CHAPTER IX

First Sketch of George Sand

Some six years before this romance in such few words, we glanced at the face of a woman bending over her paper and watched her enthusiastic hand pen these words: “To live, how sweet! How good it is, in spite of griefs, husbands... in spite of bitter pangs. To live,—how intoxicating! To love, to be loved! That is happiness, that is Heaven!” During these six years neither this heart, nor this body, nor this hand had much slackened. To live, indeed, was the vital business of George Sand, dumpy, greedy, and so formidably endowed for all the extravagances of the spirit and the flesh. Nothing was too strong for this small woman, so solid of head and of body. And no one had bested her. In spite of her “bitter pangs,” her chagrin, for and against a boorish and rapacious husband, this great-granddaughter of the Maréchal de Saxe, this daughter of a daughter of the people had pretty well solved the double tactical problem of happiness that she had set herself: love and fame—enough to satisfy the most exigent appetites. At twenty-seven, this provincial had written her first book and taken her first lover. At thirty she could have said, like her ancestor the Maréchal: “Life is a dream. Mine has been short, but it has been beautiful.” Now, in her thirty-fourth year, this surprising pagan thought herself finished, and for ever disgusted with pleasure. She had not yet learned that the malady of desire, once it has opened in a being its ever-living wound, has but a feeble chance of healing. At least before the season of the great cold.

But, to this malady of desire, Aurore Dudevant added a taste for lengthy associations. Heart and head she was made for them,—and from them had contracted the habits of bed and of thought. Jules Sandeau had given her her pen name, her theories of “love free and divine,” and her first experience of love. The disappointment that followed this trial plunged her into war against all yokes, even that of sentiment. Still, perhaps yoke is too heavy a word. Pressure is enough. To rid herself, however, of such disturbing memories, she chose an intelligent thaumaturgist, and, against love, a marvellous antiseptic: the writer Mérimée. She confessed as much, at a later date, in a curious letter: “On one of those days of weariness and despair I met a man of sublime self-confidence, a man who was calm and strong, who understood nothing of my nature and who laughed at my troubles. The vitality of his spirit completely fascinated me; for a week I thought he had the secret of happiness, that he would teach it to me, that his scornful indifference would cure me of my childish susceptibilities. I believed that he had suffered like me, and that he had triumphed over his surface emotions. I do not yet know if I was wrong, if this man is strong by reason of his greatness or of his poverty.... At any rate, at the age of thirty I behaved as a girl of fifteen would not have done. The experience was a complete failure.”

This woman, so smothered in words, sometimes found a phrase that plumbed the depths. She adds a little farther on, in that same letter to Sainte-Beuve: “If Prosper Mérimée had understood me, he might perhaps have loved me, and if he had loved me he might have vanquished me, and if I had been able to submit to a man I should have been saved, _because my liberty devours and kills me_.” Here is the real misfortune of this gross temperament. It needed a master and from that time sought it only among the weak. Her slight physiological inversion induced psychological aberrations from which sprang all the wrongs which this fine thinking animal committed against her own peace.

Thus, there was thenceforth in the life of George Sand an _absent being_. We can take those words to mean a kind of ideal lover, lord of her thought and minister to her flesh, this marvellous twin self who arouses our instincts but never satiates them, who invents our dearest pains and stirs up our devils, yet like an angel bears us up to the mystical union of souls. The difficulty is to find united in one being all the colours of our own neurosis. We all join the chase, however, giving each his own name to the pursuit. George Sand called it “the search for her truth.” After all, why not? One might call truth the rhythm from which our engines derive the greatest potential power, whether this be for pleasure, for pain, for work, or for love. But we must do Sand this justice, that next to her private ills the general ill, “the suffering of the race, the view, the knowledge, meditation on the destiny of man” also impassioned her elastic soul. She often succeeded in forgetting herself in order to understand others. She knew how to let her intelligence ripen, to give maturity to her thoughts. Yet, in spite of the part she took in the idealistic battles of the century, in spite of the intellectual influence which she exerted at such an early age on the minds of her time, this woman’s profound lament was that of her _Lélia_: “For ten thousand years I have cried into the infinite,—‘Truth, truth!’ For ten thousand years the infinite has answered,—‘Desire, desire!’”

But here is this _désenchantée_, after her period of despair in 1833, suddenly writing: “I think I have blasphemed Nature, and God perhaps, in _Lélia_; God, who is not wicked, and who does not wreak vengeance upon us, has sealed my mouth by giving me back my youthful heart and by forcing me to admit that he has endowed us with sublime joys.” She had just dined at the side of a fair young man of twenty-three, with arrogant eyes and no eyelashes, with a slender waist and beautiful, aristocratic hands, who scoffed loudly at all social idealism and bent over to breathe in the women’s ears: “I am not gentle, I am excessive.” He scoffed both at the “labouring classes” and at the “ruling,” at St.-Simon and at the Abbé de Lamennais. He even said: “I am more interested in the way Napoleon put on his boots than in all the politics of Europe.” Women felt that his real interest was love.

He paid immediate attention to his already celebrated neighbour with the olive skin, who sent him a few days later the two volumes of her _Leila_ with these inscriptions: the first: “To _Monsieur mon gamin d’Alfred_;” the second “To Monsieur the Viscount Alfred de Musset, respectful regards from his devoted servant, George Sand.”

We know to-day in all its details the story of this liaison and its magnificent expenditure of sorrows. We shall retain only certain crystals, the bitter dregs left in their hearts by the excesses of two fierce and consummate imaginations. It can be said that they devoured each other. Their desires differed: the one more brutal, more ravenous, less merciful; the other evil, maniacal, but savouring in little bites the marrow of their mutual suffering. “Contract your heart, big George,” he said. And she: “I no longer love you, but I still adore you. I no longer want you, but I cannot now do without you.” They departed for Venice, where these two sadists took vengeance on each other for their double impotence: cerebral with him, physical with her. And they continued nevertheless to desire and adore each other in spite of their outworn senses and spent joys. Then came those tortures that are self-inflicted for the stimulation of the senses. They soon had nothing left but the taste of their tears. Finally, in the very middle of the crisis, each of the two lovers sought refuge according to his own temperament: George in work and Alfred in sickness. Then the saviour appeared in the form of a handsome Venetian doctor on whom, at the very bedside of the delirious poet, fell the brunt of the reillumined desires of the other victim. No more pity, when the beast is once more at large. And no more despair, when the dry scales fall from an old love to leave naked a new body that melts to softness at the first touch of unfamiliar lips.

Musset departed. The three of them cultivated a curious relationship. The following summer George wrote to Alfred: “Oh! that night of rapture, when, in spite of ourselves, you joined our hands and said: ‘You love each other and still you love me; you have saved me body and soul!’” And for his part Musset cried: “Poor George, poor dear child! You thought yourself my mistress,—you were only my mother....” There the word is spoken. That physiological inversion we mentioned could at once assume another form. But the _mot juste_ is really that of mother. Because Sand was above all maternal, protective, the mistress _genetrix_. She needed to endow everything about her with the sentiment of maternity. A few months later on, when everything was over between them, the shrieks she uttered in her _Journal Intime_ over this badly quenched love were again those of a mother deprived of her suckling. “I love you! I would submit to every torture to be loved by you, and you leave me! Ah! poor man, you are mad... It is your pride that leads you... Oh, my poor children, how unhappy your mother is!... I want to surround myself with pure and distinguished men. Away with the strong; I want to see the artists: Liszt, Delacroix, Berlioz, Meyerbeer. I shall be a man among them and we shall gossip and talk. Alfred shall hear our bad jokes... Alas, if I only had him to-day! What haste I am in to have him! If I had only a few lines from you once in a while, just a word, permission to send you sometimes a little two-penny picture bought on the _quai_, cigarettes I made myself, a bird, a toy... Oh, my blue eyes, you will never look at me again! Lovely head, I shall never see you bend over me again, or wrap you in sweet languor. My little body, warm and supple, you will never stretch yourself out on me, as Elisha on the dead child, to quicken it!” “Ah! who will care for you, and for whom shall I care?”

This was the punishment for loving a man devoid of passion. The depth of her being, when she stirred it well, sent up always the same hope: “I need to suffer for someone. I must nourish this maternal solicitude, which is accustomed to guard over a tired sufferer.”

A fancy for a kind of tribune of the people intervened to heal the still live sore: she thought herself in love with Everard, he whom his contemporaries called Michel de Bourges. She yielded him the virginity of her intelligence. A cold love. The love of a slave who admires a handsome captain and a just legislator. But no giving, no suffering, nothing to blast deep caves of passion into the soul. Besides, Michel de Bourges was anti-artist. She wanted to avenge art with irony. “Berlioz is an artist,” she wrote to the master of rhetoric. “Perhaps he is even criminal enough to think secretly that all the people in the world are not worth a rightly placed chromatic scale, just as I have the insolence to prefer a white hyacinth to the crown of France. But rest assured that one can have these follies in one’s head and not be an enemy of the human race. You are for sumptuary laws, Berlioz is for demi-semi-quavers, I am for liliaceous plants.”

This lawyer was nevertheless jealous underneath his coldness. He was even tiresome. George Sand saw Liszt, found him handsome, and received him at Nohant with his mistress, Marie d’Agoult. Envying their still-young love, she noted in her diary: “What fearful calm in my heart! Can the torch be extinguished?” It was not the torch that was dying but the burned out candle lighted by the philosopher whose penholder she had aspired to be. And still the old stubborn idea reappeared: “My sweetest dream... consists in imagining the care I might give you in your feeble old age.” One important service she received from Michel was the winning of her action for divorce from Casimir Dudevant.

In the summer of 1836 she shook off the lover’s chain and broke the hobble of a husband. She was free. On the spot she turned over her two children, Maurice and Solange, to a young tutor by the name of Pelletan, whom, to know him better, she put to the test by becoming his mistress. Then she left for Geneva to join Liszt and the Countess d’Agoult. She returned in the early autumn and settled for a time in Paris with this couple, who were beginning to tire of solitude. All three of them went to the Hôtel de France in the rue Laffitte. This sedate bourgeois tavern became a communal dwelling of artists. On the stairs one passed Eugène Sue, Miçkiewicz, the singer Nourrit, the Abbé de Lamennais, Heinrich Heine. The musical gentlemen, with Liszt at the head, spoke of nothing but Chopin.

“Bring him to me,” demanded George.

He came one evening with Hiller. Mr. Sand and Miss Chopin saw each other for the first time.

Returning home, Chopin said to his friend: “What an antipathetic woman that Sand is! Is she really a woman? I’m inclined to doubt it.”