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.

George Sand and Pauline Viardot: Consuelo

Pauline Viardot by Ary Scheffer, 1840 (detail). Image: Musée de la Vie Romantique

Pauline Garcia was the younger sister of the soprano Maria Malibran and the daughter of the singer, composer and vocal teacher Manuel Garcia. (As a measure of Manuel Garcia's skill and renown, the role of Count Almaviva in Rossini's Barber of Seville was written for him.) But both Maria and Manuel were deceased by the time Pauline made her professional singing debut in the fall of 1837 at age 16. She gave her first Parisian performance at a salon a year later; George Sand heard her sing shortly afterwards and immediately took an intense interest in her. [1]

Pauline became famous, if not quite overnight, very rapidly. In May 1839 she made her opera debut as Desdemona in Rossini's Otello at London's Covent Garden, and was invited to give a private performance for the 19-year-old Queen Victoria (Victoria wrote that "I was delighted with Garcia, who will I think surpass her poor sister." [2]) Five months later Pauline made her first Parisian opera appearance at the Théâtre Italien, again as Desdemona, followed by Angelina in Rossini's La Cenerentola and Rosina in his Il Barbiere di Siviglia.

Pauline Viardot by P. I. Solokov. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Everywhere her singing caused a sensation. While we can't know what she sounded like, a contemporary reviewer praised her for "the agility of her voice, that approaches the incredible, the surety of her most audacious intonations, the ravishing charm. . ." [3] Another critic wrote that "she possesses one of the most magnificent instruments ever heard. . .the medium tones have an indescribable sweetness and penetration that moves the heart. Hearing it is stupendous." [4]

Perhaps we can hear a hint of these qualities in certain modern singers, such as Joyce DiDonato or Cecilia Bartoli. Here is Cecilia Bartoli singing Desdemona's "Willow Song" ("Assisa al piè d’un salice") and prayer ("Deh, calma") from Act III of Otello [5]:

https://youtu.be/ScngLHsWwhY?t=4

After her triumphs on the opera stage Pauline was besieged by admirers, including Sand's former lover Alfred de Musset, who wrote that "she sings as naturally as she breathes." [6] Sand was instrumental in steering Pauline away from de Musset and arranging her marriage to Louis Viardot, the director of the Théâtre Italien, who had been an advisor to Maria Malibran. The marriage took place in April 1840; Pauline was 18, and Viardot was, at 39, old enough to be her father.

It may seem odd that, given her experience of unhappiness in her own marriage to an older man she did not love, Sand so strongly advised Pauline to marry Viardot. But as Sand may have anticipated, Viardot served three invaluable functions for Pauline. First, opera singers, like actresses, were often seen as morally questionable; after her marriage Pauline was referred to on posters and in programs as "Madame Viardot," her marital status confirming her respectability. Second, many husbands refused to allow their wives to perform in public; this prohibition was incorporated into the plot of Sand's early story "La Prima Donna" (1831) in which an opera diva is forced by her new husband to retire from the stage (see George Sand: Indiana). As an opera impresario, Louis Viardot was unlikely to place restrictions on Pauline's professional activities. In fact, when Viardot married Pauline he was the one who quit his job as theater director to take on the role of her manager. Finally, Viardot was able to provide the material and emotional security that enabled Pauline to devote herself entirely to her artistic career.

Consuelo (1842-43)

Title page of Consuelo. Source: Bibliothèque national de France

Sand's interest in Pauline did not stop with helping to arrange her marriage; she was also inspired to write a novel, Consuelo, modeled on and dedicated to her. The heroine is an orphaned Spanish gypsy waif who is discovered singing in a Venetian church. The aging composer Nicola Porpora becomes her singing master; the novel takes place around 1750, when the historical Porpora, onetime rival of Handel and teacher of the castrati Farinelli and Caffarelli, would have been in his mid-60s.

Nicola Porpora. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Eventually the predatory impresario Count Zustiniani arranges Consuelo's opera debut. But her ravishing voice and natural, unaffected onstage demeanor excite the jealousy of the reigning diva Corilla, who is Zustiniani's current mistress. Consuelo, though, refuses to engage in rivalry with Corilla; she shuns Zustiniani's sexual advances and, at Porpora's urging, flees to the Bohemian castle of Porpora's friends and patrons the Rudolstadts. Arriving during a fierce storm, Consuelo immediately senses that a mystery envelops the family. The young heir Count Albert is betrothed to his beautiful cousin Amelia, who is staying at the castle, but is subject to strange fits of melancholy and odd wanderings in the middle of the night.

A storm, an isolated castle, a strange mystery: at this point Consuelo takes on the trappings of a Gothic novel. The narrator even jokes about it:

If the ingenious and prolific Ann Radcliffe were in the place of the frank and awkward narrator of this very truthful history, she would not neglect so good an occasion, kind reader, to lead you through trap-doors, corridors, winding staircases, darkness and underground passages during half-a-dozen fine and fascinating volumes, to reveal to you only in the seventh the key to her ingenious mysteries. But. . .we will tell as quickly as possible the answer to all our riddles. [7]

Notwithstanding this disclaimer, Consuelo is filled with ghostly sounds in the night, sudden appearances and disappearances, subterranean passageways, hidden lairs, carriages with secret compartments, dangerous encounters in dark forests and the like, all of which could have indeed come straight from an Ann Radcliffe novel.

Improbabilities and coincidences abound. It's the sort of novel where Consuelo, fleeing through a Bohemian forest, is surprised by a fellow wanderer who turns out to be the young Joseph Haydn. (Consuelo ultimately introduces him to her teacher Porpora, and Haydn—as he did in real life—becomes Porpora's servant in exchange for composition lessons.) And it is the sort of novel where, after Consuelo and Joseph rescue a man in the aforementioned dark forest from being press-ganged into Prussian military service, they later by chance encounter his wife and children begging in the streets of Vienna and are able to reunite the family.

All of this is calculated to make strong-minded, skeptical readers roll their eyes. And I confess that when I read this novel for the first time a few months ago I had to talk myself out of abandoning it more than once. But what I didn't appreciate was that Sand may have been employing overfamiliar fictional tropes in order to make more acceptable to readers what was radically new about her heroine.

Consuelo is a performer on the public stage who does not fulfill the stereotype of the ambitious, coquettish, backstabbing diva who uses her sexual appeal to gain material success. Nor does Consuelo have to die (as does the heroine of "La Prima Donna") in order to confirm her virtue, or (as does the heroine of Lélia (1833)) in order to be punished for exceeding the bounds of propriety set for women in a male-dominated world. [8]

Illustration by Tony Johannot for Lélia, Oeuvres Illustrées edition, 1854. Source: Bibliothèque national de France

Instead Consuelo is courageous and resolute; throughout the novel she braves physical dangers and wins through thanks to her fortitude. She does not play flirtatious games; she avoids the sexual snares laid for her by unscrupulous men, and when she loves she does so openly and wholeheartedly (if chastely—perhaps Sand's concession to popular mores). Throughout she remains devoted to the high principles of her artistic calling rather than to worldly success:

She had dreamed, and still dreamed in spite of herself, of livelier and deeper joys of the heart and of more extended and acute pleasures of the intellect; but as the world of art which she had imagined so pure, so sympathetic and so noble had shown itself on a nearer view under so ugly and forbidding an aspect, she had chosen in preference a life of obscurity and retirement, gentle affections, and a solitude sweetened by her chosen work.  [9]

It was Pauline Viardot, who was able to combine an artist's freedom with nobility of character, that inspired Sand to conceive of this new kind of heroine.

Other posts in this series:  

• George Sand and Gustave Flaubert: Marianne (1876)
• George Sand and Frederic Chopin: Lucrezia Floriani (1846)
• George Sand and Alfred de Musset: The Confession (1836)
• George Sand: Indiana (1832)

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1. Pauline was also a highly talented instrumentalist and composer. She gave serious thought to pursuing a career as a concert pianist, but followed her mother's wishes and devoted her energies to singing. See Rebecca Bennett Fairbank, Devastating Diva: Pauline Viardot and Rewriting the Image of Women in Nineteenth-Century French Opera Culture. Doctoral dissertation, Brigham Young University, 2013, p. 56. There were few contemporary models for successful women concert pianists, Clara Wieck (later Schumann) perhaps being the best known.
2. Quoted in Fairbank, p. 65n.
3. Quoted in Fairbank, p. 128n. 
4. Théophile Gautier quoted in Fairbank, p. 108n. Translation somewhat altered.
5. For the words, see Lyle Neff's Public-Domain Opera Libretti (stanford.edu)
6. Quoted in Beatrix Borchard, "Viardot [née García], (Michelle Ferdinande) Pauline." Grove Music Online, 2001.  Retrieved 11 June 2019. 
7. George Sand, Consuelo, Vol. II, Ch. IV, 1842 (translated by Frank H. Potter, 1889). https://archive.org/details/afe0976.0002.001.umich.edu/page/25; the translator's spelling of Ann Radcliffe's name has been silently Anglicized.
8. Lélia is murdered by a monk who strangles her with his rosary (!); see Fairbank, p. 99.
9. Sand, Consuelo, Vol. IV, Ch. X. (Translation slightly altered.) https://archive.org/details/afe0976.0004.001.umich.edu/page/142

George Sand and Alfred de Musset: The Confession

George Sand by Alfred de Musset, 1833. Image: Wikimedia Commons

The decade of the 1830s saw George Sand transformed from an anonymous journalist into a literary institution. From 1831 to 1839 she published an average of a full-length novel every six months. She also embarked on a series of romantic liaisons, including with the critic Gustave Planche, the actress Marie Dorval, the writer Prosper Mérimée, her lawyer Michel de Bourges, her son's tutor Felicien Mallefille, and the socialist advocate Pierre Leroux, among others. She also had two great affairs; the first, between 1833 and 1835, was with the writer Alfred de Musset.

George Sand and Alfred de Musset (?) by Célestin Nanteuil 
(in other portraits from the 1830s de Musset is not clean-shaven)

The Confession

Alfred de Musset's La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century, 1836) is the highly fictionalized story of his affair with Sand. The narrator Octave is a young man (de Musset was 22 when he met Sand, who was 29) whose brazen betrayal by his first love has sent him careening down the path of unrestrained dissipation, bitter cynicism, and a near-pathological distrust of women.

In this state he meets the beautiful widow Brigitte Pierson. He is struck by her kindness and goodness, the peace and serenity of her home, and falls in love. Although at first she does not return his feelings, eventually she is unable to resist the intensity of his passion and they become lovers. The narrator, though, like his creator, has a volatile temperament, and only two days after their love is consummated he starts their first serious argument over a trifle. As a joke Brigitte has told him a white lie, which she immediately confesses:

She laughed heartily as she told me. But all at once I felt a cloud had settled over me. . .The more I tried to fight the gloom which had gripped me the blacker the darkness which gathered in my head became.

'Well now,' I said, 'are you really an accomplished liar?. . .Do you find that telling lies comes easily?' She looked at me in amazement. . .

You may smile, reader, as you peruse this page. But I, who write it, still tremble at the memory. Misfortunes have symptoms just as physical illnesses do, and there is nothing more alarming to the sailor than a small black dot on the horizon. [1]

De Musset is a master at describing the suffocating sense of paranoia that jealousy arouses. An example: to avoid gossip the couple plans to travel outside of France, but the narrator deliberately delays their departure due to vague suspicions of Brigitte. A friend of hers, a man named Smith, has been visiting them regularly:

Sitting by the fire, I would let my eyes wander from Smith to Brigitte and back again. They both looked pale and serious and said little. I had no idea why they were like that but, try as I might, I couldn't help thinking that it could be for the same reason and that there were not two secrets waiting to be discovered but one. . .It was an overpowering, fateful intuition. [2]

In the narrator's state of hypervigilant awareness, circumstances that might otherwise seem unimportant take on a heightened significance. One evening the narrator goes to bed, leaving Brigitte and Smith together just as she asks for tea to be served. The next morning he notices that there is only one teacup on the table: "My hands were shaking. . .What possible reason could explain why Smith and Madame Pierson drank from the same cup?" [3]

Of course, there is another and more likely explanation available to Octave: perhaps Smith simply didn't want tea and the maid took his unused cup away with her. But Octave's leap of jealous illogic is a signal that he has sensed a deeper truth: there is indeed a growing emotional connection between Brigitte and Smith, and his "fateful intuition" may be justified after all.

George Sand by Alfred de Musset

This electric moment of unwelcome insight is based on an incident from de Musset's affair with Sand. They had travelled to Venice together, but relations between them became strained. Ultimately Sand barred her bedroom door to de Musset, ostensibly so that she could write, and he went out on his own in the evenings to sample the pleasures of the city. He sampled them so thoroughly that he worried that he had contracted a venereal disease, and became seriously ill, perhaps with typhoid. The Italian doctor who treated him was the handsome, cultured 27-year-old Pietro Pagello. As Pagello and Sand stayed up together to watch over the patient, a romantic attachment formed. Pagello offered Sand the stability and comfort that the impulsive, erratic (and now prostrated) de Musset was incapable of providing.

Although de Musset lapsed in and out of consciousness, he later recounted to his brother Paul his somewhat hazy memories of one particular night. Pagello was preparing to leave when Sand asked him to stay for a cup of tea. The two leaned close and conversed in whispers, and as Sand's biographer Curtis Cate describes the scene, de Musset "had the distinct impression that they were drinking from the same cup. Later, when Pagello rose to leave, George Sand accompanied him out. They passed behind a screen placed in front of the door, and though Musset could see nothing, he had the impression that they were kissing. George Sand came back for a candle, accompanying the surgeon out on to the landing, where they remained for an unusually long time. . .By the light of the single remaining candle he could see the table, and on it was just one tea cup." [4] This image, seared into de Musset's feverish brain, becomes the moment the narrator of Confession realizes that Brigitte is being emotionally unfaithful to him.

George Sand  by Alfred de Musset

The affair of de Musset and Sand was tempestuous. Sand broke with him in Venice, and ultimately travelled back to Paris with Pagello. But the co-generated melodrama of her relationship with the poet exerted an inexorable pull, and in Paris she and de Musset became lovers again. Sand wrote him, "I no longer love you, I adore you forever. I no longer want to have anything to do with you, but I can't go on without you. Only a bolt of lightning from the heavens could cure me by annihilating me. Farewell, stay, leave, only don't say I'm not suffering. . .Go, but kill me." [5]

After an enraged de Musset took her at her word and threatened her with a knife, though, Sand made a final break with him in March 1835. He had been telling her for close to a year that he was writing a roman à clef about their affair, and after their breakup she was very concerned by what her fictional portrait might look like. In the end, she was relieved that Brigitte was portrayed as noble and self-sacrificing.

The fictional trail of this relationship would continue. In 1859, two years after the death of de Musset, Sand published Elle et lui (Her and him), her version of the affair in which "Therese" is faithful, and forgiving of the dissolute and groundlessly jealous "Laurent." De Musset's brother Paul then wrote an angry answer novel, Lui et elle (Him and her, 1859), in which the poet "Edouard" is betrayed by his lying, faithless mistress "Olympe." This was followed—in the same year!—by Louise Colet's Lui (Him). Colet had been de Musset's on-again, off-again mistress in the final years of his life. In her version of de Musset's affair with Sand, the rising poet "Albert" has the misfortune to become involved with the hypocritical, self-promoting "Antonia," who smokes, neglects her children, and betrays him with an Italian named Piacentini. At this point the satirists began to have a field day; Alexis Doinet wrote Eux, drame contemporain, par Moi (Them, a contemporary drama, by Me) and Adolphe de Lescure published Eux et Elles (Himselves and Herselves). A grand passion had become farce.

Other posts in this series:  

• George Sand and Gustave Flaubert: Marianne (1876)
• George Sand and Frederic Chopin: Lucrezia Floriani (1846)
• George Sand and Pauline Viardot: Consuelo (1842)
• George Sand: Indiana (1832)

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1. Alfred de Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century, translated with an Introduction and Notes by David Coward, Penguin Classics, 2012, p. 157.
2. De Musset, p. 221.
3. De Musset, p. 229.
4. Curtis Cate, George Sand: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin, 1975, p. 294.
5. Quoted in Cate, p. 347. Translation slightly altered.

 

George Sand: Indiana

The colorful life of George Sand (1804-1876) is perhaps better known than her writing. Her name conjures the image of the pants-wearing, tobacco-smoking gender nonconformist who counted among her lovers Chopin, the author Alfred de Musset, and the actress Marie Dorval. She was the friend of Liszt, opera singer Pauline Viardot and the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, and corresponded with Balzac, Alexandre Dumas fils, and Flaubert.

She was also, of course, an astonishingly prolific writer who produced five dozen novels, two dozen plays, hundreds of pages of essays and at least 20,000 letters (Flaubert began each of his letters to her with the salutation Chère Maître (Dear Master)). For some time I had been curious about her work and what had made her such a popular writer, but the sheer volume of her output was daunting: where to begin? Then I serendipitously came across her late novel Marianne (1876) in a used bookstore, and thought the time was right to begin exploring. I wound up reading backwards through her work, starting with Marianne, continuing with the mid-period novels Consuelo (1842) and Lucrezia Floriani (1846) and then ending (at least for now) with the first novel she wrote as sole author, Indiana (1832).

The birth of George Sand

In January 1831 the 26-year-old Aurore Dudevant, unhappy wife and mother, negotiated a partial separation from her incompatible husband and travelled to Paris to be with her much younger lover, Jules Sandeau. This was the Paris of Henri Murger's memoir-novel Scènes de la vie de Bohème, which later became the basis of Puccini's opera La Bohème. There was political ferment in the air and unrest in the streets of the bohemian quarter; the July Revolution that had overthrown Charles X had taken place only six months earlier. Authority—of all kinds—was being questioned.

Aurore Dudevant; portrait by Candide Blaize, 1830 (detail). Image: Musée Carnavelet

Aurore needed to find a means of supplementing the meagre allowance her husband provided her, and together with Sandeau began writing anonymous columns for the newspaper Le Figaro. But Aurore had literary ambitions beyond journalism. Writing articles covered her daily expenses, but she wanted to write fiction (which was also better-paid). She began to dress in men's clothes; they were much more practical, in particular, for theater-going. Wearing a suit and metal-heeled boots she could buy a ticket for the parterre (main floor) where the audience stood or sat on benches; women, with their voluminous dresses, had to sit in the roomier boxes, which were much more expensive. Dressed as a man Aurore was able to fully indulge her love of theatre and opera. She wrote a friend, "When one wants to write, one must see everything, know everything, laugh at everything. Ah, believe me, vive la vie d'artiste! Our motto is liberty!" [1]

George Sand in men's clothes; portrait by Eugene Delacroix, November 1834. Image: Musée Delacroix

Among the performers she witnessed was Maria Malibran as Desdemona in Rossini's Otello: "She made me weep, shudder, and suffer as though I had been watching a scene from real life. This woman is the foremost genius of Europe, as lovely as a Raphael Madonna, simple, energetic, naïve, she's the foremost singer and the foremost tragedian. I'm mad about her." [2]

Maria Malibran as Desdemona; portrait by François Bouchot (1834). Image: Wikimedia.org

Malibran inspired Aurore and Sandeau to write La Prima Donna, a short story which was published in April 1831 in La Revue de Paris under the joint pseudonym Jules Sand, although it was probably primarily Aurore's work.

Image from HathiTrust.org; original from Princeton University

It is the tragic tale of a star opera singer who is forced to retire from the stage after her marriage. She is languishing away when her husband finally relents. Her return to the stage in a performance of Romeo and Juliet is greeted rapturously by the public, but at the conclusion of the opera she collapses and dies. (It's an eerie coincidence that Malibran herself would collapse onstage at the end of a concert in September 1836 and die a week later; at the time of her death she was only 28.)

Aurore's fascination with Malibran is also apparent in Rose et Blanche, a full-length novel about twoconvent girls, one of whom becomes an opera singer and the other of whom becomes a nun.

Image from the Internet Archive (archive.org)

Although written collaboratively with Sandeau, the narrative obviously drew heavily on Aurore's experiences of attending a convent school between the ages of 13 and 16 and also on her love of opera. Published in five volumes in December 1931, it appeared under the name J. Sand.

Aurore was under no illusions about the literary quality of Rose et Blanche—she called it "a wretched novel of no consequence" [3]—but she had another novel in mind that would be more personal. This one she wrote entirely on her own, and although she offered to issue it under the name J. Sand, Sandeau refused to be associated with it because of its scandalous themes. So Aurore devised a new pseudonym for herself: G. Sand.

Image from French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org)

Indiana

No one has failed to point out that Indiana was about me and my life. That is absolutely untrue.

—George Sand [4]

Sand's claim is scarcely credible. Many of the characters and incidents in Indiana seem drawn directly from her life; she wrote autofiction before the word was invented.

Indiana is a young woman (19 when the novel opens) trapped in a loveless—and probably sexless—marriage with the much older Colonel Delmare. She falls in love, passionately but chastely, with her dashing neighbor Raymon de Ramière. She and Raymon meet when she tends to him after he is wounded by Delmare while climbing the wall into their garden late at night for an assignation with Indiana's creole servant Noun. Meanwhile, Indiana's reserved, taciturn cousin Sir Ralph Brown immediately perceives what is going on between Indiana and Raymon, and goes to extraordinary lengths to try to protect her from Raymon's selfish desires, her husband's jealous anger, and her own self-destructive impulses.

The unconsummated love affair between Indiana and Raymon seems to combine two situations from Sand's past. At age 17 Sand had emerged into social life after several years in a convent school. She quickly fell in love with a new acquaintance, the 30-year-old infantry lieutenant Prosper Tessier. But she was shocked when one day he suggested that their relationship should move beyond the platonic to the carnal. For him, meaningful glances, billets-doux and long horseback rides together evidently weren't sufficient manifestations of her love. An outraged Aurore rejected his proposal. As Indiana tells Raymon when he tries to seduce her, "'The insensitivity of your romantic and guilty plan wounded me very deeply. I believed then that you loved me—and you did not even respect me!'" (Ch. XII)

Perhaps, then, Aurore was on the rebound when, a few weeks later, she accepted the marriage proposal of another man. Ex-officer Casimir Dudevant was unprepossessing in appearance and almost a decade older than Aurore. He didn't offer Aurore love, but rather "eternal friendship"; he thought she would be a good match for him because of her "good and reasonable air." After their marriage in September 1822—she was 18, he was 27—it quickly became apparent that they were not well suited. As Sand describes Casimir Dudevant's fictional counterpart Colonel Delmare, "He treated all delicacies of the heart as feminine puerilities and sentimental subtleties. [He was] a man devoid of wit, tact, and education. . .His was thus the most antipathetic nature, the heart least made to comprehend, the mind the least capable of understanding his wife." (Ch. X)

Increasingly frustrated in her marriage, Aurore embarked after a few years on another platonic romance. Aurélien de Sèze was engaged to another woman, but he and Aurore exchanged murmured endearments, clandestine embraces, semi-chaste kisses and impassioned letters, all with Casimir's unhappy awareness and reluctant acquiescence. The meetings of Indiana and Raymon, where he is all impetuous desire while she, with ever-weakening resistance, insists on remaining physically faithful to her husband, probably draw heavily on these experiences.

Indiana is ultimately disappointed in both her lover and her husband. Neither of them treats her as anything more than a means of gratifying his own needs; neither takes Indiana's thoughts and feelings into consideration, or thinks of her as his equal. Indiana writes to Raymon, "You [men] think yourselves masters of the world; I think you are only its tyrants" (Ch. XXIII). And when one day on her return from Raymon's her husband demands to know where she spent the previous night, she refuses to tell him: "You have no right to ask me that question. . .I know that I am the slave and you are the master. The law of the land has made you my master. You can bind my body, tie my hands, govern my acts. You have the right of the stronger, and society confirms you in it; but you cannot command my will, monsieur." (Ch. XXI)

Only the quiet, dependable Sir Ralph (who providentially turns up to rescue her in every moment of crisis) treats Indiana with respect. He has loved her silently since they grew up together on Île Bourbon. Ultimately, in retreat from the crushing sorrows occasioned by her husband's cruelty and her lover's betrayal, Indiana returns there with Sir Ralph to try to find some residual traces of happiness from their bucolic childhood together.

The novel originally ended with Sir Ralph's confession of his love, followed by a double suicide. In the final version the two are discovered years later living together, sequestered from the world in a remote hut. Either version seems to point to the impossibility of woman's happiness and fulfillment within conventional marriage, a theme that Sand would return to repeatedly in her later novels.

Indiana was widely praised and became a huge success. Sand's literary future, at least in the near term, was assured. But as she embarked on her new novel Valentine over the summer of 1832, "working like a horse," it was becoming clear that Jules Sandeau lacked both her drive and her talent. [5] He had provided a reason for separation from her husband and had been a useful entrée into the Paris literary world, but he had become a financial and artistic burden rather than a collaborative partner. While Sand retained affection for him, she no longer needed him and did not lack for other admirers. Her next great love would be a man who was more her equal in literary talent: Alfred de Musset. In the meantime she would enjoy her fame and her sexual freedom. Henceforth her motto would indeed be "liberté!"

For further reading: George Burnham Ives' serviceable translation of Indiana.

Other posts in this series:  

• George Sand and Gustave Flaubert: Marianne (1876)
• George Sand and Frederic Chopin: Lucrezia Floriani (1846)
• George Sand and Pauline Viardot: Consuelo (1842)
• George Sand and Alfred de Musset: The Confession (1836)

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1. Quoted in Curtis Cate, George Sand: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin, 1975, p. 177.
2. Quoted in Cate, p. 178.
3. Quoted in Cate, p. 191.
4. Quoted in Elizabeth Harlan, George Sand. Yale University Press, 2004, p. 143.
5. Quoted in Cate, p. 208.

Suggested reading: Things are not what they seem edition

April Fools' Day has passed, but it's always useful to be reminded that things are not always what they seem, and what we think we know isn't always true.

1. Want a longer life? Contact your Congressional representatives

As Pagan Kennedy notes in The Secret to a Longer Life? Don’t Ask These Dead Longevity Researchers (New York Times), anti-aging research has been going on for, well, ages. And someday a substance may be discovered that protects our telomeres, removes arterial and brain plaque, strengthens our bones, repairs sun-damaged skin, and helps keep us youthful and vigorous to 100 and beyond. (A wild guess: it's not likely to be Rainier Beer.)

But we've already discovered a way to vastly increase average life expectancy: it's called public health. Kennedy quotes Dr. Thomas R. Frieden's Shattuck Lecture published in The New England Journal of Medicine: "Since 1900, the average life span in the United States has increased by more than 30 years; 25 years of this gain have been attributed to public health advances" such as immunization mandates, clean air and water regulations, and restrictions on the places where people can exhale cigarette smoke into other people's faces. (Frieden notes that "Tobacco use is still the leading underlying cause of death in the United States and worldwide.") So as Kennedy writes, "Today, the greatest threat to your life span may be the Trump administration’s assault on public health and medical research. . .When it comes to staying alive, we’re all in it together."

A group of friends notifying insurance companies about their cultivation of  healthful habits. 

Photo: Peg93 [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

2. And when it comes to staying insured. . .

The New York State Department of Financial Services has found in a recent investigation that insurance companies are mining your Instagram feed to glean information about your habits. As Nathan Heller writes in Why the Life-Insurance Industry Wants to Creep on Your Instagram (New Yorker), insurers use this information to create models and algorithms that "purport to make predictions about a consumer’s health status based on the consumer’s retail purchase history; social media, internet or mobile activity; geographic location tracking; the condition or type of an applicant’s electronic devices (and any systems or applications operating thereon); or based on how the consumer appears in a photograph." Think twice before posting those Coachella or Burning Man pix. . .

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

3. Private in public

Speaking of oversharing, we've all heard highly personal conversations held in public. But there's more at stake than embarrassment. Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John's University, gave her students A 'Creepy' Assignment: Pay Attention to What Strangers Reveal in Public (New York Times). She tasked her students with identifying someone in public using only clues from what they said loudly enough to be heard by lots of people, logos and monograms visible on their clothes and belongings, and Google searches.

It's shockingly easy: one student was able to find a stranger’s full name, college major, minor and year of graduation based only on someone addressing him by his first name and the college logo on his shirt. And some folks are just oblivious. A student reported overhearing someone recite "their entire credit card number while on a full train over the phone." And a reply to Klonick's Twitter thread about the assignment recalled a time at a Starbucks where "this dude was having like a fight with his accountant or something [more likely his bank or credit-card company]. Kept, loudly, repeating his SSN and full name on the phone. After the third time I wrote it down, and handed it to him."

We reveal private information to the strangers surrounding us because of two expectations. First, we assume anonymity in public, and paradoxically the more crowded a place is the more anonymous we feel. Second, we think we're protected by our own obscurity. But neither expectation holds when public spaces are being increasingly monitored and everyone is carrying around a powerful recording and searching device. For those of you who think, like some of the students in Klonick's class, "I don't care if anyone's watching, I have nothing to hide," you may be surprised at what you can inadvertently enable someone to discover.

Hans Asperger at the Curative Education Clinic of the University of Vienna Hospital c.1940. Photo: The Spectator

4. A touch of Nazi psychiatry

Instagram (now owned by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg), Google, and other culture-changing tech companies like Apple and Amazon have been founded and sustained by entrepreneurs with "limited social skills, a willingness to obsess and an interest in systems." As Matt McFarland's Washington Post article Why shades of Asperger’s Syndrome are the secret to building a great tech company notes, these traits are often considered essential to their success.

Asperger's Syndrome is named for Hans Asperger, a pediatric psychiatrist in the Curative Education Clinic at the University of Vienna Children's Hospital. He developed the diagnosis of high-functioning autism in his 1944 doctoral dissertation. Asperger himself coined the phrase "autism spectrum," and identified those at the higher-functioning end as having "special abilities." (Prior to Asperger, autism was a binary diagnosis: a child was autistic, or not.)

After Asperger's doctoral thesis was rediscovered and translated into English in 1991, he was hailed in some quarters as a pioneer of neurodiversity. But as Michele Pridmore-Brown writes in Unfeeling Malice (London Review of Books), her review of Edith Sheffer's book Asperger's Children (Norton, 2018), "whether autism is one condition or several, it remains steeped in the cultural values of its Nazi origins, and in the idea of the model personality: obedient, animated by collective bonds, socially competent, robust in mind and body." Those who were autistic did not fit in with the group-oriented ideal.

When the Jewish and liberal doctors were purged from the Children's Hospital after the Anschluss, the psychiatrists who remained knowingly participated in the Nazi eugenics program. While eugenic ideas did not originate with the Nazis, after the Anschluss they took on a lethal significance. Those children who were diagnosed with a failure to conform to normative neurological standards and who were deemed to lack compensating "special abilities" were sterilized, became the subject of gruesome medical experiments, or were sent to Spiegelgrund, "the children's killing centre" that was part of the Steinhof mental hospital. Asperger used his "autism spectrum" to separate children into "favorable cases" and the "ineducable." He sent the latter—many of them adolescent girls he found unruly, rebellious or precociously sexual—to Spiegelgrund, with the full awareness that they would be murdered by the injection of a fatal overdose of barbituates.

Those with Asperger's Syndrome (no longer recognized in the American DSM) are said to experience little pleasure from social interactions. At the least it's ironic that "limited social skills" are now considered a desirable condition for those who are creating the online platforms through which we increasingly conduct our social lives.

Fountain, 1917. Photo: Alfred Stieglitz

5. The unruly Baroness

Irrepressible, rebellious, and precociously (omni-) sexual: the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was Hans Asperger's worst nightmare. She was a performer, poet and artist, who approached her own life as a work of art. (Her title was real: the Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven was her third husband.)

After helping to stage her second husband's suicide and fleeing to America to escape creditors, Elsa made her way to New York in 1913. This was the year of the Armory Show, which introduced American audiences to modern art, and where Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was one of the artworks on display. Elsa joined the New York art scene, modelling for painters and photographers such as Duchamp's friend Man Ray. She wore extravagant costumes of her own design and produced assemblages of found and readymade objects, such as God (1917, co-created with Morton Schamberg, who was given sole credit for the work for many years):

Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Of course, the most famous work of readymade art is Fountain, a urinal set on its back and signed "R. Mutt 1917." Submitted to the American Society of Independent Artists exhibition, it later wound up on display at Alfred Stieglitz's gallery 291, where it was photographed by Stieglitz. The original disappeared at some point, and in the 1950s and 60s Duchamp created and sold sixteen "replicas" (the model of the urinal was different). In 2004 a poll of 500 British art professionals named Fountain as the most influential work of modern art.

Portrait of Marcel Duchamp by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, 1919. 

Photo by Charles Sheeler, ca. 1920, from Francis M. Naumann Fine Art.

But what if Fountain wasn't by Duchamp? As novelist Siri Hustvedt notes in her article A woman in the men's room (The Guardian), in 1917 Duchamp wrote a letter to his sister in which he stated, "One of my female friends who had adopted the masculine pseudonym Richard Mutt sent [in] a porcelain urinal as a sculpture." The woman who had adopted the name Richard Mutt was Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. In early 1917 she was in Philadelphia; as Dr. Glyn Thompson has discovered, the plumber's trap used in God was sold by the Haines, Jones and Cadbury plumbing supply company of that city.

Plate H-3274 of the Hajoca Pocket Price List, 1910, cropped, rotated and inverted. 

Photo: Fig. 90(a) from Dr. Glyn Thompson, "Only in Philadelphia," MooreWomenArtists.org

And the urinal that was used in Fountain was manufactured by the Trenton (New Jersey) Potteries Company Ltd. (and not, as Duchamp would later claim, by the J. L. Mott Ironworks). The same triangular pattern of the drain holes is visible in the company's 1915 catalog (see Plate 3765-N and imagine it rotated on its back):

Plates 3755-N and 3765-N from the Blue Book Catalogue of the Trenton Potteries Company, 1915. 

Photo: Fig. 3 from Dr. Glyn Thompson, "Only in Philadelphia," MooreWomenArtists.org

Trenton, N.J., is approximately 30 miles from Philadelphia, and surely Philadelphia plumbing supply houses would get their stock from conveniently located local manufacturers. Thompson, in his post "Only in Philadelphia" on the MooreWomenArtists.org site, adduces additional evidence that the creator of Fountain was Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

By the time Duchamp started authorizing Fountain "replicas" in 1950, Elsa had been dead for more than two decades. In December 1927 the gas in her Paris apartment was left on overnight, whether deliberately or by accident. She was only 53. Perhaps someday she will receive the credit she deserves for her pioneering art—including the single most influential work of the 20th century.