George Sand came, honestly, if left-handedly, by her cardiac prowess. For she was a great-great-granddaughter of Adrienne Lecouvreur and Marshal Saxe; two of history's stellar heart breakers—a fact of which she made much.
Her father was a French army officer—Lieutenant Dupin—and as a mere baby his only daughter, Aurore, was acclaimed "daughter of the regiment." Decked out in a tiny uniform, the ugly duckling ran wild in the army posts where her father was stationed, and joined right boisterously in the soldiers' rough sports.
Later, she was sent to a convent. From her own description of this particular retreat, it was a place that crushed out all normal and childish ideas and filled the growing mind with a morbid melancholy. Yet it was there that love first found the girl.
The victim—or victor—was one Stephane de Grandsaigne, professor of physiology. Under his tuition she developed a queer craving for dissection—a fad she followed, in psychic form, through life. The love scenes between herself and her adored professor were usually enacted while they were together dissecting a leg or an arm or probing the mysteries of retina and cornea.
It was a semigruesome, unromantic episode, and it ended with suddenness when the pupil was sent out into the world. There a husband was found for her. He was Casimir Dudevant, a man she liked well enough and who was mildly fond of her. They lived together for a time in modified content. Two children were born to them.
By and by, Casimir took to drink. Many people refused to blame him. Indeed, there are present-day students of George Sand's life who can find a host of excuses for his bibulous failings. But once, coming home from a spree, Casimir forgot to take his wife's lofty reproaches with his wonted good nature.
In a flash of drunken anger, he struck her. And she left him.
The high spirit of her act of independence is marred just a little by the fact that she chanced to be in love with another man. This other man was Aurelian de Seze, a ponderous country magistrate. The affair was brief. Presently the two had parted. And George Sand, penniless, went to Paris to make a living by literature.
She obtained hack work of a sort, lived in the typical drafty garret so dear to unrecognized genius, and earned for a time only fifteen francs—three dollars—a month. It was the customary nadir, wherein one gathers equipment for success.
Then she met Jules Sandeau. He was a lawyer who dabbled in literature. He fell in love with the lonely woman and she with him. They formed a literary partnership. Together they wrote novels and began to achieve a certain measure of good luck. Their novels were signed "George Sand." Why, no one knows. It was a pen name devised by the feminine member of the novelistic firm.