Books: Emancipated Woman

LÉLIA: THE LIFE OF GEORGE SAND (482 pp.)—André Maurois—Harper ($5).

If walls could speak, the manor house of Nohant in the French province of Berry would be a Niagara of sound. Chopin and Liszt set their music echoing through it; Flaubert and the younger Dumas produced puppet plays (music by Chopin) on its floor. Delacroix painted in Nohant’s garden studio, and such famous guests as Balzac, Theophile Gautier and Alfred de Vigny argued and tittle-tattled in its drawing room. In the middle years of the 19th century, Nohant’s halls, echoed to the thump of packed bags as estranged lovers and mistresses stormed down them—and if Nohant’s old walls could speak, many a French family tree would require botanical reclassification.

Hostess, mistress, mother of Nohant was the famed George Sand, the beautiful woman who walked like a handsome man. It was far more than her literary eminence that drew the brilliant men of a generation to Nohant—though she fascinated a wide public with what she wrote, and left collected works that ran to 96 volumes. Her personality and the world she built around it were of such fascination and complexity that scores of guidebooks have served only to complicate the intricacy. France’s André Maurois has now written a biography that is both the finest study ever made of George Sand and by far the best book ever written by André Maurois.

Female Don Juan. Maurois’ title, Lélia, is taken from the partly autobiographical novel of that name that George Sand wrote in 1833 when she was 29. By then, she was already a popular author, a doting mother of two children and an emancipated hybrid who wore trousers and smoked cigars. But, above all, she was a woman who sought sexual satisfaction as vainly and desperately as her male counterpart, Don Juan. “When I was with [my lover],” the Sandian heroine Lélia confesses, “I was seized with a strange, delirious hunger which no embrace could satisfy . . . Desire, in my case, was an ardor of the spirit which paralyzed the power of the senses … a savage ecstasy which took possession of my brain, and became exclusively concentrated there.”

This terrible impotence (“This marble envelope,” Sand called it) affected so many lives that it is still considered a small but essential feature of French history. Sand’s enemies declared that in her struggle to overcome it she devoured men like an insatiable ogress. She imposed her own frigidity, they said, as a punishment upon the other sex, never happy until she had reduced her lovers to a condition as hopeless as her own.

The Unforgivable. Maurois is not a member of the ogress school. He believes that George Sand was “a woman thirsting for love and worthy to be loved, yet incapable of that humility without which no love is possible.” As Aurore Dupin, she was the daughter of a dashing and aristocratic officer who was killed in a fall from his horse while Aurore was a child. Her mother was a dancer—”or, rather,” said Sand, “something lower than a dancer, in one of the most disreputable of the Paris theaters.” Aurore was raised at the Dupin estate at Nohant by a strict grandmother and educated in Paris by English nuns. At 18, strait-laced but bursting with romantic ideas, she married Casimir Dudevant, an amiable but entirely unimaginative fellow who spent his days hunting, his evenings snoring.

When Casimir caught her in the act of swooning on a young man’s shoulder, his spontaneous comment was as disillusioning as a snore. “Nobody,” he said, “must know . . . That must be our chief concern.”

“What is really unforgivable in marriage,” says Maurois, “is not adultery, but repudiation.” The repudiated Casimir took to drink. He also seduced one of the maids, and Aurore found him out a few hours before the birth of her second child. Soon after, Aurore met a young lawyer-writer named Jules Sandeau, prototype of a string of future lovers, and went to live in Paris with him. Out of their literary collaboration came the pen name George

Sand; out of their relationship came the Sand characteristics—the billowing cigar, the tasseled boots, the incurable, paradoxical habit of seeking perfect love only in the arms of men who were too feeble or feminine to supply it.

“Poor little Jules” was no dynamo. He could not, like his mistress, write for 14 hours at a stretch and then mount a horse and gallop to a lovers’ tryst. Soon he was dropped by the wayside, and George moved on to Novelist Prosper Merimee. Merimee, as Maurois vouches, “was of the race from which the Devil picks his Don Juans,” and spoke of love “with all the coarseness of a medical student”; George hoped that his cynicism would cure her “childish susceptibilities.” But “Don Juan failed utterly to come up to scratch.”

Poet Alfred de Musset was next on the list. She sat on a cushion at his feet, puffing a long pipe of Bosnian cherrywood, while he murmured that “his genius was a poor, frail thing.” It was. George left Alfred half dead in a Venetian hotel and took up with his Italian doctor. “Is it in you, my Pietro,” Sand wrote to her medico, “in you at long last that I shall see my dream fulfilled?” It was not in Pietro.

The Walking Graveyard. “What it all comes to,” said Balzac in his brusque way, “is that she is a man: all the more so since she wants to be one.” Pianist Chopin agreed. “How antipathetic this Sand woman is!” he complained after meeting her. “Is she really a woman at all?” Soon after, he wrote in his diary: “She gazed deep into my eyes while I played . . . My heart was captured! . . . She loves me!”

He left with her for Majorca, “fresh as a rose and rosy as a turnip.” He returned spitting blood and within an ace of death. Chopin lived on & off at Nohant for seven productive years—but not as George’s lover. Instead, she nursed him like an ailing child, firmly denied him any closer relationship.

Maurois does not flinch from giving a clinical history of the relationships that caused George Sand to be described as “a walking graveyard.” Nor does he deny that it was her fatal psychological weakness always to pick on men who were too weak to dominate her. And yet. his complete portrait convincingly presents a figure of memorable strength. Sand, Maurois shows, was the forerunner of today’s emancipated woman. All her characteristics would have been considered admirable—in a man. Her friends were legion; most of her ex-lovers confessed that though she had nearly been the death of them, she had been the making of them as well. Count d’Orsay was not trying to be funny when he wrote to her: “You are a much-loved woman, in addition to being the one outstanding man of our times.”