Side by side with the books which have the high-minded young girl as heroine, we find one or two in which the mature woman is the central figure—in which George Sand has given a more direct representation of her own character. Such are Le Secrétaire intime, a comparatively weak story, and Lucrezia Floriani, one of the most remarkable productions of her pen. Of this latter book, it may with truth be said that it is not food for every one (Non hic piscis omnium). To most readers it will seem a forbidding or revolting literary paradox; for it aims at proving the modesty, nay, the chastity of an unmarried woman (an Italian actress and play-writer) who has four children by three fathers. But it is a book in which the authoress has successfully performed the difficult task she set herself, that of giving us an understanding of a woman's nature which is so rich and so healthy that it must always love, so noble that it cannot be degraded, so much that of the artist that it cannot rest content with a single feeling, and has the power to recover from repeated disappointments.
George Sand was successful because she simply presented her readers with the key to her own nature. Many who have heard of the authoress's irregular life, of her liaisons with Jules Sandeau, Alfred de Musset, Michel de Bourges, Chopin, Manceau, and half-a-dozen others, must have asked themselves how books that, with all their passion, are so pure and noble as hers, could be the outcome of such a disorderly and, according to accepted ideas, degraded life. And many have felt that the inherent curiosity of the artist nature (which she defined by saying that when the conversation turned upon cannibalism her first thought was: "I wonder what human flesh tastes like;") was not a sufficient explanation of her conduct. In Lucrezia Floriani she has given us an exhaustive study of her own character at the age of thirty. I shall endeavour to make the character intelligible with the help of passages culled from different parts of the book.
"Lucrezia Floriani by nature was—who would have believed it?—as chaste as is the soul of a little child. It certainly seems strange to hear this of a woman who had loved so much and so many.... It is probable that the sensual part of her organisation was especially powerfully developed; although to men who did not please her she seemed frigid.... In the rare intervals when her heart had been tranquil, her brain had been at rest; and if she could have been prevented from ever seeing the other sex, she would have made an excellent nun, calm and vigorous. This is as much as to say that nothing could be purer than her thoughts when she was alone, and that when she loved, all that was not her lover was to her, as far as the senses were concerned, solitude, emptiness, nonentity." Lucrezia says of love: "I know that it is said to be a sensual impulse; but this is not true in the case of clever women. With them it follows a regular course; it takes possession of the brain first, knocking at the door of the imagination. Without the golden key to that door it cannot enter. When it has established its mastery there, it descends into the lower regions; it insinuates itself into all our faculties; and then we love the man who rules us, as god, brother, husband, everything that a woman can love." The authoress explains how it was possible for Lucrezia's soul to be continually possessed afresh by the erotic illusion, and in particular how her last, ardently passionate attachment for Prince Karol (Chopin) came into being. "To these rich, strong natures the last love seems always the first; and certain it is, that if affection is to be measured by enthusiasm, Lucrezia had never loved so much. The enthusiasm she had felt for other men had been of short duration. They had been incapable of maintaining it or renewing it. Love had survived disillusionment for a certain time; then came the stage of generosity, solicitude, compassion, devotion, of the motherly feeling, to put it in a word. It was a marvel that passions so foolishly conceived should have lasted so long; although the world, judging only by appearances, was astonished and scandalised to see her breaking the ties so soon and so completely. In all these attachments she had been hardly a week happy and blind—and was not the absolute devotion of one, sometimes two, years, which followed on a love that she recognised to have been foolish and ill-bestowed, a supreme effort of heroism, greater than the sacrifice of a whole life for a being felt to be worthy of it?"
We can understand how it was that weak men had an attraction for Lucrezia. Her independent character in combination with her motherly instincts drew her to the weak. The idea of being protected was intolerable to her; and on occasions when she had felt the desire to lean upon those who were stronger than herself, she had too often been repelled by their coldness. She was therefore inclined to believe that love and energy were to be found in combination only in hearts which had suffered as much as her own.
Finally, we see how her relation to her children—and Lucrezia, like George Sand, is the tenderest, most affectionate of mothers—influenced her erotic life. "She had wished to be a mother to her lovers without ceasing to be the mother of her children, and the conflict between the two feelings had always ended in the extinction of the less obstinate passion. The children triumphed, and the lovers, who, to speak metaphorically, had been taken from the Foundling Hospital of civilisation, were obliged, sooner or later, to return there."
Lucrezia speaks of her attitude to the verdict of the world on her character and life in terms which are directly applicable to George Sand. "I have never sought notoriety. I may have caused scandal, but never knowingly or willingly. I have never loved two men at the same time. I have never, even in thought, belonged to more than one during any given time, that is, as long as my passion lasted. When I no longer loved a man, I did not deceive him. I broke off with him entirely. I had vowed, it is true, in my enthusiasm, to love him always; and I made the vow in absolute good faith. Every time I loved, it was so ardently and perfectly that I believed it was for the first and last time in my life. You cannot call me a respectable woman. But I myself am certain that I am one; I even lay claim to be a virtuous woman, though I know that, according to your ideas and public opinion, this is blasphemy. I submit my life to the verdict of the world without rebelling, without disputing the justice of its general laws, but not acknowledging that it is right in my case."[6]
The contrast between Lucrezia Floriani and the short series of simple, beautiful peasant stories which follow it after a short interval and bring us up to 1848, seems at first sight a very marked one. In reality, however, the gulf separating Lucrezia from La Mare au Diable, François le Champi, and La petite Fadette is not so wide as it appears. What attracted George Sand to the peasants of Berry, to the rustic idylls of her native province, was the very same Rousseau-like enthusiasm for nature that had lent impetus and weight to her protests against the laws of society. Her secretary and intimate friend, Müller-Strübing, a German, is said to have drawn her attention to Auerbachs earliest village stories, and thereby to have instigated her to the production of the works which, thanks to their simplicity and calm purity, no less than to their wealth of feeling, have gained her the widest circle of readers. Auerbach was consecrated peasant-annalist by Spinoza, the apostle of natural piety, George Sand by Rousseau, the worshipper of nature. Her French peasants are very certainly not "real" in the same sense as Balzac's in Les Paysans; they are not merely represented with a sympathy which is as strong as his antipathy, but are made out to be amiable, tender-hearted, and sensitively delicate in their feelings; they are to real French peasants what the shepherds of Theocritus were to the real shepherds of Greece. Nevertheless, these tales have one merit which they owe entirely to their subject-matter and which George Sand's other novels lack—they possess the charm, always rare, but doubly rare in French literature, of naïveté. All that there was of the peasant girl, of the country child, in George Sand; everything in her which was akin to the plants that grow, to the breeze that blows, knowing not whence it cometh nor whither it goeth; all that which, unconscious and dumb, was so legible in her countenance and behaviour, but was so often nullified in her works by sentimentality and phrase-mongering, revealed itself here in its childlike simplicity.
La Mare au Diable, written in 1841, is the gem of these village tales. In it idealism in French fiction reaches its highest level. In it George Sand gave to the world what she declared to Balzac it was her desire to write—the pastoral of the eighteenth century.
[1] Compare the passages from Jacques quoted in The Romantic School in Germany, pp. 104, 105. Émile Zola latterly adopted a different tone.