George Sand

Abstract

George Sand is essentially our contemporary.

Charity towards others:

dignity towards oneself:

sincerity before God.

George Sand, Histoire de ma vie, 1847

5.1 Premise

George Sand is essentially our contemporary.

This no audacious statement. It is simply a matter of recognising the genius of an anticipator, opening up a sense of closeness, of reassuring commonality, leading, perhaps beyond the commonplace and beyond the legends regarding a woman remembered because her ‘clothes’ gave rise to scandal.

Her relevance is to be found in the folds of an existence, of events investigated and known so little, in the pages of her books and memoirs: 70 novels and short stories, 24 plays, dozens of essays; 150 volumes of which 25 comprising correspondence amounting to about a thousand pages each.

What prompted Balzac to wonder ‘how will the world fare when all women are like George Sand?’ Why did Dostoevsky, when he read her for the first time, declare he had spent the whole night in feverish excitement, acknowledging her as the mother of the Russian novel?

Yet many have been content with the all-encompassing terms used to summarise her, like androgynous, transvestite, nympholepsic. One of the kindest biographers described her exploits of ‘nymphomaniacal frigidity’; someone else coined the noun ‘Georgesandism’.

Baudelaire found her work ‘heavy and garrulous’ to the point of defining the writer as a ‘grosse bete’.¹ Nietzsche called her a ‘prolific cow’. Chateaubriand referred to her, however, as the ‘nouveau Byron’ and de Musset considered her the most feminine of all women. Balzac, who had always had reservations about women’s intelligence, called her ‘Mon camarade’, Heine ‘mon cher frère’, judging her superior to Victor Hugo, who had already acknowledged her as an ‘éminent esprit’; Flaubert, a lifelong friend of Sand, claimed she was a ‘génie’ who had produced some of the most suggestive correspondence.²

So, who was George Sand really? This answer is the responsibility of the biographer as Joseph Barry held when writing that ‘the biographer makes an attempt, ventures upon a journey of discovery with the inevitable baggage of himself alone, but he needs to be prepared to discard a good part of it along the way, since this is also a journey to discover oneself’ one’s own beliefs, prejudices and cultural heritage.

The name of George Sand, from 1830 on and throughout her century, constantly made the headlines in the newspapers as, along with Victor Hugo, she was the most widely read author and not only in France. In the English-speaking world, George Eliot and the Bronte sisters admired her, as did the more modern Walt,³ while Henry James dedicated nine long articles to her calling her ‘Goethe’s sister’. In Russia, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were fascinated by her, as was the reading public of many countries because her novels were full of emancipating ideas, love for the underprivileged, peasants, the people. She was a friend and supporter of Giuseppe Mazzini. He read and appreciated her works considering them occasions for readers ‘to learn to love virtue’.⁴ George Sand considered Christianity a social faith, a community where piety and mercy predominated, faith in a better future.

5.2 The Story of Her Life

Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, a princess on her father’s side,⁵ a plebeian on her mother’s,⁶ was born in 1804. She became George Sand in 1832. At the age of four, she already knew how to read, invented stories, acted two parts to create fantastic characters, remembering having discovered she could become double when listening to the echo in a valley. She played at war and remembered never being afraid of punishment because her parents never punished her. George Sand remembered her mother as visceral and passionate, and, although formally uneducated, having the soul of an artist. His father also loved the arts: music, drawing and literature, but in real life he embarked on a military career.

Following the death of her father, due to a trivial fall from his horse, the future George Sand, still very young, was entrusted to the care of her paternal grandmother to save her from the influence of her mother: ‘A woman with a tainted past and a doubtful future’.⁷ Aurore lived her childhood torn between the affection of her grandmother within the grand, luxurious estate of Nohant, in the province of Paris, and the void created by her want of maternal warmth: A presence that she always longed for and desired. Her mother, Sophie Delaborde, lived in Paris, a city and a constant destination during Aurore’s entire life. To deal with the laceration this created she began to write, compose songs and send her mother odes she composed in her honour.

The death of her husband, Maurice Dupin, dealt a serious blow to Sophie who fell into a state of profound depression. It was probably this, as well as the mutually jealousy-driven rift between her mother and her grandmother, which induced Aurore to move into the imposing estate owned by her grandmother, Marie-Aurore, who had taken care of her upbringing and where Aurore had lived with her half-brother Hyppolite. Her mother, Sophie, remained in Paris, living on the income made available to her by her mother-in-law.

Aurore’s tutor was Jean-François Deschartes, administrator of the Nohant estate, taught her not only reading, writing, arithmetic and history, but also made the library available to her and accustomed her to wear male clothes, more practical for running through the meadows, walking in the woods and hunting. Her grandmother loved to sing and played the harpsichord and taught her to love music. With her, Aurore spent a few months in Paris, where she visited her mother and learnt dancing and drawing, but the difficult relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law meant that these encounters dwindled over time. ‘I told myself that my mother did not love me as much as I loved her; I was unfair under the circumstances, but, in the end, it proved to be a truth which revealed and confirmed itself with the passing of each day. My mother felt for me, as she did for all the beings she had loved, with greater passion than tenderness.’⁸

She lived her teenage years in a state of turbulence which her grandmother strove to curb, immersed in an education comprising reading, painting and music. At that time, she found two books particularly fascinating: the Iliad and Gerusalemme Liberata , but neither one nor the other answered her questions. She could provide no answers for herself. Neither could her grandmother, an atheist and Voltairean, opposed to her mother who believed in a romantic but distant brand of Christianity, prove any. So, she created a religion of his own, inspired by the Gospel and J. J. Rousseau’s Social Contract.⁹ Like many young aristocratic girls of her day, she was sent to a convent at the age of 14, to the English Augustinians, to complete her education, an experience she saw as a liberation from the rivalry between her grandmother and mother. Here she immersed herself in the solitude of readings, discovering her own particular vein of mysticism. In the early days, alone in her cell, she wrote, ‘the nocturnal aspect of the chapel conquered and fascinated me’.¹⁰ She decided to become a nun, but both her confessor and her grandmother flinched. In response to her daily confession of weaknesses and sins daily, the abbot replied, ‘Your relatives are very saddened by your conduct, your mother believes that life in the convent is killing you; and your grandmother writes that she is making a bigoted fanatic out of you (...) I order, therefore, that as a penance, you shall return to the games and innocent pastimes suited to your age. From this afternoon on, instead of prostrating yourself in the chapel, you shall play and run in the garden with the other girls.’¹¹ This new approach led to the release of all the energy that was to characterise her life force as George Sand. Only a few months after the abbot’s remonstrance, months she had set up a theatrical group in the convent, to stage Molière’s Le malade imaginaire [The Imaginary Invalid].

After she left the convent she returned to Nohant, where her half-brother Hyppolite taught her to ride in an unorthodox but effective manner, astride the horse like a man. Her days were those of the anchorite, she got up late on purpose to shorten them: ‘then I dine, I chat with my grandmother for an hour or two, I go back up to play the harp and the guitar, I read, I warm up, I spit in the fire – as they say here – that is, I stir up my memories; I write in the ashes with the tongs, I go down for dinner and, while my grandmother is playing cards, I go back up to scribble some ideas in my notebook’.¹²

She never spoke about the convent again, even if the mysticism she acquired there always remained alive in her as a writer,¹³ although she became anti-clerical as an adult.¹⁴ Her quest for religiosity was to remain constant, though she attributed different meanings and significances to it, ‘of all present and past religions, the Christian is the most poetic and human. (…) Read the poets, they are always religious; and do not fear the philosophers, who are powerless in the face of faith’.¹⁵ In 1848 she wrote that ‘(...) communism is true Christianity; a religion of brotherhood does not threaten anybody’s purse or their life’.¹⁶

When she returned to Nohant at the age of 17, she read the works of many philosophers like Locke, Montesquieu, Leibniz, Bacon, Aristotle, Pascal, Montaigne and of poets like Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare. In the years to come, she developed an interest in esotericism, physiognomy, phrenology, magnetism, as did many of the romantics, as modern surrealists would later on.

The new life in Nohant acted as an interlude between the dominance of her grandmother and the hegemony of her future husband. Aurore was destined to clash with a fate of which she had no awareness initially, that of being a woman and, for this reason, an eternal civil and political minor. Her grandmother decided that before she died, she needed to find a husband for her granddaughter. No easy task. So difficult was this that the family’s administrator began to transfer the management of the property to Aurore, and, during their tour of the property, actually advised her to dress as a young man, wear a blue shirt, long riding jacket and trousers for greater convenience and the possibility of jumping easily into the saddle. ‘The righteous bourgeois were offended by the freedom that Aurore boldly allowed herself, above all by her gallops like some Amazon through the countryside where she showed all her daring. “I felt alive and as if I were reborn – wrote George Sand – dominating the landscape from my saddle. (…). It is at a gallop that all thoughts forsake their normal course and change places, so to speak. Taking the air as you ride swiftly, you no longer suffer, you no longer think, you breathe (...). Look back: as Madame de Stael says, you have just regained life.”’¹⁷

This was the origin of her transvestism, which over time became determination to arouse scandal, but which as we know dates back to a popular tradition of at least four hundred years. In the nineteenth century, it was definitively condemned as a practice to be severely frowned upon, a blatant sexual transgression. It was prohibited by law as a disturbing form of behaviour, characteristic of female deviance. Georgesandism was born – and entered the vocabularies of English, French, German, Russian – and used to condemn all women who emulated her conduct. Her grandmother died without seeing her married, and Aurore was able to fulfil her dream of going to Paris to live with her mother. Then the two clashed explosively. Sophie found she was harbouring in her home a daughter who was judge, regulator, educated according to a rigorous etiquette, though, at the same time, she thought and wrote dangerous, ridiculous, unbearable things. The quarrels and prohibitions alternated, so, in all haste Aurore chose a husband when she was eighteen, the noble Casimir Dudevant, a man whom she described as cold, mild, boring, rich enough to protect her; a man who, one day, asked her directly for her hand, a gesture that did not conform to the established rules, but which nevertheless pleased Aurore: ‘I found sincerity in his words and in his way of being. He never spoke to me of love and confessed that he was unwilling to indulge in sudden passion, enthusiasm, and, that, in any case, he was unable to express similar emotions in a seductive way. He spoke of friendship capable of being put to the test.’ She went back to live in the provinces where the couple had had two children, Maurice born in 1823 and Solange born in 1828. A year after the birth of her daughter Aurore wrote her first novel, La Marraine , which she disavowed; it was published posthumously. Her marriage was increasingly in crisis. Aurore did not share any of Casimir’s interests and her desire to go to live in Paris became stronger and stronger. She reached an agreement with her husband, leaving him the running and income of her Nohant assets in exchange for an income of 3000 francs, reserving the right to spend half the year in Nohant with the children. Her husband did not object. Her stepbrother, Hyppolite, rented an apartment for her but warned, ‘You really make me laugh! Not at all, you don’t even know how much a chicken costs! In two weeks, you will be back home penniless’. ‘Maybe’, replied Aurora, ‘but I want to try’. Throughout the trip, she wrote resting her head on a sack containing three stuffed turkeys.

She moved to Paris in 1831, at the age of twenty-six, and publicly had a relationship with a young writer, Jules Sandeau, with whom, even before leaving the provinces, she had decided to live, writing and experiencing independence. In Paris she met Balzac, joined the Scapigliatura movement, contacted a publisher, Latouche, the one which had launched Balzac. Aurore read some pages of her ‘Amata’ manuscript to the editor, and in a letter related the dialogue she had with Latouche:

• ‘Have you got children, madam?

• Alas yes, sir, but I can neither have them here with me nor return to them.

• And you count on living in Paris by writing?

• I have to!

• What a pity, because I don’t see any element of success here. Believe me Madam, one way or another you will have to return under your husband’s roof.’

‘... Yet’ – Aurore wrote – he said that I could learn to do better and that one day I might even be able to write something good, “But you must first experience life, learn something about it – he added – a novel is life directed by art” (...) in a nutshell a woman shouldn’t write (...) believe me you should not make books, but children.’¹⁸

So, Aurore began writing with ritual, regularity every day at the same time, during the hours of the night, with impressive regularity and constancy, to the point of being able to write in moments of greatest sorrow, like that which followed the death of her favourite granddaughter.

Her novels united imagination and faith to develop new values for a future society. Often, rather than a novelist, she preferred to be considered an author of short stories, declaring that ‘only a book can prompt our action’.¹⁹

In George Sand’s works we find a constant exaltation of the people, a passion and respect transmitted by her mother; the Sandian heroes and heroines belong either to the populace or the aristocracy, members of the bourgeoisie feature, they are negative, so much so that for the sake of greater fidelity to the peasant world she dwelt at length on the linguistic problem of transcribing their ‘patois’.

Aurore not only wrote about but also took an active part in political life, in the Paris uprising, published articles and biting satires against the Monarchy. One day she wrote in Le Figaro that ‘the next Government decree will dictate the following provisions: 1) All citizens capable of bearing arms shall muster every day from seven to twenty-three hours to protect the royal palace and from twenty-three to seven hours to defend churches and other public buildings (...); 2) so that nothing may disturb the tranquillity of the population, every morning 25 cannon shots will be fired on the squares ...; 3) every Monday, Wednesday and Friday we shall dedicate ourselves to preventing illegal meetings and every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday to disperse them (...)’. People laughed, but Louis Philippe did not enjoy it. Le Figaro newspaper was seized, and Aurora wrote, ‘I would give 9.50 francs to experience the joy of being condemned .... alas, the prefect of police let the matter fall, Bad! Bad! A political sentence would have made my fortune (...)’.²⁰

When she learned that her husband had got a maid servant with child, she ordered that the girl not be sacked and that she was to be helped educate the child.

With Jules Sandeau, Aurore became George. Together they wrote a short story on commission, La prima Donna, and two novels, Le Commissionaire and Rose et Blanche. They later chose a shared pseudonym to unite their two names: J. Sand.

George Sand in her autobiography explained how she begin writing in 1847, at the age of 43:

What’s in a name in this revolutionary world of ours? A number for those who do nothing, a mark or uniform for those who work and fight: what they gave me, I did, I alone with my laborious effort later (...) And now I hold this name, although it is, as they say, half the name of another writer.²¹

Balzac never ceased to encourage them. He never tired of panting breathlessly up five flights of stairs to join them in their apartment. When she wrote her first masterpiece Indiana²² (1832) as George Sand, Balzac stated that he had never known anything written more simply, more enchantingly conceived, ‘fires follow one another and crowd together without artifice, as in life, where everything collides with everything else and chance piles up more tragedies than even Shakespeare could have written. In short, the success of this book is guaranteed’.²³

The beginning – wrote Joseph Barry – lay in the early movements of the new person, that is, with the creation of a novel of her own. She fell morbidly ill because of it; they drew her blood, without providing her with lasting relief: I am constantly suffocating, I cannot walk around my room without feeling faint (...) I have terrible heartburn (...). Don’t let me die!²⁴

George Sand lived years of intense literary activity and finally managed not only to support herself but also to help friends (with the proceeds of one of her books, she prevented Jules Sandeau being called up during the war) and carry out works of charity. Thanks to her literary work, she was able to keep herself and her family. She dealt with her publishers with skill and determination, never accepting any changes to her novels or hesitating when it came to economic issues because her works met the taste of the public and were appreciated unanimously.

She wrote prefaces to all her novels, where she presented the themes and motifs of her characters to defend her innovative theses regarding marriage, the condition of women, her political-social vision.

While she was writing Indiana, she took her daughter Solange with her from Nohant to Paris and as her relationship with Jules Sandeau had cooled down, she moved to Quai Malaquais, to the so-called ‘blue attic’; the following year, she formally ended her sentimental and literary rapport with Jules. The same year, Lélia was issued. It became the novel of ‘scandal’, where she described her own existential crisis, defined as ‘abominable’ by the writer Jules Janin in the Journal des Débats , because it presented a woman who declared herself openly dissatisfied with her lovers.

We need to understand that the story of George Sand is one of love, which must include all the passions of her mind and heart: from politics to maternal, from self-fulfilment, self-denial and commitment to the cause of the oppressed, be they men or women.

In 1832 she had cursed the monarchy and the republic of all men; she had borne witness to the horrendous death rattle of the dying, torn to pieces and thrown into the Seine. She was criticised for having publicly raised her voice against the horror of the spilled blood, ‘in pools that still stain the streets, erasing any distinction between the vanquished and the victors’.²⁵

From moderate to pacifist to radical,²⁶ she recalled the need to found a civil society; doubted that individual freedom could be reconciled through collective action, the violence of crowds; yet, over time she came to justify regicide. She joined the famous radical opposition lawyer, Michel De Bourges, gathered funds for prisoners, turned her apartment into a republican centre placed under police surveillance.

She supported attempts to unify the different currents of the labour movement, writing in this regard Le Compagnon du tour de France , inspired by the figure of the socialist activist Agricol Perdiguier. She then collaborated on Louis Blanc’s La Réforme, publishing Le Meunier d’Angibault, praised Blanc’s Histoire de la Révolution française, and encouraged the artistic efforts of the so-called ‘worker poets’; to the latter, Sand dedicated Dialogues familiers sur la poésie des prolétaires (1842).²⁷

During those same years, George Sand wrote the introduction to Memoires de Garibaldi by Alexandre Dumas, preceded by a commentary on Garibaldi by Victor Hugo. In 1848, during the repression, she worked hard for her imprisoned socialist friends, helped their families economically, brought pressure to bear on public opinion and constantly financed Pierre Leroux, an ideologue of messianic socialism. She collaborated with several magazines: Revue indépendant, Le Bullettin de la Republique, la Cause du peuple. In an evangelical sense, George Sand understood the word ‘communisme’ which appeared for the first time in her novel Le Compagnon du Tour de France (1840), intended as an associative kind of spirit, grounded in a sense of human solidarity, brotherhood, communitarianism meaning the cessation of the oppression of the weak by the strongest, of the selfishness shown towards the poor by the wealthy. This type of communism, she believed, could not be achieved by violence, nor should it threaten private property, but presented a way by which to collaborate for the common good, following the teachings of all religions: ‘un élément régulier de construction sociale [a regulating element of social construction].’²⁸ George Sand’s utopia foresaw a state that reconciled all interests, leaving the individual free, while establishing the principles upon which to base the agreement and collaboration of the various social classes. It opposed the abolition of private property because the recognition of equal rights needed, in any case, to pursue a need for social hierarchies as not all men were suited to play prominent social roles; although even the humblest work, when considered in the proper light of its collective utility, was as deserving as the cultivation of the arts or sciences.²⁹

Having included women among the derelict, she held that for the political condition of women to change, society needed to change radically first. But some women ask is you want to change society shouldn’t women intervene politically in public affairs? I risk by denying this, since the social conditions are such that they could not exercise a public mandate honourably and’.³⁰ George Sand understood the essential need to obtain civil rights, because ‘if there were female deputies today, each of them would represent only half a person: the other half would be their husbands’.³¹ Considered ‘minors’ according to the Napoleonic code, women had no authority; they could not exercise civil rights over themselves and their children; but even before asking for the right to vote, women needed to fight for the right to education first, because even in the wealthy classes, mathematics, philosophy, philology were not included in the education of women.³² In her novels, all the heroines are ‘femmes superieures’ who educate, support, guide man, capable of living their freedom (especially in Lélia and Consuelo) except for Indiana, the anti-heroine blamed by Sand because she passed from being the slave of herself to being that of her seducer. ‘Honte à cette femme imbécile! Elle s’abandonna à ces trompeuses démonstrations [Shame on that foolish woman! She gave in to those deceptive demonstrations].’³³

We can read the modern relevance of her feminism in her writings where equality is not intended as identity or similarity between the sexes. Women are constitutionally and psychologically different from men. Therefore, they need to continue to play, with some exceptions, different roles, without being treated as inferiors. Sand believed that among the main functions of women remained motherhood. Among the first reforms she advocated, she called for the revision of the marriage laws, the introduction of divorce and the cancellation of the crime of adultery (which was envisaged only for females only). She also asked for judicial separation for herself from her husband, which was granted by the judge in 1836.

Sandian heroines differ from ordinary women because of their cerebral abilities, like those of the progressive aristocratic Edmée de Mauprat, Lélia, the blasé intellectual, Cécile Merquem, the enlightened provincial, Consuelo, an artist.

George Sand believed in and sustained the idea of true and total love between a man and a woman, as if it were a divine law. God, according to her, united a man and a woman, two halves meant to form a complete being. George Sand’s feminism was not separatist or intransigent, therefore, nor was the style she adopted aggressive, but conciliatory, rather, aimed at acknowledging and affirming the dignity and the identity of women without denying the qualities of femininity, sweetness, understanding, altruism, dedication and, above all, a passion for motherhood.

At the age of 43, she decided to start editing her autobiography, Histoire de ma vie , published as a feuilleton in La Presse and later issued in twenty volumes. In the history of the genre of autobiography, George Sand was the first woman to write and publish the story of her own life. She began her story with events which had occurred before her birth, providing a detailed account of her ancestors up to 1854, when she turned 50. Until that moment, women had written letters, intimate diaries, never published during their lifetimes and none had dared to share their story publicly. Sand decided to write her autobiography as the genesis, construction and defence of her own identity, without any intention of being exhaustive or making a confession. She did not intend it to be a literary masterpiece,³⁴ where personal events were always and inevitably intertwined with the narration of the political and social history of one’s time:

All creatures are linked to each other and the human being, man or woman, who presents his life in isolation, detached from that of others offers us nothing, if not an enigma to solve (...). I could neither tell nor explain my life without first telling and explaining that of my ancestors. (…). Here I tell an intimate story, because the story of individuals is the intimate history of all humanity; therefore, in order to narrate forty years of my personal life, I also need to embrace a period of about a hundred years.³⁵

Sand narrates her story along three different lines: memories, professions of faith, meditations. In her memoires we find childhood stories, accounts of a time rediscovered; in her professions of faith we find the intellectual and spiritual autobiography of one who lived in ‘a century that was drifting’, seeking in disillusionment new reasons for believing in humanity; her meditations are veritable solitary reflections, of great poesis, where the different aspects of her life, art, spirituality, being a woman, politics, morality, intertwine.

She concludes the eight-year-long narration of her life story with the determination to act:

Hélas! Et merci, mon Dieu! Puisque la doleur est le creuset où l’amour s’épure, et puisque, véritablement aimée de quelques-uns, je peux encore ne pas tomber sur la route où la charité envers tous commande de marcher [Alas! And thank you, my God! Since grief is the crucible where love is purified, and since, I have been truly loved by a few, I still cannot fall on the road where charity towards all commands one to walk]. (14 June 1855)

Believing that the revolution of 1848 had consolidated the middle classes while blocking social reform, she wrote, ‘The Monarchy is dead, long live the republic of privilege!’³⁶ and foresaw a ferocious future fight against the bourgeoisie. Tocqueville agreed with her, saying ‘I had no doubt that we were on the eve of a terrible fight. However, I did not understand all the dangers of the moment, until I had a conversation with the famous Madame Sand’.³⁷

‘Try – Sand advised Tocqueville – to persuade your friends not to push the people into the streets, by provoking and offending them; just as I, for my part, would like to instil them with patience; because, if there is an open struggle, you will all perish’. Tocqueville was impressed: ‘We talked for a whole hour about public issues (...) I was very impressed by what she said to me on this subject: it was the first time that I found myself talking directly and familiarly with someone capable and willing to tell me something about what was happening in the field of our opponents. The political parties never know each other (...) Madame Sand gave me a detailed and vivid picture of the situation of the Parisian workers in terms of organisation, numbers, weapons, preparation, thinking, passions, terrible decisions.’³⁸

In one of her most poetic pages, preoccupied with the violence of the Commune and future struggles, she wrote: ‘I don’t want any more bloodshed, no diabolical means of implementing laudable ends or massacres in the name of renewal. (...) Damn all those who dig ossuaries! Life never comes out of those. Instead, we must learn to be tenacious, patient revolutionaries – terrorists never. For a long time, we will not be heard; but what does it matter! The poet should live on a peak, high above his contemporaries and see beyond his own life: humanity will only progress when it learns to despise the deception found in everyone and respect the human race despite deception’.³⁹

After Napoleon III’s coup d’état, Sand asked and obtained two audiences with the Emperor, obtaining some reduction of their sentences for some prisoners, exposing herself to various degrees of criticism from her friends, for having bowed to deal with the dictator. To these remarks Sand replied that she had not changed her mind at all and had not earned any favourable treatment for herself from the new Regime.

Supported by Prince Napoleon Joseph, cousin of the Emperor, moderately liberal and anticlerical, she published the novels Daniella (1857) and Mademoiselle La Quintinie (1863), where she painted the Catholic Church as a dangerous power concerned with imposing dogmatic and indisputable ‘truths’ regarding individual freedoms. The Church reacted in 1863 by putting all of her works on the Index.

Her contemporaneity is to be found in what she knew and sought to live out on the basis of her experiences and intuitions.

She left her readers with a passion, with frequently tormented love stories, in a continuous construction and discovery Prince Napoleon of herself, of others, of human nature; inspired by Rousseau’s theses, she tended to represent society and its components neither as they really were nor should be, but as they might have been had society not spoiled them.

So, she said goodbye to her love for Jules Sandeau: ‘Nothing remains; it is madness to become attached to places where happiness once was: love passes, places change, and the heart ages. (...) If the wound is deep, it cannot heal. The more we love the person to whom we have given ourselves body and soul, the more we hate him; because the poison of ingratitude has penetrated the heart.’⁴⁰ The story of their meeting was to be told in the novel they wrote together in 1831, Rose et Blanche, and finally in the novel she wrote on her own, Lélia (1833).

This is how she explains the love for a woman and the need, perhaps the stimulus, that drew her and urged her to write, ‘Frankness, far from cleansing us in the eyes of men, would, on the contrary, be one more stain with which they would feel entitled to charge us.’.⁴¹ Her love for the theatre became love for a great actress, Marie. ‘There is something cold and incomplete in my nature – she confessed; a kind of paralysis prevents my feelings Prince Napoleon from expressing themselves. (...) Thus, when she appears on the scene with her languishing body, her indolent step, her sad, penetrating eyes (...) I seem to see my own soul (...) dressed in a costume suitable to reveal it to me, and to others.’⁴²

Of her first meeting with Alfred de Musset, she recalled offering him Egyptian tobacco, as he sat at her feet Prince Napoleon on a cushion smoking his long Bosnian pipe. It was a stormy relationship.⁴³ Their story aroused scandal because they were both well known. From a great love stems great betrayal that George explained saying ‘Is it therefore a crime to love life?’ Musset lay ill and witnessed George falling in love with Pagello, the doctor who had treated both of them in Venice – an Italian, a stranger. ‘Born under different skies – she commented – we have neither thoughts nor language in common; but have we not at least a commonality of hearts? ... I know how to love and suffer, and you? How do you love? Should people be raised in the belief that women have no soul? But do you understand that they have? Will I be a companion or a slave to you? Do you only want me or do you love me? When your craving is satisfied, will you know how to appreciate me? And when I have made you happy, will you be able to tell me about it? Do you know that longing of the soul that the senses cannot distinguish, nor caresses put to sleep or cause to tire? When your mistress falls asleep in your arms, do you stay awake to contemplate her, praying to God and crying? (...) This is how we remain; don’t try to learn my language I’d rather not even know your name. A silent love, without questions, without a past, without a future, only a pure present.’⁴⁴

Once he was cured and became aware of the new situation, de Musset returned to France, while Sand rented an apartment in Venice, worked on new novels, like Leone Leoni, André, Le Secrétaire intime, Jacques and Lettres d’un Voyageur,⁴⁵ while continuing her relationship with Pagello. After a few months, Sand and Pagello left Venice together for Paris. The Venetian doctor was not convinced, however, about the move to France, to environments which he felt alien; so, only after a few months, he returned to Venice.

George Sand resumed her love story with de Musset in epistolary form, but according to biographer Joseph Barry, it became little more than a literary deception; de Musset wrote, ‘I saw my image in a shop window and I recognised the boy I was, the man you wished to love.’.⁴⁶ ‘Love and write, replied George Sand, this is your vocation’. They met for two hours of tears and kisses of goodbye and de Musset promised, ‘I will not die, until I have written a book about you and me’.⁴⁷ De Musset wrote about his Venetian love with Sand in Confessions of a Son of the Century (1835) devoid of controversy about the end of their story. After Alfred’s death, George too wrote a book about their love, Elle et Lui (1859). The text aroused the indignation of the friends of the poet, who had died two years earlier, so much so, that his brother Paul de Musset wrote and published another novel called Lui et elle.

George, over time, had a clearer vision of love ‘true, complete love comes when two hearts, two minds, two bodies understand each other and embrace each other (...) such an encounter occurs once in a thousand years. As long as only two elements agree – mind and senses without the heart, or heart and mind without the senses – the third is believed to be involved in some way, until its absence makes itself felt and quenches the other two’.⁴⁸

George, as a mother, returns to fight for custody of her children (succeeding) and to obtain a permanent separation from her husband. ‘I am leading a monastic life, shamefully respectable, in order to earn the admiration of three idiots (the future judges).’⁴⁹ Her husband brought forward all the accusations, all the gossip possible citing the relative dates too. ‘In Paris she scandalises everyone, according to the porter she writes novels!’ He surprised her with her lovers. In 1835, he claimed ‘a mutual aversion: the lady affects the manners of a young man, smoking, cursing, dressing as a man, so as to lose all the grace of the female sex. She does not know the value of money’,⁵⁰ forgetting to mention that he received money thanks to his wife’s activities.

George Sand wrote that ‘Those who avow the noblest of principles are often the meanest and most bitter, because of their disgusting disillusionments. We esteem and admire them; but we can no longer love them. (...) I have had a feast of great men; I would like to see them all in Plutarch, where their private demeanour cannot hurt anyone, whether modelled in marble or cast in bronze and you never hear about them again! In life, they are bad, short-tempered, despotic, bitter and suspicious persecutors; in all their arrogant contempt, they confuse sheep and goats and behave worse with friends than with enemies. May God save us from them!!’⁵¹ Years before that she had mused ‘It is not wise to put a man with his back to the wall, even the weakest’.

She wrote Consuelo during the nine years she lived with Chopin,⁵² a love which gave both of them the inspirational strength to forge new creations. Consuelo⁵³ is the life story of a young singer continuously travelling through Europe. Through her music she bares souls, soothes trouble and pain. She manages to open up an intimate world where words are superfluous. Chopin was struggling and succumbing to tuberculosis. George Sand was one of the few who believed immediately in Chopin’s musical genius, which, during the nineteenth century, was appreciated only by a few. ‘Step by step the two artists compared and admired each other, their works, complemented each other. Chopin’s poetic soul appreciated the grace and idealism of Sand’s novels, George, an amateur musician, delighted in listening to Chopin’s preludes and sonatas. It was precisely through the language of art that these two so completely different beings understood each other.’⁵⁴

Streams of words have been written about their relationship. It is necessary to surrender and understand its insurmountable limits, wrote Sibilla Aleramo. ‘It is the fate of every great existence, to attract profound consents, some cruel misunderstanding, some unjust and livid expressions of outrage. Just as it is fatal that no outsider, whether among contemporaries nor posterity, shall ever be able to fully penetrate the secret of a love story, even if the protagonists not only experienced it but wrote about it. Fatal and providential. Because where else would the charm, the magic, the supreme value lead?’⁵⁵

After the death of Chopin, George Sand spent her last years in Nohant, surrounded by her grandchildren, by the friendship of Liszt, Delacroix, Maupassant and Flaubert. She confided in him, telling him that ‘you live with your own character, rather than with your own intelligence and greatness’ to which Flaubert replied, ‘Far from building our destiny, we suffer it. In my youth I was cowardly: I was afraid of life! We pay for everything adequately! (...) Man is nothing and work is everything’.⁵⁶

During these last years she never ceased to write, dedicating herself more to the theatre, which in her opinion summarised all the art forms, performing a thaumaturgical function. She adapted some of her most famous novels for the stage, Mauprat, François le Champi, Le Marquis de Villemer . Sand dressed like a man above all in the theatre and drew up a modern theory for theatrical representation based on the tradition of improvisation of the Commedie de l’art, but above all on the skill of the actor fusing dance, acrobatics, whole body gesture, thus anticipating avant-garde theatre. In Nohant she opened a theatre meant for all, adults, children and adolescents, for an audience that the writer believed needed to be educated with great urgency, and where the audience itself could take part in the show improvising as actors. As the people were almost entirely illiterate, they were unable to read her novels, but they could go to the theatre. Sand’s insight has been compared to that of Stanislavski and Grotowski.⁵⁷

Even in the field of music, she had some intuitions which were later realised by others in the twentieth century, like the idea of reproducing the sounds of nature by studying all the harmonies ignored until then, something achieved in works by Stockhausen or experiments by Russolo.⁵⁸

Finally, George Sand devoted herself to children’s literature and dedicated to her grandchildren Contes d’une grand-mére, the best known of which is the story of ‘La Petite Fadette’.

When George Sand died in 1876, at the age of 72, Dostoevsky said her works were ‘the liberation of the individual’ and with the following words expressed all his regret for her passing:

It was only when I learned of her death did I understand how much her name was present in my life, all the enthusiasm and adoration I had for this poet and how many moments of joy and happiness I owe her. George Sand is for us Russian idealists of the 1840s one of our contemporaries in the strictest sense of the word. (...) Everything this writer has contributed to with new, universally human expressions, to the point of becoming an echo here in Russia, producing strong and profound admiration.⁵⁹

From the speech that Victor Hugo wrote and read at Sand’s funeral, we quote some passages full of profound admiration and regret:

I mourn a dead woman and greet an immortal. I loved her, I admired her, I venerated her; today I contemplate her in the august serenity of death. I congratulate her because what she has done is great and I thank her because what she has done is good. (...)

Have we lost her? No.

The great figures disappear, but they do not vanish: quite the opposite; indeed, it might be said that they are realised. They become invisible under one aspect, they become visible under another. (...)

George Sand occupies a unique place in our time. In the century she had as a law that of completing the French revolution and starting the human revolution, a great woman who claimed that equality of the sexes as the first step towards the equality of men was necessary. (...) In this era when Garibaldi performed miracles, she created masterpieces.⁶⁰

The first biography of George Sand was written by a Russian female scholar, Varvara Komarow, who published it after 35 years of study and research, under the male pseudonym Wladimir Karénine.⁶¹

In literature there are frequent references to the works of George Sand, like that in Possession by Antonia Susan Byatt. The English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote two poems dedicated to Sand, ‘To George Sand: A Recognition’ and ‘To George Sand: A Desire’. Stepan Verchovensky, a character in the novel The Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated the works of George Sand in his periodical, before it was seized by the Russian government.

In the first episode of the ‘Overture’ of Swann’s Way, the first novel of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, a distraught young Marcel is calmed by his mother’s referring to François le Champi, a novel, which in Proust’s story was part of a gift from his grandmother, which also included La mare au Diable, Fadette and Les Maîtres Sonneurs.

In the 1900s, the reception of George Sand’s works was even more controversial. They were appreciated by Anatole France and Marcel Proust,⁶² while in Italy they were often forgotten or slated.⁶³ ‘It was precisely her fluid, spontaneous, instinctive writing that irritated her detractors, partisans of the arteficiel as opposed to romantic naturalism.’⁶⁴

Between 1923 and 1946 and again between 1963 and 1982, 18 films and TV series were produced based on her novels or her life.

In France, in 1978, a magazine titled Présence de George Sand was published, while in Italy only the novel Laura, Voyage dans le cristal was translated, so much so, that the writer and literary critic Carlo Bo in an article published in ‘Il Corriere della Sera’ hoped for renewed interest in her works.⁶⁵

Works by George Sand

• Le Commissionnaire, B. Renault, Paris, 1830, written with Jules Sandeau.

• Rose et Blanche, B. Renault, Paris, 1831, written with Jules Sandeau.

• Indiana, J. P. Roret, Paris, 1832.

• Valentine, H. Dupuy, Paris, 1832.

• Lélia, H. Dupuy, Paris, 1833.

• Jacques, F. Bonnaire, Paris, 1834.

• Le Secrétaire intime, V. Magen, Paris, 1834.

• La Marquise, V. Magen, Paris, 1834.

• Lavinia, V. Magen, Paris, 1834.

• Métella, V. Magen, Paris, 1834.

• Chaillot, Ladvocat, Paris, 1834.

• André, F. Bonnaire, Paris, 1835.

• Leone Leoni, F. Bonnaire, Paris, 1835.

• Simon, F. Bonnaire, Paris, 1836.

• Mattéa, F. Bonnaire, Paris, 1837.

• Mauprat, F. Bonnaire, Paris, 1837.

• Dodecation o Le livre des Douze, F. Bonnaire, Paris, 1837.

• Aldo le Rimeur, F. Bonnaire, Paris, 1837.

• Lettres d’un voyageu, F. Bonnaire, Paris, 1837.

• Les Maîtres mosaïstes, F. Bonnaire, Paris, 1838.

• La derniére Aldini, A. Wahlen, Bruxelles, 1838.

• L’Uscoque, F. Bonnaire, Paris, 1838.

• Spiridion, F. Bonnaire, Paris, 1838.

• Les sept cordes de la lyre, F. Bonnaire, Paris, 1839.

• Pauline. Les Mississipiens, F. Bonnaire, Paris, 1840.

• Cosima, ou la haine dans l’amour, F. Bonnaire, Paris, 1839.

• Gabriel, F. Bonnaire, Paris, 1840.

• Le Compagnon du Tour de France, Perrotin, Paris, 1841.

• Horace, L. De Potter, Paris, 1842.

• Un hiver à Majorque, H. Souverain, Paris, 1842.

• L’orco, Perrotin, Paris, 1842.

• Mouny-Robin. Georges de Guérin, Perrotin, Paris, 1842.

• Lettres à Marcie. Poéme de Myrza, Perrotin, Paris, 1843.

• La sœur cadette, Perrotin, Paris, 1843.

• Jean Zizka, L. De Potter, Paris, 1843.

• Consuelo, L. de Potter, Paris, 1843.

• La comtesse de Rudolstadt, L. de Potter, Paris, 1844.

• Jeanne, Hauman, Bruxelles, 1844.

• Le meunier d’Angibault, Desessart, Paris, 1845.

• Isidora, H. Souverain, Paris, 1846.

• La mare au diable, Desessart, Paris, 1846.

• Teverino, Desessart, Paris, 1846.

• Le péché de Monsieur Antoine, H. Souverain, Paris, 1846–1847.

• Lucrézia Floriani, Desessart, Paris, 1847.

• Le Piccinino, Desessart, Paris, 1847.

• François le Champi, Méline, Cans et Cie, Bruxelles, 1848.

• La petite Fadette, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1849.

• Le mariage de Victorine, E. Blanchard, Paris, 1851.

• Il castello delle Désertes, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1851.

• Histoire du véritable Grigouille, E. Blanchard, Paris, 1851.

• La fauvette du docteur, J. Hetzel, 1852.

• Les Vacances de Pandolphe, D. Giraud e J. Dagneau, Paris, 1852.

• La Filleule, A. Cadot, Paris, 1853.

• Les maîtres sonneurs, A. Cadot, Paris, 1853.

• Mont Revéche, A. Cadot, Paris, 1853.

• Le Pressoir, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1853.

• Les Visions de la nuit dans la campagne, A. Cadot, Paris, 1853.

• La vallée noire, J. Hetzel, Paris, 1854.

• Flaminio, Librairie théâtrale, Paris, 1854.

• Adriani, C. Lassalle, New York, 1854.

• Histoire de ma vie, V. Lecou, Paris, 1854–1855.

• Procope le Grand. Le cercle hippique de Méziéres-en-Brenne, J. Hetzel, 1855.

• Maître Favilla, Librairie nouvelle, Paris, 1855.

• Comme il vous plaira, Librairie nouvelle, Paris, 1856.

• Françoise, Librairie nouvelle, Paris, 1856.

• Lucie, Librairie nouvelle, Paris, 1856.

• Evenor et Leucippe. Les amours de l’Âge d’Or, Garnier fréres, Paris, 1856.

• La Daniella, Librairie nouvelle, Paris, 1857.

• Le diable aux champs, Jaccottet, Bourdilliat et Cie, Paris, 1857.

• Ces beaux messieurs de Bois-Doré, A. Cadot, Paris, 1858.

• Légendes rustiques, A. Morel, Paris, 1858.

• Elle et Lui, L. Hachette, Paris, 1859.

• L’homme de neige, L. Hachette, Paris, 1859.

• Narcisse, L. Hachette, Paris, 1859.

• Marguerite de Sainte-Gemme, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1859.

• Constance Verrier, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1860.

• Jean de la Roche, L. Hachette, Paris, 1859.

• Le Marquis de Villemer, G. Paetz, Naumbourg, 1860.

• La famille de Germandre, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1861.

• Valvédre, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1861.

• La Ville Noire, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1861.

• Tamaris, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1862.

• Le Pavé, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1862.

• Souvenirs et impressions littéraires, E. Dentu, Paris, 1862.

• Antonia, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1863.

• Les Dames Vertes, J. Hetzel, Paris, 1963.

• Mademoiselle La Quintinie, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1863.

• Lettre d’un voyageur, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1863.

• Ce que dit le ruisseau, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1863.

• Le Drac, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1864.

• Théâtre de Nohant, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1864.

• La Confession d’une jeune fille, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1865.

• Laura, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1865.

• Les Charmettes, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1865.

• Flavie, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1866.

• Le Roi attend, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1866.

• Les Don Juan de village, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1866.

• Le Lis du Japon, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1866.

• Monsieur Sylvestre, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1866.

• Promenades autour d’un village, Hachette, Paris, 1866.

• Le dernier amour, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1867.

• Mademoiselle Merquem, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1868.

• Cadio, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1868.

• La Fille d’Albano, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1869.

• Carl, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1869.

• Pierre qui roule, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1870.

• Le beau Laurence, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1870.

• L’Autre, Michel Lévy fréres, Paris, 1870.

• Malgrétout, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1870.

• Journal d’un voyageur pendant la guerre, Michel Lévy fréres, Paris, 1871.

• Césarine Dietrich, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1871.

• Francia. Un bienfait n’est jamais perdu, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1872.

• Nanon, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1872.

• Impressions et souvenirs, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1873.

• Contes d’une grand’mére, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1873 e 1876.

• Ma sœur Jeanne, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1874.

• Les deux fréres, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1875.

• Flamarande, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1875.

• L'orgue du titan, Michel-Lévy fréres, Paris, 1876.

• La Tour de Percemont, C. Lévy, Paris, 1877.

• Nouvelles lettres d’un voyageur, C. Lévy, Paris, 1877.

• Marianne, C. Lévy, Paris, 1877.

• Derniéres pages, C. Lévy, Paris, 1877.

• Souvenirs de 1848, C. Lévy, Paris, 1880.

• Journal intime, Calmann Lévy, Paris, 1926 (written in 1834).

• Une conspiration en 1537, E. Droz, Paris, 1936 (written in 1831).