But a turning-point in the spoilt, arrogant young man's life was at hand.
On the 15th of August 1833 Rolla appeared in what was then a new periodical, the Revue des deux Mondes. A few days afterwards its editor, Buloz, a Swiss, invited his collaborators to a dinner at the famous Palais-Royal restaurant, Les trois frères provençaux. The guests were numerous; among them was one lady. The host, introducing Alfred de Musset to Madame George Sand, requested him to take her in to dinner.
They were a handsome couple. He was slender and refined-looking, fair, with dark eyes, and a sharp, horse-like profile; she was dark, with luxuriant, wavy, black hair, a beautifully smooth, olive skin, faintly tinged with red in the cheeks, large, striking dark eyes, and perfectly shaped arms and hands. One felt that there was a whole world behind that forehead, and yet the lady was young and charming and as silent as if she had no pretensions to intellect. Her dress was simple, though somewhat fantastic; she wore a gold-embroidered Turkish jacket over her bodice and a dagger at her waist.
In Paris in 1870 I heard one of the few surviving guests at this dinner say that it was a piece of peasant cunning, a regular speculation on the part of Buloz, this bringing together of De Musset and George Sand. Buloz had said beforehand to one of his acquaintances: "He shall take her in to dinner. All women fall in love with him; all men consider it their duty to fall in love with her; they will certainly fall in love with each other—what manuscripts I shall get then!" And he rubbed his hands at the thought.
They were two extremely dissimilar beings who sat side by side at this table. Probably the only point of resemblance between them was that they were both authors.
Hers was a fertile, a maternal nature. Her mind was healthy, healthy even in its revolutionary outbursts, richly endowed and well-balanced. Her body was healthy too; she could stand the most fatiguing kind of life, could work most of the night, and content herself with a long morning sleep, which she commanded at will, and from which she awoke refreshed. Every great passion, every revolutionary idea which had moved the nineteenth century, had been housed by this woman in her soul, and yet she had retained her freshness, her tranquillity of mind, and her self-control. She could write calmly and carefully for six hours at a stretch. She had a gift of mental concentration which enabled her to take her pen and transfer her dreams to paper amidst the talking and laughing of a large company as if she were sitting in perfect solitude. And after doing it she would take part in what was going on, smiling, rather taciturn, hearing everything, understanding everything, absorbing everything that was said as a sponge absorbs water.
And he! His was in a far higher degree the artistic temperament. His work was a fever, his sleep was restless, his impulses and passions were uncontrollable. When he conceived an idea he did not sit brooding over it silent and sphinx-like as she did; he was overpowered and trembled, "plus étourdi qu'un page amoureux d'une fée," to quote an expression of his own. And when he seated himself at his desk to work out his idea he was constantly tempted to throw away his pen in despair. The process was so slow; the thoughts came crowding, demanding instant expression; violent palpitation of the heart was the result; and if the smallest temptation presented itself—an invitation to sup with friends and beautiful women, or a proposal to make a country excursion—he fled from his work as men flee from an enemy.
She "knitted" her novels; he wrote his works in a brief, burning, blissful ecstasy which gave place on the following day to disgust with what he had written. He thought it bad, and yet was incapable of re-writing it, for he hated his pen as the galley-slave hates his oar. In spite of all his youthful arrogance he writhed and moaned as if in constant anguish, and the reason was that within his slender, pliant frame dwelt a giant of an artist, who felt more deeply and strongly and lived harder and faster than the man in whom he was incorporate could bear, and who conceived greater ideas than the brain which was his organ could bring into the world without the most distressful birth-throes. When the poet flung himself into every kind of dissipation, it was chiefly from the need of deadening the suffering that his genius caused him.
He, the youth of two-and-twenty, the spoiled son of aristocratic parents, living at home, protected by a brother's vigilant affection, and with no real experience except of a few love affairs, had the knowledge of life, the suspiciousness, the bitterness, the misanthropy of a man of forty; and where his knowledge was insufficient, he eked it out with assumed indifference and cynicism.
She, the woman of twenty-eight, with Bohemian and royal blood in her veins (she was a great-granddaughter of Maurice of Saxony), with the gravest experiences of life behind her, now without family, fortune, home, or the support of any male relative, separated from her little children, reduced to elective affinities, leading the life of the literary Bohemian, bearing a man's name, wearing male attire, and living like a man among men, was, nevertheless, in the depths of her soul, naïve, passionless, enthusiastic, tender-hearted, and as eagerly receptive of everything new as if she had had no experiences to speak of, and had never been disillusioned.