GEORGE SAND.
Upon no woman of the century has the public fixed its eye with a more eager interest and curiosity than upon Aurore Dudevant, known to the world as George Sand.
The utmost heights of panegyric and adulation have been scaled in describing her and her work; also the lowest depths of denunciation and of calumny. Her admirers describe her as being not only the greatest genius of her time, which perhaps few will dispute, but as being the most magnificent and adorable of women as well; while her detractors can find no language in which to express the depths of their loathing both for her life and some of her works. As usual, a just estimate of such a character as this will be found between the two extremes. She was neither a monster nor a saint, but a woman of magnificent qualities and of defects upon a corresponding scale. As with her life, so with her works. Some are undoubtedly pernicious to an alarming degree, while the influence of others cannot by any stretch of imagination be called bad. The two kinds may perhaps be divided under the head of earlier and later works. When the tumultuous feelings and wild visions of youth were calmed by age, a new kind of literary product came forth. And her life in its latter years was as quiet as her books, and ran as little against the traditions and usages of mankind.
George Sand was born in 1804, and descended from Marshal Saxe, the natural son of the King of Poland. This Marshal Saxe was one of the bravest but most licentious men of his time,—a time not noted for its domestic virtues. She was brought up in the country until fifteen years of age, in the midst of the elegancies of an aristocratic home. But her unbounded vitality called loudly for an out-of-door life, and she lived the life of a boy, never wearying of its rude sports, and enjoying its sometimes dangerous excitements. At the close of her fifteenth year she was taken to the Augustine Convent in Paris, where she remained for three years, and where she passed through a very intense religious experience and came near becoming a nun. It is a curious piece of speculation to try to imagine what her life as a nun would have been, had this design been carried out. Would the prayers and litanies, the penances and the fasts, have tamed her wild blood? Would her nature have still asserted itself under the cap of the sister? would she have led a revolt against authority within the church as she did without? Are there any such fierce, tumultuous natures as hers to-day kneeling on stony cloister floors? Can matins and vespers, the odors of incense, and the sacred ceremonial of the church fill up for an ardent nature all that the service of the world supplies? We shall never know; for the real history of a faithful daughter of the church will never be written. The story of the three years of George Sand's convent life is very charming, full of variety and sincerity, and matchless in point of style; but it is a fragment.
She came out of the convent a young woman knowing absolutely nothing of real life. The object of all who have charge of young girls in France is to keep them in perfect ignorance of the world. The safety that lies in knowledge is utterly forbidden to them. They are supposed to be children, and are watched over as such until a marriage can be arranged. And this marriage, whatever it may be, is usually accepted by the girl as an escape from a sort of slavery. She is always told that she may only do the things she desires to do after marriage. And it is very unusual for any girl to object to the wishes of her friends in this matter. The whole system of marriage in France is so utterly abominable that no other civilized land would tolerate it; and this sacrifice of the young and ignorant is only one of its diabolical features. Aurore Dudevant did not seem to object more than the rest. She was married, and lived for eight years with her husband, becoming the mother of two children.
She then left him and her estate of Nohant, and went up to Paris, taking her two children with her. She sacrificed her personal fortune—which was considerable—in doing so, and was obliged to earn her own living. She tried various things in the artistic line before she essayed the writing of books. At last with one grand bound she leaped before the world in "Indiana." Of course she had written some things of small value before this, but that wonderful book was really her introduction to the world. And it brought the whole literary world to her feet. Thereafter her friends were the first men of France. De Lamennais, Pierre Leroux, Michel, Alfred de Musset, Chopin, Liszt, Delacroix, Béranger, Sainte-Beuve, Gustave Planche, Mazzini, were her friends, her intimates, or her lovers.
Alfred de Musset was the first who found favor with her heart, it appears; and they were inseparably associated for about three years. This brilliant young poet, so sceptical, so sad, so audacious, so dissolute, was the first of this famous coterie of men to become madly infatuated with George Sand,—but far from the last. It is asserted that each in turn, and many more besides, were the victims of her luring wiles. For many years the wildest stories were afloat concerning her and her enchantments. And the fact that two or three of her most ardent worshippers ended their lives for her sake only added to the interest and the horror with which the world of respectability and morality looked upon this strange woman. She had broken once for all with the world of conventionality, and was free to follow whatever inclination seized upon her, unrestrained by aught but conscience,—for we are far from thinking that she ever parted permanently with that disagreeable but useful monitor.
So she lived out her brief romance with De Musset, and, apparently unmindful of his tragic end, entered upon a new epoch of her life with that most remarkable modern musical genius, Chopin.
Poor Alfred de Musset has had the sympathy of all classes and conditions of men, apparently, from that day to this. She tried to vindicate herself in the affair by publishing a book entitled "Elle et Lui," "wherein she depicted the sufferings of an angelic woman, all tenderness, love, and patience, whose fate was joined to that of a man all egotism, selfishness, sensuousness, and eccentricity." How grandly the woman suffered, and how wantonly the man flung happiness away, is told with all the impassioned fervor of George Sand in her early writings. The taste of the whole proceeding was revoltingly low, and no more than matched by that of the rejoinder, which was made in a book called "Lui et Elle," written by Paul de Musset after his brother's death. In this book the picture is reversed: "a hideous woman is portrayed, utterly selfish, dissolute, heartless; and her lover, who is easily recognized as Musset himself, is described as having almost all of the heroic virtues." Both books were thoroughly French,—thoroughly execrable.
Chopin at first feared Madame Sand very much, and refused to be presented to her; but as she persisted in her desire to make the acquaintance of so fine and delicate a genius, they at last met, and the fate of poor Chopin was at once sealed. He was consumed from the very first by an absorbing passion, to which no other name but morbid infatuation could be applied. Madame Sand herself describes it in "Lucrezia Floriani" thus:—