No More Learning

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3
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GEORGE SAND
(BARONNE DUDEVANT: Born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin)
(1804-1876)
BY TH. BENTZON (MADAME THÉRÈSE BLANC)
F GENIUS means creative faculty constantly renewed, and pow-
erful and fertile inspiration, then George Sand certainly
had more genius than any other female writer. Others
are distinguished by a more chastened talent, or have soared to the
heaven of art on a steadier wing, but none have surpassed her in
magnificent spontaneity. One of her latest critics-speaking of
her ample and copious style, which satisfied even Flaubert, yet is
frequently disparaged by modern chiselers of "artistic writing"-
uses the expressive Latin phrase lactea ubertas; giving the idea of
an abundant stream of generous milk ever gushing forth and over-
flowing. M. Jules Lemaître adds that this quality resembles natural
kindness of heart, and is its near relative. And he is right. George
Sand was above all else kind-hearted, and was most womanly in this;
she was truly feminine also in her extraordinary power of assim-
ilation, which however did not interfere with her originality, as
everything she absorbed, whether ideas or knowledge, seemed to
blossom in a new and personal form when she applied it.
Nothing is more interesting than to go to the source of her life
to find the determining causes of her work; and to her friendships,
chosen in the most varied spheres, to follow the evolutions of her
thought. One can then see that she was an admirable instrument,
formed by nature in one of her exceptional moods, to vibrate with
extraordinary intensity under every influence approaching her. The
aspirations, failures, doctrines, the good and evil, of half a century,
palpitate in her noble fictions, even though we can here and there
discern the errors of a mind led astray by enthusiasm. Every prob-
lem interesting to contemporary humanity attracted her broad sympa-
thies. Long before those avowed apostles of pity, the Russian writers,
she felt that "for those who are born compassionate, there will always
be something to love, and consequently to pity, serve, and suffer for,
on earth. " She was the first who said forcibly that the most living
and religious source of the progress of the human mind was in the
idea of solidarity.
-
And this is why she will always be great, in spite of the trans-
formation of taste, which in the name of pretended realism declares


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12760
GEORGE SAND
this idealist somewhat out of fashion. It is not her fault if her
instinct always led her to write poetic rather than analytic works.
According to her theories of art,—and very instructive theories they
are,- a novel should be a mixture of both, with true situations and
characters grouped around a type intended to personify the senti-
ment of the book. The author must not be afraid to give this sen-
timent all the force with which he aspires to it himself, but must
on no account degrade it in the play of events. He may moreover
lend it powers above the average, and charms and sufferings beyond
the probabilities admitted by the greater number of minds. Above
all, the author must beware of thinking that he does not need a faith
of his own for writing, and that it is enough to reflect facts like
a mirror. "No, this is not true: readers are attracted only to the
writer with an individuality, whether this pleases or shocks them. ”
This phrase is in a letter which George Sand wrote me, while she
emphasized the following words: "The soul must not be void of
faith, for talent cannot develop in a vacuum; it may flutter there
for a moment, but only to expire. "
Truly this has nothing in common with the cruel impersonality so
boasted of nowadays: this is not the novel as understood by M. Zola,
who has never agreed with her that true reality is made up of both
beauty and ugliness, and that the will to do good finds its place and
use after all; nor is it the laborious effort, often driven to the point
of anguish, of her friend Flaubert, who used to torture himself to
find an epithet, and to whom she said, when scolding him: "Feed
on the ideas and sentiments stored in your brain and your heart;
form, which you think so important, will be the result of
your digestion, without any help. You consider it an aim, it is
only an effect. " The minutely detailed psychology of a certain school
was equally foreign to her, although she has made some superb and
profound studies of character: fraternal jealousy in 'Jean de la
Roche,' and Prince Karl's jealousy of the past in Lucrezia Floriani,'
-merely to mention one of the passions into which she delved
deeply. But her aim was to interest, above all else, and who shall
dare to say that she was wrong? In her eyes supreme impartial-
ity was something anti-human; incompatible with the novel, whose
prime object is to be human. She wrote for the sheer delight of
giving the best of her heart and brains to many others. As for
the improbabilities she is accused of trying to make people accept
on principle, we must admit that very often nothing is more improb-
able than reality itself, especially when that reality is the life of
George Sand; whence, as may be readily understood, she drew her
inspiration with an artist's privilege. Every contrast can be found
in it; the wildest extravagance of fancy as well as a bourgeoise sim-
plicity.
-
•


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GEORGE SAND
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Aurore Dupin was born the year of Napoleon's coron
ronation, at the
apogee of the glories of France; which she always loved passionately,
while at the same time she had an extremely correct opinion of the
faults of the Latin races, particularly that lack of practical common-
sense she was so aware of in herself, and which condemns one either
to be led or made use of by others. Nevertheless there was a mix-
ture of foreign blood in her veins; and strangely enough, she had
inherited her republican soul through royal descent,-twice branded,
however, with the stigma of illegitimacy. She was a descendant of
Augustus II. , Elector of Saxony and King of Poland; for her grand-
mother was a natural daughter of the Maréchal de Saxe, and had
married M. Dupin de Francueil. It was impossible for those who,
like me, knew her in her old age, not to compare her, on seeing her
so calm, dignified, and tenderly devoted to her children, to that
noble woman who had been the lady of the manor of Nohant before
her, had brought her up, and bequeathed her some of her tastes,
among them a love for music.
Madame Dupin had known Gluck and Piccini; she interpreted the
old masters-Porpora, Hasse, Pergolese - etc. , with deep feeling, in
spite of her semi-paralyzed fingers and voice cracked by old age, but
once so magnificent. Through her, her granddaughter received those
musical impressions that abound in the delightful story of Consuelo,'
where George Sand displays so complete an acquaintance with the
manners and spirit of the eighteenth century. Madame Dupin de
Francueil had, besides her talents and most remarkable mental quali-
ties, all those natural virtues that can be strengthened by philosophy
in the absence of religious belief.
The direction given by such a mother had already begun to bear
its fruits in Maurice, the father of the future George Sand,—a brave
soldier during the Revolution, who became a handsome officer of the
First Empire, and died young, but had the intuitive gift of writing,
as his brilliant and gushing letters prove; yet his excellent heart
had inherited certain ancestral weaknesses. He became attached to
a girl of low birth and no education, who had already been led into
sorry adventures. And so the blood of kings and heroes mingled with
that of the lower-class Parisians in the veins of the little girl, who
at a later day was to transform the active qualities of her ancestors
into qualities of imagination. Her maternal grandfather had been a
bird-seller, who plied his trade on the quays of the Seine; and it
is interesting to note the love that George Sand had all her life
for feathered folk. She has spoken of them almost as eloquently as
of music and children,- those divine themes which her pen never
exhausted. And the fascination was reciprocal. In her garden at
Nohant she used to walk surrounded by a flock of sparrows and


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GEORGE SAND
goldfinches, who trustfully pecked from the hands held out to them,
just as she describes it in Teverino. '
George Sand owed something more than her love of birds to her
mother, whom she loved passionately, but whose inferior station,
barely tolerated by the family, made the daughter suffer keenly;-
I mean a deep tenderness for the poor and lowly, an advanced pre-
dilection for outlaws of all sorts, a revolt against social prejudices
and conventionalities, and a certain bohemianism that-in her youth
especially was constantly struggling against that good-breeding
which nevertheless served her so well for giving her personages the
tone proper to good society. Her most perfect specimen of this is
the old Marchioness in 'Le Marquis de Villemer'; yet in spite of her
plebeian sympathies, the same refinement appears everywhere. And
here we have the evidence of her grandmother's and the convent's
influence.
―
Aurore Dupin's years at the English nuns' convent contributed not
a little to the formation of a peculiar manner, in which so many con-
trary elements were combined. Her free-thinking grandmother had
put her in this pious retreat out of respect to the customs of society.
She wished the dreamy and untrained child, who had grown up in all
the freedom of country life, and was adopting peasant habits, to learn
good manners. Let us hasten to add that for our future joy, George
Sand always remained somewhat a peasant; we owe her admirable
pastoral novels to this rustic substratum. She certainly conceived
their germ in the ruminating life she led when quite a child at
Nohant, in the company of little shepherds who charmed her with
the legends she used so well later on.
The convent made a mystic of this wild creature, but not at once,
for she bore her well-deserved name of Madcap a long time; still, the
influence of a group of women of the highest moral superiority acted
upon her by degrees. She has rendered them the most grateful hom-
age in her 'Memoirs,' recognizing that the years spent in that great
female family were the happiest and most peaceful of her life.
1
Religious idealism seems to have been innate with George Sand.
Brought up by a Voltairean grandmother with contempt for what she
called superstitions, she had made up a religion for herself out of a
compound of mythology, fairy stories, and theories of political equal-
ity gathered in. her childish readings- seemingly least fitted to sug-
gest it. Her first poetic effort-and this word must be used from the
beginning in speaking of her prose was written to extol Corambé;
a beneficent genius, to whom she raised altars in the park at Nohant
when about eleven years old, at the time when she was under the
double spell of the Iliad and Jerusalem Delivered. ' Jesus and his
Gospel succeeded the somewhat pagan phantom she had adored
―――――


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during her pensive childhood: the most ardent piety seized her, and
she came near consecrating herself to a religious life; this would have
been a great loss to French literature. Fortunately the wisdom of
the nuns curbed her excessive zeal; yet all through life she had that
sacred pain, which has been so aptly termed "the anguish of divine
things. " If it had not been for this, she never could have expressed,
as she did many years later in 'Spiridion,' all the agony endured by
the soul of a young priest on losing his faith. The influence of her
intimacy with Abbé de Lamennais can be traced here; but there is
more than that, there is a personal experience.
Aurore astounded her grandmother by coming home a Catholic.
She soon ceased to find certitude in dogma, however. A most irregu-
lar course of reading led her helter-skelter through all philosophies
and all literatures. Spinoza seized her; her admiration made her set
Leibnitz above all metaphysicians; she came in turn under the as-
cendency of Châteaubriand, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Byron; but her
real master was Rousseau. By her first novels especially she belongs
to his school; no freer from the great fault of declamation than he,
as enamored of nature as he had been, and able to speak the burn-
ing language of love as he had known how to speak it.
If it is true that modern pedagogy, by following methods and
giving an important place to science, has the inevitable result of kill-
ing women's imagination and making them uniform, then George
Sand was a most privileged creature; for she was brought up with-
out a plan,-educating herself hap-hazard, learning a little Latin
when quite a child with Deschartres, her deceased father's preceptor,
and no doubt picking up many other things as well, while with that
learned and eccentric man. She was influenced by the convent
next, where her ardor for learning was somewhat benumbed; and
finally turned loose in a library, where like a bee she made honey
of everything.
A perfect rage for reading and physical exercise, long hours of
study alternating with long rides, were her peculiarities, when some
of her imprudent friends thought it was time to marry this young
girl, so entirely free from coquetry or even the desire to please.
Her large, black, dreamy eyes seemed ever following some inward
vision, and gave her, as she says herself, a stupid look; in fact she
never was bright at any period of her life. Her conversation was
not brilliant, although she has often made her written dialogues
extremely so; talking tired her, and the George Sand of future liter-
ary dinners usually played there a mute part. Melancholy by reflec-
tion, she needed gayety; and this silent creature often surprised
those about her by sudden outbursts of animal spirits. Moreover, she
never thought herself handsome. (Balzac, who has described her as


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GEORGE SAND
Camille Maupin in his novel 'Beatrix,' has contradicted her on this
point. )
She was given in marriage to M. Dudevant, the son of a retired
colonel. He had been an officer himself, but was now nothing but
a hunting country-gentleman, and at times a hard drinker. It will
surprise no one that this hasty and ill-assorted union was unhappy.
It is more astonishing that it should have lasted nearly ten years.
To give it so long life, it needed the all-powerful assistance of ma-
ternity, George Sand's really great passion, and her only lasting and
indestructible one. She nursed her children herself; took care of
them night and day, even at the beginning of her restless career;
always found the time to look after them most tenderly; and at
last, in the later period of her life, when she had calmed down, she
became the indefatigable educator of her granddaughters.
She was
most skillful with her needle, and did not despise any household
detail. I saw her thus when she was sixty years old; but when she
was twenty she enjoyed dancing the bourrée with the peasants on
holidays as well.
Finally all this was not enough for her, and she went to Paris
for a short time every year; but as her husband, the master of their
common fortune, gave her a ridicuously small allowance, she util-
ized her talents in order to live,― made crayon portraits, painted min-
iature ornaments, or collaborated with several journalists from her
native province of Berri, for the Figaro. These articles never were
remarkable, as George Sand had neither the requisite spirit and
dash, nor had she any talent for brevity; although later she suc-
ceeded several times in short stories, as those rare pearls 'Lavinia,'
'Metella,' etc. , prove. By a remarkable coincidence, 'Lavinia,' pub-
lished before 1838, resembles Owen Meredith's 'Lucile,' published in
1860, almost stroke for stroke.
One year when she was in the country, having read much of
Walter Scott, she wrote her first novel. ་ Having read it over," she
says ingenuously, "I concluded that it was good for nothing; but
that I could write some not quite so bad. " She had found her voca-
tion.
At first Jules Sandeau wrote with her, and later left her half his
surname. As for "George," it is as common a name in Berri as
"Patrick" in Ireland. The courts did not decree the legal separa-
tion of M. and Madame Dudevant until 1836. It was in favor of the
latter, intrusting her with the education of her two children; this
proves that all the blame cannot have been hers. By this time she
had published her masterpieces, if one can apply this term to George
Sand's novels,- for perhaps there is not a perfect one among them,
except the pastoral novels. Working without any plan, stopping as if


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GEORGE SAND
12765
exhausted when she had said all that was pent up in her, she usually
broke down at the dénouement.
These captivating early works are pre-eminently works of passion.
It would be a mistake to consider them the voluntary unveiling of
the author's life; but one is certain to find it everywhere, and appar-
ently in spite of herself. Indiana' was surely not the cry of her
personal revolt against marriage, for the selfish lover in it is not any
nobler than the tyrannical husband; but just here George Sand has
demonstrated with the deepest feeling, in which many a memory
echoes, how far she considers a woman superior to man when love is
at stake. She seems to be less severe in her opinions with Jacques,
a heroic husband, who resolves to commit suicide, so as to save his
wife from the shame of becoming guilty towards him. There is no
less audacity and horror of conventional forms in Valentine,' where
aristocratic prejudices are trampled under foot by the descendant of
an illustrious race, in favor of the son of a peasant. The dangerous
doctrine that love can dictate duties superior to law is brought for-
ward in these burning pages, and must have served as an excuse
to many sensitive souls that went astray; and we may say that they
must have been among the best and noblest of such souls, for George
Sand never knew how to use the demoralizing language that appeals
to base natures.
'Lélia' must be considered a magnificent prose poem, as all the
characteristics of the most elevated poetry are found in it: ampli-
tude, rhythm, brilliancy, and powerful imagery. Taken as a whole,
it is more out of date than all George Sand's other novels, just on
account of this excessive poetic enthusiasm. Yet it is the one con-
taining the greatest beauties. The characters seem like incarnated
myths or allegories. Lélia represents agonized aspirations towards
the sublime, although we recognize that duality in her which is more
or less noticeable in every one, but was present in so extraordinary a
degree in George Sand. Sténio, while he recalls Alfred de Musset,
typifies the struggles of an inspired poet, whose weak and vacillating
will betrays him to seducing sensualism. The priest Magnus stands
for the demoralized and fanatic clergy as George Sand saw it; for
she was always the enemy of the clergy, if not of religion. As for
the philosophical idea,-uniting as it does, in its absurd and entan-
gled action, such strange characters as Trenmor the virtuous con-
vict, Pulchérie the wise courtesan, etc. , who all argue and declaim,—
we have the key to it; for when George Sand wrote Lélia,' she was
painting the agonized state of her own soul facing a terrible enigma.
She had reached her thirtieth year without having had her eyes
opened to the realities of life; and then suddenly found herself in at
great social centre where all the sadness, want, vice, and injustice of


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GEORGE SAND
Up to that time she had wept over her
an atom among the millions of creatures
Her despair is reflected in the charac-
the world confronted her.
own woes; now she felt like
crushed by inexorable fate.
ter of Lélia, in whom the evil of doubt and the thirst for truth are
warring; her heart, incapable of finding happiness anywhere, is con-
sumed with boundless desires; and she dies without having gratified
them.
The subject of 'Mauprat' is simpler and more wholesome. It is the
effect of passion, working for good this time, upon a wild, violent,
and apparently untamable creature, in whom the pure young girl he
adores creates a conscience, and as it were, a soul.
The supreme
power of ennobling love was a subject dear to George Sand. She
takes it up again in Simon'; where a semi-peasant, by his merit
and talents, becomes the equal of the high-born lady. And both these
beautiful books end by a happy marriage, no more nor less than
a fairy tale. 'Le Secrétaire Intime,' if it were not the most delight-
ful of fancies without the intention of proving anything, would lead
us to believe that clandestine marriages have the greatest chance of
being the happiest.
In 'Leone Leoni' George Sand reverses the subject of 'Manon
Lescaut,' and shows us how a weak and gentle woman is bewitched
and subjugated to the very last by a man most unworthy of her. In
'La Dernière Aldine,' she makes us, by sheer art, accept the some-
what delicate subject of the love of a great Venetian lady for her
gondolier; this love, however, for some unknown reason remaining
perfectly chaste.
We must not forget that this bold and mad harvest, in which
common-sense has no place, was grown in 1830,- the era of all Uto-
pias and anticipated possibilities; when a new world seemed about to
be born on the ruins of the old. 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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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
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.