A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Dudevant, Amantine-Aurore-Dupin
DUDEVANT, AMANTINE-AURORE-DUPIN.
Better known as George Sand, the most remarkable French woman of our time, was born in the province of Berry, within the first ten years of the present century. A royal descent is claimed for her, through her paternal grandmother, a daughter of Marshal Saxe, well known to be a son of Augustus the Second, King of Poland. Her father, Maurice Dupin, was an officer in the Imperial service. Dying young, he left his daugher to the care of her grand-mother, by whom she was brought up, á la Rousseau. At the age of fourteen she was transferred to the aristocratic convent of the Dames Anglaises, in Paris; the religious reaction which followed the restoration, rendering some modification of Madame Dupin's philosophical system of education necessary. Here the ardent excitable imagination of the young Amantine Aurore exhibited itself in a fervour of devotion so extreme as to call for the interposition of her superior. Young, rich, and an orphan, she suffered herself, at the age of twenty, to be led into one of those marriages—called "suitable" by the French—with a retired Imperial officer; an upright, honest, but very dull man. Utterly unsuited to one another, and neither of them willing to make sacrifices to duty, the unhappy pair struggled on through some years of wretchedness, when the tie was snapt by the abrupt departure of Madame Dudevant, who fled from her husband's roof to the protection of a lover. While living in obscurity with this lover, her first work, "Indiana," was published. This connexion, which had a marked and most deleterious influence upon her mind and career, did not continue long. She parted from her lover, assumed half of his name, and has since rendered it famous by a series of writings, amounting to more than forty volumes, which have called forth praise and censure in their highest extremes.
Madame Dudevant's subsequent career has been marked by strange and startling contrasts. Taking up her residence in Paris, and casting from her the restraints and modesty of her sex, she has indulged in a life of license, such as we shrink from even in man. Step by step, however, her genius has been expanding, and working itself clear of the dross which encumbered it. Her social position having been rendered more endurable by a legal separation from her husband, which restored her to fortune and independence, a healthier tone has become visible in her writings, the turbulence of her volcanic nature is subsiding, and we look forward, hopefully to the day of better things. She has lately written a dramatic piece, called "Francois le Chamfri," which has been highly successful in Paris, and is represented to be a production of unexceptionable moral character.
Much has been said and written of the intention of Madame Dudevant's early productions. That she had any "intention" at all, save the almost necessary one of expressing the boiling tide of emotions which real or fancied wrongs, a highly poetic temperament, and violent passions engendered, we do not believe Endowed with genius of an order capable of soaring to the most exalted heights, yet eternally dragged to earth by the clogs of an ill-regulated mind, never disciplined by the saving influences of moral and Christian training, she dipped her pen into the gall and wormwood of her own bitter experience, and we have the result. We cannot say that works have an immoral intention, which contain as much that is high, good, and elevating, as there is of an opposite character. We might as soon declare those arrows pointed by design, which are flung from the bow of a man stung and wounded to blindness.
Of their tendency, we cannot speak so favourably. Among her thousands of readers, how many are there who pause, or are capable of pausing, to reflect that life is seen from only one point of view by this writer, and that that point was gained by Madame Dudevant when she lost the approval of her own conscience, abjured her womanhood, and became George Sand!
However, we are willing—ay, more, we are glad—to hope Madame Dudevant will henceforth strive to remedy the evils she has caused, and employ her wonderful genius on the side of virtue and true progress. To do this effectually, she must throw by her miserable affectation of manhood, and the wearing of man's apparel, which makes her a recreant from the moral delicacy of her own sex, without attaining the physical power of the other. Surely, one who can write as she has lately written, must be earnestly seeking for the good and true. It was, probably, this which led her, in the Revolution of 1848, to connect herself with the Socialist Party; but she will learn, if she has not already, that political combinations do not remove moral evils. Her genius should teach truth, and inspire hearts to love the good; thus her Influence would have a mightier effect on her country than any plan of social Inform political expediency could devise. That she does now write in this manner, a glance at one of her late works will show. "La Mare au Diable," (The Devil's Pond,) notwithstanding its name, is as sweet a pastoral as we have ever read. There is a naive tenderness in its rural pictures, which reminds one of the "Vicar of Wakefield," while its feminine purity of tone invests it with a peculiar charm.