The picture given by Madame Sand and her guests of these years of her life is charming enough, and in certain ways seems an ideal kind of existence, amid beloved children, friends, pleasant and calm surroundings, and the sweets of successful literary activity. But if it had its bright lights, it had also its deep shadows. For every fresh pleasure and interest crowded into her existence, there entered a fresh source of anxiety and trouble. Age, in bringing her more power of endurance, had not blunted her sensibilities. As usual with the strongest natures in their hours of depression—and none so strong as to escape these—she could then look for no help except from herself. Those accustomed, like her, to shirk no responsibility, no burden, to invite others to lean on them, and to ask no support, if their fortitude gives way find the allowance, help and sympathy so easily accorded to their weaker fellow-creatures nowhere ready for them. The exclamation wrung from one of the characters in a later work of Madame Sand's, may be but a faithful echo of the cry of her own nature in some moment of mental torment. "Let me be weak; I have been seeming to be strong for so long a time!"
Chopin, though the study of his genius had freshly inspired her own, and greatly extended her comprehension of musical art, was a being to whom the burden of his own life was too painful to allow him to lighten the troubles of another; a partial invalid, a prey to nervous irritation, he was dependent on her to soothe and cheer him at the best of times, and to be nurse and secretary besides when he was prostrated by illness or despondency. One is loth to call selfish a nature so attractive in its refinement, so unhappy in its over-susceptibility. But it is obvious that such a one might easily become a trial to those he loved. With all its vigor her nervous system could not escape the exhaustion and disturbance that attend on incessant brain-work. "Those who have nothing to do," she remarks, "when they see artists produce with facility, are ready to wonder at how few hours, how few instants, these can reserve for themselves. For such do not know how these gymnastics of the imagination, if they do not affect your health, yet leave an excitation of your nerves, an obsession of mental pictures, a languor of spirit, that forbid you to carry on any other kind of work."
Although her constitution was even stronger than in her youth, she had for some years been subject to severe attacks of neuralgia. "Madame Sand suffers terribly from violent headaches and pain in her eyes," remarks Delacroix, in one of the letters above quoted, "which she takes upon herself to surmount as far as possible, with a great effort, so as not to distress us by what she goes through." Her habit of writing principally at night and contenting herself with the least possible allowance of repose, few could have persisted in for so long without breaking down. For many years she never took more than four hours sleep. The strain began to tell on her eye-sight at last, and already in a letter of 1842 she speaks of being temporarily compelled to suspend this practice of night-work, to her great regret, as in the daylight hours she was never secure from interruption. Only her abnormal power of activity and of bearing fatigue could have enabled her to fulfill so strenuously the responsibilities she had undertaken to her children, her private friends, and the public. The pressure of literary work was incessant, and whatever her dislike to accounts and arithmetic she is said to have fulfilled her engagements to editors and publishers with the regularity and punctuality of a notary. Her large acquaintance, relations with various classes, various projects, literary, political, and philanthropical, involved an immense amount of serious correspondence in addition to that arising from the postal persecution from which no celebrity escapes. Ladies wrote to consult her on sentimental subjects—to inquire of her, as of an oracle, whether they should bestow their heart, their hand, or both, upon their suitors; poets, to solicit her patronage and criticism. In the course of a single half-year, 153 manuscripts were sent her for perusal! She replied when it seemed fit, conscientiously and ungrudgingly; but experience had made her less expansive than formerly to those whose overtures she felt to be prompted by curiosity or some such idle motive, in the absence of any sympathy for her ways of thinking. "I am not to be caught in my words with indifferent persons," she writes to M. Charles Duvernet, describing how, when in her friend Madame Marliani's salon in Paris she heard herself and her political allies or their opinions attacked, she was not to be provoked into argument or indignant denial, but went on quietly with her work of hemming pocket-handkerchiefs. "To such people one speaks through the medium of the Press. If they will not attend, no matter."
Her sex, her anomalous position, her freedom of expression and action, exposed her to an extent quite exceptional, even for a public character, to the shafts of malice and slander. Accustomed to have to brave the worst from such attacks, she might and did arrive at treating them with an indifference that was not, however, in her nature, which shrank from the observation and personal criticism of the vulgar.
To a young poet of promise in whose welfare she took interest, she writes, August, 1842:—
Never show my letters except to your mother, your wife, or your greatest friend. It is a shy habit, a mania I have to the last degree. The idea that I am not writing for those alone to whom I write, or for those who love them thoroughly, would freeze my heart and my hand directly. Everyone has a fault. Mine is a misanthropy in my outward habits—for all that I have no passion left in me but the love of my fellow-creatures; but with the small services that my heart and my faith can render in this world, my personality has nothing to do. Some people have grieved me very much, unconsciously, by talking and writing about me personally and my doings, even though favorably, and meaning well. Respect this malady of spirit.
Madame Sand, being naturally undemonstrative, was commonly more or less tongue-tied and chilled in the presence of a stranger, and she had a frank dread of introductions and first interviews, even when the acquaintance was one she desired to make. Sometimes she asks her friends to prepare such new comers for receiving an unfavorable first impression, and to beg them not to be unduly prejudiced thereby. Such a one would find the persecution of lion-hunters intolerable, and now and then this drove her to extremities. Great must, indeed, have been the wrath of one of these irrepressibles, who, more obstinate than the rest, failing by fair means to get an introduction to George Sand, calmly pushed his way into Nohant unauthorized by anyone, whereupon her friends conspired to serve him the trick it must be owned he deserved; and which we give in the words of Madame Sand, writing to the Comtesse d'Agoult. The story is told also by Liszt in his letters:—
M. X. is ushered into my room. A respectable-looking person there receives him. She was about forty years of age, but you might give her sixty at a pinch. She had had beautiful teeth, but had got none left. All passes away! She had been rather good-looking, but was so no longer. All changes! Her figure was corpulent, and her hands were soiled. Nothing is perfect!
She was clad in a gray woolen gown spotted with black, and lined with scarlet. A silk handkerchief was negligently twisted round her black hair. Her shoes were faulty, but she was thoroughly dignified. Now and then she seemed on the point of putting an s or a t in the wrong place, but she corrected herself gracefully, talked of her literary works, of her excellent friend M. Rollinat, of the talents of her visitor which had not failed to reach her ears, though she lived in complete retirement, overwhelmed with work. M. G. brought her a foot-stool, the children called her mamma, the servants Madame.
She had a gracious smile, and much more distinguished manners than that fellow George Sand. In a word X. was happy and proud of his visit. Perched in a big chair, with beaming aspect, arm extended, speech abundant, there he stayed for a full quarter of an hour in ecstasies, and then took leave, bowing down to the ground to—Sophie!