George Sand and Frederic Chopin: Lucrezia Floriani

George Sand, part of an unfinished double portrait of Sand and Frédéric Chopin by Eugène Delacroix, 1838. 
Source: Wikipedia

The first meeting of George Sand and the Polish pianist and composer Frédéric (Fryderyk) Chopin was anything but auspicious. They met at Sand's request in the fall of 1836 in the company of Franz Liszt and his mistress Marie d'Agoult, but Chopin was unimpressed. "How repellent La Sand is," he reportedly said. "Is she really a woman? I am inclined to doubt it." [1]

Their acquaintance was renewed in the spring of 1838, however, when they met again in the Paris apartment of mutual friends during an after-theater party for the actress Marie Dorval. Chopin was prevailed on to perform an impromptu, and Sand wrote him a quick note: "On vous adore" (We adore you).

Arthur (Artur) Rubinstein performing Chopin's Impromptu in F-sharp major op. 36 (1839):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XExCU6MdjEc

Sand must have improved on closer acquaintance. She and Chopin became lovers a few weeks later, although she would not fully extract herself from a relationship with her son's tutor Félicien Mallefille until September.

Frédéric Chopin, part of an unfinished double portrait of George Sand and Chopin by Eugène Delacroix, 1838,
at the same scale as the portrait of Sand above. Source: Wikipedia

From the beginning of their relationship Sand recognized that the younger and less sexually experienced Chopin was physically frail and emotionally sensitive. But perhaps these were some of the qualities, along with his artistic nature, that attracted her. And as in her other great affair, with Alfred de Musset, with Chopin she became nurse as well as lover. She was to write, "I look after him like a child, and he loves me like his mother." [2]

There is a current of (largely misogynistic) thought that portrays Sand as a distracting and destructive influence on Chopin. In fact, "much of his greatest music was composed in [Sand's country estate at] Nohant" [3], and he composed almost nothing after their separation in 1847 (although it's also true that his health was poor and continued to decline until his death in 1849). And Sand was deeply appreciative of his musical expressivity. In her autobiography The Story of My Life (1856) she wrote, "Chopin's genius is the deepest, the most sensitive and the most emotional in existence. He made a lone instrument speak the language of the infinite." [4]

Frédéric Chopin by Jakob Götzenberger, 1838. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Google Art Project

This is not to deny that there were continuing tensions. In many ways the two were opposites. Sand was politically liberal, while Chopin was conservative. Sand moved in bohemian circles, while Chopin cultivated friends and patrons with high social standing. Sand was passionate and impulsive, while Chopin could be withdrawn and irritable. There was also a kind of gender role reversal between the fastidious Chopin and the trouser-wearing, tobacco-smoking Sand; as Chopin's friend and biographer Frederick Niecks noted, "He is so lady-like, and she is such a perfect gentleman." [5]

Sand was gregarious and sought a wide acquaintance, while Chopin was reserved and became increasingly jealous of Sand's friendships with other men. That jealousy, and the ultimate doom it spelled for the relationship, were reflected in the novel Sand worked on in the summer of 1846, Lucrezia Floriani.

Lucrezia Floriani (1846)

Title page of Belgian edition of Lucrezia Floriani. Source: archive.org

As the novel opens the young, neuraesthenic Prince Karol de Roswald and his friend Salvator Albani arrive at Lake Iseo, about halfway between Milan and Verona (Sand and her then-lover Pietro Pagello had visited it in 1834; see George Sand and Alfred de Musset: The Confession). Karol is described in terms that are reminiscent of Chopin: social correctness, constitutional weakness and emotional coldness.

. . .he had the gift of pleasing even those who did not know him well. His charming face predisposed one in his favour; his physical frailty made him interesting in the eyes of women; the richness and ease of his intellectual gifts, the suave and attractive originality of his conversation, won him the attention of educated men. As for those of lesser metal, they liked his exquisite politeness and they were all the more appreciative of it as they could not imagine, in their simple goodheartedness, that he was merely performing a duty and that sympathy did not enter into it at all. [6]

Salvator learns that an old friend for whom he has kept burning an unrequited passion, the actress and playwright Lucrezia Floriani, is staying at her villa nearby. He impulsively convinces Karol to join him in dropping in on her unannounced. Lucrezia is an idealized version of an unconventional woman very like George Sand herself:

 'Would you say that I am a courtesan? I don't think so, since I have always given to my lovers and have never received anything. . .

'Would you say that I am a wanton? My heart, not my senses have ruled me, and I cannot even begin to understand pleasure without rapturous affection.

'Finally, am I a low, immoral woman? We must know what you mean by that. I have never sought scandal. Maybe I have caused it without wishing to, and without knowing. I have never loved two men at the same time. I have never in fact and in intention belonged to more than one man during a given time, depending on the duration of my love. When I no longer loved him I did not deceive him. I broke with him absolutely. True, at the height of passion I had sworn  to love him for ever; when I did swear it, I was in perfect good faith. Each time I have loved, it was with so much of my heart that I thought it was for the first and last time in my life. . .

'I have never fought against my passions. If I have acted well or badly I have been punished and rewarded by those passions themselves. I was to lose my reputation as a result; I expected it; I sacrificed reputation to love, and that concerns me alone.' [7]

L'amoureuse au piano by Eugène Delacroix, 1843

Karol is dismayed to learn of Lucrezia's past—she has four children by three different men and has never married—and is determined to leave as soon as possible. But as he is departing the next day he falls ill, and after Lucrezia slowly nurses him back to health they become lovers. Salvator sees what is happening with unease, but leaves the two to their idyll.

"You are mortally sad this evening." Illustration from Lucrezia Floriani, Chapter 24, by Maurice Sand (George Sand's son), 1854. Source: archive.org

But that idyll only lasts a few weeks. The actor father of one of Lucrezia's children comes to visit, and Karol is tortured by jealousy. Soon that jealousy spreads to all of Lucrezia's past and present contacts with other men, and poisons their relationship.

The more exasperated he was the colder he appeared and one could only judge of the degree of his fury by that of his icy courtesy. . .And then he brought wit into play, false, brittle wit, in order to torture those whom he loved. He was bantering, artificial, precious, utterly disgusted with everything. He seemed to be nibbling very gently, for sheer pleasure, but the wound he was making penetrated ever deeper into one's soul. Alternatively, if he had not the courage to contradict and mock, he withdrew into a scornful silence, a fit of sulks which rent his victim's heart. . .he thoroughly despised everything one had said and one could possibly say.

. . .A nature which is rich through exuberance and one which is rich through exclusiveness cannot fuse. One of the two must consume the other and leave nothing but its ashes. And this is what happened. [8]

After many weary years, Karol's possessiveness kills Lucrezia's love for him, and ultimately Lucrezia herself loses the will to live: "She was extinguished like a flame deprived of air." [9]

In mid-August 1846 Eugène Delacroix travelled to Nohant to visit with Sand and Chopin. One evening George Sand read her work-in-progress aloud to both men. The parallels between Lucrezia/Karol and Sand/Chopin were stunningly clear to Delacroix; he later wrote, "Executioner and victim both amazed me. Madame Sand seemed absolutely at her ease, and Chopin never stopped admiring the story." [10]

Photograph of a daguerreotype likely to be of Chopin by Louis-Auguste Bisson, ca. 1847, found in a private collection by Alain Kohler. Source: Institut Polonais Paris/CBC

However, Chopin may have been brought to recognize and resent the unflattering portrayal. After that summer he never returned to Nohant, and although Sand saw him over the next winter in Paris, the inevitable final break occurred—by letter—the following summer. (There was another ostensible cause: Chopin sided with Sand's daughter Solange and against Sand in a family quarrel.) Although Sand continued to make solicitous inquiries about him through mutual friends such as Pauline Viardot, Chopin remained bitter towards Sand for the remainder of his life. He died in October 1849, probably of chronic tuberculosis.

At the end of Lucrezia Floriani the narrator suggests that there may be a sequel that would continue to follow Prince Karol, but one never appeared. Perhaps regarding these characters Sand came to feel that there was nothing more she wished to say.

Other posts in this series:  

• George Sand and Gustave Flaubert: Marianne (1876)
• George Sand and Pauline Viardot: Consuelo (1842)
• George Sand and Alfred de Musset: The Confession (1836)
• George Sand: Indiana (1832)

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1. Combined quotation from Ann Deters, 2003, "Frederic Chopin and George Sand Romanticized," Constructing the Past, Vol. 4, No. 1, Article 6. http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/constructing/vol4/iss1/6, and Curtis Cate, George Sand: A Biography, Houghton Mifflin, 1975, p. 413. Translation slightly altered. 
2. Quoted in Kornel Michałowski and Jim Samson, 2001, "Chopin, Fryderyk Franciszek." Grove Music Online. 
3. Michałowski and Samson.
4. Quoted in Catherine Kautsky, 2012, "Sand and Chopin: The Mysterious Liaison," American Music Teacher, Vol. 61, No. 5, pp. 25-28. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43539981. Translation slightly altered. 
5. Quoted in Kautsky.
6. George Sand, Lucrezia Floriani, translated by Julius Eker, Academy Chicago Publishers, 1993, p. 8.
7. Sand, pp. 25-26.
8. Sand, pp. 212-213. Translation slightly altered.
9. Sand, p. 227.
10. Quoted in Cate, pp. 545-546.