Superwomen Part 17

was then in his prime as a lion of the salons. To him George Sand gave her heart irrevocably and forever. Through youth and maturity they worshiped each other--for eight consecutive days. On the ninth day, George Sand informed "Carmen's" creator that he was far too cynical to be her ideal any longer. Merimee retorted that her "pose of divine exaltation" was better suited to an angel than to an ugly woman who continually smoked cigars and who swore as pyrotechnically as one of her father's most loquacious troopers. So the romance ended.

Followed a bevy of loves well-nigh as brief, most of whose heroes'

names are emblazoned on the book backs of the world's libraries. And after this populous interregnum, came Alfred de Musset.

De Musset was a mere boy. But his wonderful poetry had already awakened Europe to ecstacy. He was the beau-ideal of a million youthful lovers and their sweethearts; even as, a generation earlier, Byron had been.

It was in 1833 that he and George Sand met. De Musset had seen her from afar and had begged for an introduction. She was six years older than he, and the prettiest girls in France were pleading wistfully for his smile. But, at sight, he loved the horse-faced, almost middle-aged swearer of strange oaths and smoker of strong cigars. Hence his plea to be introduced.

Sainte-Beuve, to whom he made the request, wrote, asking leave to bring him to one of George Sand's "at homes." The same day she returned a most positive refusal, writing:

I do not want you to introduce De Musset to me. He is a fop, and we would not suit each other. Instead, bring Dumas; in whose art I have found a soul, if only the soul of a commercial traveler.

But de Musset, unrebuffed, succeeded in his ambition. He managed to secure an introduction to her at a banquet given by the ~Revue des Deux Mondes~ editors. And almost at once his love was reciprocated.

Then began a union that was alternately the interest, the scandal, and the laughing-stock of a continent.

Each of the lovers was a genius; each had been pedestaled by the world; each was supposed to live on a rarified plane far above the heads or the ken of mere earth folk. The love affair of two such immortals might reasonably be expected--was expected--to be akin to the n.o.ble romances of poetry.

As a matter of fact, its three-year course was one long series of babyish spats, of ridiculous scenes, and of behavior worthier the inmates of a mad-house or a kindergarten than of the decade's two master intellects.

George Sand expected De Musset to live on the heights of bloodless idealism. When he did so, she berated him as heartless. When he failed to, she denounced him as an animal. She was never content with whatever course he might follow. Yet she was madly in love with him.

During their brief separations, she avalanched him with letters; some furious, some imploring, some wildly affectionate, some drearily commonplace. Here is an extract from one, displaying a fair sample of her warmer moods:

It is nothing to you to have tamed the pride of such a woman as I, and to have stretched me a suppliant at your feet? It is nothing to you that I am dying of love?--torment of my life that you are!

He found himself unable to avoid accepting some of the numberless hearts that were flung like roses at his feet. He could modulate from one love affair to another as fleetly and as gracefully as from one key to its remote neighbor.

Here, too, is the account given by a later chronicler of the composer's meeting with George Sand:

One evening, as he was entering a house where a literary reception was in progress, Chopin fancied he was pursued by a violet-scented phantom. In superst.i.tious fear, he would have left the house at once, but friends who were with him laughed away his dread and described the phenomenon as the fancy of a sick man's brain.

He entered the crowded salon and was forthwith presented to the guest of honor, a swarthy and strange-looking woman--the premiere novelist, Madame Dudevant--George Sand.

In his diary that same night Chopin wrote of his new acquaintance:

I do not like her face. There is something in it that repels me.

Yet within a day or so he was her adorer.

For a time all went as well as any love story could with such a heroine. She gloried in her power to build up for the moment her lover's waning strength. Her friends' praise of the feat was as music to her. But she was not the type of woman who can forever wait patiently upon a fretful convalescent's whims. Her self-sacrifice was a flash, not a steady flame.

And in time she girded at the restraints of playing nurse and vitality giver. Then, instead of boasting as before, she waxed complaining. She told the world at large how exacting and cross and tiresome Chopin was.

She once referred to him publicly as "that detestable invalid." She announced that she was his ever-patient comrade and nurse. There is no authority but hers to bear out the claim of patience. And so the once-beautiful relationship dragged out its weary length until George Sand could endure the strain no longer.

She deserted Chopin.

Not content with this final blow to the invalid who had loved her for years, she continued to vilify him. Among her complaints was one that has since pa.s.sed, in slightly altered form, into a good old reliable vaudeville wheeze. She wrote:

We never addressed a single reproach to each other except once.

And that was from the first to the last time we met.

George Sand's desertion was Chopin's deathblow. He never rallied from it. He tried to mask his heartbreak by going about as before and appearing often in public. But even this was soon denied to him--not only by collapsed health, but from the danger of meeting his former divinity at the houses he chanced to visit or on the streets. One such lesson was enough for him. It was in a friend's crowded drawing-room.

A historian describes the encounter:

Thinking herself un.o.bserved, George Sand walked up to Chopin and held out her hand.

"Frederic!" she murmured, in a voice audible to him alone.

He saw her familiar form standing before him. She was repentant, subdued, and seeking reconciliation. His handsome face grew deadly pale, and without a word he left the room.

The end came soon afterward. Chopin's mortal illness struck him down.

Dying, he sent for his lost love. Perhaps the message never reached her; perhaps she thought it a trick--she had tried something of the sort on de Musset; perhaps she did not realize that the time was so short.

At all events, she paid no heed to the frantic appeal that she come at once to the dying composer.

Hour after hour, Chopin waited for her, his ears strained for the sound of her heavy tread. At last he grew to realize that she would not obey the summons, that he would never again see her.

As hope fled, Chopin broke down and cried piteously.

"She promised I should die in no arms but hers!" he sobbed over and over.

And that night he died--no less than seven different women claiming later to have taken his recreant sweetheart's place at his deathbed.

George Sand was conscience-stricken. She wrote and proclaimed long and more or less plausible reasons to account for her failure to go to Chopin. But no one who really knew her was convinced of her excuses'

truth. And so ended one more of her heart stories.

De Musset, by the way refused to admit her to his rooms when he himself lay dying--a grisly joke that Paris appreciated.

Back to her work, as once before, George Sand fled for forgetfulness.

And her fame grew. She was the most prolific woman writer, by the way, in literature's history; writing, in all, twenty plays and more than one hundred novels.

An Englishman (name buried) courted her at about this time. Still miserable over Chopin's death--and far more so over the way people were talking about her treatment of him--she was decidedly waspish to the trans-Channel admirer. Seeking to win her interest, in a literary discussion, he opened one conversation by inquiring:

"Madame Dudevant, what is your favorite novel?"

"'Olympia,'" she answered, without a second of hesitance.

"'Olympia?'" the Englishman repeated, vainly ransacking his memory. "I don't think I recall any book of that name."

"Of course you don't," she snapped. "I haven't written it yet."

And perhaps--or perhaps not--his British brain some day unraveled the meaning of cryptic retort.

For her infidelities George Sand felt no compunction. She wrote frankly concerning them:

I have never imposed constancy upon myself. When I have felt that love is dead, I have said so without shame or remorse, and have obeyed Providence that was leading me elsewhere.

By her marriage with Dudevant, she had had a son and a daughter. The daughter, Solange, inherited much of her mother's lawlessness, with none of the latter's inspiration. And now George Sand was to see how her own nature worked in another of the same blood.