The Dream Lover (43 page)

Bad reputation or not, I had looked forward to seeing how he would sculpt me. But now I seized on another opportunity to try to make Solange shine.

I was trying to bring my daughter back to me somehow. I'd used various methods to downplay myself, including letting myself go in a way that would have horrified my mother. I'd gained weight—my formerly enviable waist was long gone, and I had an extra chin. I did not speak of my work, and I hid away the letters of admiration I received. No matter what I did, though, it was never enough; I seemed ever to be a stone in her shoe. I had wished for shared joy when we selected things for her trousseau, but instead I felt I was along with her only to pay the cost of her expensive selections.

But she took me up on this offer, and we went to the studio together.

I made the introduction and proposed that Clésinger sculpt Solange in my place. I saw his attraction to her immediately: she was, after all, a beautiful, buxom young blonde with smoldering blue eyes and a glowing complexion; one of my radical journalist friends had described her as looking overly ripe for the picking.

“I should be honored if you would accept as my gift my sculpting both of you,” Clésinger said with easy gallantry, and both of us agreed. I was asked to leave Solange alone in the studio with him so
that he could get started with her right away. I looked over at her—
Are you comfortable with this?
—and she nodded at me, smiling. A few days later, she told me at dinner that she had put her engagement on hold indefinitely.

“Because of Clésinger?” I asked. “Have you fallen in love with him?”

“It is because of you. Because of what you said to me about being sure. I am no longer sure.”

“But because of Clésinger?” I persisted.

“I am putting my engagement on hold, and that is all. Stop pestering me.”

In April, a week after Solange and I had returned to Nohant, Clésinger showed up at our door, telling me that I had twenty-four hours to agree to him having my daughter's hand in marriage and demanding that I secure her father's permission as well. There was something thrilling about it for both Solange and me. That night, for the first time in a long time, she kissed me before she retired.

I sent a letter to Maurice requesting that he accompany Clésinger to make the request of Casimir, in person, and in it I wrote of the ardent suitor:

He will get his way because his mind is set on it. He gets everything he wants by dint of sheer persistence. He seems to be able to go without sleep or food. He was here for three days, and slept no more than two hours. I am amazed, I am even rather pleased by the spectacle of such strength of will. I think he will be the saving of your restless sister
.

I confess that I was more than “rather pleased.” This situation seemed to have brought Solange and me together. Both of us knew that Casimir would voice no objection but that Chopin, who was in Paris, would not be happy about this turn of events. It was a breach of good manners, of good taste! Solange would be abandoning an aristocrat for a commoner!

“I think we must not tell Frédéric, yes?” I said to Solange one evening when I sat in her room with her. She was in her nightclothes, her beautiful hair tumbled down upon her shoulders in advance of her braiding it.

“Heavens, no!” She giggled.

I kissed the top of her head. “Our secret, then, yours and mine together.”

She nodded almost shyly, and I saw a flash of the little girl she used to be.

Frédéric heard of the upcoming marriage when he read the announcement in the newspaper. He was conspicuously absent at the wedding that followed in May, two weeks later. Although he sent a warm note to Solange, wishing her great happiness, I knew he was furious. As soon as I returned to Paris, he was in my apartment, pacing like a caged animal. I half expected him to pick up a chair and throw it, as he had reportedly done with his students when he was displeased at their efforts and his usual foot stamping would not suffice. “You know of this artist's egregious reputation, do you not?” he asked me.

“I hardly think it is
egregious
.”

“He is a drunkard. He is deeply in debt—he owes hundreds of thousands of francs. He has just abandoned his pregnant mistress—whom he regularly beat!”

“Who told you this?”

“Delacroix. But it is well known, George. You must have heard these things!”

“I have not. And unlike these gossips, I have met the man, and he is charming.”

“I won't have it.”

I stared at him. “First of all, it is not your place to have or not have the marriage of my daughter to the man she loves.”

He opened his mouth to speak.

“No,” I said. “I shall not listen to you go on about how to be a good mother, to insinuate, as you always do, that I am anything but.
What do you know about raising a child? It is all well and good for you to play entertaining friend, sympathetic ally, but when you tire of the children, what then? Off you go to one well-appointed place or another, where those who love you will guard your right to be alone so long as you desire.

“And let me say as well that since I have known you, you have never been able to face facts or understand human nature. You are all poetry and music, a child yourself, protected from unpleasantness because of your prodigious talent, yes, but also because of your constant respiratory illnesses, which seem to me at times to be a bit too convenient.”

He had fallen into a chair to endure my lambasting, and because he was silent I thought that he might even agree with at least some of what I'd said. But this last was too much. He looked up at me, and in his eyes was such pain, such betrayal, that I fell to the floor and laid my head in his lap, weeping. “Forgive me,” I said.

He rested his hand on my head. His breathing slowed, then calmed, and he said simply, “My apologies, Aurore.”

June 1847

NOHANT

S
eeing Solange married made me eager for Maurice to take that step as well. For some time, I had hoped that he would marry Augustine. I knew that he found her very attractive for many reasons, and certainly he had advocated with me on her behalf. But then my son seemed abruptly to lose interest in her.

One day I took a walk with him, and after an agreeable silence, I asked about his intentions.

He shrugged in a way that aroused my wrath.

“What do you mean? Do you no longer care for her?”

“I
care
for her….” He kicked a clod of dirt before him, and I
grasped him by the arm to stop him, then turned him around to face me.

“I shall not marry her, if that is your question.”

I closed my eyes and let go a huge sigh.

Maurice laughed. “Come now, Mother. Are you not the one who argued against Solange marrying Fernand?”

“It is a different situation.”

“How is it different? Am I not to save myself for someone I feel passionately about?”

I had no answer. We resumed walking.

“Has she given herself to you?” I asked quietly.

“I was not the first.”

“How do you know there have been others?”

He only looked at me.

I turned my gaze forward and walked on.

An artist named Théodore Rousseau, a friend of Maurice's, had recently visited. He was a famous painter of landscapes, and Maurice had told me he was besotted by Augustine.

I felt responsible for Titine's well-being. Indeed, I loved her. I had taken her away from her mother to give her a better life, and I wanted to make sure she would be provided for after I was gone. To that end, I began an exchange of letters with Rousseau, starting by letting him know that Augustine was very much taken with him. He wrote back to me immediately, expressing his ardent feelings for her. I shared the letter with Augustine, who, understanding all too well the change in Maurice, expressed a modest measure of appreciation. I wrote back to Rousseau:

If you could have seen how the color rushed into her cheeks, and the tears into her eyes, when I showed her that beautiful letter, you would be feeling as calm and radiant as she has been. She flung herself into my arms, saying, “Then there really is a man who will love me as you love me!”

A few weeks later, I told Rousseau that if he married Augustine, I would provide a dowry of one hundred thousand francs, to be paid gradually, out of my royalties. When Solange heard about this, she was furious. All her bitter jealousy of Augustine returned. She and Clésinger were living well beyond their means and had run through Solange's dowry in weeks. Now they expected me to finance their hothouse flowers, their hired carriages, their expensive clothing and evenings out.

But Rousseau declined my offer. He had gotten an anonymous letter, he said, that told him that Augustine loved Maurice and that if she married another, it would be her distant second choice.

Knowing full well that “Anonymous” was Solange, I argued for Rousseau to move ahead nonetheless. “One of the joys of marriage, after all, is the way that time together can make love grow,” I wrote him. At this, he grew suspicious, wondering why one who so often had objected to matrimony was now trying to push it on him.

He did not understand my feelings in this regard. I did not object to matrimony; I objected to the inequality in it. Let men and women enjoy mutual respect in the institution, and I was all for it!

But it was too late. Exit Rousseau. And enter a furious Solange.

July 1847

NOHANT

M
aurice, some friends, and I were having dinner one evening when a carriage pulled up. I went into the front hall to see Solange and Clésinger walking through the door. I was not surprised; I had invited them to spend some time in the country, hoping that the simple beauty of Nohant might remind them that the most lasting joys have nothing to do with purchases. Whatever my failings as a mother, I did always try to impress upon my children
the restorative and timeless pleasures of nature, art, and camaraderie.

But now! Clésinger, who appeared drunk, dropped their bags to the floor and began speaking in a loud voice that drew my son out into the hall with us.

“What is the meaning of this?” Maurice asked. “Lower your voice at once!”

“I shall not! Your mother is going to hear us out, one way or another!” He turned to me. “The great George Sand! If anyone knew of the way you treated your own daughter—”

“Auguste—” Solange began, embarrassed, I think, by the way he was acting. However great her ire, her behavior was never this crude.

He turned toward her so menacingly, she fell silent. But then, quietly, she said, “We are in need, Mother.”

“I have no more to give you!” I said. “The money that was offered to Augustine was to come from royalties I have not yet received.”

“Then mortgage this place!” Clésinger said.

My mouth fell open.

“I ask again that you leave; we shall discuss this later,” Maurice said in a low voice, aware, as was I, that our dinner guests had fallen silent.

“I shall not be thrown out!” Clésinger roared.

Then a rapid series of events happened that will never dim in my memory. Maurice took Clésinger's arm to escort him out. Clésinger reached into his bag to pull out a sculptor's mallet, which he raised over Maurice. I stepped between them to slap Clésinger's face once, twice; he punched me so hard in the chest I nearly fell to the floor. Maurice shouted, “I am going for my gun!” at the same time that one of our guests, a priest who was imposing in stature, came to subdue Clésinger, then told him to leave at once. Clésinger grabbed two of his sculptures that I had on tables in the vestibule and walked out. I looked to Solange, but in her face was
only bitterness, and she followed her husband out, slamming the door.

The next day, she sent a note from a nearby inn demanding my carriage to take her and her husband back to Paris. I refused her, in part because I hoped she might calm down and we could have a reasonable discussion of her other demands. Instead, I learned that she wrote to Chopin, telling him of the terrible treatment that she had suffered at her mother's hands. And he sent his carriage and his driver to fetch her, offering, as well, his condolences and the promise of his open arms.

Furious, heartbroken, betrayed, I wrote to Frédéric that he need not bother coming to Nohant unless he cut Solange and Auguste Clésinger out of his life. I told him how they had appeared at Nohant, so full of vitriol. I told him that they frequently asked for money that I could not provide and rejected the spiritual things I could give.

I am wild with grief, I told him. I feel as if my daughter is dead. I asked that he not even speak her name to me, that he regard her as a matter of indifference.

There followed days and nights of bitter pain. I could be distracted from it for an hour or so at a time, but then it would return. I waited for the relief of Frédéric arriving from Paris, but he did not come. Then I worried frantically that he was ill and made plans to go to Paris to check on him, though I was ill myself, not only in spirit but in body: I had a fever, and every bone ached.

Finally, I received a letter from Frédéric:

Solange will never be a matter of indifference to me. Your pain must be overpowering indeed to harden your heart against your child, to the point of refusing even to hear her name, and this on the threshold of her life as a woman, a time more than any other when her condition requires a mother's care
.

Her condition. So Solange was pregnant. She had not told me, as surely Frédéric must have known; surely he must have known
that! I read and reread this cold response, which made no effort to console but only criticized me. Not a word about what it must have been like for me to have been attacked in my own vestibule. No acknowledging the endless times I had tried to reach my daughter, the way I had tried to take care of her.