The passions of George Sand

The year just ended marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of George Sand. After Joan of Arc, Sand is probably the most famous Frenchwoman who wasn’t a queen or mistress to a king. In 2004, her native country came up with a record number of commemorative manifestations, that wonderfully elastic word that can mean anything from street fight to symposium. In Sand’s case, the more sedate events prevailed, but one is tempted to regret the unruly possibilities that she herself would likely have preferred.

High or low, Sand has always led biographers a merry chase. Hers seems more like several lives, literary, amorous and political, whose out-sized subject has proved a moving target. The dynamic momentum of her story has inspired numerous biopics and serial TV productions, in which she has been played by such stars as Merle Oberon, Juliette Binoche and Judy Davis. Much of her appeal has to do, of course, with the company she kept. Her lovers included Frederic Chopin, the poet Alfred de Musset, the writer and cultural bureaucrat Prosper Merimee and Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the redoubtable literary critic. But there were scores of others -- actors, jurists, journalists, politicians -- men (and at least one woman) celebrated in their day but now of interest mainly to historians or those committees that get to choose Paris street names. And there were many lesser lights.

Despite her well-publicized affairs, devoted friendships (most notably with the much younger Gustave Flaubert) and passionate involvement with family and community in her home province of Berry, Sand’s most faithful commitment was, first and always, to writing. Disappointed in love, in her marriage and children, in political engagements, she defined herself by her writing, as a successful independent woman but also as a highly conscious participant-observer of her times and of timeless human nature. In 88 novels, 25 plays, plus journals, travel pieces, political commentary and, most eloquently, the 19,000 letters exchanged with some 2,000 correspondents, Sand offers both a self-portrait in motion and a chronicle of rural and urban France under two monarchies and a republic. She examines relations between the sexes within and outside marriage, the class system, the meaning of work, the struggles of female artists and issues of illegitimacy and bisexuality -- along with such dark passions as “hatred at the heart of love,” the subtitle of one of her plays.

Sand’s precocious sense of self predated the rebirth of the bored, unhappy wife and mother Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, age 26, as “George Sand.” Her identity was formed early by her decision, as the child of a working-class mother and aristocratic father, to be a “daughter of the people” and later by the conviction that her mixed legacy gave her, along with unique insight, an almost mythic role as Representative Woman of her time. As she often reminded contemporaries, her two “bloodlines” did indeed represent a symmetry of extremes. Her father, Maurice Dupin, a young officer in Napoleon’s peninsular army, killed by a fall from his horse when his daughter was 4, traced his lineage from Marechal de Saxe, the most brilliant general in French history before Napoleon, by way of Augustus II, elector of Saxony and king of Poland. Her mother, the former Antoinette-Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, was not merely the daughter of a bird-seller on the Quai de la Megisserie. Orphaned at age 14, Sophie became a prostitute, giving birth to at least three children of uncertain paternity, including, most probably, Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, the future George Sand.

Evidence that Sand’s legitimacy was conferred on her by the besotted (and probably unsuspecting) young officer has been unearthed by Elizabeth Harlan, and questions of family and identities are the fulcrum of her new biography. Given Sand’s insistence on her dual heritage and her dramatic “choice” between conflicting class loyalties, the issues raised by Harlan’s research are momentous, and she has explored them with intelligence and tact. Comparing birth records with dates of Sophie’s letters to her lover at the front, Harlan argues persuasively that Maurice Dupin could not have fathered the future writer. (Her parents married only three weeks before her birth.) But further reverberations follow.

In her “Story of My Life,” Sand’s fascinating if unreliable memoir, there’s a famous confrontation between 13-year-old Aurore and the aristocratic grandmother who adopted her and paid the disreputable and unstable Sophie to give up all rights to the child. A malicious servant reports to the ailing woman that her ungrateful namesake wishes to abandon her and live in Paris with her “real” mother. Mme. Dupin summons her adoptive child and legatee to her bedside to inform her that her mother was and still is a whore, “a fallen woman,” and that in choosing life with her outcast parent, she will sink to the bottom of the social scale, forfeiting any chance of a proper marriage and decent future.

Middle-aged when she wrote this memoir, Sand offers a stirring defense of her mother’s early years, accusing a class system that encouraged sexual exploitation of poor parentless girls by rich older men. But her grandmother told her something even more shocking, which Sand still declined to specify some 40 years later: that she was “of father unknown.”

By robbing the girl both of her aristocratic legacy and her male parent, this interview casts a long shadow over the writer’s life, not least by refuting Sand’s elaborate self-mythology. But Harlan’s revelation creates problems for her biography as well, threatening to swallow up the rest of it. Key episodes in Sand’s life, to be sure, are laid out: the miserable marriage, the early affairs, the conquest of Paris, the success as a writer (with its spillover of succes de scandale), the failures as mother and lover and finally the frenzied productivity and passionate engagements with utopian movements and the short-lived revolutionary government of 1848. But these later chapters have a perfunctory feel, not helped by the author’s stilted translations of Sand’s letters, among the most racy, colloquial and personal of the entire century.

One casualty of Harlan’s summary treatment is Michel de Bourges, silver-tongued lawyer and Sand’s only lover who could be called a father figure. A hero to young radicals by dint of obtaining acquittals for 121 workers accused of plotting against the July Monarchy, he also successfully represented the young Baroness Dudevant in her separation agreement, winning the unheard-of settlement of the return of the wife’s property. Sand may have been the first woman in history to fall in love with her divorce lawyer. But he was also married, to a rich woman from a prominent Berry family. He had no intention of inviting scandal by leaving his marriage but for a time he was happy to let his lover live in hope. Her letters to the dodgy jurist are the most passionate, abject and heartbreaking she would ever write; toward the end of their affair, every sentence shudders with the terror of abandonment and the lament for a lost father. One of the most eloquent objects in a recent Paris exhibition devoted to the writer was a ring De Bourges gave to Sand. Engraved with the date of their first meeting, it’s a wide band of gold.

Finally, there’s the sleeping giantess of Sand biographies: her novels. Students of Sand, Harlan included, tiptoe around the beast by discussing them selectively: to illustrate ideas, as key to real people and events in her life, as case studies in author-publisher relations or as examples of “reception theory,” the dynamic between books and their readership. Two early novels, “Indiana” and “Lelia,” have entered the feminist canon as thinly disguised autobiography. “La Mare au Diable” (The Devil’s Pond) and “Francois le Champi” (Francis the Waif) were once required reading for French schoolchildren, being elegantly written, wholesome (no arousing peeks into courtesans’ boudoirs) and rich in folkloric material about a rural way of life that had already disappeared in Sand’s lifetime. But it’s safe to say that no one read Sand for pleasure once the novelist, who died in 1876, was no longer alive to spark interest in her work.

Avoiding issues of quality leaves a large question unanswered: Why was George Sand, blessed with brilliance and an imagination sympathetically attuned to other lives, master of a rich and supple prose style, such a bad novelist? The overriding cause was her inability to create a single memorable character: no Jean Valjean, Julian Sorel, Emma Bovary, Goriot or Nana -- to name only examples from her French contemporaries. A related problem points to her particular authorial ego: Wanting to play all the parts herself, she couldn’t help upstaging her creations. Defenders of her careless plots and some of the silliest love scenes ever to take place outside an opera house argue that she wrote furiously, caught in the vise of deadlines and the need to earn money. But this was true of Balzac and Zola, Dickens and Dostoevski.

A central clue is provided by the author herself, who describes “Lelia,” the story of two sisters, one a courtesan, the other a struggling artist, as a “metaphysical” novel. Rejecting “realism” in favor of an improving “idealism” (her words), most of her fiction belongs to quite another French tradition, the philosophical novel. Happily for her income, she was adept at coating the pill with enough melodrama, teary romance and erotic heat to make many of the titles bestsellers. Stripped of their suicide pacts and duets of renunciation, however, Sand’s novels fit into a succession of politically engaged French narratives. The cornerstone of the genre is Balzac’s “The Human Comedy,” which merely takes on all of French society in the mid-19th century. Lesser talents produced programmatic and dated sagas that, like Sand’s, are now unreadable and unread (including, in our own time, Jean-Paul Sartre’s multivolume clunker “The Roads to Freedom”). Whatever their interest as history, they fail as literature largely because their characters function only as clothed ideas. After Balzac, the other great exception is Emile Zola, whose art transcends creaky ideology and engages us as passionately today as when his major works were first published.

Alas, George Sand was not an artist. Unlike some of her present-day acolytes, she gracefully accepted this limitation. Her modesty and discernment, her lack of envy and her admiration for the real thing -- for Chopin, Delacroix and Flaubert -- are as awe-inspiring in their own way as the others’ genius. Writing to Flaubert, Sand acknowledged that even if she had his brilliance or his luxury of time “to prod and pare each sentence,” she could never create a work of art. She could only be a great woman. *

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From George Sand

The personal goal that Sand maintained throughout her life of loving freely and fully and being well loved in return is inextricably connected with her pressing social and humanitarian agenda. In her autobiography she looked back at this period of her life and reflected: “Seeing how far my labor was from being able to take care of ... the poverty around me, I doubled, I tripled, I quadrupled the dosage of work.... I was governed for a long time by this law of enforced labor and limitless charity, as I had once been by the idea of Catholicism.”