Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/529

DUDEVANT 509 of inclination, and the first years of her married life, during which her son and daughter, Maurice and Solange, were born, were at least calm and peaceful. Soon differences arose. Her husband seems to have been neither better nor worse than the Berrichon squires around him ; but she found herself mated, if not to a clown, yet to a hobereau whose heart was in his farm and cattle. After nine years of passive endurance she determined to put an end to a connection which had grown intolerable, and in 1831 an amicable separation was agreed upon. Nohant was sur rendered to the husband, and, taking her daughter with her, she went to seek her fortune in Paris with no provision but an allowance of 60 a year. After vain attempts to support herself by some of those expedients to which reduced gentlewomen are driven, as a last resource she tried litera ture. At this period she was living in a garret, often unable to afford the luxury of a fire. Repulsed by Balzac and K6ratry, she found an employer in Delatouche, the editor of Figaro, and, like herself, a native of Berri. In her life she has done full justice to the rough honesty and jealous affection of her first critic, who treated her much as Dr Johnson treated Fanny Burney. George Sand had neither the wit nor the piquancy to succeed as a writer in Figaro, and at the end of a month her earnings amounted to fifteen francs. But there was on the same staff a young law student already known to her as a visitor at Nohant. With Jules Sandeau she entered into literary partnership, and under the name of Jules Sand there appeared a novel, their joint work, called Rose et Blanche. Her second novel was written independently, and the famous pseudonym, George Sand, was a compromise between Madame Dudevant, who wished to preserve the joint authorship, and Jules Sandeau, who disclaimed any share in the work. Nothing like Indiana had appeared before in French fiction. The public were wearied with the unreality of the fashionable historical novel, and the realistic humour of Paul de Kock. Balzac s earliest novels gave little promise of his future greatness. In the unknown writer they found one who combined the absorbing passion of Rousseau, the delicate picturesqueness of St Pierre, and the wild grandeur of Chateaubriand, in a living picture of present times and manners. Like Byron she awoke one morning and found herself famous. Dela touche was the first to throw himself at her feet and bid her forget all the hard things he had said of her. Sainte-Beuve expressed the approval of the learned, and the public eagerly canvassed the secret of her name, sex, arid history. Valentine, which appeared two months afterwards, proved that Indiana was not, like so many first novels, a graphic rescript merely of the author s own emotions, but the beginning of an inexhaustible series, in which experience was the raw material woven by imagination and coloured by fancy. In Valentine, written during a visit to Nohant, she draws her inspiration from her native soil, and nowhere has she better described the quiet beauty and pastoral melancholy of the Vallee Noire and the banks of the Indre. Her Bohemian life at Paris her vie de gamin, as she calls it in which she adopted not only the dress but the life of a college student, and made the acquaintance of the whole Paris world between the artist and the artisan, is sketched by her in an allegory which is worth quoting if only as a specimen of the simple perfection of her style. " I care little about growing old ; I care far more not to grow old alone, but I kave never met the being with whom I could have chosen to live and die, or if I ever met him I knew not how to keep him. Listen to a story and weep. There was a good artist called Watelet, the best acquafortis engraver of his day. He loved Marguerite Lecomte, and taught her to engrave as well as himself. She left husband and home to go and live with him. The world con demned them; then, as they were poor and modest, it forgot them. Forty years afterwards their retreat was discovered. In a cottage in the environs of Paris called le moulinjoli, there sat at the same table an old man engraving and an old woman whom lie called his iiuuniere also engraving. The last design they were at woik upon represented the Moulin joli, the house of Marguerite, with the device Cur valle permutem Sabina divitias opcrosiorcs. It hangs in my room over a portrait the original of which no one here has seen. For a year the person who gave me this portrait sat with me every night at a little table and lived by the same work. At daybreak we consulted together on our work for the day, and at night we supped at the same little table, chatting the while on art, on sentiment, on the future. The future broke faith with us. Pray for me, Marguerite Lecomte ! " Her third novel, Lelie, marks the climax of her rebellion against society. It was written in a fit of deep depression, religious and political, and is a wild dithyramb, the passion ate wail of a woman whose affections have been blighted, and whose jaundiced eyes see nothing but a lifeless, loveless, godless world. But like Goethe in his Werther she " rid her bosom of that perilous stuff," and, though once and again she inveighed against society, she never more lost faith in the moral government of the world. Of her unfortunate relations with A. de Musset, and her voyage to Italy in his company, which followed the publica tion of Lelie, nothing need be said except as they affected her literary career. As the motives of Indiana and Valentine are an unhappy marriage, so the novels of this period (1833-1835), Jacques, Andre, and Leone Leoni, are the outcome of an unhappy liaison. Her creed, the opposite of Shakespeare s, is, that love must alter as it alteration finds, and that no ties are binding but the mutual passion of the hour. Elle et lui is a woman s version of the quarrel between a man and woman, and if true it ought never to have been told. The moral of the tale is worth giving in George Sand s own words, "God makes certain men of genius to wander in the tempest and to create in pain. I studied you in your light and in your darkness, and know that you are not to be weighed in the balance like other men." The measure she here metes to De Musset we may fairly measure to her again. To this Italian journey we owe some of her most charm ing pictures of scenery. Venice was the only town she loved for itself, and it exercised over her the same fascina tion as over Byron, Shelley, and Goethe. The opening scenes of Conmelo are worthy to take rank with " Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller, Shakespeare s Art," with the 4th canto of Childe Harold, Shelley s Lyrics, and Goethe s Venetian Epigrams. The Lettres d un Voyageur mark the calm which succeeded this Sturm und Drang period. They are specially valuable to the student of George Sand, as they give her views of men and things, not refracted and dis torted by the exigencies of a novel. In Michel de Bourges (the " Edouard " of the letters) we make the acquaintance of another of those celebrated men who influenced for a time her life and writings. He conducted the suit which ended in a judicial separation from her husband (1836), and sought to convert her to the extreme republicanism of which he was the foremost advocate and defender. This Lovelace of politics laid siege to her intellect as persistently as Richardson s hero (for nine mortal hours he declaimed to her, pacing to and fro before her hotel at Bourges, and at Paris he locked her into her own room that she might reflect at leisure on his suit), but though she coquetted with his communistic theories, her artist nature rebelled against his extravagant radicalism. She sought safety in flight, but Mauprat, which she published this year, bears marks of his influence. The Lettres ci Marcie, of 1837, are a tribute to the broad and noble Catholicism of Lamennais, and an eloquent exposition of the doctrine of Christian resignation; but in Spiridion (1838) she returns to her proper creed, a philosophical theism founded on sentiment and unfettered by dogma. Consuelo (1844) and Lucretia Floriani (1847) were inspired by Chopin, whose declining health she tended for more than six years with motherly care.

Le Compagnon du Tour de France (1840) and Le meunier