refuge at his house were dragged out by troops sent by the senate.
In Europe, generally, the right of sanctuary survived under restrictions down to the end of the 18th century. In Germany the more serious crimes of violence were always excepted. Highwaymen, robbers, traitors and habitual criminals could not claim church protection. In 1418 sanctuary was further regulated by a bull of Martin V. and in 1 504 by another of Julius II. In a modified form the German A sylrecht lasted to modern times, not being finally abolished till about 1780. In France le droit d'asile existed throughout the middle ages, but was much limited by an edict of Francis I. in 1539, Ordonnance sur le faut de la justice. At the Revolution the right of sanctuary was entirely abolished.
Bibliography.—T. J. de Mazzinghi, Sanctuaries (Stafford, 1887); J. F. Stephen, Hist. of Criminal Law of England (3 vols., London, 1833); Luke Owen Pike, History of Crime (2 vols., 1875–1876); Aug. von Bulmerincq, Das Asylrecht (Dorpat, 1353); Henri Wallon, Droit d’asile (Paris, 1837); Samuel Pegge, “Sketch of History of Asylum or Sanctuary,” Soc. of Antiq. of London, Archaeologia viii. 1–44 (London, 1787); A. P. Stanley, Memorials of Westminster Abbey (London, 1882); Bissel, The Law of Asylum in Israel (1884); Graszhoff, “Die Gesetze der römischen Kaiser über das Asylrecht der Kirche,” in the Archiv f. kath. Kirchenrecht, Bd. 37; E. Loning, Geschichte des Kirchenrechts, i. 37; ii. 355.
SANCY, NICOLAS DE HARLAY, Seigneur de (1546–1629), French soldier and diplomatist, belonged to the Protestant branch of the family of Harlay but adopted the Catholic religion in 1572 during the massacres of the Huguenots. In 1589 he obtained in Geneva and Berne sums sufficient to raise an army of mercenaries for Henry III., partly by the sale of jewels, among them the “Sancy” diamond which in 1835 found its way to the Russian imperial treasure, and partly by leading the Swiss to suppose that the troops were intended for serious war against Savoy. Henry IV. made him superintendent of his finances in 1594, but in 1599 he was replaced by Sully. Meanwhile he had been a second time converted to Catholicism, but his influence at court waned, and he retired from public life in 1605. He survived until the 13th of October 1629, leaving a Discours sur l’occurrence des affaires.
His son, Achille Harlay de Sancy, bishop of Saint Malo (1581–1646), was educated for the church but resigned his vocation for the career of arms on the death of his elder brother in 1601. For seven years, from 1611 to 1618, he was ambassador at the Turkish court, where he amassed a fortune of some £16,000 sterling by doubtful means, and was bastinadoed by order of the sultan for his frauds. Harlayde Sancy was a learned man and a good linguist, who 'used his opportunities to acquire a valuable collection of oriental MSS., many of which are now in the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris. On his return to France he joined the Oratorian Fathers, and when Marshal Bassompierre was sent to England in 1627 to regulate the differences between Henrietta Maria and her husband, Harlay de Sancy was attached to the queen's ecclesiastical household, but Charles I. secured his dismissal. He became bishop of St Malo in 1632, and died on the 20th of November 1646.
SAND, GEORGE (1804–1876), the pseudonym of Madame
Amandine Lucile Aurore Dudevant, née Dupin, the most prolific
authoress in the history of literature, and unapproached
among the women novelists of France. Her life was as strange
and adventurous as any of her novels, which are for the most
part idealized versions of the multifarious incidents of her life.
In her self-revelations she followed Rousseau, her first master
in style, but while Rousseau in his Confessions darkened all the
shadows, George Sand is the heroine of her story, often frail
and faulty, but always a woman more sinned against than sinning.
Thanks, however, to her voluminous correspondence that has
recently been published and to family documents that her
French biographers have unearthed, there are now full materials
for tracing the history of her public and private career, and for
forming a clear and unbiased estimate of her character and
genius.
Her father was Maurice Dupin, a retired lieutenant in the army of the republic; her mother, Sophie Delaborde, the daughter of a Paris bird-fancier. Their ill-assorted marriage took place only a month before the birth of the child (July 1, 1804; at Paris). Her paternal grandfather was M. Dupin de Francueil, a farmer-general of the revenue, who married the widow of Count Horn, a natural son of Louis XV., she in her turn being the natural daughter of Maurice de Saxe, the most famous of the many illegitimate children of Augustus the Strong, by the lovely Countess of Königsmarck. George Sand, who was a firm believer in the doctrine of heredity, devotes a whole volume of her autobiography (Histoire de ma vie, 1857 seq.) to the elaboration of this strange pedigree. She boasts of the royal blood which ran through her veins, and disregarding the bar sinister she claims affinity with Charles X. and Louis XVII., but she is no less frank in declaring that she is vilaine et très villain, a daughter of the people, who shares by birth their instincts and sympathies. Her birth itself was romantic. Her father was playing a country dance at the house of a fellow officer, the future husband of Sophie's sister, when he was told that his wife, who had not long left the room, had borne him a daughter. “ She will be fortunate,” said the aunt, “ she was born among the roses to the sound of music.”
Passing by her infantile recollections, which go back further than even those of Dickens, we find her at the age of three crossing the Pyrenees to join her father who was on Murat's staff, occupying with her parents a suite of rooms in the royal palace, adopted as the child of the regiment, nursed by rough old sergeants, and dressed in a complete suit of uniform to please the general. For the next ten years she lived at Nohant, near La Châtre in Berri, the country house of her grandmother. Here her character was shaped; here she imbibed that passionate love of country scenes and country life which neither absence, politics nor dissipation could uproot; here she learnt to understand the ways and thoughts of the peasants, and laid up that rich store of scenes and characters which a marvellously retentive memory enabled her to draw upon at will. The progress of her mind during these early years well deserves to be recorded. Education, in the strict sense of the word, she had none. A few months after her return from Spain her father was killed by a fall from his horse. He was a man of remarkable literary gifts as well as a good soldier. “ Character,” says George Sand, “ is in a great measure hereditary: if my readers wish to know me they must know my father.” On his death the mother resigned, though not without a struggle, the care of Aurore to her grandmother, Mme. Dupin de Francueil, a good representative of the ancien régime. Though her husband was a patron of Rousseau, she herself had narrowly escaped the guillotine, and had only half imbibed the ideas of the Revolution. In her son's lifetime she had, for his sake, condoned the mésalliance, but it was impossible for the stately chatelaine and her low-born daughter in-law to live in peace under the same roof. She was jealous as a lover of the child's affection, and the struggle between the mother and grandmother was one of the bitterest of Aurore's childish troubles.
Next to the grandmother, the most important person in the household at Nohant was Deschatres. He was an ex-abbé who had shown his devotion to his mistress when her life was threatened, and henceforward was installed at Nohant as factotum. He was maire of the village, tutor to Aurore's half-brother, and, in addition to his other duties, undertook the education of the girl. The tutor was no more eager to teach than the pupil to learn. He, too, was a disciple of Rousseau, believed in the education of nature, and allowed his Sophie to wander at her own sweet will. At odd hours of lessons she picked up a smattering of Latin, music and natural science, but most days were holidays and spent in country rambles and games with village children. Her favourite books were Tasso, Atala and Paul et Virginie. A simple refrain of a childish song or the monotonous chaunt of the ploughman touched a hidden chord and thrilled her to tears. She invented a deity of her own, a mysterious Corambé, half pagan and half Christian, and like Goethe erected to him a rustic altar of the greenest grass, the softest moss and the brightest pebbles.
