George Sand, some aspects of her life and writings Part 3

People at La Chatre took the young man for her lover. The idea of finding him again in Paris was probably one of her reasons for wishing to establish herself there. Then came her life, as she describes it herself, "in the little room looking on to the quay. I can see Jules now in a shabby, dirty-looking artist's frock-coat, with his cravat underneath him and his shirt open at the throat, stretched out over three chairs, stamping with his feet or breaking the tongs in the heat of the discussion. The Gaulois used to sit in a corner weaving great plots, and you would be seated on a table."

All this must certainly have been charming. The room was too small, though, and George Sand commissioned Emile Regnault to find her a flat, the essential condition of which should be some way of egress for Jules at any hour.

A little flat was discovered on the Quay St. Michel. There were three rooms, one of which could be reserved. "This shall be the dark room,"

wrote George Sand, "the mysterious room, the ghost's retreat, the monster's den, the cage of the performing animal, the hiding-place for the treasure, the vampire's cave, or whatever you like to call it. . . ."

In plainer language, it was Jules' room; and then follows some touching eloquence about the dear boy she worshipped who loved her so dearly.

This is the beginning of things, but later on the tone of the correspondence changes. The letters become less frequent, and are also not so gay. George Sand speaks much less of Jules in them and much more of little Solange, whom she intended to bring back to Paris with her.

She is beginning to weary of Jules and to esteem him at his true value.

He is lazy, and has fits of depression and all the capriciousness of a spoilt child. She has had enough of him, and then, too, it is very evident from the letters that there has been some division among the lively friends who had sworn to be comrades for life. There are explanations and justifications. George Sand discovers that there are certain inconveniences connected with intimacies in which there is such disproportion of age and of social position. Finally there are the following desperate letters, written in fits of irritation: "My dear friend, go to Jules and look after him. He is broken-hearted, and you can do nothing for him in that respect. It is no use trying. I do not ask you to come to me yet, as I do not need anything. I would rather be alone to-day. Then, too, there is nothing left for me in life. It will be horrible for him for a long time, but he is so young. The day will come, perhaps, when he will not be sorry to have lived. . . .

Do not attempt to put matters right, as this time there is no remedy.

We do not blame each other at all, and for some time we have been struggling against this horrible necessity. We have had trouble enough.

There seemed to be nothing left but to put an end to our lives, and if it had not been for my children, we should have done this."

The question is, Was George Sand blameless in the matter? It appears that she had discovered that her dear Jules was faithless to her, and that, during her absence, he had deceived her. She would not forgive him, but sent him off to Italy, and refused to see him again. The last of these letters is dated June 15, 1833.

"I shall make a parcel of a few of Jules' things that he left in the wardrobe," she says, "and I will send them to you. I do not want anything to do with him when he comes back, and, according to the last words of the letter you showed me, his return may be soon. For a long time I have been very much hurt by the discoveries I made with regard to his conduct, and I could not feel anything else for him now but affectionate compa.s.sion. His pride, I hope, would refuse this. Make him clearly understand, if necessary, that there can never be anything more between us. If this hard task should not be necessary, that is, if Jules should himself understand that it could not be otherwise, spare him the sorrow of hearing that he has lost everything, even my respect. He must undoubtedly have lost his own self-esteem, so that he is punished enough."

Thus ended this great pa.s.sion. This was the first of George Sand's errors, and it certainly was an immense one. She had imagined that happiness reigns in students' rooms. She had counted on the pa.s.sing fancy of a young man of good family, who had come to Paris to sow his wild oats, for giving her fresh zest and for carving out for herself a fresh future. It was a most commonplace adventure, utterly dest.i.tute of psychology, and by its very bitterness it contrasted strangely with her elevated sentimental romance with Aurelien de Seze. That was the quintessence of refinement. All that is interesting about this second adventure is the proof that it gives us of George Sand's wonderful illusions, of the intensity of the mirage of which she was a dupe, and of which we have so many instances in her life.

Baronne Dudevant had tried conjugal life, and she had now tried free love. She had been unsuccessful in both instances. It is to these adventures though, to these trials, errors and disappointments that we owe the writer we are about to study. George Sand was now born to literature.

III

A FEMINIST OF 1832

THE FIRST NOVELS AND THE QUESTION OF MARRIAGE

When Baronne Dudevant arrived in Paris, in 1831, her intention was to earn her living with her pen. She never really counted seriously on the income she might make by her talent for painting flowers on snuff-boxes and ornamenting cigar-cases with water-colours. She arrived from her province with the intention of becoming a writer. Like most authors who commence, she first tried journalism. On the 4th of March, she wrote as follows to the faithful Boucoiran: "In the meantime I must live, and for the sake of that, I have taken up the worst of trades: I am writing articles for the _Figaro_. If only you knew what that means! They are paid for, though, at the rate of seven francs a column."

She evidently found it worth while to write for the _Figaro_, which at that time was quite a small newspaper, managed by Henri de Latouche, who also came from Berry. He was a very second-rate writer himself, and a poet with very little talent but, at any rate, he appreciated and discovered talent in others. He published Andre Chenier's first writings, and he introduced George Sand to the public. His new apprentice was placed at one of the little tables at which the various parts of the paper were manufactured. Unfortunately she had not the vocation for this work. The first principle with regard to newspaper articles is to make them short. When Aurore had come to the end of her paper, she had not yet commenced her subject. It was no use attempting to continue, so she gave up "the worst of trades," lucrative though it might be.

She could not help knowing, though, that she had the gift of writing.

She had inherited it from her ancestors, and this is the blest part of her atavism. No matter how far back we go, and in every branch of her genealogical tree, there is artistic heredity to be found. Maurice de Saxe wrote his _Reveries_. This was a fine book for a soldier to write, and for that alone he would deserve praise, even if he had not beaten the English so gloriously. Mademoiselle Verrieres was an actress and Dupin de Francueil a dilettante. Aurore's grandmother, Marie-Aurore, was very musical, she sang operatic songs, and collected extracts from the philosophers. Maurice Dupin was devoted to music and to the theatre.

Even Sophie-Victoire had an innate appreciation of beauty. She not only wept, like Margot, at melodrama, but she noticed the pink of a cloud, the mauve of a flower, and, what was more important, she called her little daughter's attention to such things. This illiterate mother had therefore had some influence on Aurore and on her taste for literature.

It is not enough to say that George Sand was a born writer. She was a born novelist, and she belonged to a certain category of novelists.

She had been created by a special decree of Providence to write her own romances, and not others. It is this which makes the history of the far-back origins of her literary vocation so interesting. It is extremely curious to see, from her earliest childhood, the promises of those faculties which were to become the very essence of her talent.

When she was only three years old, her mother used to put her between four chairs in order to keep her still. By way of enlivening her captivity, she tells us what she did.

"I used to make up endless stories, which my mother styled my novels.

. . . I told these stories aloud, and my mother declared that they were most tiresome on account of their length and of the development I gave to my digressions. . . . There were very few bad people in them, and never any serious troubles. Everything was always arranged satisfactorily, thanks to my lively, optimistic ideas. . . ."

She had already commenced, then, at the age of three, and these early stories are the precursors of the novels of her maturity. They are optimistic, drawn out, and with long digressions. Something similar is told about Walter Scott. There is evidently a primordial instinct in those who are born story-tellers, and this urges them on to invent fine stories for amusing themselves.

A little later on we have another phenomenon, almost as curious, with regard to Aurore. We are apt to wonder how certain descriptive writers proceed in order to give us pictures, the various features of which stand out in such intense relief that they appear absolutely real to us.

George Sand tells us that when Berquin's stories were being read to her at Nohant, she used to sit in front of the fire, from which she was protected by an old green silk screen. She used gradually to lose the sense of the phrases, but pictures began to form themselves in front of her on the green screen.

"I saw woods, meadows, rivers, towns of strange and gigantic architecture. . . . One day these apparitions were so real that I was startled by them, and I asked my mother whether she could see them."

With hallucinations like these a writer can be picturesque. He has in front of him, although it may be between four walls, a complete landscape. He has only to follow the lines of it and to reproduce the colours, so that in painting imaginary landscapes he can paint them from nature, from this model that appears to him, as though by enchantment.

He can, if he likes, count the leaves of the trees and listen to the sound of the growing gra.s.s.

Still later on, vague religious or philosophical conceptions began to mingle with the fiction that Aurore always had in her mind. To her poetical life, was added a moral life. She always had a romance going on, to which she was constantly adding another chapter, like so many links in a never-ending chain. She now gave a hero to her romance, a hero whose name was Corambe. He was her ideal, a man whom she had made her G.o.d. Whilst blood was flowing freely on the altars of barbarous G.o.ds, on Corambe's altar life and liberty were given to a whole crowd of captive creatures, to a swallow, to a robin-redbreast, and even to a sparrow. We see already in all this her tendency to put moral intentions into her romantic stories, to arrange her adventures in such a way that they should serve as examples for making mankind better. These were the novels, with a purpose, of her twelfth year.

Let us now study a striking contrast, by way of observing the first signs of vocation in two totally different novelists. In the beginning of _Facino Cane_, Balzac tells us an incident of the time when, as an aspiring writer, he lived in his attic in the Rue Lesdiguieres. One evening, on coming out of the theatre, he amused himself with following a working-man and his wife from the Boulevard du Pontaux-Choux to the Boulevard Beaumarchais. He listened to them as they talked of the piece they had just seen. They then discussed their business matters, and afterwards house and family affairs. "While listening to this couple,"

says Balzac, "I entered into their life. I could feel their clothes on my back and, I was walking in their shabby boots."

This is the novelist of the objective school, the one who comes out of himself, who ceases to be himself and becomes another person.

Instead of this exterior world, to which Balzac adapts himself, Aurore talks to us of an inner world, emanating from her own fancy, the reflection of her own imagination, the echo of her own heart, which is really herself. This explains the difference between Balzac's impersonal novel and George Sand's personal novel. It is just the difference between realistic art, which gives way to the object, and idealistic art, which transforms this according to its own will and pleasure.

Up to this time George Sand's ideas had not been put on to paper. Both _Corambe_ and the stories composed between four chairs were merely fancies of a child's mind. Aurore soon began to write, though. She had composed two novels while in the convent, one of which was religious and the other a pastoral story. She was wise enough to tear them both up. On leaving the convent she wrote another novel for Rene' de Villeneuve, and this shared the same fate. In 1827, she wrote her _Voyage en Auvergne_, and in 1829, another novel. In her _Histoire de ma vie_ she says of this: "After reading it, I was convinced that it was of no value, but at the same time I was sure I could write a better one. . . . I saw that I could write quickly and easily, and without feeling any fatigue.

The ideas that were lying dormant in my mind were quickened and became connected, by my deductions, as I wrote. With my meditative life, I had observed a great deal, and had understood the various characters which Fate had put in my way, so that I really knew enough of human nature to be able to depict it." She now had that facility, that abundance of matter and that nonchalance which were such characteristic features of her writing.

When George Sand began to publish, she had already written a great deal.

Her literary formation was complete. We notice this same thing whenever we study the early work of a writer. Genius is revealed to us, perhaps, with a sudden flash, but it has been making its way for a long time underground, so that what we take for a spontaneous burst of genius is nothing but the final effort of a sap which has been slowly acc.u.mulating and which from henceforth is all-powerful.

George Sand had to go through the inevitable period of feeling her way.

We are glad to think that the first book she published was not written by herself alone, so that the responsibility of that execrable novel does not lie solely with her.

On the 9th of March, 1831, George Sand wrote to Boucoiran as follows: "Monstrosities are in vogue, so we must invent monstrosities. I am bringing forth a very pleasant one just at present. . . ." This was the novel written in collaboration with Sandeau which appeared under the signature of Jules Sand towards the end of 1831. It was ent.i.tled, _Rose et Blanche, ou la Comedienne et la Religieuse_.

It begins by a scene in a coach, rather like certain novels by Balzac, but accompanied by insignificant details in the worst taste imaginable.

Two girls are travelling in the same coach. Rose is a young comedian, and Sister Blanche is about to become a nun. They separate at Tarbes, and the scene of the story is laid in the region of the Pyrenees, in Tarbes Auch, Nerac, the Landes, and finishes with the return to Paris.

Rose, after an entertainment which is a veritable orgy, is handed over by her mother to a licentious young man. He is ashamed of himself, and, instead of leading Rose astray, he takes her to the Convent of the Augustines, where she finds Sister Blanche once more. Sister Blanche has not yet p.r.o.nounced her vows, and the proof of this is that she marries Horace. But what a wedding! As a matter of fact, Sister Blanche was formerly named Denise. She was the daughter of a seafaring man of Bordeaux, and was both pretty and foolish. She had been dishonoured by the young libertine whom she is now to marry. The memory of the past comes back to Blanche, and makes her live over again her life as Denise.

In the mean time Rose had become a great singer. She now arrives, just in time to be present at her friend's deathbed. She enters the convent herself, and takes the place left vacant by Sister Blanche. The whole of this is absurd and frequently very disagreeable.

It is quite easy to distinguish the parts due to the two collaborators, and to see that George Sand wrote nearly all the book. There are the landscapes, Tarbes Auch, Nerac, the Landes, and a number of recollections of the famous journey to the Pyrenees and of her stay at Guillery with the Dudevant family. The Convent of the Augustines in Paris, with its English nuns and its boarders belonging to the best families, is the one in which Aurore spent three years. The cloister can be recognized, the garden planted with chestnut trees, and the cell from which there was a view over the city. All her dreams seemed so near Heaven there, for the rich, cloudy sky was so near--"that most beautiful and ever-changing sky, perhaps the most beautiful in the world," of which we read in _Rose et Blanche_. But together with this romance of religious life is a libertine novel with stories of orgies, of a certain private house, and of very risky and unpleasant episodes. This is the collaborator's share in the work. The risky parts are Sandeau's.

Such, then, is this hybrid composition. It was, in reality, the monstrosity announced by George Sand.

It had a certain success, but the person who was most severe in her judgment of it was Sophie-Victoire, George Sand's mother, who had very prudish tastes in literature. This woman is perfectly delightful, and every time we come across her it is a fresh joy. Her daughter was obliged to make some excuse for herself, and this she did by stating that the work was not entirely her own.

"I do not approve of a great deal of the nonsense," she writes, "and I only let certain things pa.s.s to please my publisher, who wanted something rather lively. . . . I do not like the risky parts myself. . . ." Later on in the same letter, she adds: "There is nothing of the kind in the book I am writing now, and I am using nothing of my collaborator's in this, except his name."(15)

(15) _Correspondance_: To her mother, February 22, 1832.

This was true. Jules Sand had had his day, and the book of which she now speaks was _Indiana_. She signed this "George Sand."

The unpublished correspondence with Emile Regnault, some fragments of which we have just read, contains a most interesting letter concerning the composition of _Indiana_. It is dated February 28, 1832. George Sand first insists on the severity of the subject and on its resemblance to life. "It is as simple, as natural and as positive as you could wish,"

she says. "It is neither romantic, mosaic, nor frantic. It is just ordinary life of the most _bourgeois_ kind, but unfortunately this is much more difficult than exaggerated literature. . . . There is not the least word put in for nothing, not a single description, not a vestige of poetry. There are no unexpected, extraordinary, or amazing situations, but merely four volumes on four characters. With only just these characters, that is, with hidden feelings, everyday thoughts, with friendship, love, selfishness, devotion, self-respect, persistency, melancholy, sorrow, ingrat.i.tude, disappointment, hope, and all the mixed-up medley of the human mind, is it possible to write four volumes which will not bore people? I am afraid of boring people, of boring them as life itself does. And yet what is more interesting than the history of the heart, when it is a true history? The main thing is to write true history, and it is just that which is so difficult. . . ."