Nom de Plume (6 page)

Although she was certainly adjusting to the mold of another, her new form did not belong to the dull Casimir but to George Sand, her literary persona, who would become France's best-selling writer and would be among its most prolific authors. In considering what Sand accomplished, and the inspiring way she went about it, a dictum from the inimitable artist Louise Bourgeois comes to mind: “A woman has no place in the art world unless she proves over and over again she won't be eliminated.”

Both Aurore and Casimir had casual affairs during their marriage, but at twenty-six, Aurore met a young Parisian who would play an important role in her life. When they fell in love, Jules Sandeau was nineteen and, like her, a writer. The first syllable of his surname (Sand) would become the surname of her pseudonym. Though their love affair didn't last long, Sandeau proved enormously influential and helped her find her path toward a wholly independent life. “Inspiration can pass through the soul just as easily in the midst of an orgy as in the silence of the woods,” she wrote in her autobiography, “but when it is a question of giving form to your thoughts, whether you are secluded in your study or performing on the planks of a stage, you must be in total possession of yourself.” By 1830, she was well on her way.

The following year, she decided to assert her will rather forcefully. She told Casimir that she would live in Paris for half the year with Solange, returning in the other months to care for Maurice. Yet she went through many periods of replicating her own mother's treatment of her—abandoning both children for long (and damaging) stretches to caretakers and tutors, in the single-minded pursuit of her own desires and ambitions. She wrestled with this but did not always remedy the situation to her children's liking.

Aurore's loneliness in Paris, at first, was “profound and complete.” She felt useless. There was no doubt in her mind that literature alone “offered me the most chance of success as a profession.” The few people she confided in about it were skeptical that writing and monetary concerns could successfully coexist—at least for a woman.

She dabbled in other, more pragmatic attempts at work. Feeling despair over not being able to help the poor in any meaningful way, she became “a bit of a pharmacist,” preparing ointments and syrups for her clients gratis. She tried translation work, but because she was meticulous and conscientious with the words of others, it took too long. In attempting pencil and watercolor portraits done at sittings, she said, “I caught the likenesses very well, my little heads were not drawn badly, but the métier lacked distinction.” She tried sewing, and was quick at it, but it didn't bring in much money and she couldn't see well enough close up. In another profitless venture, she sold tea chests and cigar boxes she'd varnished and painted with ornamental birds and flowers. “For four years, I went along groping, or slaving at nothing worthwhile, in order to discover within me any capability whatsoever,” she recalled. “In spite of myself, I felt that I was an artist, without ever having dreamed I could be one.”

Jules Sandeau would play an integral role in her becoming a “public” writer, as she had already written prolifically in private. He was part of a bohemian circle that Aurore eagerly joined, one that provided stimulating political, artistic, and intellectual discourse. These were people she felt an affinity with (as she most certainly did not with her husband), and they would become her close friends. It was an exciting time, and she took full advantage, throwing herself passionately into the affair with Sandeau.

The tricky issue of financial independence lingered. In the winter of 1831, Aurore reluctantly arranged an interview, through an acquaintance, with the publisher of
Le Figaro
, Henri de Latouche. She cringed at the thought of newspaper work, but recognized it as a useful entry point to literary endeavors. Also, she appreciated Latouche's intensity and fervent antibourgeois sensibility. He offered Aurore a job as columnist—making her the only woman on the staff and paying her seven francs per column. She was more than willing to prove herself. “I don't believe in all the sorrows that people predict for me in the literary career on which I'm trying to embark,” she wrote in a letter to a friend. But when she called on an author to seek advice about the Parisian publishing world, the meeting was a disaster: “I shall be very brief, and I shall tell you frankly—a woman shouldn't write,” he said before showing her the door. She recalled in her autobiography that because she left quietly, “prone more to laughter than anger,” he ended his harangue on the inferiority of women with “a Napoleonic stroke that was intended to crush me: ‘Take my word for it,' he said gravely, as I was opening the outer door to his sanctum, ‘don't make books, make babies!'”

Never mind: Aurore was more determined than ever. As she once wrote, in another context, “I was not a coward, and I could not have been if I tried.”

She continued to immerse herself in her social circle, and she and Sandeau collaborated on their writing. They received enthusiastic support from Balzac, who would drop by Aurore's flat from time to time. She later described him fondly as “childlike and great; always envious of trifles and never jealous of true glory; sincere to the point of modesty, proud to the point of braggadocio; trusting himself and others; very generous, very kind, and very crazy.” Other notable men she called her friends included Baudelaire, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Zola, Henry James, and Dumas. (John Ruskin, William Thackeray, and Thomas Carlyle, however, disliked her work intensely.) Later, Flaubert became a lifelong friend and confidant. Their letters were beautiful and mutually consoling. “There you are feeling sad and lonely, you say, and here I am feeling the same way,” Flaubert wrote to her in 1866. “Where do they come from, do you think, these black moods that engulf us like this? They rise like a tide, you feel as if you are drowning and you have to escape somehow. What I do is lie, floating, letting it all wash over me.” In 1876, a few months before she died, Flaubert wrote: “[Y]ou've never done me anything but good and I love you most tenderly.”

At the end of the summer of 1831, Aurore and Jules began work on the bawdy
Rose et Blanche
, a planned five-volume novel for which they'd secured a publishing contract, and which they'd signed with the joint pseudonym “J. Sand.” (Latouche, who had become a devoted mentor to Aurore, invented the name.) But Aurore ended up doing the bulk of the writing.

The novel was released to mixed reviews, yet it had moderate success and gave Aurore the confidence to publish entirely on her own. The following year, she published
Indiana
—a semi-autobiographical novel, and an unapologetic denunciation of marriage that she expected “to please very few people.” Instead, it won international acclaim and became a best seller. An envious Victor Hugo (her rival for the status of France's best-selling author) called it “the finest novel of manners that has been published in French for twenty years.” The author of this lauded novel was “George Sand,” a name that would not only endure as her nom de plume but serve as her identity for the rest of her life. After completing
Indiana
, “I was baptized,” she explained. “The [name] I was given, I earned myself, after the event, by my own toil. . . . I do not think anyone has anything to reproach me for.”

She was amused by the number of reviewers who spoke enthusiastically of “Mr. G. Sand,” but insisted that a woman must have had a hand in refining some of the novel's more emotional aspects. They were stumped because “the style and discrimination were too virile to be anything but a man's.”

In 1832, her romantic relationship with Sandeau collapsed, and just as she was beginning to achieve professional success, she felt increasingly isolated. But in January 1833, she met Marie Dorval, a famous stage actress in her mid-thirties whose presence toppled and intoxicated Sand, and who would become—as she later described it—the one true love of her life. Both women were married (and had other lovers) at the time, but Sand legally separated from her husband in 1835. She pursued Dorval—initially, in the name of “friendship”: “For my part I feel I love you with a heart brought back to life and rejuvenated by you,” Sand wrote to her early on. “If it is a dream, like everything else I have wished for in life, do not steal it from me too quickly. It does me so much good.” Meanwhile, Dorval's lover at the time, Alfred de Vigny, gave a detailed assessment of his rival: “Her hair is dark and curly and falls freely over her collar, rather like one of Raphael's angels,” he wrote of Sand. “She has large black eyes, shaped like those of mystics whom one sees in paintings, or in those magnificent Italian portraits. Her face is severe and gives little away, the lower half is unattractive, the mouth ill-shaped. She has no grace of bearing, and her speech is coarse. In her manner of dress, her language, her tone of voice and the audacity of her conversation, she is like a man.” Vigny had good cause to be concerned.

Sand played a male role in public because doing so offered her a much broader range of experience, and she loved freedom. Elizabeth Barrett Browning affectionately called her “thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man.” She wrote a sonnet, “To George Sand: A Recognition,” in 1844:

True genius, but true woman! dost deny

Thy woman's nature with a manly scorn,

And break away the gauds and armlets worn

By weaker women in captivity?

Ah, vain denial! that revolted cry

Is sobbed in by a woman's voice forlorn!—

Thy woman's hair, my sister, all unshorn

Floats back disheveled strength in agony,

Disproving thy man's name: and while before

The world thou burnest in a poet-fire,

We see thy woman-heart beat evermore

Through the large flame. Beat purer, heart, and higher,

Till God unsex thee on the heavenly shore

Where unincarnate spirits purely aspire!

Sand was a cigar-chomping rebel who had brazen affairs as she wished, and with whomever she desired. She could practically roll a cigarette with her eyes closed, and she loved to smoke a hookah. She reveled in her own mischief. In one of her novels, Sand boldly suggested that monogamous marriage was an abnormal, unnatural state that deprived men and women of experiencing true sexual pleasure. Her significant lovers included Alfred de Musset, Franz Liszt, and Frédéric Chopin, who reported to his family, “Something about her repels me.” Her decade-long relationship with Chopin ended badly in 1847, when Sand suspected that he had fallen in love with her daughter.

Even after it became an open secret in literary circles (and a source of malicious gossip) that Aurore Dupin was the notorious George Sand, she continued her transgressive style of dress and behavior, simply because she enjoyed it. She loved the idea of being in disguise. With her trousers, vest, military coat, hat, and tie, “I was the perfect little first-year student,” she recalled in her autobiography. “My clothing made me fearless.” And walking in her solid, sturdy boots was far preferable to the fussy discomfort of women's shoes: “With those little iron heels, I felt secure on the sidewalks. I flew from one end of Paris to the other.” In her male attire, she was a voyeur, seeing without being seen. “No one knew me, no one looked at me, no one gave me a second thought; I was an atom lost in the immense crowd.”

At theaters, she sat in the pit, where only men were permitted, and she always pulled off the ruse with ease—“the absence of coquettishness in costume and facial expression warded off any suspicion,” she explained. “I was too poorly dressed and looked too simple—my usual vacant, verging on dumb, look—to attract or compel attention. . . . There is a way of stealing about, everywhere, without turning a head, and of speaking in a low and muted pitch which does not resound like a flute in the ears of those who may hear you. Furthermore, to avoid being noticed as a man, you must already have not been noticed as a woman.”

In her autobiography, Sand recalled that one of her friends, who was privy to her sartorial secret, began calling her “monsieur” in public. But just as he would get used to addressing her this way, she would appear the following day dressed as a woman, and he couldn't keep up with the relentless change of costume. Confused by her various corrections, he took to addressing her only as “monsieur” from then on.

There was a less amusing aspect to dabbling in androgyny: having to deal with the fallout from her marriage. Casimir meticulously kept a log of his (soon to be former) wife's crimes and misdemeanors—among them, “She writes novels.” Even worse, “Mme D. affecting the manners of a young man, smoking, swearing, dressed as a man and having lost all the feminine graces, has no understanding of money.” Once tolerant and blithe about their marital arrangement, which allowed her to veer off on an independent path, Casimir came to detest the liberty she'd achieved and was disgusted by her “bohemian” lifestyle. She had to enter a nasty and protracted legal battle to end the marriage, and in the end had to divide her fortune with him.

No matter how messy her personal life became at any given time, she held steady with her writing, producing a staggering number of novels, plays, essays, and other works. She also painted, and she was an astonishingly prolific letter writer; her published correspondence includes more than fifteen thousand letters. Yet she also happily engaged in so-called women's work—making jam, doing needlework, and immersing herself in her beloved garden. Although she would periodically take stock of “the irregularity of my essentially feminine constitution,” she was never shaken by what she viewed as the mutability of the self. Given the choice between conforming to prevailing customs and doing as she wished, she simply alternated between the two. It was not always easy, yet she was constitutionally incapable of remaining in a fixed state: