I said nothing. She knew what I was thinking; she knew the way a woman in love wants to believe that her man is not anything like the others.
She spoke quietly then: “George. When it comes to the treatment of women, one man is like any other. You don’t want to believe it. I don’t want to believe it. But it’s true. Your poets answer to the call of their groins even as do the peasants in the fields. Women long for words to sear their souls; men offer them the best they can do in that regard and then immediately forget what they have said. They have their way and then go out to piss against a wall and think about what they might have to eat.”
I sat still, thinking that Alfred did not forget his words of love; he was in thrall to his own utterings at least as much as I was. Then Marie said, “What you must do is ignore him. For another well-known fact is that men want what they cannot have. We have talked about this before, George. My advice to you is that you do not endeavor to see him. Do not write him. Ignore him! Then see how fast he comes scratching at your door.” She yawned and apologized for doing so.
“It is I who should apologize,” I said. “I forget that people do not stay up all night as I do.” I hoped she would beg me to stay; but she did not. Instead, she sleepily escorted me to the door.
I walked out into the empty streets, where the fog lay in a thin blanket over the Seine. I walked with my head down, my hands in my pockets.
Marie had tried to help me, but the only friend’s words I had heard and resonated to lately were those of Sainte-Beuve. I had passed him recently on the street on a rainy day, and we had sought warmth and shelter in a café. Over steaming cups of café au lait, we began talking about the break between Alfred and me. “Poor George,” he said. “I must tell you: in some ways, I feel responsible. I should never have arranged for the two of you to meet.”
I shook my head. “Even in pain, I feel grateful that Alfred and I shared our love, though it was so full of strife it makes me wonder if it really was love. I confess that oftentimes I don’t think I understand love. How would you define it?”
He stared out the window at the rain sluicing down from the awning. Then he smiled sadly and looked over at me. “Tears. If you weep, you love.”
Well, then, I thought, I have loved a great deal.
I ignored Marie’s advice to ignore Alfred. I wrote to him again, telling him that he could spurn me as often as he liked but begging him to say that he was not forever closed to the idea of us seeing each other again, if only sometimes, if only on occasion and with no conditions attached. I begged him to say that he had not really meant “never again.”
Again, my note went unanswered. And then I heard he was out in the bars, laughing, carrying on, and often saying spiteful things about me. Finally, in deepest despair, I again returned to Nohant, but not before again inviting Delacroix to visit me there.
December 1834
NOHANT
I was not a week at Nohant when I received a note from Alfred, a sincere and naked apology for his outbursts, his temper, his cruelty. He included a lock of his hair, something I had asked him for long ago.
I sent him back a leaf from my garden and nothing else. It was all I wanted to say: once alive, now dead, still beautiful.
And then I received news in a letter from one of my Berry friends that Musset was telling everyone that the breach was final: he and I were never to be together again. He had been seen in the company of the same woman several times, a petite blonde, quite beautiful and apparently also well bred.
Delacroix was outside painting the day I got that letter; I read it sitting on a bench in the garden near the place where he was capturing the deep gold of late-afternoon light through the naked boughs of the trees.
I felt a great surge of emotion and longed to speak with him, but I did not want to disturb him. I would tell him at dinner what had transpired. Quietly, I took my leave and went off to my bedroom. I sat holding Musset’s lock of hair and then went to the gardener’s shed for a pair of shears.
Back in my room, staring into the mirror without really seeing myself, I chopped a great hunk from my black hair, which Musset had so loved and praised, which he had gathered it into his hands to kiss. I cut another piece, then another, then another still, until I looked like an ill-kempt peasant boy; my shorn locks fell unevenly around my face and stuck up in the back. I bundled the hair I had cut off in a package. I addressed it to Musset and laid it on a table in the hallway. Tomorrow it would be posted.
In the hall, I passed a maid, who tried not to show her shock at my appearance but failed. Her eyes widened, and I heard the sharp intake of her breath. I stood my ground until she curtsied and moved on. Then I went back to my room, sat at the edge of my bed, and sobbed, my hand pressed hard into my chest.
We are all fools in love, all of us, even the strongest among us. Anyone who claims otherwise is worse than a fool: he is a liar.
—
“Mon dieu!” Delacroix said as we sat down to dinner that night.
I looked calmly over at him.
“George.”
He moved to my chair, tenderly kissed my forehead, and stared into my eyes, reading at once my sorrow. Friend that he was, he did not ask me to explain. He knew that I would tell him what I wanted when I was ready. All he said was “Let me do your portrait. Never have I seen such terrible beauty.”
I let him. He captured my pain in the way my eyes stared off at nothing and, somehow, even in the empty space around me. He drew my lips gone thin and pale. He drew the irregular lines of hair that now barely reached the bottom of my neck, framing a woebegone face whose flesh seemed to droop. I had carelessly folded the ascot above my redingote; it almost resembled a hangman’s noose. What Delacroix created was a portrait of hopelessness.
Yet it wasn’t long after Musset received the package with my hair that we were locked once more in a desperate embrace. “How I wept that day!” he told me. He had come to see me at Nohant at the end of December, and in January, I had returned with him to Paris.
For six weeks we both enjoyed and suffered through the last gasps of a dying love. Finally, due mostly to his ongoing jealousy and increasingly abusive treatment of me, we really had finished with each other.
In March 1835, I returned to Nohant without telling Musset I was going. I knew if I did tell him, he would come over and create a scene.
My first night back there, in a state of great tranquillity, I produced twenty pages of writing. I had found myself again, and as well my voice on the page. I no longer loved Musset, but I did not hate him. In a letter of farewell I wrote to him, I said:
But your heart, your good heart, do not destroy it, I beg of you. Give your whole heart or as much as you can to every love of your life, but let it play its part with dignity, so that you can look back and say as I do, I have often suffered, I have sometimes been deceived, but I have loved. It is I who have loved and not some artificial being driven by ego and ennui.
I meant to soothe him, to restore some sense of equanimity to both of us. But my words did more than soothe him. Later, in one of his plays, I heard one of his characters say:
One is often deceived in love, often wounded and often unhappy, but one loves, and when one is on the edge of the grave, one looks back and says: I have often suffered, I have sometimes been deceived, but I have loved. It is I who have loved, and not some artificial being driven by ego and ennui.
When I heard that, I only smiled. My last gift to him. That play by Musset, incidentally, was called Don’t Fool with Love.
There were times when I wondered what it said of Musset that he so often and easily deserted me, that upon our final break he immediately began a romance with another, while I was for so long unable to recover. But then what did it say of me that it took a young man weeping in my lap, wiping his nose with his fist in the fashion of a schoolboy—what did it say of me that this is what he needed to present to me before I could fall in love with him?
Late March 1835
&n
bsp; NOHANT
That spring, I found myself exhausted—physically, mentally, spiritually. Even nature did not offer its customary solace. I turned to Plato, to Shakespeare, to the Koran and found no relief. I played the piano, dull-eyed, and ate without tasting. I knelt at my bedside once again, bowed my head, and begged to feel Corambe. I called out in silence to a being who seemed to have abandoned me.
I continued to work, however, filling pages with a tranquil penmanship that belied the tumult inside. But there had been a change in the way that I wrote. My popularity and deadlines and financial obligations meant that I could not take all the time I wanted to finish my stories and novels. Now, as ever, I dismissed the thought of my being a great writer. Nonetheless, I wanted to do my best. But toes tapped, and hands grabbed pages before I was quite ready to let them go. I envied the writers who could let everyday events, random encounters, memories, and dreams weave themselves into their work. I knew I did my best work when I let that second mind, that unconscious force, take over, when it felt as though I were drifting along in a boat that guided itself. But that kind of writing was impossible to do with the pressure I now felt.
I was turning my short story “Mauprat” into a novel. Like my other books, it reflected my life, this time the future as well as the past. For although I wrote about mental anguish and entanglements and a disturbed way of thinking, which reflected aspects of my time with Musset, I also focused on things beyond the individual. I addressed myself to problems in society that prefigured the politics I was soon to be actively engaged in.
Writing served to lift me away from myself and the sadness I was feeling. But when I wasn’t at my desk, the pain could be excruciating. Most of my Berry friends seemed to be of one mind, and the advice they gave me was to try to reconcile with Casimir. Wouldn’t living in a kind of placid peace with him be better than what I was enduring now? Where had all my lofty ideas about passion and romance gotten me?
Over and over again, I tried to explain my own sense of ethics when it came to love and sex: one needed the former to engage in the latter, or else one was a prostitute. “Then be one!” my friend Alexis Dutheil implored me. “Be Casimir’s mistress, for the sake of your children, for the sake of your own mental health!”
He said this even after I told him about an incident when friends were over and Casimir, in a drunken sulk, had ordered me out of the drawing room for the crime of comforting our son, to whom Casimir had spoken cruelly. I did not comply. “I’ll box your ears!” he said, and I laughed at him. Bad enough that I reacted this way, but my response prompted the other guests to laugh as well. At that, he catapulted out of his chair and then returned to the room with his hunting rifle. His face was flushed, his eyes wide; I all but expected him to froth at the mouth. He was subdued by one of the guests, and I do not think any among us believed that he would actually shoot me. But he had gone to the gun cabinet. He had had the weapon in his hands.
—
IN THE YEARS SINCE I had left, Casimir had kept to the same routine: hunting, drunkenness, and women. He managed Nohant poorly, constantly losing money, but erupted in anger if anyone tried to suggest things that might help. He did not care to converse on any topic but local politics and the weather, and the latter only insofar as it pertained to his ability to hunt.
I, on the other hand, had built up a life full of painters and writers and musicians and philosophers and dissidents. Yes, I had been devastated by Musset, but at least it was a poet I had loved, not a man who had no appreciation for the arts.
In Paris, my dinner parties often lasted all night; my guests made their way home at dawn, silly with drink but deeply inspired by all they had shared with one another. There was always much laughter, shouts of appreciation, even applause. Franz Liszt could sometimes be persuaded to play, and when he did, we all felt enraptured and elevated.
It was Alfred who had introduced me to Liszt and his mistress, Marie d’Agoult, whom I nicknamed Arabella. She had left her husband and children to be with Liszt, and she served as inspiration for a very different kind of revolution that was being talked about ceaselessly in the streets of Paris. Bad enough that she had abandoned her husband and family for another man, but to have a child out of wedlock with him and show not a flicker of remorse!
Having children changed everything, but it did not decide everything. And so I vowed that instead of staying with a husband I could not abide for the sake of my children, I would try to teach them to live by their consciences, no matter what the world around them might think, or say, or do. I would teach them by my example.
April 17, 1835
BOURGES
I had at last found myself without ambivalence about the direction in which I wanted to go. Now I was sitting in a restaurant forty-five miles north of Nohant in Bourges, where I had been brought by my childhood friend Alphonse Fleury. He knew the brilliant lawyer Louis-Chrysostom Michel, known as Michel de Bourges, and had suggested I meet with him here, to see if he would represent me in a process that should have been started long ago.
Divorce had been abolished by Napoleon, but one could secure a formal, legal separation with specific terms; one was barred only from remarriage. I had no interest in remarriage, but the idea of being given an equitable settlement—of having Nohant returned to me as my own and having a fair share of the money that had, after all, been mine in the first place—was greatly appealing. I wanted also a kind of sexual freedom I did not now enjoy: when one was separated from one’s husband, one was not condemned for other pursuits.
Fleury thought Michel would be the best person to represent me. “He never loses!” he said. I had heard this. I had also heard that in addition to his eloquence in the courtroom, Michel had a reputation for a fierce intelligence and a charisma that had made this militant republican the much-admired leader of the current government opposition. I very much looked forward to meeting him.
When he walked into the room, I was startled into silence by the size of his head; it was as though he had two brains fused together, fore to aft. He was thirty-seven to my thirty-one, but he looked like an old man: bald, stooping, and myopic.
Michel later told me that for his part, he had expected me to be dressed as a young man. He had thought of me as a child poet whom he had long admired from afar, and that upon meeting me he might offer to make me his “son.” Though I did still often dress in men’s clothes, I would also, either by whim or necessity, wear dresses and bonnets, and a finely made dress of peacock-blue silk was what I had on that night. There was no mistaking the fact that I was a woman.
He took my hand and bowed. “George Sand. May I tell you first that I am a great admirer of yours. Lélia is a work of genius.”
“From what I have been told, you are the genius.”
Fleury had told me Michel was married to a rich widow. I saw that he dressed like the peasantry he came from, in clogs and a rough greatcoat—though I noticed beneath that a blindingly white shirt made from the finest linen. Upon his head, he wore handkerchiefs fashioned into a kind of cap that would be permissible to wear indoors; it helped to keep him warm, for he was always cold. Something about this humble garb on such a fiery personality made me able to immediately relax. And there was an occasional softness to his eyes that suggested that somewhere inside this radical was a gentle spirit.
“Tell me the purpose of your meeting with me,” he said, and I told him far more than that.
I told him about my upbringing, about the relationships I’d had, finally about the way that on the face of it, I lived an aristocratic life, but my heart and my politics were ever on the side of the people. “I am not one of those who look down upon their servants,” I said, and he threw back his head and laughed. I recognized the irony and blushed.
“Understand, it is more than that,” I said. “I have always tried to see the worth of the individual despite the clothes he wears, the place he resides, or the accent with which he speaks. I grew up playing with peasant children, and I—”
>
“Bah! Because you drop into their world now and then does not make you one of them. You find them interesting, charming, you pick from what they offer to suit your own needs. Then you go home to a plate full of fine food and sleep in imported linens.”
I looked pointedly at his white shirt, and he smiled. “I suppose we can all be caught out in hypocrisy one way or another,” he said. “But my wearing a linen shirt is not tantamount to your blowing kisses from the balcony of the privileged to those who suffer below. If you speak kindly to your house staff, if you write a few articles in a newspaper about the rights that should be given to every person, you have not done your duty.”
“And what is my duty?”
He studied my face. “Your duty is to use whatever talent you have to make for a kind of equality among people that we are nowhere close to achieving, and that many people do not want to have. Your duty is to persuade those who do not want it to, if not embrace it, at least accept it; and if one method does not work, you must engage fully in another.”