But de Musset, unrebuffed, succeeded in his ambition. He managed to secure an introduction to her at a banquet given by the Revue des Deux Mondes editors. And almost at once his love was reciprocated. Then began a union that was alternately the interest, the scandal, and the laughing-stock of a continent.
Each of the lovers was a genius; each had been pedestaled by the world; each was supposed to live on a rarified plane far above the heads or the ken of mere earth folk. The love affair of two such immortals might reasonably be expected—was expected—to be akin to the noble romances of poetry.
As a matter of fact, its three-year course was one long series of babyish spats, of ridiculous scenes, and of behavior worthier the inmates of a mad-house or a kindergarten than of the decade's two master intellects.
George Sand expected De Musset to live on the heights of bloodless idealism. When he did so, she berated him as heartless. When he failed to, she denounced him as an animal. She was never content with whatever course he might follow. Yet she was madly in love with him.
During their brief separations, she avalanched him with letters; some furious, some imploring, some wildly affectionate, some drearily commonplace. Here is an extract from one, displaying a fair sample of her warmer moods:
It is nothing to you to have tamed the pride of such a woman as I, and to have stretched me a suppliant at your feet? It is nothing to you that I am dying of love?—torment of my life that you are!
He found himself unable to avoid accepting some of the numberless hearts that were flung like roses at his feet. He could modulate from one love affair to another as fleetly and as gracefully as from one key to its remote neighbor.
Here, too, is the account given by a later chronicler of the composer's meeting with George Sand:
One evening, as he was entering a house where a literary reception was in progress, Chopin fancied he was pursued by a violet-scented phantom. In superstitious fear, he would have left the house at once, but friends who were with him laughed away his dread and described the phenomenon as the fancy of a sick man's brain.
He entered the crowded salon and was forthwith presented to the guest of honor, a swarthy and strange-looking woman—the premiere novelist, Madame Dudevant—George Sand.