I arrived at the Château de Nohant on Shrove Saturday, about half-past seven in the evening, and I found comrade George Sand in her dressing-gown, smoking a cigar after dinner in the chimney-corner of an immense solitary chamber. She was wearing pretty yellow slippers trimmed with fringe, coquettish stockings, and red trousers. So much for the moral. Physically, she has doubled her chin like a monk. She has not a single white hair in spite of her dreadful troubles; her swarthy skin has not varied; her beautiful eyes are still dazzling; she has the same stupid look when she thinks, for, as I told her, after studying her, all her physiognomy is in her eye. She has been at Nohant a year, very sad, and working enormously. She leads about the same life as mine. She goes to bed at six in the morning and rises at midday; I go to bed at six in the evening and rise at midnight. But, naturally, I conformed to her habits; and for three days we talked from five o'clock, after dinner, till five next morning; so that I knew her better, and reciprocally, in those three talks, than during the four preceding years, when she came to my house at the time she loved Jules Sandeau, and was connected with Musset. She knew me only as I went to see her now and then.
It was useful for me to see her, for we made mutual confidences on the subject of Jules Sandeau. I, who am the last to blame her for that desertion, have nothing now but the deepest compassion for her, as you will have for me when you know with whom we had to do, she, in love; I, in friendship.
She was, however, even more unhappy with Musset; and she is now in deep retirement, condemning both marriage and love; because in both states she has met with nothing but deceptions.
Her male is rare, that is the whole of it. He is the more so because she is not lovable, and, consequently, will always be difficult to love. She is a lad, she is an artist, she is grand, generous, devoted, chaste; she has the great lineaments of a man: ergo, she is not a woman. I did not feel, any more than I formerly felt when beside her, attacked by that gallantry of the epidermis which one ought to employ in France and Poland towards every species of woman. I talked as with a comrade. She has lofty virtues, of the kind that society takes the wrong way. We discussed, with a gravity, good faith, candor, and conscience worthy of the great shepherds who lead herds of men, the grand questions of marriage and liberty: "For," as she said to me with immense pride (I should never have dared to think it for myself), "although by our writings we are preparing a revolution for future manners and morals, I am not less struck by the objections to the one than by those to the other."
We talked a whole night on this great problem. I am altogether for the liberty of the young girl and the slavery of the wife; that is to say, I wish that before marriage she should know what she binds herself to, that she should study it all, because, when she has signed the contract and experienced its chances she must be faithful to it. I gained a great deal in making Madame Dudevant recognize the necessity of marriage; but she will believe it, I am sure, and I think I have done good in proving it to her.
She is an excellent mother, adored by her children; but she dresses her daughter Solange as a boy, which is not right. Morally, she is like a young man of twenty, for she is inwardly chaste and prudish; she is only an artist externally. She smokes immoderately; plays the princess a little too much, perhaps; and I am convinced that she has faithfully painted herself in the princess of her "Secrétaire intime." She knows, and said, of herself just what I think, without my saying it to her, namely: that she has neither force of conception, nor gift of constructing plots, nor faculty of reaching the true, nor the art of pathos, but—without knowing the French language—she has style; and that is true.
She takes her fame, as I do mine, in jest, and she has a profound contempt for the public, calling it Jumento.
I will relate to you the immense and secret devotion of this woman for those two men, and you will say to yourself that there is nothing in common between angels and devils. All the follies that she has committed are titles to fame in the eyes of great and noble souls. She was duped by Madame Dorval, Bocage, Lamennais, etc., etc. Through the same sentiment she is now the dupe of Listz and Madame d'Agoult; but she has just come to see it as to that pair as she did in the case of la Dorval; she has one of those minds that are powerful in the study, through intellect, and extremely easy to entrap on the domain of realities.
Apropos of Listz and Madame d'Agoult, she gave me the subject of "Les Galériens," or "Amours forcés," which I am going to write; for in her position she cannot do so. Keep that secret. In short, she is a man, and all the more a man because she wants to be one, because she has come out of womanhood, and is not a woman. Woman attracts, and she repels; and, as I am very much of a man, if she produces that effect on me she must produce it on all men who are like me; she will always be unhappy. Thus, she now loves a man who is inferior to her, and in that contract there can be only deception and disenchantment for a woman with a fine soul. A woman ought always to love a man superior to herself, or else be so well deceived that it will be as if it were so.