“And let me say as well that since I have known you, you have never been able to face facts or understand human nature. You are all poetry and music, a child yourself, protected from unpleasantness because of your prodigious talent, yes, but also because of your constant respiratory illnesses, which seem to me at times to be a bit too convenient.”
He had fallen into a chair to endure my lambasting, and because he was silent I thought that he might even agree with at least some of what I’d said. But this last was too much. He looked up at me, and in his eyes was such pain, such betrayal, that I fell to the floor and laid my head in his lap, weeping. “Forgive me,” I said.
He rested his hand on my head. His breathing slowed, then calmed, and he said simply, “My apologies, Aurore.”
June 1847
NOHANT
Seeing Solange married made me eager for Maurice to take that step as well. For some time, I had hoped that he would marry Augustine. I knew that he found her very attractive for many reasons, and certainly he had advocated with me on her behalf. But then my son seemed abruptly to lose interest in her.
One day I took a walk with him, and after an agreeable silence, I asked about his intentions.
He shrugged in a way that aroused my wrath.
“What do you mean? Do you no longer care for her?”
“I care for her….” He kicked a clod of dirt before him, and I grasped him by the arm to stop him, then turned him around to face me.
“I shall not marry her, if that is your question.”
I closed my eyes and let go a huge sigh.
Maurice laughed. “Come now, Mother. Are you not the one who argued against Solange marrying Fernand?”
“It is a different situation.”
“How is it different? Am I not to save myself for someone I feel passionately about?”
I had no answer. We resumed walking.
“Has she given herself to you?” I asked quietly.
“I was not the first.”
“How do you know there have been others?”
He only looked at me.
I turned my gaze forward and walked on.
An artist named Théodore Rousseau, a friend of Maurice’s, had recently visited. He was a famous painter of landscapes, and Maurice had told me he was besotted by Augustine.
I felt responsible for Titine’s well-being. Indeed, I loved her. I had taken her away from her mother to give her a better life, and I wanted to make sure she would be provided for after I was gone. To that end, I began an exchange of letters with Rousseau, starting by letting him know that Augustine was very much taken with him. He wrote back to me immediately, expressing his ardent feelings for her. I shared the letter with Augustine, who, understanding all too well the change in Maurice, expressed a modest measure of appreciation. I wrote back to Rousseau:
If you could have seen how the color rushed into her cheeks, and the tears into her eyes, when I showed her that beautiful letter, you would be feeling as calm and radiant as she has been. She flung herself into my arms, saying, “Then there really is a man who will love me as you love me!”
A few weeks later, I told Rousseau that if he married Augustine, I would provide a dowry of one hundred thousand francs, to be paid gradually, out of my royalties. When Solange heard about this, she was furious. All her bitter jealousy of Augustine returned. She and Clésinger were living well beyond their means and had run through Solange’s dowry in weeks. Now they expected me to finance their hothouse flowers, their hired carriages, their expensive clothing and evenings out.
But Rousseau declined my offer. He had gotten an anonymous letter, he said, that told him that Augustine loved Maurice and that if she married another, it would be her distant second choice.
Knowing full well that “Anonymous” was Solange, I argued for Rousseau to move ahead nonetheless. “One of the joys of marriage, after all, is the way that time together can make love grow,” I wrote him. At this, he grew suspicious, wondering why one who so often had objected to matrimony was now trying to push it on him.
He did not understand my feelings in this regard. I did not object to matrimony; I objected to the inequality in it. Let men and women enjoy mutual respect in the institution, and I was all for it!
But it was too late. Exit Rousseau. And enter a furious Solange.
July 1847
NOHANT
Maurice, some friends, and I were having dinner one evening when a carriage pulled up. I went into the front hall to see Solange and Clésinger walking through the door. I was not surprised; I had invited them to spend some time in the country, hoping that the simple beauty of Nohant might remind them that the most lasting joys have nothing to do with purchases. Whatever my failings as a mother, I did always try to impress upon my children the restorative and timeless pleasures of nature, art, and camaraderie.
But now! Clésinger, who appeared drunk, dropped their bags to the floor and began speaking in a loud voice that drew my son out into the hall with us.
“What is the meaning of this?” Maurice asked. “Lower your voice at once!”
“I shall not! Your mother is going to hear us out, one way or another!” He turned to me. “The great George Sand! If anyone knew of the way you treated your own daughter—”
“Auguste—” Solange began, embarrassed, I think, by the way he was acting. However great her ire, her behavior was never this crude.
He turned toward her so menacingly, she fell silent. But then, quietly, she said, “We are in need, Mother.”
“I have no more to give you!” I said. “The money that was offered to Augustine was to come from royalties I have not yet received.”
“Then mortgage this place!” Clésinger said.
My mouth fell open.
“I ask again that you leave; we shall discuss this later,” Maurice said in a low voice, aware, as was I, that our dinner guests had fallen silent.
“I shall not be thrown out!” Clésinger roared.
Then a rapid series of events happened that will never dim in my memory. Maurice took Clésinger’s arm to escort him out. Clésinger reached into his bag to pull out a sculptor’s mallet, which he raised over Maurice. I stepped between them to slap Clésinger’s face once, twice; he punched me so hard in the chest I nearly fell to the floor. Maurice shouted, “I am going for my gun!” at the same time that one of our guests, a priest who was imposing in stature, came to subdue Clésinger, then told him to leave at once. Clésinger grabbed two of his sculptures that I had on tables in the vestibule and walked out. I looked to Solange, but in her face was only bitterness, and she followed her husband out, slamming the door.
The next day, she sent a note from a nearby inn demanding my carriage to take her and her husband back to Paris. I refused her, in part because I hoped she might calm down and we could have a reasonable discussion of her other demands. Instead, I learned that she wrote to Chopin, telling him of the terrible treatment that she had suffered at her mother’s hands. And he sent his carriage and his driver to fetch her, offering, as well, his condolences and the promise of his open arms.
Furious, heartbroken, betrayed, I wrote to Frédéric that he need not bother coming to Nohant unless he cut Solange and Auguste Clésinger out of his life. I told him how they had appeared at Nohant, so full of vitriol. I told him that they frequently asked for money that I could not provide and rejected the spiritual things I could give.
I am wild with grief, I told him. I feel as if my daughter is dead. I asked that he not even speak her name to me, that he regard her as a matter of indifference.
There followed days and nights of bitter pain. I could be distracted from it for an hour or so at a time, but then it would return. I waited for the relief of Frédéric arriving from Paris, but he did not come. Then I worried frantically that he was ill and made plans to go to Paris to check on him, though I was ill myself, not only in spirit but in body: I had a fever, and every bone ached.
Finally, I received a letter from
Frédéric:
Solange will never be a matter of indifference to me. Your pain must be overpowering indeed to harden your heart against your child, to the point of refusing even to hear her name, and this on the threshold of her life as a woman, a time more than any other when her condition requires a mother’s care.
Her condition. So Solange was pregnant. She had not told me, as surely Frédéric must have known; surely he must have known that! I read and reread this cold response, which made no effort to console but only criticized me. Not a word about what it must have been like for me to have been attacked in my own vestibule. No acknowledging the endless times I had tried to reach my daughter, the way I had tried to take care of her.
I wrote him back:
Do as your heart tells you, and take its instinctive promptings for the language of your conscience. I quite understand.
As to my daughter…she has the bad taste to say that she needs the love of a mother whom, in fact, she hates and slanders, whose most sacred actions she sullies. You have undertaken to lend a willing ear to her, and perhaps you really do believe what she tells you. I would rather see you go over to the enemy than myself take arms against that same enemy who was born of my body and fed of my milk.
Take good care of her, since you seem to have decided that it is your duty to devote yourself to her. I will not hold it against you, but you will, I hope, understand me if I say that I shall stick to my role of outraged mother. To have been a dupe and a victim is quite enough. I forgive you, and will not, from this day forward, address so much as a single word of reproach to you, since you have confessed frankly what is in your mind.
Goodbye, my friend. May you soon be cured of all your ills, as I hope that now you may be (I have my reasons for thinking so). If you are, I will offer thanks to God for this fantastic ending of a friendship which has, for nine years, absorbed both of us. Send me news of yourself from time to time. It is useless to think that things can ever again be the same between us.
And then, as I have the fragile and contrary heart of a woman, I waited for him to come to me, or to at least respond. He did neither. We marched forward into our separate lives.
March 4, 1848
PARIS
I was on my way to see Charlotte Marliani when I ran into Chopin in her anteroom, coming out from having just visited her himself.
“George!” he said.
“Frédéric.” I kept my tone neutral, and I tried not to let my eyes devour him in the way he used to make fun of me for. He was pale, thin. I took his hand briefly; it was cold as ice.
“How do you fare?” he asked.
“Well, and you?”
“The same. Have you any news from Solange?” he asked.
“Last week I heard from her.”
“Not yesterday or the day before?”
“No.”
He smiled: half joy, half sorrow. “Then let me tell you that you are a grandmother. Solange has had a little girl, and I am delighted to think that I am the first to inform you of that fact. Her name is Jeanne-Gabrielle.”
“But then she came early!”
“Yes.”
I stood still; he bowed and made his way downstairs with his companion, an Abyssinian man named Combes.
I was turning to go into the apartment when I heard Combes calling my name as he bounded up the stairs again. I waited for him to reach me. “Frédéric wanted me to tell you that Solange and the baby are in good health,” he said breathlessly and smiled.
“And this he would not tell me himself?”
Combes spoke softly, “He could not climb the stairs again, madame.”
I rushed downstairs and asked Frédéric all about Solange, though I wanted desperately to inquire about him as well. He dutifully answered every question about my daughter, ending by saying that Solange had had a difficult labor but that the sight of her child had made her forget her pain.
I looked into his eyes. “As it ever goes. If given a chance, true love will always vanquish pain.”
“So it is said. Well. Good evening.” He bowed and started to turn away, and I quickly said, “And you, Frédéric? How is your health?”
“I am well,” he said, but he would not meet my eyes and instead bade the porter to open the door to his carriage. He did not turn around. He climbed in, and Combes followed him, the carriage creaking with his greater weight; and then it drove away. I stood at the edge of the street on a clear evening, the stars a rebuke, the memories falling like rain.
I thought, Love begins as a rhapsody and ends as a dirge.
I never saw him again. And most unfortunately, Solange’s baby died within days.
May 1848
PARIS
Michel de bourges and I may have come to a bad end, but his political proselytizing was not entirely in vain. After the July Monarchy was overthrown early in ’48, it seemed that at last a socialist republic would rise up. Undone by love (though what I declared was that I was through with it), I went to Paris and immersed myself in politics, giving it the same hectic energy and trusting heart I had offered my paramours.
I was called “the mind and the pen of the new regime.” I wrote government circulars, and I had access to all members of the provisional government at any time. I was privileged to award friends of mine temporary positions as commissaries of the republic at Châteauroux and La Châtre, and I even appointed my son as mayor of Nohant. What hope I had for the elevation of the masses! What faith I put in the courage of the people! But how far we fell in our efforts to grant freedom, and in such a short length of time. By May, the general elections showed us that the cause of the socialist republic was lost. All our efforts for the creation of a grand republic had failed.
Back at Nohant, I was greeted by men with tipped hats and straight lines for smiles; these same men wanted to burn my house down for my liberal politics. They were not like the protesters in Paris, who had barricaded the streets with everything from chairs and paving stones to broken cups and saucers. The people of Berry were more conservative than I had imagined them to be. The new mayor of Nohant, who was a political adversary but a personal friend, even suggested I leave town for a while. I shared this advice with some friends and received a letter back from Delacroix, in which he wrote:
Liberty purchased at the cost of pitched battles is not liberty at all, seeing that true liberty consists in the freedom to come and go in peace, to think as one will and eat as one likes, and enjoy a great many other advantages to which political upsets pay no attention.
He was right, I thought.
Not long afterward, I was out for a walk in the country one day with my old friend François Rollinat. He reminded me of how, a year ago, we had walked there and I had told him a story called “The Waif.” I had told it in the same easy, conversational style as an old village woman had told it to me, so long ago.
“I remember,” I said. “And it seems that in one year, we have aged ten. So much has changed from that day when we spoke here.”
François nodded sadly and looked out over the land. He drew in a breath, as though pulling the vision of all he was seeing deep into his lungs. Then he said, “Yet the stars shine on and the smell of the air is still sweet. Perhaps that is the only offering we can make. Let us use art again as we once understood it, and treat the anguish of the soul with the balm of the natural world.”
“Yes,” I said. “Let the cobbler return to his last, and the novelist to her pen.”
My next book was La Petite Fadette, which was praised for its evocation of the beauty of the rustic life, and it put me back in the good graces of the public, where I stayed.
October 1849
PARIS
October 17, 1849, FrÉdÉric FranÇois Chopin died. Solange was among those at his bedside; in fact, I heard that he died in her arms.
People said I did not care enough to go to him or to attend his funeral, but I was not told he was dying. I knew he was ill; I had heard that his sister Ludwika had come to care for him.
After she arrived in Paris, I wrote to her, inquiring after Frédéric, but heard nothing back. Therefore I assumed it was nothing serious, and that he would recover the way he always had.
He had often said that he wanted to die in my arms; I had responded that if the fates decreed he went first, I would be the one to hold him then. My name may not have crossed his lips as he lay on his deathbed, but I know beyond knowing that I was in his thoughts and deep in his heart, and that if he did not call for me, he wanted to.
In the years that followed, I would be reviled for having caused his death, when in fact I’d extended his life. Without me, the world would have far fewer of his mazurkas, polonaises, preludes, and waltzes. It would be without his ravishing B-flat Minor Sonata, which he completed on a stormy afternoon at Nohant, after which he called me from the kitchen, where I had been putting up plum jam, to hear it. I stood at the piano with my fingers stained blue, with minute blossoms that had fallen in the wind on my walk that morning still dotting my hair. After he lifted his hands from the keys and the room fell abruptly silent, I opened my eyes and smiled at him through tears. And the breath he had been holding came rushing from him.
The world will ever love Chopin’s music. I loved not only his music but, to the bones, I loved that shy and private man, he with his constant cough and listless appetite, his nervous complaints and the raised veins in his feet, the tenderest of tributaries. And he loved me. We were not the thing each of us privately longed for; but our understanding of that made it possible for us to be to each other what we were. Our souls met and mingled in our love for music, in the grace and transcendence it provided us both. For all those years we were together, I listened daily as he played out his rapture, his questioning, his suffering; I knew him as well as he knew himself and perhaps better. However unconventional the manifestation of love between us, it was a true love. And even after it was over, it lasted.