How the French Invented Love (24 page)

French romantics projected upon Spanish princes, bandits, and gypsies their own roiled emotions. Love combined with suffering, jealousy, infidelity, honor, and death inspirited their lives and made for marketable literature. If previous generations had given love its due as prescribed by the codes of
fin’amor
, gallantry, or sensibility, the romantics raised the stakes: love or death, love and death, love in death, love, love, love as the supreme value in life. Love was worth living for and dying for. In novels and plays, women and men died of broken hearts, even as their authors recovered and went on to new romances.

No one incarnates the French romantic spirit better than George Sand. From the start, even before her birth, Sand’s story was what the French would call
romanesque
, meaning “like a novel.” Sand was born on July 1, 1804, only one month after her parents, Maurice Dupin, a dashing Napoleonic officer, and Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, a woman with a shady past, legalized their union. She was baptized the next day as Amantine-Aurore-Lucie Dupin. Her parents’ liaison of four years had been hidden from Maurice Dupin’s aristocratic mother, since she would never have accepted his marriage to the disreputable daughter of a bird vendor. But when Dupin met an untimely death, his mother, Madame Dupin de Francueil, was obliged to look out for her daughter-in-law and her four-year-old granddaughter, Aurore. Growing up in her grandmother’s country manor at Nohant (today a pilgrimage site for Sand aficionados), Aurore Dupin experienced a divided sense of loyalty between the mother she fiercely loved and the grandmother she profoundly respected. Although she attributed her artistic genes to her parents, it was probably the education she received under her grandmother’s tutelage that deserves equal credit for her ability to compete in the male literary arena.

As a child, Aurore caroused with peasant children of both sexes. She spoke their patois and joined in their rustic activities—milking cows and goats, making cheese, dancing country dances, eating wild apples and pears. Up to the age of thirteen, she could roam according to her fancy and read whatever she liked. In the twelve months between her twelfth and thirteenth years, Aurore grew three inches, attaining a maximum height of five feet two. It was then that she began to show the signs of adolescence that became the despair of her grandmother—irritability, temper tantrums, outbursts toward her tutor. At this point, her grandmother decided to send her off to a convent school in Paris so as to transform her from an unmannered country girl into a marriageable young lady.

Sand’s autobiography
Histoire de ma vie
(
Story of My Life
) presents the picture of an active, energetic, curious thirteen-year-old who had trouble adapting to convent ways.
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But gradually she settled in and formed close friendships. Sand, at the age of fifty, remembered in detail a large number of girls she had loved with great tenderness. She also wrote of the nuns who served as mother figures, including “the pearl of the convent,” Madame Alicia, for whom she developed a great worshipful love, and the lowly lay sister, Sister Hélène. These intense attachments, all the more intense because they were formed in the absence of boys, can be seen as the prototype for the highly charged friendships the future author would form throughout adulthood.

We mustn’t leave Aurore’s school years without speaking about her conversion experience. During her second year at the convent, she had an epiphany in the chapel: “I felt faith grab hold of me.” That episode inaugurated “a state of calm devotion” that she maintained throughout her third and final school year. For the rest of her life, despite her unconventional existence as a novelist, an adulteress, a cigarette-smoking woman in male clothes, and a political radical, she held onto her faith in God.

At sixteen, Aurore Dupin returned to her grandmother’s estate and renewed the freer existence she had known before. Reading books, playing the harpsichord, going out horseback riding, befriending the locals, and taking classes with her old tutor filled her days, until her grandmother had a stroke and died in December 1821. Then, with mixed emotions, Aurore went to live with her mother in Paris. Her relations with her mother were always extra sensitive: as a child she had idolized her; as a young woman she recognized her mother’s character flaws. Temperamental, uneducated, unpredictable, and disorderly, the younger Madame Dupin was in every way the opposite of Aurore’s dignified grandmother.

Before her marriage to Maurice Dupin, when she was thirty-one and he was twenty-six, Sophie Delaborde belonged to that class of women known as demi-mondaines—women of doubtful reputation supported by their lovers. One of her previous lovers had fathered Aurore’s half-sister, Caroline. On the paternal side, Aurore also had to deal with an illegitimate half-brother, Hippolyte Chatiron. And for all her grandmother’s haughty sense of class, she, too, had been the illegitimate daughter of the field marshal Maurice de Saxe and his mistress, Aurore de Königsmark. Aurore Dupin, one month short of being illegitimate herself, was surrounded by the fruit of irregular unions. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, the man she was to marry was the illegitimate son of a baron, who legally recognized him and passed on the baronial title.

Nine months after her grandmother’s death, Aurore Dupin married Casimir Dudevant, a thin, elegant-looking military man with the friendly air of a companion. She was eighteen and he was twenty-seven. The first year of their marriage passed congenially enough for Aurore, elevated to the rank of a baroness and blessed with a son named Maurice. Though her affection for Casimir seems to have been relatively short-lived, her great love for her son would last a lifetime.

Sand’s maternal capacity would be manifest not only to her son and later to her daughter, but also to her younger lovers. In these relations, she was wont to refer to her lover as
enfant
(child) and to herself as
mère
(mother) and take the lead in helping him advance both professionally and personally. Her standards were high, too high for some of the men, whom she abandoned or who broke away on their own. But most agreed, at least in retrospect, that she had played the combined role of lover and mother at a time when they needed both.

Much has been written about Sand’s successive love affairs, a good deal by Sand herself in her correspondence, intimate journal, autobiography, travel literature, and semiautobiographical fiction. Numerous biographies have attempted to capture the intensity of a woman given to love, who was also a tireless writer, a wage earner, a concerned mother, a devoted friend, a sometime political activist, and an estate manager. I shall try to extract from her life story those elements that are quintessentially romantic.

George Sand—she took that pen name in 1832 for her novel
Indiana
—was a force of nature, endowed with physical energy and mental vigor that lasted into her seventies. Whether she was horseback riding at night to meet her lover Michel de Bourges, traveling abroad with Musset to Venice or with Chopin to Majorca, launching a political magazine or promoting a friend, Sand gave herself heart and soul to the enterprise. And all the while, she was writing from late evening till five in the morning in order to provide for herself, her children, some of her lovers, and numerous hangers-on. Like Hugo and Balzac, Sand was an indefatigable writing machine.

Sand had a great romantic imagination, by which I mean that she imagined love as a sublime experience and would settle for nothing less, both in her personal life and in the lives of her fictive heroines. She believed in the power of love to elevate, rather than degrade, and clung to this idealistic vision in spite of the suffering caused by her love affairs. Placing herself in the camp of Rousseau, she espoused emotion above reason as a spiritual guide to life.

Her husband, Casimir, did not share her idealism. He was not a bad sort but simply an ordinary mortal with down-to-earth tastes, like hunting, drinking, and bedding the household help. Sand knew fairly early in the marriage that he was not a match for her. But then, who was?

Her great platonic love for the magistrate Aurélien de Sèze lasted about three years, from 1825 to 1827. Their chaste affair survived mainly on the lofty sentiments they expressed in their correspondence and in rare face-to-face meetings in his native Bordeaux. Her short-lived liaison with Stéphane Ajasson de Grandsagne, a neighbor in the town of La Châtre near her grandmother’s estate, was decidedly more corporeal and may have produced Sand’s daughter, Solange, born in 1828. Whatever her paternity, Solange was much loved by Sand when she was a child, though she never took the central place in her mother’s heart occupied by her son, Maurice.

During these years, the future writer was finding her voice, first in her letters to Aurélien de Sèze and their mutual female friend; then in four semiautobiographical texts that would remain unpublished until after Sand’s death. By 1830 the writing machine was running nonstop and was ready to relocate to Paris. It was not an easy thing to persuade Casimir Dudevant that his wife could make a go of it in the literary capital, but with the revolution of 1830 inciting freedom even in the provinces, the fledgling writer was not to be denied. Casimir granted her a leave of three months twice a year and a modest pension of 3,000 francs to cover expenses. So off she went to Paris in January 1831, for what was to be an amazingly successful literary career, second only to that of Victor Hugo among the romantics.

Sand’s first novel,
Rose and Blanche
, was a collaborative effort with a young man named Jules Sandeau, whose name appeared alone on the book jacket since it was not considered proper for a woman of her class to use her own name. Jules Sandeau became not only Sand’s collaborator but also her lover—her third or fourth, depending on whether we include Aurélien, but who’s counting? At nineteen, Sandeau tapped into the maternal tenderness that Sand was to show over and over again with her younger lovers. Trying to convince herself that Sandeau was worthy of her love, she wrote to a friend: “Doesn’t he merit my loving him with passion? Doesn’t he love me with all his soul and am I not right to sacrifice everything to him, fortune, reputation, children?”
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Such was the importance romantics like Sand attributed to love that she was ready to abandon everything for what proved to be a relatively short affair. Sandeau turned out to be a lightweight, no match for Sand in energy and talent. She wrote her second novel,
Indiana
, without him and published it under the name of G. Sand, which would become George Sand in her later works. By the summer of 1832, Sand was a waxing star on the Parisian literary horizon.

Her novel
Indiana
is the story of one women’s struggle to free herself from an oppressive marriage and, of course, to find true love. The heroine, Indiana, is married to Colonel Delmare, a middle-aged man still loyal to his Napoleonic past. Two other men vie for her attention: Raymon de Ramière, an archetypical aristocratic seducer, who casts a spell over Indiana despite her resistance, and her cousin Sir Ralph, a silent soul mate, who reveals his true nature only at the end of the novel. It was characteristic of Sand at this period of her life to conceptualize women primarily in terms of their relationships with men. Indeed, Sand always believed that what distinguished women from men was the feminine capacity for boundless love.

Sand’s much admired contemporary, the English poet Byron, understood the imaginative hold of romantic love over nineteenth-century women when he wrote: “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart; ’Tis women’s whole existence.” Today, women have other outlets, but in nineteenth-century France, it was possible for women of the upper classes to focus exclusively on love, if not romantic, then conjugal and maternal. And if we are to believe the novels, some Frenchmen also turned to love for the fabric of their “whole existence.”

Certainly Raymon de Ramière in
Indiana
seems to have nothing to do beyond courting Indiana and her servant, Noun. And here we see the psychological genius of George Sand at work, for Indiana and Noun are doubles representing a basic duality in European culture—that of the idolized spiritual woman and her fleshly counterpart. Consider the following passage:

    Noun was Mme Delmare’s foster sister, and the two young women, who had been brought up together, loved each other dearly. Noun was tall and strong, vividly alive, full of the ardor and passion of her Creole blood, and strikingly beautiful in a way that far outshone the delicate, fragile charms of the pale Mme Delmare; but their tender hearts and mutual affection eliminated all possibility of feminine rivalry.
⁴

The words “foster sister” do not fully convey the original French expression
soeur de lait
(literally, “milk sister”), which indicates that Noun and Indiana had shared the same wet nurse, probably Noun’s mother. Having nursed at the same breast, they are symbolic sisters, despite the difference in their social positions. Each is endowed with the physical attributes deemed appropriate to her station: Noun is tall, strong, healthy, and passionate, whereas Indiana is pale, frail, and implicitly less hot-blooded than her Creole counterpart. Individually they are stereotypes of their respective classes; together they constitute a whole person who has been fragmented by social proscriptions. Indiana’s sense of sisterhood with Noun far exceeds the conventional bonds between mistress and maid. It suggests the union of a “respectable” woman and what the psychiatrist Carl Jung would have called her “shadow” self.

It is Noun who carries on the behind-the-scenes affair with Raymon. She is the free, uninhibited female who delights in lovemaking. She is the body experiencing pleasure. Raymon loves her “with his senses,” but he loves Indiana “with all his heart and soul.” During the day he declares his chaste and undying love to Indiana: “You are the woman I have dreamed of, the purity I have worshiped.” But at night he returns to Noun to exchange “voluptuous caresses” that banish all vestiges of reason.