CHAPTER IX
HER FRIENDSHIP WITH GEORGE SAND
1858-1870
“Ma grande amie maternelle a été mon guide.”—Mme. Adam, Souvenirs.
To have been intimately associated with George Sand during the last fifteen years of that distinguished woman’s life, Mme. Adam regards as one of her greatest privileges.
Each of Mme. Adam’s seven volumes of Souvenirs has its hero and heroine: her grandmother, Mme. Seron, dominates the first, Mme. d’Agoult the second, Gambetta the four last. George Sand, while intervening in several volumes, figures most prominently in the third, Mes Sentiments et Nos Idées avant 1870. Here we find a striking portrait of that celebrated novelist whom her English critic, W. H. Myers, considers “the most noteworthy woman, with perhaps one exception, who has appeared since Sappho.”[138] Mme. Adam knew George Sand in the evening of her days, when she had lived down her enemies, partisanships, scandals, loves. They had passed away and left her “in grand old age sitting beneath the roof that sheltered her earliest years, and writing for her grandchildren stories in which her own childhood lives anew.”
It is not surprising that Juliette Adam and George Sand should have been attracted to one another; for they had many natural affinities. They were both passionately romantic and idealist. “Je suis restée troubadour,” writes Mme. Sand in January 1867,[139] “c’est à dire croyant à l’amour, à l’art, à l’idéal.” They were both incurable optimists, ardent adorers of nature, lovers of humble folk, and of peasants especially; delighting in simple things, in the joys of friendship, in the pleasures of family life, though both had known marital miseries. Their upbringing had not been unlike, penetrated in each case with a strong strain of paganism. Neither was a rationalist, for surging up from the subconsciousness of them both was a keen sense of the unseen and a lively curiosity in the occult.
Their creeds differed: George Sand was a deist, Juliette in those days a pantheist. But Mme. Sand was not mistaken when she prophesied that one day her young friend’s faith would approximate more nearly to her own. “Essayez donc de vous convertir à mon Dieu unique,” she said. “Il y’a en votre âme un grand vide de spiritualité dont vous ne vous apercevez pas a cette heure, parce que vous avez la vie la plus pleine que se puisse imaginer, mais un beau jour vous sentirez l’insufficence que vous apporte votre croyance en l’incroyance.”[140]
It was in 1858, on the publication of her first book, Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes, written as we have seen partly in defence of George Sand, that Juliette first came into personal relationship with the writer whom she had long admired. “George Sand me remercia par une fort belle lettre pleine de gratitude,” she writes.[141] Later the young authoress received a visit from one of Mme. Sand’s friends, a certain Captain d’Arpentigny, who explained to her that, as she was the friend of the Comtesse d’Agoult, with whom Mme. Sand had quarrelled,[142] the latter deemed it prudent that she and her young champion should not meet. If some day Juliette should break off her relations with Mme. d’Agoult, then she might come to see George Sand.