She
died only a short time before the poet himself was laid to rest in Paris
with magnificent obsequies which an emperor might have envied.
died only a short time before the poet himself was laid to rest in Paris
with magnificent obsequies which an emperor might have envied.
Orr - Famous Affinities of History, Romacen of Devotion
His gifts were varied, and he knew
thoroughly the life and thought of his own countrymen; and, therefore,
in his later days he was almost deified by them.
At the same time, there were defects in his intellect and character
which are perceptible in what he wrote, as well as in what he did. He
had the Gallic wit in great measure, but he was absolutely devoid of any
sense of humor. This is why, in both his prose and his poetry, his most
tremendous pages often come perilously near to bombast; and this is why,
again, as a man, his vanity was almost as great as his genius. He had
good reason to be vain, and yet, if he had possessed a gleam of humor,
he would never have allowed his egoism to make him arrogant. As it was,
he felt himself exalted above other mortals. Whatever he did or said or
wrote was right because he did it or said it or wrote it.
This often showed itself in rather whimsical ways. Thus, after he had
published the first edition of his novel, The Man Who Laughs, an English
gentleman called upon him, and, after some courteous compliments,
suggested that in subsequent editions the name of an English peer who
figures in the book should be changed from Tom Jim-Jack.
"For," said the Englishman, "Tom Jim-Jack is a name that could not
possibly belong to an English noble, or, indeed, to any Englishman. The
presence of it in your powerful story makes it seem to English readers a
little grotesque. "
Victor Hugo drew himself up with an air of high disdain.
"Who are you? " asked he.
"I am an Englishman," was the answer, "and naturally I know what names
are possible in English. "
Hugo drew himself up still higher, and on his face there was a smile of
utter contempt.
"Yes," said he. "You are an Englishman; but I--I am Victor Hugo. "
In another book Hugo had spoken of the Scottish bagpipes as "bugpipes. "
This gave some offense to his Scottish admirers. A great many persons
told him that the word was "bagpipes," and not "bugpipes. " But he
replied with irritable obstinacy:
"I am Victor Hugo; and if I choose to write it 'bugpipes,' it IS
'bugpipes. ' It is anything that I prefer to make it. It is so, because I
call it so! "
So, Victor Hugo became a violent republican, because he did not wish
France to be an empire or a kingdom, in which an emperor or a king
would be his superior in rank. He always spoke of Napoleon III as "M.
Bonaparte. " He refused to call upon the gentle-mannered Emperor of
Brazil, because he was an emperor; although Dom Pedro expressed an
earnest desire to meet the poet.
When the German army was besieging Paris, Hugo proposed to fight a duel
with the King of Prussia, and to have the result of it settle the war;
"for," said he, "the King of Prussia is a great king, but I am Victor
Hugo, the great poet. We are, therefore, equal. "
In spite, however, of his ardent republicanism, he was very fond of
speaking of his own noble descent. Again and again he styled himself "a
peer of France;" and he and his family made frequent allusions to the
knights and bishops and counselors of state with whom he claimed an
ancestral relation. This was more than inconsistent. It was somewhat
ludicrous; because Victor Hugo's ancestry was by no means noble. The
Hugos of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were not in any
way related to the poet's family, which was eminently honest and
respectable, but by no means one of distinction. His grandfather was
a carpenter. One of his aunts was the wife of a baker, another of a
barber, while the third earned her living as a provincial dressmaker.
If the poet had been less vain and more sincerely democratic, he would
have been proud to think that he sprang from good, sound, sturdy
stock, and would have laughed at titles. As it was, he jeered at
all pretensions of rank in other men, while he claimed for himself
distinctions that were not really his. His father was a soldier who rose
from the ranks until, under Napoleon, he reached the grade of general.
His mother was the daughter of a ship owner in Nantes.
Victor Hugo was born in February, 1802, during the Napoleonic wars, and
his early years were spent among the camps and within the sound of the
cannon-thunder. It was fitting that he should have been born and reared
in an age of upheaval, revolt, and battle. He was essentially the
laureate of revolt; and in some of his novels--as in Ninety-Three--the
drum and the trumpet roll and ring through every chapter.
The present paper has, of course, nothing to do with Hugo's public life;
yet it is necessary to remember the complicated nature of the man--all
his power, all his sweetness of disposition, and likewise all his vanity
and his eccentricities. We must remember, also, that he was French, so
that his story may be interpreted in the light of the French character.
At the age of fifteen he was domiciled in Paris, and though still a
schoolboy and destined for the study of law, he dreamed only of poetry
and of literature. He received honorable mention from the French
Academy in 1817, and in the following year took prizes in a poetical
competition. At seventeen he began the publication of a literary
journal, which survived until 1821. His astonishing energy became
evident in the many publications which he put forth in these boyish
days. He began to become known. Although poetry, then as now, was not
very profitable even when it was admired, one of his slender volumes
brought him the sum of seven hundred francs, which seemed to him
not only a fortune in itself, but the forerunner of still greater
prosperity.
It was at this time, while still only twenty years of age, that he met
a young girl of eighteen with whom he fell rather tempestuously in love.
Her name was Adele Foucher, and she was the daughter of a clerk in the
War Office. When one is very young and also a poet, it takes very little
to feed the flame of passion. Victor Hugo was often a guest at the
apartments of M. Foucher, where he was received by that gentleman
and his family. French etiquette, of course, forbade any direct
communication between the visitor and Adele. She was still a very young
girl, and was supposed to take no share in the conversation. Therefore,
while the others talked, she sat demurely by the fireside and sewed.
Her dark eyes and abundant hair, her grace of manner, and the picture
which she made as the firelight played about her, kindled a flame in the
susceptible heart of Victor Hugo. Though he could not speak to her,
he at least could look at her; and, before long, his share in the
conversation was very slight. This was set down, at first, to his
absent-mindedness; but looks can be as eloquent as spoken words. Mme.
Foucher, with a woman's keen intelligence, noted the adoring gaze of
Victor Hugo as he silently watched her daughter. The young Adele herself
was no less intuitive than her mother. It was very well understood,
in the course of a few months, that Victor Hugo was in love with Adele
Foucher.
Her father and mother took counsel about the matter, and Hugo himself,
in a burst of lyrical eloquence, confessed that he adored Adele and
wished to marry her. Her parents naturally objected. The girl was but
a child. She had no dowry, nor had Victor Hugo any settled income. They
were not to think of marriage. But when did a common-sense decision,
such as this, ever separate a man and a woman who have felt the
thrill of first love! Victor Hugo was insistent. With his supreme
self-confidence, he declared that he was bound to be successful, and
that in a very short time he would be illustrious. Adele, on her side,
created "an atmosphere" at home by weeping frequently, and by going
about with hollow eyes and wistful looks.
The Foucher family removed from Paris to a country town. Victor Hugo
immediately followed them. Fortunately for him, his poems had attracted
the attention of Louis XVIII, who was flattered by some of the verses.
He sent Hugo five hundred francs for an ode, and soon afterward settled
upon him a pension of a thousand francs. Here at least was an income--a
very small one, to be sure, but still an income. Perhaps Adele's father
was impressed not so much by the actual money as by the evidence of the
royal favor. At any rate, he withdrew his opposition, and the two young
people were married in October, 1822--both of them being under age,
unformed, and immature.
Their story is another warning against too early marriage. It is true
that they lived together until Mme. Hugo's death--a married life of
forty-six years--yet their story presents phases which would have made
this impossible had they not been French.
For a time, Hugo devoted all his energies to work. The record of his
steady upward progress is a part of the history of literature, and need
not be repeated here. The poet and his wife were soon able to leave the
latter's family abode, and to set up their own household god in a home
which was their own. Around them there were gathered, in a sort of
salon, all the best-known writers of the day--dramatists, critics,
poets, and romancers. The Hugos knew everybody.
Unfortunately, one of their visitors cast into their new life a drop of
corroding bitterness. This intruder was Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve,
a man two years younger than Victor Hugo, and one who blended learning,
imagination, and a gift of critical analysis. Sainte-Beuve is to-day
best remembered as a critic, and he was perhaps the greatest critic ever
known in France. But in 1830 he was a slender, insinuating youth who
cultivated a gift for sensuous and somewhat morbid poetry.
He had won Victor Hugo's friendship by writing an enthusiastic notice of
Hugo's dramatic works. Hugo, in turn, styled Sainte-Beuve "an eagle,"
"a blazing star," and paid him other compliments no less gorgeous and
Hugoesque. But in truth, if Sainte-Beuve frequented the Hugo salon, it
was less because of his admiration for the poet than from his desire to
win the love of the poet's wife.
It is quite impossible to say how far he attracted the serious attention
of Adele Hugo. Sainte-Beuve represents a curious type, which is far more
common in France and Italy than in the countries of the north. Human
nature is not very different in cultivated circles anywhere. Man loves,
and seeks to win the object of his love; or, as the old English proverb
has it:
It's a man's part to try,
And a woman's to deny.
But only in the Latin countries do men who have tried make their
attempts public, and seek to produce an impression that they have been
successful, and that the woman has not denied. This sort of man, in
English-speaking lands, is set down simply as a cad, and is excluded
from people's houses; but in some other countries the thing is regarded
with a certain amount of toleration. We see it in the two books written
respectively by Alfred de Musset and George Sand. We have seen it still
later in our own times, in that strange and half-repulsive story in
which the Italian novelist and poet, Gabriele d'Annunzio, under a very
thin disguise, revealed his relations with the famous actress, Eleanora
Duse. Anglo-Saxons thrust such books aside with a feeling of disgust for
the man who could so betray a sacred confidence and perhaps exaggerate
a simple indiscretion into actual guilt. But it is not so in France and
Italy. And this is precisely what Sainte-Beuve attempted.
Dr. George McLean Harper, in his lately published study of Sainte-Beuve,
has summed the matter up admirably, in speaking of The Book of Love:
He had the vein of emotional self-disclosure, the vein of romantic or
sentimental confession. This last was not a rich lode, and so he was at
pains to charge it secretly with ore which he exhumed gloatingly, but
which was really base metal. The impulse that led him along this false
route was partly ambition, partly sensuality. Many a worse man would
have been restrained by self-respect and good taste. And no man with a
sense of honor would have permitted The Book of Love to see the light--a
small collection of verses recording his passion for Mme. Hugo, and
designed to implicate her.
He left two hundred and five printed copies of this book to be
distributed after his death. A virulent enemy of Sainte-Beuve was not
too expressive when he declared that its purpose was "to leave on the
life of this woman the gleaming and slimy trace which the passage of a
snail leaves on a rose. " Abominable in either case, whether or not the
implication was unfounded, Sainte-Beuve's numerous innuendoes in regard
to Mme. Hugo are an indelible stain on his memory, and his infamy not
only cost him his most precious friendships, but crippled him in every
high endeavor.
How monstrous was this violation of both friendship and love may be seen
in the following quotation from his writings:
In that inevitable hour, when the gloomy tempest and the jealous gulf
shall roll over our heads, a sealed bottle, belched forth from the
abyss, will render immortal our two names, their close alliance, and our
double memory aspiring after union.
Whether or not Mme. Hugo's relations with Sainte-Beuve justified the
latter even in thinking such thoughts as these, one need not inquire too
minutely. Evidently, though, Victor Hugo could no longer be the friend
of the man who almost openly boasted that he had dishonored him. There
exist some sharp letters which passed between Hugo and Sainte-Beuve.
Their intimacy was ended.
But there was something more serious than this. Sainte-Beuve had in fact
succeeded in leaving a taint upon the name of Victor Hugo's wife. That
Hugo did not repudiate her makes it fairly plain that she was innocent;
yet a high-spirited, sensitive soul like Hugo's could never forget that
in the world's eye she was compromised. The two still lived together
as before; but now the poet felt himself released from the strict
obligations of the marriage-bond.
It may perhaps be doubted whether he would in any case have remained
faithful all his life. He was, as Mr. H. W. Wack well says, "a man of
powerful sensations, physically as well as mentally. Hugo pursued every
opportunity for new work, new sensations, fresh emotion. He desired to
absorb as much on life's eager forward way as his great nature craved.
His range in all things--mental, physical, and spiritual--was so far
beyond the ordinary that the gage of average cannot be applied to him.
The cavil of the moralist did not disturb him. "
Hence, it is not improbable that Victor Hugo might have broken through
the bonds of marital fidelity, even had Sainte-Beuve never written his
abnormal poems; but certainly these poems hastened a result which may or
may not have been otherwise inevitable. Hugo no longer turned wholly
to the dark-haired, dark-eyed Adele as summing up for him the whole of
womanhood. A veil was drawn, as it were, from before his eyes, and he
looked on other women and found them beautiful.
It was in 1833, soon after Hugo's play "Lucrece Borgia" had been
accepted for production, that a lady called one morning at Hugo's house
in the Place Royale. She was then between twenty and thirty years of
age, slight of figure, winsome in her bearing, and one who knew the arts
which appeal to men. For she was no inexperienced ingenue. The name upon
her visiting-card was "Mme. Drouet"; and by this name she had been known
in Paris as a clever and somewhat gifted actress. Theophile Gautier,
whose cult was the worship of physical beauty, wrote in almost lyric
prose of her seductive charm.
At nineteen, after she had been cast upon the world, dowered with that
terrible combination, poverty and beauty, she had lived openly with a
sculptor named Pradier. This has a certain importance in the history
of French art. Pradier had received a commission to execute a statue
representing Strasburg--the statue which stands to-day in the Place
de la Concorde, and which patriotic Frenchmen and Frenchwomen drape in
mourning and half bury in immortelles, in memory of that city of Alsace
which so long was French, but which to-day is German--one of Germany's
great prizes taken in the war of 1870.
Five years before her meeting with Hugo, Pradier had rather brutally
severed his connection with her, and she had accepted the protection
of a Russian nobleman. At this time she was known by her real
name--Julienne Josephine Gauvin; but having gone upon the stage, she
assumed the appellation by which she was thereafter known, that of
Juliette Drouet.
Her visit to Hugo was for the purpose of asking him to secure for her
a part in his forth-coming play. The dramatist was willing, but
unfortunately all the major characters had been provided for, and he
was able to offer her only the minor one of the Princesse Negroni. The
charming deference with which she accepted the offered part attracted
Hugo's attention. Such amiability is very rare in actresses who have had
engagements at the best theaters. He resolved to see her again; and he
did so, time after time, until he was thoroughly captivated by her.
She knew her value, and as yet was by no means infatuated with him.
At first he was to her simply a means of getting on in her
profession--simply another influential acquaintance. Yet she brought to
bear upon him the arts at her command, her beauty and her sympathy, and,
last of all, her passionate abandonment.
Hugo was overwhelmed by her. He found that she was in debt, and
he managed to see that her debts were paid. He secured her other
engagements at the theater, though she was less successful as an actress
after she knew him. There came, for a time, a short break in their
relations; for, partly out of need, she returned to her Russian
nobleman, or at least admitted him to a menage a trois. Hugo underwent
for a second time a great disillusionment. Nevertheless, he was not too
proud to return to her and to beg her not to be unfaithful any more.
Touched by his tears, and perhaps foreseeing his future fame, she gave
her promise, and she kept it until her death, nearly half a century
later.
Perhaps because she had deceived him once, Hugo never completely lost
his prudence in his association with her. He was by no means lavish with
money, and he installed her in a rather simple apartment only a short
distance from his own home. He gave her an allowance that was relatively
small, though later he provided for her amply in his will. But it was
to her that he brought all his confidences, to her he entrusted all his
interests. She became to him, thenceforth, much more than she appeared
to the world at large; for she was his friend, and, as he said, his
inspiration.
The fact of their intimate connection became gradually known through
Paris. It was known even to Mme. Hugo; but she, remembering the affair
of Sainte-Beuve, or knowing how difficult it is to check the will of a
man like Hugo, made no sign, and even received Juliette Drouet in her
own house and visited her in turn. When the poet's sons grew up to
manhood, they, too, spent many hours with their father in the little
salon of the former actress. It was a strange and, to an Anglo-Saxon
mind, an almost impossible position; yet France forgives much to genius,
and in time no one thought of commenting on Hugo's manner of life.
In 1851, when Napoleon III seized upon the government, and when Hugo was
in danger of arrest, she assisted him to escape in disguise, and with a
forged passport, across the Belgian frontier. During his long exile
in Guernsey she lived in the same close relationship to him and to his
family. Mme. Hugo died in 1868, having known for thirty-three years that
she was only second in her husband's thoughts. Was she doing penance, or
was she merely accepting the inevitable? In any case, her position was
most pathetic, though she uttered no complaint.
A very curious and poignant picture of her just before her death has
been given by the pen of a visitor in Guernsey. He had met Hugo and his
sons; he had seen the great novelist eating enormous slices of roast
beef and drinking great goblets of red wine at dinner, and he had
also watched him early each morning, divested of all his clothing and
splashing about in a bath-tub on the top of his house, in view of
all the town. One evening he called and found only Mme. Hugo. She was
reclining on a couch, and was evidently suffering great pain. Surprised,
he asked where were her husband and her sons.
"Oh," she replied, "they've all gone to Mme. Drouet's to spend the
evening and enjoy themselves. Go also; you'll not find it amusing here. "
One ponders over this sad scene with conflicting thoughts. Was there
really any truth in the story at which Sainte-Beuve more than hinted?
If so, Adele Hugo was more than punished. The other woman had sinned far
more; and yet she had never been Hugo's wife; and hence perhaps it
was right that she should suffer less. Suffer she did; for after her
devotion to Hugo had become sincere and deep, he betrayed her confidence
by an intrigue with a girl who is spoken of as "Claire. " The knowledge
of it caused her infinite anguish, but it all came to an end; and she
lived past her eightieth year, long after the death of Mme. Hugo.
She
died only a short time before the poet himself was laid to rest in Paris
with magnificent obsequies which an emperor might have envied. In her
old age, Juliette Drouet became very white and very wan; yet she never
quite lost the charm with which, as a girl, she had won the heart of
Hugo.
The story has many aspects. One may see in it a retribution, or one may
see in it only the cruelty of life. Perhaps it is best regarded simply
as a chapter in the strange life-histories of men of genius.
THE STORY OF GEORGE SAND
To the student of feminine psychology there is no more curious and
complex problem than the one that meets us in the life of the gifted
French writer best known to the world as George Sand.
To analyze this woman simply as a writer would in itself be a long,
difficult task. She wrote voluminously, with a fluid rather than a
fluent pen. She scandalized her contemporaries by her theories, and by
the way in which she applied them in her novels. Her fiction made her,
in the history of French literature, second only to Victor Hugo.
She might even challenge Hugo, because where he depicts strange and
monstrous figures, exaggerated beyond the limits of actual life, George
Sand portrays living men and women, whose instincts and desires she
understands, and whom she makes us see precisely as if we were admitted
to their intimacy.
But George Sand puzzles us most by peculiarities which it is difficult
for us to reconcile. She seemed to have no sense of chastity whatever;
yet, on the other hand, she was not grossly sensual. She possessed the
maternal instinct to a high degree, and liked better to be a mother
than a mistress to the men whose love she sought. For she did seek men's
love, frankly and shamelessly, only to tire of it. In many cases she
seems to have been swayed by vanity, and by a love of conquest, rather
than by passion. She had also a spiritual, imaginative side to her
nature, and she could be a far better comrade than anything more
intimate.
The name given to this strange genius at birth was Amantine Lucile
Aurore Dupin. The circumstances of her ancestry and birth were quite
unusual. Her father was a lieutenant in the French army. His grandmother
had been the natural daughter of Marshal Saxe, who was himself the
illegitimate son of Augustus the Strong of Poland and of the bewitching
Countess of Konigsmarck. This was a curious pedigree. It meant strength
of character, eroticism, stubbornness, imagination, courage, and
recklessness.
Her father complicated the matter by marrying suddenly a Parisian of the
lower classes, a bird-fancier named Sophie Delaborde. His daughter,
who was born in 1804, used afterward to boast that on one side she was
sprung from kings and nobles, while on the other she was a daughter
of the people, able, therefore, to understand the sentiments of the
aristocracy and of the children of the soil, or even of the gutter.
She was fond of telling, also, of the omen which attended on her birth.
Her father and mother were at a country dance in the house of a fellow
officer of Dupin's. Suddenly Mme. Dupin left the room. Nothing was
thought of this, and the dance went on. In less than an hour, Dupin was
called aside and told that his wife had just given birth to a child. It
was the child's aunt who brought the news, with the joyous comment:
"She will be lucky, for she was born among the roses and to the sound of
music. "
This was at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Lieutenant Dupin was on the
staff of Prince Murat, and little Aurore, as she was called, at the age
of three accompanied the army, as did her mother. The child was
adopted by one of those hard-fighting, veteran regiments. The rough old
sergeants nursed her and petted her. Even the prince took notice of her;
and to please him she wore the green uniform of a hussar.
But all this soon passed, and she was presently sent to live with
her grandmother at the estate now intimately associated with her
name--Nohant, in the valley of the Indre, in the midst of a rich
country, a love for which she then drank in so deeply that nothing in
her later life could lessen it. She was always the friend of the peasant
and of the country-folk in general.
At Nohant she was given over to her grand-mother, to be reared in a
strangely desultory sort of fashion, doing and reading and studying
those things which could best develop her native gifts. Her father had
great influence over her, teaching her a thousand things without seeming
to teach her anything. Of him George Sand herself has written:
Character is a matter of heredity. If any one desires to know me, he
must know my father.
Her father, however, was killed by a fall from a horse; and then the
child grew up almost without any formal education. A tutor, who also
managed the estate; believed with Rousseau that the young should be
reared according to their own preferences. Therefore, Aurore read poems
and childish stories; she gained a smattering of Latin, and she was
devoted to music and the elements of natural science. For the rest of
the time she rambled with the country children, learned their games, and
became a sort of leader in everything they did.
Her only sorrow was the fact that her mother was excluded from Nohant.
The aristocratic old grandmother would not allow under her roof her
son's low-born wife; but she was devoted to her little grandchild. The
girl showed a wonderful degree of sensibility.
This life was adapted to her nature. She fed her imagination in a
perfectly healthy fashion; and, living so much out of doors, she
acquired that sound physique which she retained all through her life.
When she was thirteen, her grandmother sent the girl to a convent school
in Paris. One might suppose that the sudden change from the open woods
and fields to the primness of a religious home would have been a great
shock to her, and that with her disposition she might have broken
out into wild ways that would have shocked the nuns. But, here, as
elsewhere, she showed her wonderful adaptability. It even seemed as
if she were likely to become what the French call a devote. She gave
herself up to mythical thoughts, and expressed a desire of taking the
veil. Her confessor, however, was a keen student of human nature, and
he perceived that she was too young to decide upon the renunciation of
earthly things. Moreover, her grandmother, who had no intention that
Aurore should become a nun, hastened to Paris and carried her back to
Nohant.
The girl was now sixteen, and her complicated nature began to
make itself apparent. There was no one to control her, because her
grandmother was confined to her own room. And so Aurore Dupin, now in
superb health, rushed into every sort of diversion with all the zest of
youth. She read voraciously--religion, poetry, philosophy. She was an
excellent musician, playing the piano and the harp. Once, in a spirit of
unconscious egotism, she wrote to her confessor:
Do you think that my philosophical studies are compatible with Christian
humility?
The shrewd ecclesiastic answered, with a touch of wholesome irony:
I doubt, my daughter, whether your philosophical studies are profound
enough to warrant intellectual pride.
This stung the girl, and led her to think a little less of her own
abilities; but perhaps it made her books distasteful to her. For a while
she seems to have almost forgotten her sex. She began to dress as a boy,
and took to smoking large quantities of tobacco. Her natural brother,
who was an officer in the army, came down to Nohant and taught her to
ride--to ride like a boy, seated astride. She went about without any
chaperon, and flirted with the young men of the neighborhood. The prim
manners of the place made her subject to a certain amount of scandal,
and the village priest chided her in language that was far from tactful.
In return she refused any longer to attend his church.
Thus she was living when her grandmother died, in 1821, leaving to
Aurore her entire fortune of five hundred thousand francs. As the girl
was still but seventeen, she was placed under the guardianship of the
nearest relative on her father's side--a gentleman of rank. When the
will was read, Aurore's mother made a violent protest, and caused a most
unpleasant scene.
"I am the natural guardian of my child," she cried. "No one can take
away my rights! "
The young girl well understood that this was really the parting of the
ways. If she turned toward her uncle, she would be forever classed
among the aristocracy. If she chose her mother, who, though married, was
essentially a grisette, then she must live with grisettes, and find her
friends among the friends who visited her mother. She could not belong
to both worlds. She must decide once for all whether she would be a
woman of rank or a woman entirely separated from the circle that had
been her father's.
One must respect the girl for making the choice she did. Understanding
the situation absolutely, she chose her mother; and perhaps one would
not have had her do otherwise. Yet in the long run it was bound to be a
mistake. Aurore was clever, refined, well read, and had had the training
of a fashionable convent school. The mother was ignorant and coarse, as
was inevitable, with one who before her marriage had been half shop-girl
and half courtesan. The two could not live long together, and hence it
was not unnatural that Aurore Dupin should marry, to enter upon a new
career.
Her fortune was a fairly large one for the times, and yet not large
enough to attract men who were quite her equals. Presently, however, it
brought to her a sort of country squire, named Casimir Dudevant. He was
the illegitimate son of the Baron Dudevant. He had been in the army,
and had studied law; but he possessed no intellectual tastes. He was
outwardly eligible; but he was of a coarse type--a man who, with passing
years, would be likely to take to drink and vicious amusements, and in
serious life cared only for his cattle, his horses, and his hunting. He
had, however, a sort of jollity about him which appealed to this girl of
eighteen; and so a marriage was arranged. Aurore Dupin became his wife
in 1822, and he secured the control of her fortune.
The first few years after her marriage were not unhappy. She had a son,
Maurice Dudevant, and a daughter, Solange, and she loved them both. But
it was impossible that she should continue vegetating mentally upon
a farm with a husband who was a fool, a drunkard, and a miser. He
deteriorated; his wife grew more and more clever. Dudevant resented
this. It made him uncomfortable. Other persons spoke of her talk as
brilliant. He bluntly told her that it was silly, and that she must stop
it. When she did not stop it, he boxed her ears. This caused a breach
between the pair which was never healed. Dudevant drank more and more
heavily, and jeered at his wife because she was "always looking for noon
at fourteen o'clock. " He had always flirted with the country girls; but
now he openly consorted with his wife's chambermaid.
Mme. Dudevant, on her side, would have nothing more to do with this
rustic rake. She formed what she called a platonic friendship--and it
was really so--with a certain M. de Seze, who was advocate-general at
Bordeaux. With him this clever woman could talk without being called
silly, and he took sincere pleasure in her company. He might, in fact,
have gone much further, had not both of them been in an impossible
situation.
Aurore Dudevant really believed that she was swayed by a pure and mystic
passion. De Seze, on the other hand, believed this mystic passion to
be genuine love. Coming to visit her at Nohant, he was revolted by the
clownish husband with whom she lived. It gave him an esthetic shock to
see that she had borne children to this boor. Therefore he shrank back
from her, and in time their relation faded into nothingness.
It happened, soon after, that she found a packet in her husband's desk,
marked "Not to be opened until after my death. " She wrote of this in her
correspondence:
I had not the patience to wait till widowhood. No one can be sure of
surviving anybody. I assumed that my husband had died, and I was very
glad to learn what he thought of me while he was alive. Since the
package was addressed to me, it was not dishonorable for me to open it.
And so she opened it. It proved to be his will, but containing, as a
preamble, his curses on her, expressions of contempt, and all the vulgar
outpouring of an evil temper and angry passion. She went to her husband
as he was opening a bottle, and flung the document upon the table.
He cowered at her glance, at her firmness, and at her cold hatred. He
grumbled and argued and entreated; but all that his wife would say in
answer was:
"I must have an allowance. I am going to Paris, and my children are to
remain here. "
At last he yielded, and she went at once to Paris, taking her daughter
with her, and having the promise of fifteen hundred francs a year out of
the half-million that was hers by right.
In Paris she developed into a thorough-paced Bohemian. She tried to make
a living in sundry hopeless ways, and at last she took to literature.
She was living in a garret, with little to eat, and sometimes without
a fire in winter. She had some friends who helped her as well as they
could, but though she was attached to the Figaro, her earnings for the
first month amounted to only fifteen francs.
Nevertheless, she would not despair. The editors and publishers might
turn the cold shoulder to her, but she would not give up her ambitions.
She went down into the Latin Quarter, and there shook off the
proprieties of life. She assumed the garb of a man, and with her quick
perception she came to know the left bank of the Seine just as she had
known the country-side at Nohant or the little world at her convent
school. She never expected again to see any woman of her own rank in
life. Her mother's influence became strong in her. She wrote:
The proprieties are the guiding principle of people without soul and
virtue. The good opinion of the world is a prostitute who gives herself
to the highest bidder.
She still pursued her trade of journalism, calling herself a "newspaper
mechanic," sitting all day in the office of the Figaro and writing
whatever was demanded, while at night she would prowl in the streets
haunting the cafes, continuing to dress like a man, drinking sour wine,
and smoking cheap cigars.
One of her companions in this sort of hand-to-mouth journalism was a
young student and writer named Jules Sandeau, a man seven years younger
than his comrade. He was at that time as indigent as she, and their
hardships, shared in common, brought them very close together. He was
clever, boyish, and sensitive, and it was not long before he had fallen
at her feet and kissed her knees, begging that she would requite the
love he felt for her. According to herself, she resisted him for six
months, and then at last she yielded. The two made their home together,
and for a while were wonderfully happy. Their work and their diversions
they enjoyed in common, and now for the first time she experienced
emotions which in all probability she had never known before.
Probably not very much importance is to be given to the earlier
flirtations of George Sand, though she herself never tried to stop the
mouth of scandal. Even before she left her husband, she was credited
with having four lovers; but all she said, when the report was brought
to her, was this: "Four lovers are none too many for one with such
lively passions as mine. "
This very frankness makes it likely that she enjoyed shocking her prim
neighbors at Nohant. But if she only played at love-making then, she now
gave herself up to it with entire abandonment, intoxicated, fascinated,
satisfied. She herself wrote:
How I wish I could impart to you this sense of the intensity and
joyousness of life that I have in my veins. To live! How sweet it
is, and how good, in spite of annoyances, husbands, debts, relations,
scandal-mongers, sufferings, and irritations! To live! It is
intoxicating! To love, and to be loved! It is happiness! It is heaven!
In collaboration with Jules Sandeau, she wrote a novel called Rose
et Blanche. The two lovers were uncertain what name to place upon the
title-page, but finally they hit upon the pseudonym of Jules Sand. The
book succeeded; but thereafter each of them wrote separately, Jules
Sandeau using his own name, and Mme. Dudevant styling herself George
Sand, a name by which she was to be illustrious ever after.
As a novelist, she had found her real vocation. She was not yet well
known, but she was on the verge of fame. As soon as she had written
Indiana and Valentine, George Sand had secured a place in the world of
letters. The magazine which still exists as the Revue des Deux Mondes
gave her a retaining fee of four thousand francs a year, and many other
publications begged her to write serial stories for them.
The vein which ran through all her stories was new and piquant. As was
said of her:
In George Sand, whenever a lady wishes to change her lover, God is
always there to make the transfer easy.
In other words, she preached free love in the name of religion. This was
not a new doctrine with her. After the first break with her husband, she
had made up her mind about certain matters, and wrote:
One is no more justified in claiming the ownership of a soul than in
claiming the ownership of a slave.
According to her, the ties between a man and a woman are sacred only
when they are sanctified by love; and she distinguished between love and
passion in this epigram:
Love seeks to give, while passion seeks to take.
At this time, George Sand was in her twenty-seventh year. She was
not beautiful, though there was something about her which attracted
observation. Of middle height, she was fairly slender. Her eyes were
somewhat projecting, and her mouth was almost sullen when in repose. Her
manners were peculiar, combining boldness with timidity. Her address was
almost as familiar as a man's, so that it was easy to be acquainted with
her; yet a certain haughtiness and a touch of aristocratic pride made it
plain that she had drawn a line which none must pass without her
wish. When she was deeply stirred, however, she burst forth into an
extraordinary vivacity, showing a nature richly endowed and eager to
yield its treasures.
The existence which she now led was a curious one. She still visited her
husband at Nohant, so that she might see her son, and sometimes, when
M. Dudevant came to town, he called upon her in the apartments which she
shared with Jules Sandeau. He had accepted the situation, and with his
crudeness and lack of feeling he seemed to think it, if not natural,
at least diverting. At any rate, so long as he could retain her
half-million francs, he was not the man to make trouble about his former
wife's arrangements.
Meanwhile, there began to be perceptible the very slightest rift within
the lute of her romance. Was her love for Sandeau really love, or was
it only passion? In his absence, at any rate, the old obsession still
continued. Here we see, first of all, intense pleasure shading off into
a sort of maternal fondness. She sends Sandeau adoring letters. She is
afraid that his delicate appetite is not properly satisfied.
Yet, again, there are times when she feels that he is irritating and
ill. Those who knew them said that her nature was too passionate and
her love was too exacting for him. One of her letters seems to make
this plain. She writes that she feels uneasy, and even frightfully
remorseful, at seeing Sandeau "pine away. " She knows, she avows, that
she is killing him, that her caresses are a poison, and her love a
consuming fire.
It is an appalling thought, and Jules will not understand it. He laughs
at it; and when, in the midst of his transports of delight, the idea
comes to me and makes my blood run cold, he tells me that here is the
death that he would like to die.
thoroughly the life and thought of his own countrymen; and, therefore,
in his later days he was almost deified by them.
At the same time, there were defects in his intellect and character
which are perceptible in what he wrote, as well as in what he did. He
had the Gallic wit in great measure, but he was absolutely devoid of any
sense of humor. This is why, in both his prose and his poetry, his most
tremendous pages often come perilously near to bombast; and this is why,
again, as a man, his vanity was almost as great as his genius. He had
good reason to be vain, and yet, if he had possessed a gleam of humor,
he would never have allowed his egoism to make him arrogant. As it was,
he felt himself exalted above other mortals. Whatever he did or said or
wrote was right because he did it or said it or wrote it.
This often showed itself in rather whimsical ways. Thus, after he had
published the first edition of his novel, The Man Who Laughs, an English
gentleman called upon him, and, after some courteous compliments,
suggested that in subsequent editions the name of an English peer who
figures in the book should be changed from Tom Jim-Jack.
"For," said the Englishman, "Tom Jim-Jack is a name that could not
possibly belong to an English noble, or, indeed, to any Englishman. The
presence of it in your powerful story makes it seem to English readers a
little grotesque. "
Victor Hugo drew himself up with an air of high disdain.
"Who are you? " asked he.
"I am an Englishman," was the answer, "and naturally I know what names
are possible in English. "
Hugo drew himself up still higher, and on his face there was a smile of
utter contempt.
"Yes," said he. "You are an Englishman; but I--I am Victor Hugo. "
In another book Hugo had spoken of the Scottish bagpipes as "bugpipes. "
This gave some offense to his Scottish admirers. A great many persons
told him that the word was "bagpipes," and not "bugpipes. " But he
replied with irritable obstinacy:
"I am Victor Hugo; and if I choose to write it 'bugpipes,' it IS
'bugpipes. ' It is anything that I prefer to make it. It is so, because I
call it so! "
So, Victor Hugo became a violent republican, because he did not wish
France to be an empire or a kingdom, in which an emperor or a king
would be his superior in rank. He always spoke of Napoleon III as "M.
Bonaparte. " He refused to call upon the gentle-mannered Emperor of
Brazil, because he was an emperor; although Dom Pedro expressed an
earnest desire to meet the poet.
When the German army was besieging Paris, Hugo proposed to fight a duel
with the King of Prussia, and to have the result of it settle the war;
"for," said he, "the King of Prussia is a great king, but I am Victor
Hugo, the great poet. We are, therefore, equal. "
In spite, however, of his ardent republicanism, he was very fond of
speaking of his own noble descent. Again and again he styled himself "a
peer of France;" and he and his family made frequent allusions to the
knights and bishops and counselors of state with whom he claimed an
ancestral relation. This was more than inconsistent. It was somewhat
ludicrous; because Victor Hugo's ancestry was by no means noble. The
Hugos of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were not in any
way related to the poet's family, which was eminently honest and
respectable, but by no means one of distinction. His grandfather was
a carpenter. One of his aunts was the wife of a baker, another of a
barber, while the third earned her living as a provincial dressmaker.
If the poet had been less vain and more sincerely democratic, he would
have been proud to think that he sprang from good, sound, sturdy
stock, and would have laughed at titles. As it was, he jeered at
all pretensions of rank in other men, while he claimed for himself
distinctions that were not really his. His father was a soldier who rose
from the ranks until, under Napoleon, he reached the grade of general.
His mother was the daughter of a ship owner in Nantes.
Victor Hugo was born in February, 1802, during the Napoleonic wars, and
his early years were spent among the camps and within the sound of the
cannon-thunder. It was fitting that he should have been born and reared
in an age of upheaval, revolt, and battle. He was essentially the
laureate of revolt; and in some of his novels--as in Ninety-Three--the
drum and the trumpet roll and ring through every chapter.
The present paper has, of course, nothing to do with Hugo's public life;
yet it is necessary to remember the complicated nature of the man--all
his power, all his sweetness of disposition, and likewise all his vanity
and his eccentricities. We must remember, also, that he was French, so
that his story may be interpreted in the light of the French character.
At the age of fifteen he was domiciled in Paris, and though still a
schoolboy and destined for the study of law, he dreamed only of poetry
and of literature. He received honorable mention from the French
Academy in 1817, and in the following year took prizes in a poetical
competition. At seventeen he began the publication of a literary
journal, which survived until 1821. His astonishing energy became
evident in the many publications which he put forth in these boyish
days. He began to become known. Although poetry, then as now, was not
very profitable even when it was admired, one of his slender volumes
brought him the sum of seven hundred francs, which seemed to him
not only a fortune in itself, but the forerunner of still greater
prosperity.
It was at this time, while still only twenty years of age, that he met
a young girl of eighteen with whom he fell rather tempestuously in love.
Her name was Adele Foucher, and she was the daughter of a clerk in the
War Office. When one is very young and also a poet, it takes very little
to feed the flame of passion. Victor Hugo was often a guest at the
apartments of M. Foucher, where he was received by that gentleman
and his family. French etiquette, of course, forbade any direct
communication between the visitor and Adele. She was still a very young
girl, and was supposed to take no share in the conversation. Therefore,
while the others talked, she sat demurely by the fireside and sewed.
Her dark eyes and abundant hair, her grace of manner, and the picture
which she made as the firelight played about her, kindled a flame in the
susceptible heart of Victor Hugo. Though he could not speak to her,
he at least could look at her; and, before long, his share in the
conversation was very slight. This was set down, at first, to his
absent-mindedness; but looks can be as eloquent as spoken words. Mme.
Foucher, with a woman's keen intelligence, noted the adoring gaze of
Victor Hugo as he silently watched her daughter. The young Adele herself
was no less intuitive than her mother. It was very well understood,
in the course of a few months, that Victor Hugo was in love with Adele
Foucher.
Her father and mother took counsel about the matter, and Hugo himself,
in a burst of lyrical eloquence, confessed that he adored Adele and
wished to marry her. Her parents naturally objected. The girl was but
a child. She had no dowry, nor had Victor Hugo any settled income. They
were not to think of marriage. But when did a common-sense decision,
such as this, ever separate a man and a woman who have felt the
thrill of first love! Victor Hugo was insistent. With his supreme
self-confidence, he declared that he was bound to be successful, and
that in a very short time he would be illustrious. Adele, on her side,
created "an atmosphere" at home by weeping frequently, and by going
about with hollow eyes and wistful looks.
The Foucher family removed from Paris to a country town. Victor Hugo
immediately followed them. Fortunately for him, his poems had attracted
the attention of Louis XVIII, who was flattered by some of the verses.
He sent Hugo five hundred francs for an ode, and soon afterward settled
upon him a pension of a thousand francs. Here at least was an income--a
very small one, to be sure, but still an income. Perhaps Adele's father
was impressed not so much by the actual money as by the evidence of the
royal favor. At any rate, he withdrew his opposition, and the two young
people were married in October, 1822--both of them being under age,
unformed, and immature.
Their story is another warning against too early marriage. It is true
that they lived together until Mme. Hugo's death--a married life of
forty-six years--yet their story presents phases which would have made
this impossible had they not been French.
For a time, Hugo devoted all his energies to work. The record of his
steady upward progress is a part of the history of literature, and need
not be repeated here. The poet and his wife were soon able to leave the
latter's family abode, and to set up their own household god in a home
which was their own. Around them there were gathered, in a sort of
salon, all the best-known writers of the day--dramatists, critics,
poets, and romancers. The Hugos knew everybody.
Unfortunately, one of their visitors cast into their new life a drop of
corroding bitterness. This intruder was Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve,
a man two years younger than Victor Hugo, and one who blended learning,
imagination, and a gift of critical analysis. Sainte-Beuve is to-day
best remembered as a critic, and he was perhaps the greatest critic ever
known in France. But in 1830 he was a slender, insinuating youth who
cultivated a gift for sensuous and somewhat morbid poetry.
He had won Victor Hugo's friendship by writing an enthusiastic notice of
Hugo's dramatic works. Hugo, in turn, styled Sainte-Beuve "an eagle,"
"a blazing star," and paid him other compliments no less gorgeous and
Hugoesque. But in truth, if Sainte-Beuve frequented the Hugo salon, it
was less because of his admiration for the poet than from his desire to
win the love of the poet's wife.
It is quite impossible to say how far he attracted the serious attention
of Adele Hugo. Sainte-Beuve represents a curious type, which is far more
common in France and Italy than in the countries of the north. Human
nature is not very different in cultivated circles anywhere. Man loves,
and seeks to win the object of his love; or, as the old English proverb
has it:
It's a man's part to try,
And a woman's to deny.
But only in the Latin countries do men who have tried make their
attempts public, and seek to produce an impression that they have been
successful, and that the woman has not denied. This sort of man, in
English-speaking lands, is set down simply as a cad, and is excluded
from people's houses; but in some other countries the thing is regarded
with a certain amount of toleration. We see it in the two books written
respectively by Alfred de Musset and George Sand. We have seen it still
later in our own times, in that strange and half-repulsive story in
which the Italian novelist and poet, Gabriele d'Annunzio, under a very
thin disguise, revealed his relations with the famous actress, Eleanora
Duse. Anglo-Saxons thrust such books aside with a feeling of disgust for
the man who could so betray a sacred confidence and perhaps exaggerate
a simple indiscretion into actual guilt. But it is not so in France and
Italy. And this is precisely what Sainte-Beuve attempted.
Dr. George McLean Harper, in his lately published study of Sainte-Beuve,
has summed the matter up admirably, in speaking of The Book of Love:
He had the vein of emotional self-disclosure, the vein of romantic or
sentimental confession. This last was not a rich lode, and so he was at
pains to charge it secretly with ore which he exhumed gloatingly, but
which was really base metal. The impulse that led him along this false
route was partly ambition, partly sensuality. Many a worse man would
have been restrained by self-respect and good taste. And no man with a
sense of honor would have permitted The Book of Love to see the light--a
small collection of verses recording his passion for Mme. Hugo, and
designed to implicate her.
He left two hundred and five printed copies of this book to be
distributed after his death. A virulent enemy of Sainte-Beuve was not
too expressive when he declared that its purpose was "to leave on the
life of this woman the gleaming and slimy trace which the passage of a
snail leaves on a rose. " Abominable in either case, whether or not the
implication was unfounded, Sainte-Beuve's numerous innuendoes in regard
to Mme. Hugo are an indelible stain on his memory, and his infamy not
only cost him his most precious friendships, but crippled him in every
high endeavor.
How monstrous was this violation of both friendship and love may be seen
in the following quotation from his writings:
In that inevitable hour, when the gloomy tempest and the jealous gulf
shall roll over our heads, a sealed bottle, belched forth from the
abyss, will render immortal our two names, their close alliance, and our
double memory aspiring after union.
Whether or not Mme. Hugo's relations with Sainte-Beuve justified the
latter even in thinking such thoughts as these, one need not inquire too
minutely. Evidently, though, Victor Hugo could no longer be the friend
of the man who almost openly boasted that he had dishonored him. There
exist some sharp letters which passed between Hugo and Sainte-Beuve.
Their intimacy was ended.
But there was something more serious than this. Sainte-Beuve had in fact
succeeded in leaving a taint upon the name of Victor Hugo's wife. That
Hugo did not repudiate her makes it fairly plain that she was innocent;
yet a high-spirited, sensitive soul like Hugo's could never forget that
in the world's eye she was compromised. The two still lived together
as before; but now the poet felt himself released from the strict
obligations of the marriage-bond.
It may perhaps be doubted whether he would in any case have remained
faithful all his life. He was, as Mr. H. W. Wack well says, "a man of
powerful sensations, physically as well as mentally. Hugo pursued every
opportunity for new work, new sensations, fresh emotion. He desired to
absorb as much on life's eager forward way as his great nature craved.
His range in all things--mental, physical, and spiritual--was so far
beyond the ordinary that the gage of average cannot be applied to him.
The cavil of the moralist did not disturb him. "
Hence, it is not improbable that Victor Hugo might have broken through
the bonds of marital fidelity, even had Sainte-Beuve never written his
abnormal poems; but certainly these poems hastened a result which may or
may not have been otherwise inevitable. Hugo no longer turned wholly
to the dark-haired, dark-eyed Adele as summing up for him the whole of
womanhood. A veil was drawn, as it were, from before his eyes, and he
looked on other women and found them beautiful.
It was in 1833, soon after Hugo's play "Lucrece Borgia" had been
accepted for production, that a lady called one morning at Hugo's house
in the Place Royale. She was then between twenty and thirty years of
age, slight of figure, winsome in her bearing, and one who knew the arts
which appeal to men. For she was no inexperienced ingenue. The name upon
her visiting-card was "Mme. Drouet"; and by this name she had been known
in Paris as a clever and somewhat gifted actress. Theophile Gautier,
whose cult was the worship of physical beauty, wrote in almost lyric
prose of her seductive charm.
At nineteen, after she had been cast upon the world, dowered with that
terrible combination, poverty and beauty, she had lived openly with a
sculptor named Pradier. This has a certain importance in the history
of French art. Pradier had received a commission to execute a statue
representing Strasburg--the statue which stands to-day in the Place
de la Concorde, and which patriotic Frenchmen and Frenchwomen drape in
mourning and half bury in immortelles, in memory of that city of Alsace
which so long was French, but which to-day is German--one of Germany's
great prizes taken in the war of 1870.
Five years before her meeting with Hugo, Pradier had rather brutally
severed his connection with her, and she had accepted the protection
of a Russian nobleman. At this time she was known by her real
name--Julienne Josephine Gauvin; but having gone upon the stage, she
assumed the appellation by which she was thereafter known, that of
Juliette Drouet.
Her visit to Hugo was for the purpose of asking him to secure for her
a part in his forth-coming play. The dramatist was willing, but
unfortunately all the major characters had been provided for, and he
was able to offer her only the minor one of the Princesse Negroni. The
charming deference with which she accepted the offered part attracted
Hugo's attention. Such amiability is very rare in actresses who have had
engagements at the best theaters. He resolved to see her again; and he
did so, time after time, until he was thoroughly captivated by her.
She knew her value, and as yet was by no means infatuated with him.
At first he was to her simply a means of getting on in her
profession--simply another influential acquaintance. Yet she brought to
bear upon him the arts at her command, her beauty and her sympathy, and,
last of all, her passionate abandonment.
Hugo was overwhelmed by her. He found that she was in debt, and
he managed to see that her debts were paid. He secured her other
engagements at the theater, though she was less successful as an actress
after she knew him. There came, for a time, a short break in their
relations; for, partly out of need, she returned to her Russian
nobleman, or at least admitted him to a menage a trois. Hugo underwent
for a second time a great disillusionment. Nevertheless, he was not too
proud to return to her and to beg her not to be unfaithful any more.
Touched by his tears, and perhaps foreseeing his future fame, she gave
her promise, and she kept it until her death, nearly half a century
later.
Perhaps because she had deceived him once, Hugo never completely lost
his prudence in his association with her. He was by no means lavish with
money, and he installed her in a rather simple apartment only a short
distance from his own home. He gave her an allowance that was relatively
small, though later he provided for her amply in his will. But it was
to her that he brought all his confidences, to her he entrusted all his
interests. She became to him, thenceforth, much more than she appeared
to the world at large; for she was his friend, and, as he said, his
inspiration.
The fact of their intimate connection became gradually known through
Paris. It was known even to Mme. Hugo; but she, remembering the affair
of Sainte-Beuve, or knowing how difficult it is to check the will of a
man like Hugo, made no sign, and even received Juliette Drouet in her
own house and visited her in turn. When the poet's sons grew up to
manhood, they, too, spent many hours with their father in the little
salon of the former actress. It was a strange and, to an Anglo-Saxon
mind, an almost impossible position; yet France forgives much to genius,
and in time no one thought of commenting on Hugo's manner of life.
In 1851, when Napoleon III seized upon the government, and when Hugo was
in danger of arrest, she assisted him to escape in disguise, and with a
forged passport, across the Belgian frontier. During his long exile
in Guernsey she lived in the same close relationship to him and to his
family. Mme. Hugo died in 1868, having known for thirty-three years that
she was only second in her husband's thoughts. Was she doing penance, or
was she merely accepting the inevitable? In any case, her position was
most pathetic, though she uttered no complaint.
A very curious and poignant picture of her just before her death has
been given by the pen of a visitor in Guernsey. He had met Hugo and his
sons; he had seen the great novelist eating enormous slices of roast
beef and drinking great goblets of red wine at dinner, and he had
also watched him early each morning, divested of all his clothing and
splashing about in a bath-tub on the top of his house, in view of
all the town. One evening he called and found only Mme. Hugo. She was
reclining on a couch, and was evidently suffering great pain. Surprised,
he asked where were her husband and her sons.
"Oh," she replied, "they've all gone to Mme. Drouet's to spend the
evening and enjoy themselves. Go also; you'll not find it amusing here. "
One ponders over this sad scene with conflicting thoughts. Was there
really any truth in the story at which Sainte-Beuve more than hinted?
If so, Adele Hugo was more than punished. The other woman had sinned far
more; and yet she had never been Hugo's wife; and hence perhaps it
was right that she should suffer less. Suffer she did; for after her
devotion to Hugo had become sincere and deep, he betrayed her confidence
by an intrigue with a girl who is spoken of as "Claire. " The knowledge
of it caused her infinite anguish, but it all came to an end; and she
lived past her eightieth year, long after the death of Mme. Hugo.
She
died only a short time before the poet himself was laid to rest in Paris
with magnificent obsequies which an emperor might have envied. In her
old age, Juliette Drouet became very white and very wan; yet she never
quite lost the charm with which, as a girl, she had won the heart of
Hugo.
The story has many aspects. One may see in it a retribution, or one may
see in it only the cruelty of life. Perhaps it is best regarded simply
as a chapter in the strange life-histories of men of genius.
THE STORY OF GEORGE SAND
To the student of feminine psychology there is no more curious and
complex problem than the one that meets us in the life of the gifted
French writer best known to the world as George Sand.
To analyze this woman simply as a writer would in itself be a long,
difficult task. She wrote voluminously, with a fluid rather than a
fluent pen. She scandalized her contemporaries by her theories, and by
the way in which she applied them in her novels. Her fiction made her,
in the history of French literature, second only to Victor Hugo.
She might even challenge Hugo, because where he depicts strange and
monstrous figures, exaggerated beyond the limits of actual life, George
Sand portrays living men and women, whose instincts and desires she
understands, and whom she makes us see precisely as if we were admitted
to their intimacy.
But George Sand puzzles us most by peculiarities which it is difficult
for us to reconcile. She seemed to have no sense of chastity whatever;
yet, on the other hand, she was not grossly sensual. She possessed the
maternal instinct to a high degree, and liked better to be a mother
than a mistress to the men whose love she sought. For she did seek men's
love, frankly and shamelessly, only to tire of it. In many cases she
seems to have been swayed by vanity, and by a love of conquest, rather
than by passion. She had also a spiritual, imaginative side to her
nature, and she could be a far better comrade than anything more
intimate.
The name given to this strange genius at birth was Amantine Lucile
Aurore Dupin. The circumstances of her ancestry and birth were quite
unusual. Her father was a lieutenant in the French army. His grandmother
had been the natural daughter of Marshal Saxe, who was himself the
illegitimate son of Augustus the Strong of Poland and of the bewitching
Countess of Konigsmarck. This was a curious pedigree. It meant strength
of character, eroticism, stubbornness, imagination, courage, and
recklessness.
Her father complicated the matter by marrying suddenly a Parisian of the
lower classes, a bird-fancier named Sophie Delaborde. His daughter,
who was born in 1804, used afterward to boast that on one side she was
sprung from kings and nobles, while on the other she was a daughter
of the people, able, therefore, to understand the sentiments of the
aristocracy and of the children of the soil, or even of the gutter.
She was fond of telling, also, of the omen which attended on her birth.
Her father and mother were at a country dance in the house of a fellow
officer of Dupin's. Suddenly Mme. Dupin left the room. Nothing was
thought of this, and the dance went on. In less than an hour, Dupin was
called aside and told that his wife had just given birth to a child. It
was the child's aunt who brought the news, with the joyous comment:
"She will be lucky, for she was born among the roses and to the sound of
music. "
This was at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Lieutenant Dupin was on the
staff of Prince Murat, and little Aurore, as she was called, at the age
of three accompanied the army, as did her mother. The child was
adopted by one of those hard-fighting, veteran regiments. The rough old
sergeants nursed her and petted her. Even the prince took notice of her;
and to please him she wore the green uniform of a hussar.
But all this soon passed, and she was presently sent to live with
her grandmother at the estate now intimately associated with her
name--Nohant, in the valley of the Indre, in the midst of a rich
country, a love for which she then drank in so deeply that nothing in
her later life could lessen it. She was always the friend of the peasant
and of the country-folk in general.
At Nohant she was given over to her grand-mother, to be reared in a
strangely desultory sort of fashion, doing and reading and studying
those things which could best develop her native gifts. Her father had
great influence over her, teaching her a thousand things without seeming
to teach her anything. Of him George Sand herself has written:
Character is a matter of heredity. If any one desires to know me, he
must know my father.
Her father, however, was killed by a fall from a horse; and then the
child grew up almost without any formal education. A tutor, who also
managed the estate; believed with Rousseau that the young should be
reared according to their own preferences. Therefore, Aurore read poems
and childish stories; she gained a smattering of Latin, and she was
devoted to music and the elements of natural science. For the rest of
the time she rambled with the country children, learned their games, and
became a sort of leader in everything they did.
Her only sorrow was the fact that her mother was excluded from Nohant.
The aristocratic old grandmother would not allow under her roof her
son's low-born wife; but she was devoted to her little grandchild. The
girl showed a wonderful degree of sensibility.
This life was adapted to her nature. She fed her imagination in a
perfectly healthy fashion; and, living so much out of doors, she
acquired that sound physique which she retained all through her life.
When she was thirteen, her grandmother sent the girl to a convent school
in Paris. One might suppose that the sudden change from the open woods
and fields to the primness of a religious home would have been a great
shock to her, and that with her disposition she might have broken
out into wild ways that would have shocked the nuns. But, here, as
elsewhere, she showed her wonderful adaptability. It even seemed as
if she were likely to become what the French call a devote. She gave
herself up to mythical thoughts, and expressed a desire of taking the
veil. Her confessor, however, was a keen student of human nature, and
he perceived that she was too young to decide upon the renunciation of
earthly things. Moreover, her grandmother, who had no intention that
Aurore should become a nun, hastened to Paris and carried her back to
Nohant.
The girl was now sixteen, and her complicated nature began to
make itself apparent. There was no one to control her, because her
grandmother was confined to her own room. And so Aurore Dupin, now in
superb health, rushed into every sort of diversion with all the zest of
youth. She read voraciously--religion, poetry, philosophy. She was an
excellent musician, playing the piano and the harp. Once, in a spirit of
unconscious egotism, she wrote to her confessor:
Do you think that my philosophical studies are compatible with Christian
humility?
The shrewd ecclesiastic answered, with a touch of wholesome irony:
I doubt, my daughter, whether your philosophical studies are profound
enough to warrant intellectual pride.
This stung the girl, and led her to think a little less of her own
abilities; but perhaps it made her books distasteful to her. For a while
she seems to have almost forgotten her sex. She began to dress as a boy,
and took to smoking large quantities of tobacco. Her natural brother,
who was an officer in the army, came down to Nohant and taught her to
ride--to ride like a boy, seated astride. She went about without any
chaperon, and flirted with the young men of the neighborhood. The prim
manners of the place made her subject to a certain amount of scandal,
and the village priest chided her in language that was far from tactful.
In return she refused any longer to attend his church.
Thus she was living when her grandmother died, in 1821, leaving to
Aurore her entire fortune of five hundred thousand francs. As the girl
was still but seventeen, she was placed under the guardianship of the
nearest relative on her father's side--a gentleman of rank. When the
will was read, Aurore's mother made a violent protest, and caused a most
unpleasant scene.
"I am the natural guardian of my child," she cried. "No one can take
away my rights! "
The young girl well understood that this was really the parting of the
ways. If she turned toward her uncle, she would be forever classed
among the aristocracy. If she chose her mother, who, though married, was
essentially a grisette, then she must live with grisettes, and find her
friends among the friends who visited her mother. She could not belong
to both worlds. She must decide once for all whether she would be a
woman of rank or a woman entirely separated from the circle that had
been her father's.
One must respect the girl for making the choice she did. Understanding
the situation absolutely, she chose her mother; and perhaps one would
not have had her do otherwise. Yet in the long run it was bound to be a
mistake. Aurore was clever, refined, well read, and had had the training
of a fashionable convent school. The mother was ignorant and coarse, as
was inevitable, with one who before her marriage had been half shop-girl
and half courtesan. The two could not live long together, and hence it
was not unnatural that Aurore Dupin should marry, to enter upon a new
career.
Her fortune was a fairly large one for the times, and yet not large
enough to attract men who were quite her equals. Presently, however, it
brought to her a sort of country squire, named Casimir Dudevant. He was
the illegitimate son of the Baron Dudevant. He had been in the army,
and had studied law; but he possessed no intellectual tastes. He was
outwardly eligible; but he was of a coarse type--a man who, with passing
years, would be likely to take to drink and vicious amusements, and in
serious life cared only for his cattle, his horses, and his hunting. He
had, however, a sort of jollity about him which appealed to this girl of
eighteen; and so a marriage was arranged. Aurore Dupin became his wife
in 1822, and he secured the control of her fortune.
The first few years after her marriage were not unhappy. She had a son,
Maurice Dudevant, and a daughter, Solange, and she loved them both. But
it was impossible that she should continue vegetating mentally upon
a farm with a husband who was a fool, a drunkard, and a miser. He
deteriorated; his wife grew more and more clever. Dudevant resented
this. It made him uncomfortable. Other persons spoke of her talk as
brilliant. He bluntly told her that it was silly, and that she must stop
it. When she did not stop it, he boxed her ears. This caused a breach
between the pair which was never healed. Dudevant drank more and more
heavily, and jeered at his wife because she was "always looking for noon
at fourteen o'clock. " He had always flirted with the country girls; but
now he openly consorted with his wife's chambermaid.
Mme. Dudevant, on her side, would have nothing more to do with this
rustic rake. She formed what she called a platonic friendship--and it
was really so--with a certain M. de Seze, who was advocate-general at
Bordeaux. With him this clever woman could talk without being called
silly, and he took sincere pleasure in her company. He might, in fact,
have gone much further, had not both of them been in an impossible
situation.
Aurore Dudevant really believed that she was swayed by a pure and mystic
passion. De Seze, on the other hand, believed this mystic passion to
be genuine love. Coming to visit her at Nohant, he was revolted by the
clownish husband with whom she lived. It gave him an esthetic shock to
see that she had borne children to this boor. Therefore he shrank back
from her, and in time their relation faded into nothingness.
It happened, soon after, that she found a packet in her husband's desk,
marked "Not to be opened until after my death. " She wrote of this in her
correspondence:
I had not the patience to wait till widowhood. No one can be sure of
surviving anybody. I assumed that my husband had died, and I was very
glad to learn what he thought of me while he was alive. Since the
package was addressed to me, it was not dishonorable for me to open it.
And so she opened it. It proved to be his will, but containing, as a
preamble, his curses on her, expressions of contempt, and all the vulgar
outpouring of an evil temper and angry passion. She went to her husband
as he was opening a bottle, and flung the document upon the table.
He cowered at her glance, at her firmness, and at her cold hatred. He
grumbled and argued and entreated; but all that his wife would say in
answer was:
"I must have an allowance. I am going to Paris, and my children are to
remain here. "
At last he yielded, and she went at once to Paris, taking her daughter
with her, and having the promise of fifteen hundred francs a year out of
the half-million that was hers by right.
In Paris she developed into a thorough-paced Bohemian. She tried to make
a living in sundry hopeless ways, and at last she took to literature.
She was living in a garret, with little to eat, and sometimes without
a fire in winter. She had some friends who helped her as well as they
could, but though she was attached to the Figaro, her earnings for the
first month amounted to only fifteen francs.
Nevertheless, she would not despair. The editors and publishers might
turn the cold shoulder to her, but she would not give up her ambitions.
She went down into the Latin Quarter, and there shook off the
proprieties of life. She assumed the garb of a man, and with her quick
perception she came to know the left bank of the Seine just as she had
known the country-side at Nohant or the little world at her convent
school. She never expected again to see any woman of her own rank in
life. Her mother's influence became strong in her. She wrote:
The proprieties are the guiding principle of people without soul and
virtue. The good opinion of the world is a prostitute who gives herself
to the highest bidder.
She still pursued her trade of journalism, calling herself a "newspaper
mechanic," sitting all day in the office of the Figaro and writing
whatever was demanded, while at night she would prowl in the streets
haunting the cafes, continuing to dress like a man, drinking sour wine,
and smoking cheap cigars.
One of her companions in this sort of hand-to-mouth journalism was a
young student and writer named Jules Sandeau, a man seven years younger
than his comrade. He was at that time as indigent as she, and their
hardships, shared in common, brought them very close together. He was
clever, boyish, and sensitive, and it was not long before he had fallen
at her feet and kissed her knees, begging that she would requite the
love he felt for her. According to herself, she resisted him for six
months, and then at last she yielded. The two made their home together,
and for a while were wonderfully happy. Their work and their diversions
they enjoyed in common, and now for the first time she experienced
emotions which in all probability she had never known before.
Probably not very much importance is to be given to the earlier
flirtations of George Sand, though she herself never tried to stop the
mouth of scandal. Even before she left her husband, she was credited
with having four lovers; but all she said, when the report was brought
to her, was this: "Four lovers are none too many for one with such
lively passions as mine. "
This very frankness makes it likely that she enjoyed shocking her prim
neighbors at Nohant. But if she only played at love-making then, she now
gave herself up to it with entire abandonment, intoxicated, fascinated,
satisfied. She herself wrote:
How I wish I could impart to you this sense of the intensity and
joyousness of life that I have in my veins. To live! How sweet it
is, and how good, in spite of annoyances, husbands, debts, relations,
scandal-mongers, sufferings, and irritations! To live! It is
intoxicating! To love, and to be loved! It is happiness! It is heaven!
In collaboration with Jules Sandeau, she wrote a novel called Rose
et Blanche. The two lovers were uncertain what name to place upon the
title-page, but finally they hit upon the pseudonym of Jules Sand. The
book succeeded; but thereafter each of them wrote separately, Jules
Sandeau using his own name, and Mme. Dudevant styling herself George
Sand, a name by which she was to be illustrious ever after.
As a novelist, she had found her real vocation. She was not yet well
known, but she was on the verge of fame. As soon as she had written
Indiana and Valentine, George Sand had secured a place in the world of
letters. The magazine which still exists as the Revue des Deux Mondes
gave her a retaining fee of four thousand francs a year, and many other
publications begged her to write serial stories for them.
The vein which ran through all her stories was new and piquant. As was
said of her:
In George Sand, whenever a lady wishes to change her lover, God is
always there to make the transfer easy.
In other words, she preached free love in the name of religion. This was
not a new doctrine with her. After the first break with her husband, she
had made up her mind about certain matters, and wrote:
One is no more justified in claiming the ownership of a soul than in
claiming the ownership of a slave.
According to her, the ties between a man and a woman are sacred only
when they are sanctified by love; and she distinguished between love and
passion in this epigram:
Love seeks to give, while passion seeks to take.
At this time, George Sand was in her twenty-seventh year. She was
not beautiful, though there was something about her which attracted
observation. Of middle height, she was fairly slender. Her eyes were
somewhat projecting, and her mouth was almost sullen when in repose. Her
manners were peculiar, combining boldness with timidity. Her address was
almost as familiar as a man's, so that it was easy to be acquainted with
her; yet a certain haughtiness and a touch of aristocratic pride made it
plain that she had drawn a line which none must pass without her
wish. When she was deeply stirred, however, she burst forth into an
extraordinary vivacity, showing a nature richly endowed and eager to
yield its treasures.
The existence which she now led was a curious one. She still visited her
husband at Nohant, so that she might see her son, and sometimes, when
M. Dudevant came to town, he called upon her in the apartments which she
shared with Jules Sandeau. He had accepted the situation, and with his
crudeness and lack of feeling he seemed to think it, if not natural,
at least diverting. At any rate, so long as he could retain her
half-million francs, he was not the man to make trouble about his former
wife's arrangements.
Meanwhile, there began to be perceptible the very slightest rift within
the lute of her romance. Was her love for Sandeau really love, or was
it only passion? In his absence, at any rate, the old obsession still
continued. Here we see, first of all, intense pleasure shading off into
a sort of maternal fondness. She sends Sandeau adoring letters. She is
afraid that his delicate appetite is not properly satisfied.
Yet, again, there are times when she feels that he is irritating and
ill. Those who knew them said that her nature was too passionate and
her love was too exacting for him. One of her letters seems to make
this plain. She writes that she feels uneasy, and even frightfully
remorseful, at seeing Sandeau "pine away. " She knows, she avows, that
she is killing him, that her caresses are a poison, and her love a
consuming fire.
It is an appalling thought, and Jules will not understand it. He laughs
at it; and when, in the midst of his transports of delight, the idea
comes to me and makes my blood run cold, he tells me that here is the
death that he would like to die.
