Aurore was putting him to a test, that's all. She was proving to him that she could meet him on his own preserve, give him choice of weapons, and make him cry for mercy.
Her bent was literature, with music, science and art as side-lines. She read Montaigne, Rochefoucald, Racine and Moliere, and a modern by the name of Alfred de Musset, and quoted her authors at inconvenient times. She flashed quotations and epigrams upon the doughty dragoon in a way he could neither fend nor parry. At other times she was deeply religious and tearfully penitent.
In fact, she was living on a skimped allowance of love, and had never received the attention that a good woman deserves. Her chains were galling her. She sighed for Paris—forty miles away—Paris and a career.
The epigrams were coming faster, shot in a sort of frenzy and fever. And when she asked her liege for leave to go to Paris, he granted her prayer, and agreed to give her ten dollars a week allowance.
She grabbed at the offer, and he bade her Godspeed and good riddance.
So leaving her two children behind, until such a time as she could provide a home for them, with scanty luggage and light heart and purse, she started away.
Other women have gone up to Paris from country towns, too, and the chances are as one to ten thousand that the maelstrom will sweep them into hades.
But Madame Dudevant was different—in two years she had won her way to literary fame, and was commanding the jealous admiration of the best writers of Paris. Her first work was a collaboration with Jules Sandeau in a novel. Every woman who ever wrote well began by collaborating with a man. Sandeau had formerly come from Nohant, and how much he had to do with Madame Dudevant's breaking loose from her homes-ties no one knows. Anyway, the second novel was written by the Madame alone, and as a tribute to her friend the name "George Sand" was placed upon the title-page as author. Jules Sandeau, all-'round hack-writer and critic, was greatly pleased by the compliment of having his name anglicized and printed on the title-page of "Indiana," but later he was not so proud of it. George Sand soon proved herself to be a bigger man than Sandeau.
She was not handsome, either in face or in form. She was inclined to be stout—was rather short—and her complexion olive. But she lured with her eyes—great sphinx-like eyes of hazel-brown—that looked men through and through. Liszt has told us that "she had eyes like a cow," which is not so bad as Thomas Carlyle's remark that George Eliot had a face like a horse. George Sand was silent when other women talked, and her look told in a half-proud, half-sad way that she knew all they knew, and all she herself knew beside.
Without going into the issue as to what George Sand was not, let us frankly admit that pain, deprivation, misunderstanding and maternity had taught her many things not found in books, and that she looked at Fate out of her wide-open eyes with a gaze that did not blink. She was wise beyond the lot of women. I was just going to say she was a genius, but I remember the remark of the De Goncourts to the effect that, "There are no women of genius—women of genius are men." Possibly the point could be covered by saying George Sand had a man's head and a woman's heart.