The Dream Lover
Authors: Elizabeth Berg
The Dream Lover
is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Elizabeth Berg
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
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OUSE
colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint excerpts from
Lelia: The Life of George Sand
by André Maurois, translated from the French by Gerald Hopkins, copyright © 1953 by André Maurois and copyright renewed 1981 by Gerald Maurois. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Berg, Elizabeth.
The dream lover: a novel/Elizabeth Berg.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-8129-9315-8
eBook ISBN 978-0-679-64470-5
1. Sand, George, 1804â1876âFiction. I. Title.
PS3552.E6996D73 2014
813â².54âdc23 2014043629
eBook ISBNâ9780679644705
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Barbara M. Bachman
Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover image: De Agostini/A. Dagli Orti
v4.1
a
The finest female genius of any country or age.
âElizabeth Barrett Browning
She is beyond doubt or comparison the strongest woman and the most astonishingly gifted.
âFranz Liszt
When my submission has been claimed, no longer in the name of love and friendship but by reason of some right or power, I have drawn upon the strength that is buried in my nature, I have straightened my shoulders and thrown off the yoke. I alone know the latent force hidden within me. I alone know how much I grieve and suffer and love.
âGeorge Sand
April 1873
COUNTRY ESTATE AT NOHANT
CENTRAL
FRANCE
I
n the dining room, the men are eating roses. The small bouquet I placed at the table's center will soon be naked stems. A wreath of cigar smoke hangs in the air above my guests' heads, moving ever upward toward the Venetian glass chandelier, where the pink and turquoise colors will give in further to the dimming of their clarity.
The menâGustave Flaubert, Ivan Turgenev, Alexandre Dumas fils, and my darling son, Mauriceâare pushed back in their velvet chairs, sated; and the conversation has gone languorous. But not for long! Soon we will be dancing, singing, playing at charades, and making a great deal of noise, though Gustave will no doubt sulk and complain that we have too quickly turned our attentions away from literature, his raison d'être. The rest of usâIvan especiallyâgreatly enjoy the kind of raucousness that takes us back to the easy pleasures of childhood. I love doing my work and the reverie it requires, but too much contemplation turns to melancholy, and gaiety must then come to the rescue.
Before we begin our evening's amusements, our puppet show and readings and bagatelles, I have sought the out-of-doors and a temporary reprieve from my role as hostess. I stand now in a mantilla of shade, beneath a tree here so long its mere presence dwarfs the idle happenings or musings of those who seek out its shelter.
The light is amber, the air still; the daylilies have folded in on themselves. Soon the hooded blue of dusk will fall, followed by the darkness of night and the sky writing of the stars, indecipherable to us mortals, despite our attempts to force narrative upon them.