When, in 1869, Madame Sand was applied
to by M. Louis Ulbach a literary friend
who proposed to write her biography for some account of her life from that time
onwards where her memoirs break off, she replied, in a letter now appended to
those memoirs, as follows:
For the last five-and-twenty years
there is nothing more that is of interest.
It is old age, very quiet and very happy, en famille,
crossed by sorrows entirely personal in their
nature deaths, defections, and then
the general state of affairs in which we have suffered,
you and I, from the same causes. My time is spent
in amusing the children, doing a little botany,
long walks in summer I am still a
first-rate pedestrian and writing novels,
when I can secure two hours in the daytime and
two in the evening. I write easily and with
pleasure. This is my recreation, for my correspondence
is numerous, and there lies work indeed! If one
had none but one’s friends to write to!
But how many requests, some touching, some impertinent!
Whenever there is anything I can do, I reply.
Those for whom I can do nothing I do not answer.
Some deserve that one should try, even with small
hope of succeeding. Then one must answer
that one will try. All this, with private affairs
to which one must really give attention now and then,
makes some ten letters a day.
The old age of George Sand, brighter,
fuller and more active than the youth of most men
and women, was in itself a most signal proof of the
stability and worth of her mental organization.
Life, which deteriorates a frail character, told with
a perfecting and elevating power upon hers.
Of her earlier personal beauty few
traces remained after middle age except a depth of
expression in her eyes, the features having become
thickened by age. Some among those who, like Dickens,
first saw her in her later years and still looked
for the semblance of a heroine of romance, failed
to find the muse Lelia of their imaginations under
the guise of a middle-aged bourgeoise.
But such impressions were superficial. Her portrait
in black and white by Couture, engraved by Manceau,
seems to reconcile these apparent discrepancies.
Beauty is not here, but the face is so powerful and
comprehensive that we perceive there at once the mirror
of a mind capable of embracing both the prose and
the poetry of life; and by many this portrait is preferred
to the earlier likenesses.
Nor is there anything more remarkable
in her correspondence than the extremely interesting
series of letters, extending from February, 1863,
to within three months of her death in 1876, and addressed
to Gustave Flaubert, at this period her familiar friend.
The intercourse of two minds of so different an intellectual
and moral order as those of the authors of Consuelo
and of Madame Bovary offers to all a curious
study. To the admirers of George Sand these letters
are invaluable, both from a literary point of view
and as a record of her inner life from that time onwards,
when, as expressed by herself, she resolutely buried
youth, and owned herself the gainer by an increasing
calm within. The secret of her future happiness
she found in living for her children and her friends.
That she retained her zest for intellectual pleasures
she ascribed to the very fact that she never allowed
herself to be absorbed for long in these and in herself.
“Artists are spoilt children,”
she writes to Flaubert, “and the best of them
are great egoists. You tell me I love them too
well; I love them as I love woods and fields, all
things, all beings that I know a little and make my
constant study. In the midst of it all I pursue
my calling; and how I love that calling of mine, and
all that nourishes and renovates it!”
We must now take up the thread of
outward events again, which we have slightly anticipated.
In the autumn of 1860 Madame Sand
had a severe attack of typhoid fever. She was
then on the point of beginning her little tale, La
Famille de Germandre; “le roman de ma
fièvre, she playfully terms it afterwards, when retracing the
circumstances in a letter to her old friend Francois Rollinat:
The day before that upon which I was
suddenly taken very seriously ill, I had felt
quite well. I had scribbled the beginning of a
novel; I had placed all my personages; I knew
them thoroughly; I knew their situations in the
world, their characters, tendencies, ideas, relations
to each other. I saw their faces. All that
remained to be known was what they were going
to do, and I did not trouble my head about that,
having time to think it over to-morrow.
Struck down on the morrow, she was
for many days in a precarious condition; and in the
confused fancies of fever found herself wandering
with La Famille de Germandre about the country,
alighting in ruined castles, and encountering the
most whimsical adventures in flood and field.
It would have been an easy death,
she remarked afterwards, had she died then, as she
might, in her dream; but she came to herself to find
her son and friends in such anxiety on her account,
so overjoyed at her convalescence, that she could
not but be glad of the life that was given back to
her. Early in 1861 we find her recruiting her
forces by a stay at Tamaris, near Toulon, completing
the novel interrupted by illness; resuming her long
walks and botanic studies, and thoroughly enjoying
the sense of returning vital powers.
She stood always in great dread of
the idea of possibly losing her activity as she advanced
in years. The infirmities of old age, however,
she was happily to be spared, preserving her energy
and mental faculties, as will be seen, till just before
her death. But though she was restored to health
and strength, this illness seems to have left its
traces on her constitution.
Her son’s marriage to Mdlle.
Calamatta, spoken of by Madame Sand as a heart’s
desire of hers at length fulfilled, took place in 1862,
not many months after his return from half a year
of travel in Africa and America, in the company of
Prince Napoleon. The event proved a fresh source
of the purest happiness to her, and was not to separate
her from her son. The young people settled at
Nohant, which remained her head-quarters. There
a few years later we find her residing almost exclusively,
except when called by matters of business to her pied-a-terre
in Paris, where she never lingered long. To the
two little grand-daughters, Aurore and Gabrielle,
whom she saw spring up in her home, she became passionately
devoted. Most of her compositions henceforward
are dated from Nohant, where, indeed, more than fifty
years of her life were spent.
As regards decorum of expression and
temperance of sentiments, the later novels of George
Sand have earned more praise than censure; but some
readers may feel that in fundamental questions of taste
the comparison between them and their forerunners
is not always entirely to their advantage. The
fervor of youth has a certain purifying power to redeem
from offense matter, even though over-frankly treated,
which becomes disagreeable in cold analysis, however
sober the wording, and clear and admirable the moral
pointed.
Mademoiselle La Quintinie,
which appeared in 1863, was suggested by M. Octave
Feuillet’s Sibille. The point of
M. Feuillet’s novel is, that Sibille, an ardent
Catholic, stifles her love, and renounces her lover
on account of his heterodox opinions. Madame Sand
gives us the reverse a heroine who is reflectively
rather than mystically inclined, and whose lover by
degrees succeeds in effecting her conversion to his
more liberal views. Here, as elsewhere, the author’s
mind shows a sympathetic comprehension of the standpoint
of enlightened Protestantism curiously rare among
those who, like herself, have renounced Romanism for
the pursuit of free thought and speculation. But
even those who prefer the denoument of George
Sand’s novel to that of M. Feuillet’s
will not rank Mademoiselle La Quintinie very
high among the author’s productions. It
is colorless, and artistically weak, however controversially
strong.
Madame Sand, according to her own
reckoning in 1869, had made at least L40,000 by her
writings. Out of this she had saved no fortune.
She had always preferred to live from day to day on
the proceeds of her work, regulating her expenses
accordingly, trusting her brain to answer to any emergency
and bring her out of the periodical financial crises
in which the uncertainty of literary gains and the
liberality of her expenditure involved her. She
continued fond of travelling, especially of exploring
the nooks and corners of France, felt by her to be
less well known than they deserve, and fully as picturesque
as the spots tourists go far to visit. Here she
sought fresh frames for her novels. “If
I have only three words to say about a place,”
she tells us, “I like to be able to refer to
it in my memory so as to make as few mistakes as possible.”
In January, 1869, we find her writing of herself in a playful strain to her
friend Flaubert:
The individual called George Sand is
quite well, enjoying the marvelous winter now
reigning in Berry, gathering flowers, taking note
of interesting botanic anomalies, stitching at dresses
and mantles for her daughter-in-law, costumes
for the marionettes, dressing dolls, reading
music, but, above all, spending hours with little
Aurore, who is a wonderful child. There is not
a being on earth more tranquil and happier in
his home than this old troubadour retired from
business, now and then singing his little song
to the moon, singing well or ill he does not particularly
care, so long as he gives the motif that
is running in his head.... He is happy,
for he is at peace, and can find amusement in everything.
M. Plauchut, another literary friend
and a visitor at Nohant during this last decade of
her lifetime, gives a picture of the order of her day;
it is simplicity itself.
Nine o’clock, in summer and
in winter alike, was her hour of waking. Letters
and newspapers would then occupy her until noon, when
she came down to join the family dejeuner.
Afterwards she would stroll for an hour in the garden
and the wood, visiting and tending her favorite plants
and flowers. At two o’clock she would come
indoors to give a lesson to her grandchildren in the
library, or work there on her own account, undistracted
by the romps around her. Dinner at six was followed
by a short evening walk, after which she played with
the children, or set them dancing indoors. She
liked to sit at the piano, playing over to herself
bits of music by her favorite Mozart, or old Spanish
and Berrichon airs. After a game of dominoes or
cards she would still sit up so late, occupying herself
with water-color painting or otherwise, that sometimes
her son was obliged to take away the lights.
These long evenings, the same writer bears witness,
sometimes afforded rare opportunities of hearing Madam
Sand talk of the events and the men of her time.
In the absolute quiet of the country, among a small
circle of responsive minds, she, so silent otherwise,
became expansive. “Those who have never
heard George Sand at such hours,” he concludes,
“have never known her. She spoke well,
with great elevation of ideas, charming eloquence,
and a spirit of infinite indulgence.” When
at length she retired, it was to write on until the
morning hours according to her old habit, only relinquished
when her health made this imperative.
She had allowed her son and her daughter-in-law
to take the cares of household management off her
hands. This left her free, as she expressed it,
to be a child again, to hold aloof from things immediate
and transitory, reserving her thoughts and contemplations
for what is general and eternal. She found a
poet’s pleasure in abstracting herself from
human life, saying: “There are hours when
I escape from myself, when I live in a plant, when
I feel myself grass, a bird, a tree-top, a cloud,
a running stream.” Shaking off, as it were,
the sense of personality, she felt more freely and
fully the sense of kinship with the life and soul
of the universe.
It was her habit every evening to
sum up in a few lines the impressions of the day,
and this journal, for the conspicuous absence of incident
in its pages, she compares to the log-book of a ship
lying at anchor. But one terrible and little
anticipated break in its tranquil monotony was yet
to come.
George Sand lived to see her country
pass through every imaginable political experience.
Born before the First Republic had expired, she had
witnessed the First Empire, the restored Monarchy,
the Revolution of 1830, the reign of Louis Philippe,
the convulsions of 1848, the presidency of Louis Bonaparte,
and the Second Empire. She was still to see and
outlive its fall, the Franco-German War, the Commune,
and to die, as she was born, under a republic.
To some of her friends who had reproached
her with showing too much indulgence for the state
of things under Imperial rule, she replied that the
only change in her was that she had acquired more patience
in proportion as more was required. The regime
she condemned and amid apparent prosperity
had foretold the corrupting influence on the nation
of the established ideal of frivolity, and that a crash
of some kind must ensue. Her judgment on the
Emperor, after his fall, is worth noting, if only
because it is dispassionate. Since his elevation
to the Imperial dignity she had lost all old illusions
as to his public intentions. With regard to these,
on the occasion of her interviews with him at the
Elysee, he had completely deceived her, and designedly,
she had at first thought. Nor had she concealed
her disgust.
I left Paris, and did not come to an
appointment he had offered me. They did
not tell me “The King might have had to wait!”
but they wrote “The Emperor waited.”
However, I continued to write to him, whenever
I saw hopes of saving some victim, to ponder his answers
and watch his actions; and I became convinced
that he did not intentionally impose upon any
one. He imposed on himself and on everybody
else.... In private life he had genuine qualities.
I happened to see in him a side that was really
generous and sincere. His dream of grandeur
for France was not that of a sound mind, but neither
of an ordinary mind. Really France would have
sunk too low if she had submitted for twenty
years to the supremacy of a cretin, working
only for himself. One would then have to give
her up in despair for ever and ever. The
truth is that she mistook a meteor for a star,
a silent dreamer for a man of depth. Then seeing
him sink under disasters he ought to have foreseen,
she took him for a coward.
George Sand’s Journal d’un
Voyageur pendant la guerre has a peculiar and
painful interest. It is merely a note-book of
passing impressions from September, 1870, to January,
1871; but its pages give a most striking picture of
those effects of war which have no place in military
annals.
The army disasters of the autumn were
preceded by natural calamities of great severity.
The heat of the summer in Berry had been tremendous,
and Madame Sand describes the havoc as unprecedented
in her experience the flowers and grass
killed, the leaves scorched and yellowed, the baked
earth under foot literally cracking in many places;
no water, no hay, no harvest, but destructive cattle-plague,
forest-fires driving scared wolves to seek refuge
in the courtyard of Nohant itself the remnant
of corn spared by the sun, ruined by hail-storms.
She and all her family had suffered from the unhealthiness
of the season. Thus the political catastrophe
found her already weakened by anxiety and fatigue,
and feeling greatly the effort to set to work again.
Finally, an outbreak of malignant small-pox in the
village forced her to take her little grandchildren
and their mother from Nohant out of reach of the infection.
September and October were passed at or in the neighborhood
of Boussac, a small town some thirty miles off.
Sedan was over, and the worst had begun; the protracted
suspense, the long agony of hope.
Those suffered most perhaps who, like
herself, had to wait in enforced inaction, amid the
awful dead calm that reigned in the provinces, yet
forbidden to forget their affliction for a moment.
The peasant was gone from the land only
the old and infirm were left to look after the flocks,
to till and sow the field. Madame Sand notes,
and with a kind of envy, the stolid patience and industry,
the inextinguishable confidence, of poor old Jacques
Bonhomme when things are at the worst. “He
knows that in one way or another it is he who will
have to pay the expenses of the war; he knows next
winter will be a season of misery and want, but he
believes in the spring” in the bounty
of nature to repair war’s ravages.
During this time of unimaginable trouble
some of the strongest minds were unhinged. It
is no small honor to George Sand that hers should
have preserved its balance. The pages of this
journal are distinguished throughout by a wonderful
calm of judgment and an equitable tone not
the calm of indifference, but of a broad and penetrating
intelligence, no longer to be blinded by the wild
excitement and passions of the moment, or exalted
by childish hopes one hour to be thrust into the madness
of despair the next.
Although tempted now and then to regret
that she had recovered from her illness ten years
ago, surviving but to witness the abasement of France,
she was not, like others, panic-struck at the prospect
of invasion, as though this meant the end of their
country. “It will pass like a squall over
a lake,” she said.
But it was a time when they could
be sure of nothing except of their distress.
The telegraph wires were cut; rumors of good news they
feared to believe would be succeeded by tales of horror
they feared to discredit. Tidings would come
that three hundred thousand of the enemy had been
disposed of in a single engagement and King William
taken prisoner; then of fatal catastrophes befallen
to private friends stories which often
proved equally unfounded.
She had friends shut up in Paris of
whom she knew not whether they were alive or dead.
The strain of anxiety and painful excitement made sleep
impossible to her except in the last extremity of fatigue.
Yet she had her little grandchildren to care for;
and when they came around her, clamoring for the fairy
tales she was used to supply, she contented them as
well as she could and gave them their lessons as usual,
anxious to keep them from realizing the sadness the
causes of which they were too young to understand.
It was the first time that she had
known a distress that forbade her to find a solace
in nature. She describes how one day, walking
out with some friends and following the course of
the river Tarde, she had half abandoned
herself to the enjoyment of the scene the
cascade, the dragon-flies skimming the surface, the
purple scabious flowers, the goats clambering on the
boulders of rock that strewed the borders and bed
of the stream when one of the party remarks:
“Here’s a retreat pretty well fortified
against the Prussians.”
And the present, forgotten for an
instant in reverie, came back upon her with a shock.
Letters in that district took three
or four days to travel thirty miles. Newspapers
were rarely to be procured; and when procured, made
up of contradictions, wild suggestions, and the pretentious
speeches of national leaders, meant to be reassuring,
but marked by a vagueness and violence from which
Madame Sand rightly augured ill.
The red-letter days were those that
brought communications from their friends in Paris
by the aerial post. On October 11, two balloons,
respectively called “George Sand” and the
“Armand Barbes,” left the capital.
“My name,” she remarks, “did not
bring good luck to the first which suffered
injuries and descended with difficulty, yet rescued
the Americans who had gone up in it.” The
“Barbes” had a smoother but a more
famous flight; alighting and depositing M. Gambetta
safely at Tours.
As the autumn advanced Madame Sand
and her family were enabled to return to Nohant.
But what a return was that! The enemy were quartered
within forty miles, at Issoudun; the fugitives thence
were continually seen passing, carrying off their
children, their furniture and their merchandise to
places of security. Already the enemy’s
guns were said to have been heard at La Châtre. Madame
Sand walked in her garden daily among her marigolds, snapdragon and ranunculus,
making curious speculations as to what might be in store for herself and her
possessions. She remarks:
You get accustomed to it, even though
you have not the consolation of being able to
offer the slightest resistance.... I look at my
garden, I dine, I play with the children, whilst
waiting in expectation of seeing the trees felled
roots upwards; of getting no more bread to eat,
and of having to carry my grandchildren off on my
shoulders; for the horses have all been requisitioned.
I work, expecting my scrawls to light the pipes
of the Prussians.
But the enemy, though so near, never
passed the boundaries of the “Black Valley.”
The department of the Indre remained uninvaded, though
compassed on all sides by the foreign army; and George
Sand was able to say afterwards that she at least
had never seen a Prussian soldier.
A sad Christmas was passed. On
the last night of 1870 a meeting of friends at Nohant
broke up with the parting words, “All is lost!”
“The execrable year is out,”
writes Madame Sand, “but to all appearances
we are entering upon a worse.”
On the 15th of January, 1871, her
little drama Francois le Champi, first represented
in the troublous months of 1849, was acted in Paris
for the benefit of an ambulance. She notes the
singular fate of this piece to be reproduced in time
of bombardment. A pastoral!
The worst strain of suspense ended
January 29, with the capitulation of Paris. Here
the Journal d’un Voyageur breaks off.
It would be sad indeed had her life, like that of
more than one of her compeers, closed then over France
in mourning. Although it was impossible but that
such an ordeal must have impaired her strength, she
outlived the war’s ending, and the horrible
social crisis which she had foreseen must succeed
the political one. Happier than Prosper Merimee,
than Alexandre Dumas, and others, she saw the dawn
of a new era of prosperity for her country, whose
vital forces, as she had also foretold, were to prevail
in the end over successive ills the enervation
of corruption, of military disaster, and the “orgie
of pretended renovators” at home, that signalized
the first months of peace abroad.
In January, 1872, we again find her writing cheerily to Flaubert:
Mustn’t be ill, mustn’t
be cross, my old troubadour. Say that France
is mad, humanity stupid, and that we are unfinished
animals every one of us, you must love on all
the same, yourself, your race, above all, your
friends. I have my sad hours. I look at my
blossoms, those two little girls smiling as ever,
their charming mother, and my good, hard-working
son, whom the end of the world will find hunting,
cataloguing, doing his daily task, and yet as merry
as Punch in his rare leisure moments.
In a later letter she writes in a more serious strain:
I do not say that humanity is on the
road to the heights; I believe it in spite of
all, but I do not argue about it, which is useless,
for every one judges according to his own eyesight,
and the general outlook at the present moment
is ugly and poor. Besides, I do not need
to be assured of the salvation of our planet and its
inhabitants in order to believe in the necessity
of the good and the beautiful; if our planet
departs from this law it will perish; if its
inhabitants discard it they will be destroyed.
As for me, I wish to hold firm till my last breath,
not with the certainty or the demand to find
a “good place” elsewhere, but because my
sole pleasure is to maintain myself and mine
in the upward way.
The last five years of her life saw
her pen in full activity. In the Revue des
Deux Mondes, Malgretout, the novel of 1870,
was succeeded by Flamarande and Les Deux
Frères compositions executed with unflagging
energy and animation of style; La Tour de Percemont,
and a series of graceful fairy-stories entitled Contes
d’une grand’mere. Nanon (1872),
a rustic romance of the First Revolution, is a highly
remarkable little work, possibly suggested by her recent
experiences of the effect of public disturbances on
remote country places.
She was also a constant contributor
to the newspaper Le Temps. A critical
notice by her hand of M. Renan’s Dialogues
et Fragments Philosophiques, reprinted from those
columns, bears date May, 1876, immediately before
she succumbed to the illness which in a few days was
to cut short her life.
At the beginning of this year she had written on this subject to Flaubert, in
the brave spirit she would fain impart to her weaker brethren:
Life is perhaps eternal, and work in
consequence eternal. If so, let us finish
our march bravely. If otherwise, if the individual
perish utterly, let us have the honor of having
done our task. That is duty, for our only
obvious duties are to ourselves and our fellow-creatures.
What we destroy in ourselves we destroy in them.
Our abasement abases them; our falls drag them
down; we owe to them to stand fast, to save them
from falling. The desire to die early is
a weakness, as is the desire to live long.
George Sand, like most persons of
an exceptional constitution, had little faith in the
efficacy for herself of medical science. She was
persuaded that the prescribed remedies did her more
harm than good, and on more than one occasion, when
her health had caused her children uneasiness, they
had had to resort to an affectionate ruse to
induce her to take advice. Her habit of disregarding
physical ailments, fighting against them as a weakness,
and working on in their despite, led her to neglect
for too long failing health that should have been
attended to. During the whole of May, 1876, Madame
Sand, though suffering from real illness, continued
to join in the household routine and to proceed with
her literary work as usual. Not till the last
days of the month did she, unable any longer to make
light of her danger, at length consent to send for
professional advice. It was then too late.
She was suffering from internal paralysis. The
medical attention which, sought earlier, might, in
the opinion of the doctors, have prolonged her life
for years, could now do nothing to avert the imminent
fatal consequences of her illness. “It
is death,” she said; “I did not ask for
it, but neither do I regret it.” For beyond
the sorrow of parting it had no particular terrors
for her; she had viewed and could meet it in another
spirit. “Death is no more,” she had
written; “it is life renewed and purified.”
She lingered for a week, in great
suffering, but bearing all with fortitude and an unflinching
determination not to distress those around her by
painful complaining. Up to her last hour she preserved
consciousness and lucidity. The words, “Ne
touchez pas a la verdure,” among the last
that fell from her lips, were understood by her children,
who knew her wish that the trees should be undisturbed
under which, in the village cemetery, she was soon
to find a resting-place a wish that had
been sacredly respected.
Her suffering ceased a short while
before death, which came to her so quietly that the
transition was almost imperceptible to the watchers
by her side. It was on the morning of the 8th
of June. She was within a month of completing
her seventy-second year. Although her life’s
work had long since been mainly accomplished, yet
the extinction of that great intelligence was felt
by many as fitly expressed by M. Renan “like
a diminution of humanity.”
Two days later she was buried in the
little cemetery of Nohant, that adjoins her own garden
wall. The funeral was conducted with extreme
simplicity, in accordance with her taste and spirit.
The scene was none the less a memorable one.
The rain fell in torrents, but no one seemed to regard
it; the country-people flocking in from miles around,
old men standing bare-headed for hours, heedless of
the deluge. The peasant and the prince, Parisian
leaders of the world of thought and letters, and the
humblest and most unlearned of her poorer neighbors,
stood together over her grave.
Six peasants carried the bier from
the house to the church, a few paces distant.
The village priest came, preceded by three chorister-boys
and the venerable singing-clerk of the parish, to
perform the ceremony. A portion of the little
churchyard, railed off from the rest and planted with
evergreen-trees, contains the graves of her grandmother,
her father, and the two little grandchildren she had
lost. A plain granite tomb in their midst now
marks the spot where George Sand was laid, literally
buried in flowers.
A great spirit was gone from the world;
and a good spirit, it will be generally acknowledged:
an artist in whose work the genuine desire to leave
those she worked for better than she found them, is
one inspiring motive. Such endeavor may seem
to fail, and she affirmed: “A hundred times
it does fail in its immediate results. But it
helps, notwithstanding, to preserve that tradition
of good desires and of good deeds, without which all
would perish.”