Why
was there a staircase leading into a blind space?
was there a staircase leading into a blind space?
Warner - World's Best Literature - v21 to v25 - Rab to Tur
This was the time when Théophile
Gautier went to the theatre with long hair and a pink satin waist-
coat, when Balzac wore a monk's white robe instead of a dressing-
gown, and when George Sand used to cut off her beautiful black
locks and wear masculine attire, making herself look a boy of twelve
in it on account of her diminutive stature. However much may
have been said about this, she never wore those unbecoming clothes
except in an intermittent way, finding them more convenient and
less expensive than others.
Up to 1840 George Sand wrote under the impulse of feeling, fol-
lowing no system; later on, a system was grafted on the feeling
without destroying it. Lamennais's humanitarian Christianity, Michel
de Bourges's revolutionary tirades, Pierre Leroux's dreamy social-
ism, all took hold on her either successively or at once. With
more zeal than discernment she made herself the echo of the most
-
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advanced principles of political equality and of communism. These
ideas led her to publish 'Le Compagnon du Tour de France,' in
which an aristocratic maiden openly declares her resolution to marry
into the lower classes, so as to belong to them herself; 'Le Meunier
d'Angibault,' wherein an obstinate artisan proudly refuses the hand
of the young countess he adores, because she represents the wealth
he would not have at any price (fortunately she becomes poor, and
rejoices at it as if it were the greatest happiness); and 'La Com-
tesse de Rudolstadt,' that misty sequel to the sunny and harmonious
story of Consuelo,' with all its theosophical and humanitarian alle-
gories, that at times make us yawn. If however we leave out the
political harangues, carbonarism, and other chimeras, what magnifi-
cent fragments there are in these partisan books! —although their
romantic imagination is smothered by the medley of accumulated
dissertations and arguments. Still the author is always arguing and
fighting for progress and reforms; and some of these have been
achieved since, in a less radical way, no doubt, than she would
have wished, yet they would have gratified her. George Sand was
in open rebellion against every kind of slavery. She greatly admired
'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' saying of Harriet Beecher Stowe: "I do not
know whether she is a genius, but she has more than genius,—she
surely is a saint. " She spurned the limits of sex, and above all
things despised hypocrisy. As regards what is called the "woman
question" to-day, Margaret Fuller certainly went as far as she did,
while she had many more illusions on woman's native nobility; but
setting talents aside, there is a difference between them, delicately
expressed by Margaret Fuller herself:-"Those who would reform the
world must show that they do not speak in the heat of wild impulse;
their lives must not be sustained by passionate error. They must
be religious students of the Divine purpose with regard to men, if
they would not confound the fancies of a day with the requisitions of
eternal good. "
In order to rest after her socialist campaigns, George Sand would
wing her flight to dreamland; and it was wise of her to do so, for
we would now willingly give up all the dullness of 'Horace' and
the turgid speeches in 'Le Péché de M. Antoine,' for that one day's
drive on charming roads when a group of tourists, brought together
by good luck, have that accidental meeting with Teverino, the vaga-
bond genius, beautiful as a young god, and disporting himself free
and naked under his wreath of reeds, in the bluest of lakes. He
needs only to don gentleman's clothes to be one, and an accom-
plished one at that; he plays the part for a time, scorns it, and
disappears. What a delightful excursion beyond the vulgarities of
every-day life!
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GEORGE SAND
The idyl too always seized George Sand as soon as she left the
streets of Paris, and returned to the peace and refreshing breezes of
her beloved Nohant. After the fiery and rather bombastic eloquence
and paradoxes found in her other works launched against society,
the artless speech of her peasants is most restful reading.
There is no purer, simpler, nor more beautiful French than that
which adapts itself so perfectly to the humble subjects of 'La Mare
au Diable' and 'François le Champi. ' Some critics have said that
George Sand's peasants were not real. They seem to me, on the
contrary, to be very closely studied from the honest and laborious
population of central France; and however much they may be ideal-
ized, they are far more like those I have known than the brutes
painted by the masters of the so-called naturalistic school, the latter
evidently preferring to look at their coarseness through a magnifying
glass. George Sand did the reverse; she set off the best traits
of these primitive natures, with whom she had the greatest affinity.
The revolution of 1848 tore her from her eclogues; her friends
dragged her into the very thick of the fight, and used her as a
sonorous instrument. She drew up 'Lettres au Peuple' and the
'Bulletins de la République'; but her illusions about the new form
of government could not hold out against the bloody days of June:
she says that "disgust drove her to solitude, where she faced her
free and revolted conscience"; and she now went back to her best,
her noblest inspirer,- Nature. Whether she carries about a broken
heart in Italy after a celebrated quarrel, or gayly climbs the Alps
with Liszt and the Countess d'Agoult,-whether she spends the win-
ter at Majorca nursing Chopin, or wanders dreamily along the sunken
lanes of the Black Valley and the banks of the Indre, she never
fails to reflect the humble or striking beauties surrounding her, or to
make a soul vibrate in them. She has the marvelous and peculiar
art of infusing a human emotion into external and inanimate objects
- which then seems to emanate from them. Has she not written an
immortal page on perfume and memory, in connection with a sage
leaf she had bruised between her fingers?
Nohant was a salutary retreat for her in every respect. She spent
the greater part of her life there in close communion with the earth,
frequently cultivating it with her own hands, and drawing her favor-
ite subjects of study from plants and stones. Nothing interested
her more than natural history. She gave herself up to it with ardor;
convinced that constant study was imperative, and that if a writer
does not lay up a treasure of knowledge, the tool he uses, though
ever so fine, will be wielded in vain. Botany and geology filled her
days, and she read much besides: science, history, everything inter-
esting her. In the evening, other things were read aloud in the
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family circle; very often plays were acted. According to her fixed
habit, she wrote at night after every one had retired, never failing to
cover twelve large quarto pages before going to bed, her inspiration
being so tractable.
As she grew older she went to Paris less frequently, except when
there was a question of performing one of the plays she willingly
dramatized from her novels. She was passionately fond of the stage
and all connected with it; and liked to put actors and showmen
of all sorts in her books, as she did in 'L'Homme de Neige,' 'Le
Château des Désertes,' 'Pierre qui Roule,' etc. But when it came
to writing a play, she did not always show the qualities the stage
demands, such as logical sequence in a briskly carried action, spark-
ling dialogue, and a sense for comic situations. Several of her com-
edies or dramas, however, were very successful; viz. , 'Le Mariage de
Victorine,' 'Claudie,' and 'Le Marquis de Villemer. ' She made a
great many plays for her own little theatre at Nohant, never neglect-
ing her marionettes, who inspired 'Le Diable aux Champs,' and for
whom her fairy fingers were always making new costumes.
In the novels written towards the close of her life there is not a
trace of that sensual ideality once considered such a grave fault in
the author of 'Lélia'; pure and spotless ideality shines in them: and
it seemed to cost her no effort to write those charming, fantastic
tales for her granddaughters,- tales any child can enjoy, but needing
refined scholars to do them full justice. She kept abreast of all new
efforts in literature with interest and sympathy, yet always repeating
that "art for art's sake" was a vain phrase; that art for whatever is
worthy, and for the general welfare, should be the aim of all study;
that when there a beautiful sentiment in one's soul, it becomes
a duty to find such expression for it as will make it enter into many
other souls. For this reason she, the great democrat, could not belong
to the haughty schools that despise the general public—the masses-
to the degree of frequently using language intelligible only to a hand-
ful of the initiated. Neither would she admit, feeling all humanity
vibrate within herself, that this humanity was to be represented by
scoundrels, villains, and fools alone; nor that truth was to be found
merely in the painting of evil. These may have been old-fashioned
ideas; but by remaining true to them, this inexhaustible Scheher-
azade found the means of keeping an audience composed of all
classes attentive to her ever fresh and youthful stories, and raised
her readers above the obscenity so complacently provided for them
elsewhere. Being sincerely modest, she did not believe in posterity,
imagining that it would take her at her own valuation. Once they
were finished, she completely forgot her novels. "Consuelo '-
what is that? " she asked Flaubert. "I do not remember a single
XXII-799
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GEORGE SAND
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word of it. Are you indeed reading it, and does it really amuse
you? If so, I must read it again and be pleased with myself, because
you are. »
Death found her as busy as ever. Two days before the end, al-
though she at times suffered acutely, she wrote cheerfully: "I feel"
stronger and freer within myself than ever. " She passed away in
her seventy-third year, before her powers had waned.
Those who wish to enter further into this life, in which personal
vicissitudes are so closely connected with the evolution of genius,
will find all of George Sand in 'L'Histoire de ma Vie,' where she
has drawn so correct a portrait of herself,- although she tells us
hardly more than the story of her childhood and early youth, to the
eternal regret of scandal-mongers; in the 'Lettres d'un Voyageur,'
those poetic disclosures that she occasionally made to the public in
an impersonal yet most transparent form; and finally in her 'Cor-
respondence,' which reveals her great warm heart perfectly. One
cannot fail to be touched on seeing her, while busy writing a hun-
dred volumes, lavish kindness unceasingly on every claimant, answer-
ing every question, counseling young authors and giving them letters
of introduction, helping hesitating talent to discover its vocation,
pleading for exiles or political prisoners; and most bountifully put-
ting her time, her words, her influence, even when it cost her the
most, at the disposal of others. This Correspondence' shows how
her adversaries themselves respected her; and how anxious the Em-
peror Napoleon III. , whom she petitioned more than once, was to
please her.
After reading these letters covering a period of over fifty years,
and where she always appears to be the slave of her family, tender
to her friends, helpful to a swarm of strangers who thought them-
selves authorized to intrude upon her on account of her unbounded
generosity, no one will be surprised that she should have blessed
the hour of rest when it came. She had already given old age a
smiling welcome, saying that it was "so good of God to calm us by
taking away those stings of personality that are so sharp in youth.
How can people complain of losing some things with age," she added,
"when, on the contrary, they gain so many others? when our ideas
grow broader and more correct, when our heart softens and grows
larger, and our victorious conscience may at last look back and say,
'I have done my task! " Her special task had been to bear high
aloft the banner of ideality and liberty, to love and glorify the hum-
ble, and to rise above herself by work. She had earned more than
a million francs by her pen in the days when literature had nothing
in common with merchandise, and she had given all this fortune to
others.
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When one day in June 1876 she dropped that valiant pen, she
surely had also earned the right to a gentle, uninterrupted sleep in
the pretty little cemetery at Nohant. She did not believe that death
was the end, but held to a perpetual ascent towards infinite goodness
and infinite truth. And she would laughingly say that she hoped she
might go to some planet where reading and writing were unknown,
so she might rest "for good. " Indeed, she had a right to rest after
having exercised the most beautiful sovereignty over the minds of
two generations,— a sovereignty not yet at an end, although just now
it seems somewhat eclipsed.
The future will winnow her abundant but uneven work, and sep-
arate the tares from the wheat; and of the latter there will remain
a well-filled measure fully sufficing for her glory.
The Bentzen
i
THE CONVENT OF THE ENGLISH AUGUSTINES
From The Story of my Life >
TH
HIS Convent was one of the three or four British communities
established in Paris during Cromwell's ascendency.
It is the only one now in existence, its house having endured
the various revolutions without suffering greatly. Its traditions
say that Henriette of France, the daughter of our Henry IV.
and wife of the unfortunate Charles I. of England, had often.
come to pray in our chapel with her son James II.
All our
nuns were English, Scotch, or Irish. Two-thirds of the boarding
pupils and lodgers, as well as some of the priests who came to
officiate, belonged to these nations. During certain hours of the
day the whole school was forbidden to speak a word of French,
which was the best means for learning English rapidly. Nat-
urally our nuns hardly ever spoke anything else to us. They re-
tained the habits of their country; drank tea three times a day,
allowing those among us who were good to take it with them.
The cloister and the church were paved with long tombstones,
beneath which were the venerated bones of those Catholics of
Old England who had died in exile, and been buried by favor in
this inviolable sanctuary. There were English epitaphs and pious
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GEORGE SAND
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inscriptions everywhere on tombs and walls. Large old portraits
of English princes and prelates hung in the Superior's room and
in her private parlor. The beautiful and amorous Mary Stuart,
reputed a saint by our chaste nuns, shone there like a star. In
short, everything in that house was English, both of the past and
of the present; and when within its gates, one seemed to have
crossed the Channel. All this was a "nine days' wonder" to me,
the Berri peasant.
My grandmother on presenting me could not forego the little
vanity of saying that I was very well informed for my age, and
that it would be a waste of time to put me in a class with young
children. The school was divided into two sections: a junior and
a senior class. By my age I belonged to the juniors, where there
were about thirty boarding pupils between six and fourteen years
old. By my reading, and the ideas it had developed, I belonged
to a third class that would have had to be created for me and
two or three others; but I had not been trained to work method-
ically, and did not know a word of English. I understood a great
deal about history, and even philosophy; but I was very ignor-
ant, or at least very uncertain, about the order of epochs and
events. I might have been able to talk about everything with
the professors, and perhaps have seen a little clearer and a little
further than those who directed us; but the merest college fag
would have greatly puzzled me on facts, and I could not have
passed a regular examination on any subject whatever. I felt
this perfectly; and was much relieved to hear the Superior say
that as I had not yet been confirmed, I should have to enter the
junior class.
We were cloistered in the full sense of the word. We went
out twice a month only, and never spent a night out except
at New-Year's. There were vacations, but I had none; as my
grandmother said she preferred not to interrupt my studies, so
as to have me at the convent a shorter time. She left Paris a
few weeks after our separation, and did not come back for a
year; then went away for another year. She had demanded that
my mother was not to ask to take me out. My cousins the
Villeneuves offered me their home for all holidays, and wrote to
my grandmother for her permission. I wrote too, and begged
her not to grant it; and had the courage to tell her, that not
going out with mother, I ought not and did not wish to go out
with any one.
I trembled lest she should not listen to me; and
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12773
though I felt the need and the wish to enjoy these outings, I
made up my mind to pretend illness if my cousins came to fetch
me armed with a permit. This time my grandmother approved
my action; and instead of finding fault, praised my feeling in
a way I found rather exaggerated. I had done nothing but my
duty; yet it made me spend two whole years behind bars.
We had mass in our chapel, received visits in the parlor, took
our private lessons there; the professor being on one side of the
grating while we were on the other. All the convent windows
towards the street had not only gratings, but immovable linen
screens besides. It was really a prison, but a prison with a large
garden and plenty of company. I must confess that I never felt
the rigors of captivity for an instant; and that the minute pre-
cautions taken to keep us locked up and prevent us from getting
a glimpse of the outer world, often made me laugh. This care
was the only stimulant we had to long for freedom; for there was
not one of us who would ever have dreamt of crossing her moth-
er's threshold unattended: yet almost every girl at the convent
watched for the opening of the cloister door, or peeped furtively
through the slits in the linen screens. To outwit supervision, go
down into the court three or four steps, see a cab pass by, was
the dream and the ambition of forty or fifty wild and mischiev-
ous girls, who the very next day would go about Paris without in
the least enjoying it; because once outside the convent inclosure,
stepping on the pavement and looking at people were no longer
forbidden fruit.
[After describing the immense and complicated medley of buildings within
this inclosure, their inconvenient and illogical arrangement, "so scattered that
one lost a quarter of a day going to and fro," and the curious way the one
hundred and twenty or thirty persons living there were lodged, some
crowded into the closest quarters, while others were spread over more space
than ten families would have needed for living at ease,- George Sand de-
scribes the nuns' cells, their cleanliness, and how their patient devotion orna-
mented them with the trifles dear to the pious heart. She then resumes as
follows:-]
My first feeling on entering the junior school-room was a
painful one. Thirty girls were crowded into a room neither
large nor high enough for the number. Its walls were covered
with ugly yolk-of-egg-colored paper, the ceiling was stained and
cracked, the benches, tables, and stools were all dirty, the stove
was ugly and smoky, and the smell of coal was mixed with that.
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GEORGE SAND
coming from the near poultry-yard; the plaster crucifix was com-
mon, the flooring broken, and we were to spend two thirds of
the day here, three quarters of it in winter,- and it was winter
just then.
I do not know of anything more unpleasant than the cus-
tom followed in educational arrangements of making school-rooms
the saddest and most forlorn of places: under the pretense that
children would spoil the furniture and ruin the ornaments, peo-
ple take away everything that would stimulate their imagination.
They pretend that pictures and decorations, even the patterns on
the wall-paper, would make them inattentive. Why are churches
and chapels decorated with paintings and statues, if not to ele-
vate the soul and revive its languor by the sight of venerated
objects? Children, we are told, have dirty and clumsy habits.
They spill ink over everything, and love to destroy. Surely they
dó not bring these tastes and habits from their homes, where
they are taught to respect whatever is beautiful or useful; and
as soon as they are old enough to think, they never dream of
doing the mischief that becomes so attractive at school only be-
cause there it is a sort of revenge on the neglect and parsimony
practiced upon them. The better they are housed, the more
careful they would be. They would think twice before soiling a
carpet or breaking a frame. Those ugly bare walls in which you
shut them up soon become an object of horror; and they would
knock them down if they could. You want them to work like
machines, and make their minds run on by the hour, free from
all personal consciousness and untouched by all that makes up
life and the renewal of intellectual life. That is both false and
impossible. The studying child has all the needs of a creating
artist. He must breathe pure air; his body must be at ease; he
must have things to look at, and be able to change his thoughts
at will by enjoying form and color. Nature is a continual spec-
tacle for him. By shutting him up in a bare, sad, unwholesome
room, you suffocate his heart and brain as well as his body. I
should like everything around a city child to be cheerful, from
its cradle. The country child has the sky, trees, plants, and sun.
The other is too often stunted both physically and morally by
the squalor of a poor home, the bad taste of a rich one, or the
absence of all taste in the middle-class home.
Why are Italians born, as it were, with a feeling for the
beautiful? Why does a Veronese mason, a Venetian tradesman,
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GEORGE SAND
12775
a peasant of the Roman Campagna, love to look at fine monu-
ments? Why do they understand good pictures and music, while
our proletarians more intelligent in other respects, and our mid-
dle class though educated with more care, love what is false,
vulgar - even ugly in art, unless a special training corrects
their instincts? It is because we live amidst what is ugly and
vulgar; because our parents have no taste, and we hand down
the traditional bad taste to our children.
It would be so easy
to surround childhood with things at once noble, agreeable, and
instructive.
-
[Owing to her grandmother's Voltairean principles, Aurore Dupin's reli-
gious training had been rather neglected: this shocked her present pious
teachers. The means taken to correct this seemed silly to her already philo-
sophical mind; and after a short time she decided to "set her cap on her
ear and join the devils' camp. " This was the name given to those who were
not pious. The latter were called "the good," while there was an intermedi-
ate variety called "the stupid. " Mary G, a bright Irish girl, generally
spoken of as "the boy," became Aurore's best friend, after ridiculing her and
nicknaming her Rising Sun (Aurora) and Some Bread (Du pain). Being
the leading spirit in the devils' camp, she offered to admit Aurore to its
ranks. ]
"You shall be initiated this evening. "
I waited for night and supper very impatiently. Recreation
time began as soon as we left the refectory. In summer the
two classes went to the garden. In winter each class went to
its own room: the seniors to their fine and spacious study; we
to our forlorn quarters, where there was no room to play, and
where our teacher forced us to "amuse >> ourselves quietly,- that
is, not at all. Leaving the refectory always made a momentary
confusion, and I admired the way the "devils" of the two classes
managed to create the slight disorder under whose favor one
could easily escape. The cloister had but one little lamp to
light it: this left the other three galleries in semi-darkness.
Instead of walking straight ahead towards the juniors' room, you
stepped to the left, let the flock pass on, and you were free. I
did so, and found myself in the dark with my friend Mary and
the other "devils" she had told me would be there.
They were all armed, some with logs, others with tongs. I had
nothing, but was bold enough to go to the school-room, get a
poker, and return to my accomplices without being noticed.
•
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Then they initiated me into the great secret, and we started
on our expedition.
Its
The great secret was the traditional legend of the convent: a
dream handed down from generation to generation, and from
"devil" to "devil," for about two centuries; a romantic fiction
which may have had some foundation of truth at the beginning,
but now rested merely on the needs of our imagination.
object was to deliver the victim. There was a prisoner, some
said several prisoners, shut up somewhere in an impenetrable
retreat: either a cell hidden and bricked up in the thickness of
the walls, or in a dungeon under the vaults of the immense sub-
basements extending beneath the monastery as well as under a
great part of the Saint-Victor district. There were indeed mag-
nificent cellars there,—a real subterranean city, whose limits we
never found,—and they had many mysterious outlets at different
points within the vast area of the inclosure. We were told that
at a great distance off, these cellars joined the excavations run-
ning under the greater part of Paris and the surrounding coun-
try as far as Vincennes. They said that by following our convent
cellars you could reach the Catacombs, the quarries, the Baths of
Julian, and what not. These vaults were the key to a world of
darkness, terrors, mysteries: an immense abyss dug beneath our
feet, closed by iron gates, and whose exploration was as perilous
as the descent into hell of Eneas or Dante. For this reason it
was absolutely imperative to get there, in spite of the insur-
mountable difficulties of the enterprise, and the terrible punish-
ments the discovery of our secret would provoke.
Entering these subterranean domains was one of those unhoped-
for strokes of good luck that occurred once, or at most twice,
in the life of a "devil," after years of perseverance and mental
effort. It was of no use thinking of getting in by the main
door. That door was at the bottom of a wide staircase next
to the kitchens, which were cellars too; and here the lay sisters
congregated.
But we were sure that the vaults could be reached by a
thousand other ways, even by the roof. According to us, every
nailed-up door, every dark corner under a staircase, every hollow.
sounding wall, might communicate mysteriously with the sub-
terranean region; and we looked for that communication most
earnestly up to the very attic.
M AND L
--
"
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12777
I had read Mrs. Radcliffe's 'Castle of the Pyrenees' at No-
hant, with terror and delight. My companions had many another
Scotch and Irish legend in their heads, all fit to set one's hair
on end. The convent too had innumerable stories of its own
lamentable events,― about ghosts, dungeons, inexplicable appari-
tions, and mysterious noises. All this, and the thought of finally
discovering the tremendous secret of the victim, so kindled our
imaginations that we were sure we heard sighs and groans start
from under the stones, or breathe through the cracks of doors
and walls.
We started off, my companions for the hundredth, I for the
first time, in search of that elusive captive,-languishing no one
knew where, but certainly somewhere, and whom perhaps we
were called to discover. She must have been very old, consider-
ing how long she had been sought in vain! She might have
been over two hundred years old, but we did not mind that!
We sought her, called her, thought of her incessantly, and never
despaired.
That evening I was led into the oldest and most broken-up
part of the buildings,— perhaps the most exciting locality for our
exploration. We selected a little passage with wooden railings
overlooking an empty space without any known outlet. A stair-
case with banisters led to this unknown region, but an oaken
door forbade access to the stairs. We had to get around the
obstacle by passing from the railing to the banisters, and walk
down the outside of the worm-eaten balusters. There was a dark
void below us whose depth we could not fathom. We had only
a little twisted taper (a "rat "), and that hardly let us see more
than the first steps of the mysterious staircase.
We were at the bottom in a moment; and with more joy than
disappointment found that we were directly under the passage,
in a square space without any opening. Not a door nor window,
nor any explicable purpose for this sort of closed vestibule.
Why
was there a staircase leading into a blind space? Why was there
a strong padlocked door shutting off the staircase?
The little taper was divided into several lengths, and each
one began examining for herself. The staircase was made of
wood. A secret spring in one of the steps must lead to a pass-
age, another staircase, or a hidden trap. While some explored
the staircase, and tried to force its old planks apart, others groped
along the wall in search of a knob, a crack, a ring, or any of the
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GEORGE SAND
thousand contrivances mentioned in the chronicles of old manors
as moving a stone, turning a panel, or opening an entrance into
unknown regions.
Alas, there was nothing! The wall was smooth and plastered.
The pavement sounded dull; not a stone was loose, and the
staircase hid no spring. One of us looked further. She declared
that in the extreme corner under the staircase the wall had a
hollow sound; we struck it, and found it true. "It's here! " we
all exclaimed. "There's a walled-up passage in there, but that
passage leads to the awful dungeon. That is the way down to
the sepulchre holding the living victims. " We glued our ears to
the wall, heard nothing; still the discoverer maintained that she
could hear confused groans and clanking chains. What was to
be done?
"Why, it's quite plain," said Mary: "we must pull the wall
down. All of us together can surely make a hole in it. "
Nothing seemed easier to us; and we all went to work,-
some trying to knock it down with their logs, others scraping it
with their shovels and tongs,-never thinking that by worrying
those poor shaky walls, we risked tumbling the building down
on our heads. Fortunately we could not do much harm, because
the noise made by the logs would have attracted some one.
We had to be satisfied with pushing and scratching. Yet we
had managed to make quite a noticeable hole in the plaster,
lime, and stones, when the bell rang for prayers. We had just
time to repeat our perilous escalade, put out our lights, separate,
and grope our way back to the school-rooms. We put off the
continuation of the enterprise till the next day, and appointed
the same place of meeting. Those who got there first were
not to wait for those who might be detained by punishment or
unusual surveillance. Each one was to do her best to scoop out
the wall. It would be just so much done towards the next
day's work. There was no chance of any one's noticing it, as no
one ever went down into that blind hall-way given over to mice
and spiders.
We dusted each other off, regained the cloister, slipped into
our respective class-rooms, and were ready to kneel at prayers
with the others. I forget whether we were noticed and punished
that evening. It happened so often that no single event of the
kind has any special date in the great number. Still we could
often carry on our work with impunity.
## p. 12779 (#197) ##########################################
GEORGE SAND
12779
The search for the great secret and the dungeon lasted the
whole winter I spent in the junior class. The wall was per-
ceptibly damaged, but we were stopped by reaching wooden
girders. We looked elsewhere, ransacked twenty different places,
never having the least success, yet never losing hope.
One day we thought we would look for some mansard win-
dow which might be, so to speak, the upper key to the so
ardently desired subterranean world. There were many such
windows, whose purpose we ignored. There was a little room in
the attic where we practiced on one of the thirty pianos scattered
through the establishment. We had an hour for this practice
every day, and very few of us cared for it. As I always loved
music, I liked to practice. But I was becoming more of an artist
in romance than music; for what more beautiful poem could
there be than the romance in action we were pursuing with our
joint imaginations, courage, and palpitating emotions?
In this way the piano hour became the daily hour for ad-
ventures, without detriment, however, to the evening ones. We
appointed meetings in one of these straggling rooms, and from
there would go to the "I don't know where " or the "As you
please" of fancy.
From the attic where I was supposed to be playing scales,
I could see a labyrinth of roofs, sheds, lofts, and slopes, all cov-
ered with moss-grown tiles and decorated with broken chimneys,
offering a vast field for new explorations. So on to the roof
we went. It was not hard to jump out of the window. Six feet
below us there was a gutter joining two gables. It was more
imprudent than difficult to scale these gables, meet others, jump
from slope to slope, and run about like cats; and danger, far
from restraining, only seemed to stimulate us.
There was something exceedingly foolish, but at the same
time heroic, in this mania of seeking the victim; foolish, because
we had to suppose that the nuns, whose gentleness and kind-
ness we worshiped, were practicing horrible tortures upon some
one; heroic, because we risked our lives every day to deliver an
imaginary creature, who was the object of our most generous
thoughts and most chivalrous undertakings.
We had been out about an hour, spying into the garden,
looking down on a great part of the courts and buildings, and
carefully hiding behind chimneys whenever we saw a black-veiled
nun, who might have raised her head and seen us in the clouds,
## p. 12780 (#198) ##########################################
12780
GEORGE SAND
when we asked ourselves how we should get back. The arrange-
ment of the roofs had allowed us to step or jump down. Going
up was not so easy. I think it would have been impossible
without a ladder. We scarcely knew where we were. At last
we recognized a parlor-boarder's window,- Sidonie Macdonald's,
the celebrated general's daughter. It could be reached by a
final jump, but would be more dangerous than the others. I
jumped too hurriedly, and caught my heel in a flat sky-light,
through which I should have fallen thirty feet into a hall near
the juniors' room, if by chance my awkwardness had not made me
swerve. I got off with two badly flayed knees, but did not give
them a second thought. My heel had broken into a part of the
sash of that deuced window, and smashed half a dozen panes,
which dropped with a frightful crash quite near the kitchen.
entrance. A great noise arose at once among the lay sisters, and
through the opening I had just made, we could hear Sister
Theresa's loud voice screaming, "Cats! " and accusing Whisky-
Mother Alippe's big tom-cat- of fighting with all his fellows,
and breaking all the windows in the house. But Sister Mary
defended the cat's morals, and Sister Helen was sure that a
chimney had fallen on the roof. This discussion started the
nervous giggle that nothing can stop in little girls. We heard
the sisters on the stairs, we should be caught in the very act of
walking on the roofs, and still we could not stir to find refuge.
Then I discovered that one of my shoes was gone,- that it had
dropped through the broken sash into the kitchen hall. Though
my knees were bleeding, my laughter was so uncontrollable that
I could not say a word, but merely showed my unshod foot,
and explained what had happened by dumb show. A new ex-
plosion of laughter followed, although the alarm had been given
and the lay sisters were near.
--
We were soon reassured. Being sheltered and hidden by
overhanging roofs, we could hardly be discovered without get-
ting up to the broken window by a ladder, or following the road
we had taken. And that was something we could safely chal-
lenge any of the nuns to do. So when we had recognized the
advantage of our position, we began to me-ouw Homerically, so
that Whisky and his family might be accused and convicted in
our stead.
Then we made for the window of Sidonie, who did
not welcome us. The poor child was practicing on the piano,
and paying no attention to the feline howls vaguely striking her
## p. 12781 (#199) ##########################################
GEORGE SAND
12781
ear. She was delicate and nervous, very gentle, and quite in-
capable of understanding what pleasure we could find in roaming
over roofs. As she sat playing, her back was turned to the win-
dow; and when we burst into it in a bunch, she screamed aloud.
We lost little time in quieting her. Her cries would attract the
nuns; so we sprang into the room and scampered to the door,
while she stood trembling and staring, seeing all this strange
procession flit by without understanding it nor recognizing any
one of us, so terrified was she. In a moment we had all dis-
persed: one went to the upper room whence we had started, and
played the piano with might and main; another took a round-
about way to the school-room. As for me, I had to find my
shoe, and secure that piece of evidence, if I still had the time.
I managed to avoid the lay sisters, and to find the kitchen entry
free. Audaces fortuna juvat, said I to myself, thinking of the
aphorisms Deschartres* had taught me. And indeed I found
the lucky shoe, where it had fallen in a dark corner and not
been seen. Whisky alone was accused. My knees hurt me very
much for a few days, but I did not brag of them; and the explo-
rations did not slacken.
-
I needed all this romantic excitement to bear up against the
convent regulations, which went very much against me. We
were fed well enough, yet that is a thing I have always cared
least for; but we suffered most cruelly from the cold, and that
year the winter was very severe. The rules for rising and retir-
ing were as harmful as they were disagreeable to me. I have
always loved to sit up late, and not to rise early. At Nohant I
had done as I pleased — read or written in my room at night, and
not been compelled to confront the morning cold. My circulation
is sluggish, and the word "cool-blooded" describes both my phys-
ical and my mental organization. A "devil" among the "devils"
of the convent, I never lost my wits, and did the wildest things
in a solemn way that always delighted my accomplices; but the
cold really paralyzed me, especially during the first half of the
day. The dormitory was in the mansard roof, and so icy that I
could not go to sleep, but sadly heard every hour of the night
strike. At six o'clock two servants came and waked us pitilessly.
It has always seemed a melancholy thing to me to rise and dress.
by lamplight. We had to wash in water whose icy crust we
*Her father's tutor.
## p. 12782 (#200) ##########################################
12782
GEORGE SAND
had to break, and then it could not be washed with. We had
chilblains, and our feet bled in our tight shoes. We went to mass
by candle-light, and shivered on the benches or dozed on our
knees, in the attitude of piety. At seven o'clock we breakfasted
on a piece of bread and a cup of tea. At last, on reaching the
school-room, we could see a little light dawn in the sky, and a
bit of fire in the stove. I never thawed until about noon; I had
frightful colds, and sharp pains in all my limbs, and suffered
from them fifteen years later.
But Mary could not bear complaining; being as strong as a
boy, she made pitiless fun of all who were not stoical. She
taught me to be pitiless towards myself. I deserved some credit
for this, for I suffered more than any one else; and the Paris
climate was killing me already. Sallow, apathetic, and silent, I
seemed the calmest and most submissive of persons when in the
school-room. I never answered back: anger was foreign to my
nature, and I do not remember having an attack of it during
the three years I spent in the convent. Thanks to this disposi-
tion, I was always loved, even at the time of my worst impish-
ness, by my most disagreeable companions and the most exacting
teachers and nuns. The Superior told my grandmother that I
was "still waters. " Paris had frozen the fever of movement I
had had at Nohant. Yet this did not prevent me from climb-
ing over roofs in the month of December, or spending whole
evenings bare-headed in the garden in the middle of winter: for
we hunted "the great secret" in the garden too; and when the
doors were closed, we got down there by the windows. And
that was because we lived by our brain at those times, and I
never noticed then that I was dragging about a sick body.
LÉLIA
[Written in 1833, the period of passion and despair. In this magnificent,
fiery, yet at times absurd poem of doubt and despair, Sténio sometimes
stands for Alfred de Musset, and again for the Ideal; while Lélia is at once
George Sand, and the human soul warred upon and torn by its dual nature. ]
"THE
HE prophets are crying in the desert to-day, and no voice
answers, for the world is indifferent and deaf: it lies
down and stops its ears so as to die in peace. A few
scattered groups of weak votaries vainly try to rekindle a spark
## p. 12783 (#201) ##########################################
GEORGE SAND
12783
of virtue.
As the last remnants of man's moral power, they will
float for a moment about the abyss, then go and join the other
wrecks at the bottom of that shoreless sea which will swallow
up the world. "
"O Lélia, why do you thus despair of those sublime men who
aspire to bring virtue back to our iron age? Even if I were as
doubtful of their success as you are, I would not say so. I should
fear to commit an impious crime. "
"I admire those men," said Lélia, "and would like to be the
least among them. But what will those shepherds bearing a
star on their brows be able to do before the huge monster of
the Apocalypse before that immense and terrible figure outlined
in the foreground of all the prophets' pictures? That woman, as
pale and beautiful as vice,—that great harlot of nations, decked
with the wealth of the East, and bestriding a hydra belching
forth rivers of poison on all human pathways,-is Civilization;
is humanity demoralized by luxury and science; is the torrent
of venom which will swallow up all virtue, all hope of regen-
eration. "
― -
"O Lélia! " exclaimed the poet, struck by superstition, "are
not you that terrible and unhappy phantom? How many times
this fear has taken possession of my dreams! How many times
you have appeared to me as the type of the unspeakable agony
to which the spirit of inquiry has driven man! With your beauty.
and your sadness, your weariness and your skepticism, do you
not personify the excess of sorrow produced by the abuse of
thought? Have you not given up, and as it were prostituted,
that moral power, so highly developed by what art, poetry, and
science have done for it, to every new impression and error? In-
stead of clinging faithfully and prudently to the simple creed of
your fathers, and to the instinctive indifference God has implanted
in man for his peace and preservation; instead of confining your-
self to a pious life free from vain show, you have abandoned
yourself to all the seductions of ambitious philosophy. You have
cast yourself into the torrent of civilization rising to destroy, and
which by dashing along too swiftly has ruined the scarcely laid
foundations of the future. And because you have delayed the
work of centuries for a few days, you think you have shattered
the hour-glass of Eternity. There is much pride in this grief,
Lélia! But God will make this billow of stormy centuries, that
for him are but a drop in the ocean, float by. The devouring
## p. 12784 (#202) ##########################################
12784
GEORGE SAND
hydra will perish for lack of food; and from its world-covering
corpse a new race will issue, stronger and more patient than the
old. "
"You see far into the future, Sténio! You personify Nature
for me, and are her unspotted child. You have not yet blunted
your faculties: you believe yourself immortal because you feel
yourself young and like that untilled valley now blooming in
pride and beauty,-never dreaming that in a single day the
plowshare and the hundred-handed monster called industry can
tear its bosom to rob it of its treasures; you are growing up
full of trust and presumption, not foreseeing your coming life,
which will drag you down under the weight of its errors, disfig-
ure you with the false colors of its promises. Wait, wait a few
years, and you too will say, 'All is passing away! '»
"No, all is not passing away! " said Sténio. "Look at the
sun, and the earth, and the beautiful sky, and these green hills;
and even that ice, winter's fragile edifice, which has withstood
the rays of summer for centuries. Even so man's frail power
will prevail! What matters the fall of a few generations? Do
you weep for so slight a thing, Lélia? Do you deem it possible
a single idea can die in the universe? Will not that imperish-
able inheritance be found intact in the dust of our extinct races,
just as the inspirations of art and the discoveries of science arise.
alive each day from the ashes of Pompeii or the tombs of Mem-
phis? Oh, what a great and striking proof of intellectual immor-
tality! Deep mysteries had been lost in the night of time; the
world had forgotten its age, and thinking itself still young,
was alarmed at feeling itself so old. It said as you do, Lélia:
'I am about to end, for I am growing weak, and I was born but
a few days ago! How few I shall need for dying, since so few
were needed for living! ' But one day human corpses were ex-
humed from the bosom of Egypt - Egypt that had lived out its
period of civilization, and has just lived its period of barbarism!
Egypt, where the ancient light, lost so long, is being rekindled,
and a rested and rejuvenated Egypt may perhaps soon come
and establish herself upon the extinguished torch of our own.
Egypt, the living image of her mummies sleeping under the dust
of ages, and now awaking to the broad daylight of science in
order to reveal the age of the old world to the new! Is this not
solemn and terrible, Lélia? Within the dried-up entrails of a
human corpse, the inquisitive glance of our century discovered the
## p. 12785 (#203) ##########################################
GEORGE SAND
12785
papyrus, that mysterious and sacred monument of man's eternal
power, the still dark but incontrovertible witness of the impos-
ing duration of creation. Our eager hand unrolls those per-
fumed bandages, those frail and indissoluble shrouds at which
destruction stopped short. These bandages that once enfolded a
corpse, these manuscripts that have rested under fleshless ribs in
the place once occupied perhaps by a soul, are human thought;
expressed in the science of signs, and transmitted by the help
of an art we had lost, but have found again in the sepulchres of
the East, the art of preserving the remains of the dead from
the outrages of corruption,- the greatest power in the universe.
O Lélia, deny the youth of the world if you can, when you see
it stop in artless ignorance before the lessons of the past, and
begin to live on the forgotten ruins of an unknown world. "
"Learning over again
Knowledge is not power," replied Lélia.
is not progress; seeing is not living. Who will give us back the
power to act, and above all, the art of enjoying and retaining?
We have gone too far forward now to retreat. What was merely
repose for eclipsed civilizations will be death for our tired-out
one; the rejuvenated nations of the East will come and intoxi-
cate themselves with the poison we have poured on
The bold barbarian drinkers may perhaps prolong the orgy of
luxury a few hours into the night of time; but the venom we
shall bequeath them will promptly be mortal for them, as it was
for us, and all will drop back into blackness.
In fact,
Sténio, do you not see that the sun is withdrawing from us? Is
not the earth, wearied in its journey, noticeably drifting towards
darkness and chaos? Is your blood so young and ardent as not
to feel the touch of that chill spread like a pall over this planet
abandoned to Fate, the most powerful of the gods? Oh, the
cold! that penetrating pain driving sharp needles into every pore.
That cursed breath that withers flowers and burns them like fire;
that pain at once physical and mental, which invades both soul
and body, penetrates to the depths of thought, and paralyzes
mind as well as blood! Cold the sinister demon who grazes
the universe with his damp wing, and breathes pestilence on be-
wildered nations! Cold, tarnishing everything, unrolling its gray
and nebulous veil over the sky's rich tints, the waters' reflections,
the hearts of flowers, and the cheeks of maidens! Cold, that
casts its white winding-sheet over fields and woods and lakes,
even over the fur and feathers of animals! Cold, that discolors
XXII-800
――
-
## p. 12786 (#204) ##########################################
12786
GEORGE SAND
all in the material as well as in the intellectual world; not only
the coats of bears and hares on the shores of Archangel, but the
very pleasures of man and the character of his habits in the
spots it approaches! You surely see that everything is being
civilized; that is to say, growing cold. The bronzed nations of
the torrid zone are beginning to open their timid and suspicious
hands to the snares of our skill; lions and tigers are being
tamed, and come from the desert to amuse the peoples of the
north. Animals which had never been able to grow accustomed
to our climate, now leave their warm sun without dying, to live
in domesticity among us, and even forget the proud and bitter
sorrow which used to kill them when enslaved. It is because
blood is congealing and growing poorer everywhere, while instinct
grows and develops. The soul rises and leaves the earth, no
longer sufficient for her needs, to steal the fire of Prometheus
from heaven again: but, lost in darkness, it stops in its flight and
falls; for God, seeing its presumption, stretches forth his hand
and deprives it of the sun. "
A TRAVELER'S LETTERS
I
REMEMBER that when I was a child the hunters, towards
autumn, brought home beautiful, gentle, blood-stained ring-
doves. They would give me those that were still alive, and
I took care of them. I did it with all the ardor and tenderness
a mother lavishes upon her children, and was able to cure some
of them. When their strength came back they grew sad, and
refused the fresh beans they had pecked so greedily from my
hand during their illness. As soon as they could spread their
wings they became restless, and wounded themselves by dashing
against the bars of their cage. They would have died of grief
and fatigue if I had not set them free. And so, though I was
a most selfish child, I trained myself to sacrifice the pleasure of
possession to the pleasure of generosity. The day I carried one
of my doves to the window was always one of keen emotion,
triumphant joy, and invincible regret. I would kiss it a thousand
times, and beg it to remember me, return, and feed on the ten-
der beans in my garden.
Gautier went to the theatre with long hair and a pink satin waist-
coat, when Balzac wore a monk's white robe instead of a dressing-
gown, and when George Sand used to cut off her beautiful black
locks and wear masculine attire, making herself look a boy of twelve
in it on account of her diminutive stature. However much may
have been said about this, she never wore those unbecoming clothes
except in an intermittent way, finding them more convenient and
less expensive than others.
Up to 1840 George Sand wrote under the impulse of feeling, fol-
lowing no system; later on, a system was grafted on the feeling
without destroying it. Lamennais's humanitarian Christianity, Michel
de Bourges's revolutionary tirades, Pierre Leroux's dreamy social-
ism, all took hold on her either successively or at once. With
more zeal than discernment she made herself the echo of the most
-
## p. 12767 (#185) ##########################################
GEORGE SAND
12767
advanced principles of political equality and of communism. These
ideas led her to publish 'Le Compagnon du Tour de France,' in
which an aristocratic maiden openly declares her resolution to marry
into the lower classes, so as to belong to them herself; 'Le Meunier
d'Angibault,' wherein an obstinate artisan proudly refuses the hand
of the young countess he adores, because she represents the wealth
he would not have at any price (fortunately she becomes poor, and
rejoices at it as if it were the greatest happiness); and 'La Com-
tesse de Rudolstadt,' that misty sequel to the sunny and harmonious
story of Consuelo,' with all its theosophical and humanitarian alle-
gories, that at times make us yawn. If however we leave out the
political harangues, carbonarism, and other chimeras, what magnifi-
cent fragments there are in these partisan books! —although their
romantic imagination is smothered by the medley of accumulated
dissertations and arguments. Still the author is always arguing and
fighting for progress and reforms; and some of these have been
achieved since, in a less radical way, no doubt, than she would
have wished, yet they would have gratified her. George Sand was
in open rebellion against every kind of slavery. She greatly admired
'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' saying of Harriet Beecher Stowe: "I do not
know whether she is a genius, but she has more than genius,—she
surely is a saint. " She spurned the limits of sex, and above all
things despised hypocrisy. As regards what is called the "woman
question" to-day, Margaret Fuller certainly went as far as she did,
while she had many more illusions on woman's native nobility; but
setting talents aside, there is a difference between them, delicately
expressed by Margaret Fuller herself:-"Those who would reform the
world must show that they do not speak in the heat of wild impulse;
their lives must not be sustained by passionate error. They must
be religious students of the Divine purpose with regard to men, if
they would not confound the fancies of a day with the requisitions of
eternal good. "
In order to rest after her socialist campaigns, George Sand would
wing her flight to dreamland; and it was wise of her to do so, for
we would now willingly give up all the dullness of 'Horace' and
the turgid speeches in 'Le Péché de M. Antoine,' for that one day's
drive on charming roads when a group of tourists, brought together
by good luck, have that accidental meeting with Teverino, the vaga-
bond genius, beautiful as a young god, and disporting himself free
and naked under his wreath of reeds, in the bluest of lakes. He
needs only to don gentleman's clothes to be one, and an accom-
plished one at that; he plays the part for a time, scorns it, and
disappears. What a delightful excursion beyond the vulgarities of
every-day life!
## p. 12768 (#186) ##########################################
12768
GEORGE SAND
The idyl too always seized George Sand as soon as she left the
streets of Paris, and returned to the peace and refreshing breezes of
her beloved Nohant. After the fiery and rather bombastic eloquence
and paradoxes found in her other works launched against society,
the artless speech of her peasants is most restful reading.
There is no purer, simpler, nor more beautiful French than that
which adapts itself so perfectly to the humble subjects of 'La Mare
au Diable' and 'François le Champi. ' Some critics have said that
George Sand's peasants were not real. They seem to me, on the
contrary, to be very closely studied from the honest and laborious
population of central France; and however much they may be ideal-
ized, they are far more like those I have known than the brutes
painted by the masters of the so-called naturalistic school, the latter
evidently preferring to look at their coarseness through a magnifying
glass. George Sand did the reverse; she set off the best traits
of these primitive natures, with whom she had the greatest affinity.
The revolution of 1848 tore her from her eclogues; her friends
dragged her into the very thick of the fight, and used her as a
sonorous instrument. She drew up 'Lettres au Peuple' and the
'Bulletins de la République'; but her illusions about the new form
of government could not hold out against the bloody days of June:
she says that "disgust drove her to solitude, where she faced her
free and revolted conscience"; and she now went back to her best,
her noblest inspirer,- Nature. Whether she carries about a broken
heart in Italy after a celebrated quarrel, or gayly climbs the Alps
with Liszt and the Countess d'Agoult,-whether she spends the win-
ter at Majorca nursing Chopin, or wanders dreamily along the sunken
lanes of the Black Valley and the banks of the Indre, she never
fails to reflect the humble or striking beauties surrounding her, or to
make a soul vibrate in them. She has the marvelous and peculiar
art of infusing a human emotion into external and inanimate objects
- which then seems to emanate from them. Has she not written an
immortal page on perfume and memory, in connection with a sage
leaf she had bruised between her fingers?
Nohant was a salutary retreat for her in every respect. She spent
the greater part of her life there in close communion with the earth,
frequently cultivating it with her own hands, and drawing her favor-
ite subjects of study from plants and stones. Nothing interested
her more than natural history. She gave herself up to it with ardor;
convinced that constant study was imperative, and that if a writer
does not lay up a treasure of knowledge, the tool he uses, though
ever so fine, will be wielded in vain. Botany and geology filled her
days, and she read much besides: science, history, everything inter-
esting her. In the evening, other things were read aloud in the
## p. 12769 (#187) ##########################################
GEORGE SAND
12769
family circle; very often plays were acted. According to her fixed
habit, she wrote at night after every one had retired, never failing to
cover twelve large quarto pages before going to bed, her inspiration
being so tractable.
As she grew older she went to Paris less frequently, except when
there was a question of performing one of the plays she willingly
dramatized from her novels. She was passionately fond of the stage
and all connected with it; and liked to put actors and showmen
of all sorts in her books, as she did in 'L'Homme de Neige,' 'Le
Château des Désertes,' 'Pierre qui Roule,' etc. But when it came
to writing a play, she did not always show the qualities the stage
demands, such as logical sequence in a briskly carried action, spark-
ling dialogue, and a sense for comic situations. Several of her com-
edies or dramas, however, were very successful; viz. , 'Le Mariage de
Victorine,' 'Claudie,' and 'Le Marquis de Villemer. ' She made a
great many plays for her own little theatre at Nohant, never neglect-
ing her marionettes, who inspired 'Le Diable aux Champs,' and for
whom her fairy fingers were always making new costumes.
In the novels written towards the close of her life there is not a
trace of that sensual ideality once considered such a grave fault in
the author of 'Lélia'; pure and spotless ideality shines in them: and
it seemed to cost her no effort to write those charming, fantastic
tales for her granddaughters,- tales any child can enjoy, but needing
refined scholars to do them full justice. She kept abreast of all new
efforts in literature with interest and sympathy, yet always repeating
that "art for art's sake" was a vain phrase; that art for whatever is
worthy, and for the general welfare, should be the aim of all study;
that when there a beautiful sentiment in one's soul, it becomes
a duty to find such expression for it as will make it enter into many
other souls. For this reason she, the great democrat, could not belong
to the haughty schools that despise the general public—the masses-
to the degree of frequently using language intelligible only to a hand-
ful of the initiated. Neither would she admit, feeling all humanity
vibrate within herself, that this humanity was to be represented by
scoundrels, villains, and fools alone; nor that truth was to be found
merely in the painting of evil. These may have been old-fashioned
ideas; but by remaining true to them, this inexhaustible Scheher-
azade found the means of keeping an audience composed of all
classes attentive to her ever fresh and youthful stories, and raised
her readers above the obscenity so complacently provided for them
elsewhere. Being sincerely modest, she did not believe in posterity,
imagining that it would take her at her own valuation. Once they
were finished, she completely forgot her novels. "Consuelo '-
what is that? " she asked Flaubert. "I do not remember a single
XXII-799
## p. 12770 (#188) ##########################################
GEORGE SAND
12770
word of it. Are you indeed reading it, and does it really amuse
you? If so, I must read it again and be pleased with myself, because
you are. »
Death found her as busy as ever. Two days before the end, al-
though she at times suffered acutely, she wrote cheerfully: "I feel"
stronger and freer within myself than ever. " She passed away in
her seventy-third year, before her powers had waned.
Those who wish to enter further into this life, in which personal
vicissitudes are so closely connected with the evolution of genius,
will find all of George Sand in 'L'Histoire de ma Vie,' where she
has drawn so correct a portrait of herself,- although she tells us
hardly more than the story of her childhood and early youth, to the
eternal regret of scandal-mongers; in the 'Lettres d'un Voyageur,'
those poetic disclosures that she occasionally made to the public in
an impersonal yet most transparent form; and finally in her 'Cor-
respondence,' which reveals her great warm heart perfectly. One
cannot fail to be touched on seeing her, while busy writing a hun-
dred volumes, lavish kindness unceasingly on every claimant, answer-
ing every question, counseling young authors and giving them letters
of introduction, helping hesitating talent to discover its vocation,
pleading for exiles or political prisoners; and most bountifully put-
ting her time, her words, her influence, even when it cost her the
most, at the disposal of others. This Correspondence' shows how
her adversaries themselves respected her; and how anxious the Em-
peror Napoleon III. , whom she petitioned more than once, was to
please her.
After reading these letters covering a period of over fifty years,
and where she always appears to be the slave of her family, tender
to her friends, helpful to a swarm of strangers who thought them-
selves authorized to intrude upon her on account of her unbounded
generosity, no one will be surprised that she should have blessed
the hour of rest when it came. She had already given old age a
smiling welcome, saying that it was "so good of God to calm us by
taking away those stings of personality that are so sharp in youth.
How can people complain of losing some things with age," she added,
"when, on the contrary, they gain so many others? when our ideas
grow broader and more correct, when our heart softens and grows
larger, and our victorious conscience may at last look back and say,
'I have done my task! " Her special task had been to bear high
aloft the banner of ideality and liberty, to love and glorify the hum-
ble, and to rise above herself by work. She had earned more than
a million francs by her pen in the days when literature had nothing
in common with merchandise, and she had given all this fortune to
others.
-
## p. 12771 (#189) ##########################################
GEORGE SAND
12771
When one day in June 1876 she dropped that valiant pen, she
surely had also earned the right to a gentle, uninterrupted sleep in
the pretty little cemetery at Nohant. She did not believe that death
was the end, but held to a perpetual ascent towards infinite goodness
and infinite truth. And she would laughingly say that she hoped she
might go to some planet where reading and writing were unknown,
so she might rest "for good. " Indeed, she had a right to rest after
having exercised the most beautiful sovereignty over the minds of
two generations,— a sovereignty not yet at an end, although just now
it seems somewhat eclipsed.
The future will winnow her abundant but uneven work, and sep-
arate the tares from the wheat; and of the latter there will remain
a well-filled measure fully sufficing for her glory.
The Bentzen
i
THE CONVENT OF THE ENGLISH AUGUSTINES
From The Story of my Life >
TH
HIS Convent was one of the three or four British communities
established in Paris during Cromwell's ascendency.
It is the only one now in existence, its house having endured
the various revolutions without suffering greatly. Its traditions
say that Henriette of France, the daughter of our Henry IV.
and wife of the unfortunate Charles I. of England, had often.
come to pray in our chapel with her son James II.
All our
nuns were English, Scotch, or Irish. Two-thirds of the boarding
pupils and lodgers, as well as some of the priests who came to
officiate, belonged to these nations. During certain hours of the
day the whole school was forbidden to speak a word of French,
which was the best means for learning English rapidly. Nat-
urally our nuns hardly ever spoke anything else to us. They re-
tained the habits of their country; drank tea three times a day,
allowing those among us who were good to take it with them.
The cloister and the church were paved with long tombstones,
beneath which were the venerated bones of those Catholics of
Old England who had died in exile, and been buried by favor in
this inviolable sanctuary. There were English epitaphs and pious
## p. 12772 (#190) ##########################################
GEORGE SAND
12772
inscriptions everywhere on tombs and walls. Large old portraits
of English princes and prelates hung in the Superior's room and
in her private parlor. The beautiful and amorous Mary Stuart,
reputed a saint by our chaste nuns, shone there like a star. In
short, everything in that house was English, both of the past and
of the present; and when within its gates, one seemed to have
crossed the Channel. All this was a "nine days' wonder" to me,
the Berri peasant.
My grandmother on presenting me could not forego the little
vanity of saying that I was very well informed for my age, and
that it would be a waste of time to put me in a class with young
children. The school was divided into two sections: a junior and
a senior class. By my age I belonged to the juniors, where there
were about thirty boarding pupils between six and fourteen years
old. By my reading, and the ideas it had developed, I belonged
to a third class that would have had to be created for me and
two or three others; but I had not been trained to work method-
ically, and did not know a word of English. I understood a great
deal about history, and even philosophy; but I was very ignor-
ant, or at least very uncertain, about the order of epochs and
events. I might have been able to talk about everything with
the professors, and perhaps have seen a little clearer and a little
further than those who directed us; but the merest college fag
would have greatly puzzled me on facts, and I could not have
passed a regular examination on any subject whatever. I felt
this perfectly; and was much relieved to hear the Superior say
that as I had not yet been confirmed, I should have to enter the
junior class.
We were cloistered in the full sense of the word. We went
out twice a month only, and never spent a night out except
at New-Year's. There were vacations, but I had none; as my
grandmother said she preferred not to interrupt my studies, so
as to have me at the convent a shorter time. She left Paris a
few weeks after our separation, and did not come back for a
year; then went away for another year. She had demanded that
my mother was not to ask to take me out. My cousins the
Villeneuves offered me their home for all holidays, and wrote to
my grandmother for her permission. I wrote too, and begged
her not to grant it; and had the courage to tell her, that not
going out with mother, I ought not and did not wish to go out
with any one.
I trembled lest she should not listen to me; and
## p. 12773 (#191) ##########################################
GEORGE SAND
12773
though I felt the need and the wish to enjoy these outings, I
made up my mind to pretend illness if my cousins came to fetch
me armed with a permit. This time my grandmother approved
my action; and instead of finding fault, praised my feeling in
a way I found rather exaggerated. I had done nothing but my
duty; yet it made me spend two whole years behind bars.
We had mass in our chapel, received visits in the parlor, took
our private lessons there; the professor being on one side of the
grating while we were on the other. All the convent windows
towards the street had not only gratings, but immovable linen
screens besides. It was really a prison, but a prison with a large
garden and plenty of company. I must confess that I never felt
the rigors of captivity for an instant; and that the minute pre-
cautions taken to keep us locked up and prevent us from getting
a glimpse of the outer world, often made me laugh. This care
was the only stimulant we had to long for freedom; for there was
not one of us who would ever have dreamt of crossing her moth-
er's threshold unattended: yet almost every girl at the convent
watched for the opening of the cloister door, or peeped furtively
through the slits in the linen screens. To outwit supervision, go
down into the court three or four steps, see a cab pass by, was
the dream and the ambition of forty or fifty wild and mischiev-
ous girls, who the very next day would go about Paris without in
the least enjoying it; because once outside the convent inclosure,
stepping on the pavement and looking at people were no longer
forbidden fruit.
[After describing the immense and complicated medley of buildings within
this inclosure, their inconvenient and illogical arrangement, "so scattered that
one lost a quarter of a day going to and fro," and the curious way the one
hundred and twenty or thirty persons living there were lodged, some
crowded into the closest quarters, while others were spread over more space
than ten families would have needed for living at ease,- George Sand de-
scribes the nuns' cells, their cleanliness, and how their patient devotion orna-
mented them with the trifles dear to the pious heart. She then resumes as
follows:-]
My first feeling on entering the junior school-room was a
painful one. Thirty girls were crowded into a room neither
large nor high enough for the number. Its walls were covered
with ugly yolk-of-egg-colored paper, the ceiling was stained and
cracked, the benches, tables, and stools were all dirty, the stove
was ugly and smoky, and the smell of coal was mixed with that.
## p. 12774 (#192) ##########################################
12774
GEORGE SAND
coming from the near poultry-yard; the plaster crucifix was com-
mon, the flooring broken, and we were to spend two thirds of
the day here, three quarters of it in winter,- and it was winter
just then.
I do not know of anything more unpleasant than the cus-
tom followed in educational arrangements of making school-rooms
the saddest and most forlorn of places: under the pretense that
children would spoil the furniture and ruin the ornaments, peo-
ple take away everything that would stimulate their imagination.
They pretend that pictures and decorations, even the patterns on
the wall-paper, would make them inattentive. Why are churches
and chapels decorated with paintings and statues, if not to ele-
vate the soul and revive its languor by the sight of venerated
objects? Children, we are told, have dirty and clumsy habits.
They spill ink over everything, and love to destroy. Surely they
dó not bring these tastes and habits from their homes, where
they are taught to respect whatever is beautiful or useful; and
as soon as they are old enough to think, they never dream of
doing the mischief that becomes so attractive at school only be-
cause there it is a sort of revenge on the neglect and parsimony
practiced upon them. The better they are housed, the more
careful they would be. They would think twice before soiling a
carpet or breaking a frame. Those ugly bare walls in which you
shut them up soon become an object of horror; and they would
knock them down if they could. You want them to work like
machines, and make their minds run on by the hour, free from
all personal consciousness and untouched by all that makes up
life and the renewal of intellectual life. That is both false and
impossible. The studying child has all the needs of a creating
artist. He must breathe pure air; his body must be at ease; he
must have things to look at, and be able to change his thoughts
at will by enjoying form and color. Nature is a continual spec-
tacle for him. By shutting him up in a bare, sad, unwholesome
room, you suffocate his heart and brain as well as his body. I
should like everything around a city child to be cheerful, from
its cradle. The country child has the sky, trees, plants, and sun.
The other is too often stunted both physically and morally by
the squalor of a poor home, the bad taste of a rich one, or the
absence of all taste in the middle-class home.
Why are Italians born, as it were, with a feeling for the
beautiful? Why does a Veronese mason, a Venetian tradesman,
## p. 12775 (#193) ##########################################
GEORGE SAND
12775
a peasant of the Roman Campagna, love to look at fine monu-
ments? Why do they understand good pictures and music, while
our proletarians more intelligent in other respects, and our mid-
dle class though educated with more care, love what is false,
vulgar - even ugly in art, unless a special training corrects
their instincts? It is because we live amidst what is ugly and
vulgar; because our parents have no taste, and we hand down
the traditional bad taste to our children.
It would be so easy
to surround childhood with things at once noble, agreeable, and
instructive.
-
[Owing to her grandmother's Voltairean principles, Aurore Dupin's reli-
gious training had been rather neglected: this shocked her present pious
teachers. The means taken to correct this seemed silly to her already philo-
sophical mind; and after a short time she decided to "set her cap on her
ear and join the devils' camp. " This was the name given to those who were
not pious. The latter were called "the good," while there was an intermedi-
ate variety called "the stupid. " Mary G, a bright Irish girl, generally
spoken of as "the boy," became Aurore's best friend, after ridiculing her and
nicknaming her Rising Sun (Aurora) and Some Bread (Du pain). Being
the leading spirit in the devils' camp, she offered to admit Aurore to its
ranks. ]
"You shall be initiated this evening. "
I waited for night and supper very impatiently. Recreation
time began as soon as we left the refectory. In summer the
two classes went to the garden. In winter each class went to
its own room: the seniors to their fine and spacious study; we
to our forlorn quarters, where there was no room to play, and
where our teacher forced us to "amuse >> ourselves quietly,- that
is, not at all. Leaving the refectory always made a momentary
confusion, and I admired the way the "devils" of the two classes
managed to create the slight disorder under whose favor one
could easily escape. The cloister had but one little lamp to
light it: this left the other three galleries in semi-darkness.
Instead of walking straight ahead towards the juniors' room, you
stepped to the left, let the flock pass on, and you were free. I
did so, and found myself in the dark with my friend Mary and
the other "devils" she had told me would be there.
They were all armed, some with logs, others with tongs. I had
nothing, but was bold enough to go to the school-room, get a
poker, and return to my accomplices without being noticed.
•
## p. 12776 (#194) ##########################################
12776
GEORGE SAND
Then they initiated me into the great secret, and we started
on our expedition.
Its
The great secret was the traditional legend of the convent: a
dream handed down from generation to generation, and from
"devil" to "devil," for about two centuries; a romantic fiction
which may have had some foundation of truth at the beginning,
but now rested merely on the needs of our imagination.
object was to deliver the victim. There was a prisoner, some
said several prisoners, shut up somewhere in an impenetrable
retreat: either a cell hidden and bricked up in the thickness of
the walls, or in a dungeon under the vaults of the immense sub-
basements extending beneath the monastery as well as under a
great part of the Saint-Victor district. There were indeed mag-
nificent cellars there,—a real subterranean city, whose limits we
never found,—and they had many mysterious outlets at different
points within the vast area of the inclosure. We were told that
at a great distance off, these cellars joined the excavations run-
ning under the greater part of Paris and the surrounding coun-
try as far as Vincennes. They said that by following our convent
cellars you could reach the Catacombs, the quarries, the Baths of
Julian, and what not. These vaults were the key to a world of
darkness, terrors, mysteries: an immense abyss dug beneath our
feet, closed by iron gates, and whose exploration was as perilous
as the descent into hell of Eneas or Dante. For this reason it
was absolutely imperative to get there, in spite of the insur-
mountable difficulties of the enterprise, and the terrible punish-
ments the discovery of our secret would provoke.
Entering these subterranean domains was one of those unhoped-
for strokes of good luck that occurred once, or at most twice,
in the life of a "devil," after years of perseverance and mental
effort. It was of no use thinking of getting in by the main
door. That door was at the bottom of a wide staircase next
to the kitchens, which were cellars too; and here the lay sisters
congregated.
But we were sure that the vaults could be reached by a
thousand other ways, even by the roof. According to us, every
nailed-up door, every dark corner under a staircase, every hollow.
sounding wall, might communicate mysteriously with the sub-
terranean region; and we looked for that communication most
earnestly up to the very attic.
M AND L
--
"
## p. 12777 (#195) ##########################################
GEORGE SAND
12777
I had read Mrs. Radcliffe's 'Castle of the Pyrenees' at No-
hant, with terror and delight. My companions had many another
Scotch and Irish legend in their heads, all fit to set one's hair
on end. The convent too had innumerable stories of its own
lamentable events,― about ghosts, dungeons, inexplicable appari-
tions, and mysterious noises. All this, and the thought of finally
discovering the tremendous secret of the victim, so kindled our
imaginations that we were sure we heard sighs and groans start
from under the stones, or breathe through the cracks of doors
and walls.
We started off, my companions for the hundredth, I for the
first time, in search of that elusive captive,-languishing no one
knew where, but certainly somewhere, and whom perhaps we
were called to discover. She must have been very old, consider-
ing how long she had been sought in vain! She might have
been over two hundred years old, but we did not mind that!
We sought her, called her, thought of her incessantly, and never
despaired.
That evening I was led into the oldest and most broken-up
part of the buildings,— perhaps the most exciting locality for our
exploration. We selected a little passage with wooden railings
overlooking an empty space without any known outlet. A stair-
case with banisters led to this unknown region, but an oaken
door forbade access to the stairs. We had to get around the
obstacle by passing from the railing to the banisters, and walk
down the outside of the worm-eaten balusters. There was a dark
void below us whose depth we could not fathom. We had only
a little twisted taper (a "rat "), and that hardly let us see more
than the first steps of the mysterious staircase.
We were at the bottom in a moment; and with more joy than
disappointment found that we were directly under the passage,
in a square space without any opening. Not a door nor window,
nor any explicable purpose for this sort of closed vestibule.
Why
was there a staircase leading into a blind space? Why was there
a strong padlocked door shutting off the staircase?
The little taper was divided into several lengths, and each
one began examining for herself. The staircase was made of
wood. A secret spring in one of the steps must lead to a pass-
age, another staircase, or a hidden trap. While some explored
the staircase, and tried to force its old planks apart, others groped
along the wall in search of a knob, a crack, a ring, or any of the
## p. 12778 (#196) ##########################################
12778
GEORGE SAND
thousand contrivances mentioned in the chronicles of old manors
as moving a stone, turning a panel, or opening an entrance into
unknown regions.
Alas, there was nothing! The wall was smooth and plastered.
The pavement sounded dull; not a stone was loose, and the
staircase hid no spring. One of us looked further. She declared
that in the extreme corner under the staircase the wall had a
hollow sound; we struck it, and found it true. "It's here! " we
all exclaimed. "There's a walled-up passage in there, but that
passage leads to the awful dungeon. That is the way down to
the sepulchre holding the living victims. " We glued our ears to
the wall, heard nothing; still the discoverer maintained that she
could hear confused groans and clanking chains. What was to
be done?
"Why, it's quite plain," said Mary: "we must pull the wall
down. All of us together can surely make a hole in it. "
Nothing seemed easier to us; and we all went to work,-
some trying to knock it down with their logs, others scraping it
with their shovels and tongs,-never thinking that by worrying
those poor shaky walls, we risked tumbling the building down
on our heads. Fortunately we could not do much harm, because
the noise made by the logs would have attracted some one.
We had to be satisfied with pushing and scratching. Yet we
had managed to make quite a noticeable hole in the plaster,
lime, and stones, when the bell rang for prayers. We had just
time to repeat our perilous escalade, put out our lights, separate,
and grope our way back to the school-rooms. We put off the
continuation of the enterprise till the next day, and appointed
the same place of meeting. Those who got there first were
not to wait for those who might be detained by punishment or
unusual surveillance. Each one was to do her best to scoop out
the wall. It would be just so much done towards the next
day's work. There was no chance of any one's noticing it, as no
one ever went down into that blind hall-way given over to mice
and spiders.
We dusted each other off, regained the cloister, slipped into
our respective class-rooms, and were ready to kneel at prayers
with the others. I forget whether we were noticed and punished
that evening. It happened so often that no single event of the
kind has any special date in the great number. Still we could
often carry on our work with impunity.
## p. 12779 (#197) ##########################################
GEORGE SAND
12779
The search for the great secret and the dungeon lasted the
whole winter I spent in the junior class. The wall was per-
ceptibly damaged, but we were stopped by reaching wooden
girders. We looked elsewhere, ransacked twenty different places,
never having the least success, yet never losing hope.
One day we thought we would look for some mansard win-
dow which might be, so to speak, the upper key to the so
ardently desired subterranean world. There were many such
windows, whose purpose we ignored. There was a little room in
the attic where we practiced on one of the thirty pianos scattered
through the establishment. We had an hour for this practice
every day, and very few of us cared for it. As I always loved
music, I liked to practice. But I was becoming more of an artist
in romance than music; for what more beautiful poem could
there be than the romance in action we were pursuing with our
joint imaginations, courage, and palpitating emotions?
In this way the piano hour became the daily hour for ad-
ventures, without detriment, however, to the evening ones. We
appointed meetings in one of these straggling rooms, and from
there would go to the "I don't know where " or the "As you
please" of fancy.
From the attic where I was supposed to be playing scales,
I could see a labyrinth of roofs, sheds, lofts, and slopes, all cov-
ered with moss-grown tiles and decorated with broken chimneys,
offering a vast field for new explorations. So on to the roof
we went. It was not hard to jump out of the window. Six feet
below us there was a gutter joining two gables. It was more
imprudent than difficult to scale these gables, meet others, jump
from slope to slope, and run about like cats; and danger, far
from restraining, only seemed to stimulate us.
There was something exceedingly foolish, but at the same
time heroic, in this mania of seeking the victim; foolish, because
we had to suppose that the nuns, whose gentleness and kind-
ness we worshiped, were practicing horrible tortures upon some
one; heroic, because we risked our lives every day to deliver an
imaginary creature, who was the object of our most generous
thoughts and most chivalrous undertakings.
We had been out about an hour, spying into the garden,
looking down on a great part of the courts and buildings, and
carefully hiding behind chimneys whenever we saw a black-veiled
nun, who might have raised her head and seen us in the clouds,
## p. 12780 (#198) ##########################################
12780
GEORGE SAND
when we asked ourselves how we should get back. The arrange-
ment of the roofs had allowed us to step or jump down. Going
up was not so easy. I think it would have been impossible
without a ladder. We scarcely knew where we were. At last
we recognized a parlor-boarder's window,- Sidonie Macdonald's,
the celebrated general's daughter. It could be reached by a
final jump, but would be more dangerous than the others. I
jumped too hurriedly, and caught my heel in a flat sky-light,
through which I should have fallen thirty feet into a hall near
the juniors' room, if by chance my awkwardness had not made me
swerve. I got off with two badly flayed knees, but did not give
them a second thought. My heel had broken into a part of the
sash of that deuced window, and smashed half a dozen panes,
which dropped with a frightful crash quite near the kitchen.
entrance. A great noise arose at once among the lay sisters, and
through the opening I had just made, we could hear Sister
Theresa's loud voice screaming, "Cats! " and accusing Whisky-
Mother Alippe's big tom-cat- of fighting with all his fellows,
and breaking all the windows in the house. But Sister Mary
defended the cat's morals, and Sister Helen was sure that a
chimney had fallen on the roof. This discussion started the
nervous giggle that nothing can stop in little girls. We heard
the sisters on the stairs, we should be caught in the very act of
walking on the roofs, and still we could not stir to find refuge.
Then I discovered that one of my shoes was gone,- that it had
dropped through the broken sash into the kitchen hall. Though
my knees were bleeding, my laughter was so uncontrollable that
I could not say a word, but merely showed my unshod foot,
and explained what had happened by dumb show. A new ex-
plosion of laughter followed, although the alarm had been given
and the lay sisters were near.
--
We were soon reassured. Being sheltered and hidden by
overhanging roofs, we could hardly be discovered without get-
ting up to the broken window by a ladder, or following the road
we had taken. And that was something we could safely chal-
lenge any of the nuns to do. So when we had recognized the
advantage of our position, we began to me-ouw Homerically, so
that Whisky and his family might be accused and convicted in
our stead.
Then we made for the window of Sidonie, who did
not welcome us. The poor child was practicing on the piano,
and paying no attention to the feline howls vaguely striking her
## p. 12781 (#199) ##########################################
GEORGE SAND
12781
ear. She was delicate and nervous, very gentle, and quite in-
capable of understanding what pleasure we could find in roaming
over roofs. As she sat playing, her back was turned to the win-
dow; and when we burst into it in a bunch, she screamed aloud.
We lost little time in quieting her. Her cries would attract the
nuns; so we sprang into the room and scampered to the door,
while she stood trembling and staring, seeing all this strange
procession flit by without understanding it nor recognizing any
one of us, so terrified was she. In a moment we had all dis-
persed: one went to the upper room whence we had started, and
played the piano with might and main; another took a round-
about way to the school-room. As for me, I had to find my
shoe, and secure that piece of evidence, if I still had the time.
I managed to avoid the lay sisters, and to find the kitchen entry
free. Audaces fortuna juvat, said I to myself, thinking of the
aphorisms Deschartres* had taught me. And indeed I found
the lucky shoe, where it had fallen in a dark corner and not
been seen. Whisky alone was accused. My knees hurt me very
much for a few days, but I did not brag of them; and the explo-
rations did not slacken.
-
I needed all this romantic excitement to bear up against the
convent regulations, which went very much against me. We
were fed well enough, yet that is a thing I have always cared
least for; but we suffered most cruelly from the cold, and that
year the winter was very severe. The rules for rising and retir-
ing were as harmful as they were disagreeable to me. I have
always loved to sit up late, and not to rise early. At Nohant I
had done as I pleased — read or written in my room at night, and
not been compelled to confront the morning cold. My circulation
is sluggish, and the word "cool-blooded" describes both my phys-
ical and my mental organization. A "devil" among the "devils"
of the convent, I never lost my wits, and did the wildest things
in a solemn way that always delighted my accomplices; but the
cold really paralyzed me, especially during the first half of the
day. The dormitory was in the mansard roof, and so icy that I
could not go to sleep, but sadly heard every hour of the night
strike. At six o'clock two servants came and waked us pitilessly.
It has always seemed a melancholy thing to me to rise and dress.
by lamplight. We had to wash in water whose icy crust we
*Her father's tutor.
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had to break, and then it could not be washed with. We had
chilblains, and our feet bled in our tight shoes. We went to mass
by candle-light, and shivered on the benches or dozed on our
knees, in the attitude of piety. At seven o'clock we breakfasted
on a piece of bread and a cup of tea. At last, on reaching the
school-room, we could see a little light dawn in the sky, and a
bit of fire in the stove. I never thawed until about noon; I had
frightful colds, and sharp pains in all my limbs, and suffered
from them fifteen years later.
But Mary could not bear complaining; being as strong as a
boy, she made pitiless fun of all who were not stoical. She
taught me to be pitiless towards myself. I deserved some credit
for this, for I suffered more than any one else; and the Paris
climate was killing me already. Sallow, apathetic, and silent, I
seemed the calmest and most submissive of persons when in the
school-room. I never answered back: anger was foreign to my
nature, and I do not remember having an attack of it during
the three years I spent in the convent. Thanks to this disposi-
tion, I was always loved, even at the time of my worst impish-
ness, by my most disagreeable companions and the most exacting
teachers and nuns. The Superior told my grandmother that I
was "still waters. " Paris had frozen the fever of movement I
had had at Nohant. Yet this did not prevent me from climb-
ing over roofs in the month of December, or spending whole
evenings bare-headed in the garden in the middle of winter: for
we hunted "the great secret" in the garden too; and when the
doors were closed, we got down there by the windows. And
that was because we lived by our brain at those times, and I
never noticed then that I was dragging about a sick body.
LÉLIA
[Written in 1833, the period of passion and despair. In this magnificent,
fiery, yet at times absurd poem of doubt and despair, Sténio sometimes
stands for Alfred de Musset, and again for the Ideal; while Lélia is at once
George Sand, and the human soul warred upon and torn by its dual nature. ]
"THE
HE prophets are crying in the desert to-day, and no voice
answers, for the world is indifferent and deaf: it lies
down and stops its ears so as to die in peace. A few
scattered groups of weak votaries vainly try to rekindle a spark
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12783
of virtue.
As the last remnants of man's moral power, they will
float for a moment about the abyss, then go and join the other
wrecks at the bottom of that shoreless sea which will swallow
up the world. "
"O Lélia, why do you thus despair of those sublime men who
aspire to bring virtue back to our iron age? Even if I were as
doubtful of their success as you are, I would not say so. I should
fear to commit an impious crime. "
"I admire those men," said Lélia, "and would like to be the
least among them. But what will those shepherds bearing a
star on their brows be able to do before the huge monster of
the Apocalypse before that immense and terrible figure outlined
in the foreground of all the prophets' pictures? That woman, as
pale and beautiful as vice,—that great harlot of nations, decked
with the wealth of the East, and bestriding a hydra belching
forth rivers of poison on all human pathways,-is Civilization;
is humanity demoralized by luxury and science; is the torrent
of venom which will swallow up all virtue, all hope of regen-
eration. "
― -
"O Lélia! " exclaimed the poet, struck by superstition, "are
not you that terrible and unhappy phantom? How many times
this fear has taken possession of my dreams! How many times
you have appeared to me as the type of the unspeakable agony
to which the spirit of inquiry has driven man! With your beauty.
and your sadness, your weariness and your skepticism, do you
not personify the excess of sorrow produced by the abuse of
thought? Have you not given up, and as it were prostituted,
that moral power, so highly developed by what art, poetry, and
science have done for it, to every new impression and error? In-
stead of clinging faithfully and prudently to the simple creed of
your fathers, and to the instinctive indifference God has implanted
in man for his peace and preservation; instead of confining your-
self to a pious life free from vain show, you have abandoned
yourself to all the seductions of ambitious philosophy. You have
cast yourself into the torrent of civilization rising to destroy, and
which by dashing along too swiftly has ruined the scarcely laid
foundations of the future. And because you have delayed the
work of centuries for a few days, you think you have shattered
the hour-glass of Eternity. There is much pride in this grief,
Lélia! But God will make this billow of stormy centuries, that
for him are but a drop in the ocean, float by. The devouring
## p. 12784 (#202) ##########################################
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GEORGE SAND
hydra will perish for lack of food; and from its world-covering
corpse a new race will issue, stronger and more patient than the
old. "
"You see far into the future, Sténio! You personify Nature
for me, and are her unspotted child. You have not yet blunted
your faculties: you believe yourself immortal because you feel
yourself young and like that untilled valley now blooming in
pride and beauty,-never dreaming that in a single day the
plowshare and the hundred-handed monster called industry can
tear its bosom to rob it of its treasures; you are growing up
full of trust and presumption, not foreseeing your coming life,
which will drag you down under the weight of its errors, disfig-
ure you with the false colors of its promises. Wait, wait a few
years, and you too will say, 'All is passing away! '»
"No, all is not passing away! " said Sténio. "Look at the
sun, and the earth, and the beautiful sky, and these green hills;
and even that ice, winter's fragile edifice, which has withstood
the rays of summer for centuries. Even so man's frail power
will prevail! What matters the fall of a few generations? Do
you weep for so slight a thing, Lélia? Do you deem it possible
a single idea can die in the universe? Will not that imperish-
able inheritance be found intact in the dust of our extinct races,
just as the inspirations of art and the discoveries of science arise.
alive each day from the ashes of Pompeii or the tombs of Mem-
phis? Oh, what a great and striking proof of intellectual immor-
tality! Deep mysteries had been lost in the night of time; the
world had forgotten its age, and thinking itself still young,
was alarmed at feeling itself so old. It said as you do, Lélia:
'I am about to end, for I am growing weak, and I was born but
a few days ago! How few I shall need for dying, since so few
were needed for living! ' But one day human corpses were ex-
humed from the bosom of Egypt - Egypt that had lived out its
period of civilization, and has just lived its period of barbarism!
Egypt, where the ancient light, lost so long, is being rekindled,
and a rested and rejuvenated Egypt may perhaps soon come
and establish herself upon the extinguished torch of our own.
Egypt, the living image of her mummies sleeping under the dust
of ages, and now awaking to the broad daylight of science in
order to reveal the age of the old world to the new! Is this not
solemn and terrible, Lélia? Within the dried-up entrails of a
human corpse, the inquisitive glance of our century discovered the
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12785
papyrus, that mysterious and sacred monument of man's eternal
power, the still dark but incontrovertible witness of the impos-
ing duration of creation. Our eager hand unrolls those per-
fumed bandages, those frail and indissoluble shrouds at which
destruction stopped short. These bandages that once enfolded a
corpse, these manuscripts that have rested under fleshless ribs in
the place once occupied perhaps by a soul, are human thought;
expressed in the science of signs, and transmitted by the help
of an art we had lost, but have found again in the sepulchres of
the East, the art of preserving the remains of the dead from
the outrages of corruption,- the greatest power in the universe.
O Lélia, deny the youth of the world if you can, when you see
it stop in artless ignorance before the lessons of the past, and
begin to live on the forgotten ruins of an unknown world. "
"Learning over again
Knowledge is not power," replied Lélia.
is not progress; seeing is not living. Who will give us back the
power to act, and above all, the art of enjoying and retaining?
We have gone too far forward now to retreat. What was merely
repose for eclipsed civilizations will be death for our tired-out
one; the rejuvenated nations of the East will come and intoxi-
cate themselves with the poison we have poured on
The bold barbarian drinkers may perhaps prolong the orgy of
luxury a few hours into the night of time; but the venom we
shall bequeath them will promptly be mortal for them, as it was
for us, and all will drop back into blackness.
In fact,
Sténio, do you not see that the sun is withdrawing from us? Is
not the earth, wearied in its journey, noticeably drifting towards
darkness and chaos? Is your blood so young and ardent as not
to feel the touch of that chill spread like a pall over this planet
abandoned to Fate, the most powerful of the gods? Oh, the
cold! that penetrating pain driving sharp needles into every pore.
That cursed breath that withers flowers and burns them like fire;
that pain at once physical and mental, which invades both soul
and body, penetrates to the depths of thought, and paralyzes
mind as well as blood! Cold the sinister demon who grazes
the universe with his damp wing, and breathes pestilence on be-
wildered nations! Cold, tarnishing everything, unrolling its gray
and nebulous veil over the sky's rich tints, the waters' reflections,
the hearts of flowers, and the cheeks of maidens! Cold, that
casts its white winding-sheet over fields and woods and lakes,
even over the fur and feathers of animals! Cold, that discolors
XXII-800
――
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all in the material as well as in the intellectual world; not only
the coats of bears and hares on the shores of Archangel, but the
very pleasures of man and the character of his habits in the
spots it approaches! You surely see that everything is being
civilized; that is to say, growing cold. The bronzed nations of
the torrid zone are beginning to open their timid and suspicious
hands to the snares of our skill; lions and tigers are being
tamed, and come from the desert to amuse the peoples of the
north. Animals which had never been able to grow accustomed
to our climate, now leave their warm sun without dying, to live
in domesticity among us, and even forget the proud and bitter
sorrow which used to kill them when enslaved. It is because
blood is congealing and growing poorer everywhere, while instinct
grows and develops. The soul rises and leaves the earth, no
longer sufficient for her needs, to steal the fire of Prometheus
from heaven again: but, lost in darkness, it stops in its flight and
falls; for God, seeing its presumption, stretches forth his hand
and deprives it of the sun. "
A TRAVELER'S LETTERS
I
REMEMBER that when I was a child the hunters, towards
autumn, brought home beautiful, gentle, blood-stained ring-
doves. They would give me those that were still alive, and
I took care of them. I did it with all the ardor and tenderness
a mother lavishes upon her children, and was able to cure some
of them. When their strength came back they grew sad, and
refused the fresh beans they had pecked so greedily from my
hand during their illness. As soon as they could spread their
wings they became restless, and wounded themselves by dashing
against the bars of their cage. They would have died of grief
and fatigue if I had not set them free. And so, though I was
a most selfish child, I trained myself to sacrifice the pleasure of
possession to the pleasure of generosity. The day I carried one
of my doves to the window was always one of keen emotion,
triumphant joy, and invincible regret. I would kiss it a thousand
times, and beg it to remember me, return, and feed on the ten-
der beans in my garden.
