, yes, the veil is torn!' I said, 'I see the light of heaven!

I will go! But, before all, let me render thanks. To whom? how? What is

thy name?' said I to the unknown God who called me to him. 'How shall I

pray to thee? What language worthy of thee and capable of expressing

its love can my soul speak to thee? I know not; but thou readest my

heart,--thou seest that I love thee!'"

From this moment, Aurore gave herself up to the passion of devotion,

which, in natures like hers, is often the first to unclose. There are

all sorts of religious experiences,--some poor and shallow, some rich

and deep, with every variety of shade between. But wherever Love is

capable of being heroic, Religion will also find room to work its larger

miracles. Aurore's devotion was not likely to be a frigid recognition of

doctrine, nor to consist in the minute care of an infinitesimal soul,

whose salvation could be of small avail to any save its possessor. Her

religion could only be a sympathetic and contagious flame, running from

soul to soul, as beacon-fires catch at night and illuminate a whole

tract of country. From this time she became patient, thorough, and

laborious in all the duties of her age and place. A closer sympathy now

drew her to the nuns, with several of whom she formed happy and intimate

relations. The convent life became for the time her ideal of existence,

and she formed the plan, so common among young girls educated in this

manner, of taking the veil herself, when such a step should become

possible. This hidden purpose she carried with her, when, at the age of

sixteen, she quitted the convent with bitter regret, fearing the strange

world, fearing a conventional marriage, and looking back to the pleasant

restraints of tutelage, whose thorn hedges are always in blossom when we

view them from the dusty ways and traffic of real, responsible life.

Aurore exchanged her convent for a life of equal retirement; for her

grandmother, fearing lest the pietistic influences to which she had been

subjected should awake too dominant a chord in the passionate nature of

her pupil, brought her to Nohant at once, where, for a few days, she

realized the delight of a greater freedom from rule and surveillance. It

was pleasant for once, she says, to sleep into _la grasse matinée_, to

wear a bright gingham instead of her dress of purple serge, and to comb

her hair without being reminded that it was indecent for a young girl to

uncover her temples. The projects of marriage which had alarmed her were

abandoned for the present, and she was left to enjoy, unmolested, the

pleasure of finding again the friends and playmates of her youth. It

soon appeared, however, that the convent education had left many a

_lacune_, and the grandmother felt that the result of the three years'

claustration in nowise corresponded to its expense. Aurore set

herself to work to fill up, in secret, the many blanks left by her

preceptresses,--wishing, as she says, to conceal, as far as she could,

their want of faith or of thoroughness. She sat at her books half the

night, being gifted, according to her own account, with a marvellous

power of sacrificing sleep to any other necessity. At this time she

learned to ride on horseback, her first exploit being to tame a colt of

four years, the after-companion of many a wild scramble, who grew old

and died in her service. Her grandmother becoming soon after disabled by

a paralytic stroke, the alternation of this new exercise enabled Aurore

to bear the fatigues of the sick-room without serious inconvenience. Of

this period of her life our heroine speaks as follows:--

"Had my destiny caused me to pass immediately from my grandmother's

control to that of a husband, or of a convent, it is possible that,

subjected always to influences already accepted, I should never have

been myself. But it was decided by Fate that at the age of seventeen

years I should experience a suspension of external authority, and that I

should belong wholly to myself for nearly a year, to become, for good or

evil, what I was to be for nearly all the rest of my life."

Passing much of her time at the bedside of the invalid, now incapable of

giving any further direction to the young life so dear to her, Aurore

plunged into many studies which opened to her new worlds of thought

and observation. She read Châteaubriand with delight. The "Genie du

Christianisme" proved to her rather an intellectual than a religious

stimulant, and under its impulse she proceeded, as she says, to

encounter without ceremony the French and other authors most quoted

at that time, to wit: Locke, Bacon, Montesquieu, Leibnitz, Pascal, La

Bruyère, Pope, Milton, Dante, and others not below these in difficulty.

She studied them in a crude and hurried manner; but that wonderful

alembic of youth, with its fiery heat of ardor, enabled her to compose

these far and hastily gathered ingredients into a certain homogeneity of

knowledge. "The brain was young," she says, "the memory always fugitive;

but the sentiment was quick, and the will ever tense." From these

pursuits, interrupted by the cares of nursing, she broke loose only to

mount her favorite Colette, and accompany Deschartres in his hunting

expeditions. She attempted also to acquire some knowledge of Natural

History, Mineralogy, and so on; but science was always less congenial to

her than literature, and of Leibnitz, the "Théodicée" is the only work

of which she speaks with any familiarity. For convenience in riding and

hunting, she adopted, on occasion, the dress of a boy, a blouse,

cap, and trousers, to the great scandal of the neighborhood, already

indisposed towards her by reason of her eccentric reputation; since, as

one can imagine, a small French province is the last place in the world

where a young girl can display the lone-star banner of individuality

with impunity.

Aurore had promised her aged relative that she would not read Voltaire

before the age of thirty; but her literary wanderings soon brought her

across the path of Rousseau.

The French make the reading of the "Nouvelle Héloïse" one of the epochs

in the life of woman. According to its motto, "The mother will not

allow the daughter to read it," this critical act is by common consent

adjourned till after marriage, when, we suppose, it appears something in

the light of a Bill of Rights, a coming to the knowledge of what women

can do, if they will. But as all Julie's _divagations_ occur before

marriage, and as her subsequent life becomes a model of Puritanic duty

and piety, one does not understand the applicability of her example to

French life, in which this progress is reversed. In this, as in all

works of true genius, people of the most opposite ways of thinking

take what is congenial to themselves,--the ardent and passionate fling

themselves on the swollen stream of Saint Preux's stormy love, the

older and colder justify Julie's repentance, and the slow but certain

rehabilitation of her character. With all its magnificences, and even

with the added zest of a forbidden book, the "Nouvelle Héloïse" would be

very slow reading for our youth of today. Its perpetual balloon voyage

of sentiment was suited to other times, or finds sympathy to-day

with other races. With all this, there is a great depth of truth and

eloquence in its pages,--and its moral, which at first sight would seem

to be, that the blossom of vice necessarily contains the germ of virtue,

proves to be this wiser one, that you can tell the tree only by its

fruits, which slowly ripen with length of life. As a novel, it is out of

fashion,--for novels have fashion; as a development of the individuality

of passion, it has perhaps no equal. Be sure that Aurore saw in it its

fullest significance. It was strange reading for the disciple of the

convent, but she had laid her bold hand upon the tree of the knowledge

of good and of evil. She was not to be saved like a woman, through

ignorance, but like a man, through the wisdom which has its heavenly and

its earthly side. "Émile," the "Contrat Social," and the rest of the

series succeeded each other in her studies; but she does not speak of

the "Confessions," a book most cruel to those who love the merits of the

author, and to whom the nauseating vulgarity of his personal character

is a disgust scarcely to be recovered from. Taken at his best, however,

Rousseau was the Saint John of the Revolutionary Gospel, though the

bloody complement of its Apocalypse was left for other hands than his to

trace. To Aurore, stumbling almost unaided through fragmentary studies

of science and philosophy, his glowing, broad, synthetic statement was

indeed a revelation. It made an epoch in her life. She compared him to

Mozart. "In politics," she says, "I became the ardent disciple of this

master, and I followed him long without restriction. As to religion,

he seemed to me the most Christian of all the writers of his time. I

pardoned his abjuration of Catholicism the more easily because its

sacraments and title had been given to him in an irreligious manner,

well calculated to disgust him with them." But with Aurore, too, the day

of Catholicism was over,--its rites were become "heavy and unhealthy" to

her. Her faith in things divine was unshaken; but the confessional was

empty, the mass dull, the ceremonial ridiculous to her. She was glad to

pray alone, and in her own words. Hers was a nature beyond forms. By

a rapid intuition, she saw and appropriated what is intrinsic in all

religions,--faith in God and love to man. However wild and volcanic may

have been her creed in other matters, she has never lost sight of these

two cardinal points, which have been the consolation of her life and its

redemption. The year comprising these studies and this new freedom ended

sadly with the death of her grandmother.

And now, her real protectress being removed, the discords of life broke

in upon her, and asserted themselves. Scarcely was the beloved form

cold, when Aurore's mother arrived, to wake the echoes of the chateau

with wild abuse of its late mistress. By testamentary disposition,

Madame Dupin had made Aurore her heir, and had named two of her own

relatives as guardians; but the mother now insisted on her own rights,

and, after much acrimonious dispute and comment, carried Aurore from her

beloved solitudes to her own quarters in Paris,--a journey of sorrow,

and the beginning of sorrows. In her childhood Aurore had often longed

for this mother's breast as her natural refuge, and the true home of her

childish affections. But it "was one of those characters of self-will

and passion which deteriorate in later life, and in which no new moral

beauties spring up to replace the impulsive graces of youth. Regarding

Aurore now as the work of another's hands, she made her the victim of

ceaseless and causeless petulance. Her gross abuse of her mother-in-law

gave Aurore many tears to shed in private, while her persecution of poor

Deschartres drove her daughter to the expedient of shielding him--with

a lie. The poor tutor had administered the affairs of Nohant for some

time. He was now called to account for every farthing with the most

malignant accuracy, and a sum of money, lost by ill-management, not

being satisfactorily accounted for, his new tormentor threatened him

with prison and trial. As he muttered to his late pupil that he would

not survive this disgrace, she stepped forward and shielded him after

the fashion of Consuelo.

"I have received this money," said she.

"You? Impossible! What have you done with it?"

"No matter, I have received it."

Deschartres was saved, and Aurore had only availed herself of the first

of a Frenchwoman's privileges. Nor will we reckon with her too harshly

for this lie, so benevolent in intention, so merciful in effect. A lie

sometimes seems the only refuge of the oppressed; but there is always

something better than a lie, if we could only find it out. Here is her

account of the scene itself:--

"To have gone through a series of lies and of false explanations would

not, perhaps, have been possible for me. But from the moment that it was

only necessary to persist in a 'yes' to save Deschartres, I thought that

I ought not to hesitate. My mother insisted:--

"'If M. Deschartres has paid you eighteen thousand francs, we can

easily find it out. You would not give your word of honor?'

"I felt a shudder, and I saw Deschartres ready to speak out.

"'I would give it!' I cried out

"'Give it, then,' said my aunt.

"'No, Mademoiselle,' said my mother's lawyer, 'don't give it.'

"'She shall give it!' cried my mother, to whom I could scarcely pardon

this infliction of torture.

"'I give it,' I replied;' and God is with me against you in this

matter.'

"'She has lied! she lies!' cried my mother. 'A bigot, a

_philosophailleuse.' She is lying and defrauding herself.'

"'Oh, as to that,' said the lawyer, laughing, 'she has the right to do

it, since she robs only herself.'

"'I will take her with her Deschartres before the justice of the peace,'

said my mother. 'I will make her take oath by Christ, by the Gospel!'

"'No, Madame,' said the lawyer, 'you will go no further in this matter;

and as for you, Mademoiselle, I beg your pardon for the annoyance I have

given you. Charged with your interests, I felt obliged to do so.'"

Eternal shame to those who make use of any authority to force the

secrets of a generous heart, cutting off from it every alternative but

that of a loathed deceit, or still more hateful, and scarcely less

guilty, betrayal!

Aurore now found herself in the hands of a woman of the people, ennobled

for a time by beauty and a true affection, but sinking, her good

inspiration gone, into the bitterest ill-temper and most vulgar

uncharity. Detesting her superiors in rank and position, she soon

managed to cut off Aurore from all intercourse with her father's family,

and thus to frustrate every prospect of her marriage in the sphere for

which she had been so carefully educated. She was even forbidden to

visit her old friends at the convent, and was eventually placed by her

mother with a family nearly unknown to both, whose pity had been excited

by her friendless condition and unhappy countenance. Aurore's mother

seems to us, _du reste_, the perfect type of a Parisian lorette, the

sort of woman so keenly attractive with the bloom of youth and the

eloquence of passion,--but when these have passed their day, the most

detestable of mistresses, the most undesirable of companions. Men of all

ranks and ages acknowledge their attraction, endure their tyranny, and

curse the misery it inflicts. Marriage and competency had protected this

one from the deteriorations which almost inevitably await those of

her class, but they could not save her from the natural process of an

undisciplined mind, an ungoverned temper, and a caprice verging on

insanity. This self-torment of caprice could be assuaged only by

constant change of circumstance and surroundings; her only resource was

to metamorphose things about her as often and as rapidly as possible.

She changed her lodgings, her furniture, her clothes, retrimmed her

bonnets continually, always finding them worse than before. Finally, she

grew weary of her black hair, and wore a blond periwig, which disgusting

her in turn, she finished by appearing in a different head of hair every

day in the week.

Aurore's new friends proved congenial to her, and the influence of their

happy family-life dispersed, she says, her last dreams of the beatitudes

of the convent. It was in their company that she first met the man

destined to become her husband. Most of us would like to know the

impression he made upon her at first sight. We will give it in her own

words.

"We were eating ices at Tortoni's, after the theatre, when my mother

Angèle [her new friend] said to her husband,--'See, there is Casimir.'

"A slender young man, rather elegant, with a gay aspect and military

bearing, came to shake hands with them. He seated himself by Madame

Angèle, and asked her in a low voice who I was.

"'It is my daughter,' she replied.

"'Then,' whispered he, 'she is my wife. You know that you have promised

me the hand of your eldest daughter. I thought it would have been

Wilfrid; but as this one seems of an age more suitable to mine, I accept

her, if you will give her to me.'

"Madame Angèle laughed at this, but the pleasantry proved a prediction."

Aurore had given her new protectors the titles of Mother Angèle and

Father James, and they in turn called her their daughter. The period of

her residence with them at Plessis appears in her souvenirs as an

ideal interval of happiness and repose, a renewal of the freedom and

_insousiance_ of childhood, with the added knowledge of their value, a

suspension of the terrible demands and interests of life. Would that

this ideal period could be prolonged for women!--but the exigencies

of the race, or perhaps the fears of society, do not permit it.

The two-faced spectre of marriage awaits her, for good or ill. The

_aphelion_ of a woman's liberty is soon reached, the dark organic forces

bind her to tread the narrow orbit of her sex, and if, at the farthest

bound of her individual progress, the attraction could fail, and let her

slip from the eternal circle, chaos would be the result.

Uninvited, therefore, but unrepulsed, Hymen approached our heroine in

the form of Casimir Dudevant, the illegitimate, but acknowledged son and

heir of Colonel Dudevant, an officer of good standing and reasonable

fortune. The only feeling he seems to have inspired in the bosom of his

future wife was one of mild good-will. His only recommendation was a

decent degree of suitableness in outward circumstances. For the true

wants of her nature he had neither fitness nor sympathy; but she did not

know herself then,--she was not yet George Sand. From the stand-point of

her later development, her marriage would seem to us a low one; but we

must remember that she started only from the plane, and not the highest

plane, of French society, in which a marriage of some sort is the

first necessity of a woman's life, and not the crowning point of her

experience. To compensate the rigor of such a requisition, a French

marriage, though civilly indissoluble, has yet a hundred modifications

which remove it far from the Puritan ideal which we of the Protestant

faith cherish. Hence the French novel, whose strained sentiment and

deeply logical immorality have wakened strange echoes among us of the

stricter rule and graver usage.

Without passion, then, or tender affection on either side, but with a

tolerable harmony of views for the moment, and after long and causeless

opposition on the part of Aurore's mother, this marriage took place.

Aurore was but eighteen; her bridegroom was of suitable age. With dreams

of a peaceful family existence, and looking forward to maternity as the

great joy and office of the coming years, she brought her husband to

Nohant, whose inheritance had been settled by contract upon the children

of this marriage.

But these dreams were not to be realized. Aurore was not born to be the

companion of a dull, narrow man, nor the Lady Bountiful of a little

village in the heart of France. Would she not have had it so? She tells

us that she would; and as honesty is one of her strong points, we may

believe her. She knew not the stormy ocean of life, nor the precious

freight she carried, when she committed the vessel of her fortunes to so

careless a hand as that of M. Dudevant. She throws no special blame or

odium upon him, nor does he probably deserve any.

The recital of the events spoken of above brings us well into the eighth

volume of the "Histoire de ma Vie"; and as there are but ten in all, the

treatment of the things that follow is pursued with much less

detail, and with many a gap, which the malevolent among our author's

contemporaries would assure us that they know well how to fill up.

Between the extreme reserve of the last two volumes and the wild

assertions of so many we would gladly keep the _juste milieu_, if

we could; but we wish only truth, and it is not at the hands of the

scandalmongers of any society--is it?--that we seek that commodity. The

decree of the court which at a later day gave her the guardianship

of her children, and the friendship of many illustrious and of some

irreproachable men, must be accepted in favor of her of whom we

write,--and the known fanaticism of slander, and the love of the

marvellous, which craves, in stories of good or evil, such monstrous

forms for its gratification, cause us, on the other side, to deduct

a large average from the narrations current against her. But we

anticipate.

Aurore, at first, was neither happy nor unhappy in her marriage. Her

surroundings were friendly and pleasant, and the birth of a son, a third

Maurice, soon brought to her experience the keenest joy of womanhood.

Before this child numbered two years, however, she began to feel a

certain blank in her household existence, an emptiness, a discouragement

as to all things, whose cause she could not understand. In this _ennui_,

she tells us, her husband sympathized, and by common consent they strove

to remedy it by frequent changes of abode. They visited Paris, Plessis,

returned to Nohant, made a journey in the Pyrenees, a visit to Guillery,

the château of Colonel Dudevant. Still the dark guest pursued them.

Aurore does not pretend that there was any special cause for her

suffering. It was but the void which her passionate nature found in a

conventional and limited existence, and for which as yet she knew no

remedy. The fervor of Catholic devotion had, as we have seen, long

forsaken her; her studies did not satisfy her; her children--she had by

this time a daughter--were yet in infancy; her husband was not unkind,

but indifferent, and the object of indifference. She occupied herself

with the business of her estate, and with the wants of the neighboring

poor; but she was unsuccessful in administering her expenses, and her

narrow revenue did not allow her to give large satisfaction to her

charitable impulses. After some years of seclusion and effort, she began

to dream of liberty, of wealth,--in a word, of trying her fortunes in

Paris. She felt a power within her for which she had found no adequate

task. She speaks vaguely, too, of a _Being_ platonically loved, and

loving in like manner, absent for most of the year, and seen only for

a few days at long intervals, whose correspondence had added a new

influence to her life. This attenuated relation was, however, broken

before she made her essay of a new life. Her half-brother, Hippolyte,

brought to Nohant a habit of joviality which soon degenerated into

chronic intemperance; and though she does not accuse her husband of

participation in this vice, or, indeed, of any wrong towards her, she

yet makes us understand that an occasional escape from Nohant became to

her almost a matter of necessity. She, therefore, made arrangements,

with her husband's free consent, to pass alternately three months in

Paris and three months at home, for an indefinite period; and leaving

Maurice in good hands, and the little Solange, her daughter, for a

short time only, she came to Paris in the winter with the intention of

writing.

Her hopes and pretensions were at first very modest. It had been agreed

that her husband should pay her an annual pension of fifteen hundred

francs. She would have been well satisfied to earn a like sum by her

literary efforts. She established herself in a small _mansarde_, a sort

of garret, and managed by great economy to furnish it so that Solange

could be made comfortable. She washed and ironed her fine linen with

her own hands. Not finding literary employment at once, and her slender

salary running very low, she adopted male attire for a while, as she

says, because she was too poor to dress herself suitably in any other.

The fashion of the period was favorable to her design. Men wore long

square-skirted overcoats, down to the heels. With one of these, and

trousers to match, with a gray hat and large woollen cravat, she might

easily pass for a young student.

"I cannot express the pleasure my boots gave me. I would gladly have

slept with them on. With these little iron-shod heels, I stood firm on

the pavement. I flew from one end of Paris to the other. I could have

made the circuit of the world, thus attired. Besides, my clothes did not

fear spoiling. I ran about in all weathers, I came back at all hours,

I went to the pit of every theatre. No one paid me any attention, or

suspected my disguise. Besides that, I wore it with ease; the entire

want of coquetry in my costume and physiognomy disarmed all suspicion.

I was too ill-dressed, and my manner was too simple, to attract or fix

attention. Women know little how to disguise themselves, even upon the

stage. They are unwilling to sacrifice the slenderness of their waists,

the smallness of their feet, the prettiness of their movements, the

brilliancy of their eyes; and it is by all these, nevertheless, it is

especially by the look, that they might avoid easy detection. There is a

way of gliding in everywhere without causing any one to turn round, and

of speaking in a low, unmodulated tone which does not sound like a

flute in the ears which may hear you. For the rest, in order not to

be remarked _as a man_, you must already have the habit of not making

yourself remarked _as a woman_."

This travesty, our heroine tells us, was of short duration;--it answered

the convenience of some months of poverty and obscurity. Its traditions

did not pass away so soon;--ten years later, her son, in his beardless

adolescence, was often taken for her, and sometimes amused himself

by indulging the error in those who accosted him. But in the greatly

changed circumstances in which she soon found herself, the disguise

became useless and unavailing. Its economy was no longer needed, and the

face of its wearer was soon too well known to be concealed by hat or

coat-collar.

We would not be understood as relaxing in any degree the rigor of

repudiation which such an act deserved. Yet it is imaginable, even to an

undepraved mind, that a woman might sometimes like to be on the other

side of the fence, to view the mad bull of publicity in its own pasture,

and feel that it cannot gore her. Poor George! running about in the

little boots, and wearing a great ugly coat and woollen choker,--it was

not through vanity that you did this. Strange sights you must have seen

in Paris!--none, perhaps, stranger than yourself! The would-be nun of

the English convent walking the streets in male attire, and even, as you

tell us, with your hands in your pockets! Yet when little Solange came

to live with you, as we understand, you put on your weeds of weakness

again;--your little daughter made you once more a woman!

For she was George Sand now. Aurore Dupin was civilly dead, Aurore

Dudevant was uncivilly effaced. She had taken half a name from Jules

Sandeau,--she had wrought the glory of that name herself. Yes, a glory,

say what you will. Elizabeth Browning's hands were not too pure to

soothe that forehead, chiding while they soothed; and these hands,

not illustrious as hers, shall soil themselves with no mud flung at a

sister's crowned head.

Every one knows the story of the name: how she and Jules Sandeau wrote a

novel together, and sought a _nom de plume_ which should represent their

literary union,--how soon she found that she could do much better alone,

and the weak work of Carl Sand was forgotten in the strong personality

of George Sand. Of Jules Sandeau she speaks only as of the associate of

a literary enterprise;--the world accords him a much nearer relation to

her; but upon this point she cannot, naturally, be either explicit or

implicit. One thing is certain: she was a hard worker, and did with

her might what her hand found to do. She wrote "Indiana," "Lelia,"

"Valentine," and had fame and money at will. Neither, however, gave

her unmixed pleasure. The _éclat_ of her reputation soon destroyed her

_incognito_, while the sums of money she was supposed to receive for her

works attracted to her innumerable beggars and adventurers of all

sorts. To ascertain the real wants and character of those who in every

imaginable way claimed her assistance became one of the added labors of

her life. She visited wretched garrets or cellars, and saw miserable

families,--discovering often, too late, that both garret and family had

been hired for the occasion. It was now that she first saw the real

plagues and ulcers of society. Her convent had not shown her these, nor

her life amid the peasantry of Berry. Only great cities produce those

unhealthy and unnatural human growths whose monstrosities are their

stock in trade, whose power of life lies in their depravation. She tells

us that these horrors weighed upon her, and caused her to try various

solutions of the ills that are, and are permitted to be. She was never

tempted to become an atheist, never lost sight of the Divine in life,

yet the necessity of a terrible fatalism seemed to envelop her. With her

numerous friends, she sought escape from the dilemma through various

theories of social development; and they often sat or walked half

through the night, discussing the fortunes of the race, and the

intentions of God. With her most intimate set, this sometimes led to a

jest, and "It is time to settle the social question" became the formula

of announcing dinner. These considerations led the way to her adoption

of socialistic theories in later years, of which she herself informs

us, but hints at the same time at many important reservations in her

acceptance of them.

In process of time she visited Italy with Alfred de Musset. The fever

seized on her at Genoa, and she saw the wonders of the fair land through

half-shut eyes, alternately shivering and burning. In the languor of

disease, she allowed the tossing of a coin to decide whether she should

visit Rome or Venice. Venice came uppermost ten times, and she chose to

consider it an affair of destiny. Her long stay in this city suggested

the themes of several of her romances, and the "Lettres d'un Voyageur"

might almost be pages from her own journal. Her companion was here

seized with a terrible illness. She nursed him day and night through all

its length, being so greatly fatigued at the time of his recovery that

she saw every object double, through want of sleep. Yet De Musset went

forth from his sick-room with a heart changed towards her. Hatred

had taken the place of love. Some say that this cruel change was the

punishment of as cruel a deception; others call it a mania of the fever,

perpetuating itself thenceforth in a brain sound as to all else. The

world does not know about this, and she herself tells us nothing. In

the "Lettres d'un Voyageur," however, she gives us to understand that

constancy is not her _forte_, and a sigh escapes with this confession,

"_Prie pour moi, ô Marguerite Le Conte!_"

George Sand was now launched,--with brilliant success, in the world of

letters, unheeding the conventional restraints of domestic life. The

choicest spirits of the day gathered round her. She was the luminous

centre of a circle of light. She did not hold a _salon_, the mimic court

of every Frenchwoman of distinction,--nor were the worldly wits of

fashion her vain and supercilious satellites. But De Lamennais climbed

to her _mansarde_, and unfolded therein his theories of saintly and

visionary philosophy. Liszt and Chopin bound her in the enchantment

of their wonderful melodies. De Balzac feasted her in his fantastic

lodgings, and lighted her across the square with a silver-gilt flambeau,

himself attired in a flounced satin dressing-gown, of which he was

extremely proud. Pierre Leroux instructed her in the old and the new

religions, and taught her the history of secret societies. Louis Blanc,

Cavaignac, and Pauline Garcia were bound to her by ties of intimacy.

She knew Lablache, Quinet, Miekiewiez, whom she calls the equal of Lord

Byron. Her intimates in her own province were men of high character and

intelligence, nor were friends wanting among her own sex. Good-will

and sympathy, therefore, not ill-will and antipathy, inspired her best

works. Her views of parties were charitable and conciliatory, and her

revolutionism more reconstructive than destructive. Yet, with all this

array of good company, we cannot accord her a miraculous immunity from

the fatalities of her situation. Of the guilt we are not here called

upon to judge; of the suffering many pages in this record of her

life bear witness. Little as we know, however, of her own power of

self-protection against the tyranny of the selfish and the sensual, we

yet feel as if the really base could never have held her in other than

the briefest thraldom, and as if her nobler nature must have continually

asserted and reasserted itself, with a constant tendency towards that

higher liberty which she had sought in the abandonment of outward

restraints, but which can never be thus attained. Some great moral

safeguards she had in her tireless industry, her love of art, her

honesty and geniality of nature, and, above all, in her passionate love

for her children. Happily, these deep and solid forces of Nature are

calculated to outlast the heyday of the blood, and to redeem its errors.

In connection with her domestic life, she gives some explanations which

must not be overlooked. She did not at first quit her husband's roof

with an intention of permanent absence, but with the intention of a

periodical return thither. In time, however, her presence there became

unwelcome, and she found those arrangements of which, as she says, she

had no right to complain, but which she could not recognize. Friends

intervened, advising an effectual reintegration of the broken marriage;

but against this, she says, her conscience, no less than her heart,

rebelled. There existed, indeed, no virtual bond between herself and

her late husband. Whatever may have been the beginning of their

estrangement, it seems certain that he acquiesced in her independence

with easy satisfaction. He wrote to her,--"I shall not put up at your

lodgings when I come to Paris, because I wish as little to be in your

way as I wish to have you in mine." At the same time, by visiting

her there, and appearing with her in public, he had given a certain

recognition to her position. There was, therefore, no room for penitence

on the one side, for forgiveness on the other, and, through these, for

a renewable moral relation between the two. The law took cognizance of

these facts, when, some years later, M. Dudevant brought an action

for civil divorce, wishing to recover possession of his children. His

complicity in what had taken place, and the amicable nature of the

separation, were so fully established, that the court, recognizing in

the parties neither husband nor wife, followed the pleadings of Nature,

and bestowed the children where, in the present instance, they were

likely to find the warmest cherishing. Under this decision, she gave

up the estate of Nohant to M. Dudevant, who, becoming weary of its

management, returned it to her, by a later compromise, in exchange for

other property, and the home of her childhood now shelters her declining

years.

For the history draws near its close; more travels, more novels, more

successes, more sorrows, much fond talk of her friends, many of whom

death has endeared to her, a shadowy sketch of her seven years' intimacy

with Chopin, a sob over the untimely grave of her married daughter, and

the wonderful book is ended. Surely, it tells its own moral; and we,

who have woven into short measure the tissue of its relations, need not

appear either as the apologist of a very exceptional woman, or as the

vindicator of laws inevitable and universal, the mischief of whose

violation no human knowledge can justly fathom. The world knows that the

life before us is no example for women to follow; but it also knows,

we think, that she who led it was on the whole an earnest and sincere

person, of ardent imagination and large heart, loving the good as well

as the beautiful, even if often mistaken in both,--and above all, honest

in her errors and their acknowledgment. Gross injustice has, no doubt,

been done her. The creations of her powerful fancy have been taken for

images of herself, and the popular mind, delighting to elevate all

things beyond the bounds of Nature, has made her a monster. It is clear,

we think, that those who have represented her as plunged headlong in a

career of vice and dissipation, the companion of all that is low and

trivial, have slandered alike her acts and her intentions. Like the

rest of us, she is the child of her antecedents and surroundings. Her

education was as exceptional as her character. Her marriage brought no

moral influence to bear upon her. Her separation opened before her a new

and strange way, never to be trodden by any with impunity. Yet we do not

believe, that, in the most undesirable circumstances of her life, she

ever long lost sight of its ideal object. We do not doubt that her zeal

for human progress, her sympathy for the wrongs of the race, and her

distrust of existing institutions were deep and sincere. We do not doubt

that she was devoted in friendship, disinterested in love, ardent in

philanthropy. She has seen the poverty and insincerity of society; she

has quarrelled with what she calls the shams of sacred things, the

merely conventional marriage, the God of bigotry and hypocrisy, the

government of oppression and fraud; but she ends by recognizing and

demanding the marriage of heart, the God of enlightened faith, the

government of order and progress. Responding to the dominant chord

of the nineteenth century, she strove to exalt individuality above

sociality, and passion above decorum and usage. Nor would she allow any

World's Congress of morals to settle the delicate limits between these

opposing vital forces, between what we owe to ourselves and what we owe

to others. If there be a divine of passion for which it is noble to

suffer and sacrifice, there is also a deeper divine of duty, far

transcending the other both in sacrifice and in reward. To this divine,

too often obscured to all of us, her later life increasingly renders

homage; and to its gentle redemption, our loving, pitying hearts--the

more loving, the more pitying for her story--are glad to leave her.

Ave, thou long laborious! Ave, thou worker of wonders, thou embalmer of

things most fleeting, most precious, so sealed in thy amber,

"That Nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!"

Thou hast wrought many a picture of wild and guilty passion,--yet

methinks thou didst always paint the mean as mean, the generous as

generous. Nobler stories, too, thou hast told, and thy Consuelo is as

pure as holy charity and lofty art could make her. They complain, that,

in the world of thy creations, women are sublime and men weak; may not

these things, then, be seen and judged for once through woman's eyes?

Much harm hast thou done? Nay, that can only God know. They misquote

thee, who veil a life of low intrigue with high-flown _dicta_ borrowed

from thy works. Thou art not of their sort,--or, if it be indeed _thee_

they seek to imitate,

"Decipit exemplar vitiis imitabile."

Thy faults have attracted them, not the virtues that redeem them. Shake

thyself free of such, and with those who have loved much, and to whom

much has been forgiven, go in peace! The shades of the Poets will greet

thee as they greeted Dante and Virgil, when, thyself a shade, thou goest

towards them. The heart that fainted at Francesca's sorrows will not

refuse a throb to thine. For there is a gallery of great women, great

with and without sin, where thou must sit, between Sappho and Cleopatra,

the Magdalen thy neighbor,--nor yet removed wholly out of sight the

Mother of the Great Forgiveness of God.

* * * * *