As one may glean from her verbal tilt with Sandeau, she was not a recluse or a misanthropist. In fact, she numbered her ardent wooers by the dozen. Her love life began at a convent school when she was little more than a child, and it endured until old age set in. Perhaps a list of its victims, as Sandeau so cruelly hinted, would have resembled a city directory. It certainly would have borne a striking likeness to a cyclopedic index of Europe's nineteenth-century celebrities; for it embraced such immortal names as De Musset, Sandeau, Balzac, Chopin, Carlyle, Prosper Merimee, Liszt, Dumas and many another. So many demigods knelt at her shrine that at last she wrote:
I am sick of great men. I would far rather see them in Plutarch than in real life. In Plutarch or in marble or in bronze, their human side would not disgust me so.
And the personality, the appearance, the Venusberg charm of this heart monopolist? One instinctively pictures a svelte form, a "face that launched a thousand ships," and all the rest of the sirenic paraphernalia that instinctively attach themselves to one's mental vision of a wholesale fracturer of hearts. Here is Balzac's description of her. It is found in a letter written to Madame Hanska in 1838, when George Sand was at the acme of her super-woman career:
I found her in her dressing gown, smoking an after-dinner cigar, beside the fire in an immense room. She wore very pretty yellow slippers with fringes, coquettish stockings, and red trousers. Physically, she has acquired a double chin, like a well-fed priest. She has not a single white hair, in spite of her terrible misfortunes. Her beautiful eyes are as sparkling as ever.
When she is sunk in thought, she looks just as stupid as formerly—as I told her—for her expression lies wholly in her eyes. She goes to bed at six in the morning and rises at noon. (I go to bed at six in the evening and rise at midnight; but, of course, I am conforming myself to her habits.) She smokes to excess and plays, perhaps, too much the grande dame.
Carlyle, still less merciful, snarls forth the following wholly Carlylean epitome of George Sand's looks:
"She has the face of a horse!"
Another contemporary writer declares:
"Her hair is as black and shiny as ebony; her swarthy face is red and heavy; her expression fierce and defiant, yet dull."
So much for the verity of traditional siren dreams I So much, too, for the theory that beauty or daintiness or feminity has anything to do with the nameless charm of the world's super-women.