IV: THE ROMANTIC ESCAPADE
THE VENICE ADVENTURE George Sand; Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings | ||
4. IV: THE ROMANTIC ESCAPADE
THE VENICE ADVENTURE
George Sand did not have to wait long for success. She won fame with her first book. With her second one she became rich, or what she considered rich. She tells us that she sold it for a hundred and sixty pounds! That seemed to her the wealth of the world, and she did not hesitate to leave her attic on the Quay St. Michel for a more comfortable flat on Quay Malaquais, which de Latouche gave up to her.
There was, at that time, a personage in Paris who had begun to exercise a sort of royal tyranny over authors. Francois Buloz had taken advantage of the intellectual effervescence of 1831 to found the Revue des Deux Mondes. He was venturesome, energetic, original, very shrewd, though apparently rough, obliging, in spite of his surly manners. He is still considered the typical and traditional review manager. He certainly possessed the first quality necessary for this function. He discovered talented
The literary critic of the Revue des Deux Mondes at that time was a man who was very much respected and very little liked, or, in other words, he was universally detested. This critic was Gustave Planche. He took his own rôle too seriously, and endeavoured to put authors on their guard about
When Lélia appeared, the novel was very badly treated in L'Europe littéraire. Planche challenged the writer of the article, a certain Capo de Feuillide,
About the same time, George Sand made use of Sainte-Beuve as her confessor. He seemed specially indicated for this function. In the first place, he looked rather ecclesiastical, and then he had a taste for secrets, and more particularly for whispered confessions. George Sand had absolute confidence in him. She considered that he had an almost angelic nature. In reality, just about that time, the angelic man was endeavouring to get into the good graces of the wife of his best friend, and was writing his Livre d'Amour, and divulging to the world a weakness of which he had taken advantage. This certainly was the most villainous thing a man could do. But then he, too, was in love and was struggling and praying. George Sand declares her veneration for him, and she constituted herself his penitent.
She begins her confession by an avowal that must have been difficult for her. She tells of her intimacy with Merimee, an intimacy which was of short duration and very unsatisfactory. She had been fascinated by Merimee's art.
For about a week," she says, " I thought he had the secret of happiness." At the end of the week she was "weeping with disgust, suffering and discouragement." She had hoped to find in him the devotion of a consoler, but she found nothing but cold and bitter jesting." This experiment had also proved a failure.
Such were the conditions in which George Sand found herself at this epoch. Her position was satisfactory; she might have been calm and independent. Her inner life was once more desolate, and she was thoroughly discouraged. She felt that she had lived centuries, that she had undergone torture, that her heart had aged twenty years, and that nothing was any pleasure to her now. Added to all this, public life saddened her, for the horizon had clouded over. The boundless hopes and the enthusiasm of 1831 were things of the past. " The Republic, as it was dreamed of in July," she writes, "has ended in the massacres of Warsaw and in the holocaust of the Saint-Merry cloister. The cholera has just been raging. Saint Simonism has fallen through before it had settled the great question of love."
Depression had come after over-excitement. This
It was under all these influences that George Sand wrote Lélia. She finished it in July, and it appeared in August, 1833.
It is absolutely impossible to give an analysis of Lélia. There really is no subject. The personages are not beings of flesh and blood. They are allegories strolling about in the garden of abstractions. Lélia is a woman who has had her trials in life. She has loved and been disappointed, so that she can no longer love at all. She reduces the gentle poet Sténio to despair. He is much younger than she is, and he has faith in life and in love. His ingenuous soul begins to wither and to lose its freshness, thanks to the scepticism of the beautiful, disdainful, ironical and world-weary Lélia. This strange person has a sister Pulchérie, a celebrated courtesan, whose insolent sensuality is a set-off to the other one's mournful complaints. We have here the opposition of Intelligence and of the Flesh, of Mind and Matter. Then comes Magnus, the priest, who has lost his faith, and for whom Lélia is a temptation, and after him we have Trenmor, Lélia's great friend, Trenmor, the sublime convict. As a
We all know how dear convicts are to the hearts of romantic people. There is no need for me to remind you how they have come to us recently,
The last part of the novel is devoted to Sténio. Hurt by Lélia's disdain, which has thrown him into the arms of her sister Pulchérie, he gives himself up to debauch. We find him at a veritable orgy in Pulchérie's house. Later on he is in a monastery at Camaldules, talking to Trenmor and Magnus. In such books we must never be astonished. . . . There is a long speech by Sténio, addressed to Don Juan, whom he regrets to have taken as his model. The poor young man of course commits suicide. He chooses drowning as the author evidently prefers that mode of suicide. Lélia arrives in time to kneel down by the corpse of the young man who has been her victim. Magnus then appears on the scene, exactly at the right moment, to strangle Lélia. Pious hands prepare Lélia and Sténio for their burial. They are united and yet separated up to their very death.
The summing up we have given is the original version of Lélia. In 1836, George Sand touched up this work, altering much of it and spoiling, what she altered. It is a pity that her new version, which is longer, heavier and more obscure, should have taken the place of the former one. In its first form Lélia is a work of rare beauty, but with the beauty of a poem or an oratorio. It is made of the stuff of which dreams are composed. It is a series of reveries, adapted to the soul of 1830. At every different epoch there is a certain frame of mind, and certain ideas are diffused in the air which we find alike in the works of the writers of that time, although they did not borrow them from each other. Lélia is a sort of summing up of the themes then in vogue in the personal novel and in lyrical poetry. The theme of that suffering which is beneficent and inspiring is contained in the following words: "Come back to me, Sorrow! Why have you left me? It is by grief alone that man is great." This is worthy of Chateaubriand. The theme of melancholy is as follows: "The moon appeared. . . . What is the moon, and what is its nocturnal magic to me? One hour more or less is nothing to me." This might very well be Lamartine. We then have the malediction pronounced in face of impassible Nature: "Yes, I
But the theme which predominates, and, as we have compared all this to music, we might say the leit-motiv of all, is that of desolation, of universal despair, of the woe of life. It is the same lamentation which, ever since Werther, was to be heard throughout all literature. It is the identical suffering which Rene, Obermann and Lara had been repeating to all the echoes. The elements of it were the same: pride which prevents us from adapting ourselves to the conditions of universal life, an abuse of self-analysis which opens up our wounds again and makes them bleed, the wild imagination which presents to our eyes the deceptive mirage of Promised Lands from which we are ever exiles. Lélia personifies, in her turn, the "mal du siècle." Sténio reproaches her with only singing grief and doubt. "How many, times," he says, "have you appeared to me as typical of the indescribable suffering in which mankind is plunged by the spirit
When Leélia appeared George Sand's old friends were stupefied. "What, in Heaven's name, is this?" wrote Jules Neraud, the Malgache. "Where have you been in search of this? Why have you written such a book? Where has it sprung from, and what is it for? . . . This woman is a fantastical creature. She is not at all like you. You are lively and can dance a jig; you can appreciate butterflies and you do not despise puns. You sew and can make jam very well."
It certainly was not her portrait. She was healthy and believed in life, in the goodness of things and
In George Sand's psychological evolution, Lélia is just this: the beginning of the invasion of her soul by romanticism. It was a borrowed individuality, undoubtedly, but it was not something to be put on and off at will like a mask. It adhered to the skin. It was all very fine for George Sand to say to Sainte-Beuve: "Do not confuse the man himself with the suffering. . . . And do not believe in all my satanical airs. . . . This is simply a style that I have taken on, I assure you. . . ."
Sainte-Beuve had every reason to be alarmed, and the confessor was quite right in his surmises. The crisis of romanticism had commenced. It was
No subject, perhaps, has excited the curiosity of readers like this one, and always without satisfying that curiosity. A library could be formed of the books devoted to this subject, written within the last ten years. Monsieur Rocheblave, Monsieur Maurice Clouard, Dr. Cabanes, Monsieur Marieton, the enthusiastic collector, Spoelberch de Lovenjoul and Monsieur Decori have all given us their contributions to the debate. Thanks to them, we have the complete correspondence of George Sand and Musset, the diary of George Sand and Pagello's diary.
With the aid of all these documents Monsieur Charles Maurras has written a book entitled Les Amants de Venise. It is the work of a psychologist and of an artist. The only fault I have to find with it is that the author of it seems to see calculation and
It is a subject that has been given up to the curiosity of people and to their disputes. The strange part is the zeal which at once animates every one who takes part in this controversy. The very atmosphere seems to be impregnated with strife, and those interested become, at once, the partisans of George Sand or the partisans of Musset. The two parties only agree on one point, and that is, to throw all the blame on the client favoured by their adversary. I must confess that I cannot take a passionate interest in a discussion, the subject of which we cannot properly judge. According to Mussetistes, it was thanks to George Sand that the young poet was reduced to the despair which drove him to debauchery. On the other hand, if we are to believe the Sandistes, George Sand's one idea in interesting herself in Musset was to rescue him from debauchery and convert him to a better life. I listen to all such
It is the custom, too, to pity these two unfortunates, who suffered so much. At the risk of being taken for a very heartless man, I must own that I do not pity them much. The two lovers wished for this suffering, they wanted to experience the incomparable sensations of it, and they got enjoyment and profit from this. They knew that they were working for posterity. "Posterity will repeat our names like those of the immortal lovers whose two names are only one at present, like Romeo and Juliette, like Heloise and Abelard. People will never speak of one of us without speaking of the other."
Juliette died at the age of fifteen and Heloise entered a convent. The Venice lovers did not have to pay for their celebrity as dearly as that. They wanted to give an example, to light a torch on the road of humanity. "People shall know my story," writes George Sand. "I will write it. . . . Those who follow along the path I trod will see where it leads." Et nunc erudimini. Let us see for ourselves, and learn.
Their liaison dates from August, 1833.
George Sand was twenty-nine years of age. It
Ote-moi ces yeux que je vois toujours!"
And this woman, who could have been loved passionately, merely for her charm as a woman, was a celebrity! She was a woman of genius! Alfred de Musset was twenty-three years old. He was elegant, witty, a flirt, and when he liked he could be irresistible. He had won his reputation by that explosion of gaiety and imagination, Les Contes d'Espagne el d'Italie. He had written some fine poetry, dreamy, disturbing and daring. He had also given Les Caprices de Marianne, in which he figures twice over himself, for he was both Octave the sceptic, the disillusioned man, and Coelio, the affectionate, candid Coelio. He imagined himself Rolla. It was he, and he alone, who should have been styled the sublime boy.
And so here they both are. We might call them Lélia and Sténio, but Lélia was written before the
It was as though George Sand had foreseen her destiny, for she had feared to meet Musset. On the 11th of March, she writes as follows to Sainte-Beuve: "On second thoughts, I do not want you to bring Alfred de Musset. He is a great dandy. We should not suit each other, and I was really more curious to see him than interested in him." A little later on, though, at a dinner at the Frères provencaux, to which Buloz invited his collaborators, George Sand found herself next Alfred de Musset. She invited him to call on her, and when Lélia was published she sent him a copy, with the following dedication written in the first volume: A Monsieur mon gamin d'Allred; and in the second volume: A Monsieur le vicomte Allred de Musset, hommage respectueux de son devoue serviteur George Sand. Musset replied by giving his opinion of the new book. Among the letters which followed, there is one that begins with these words: "My dear George, I have something silly and ridiculous to tell you. I am foolishly writing, instead of telling you, as I
She did not laugh at him, though, and she did not show him the door. Things did not drag on long, evidently, as she writes to her confessor, Sainte-Beuve, on the 25th of August: "I have fallen in love, and very seriously this time, with Alfred de Musset." How long was this to last? She had no idea, but for the time being she declared that she was absolutely happy.
"I have found a candour, a loyalty and an affection which delight me. It is the love of a young man and the friendship of a comrade." There was a honeymoon in the little flat looking on the Quay Malaquals. Their friends shared the joy of the happy couple, as we see by Musset's frolicsome lines:
Entre deux pots de fleurs,
Fumant sa cigarette,
Les yeux baignés de pleurs.
Lui fait de doux serments,
Solange par derrière
Gribouille ses romans.
Boucoiran tout crotté,
Contemple d'un oeil morne
Musset tout débraillé, etc.
It is evident that, as poetry, this does not equal the Nuits.
In the autumn they went for a honeymoon trip to Fontainebleau. It was there that the strange scene took place which is mentioned in Elle et Lui. One evening when they were in the forest, Musset had an extraordinary hallucination, which he has himself described:
Au pied d'un arbre vint s'asseoir
Un jeune homme vêtu de noir
Qui me ressemblait comme un frère.
Il tenait un luth d'une main,
De l'autre un bouquet d'églantine.
Il me fit un salut d'ami
Et, se détournant à demi,
Me montra du doigt la colline.
He really saw this "double," dressed in black, which was to visit him again later on. His Nuit de decembre was written from it.
They now wanted to see Italy together. Musset had already written on Venice; he now wanted to go there. Madame de Musset objected to this, but George Sand promised so sincerely that she would be a mother to the young man that finally his own
On the 28th the travellers reached Florence. The aspect of this city and his researches in the Chroniques florentines supplied the poet with the subject for Lorenzaccio. It appears that George Sand and Musset each treated this subject, and that a Lorenzaccio by George Sand exists. I have not read it, but I prefer Musset's version. They reached Venice on January 19, 1834, and put up at the Hotel Danieli. By this time they were at loggerheads.
The cause of their quarrel and disagreement is
Wounded and offended, she replied: "We do not love each other any longer, and we never really loved each other."
They therefore took back their independence. This is a point to note, as George Sand considered this fact of the greatest importance, and she constantly refers to it. She was from henceforth free, as regarded her companion.
Illness kept them now at Venice. George Sand's
George Sand was an admirable nurse. This must certainly be acknowledged. She sat up with him at night and she nursed him by day, and, astonishing woman that she was, she was also able to work and to earn enough to pay their common expenses. This is well known, but I am able to give another proof of it, in the letters which George Sand wrote from Venice to Buloz. These letters have been communicated to me by Madame Pailleron, née Buloz, and by Madame Landouzy, veuve Buloz, whom I thank for the public and for myself. The following are a few of the essential passages: "February 4. Read this when you are alone.
MY DEAR BULOZ,—Your reproaches reach me at a miserable moment. If you have received my letter, you already know that I do not deserve them. A fortnight ago I was well again and working. Alfred was working too, although he was not very well and had fits of feverishness. About five days
FACSIMILE OF AN AUTOGRAPH LETTER OF GEORGE SAND
(Written from Venice to Hipp. Chatiron)
[Description:
Greyscale image of the first half of a manuscript letter
printed across two facing pages.
]
FACSIMILE OF AN AUTOGRAPH LETTER OF GEORGE SAND
(Written from Venice to Hipp. Chatiron)
[Description:
Greyscale image of the second half of an autograph letter
printed across two facing pages.
]
"Above everything, do not tell any one, not any one in the world, that Alfred is ill. If his mother heard (and it only needs two persons for telling a secret to all Paris) she would go mad. If she has to be told, let who will undertake to tell her, but if in a fortnight Alfred is out of danger, it is useless for her to grieve now. Adieu." "February 13, 1834. "My friend, Alfred is saved. There has been no fresh attack, and we have nearly reached the fourteenth day without the improvement having altered.
Do not leave me without money, I beseech you, or I do not know what will happen to me. I spend
These letters give the lie to some of the gossip that has been spread abroad with regard to the episode of the Hotel Danieli. And I too, thanks to these letters, shall have put an end to a legend! In the second volume of Wladimir Karenine's work on George Sand, on page 61, we have the following words—
"Monsieur Plauchut tells us that, according to Buloz, Musset had been enticed into a gambling hell during his stay in Venice, and had lost about four hundred pounds there. The imprudent young man could not pay this debt of honour, and he never would have been able to do so. He had to choose between suicide or dishonour. George Sand did not hesitate a moment. She wrote at once to the manager of the Revue, asking him to advance the money." And this debt was on her shoulders for a long time.
The facts of the case are as follows, according to a letter from George Sand to Buloz: "I beseech you, as a favour, to pay Alfred's debt and to write to him that it is all settled. You cannot imagine the impatience and the disturbance that this little
There really was a gambling debt, then, but we do not know exactly where it was contracted. It amounted to three hundred and sixty francs, which is very different from the ten thousand francs and the threat of suicide.
And now we come to the pure folly! Musset had been attended by a young doctor, Pietro Pagello.
The next questions are, when did they become lovers, and how did Musset discover their intimacy? It is quite certain that he suspected it, and that he made Pagello confess his love for George Sand.
A most extraordinary scene then took place between the three of them, according to George Sand's own account. "Adieu, then," she wrote to Musset, later on, "adieu to the fine poem of our sacred friendship and of that ideal bond formed between the three of us, when you dragged from him the confession of his love for me and when he vowed to you that he would make me happy. Oh, that night of enthusiasm, when, in spite of us, you joined our hands, saying: `You love each other and yet you love me, for you have saved me, body and soul." Thus, then, Musset had solemnly abjured his love for George Sand, he had engaged his mistress of the night before to a new lover, and was from henceforth to be their best friend. Such was the ideal bond, such the sacred friendship! This may be considered the romantic escapade.
Musset returned in March, 1834, leaving George Sand with Pagello in Venice. The sentimental exaggeration continued, as we see from the letters exchanged between Musset and George Sand. When crossing the Simplon the immutable grandeur of the Alps struck Alusset with admiration, and he thought of his two "great friends." His head was evidently turned by the heights from which he looked at things. George Sand wrote to him: "I
Meanwhile George Sand had settled down in Venice with Pagello—and with all the family, all the Pagello tribe, with the brother, the sister, to say nothing of the various rivals who came and made scenes. It was the vulgar, ordinary platitude of an Italian intimacy of this kind. In spite of everything, she continued congratulating herself on her choice.
"I have my love, my stay here with me. He never suffers, for he is never weak or suspicious. . . . He is calm and good. . . . He loves me and is at peace; he is happy without my having to suffer, without my having to make efforts for his happiness. . . . As for me, I must suffer for some one. It is just this suffering which nurtures my maternal solicitude, etc. . . ." She finally begins to weary of her dear Pagello's stupidity. It occurred to her to take him with her to Paris, and that was the climax. There are some things which cannot be transplanted from one country to another. When they had once set foot in Paris, the absurdity of their situation appeared to them.
"From the moment that Pagello landed in France," says George Sand, "he could not understand anything." The one thing that he was compelled to understand was that he was no longer wanted. He was simply pushed out. George Sand had a remarkable gift for bringing out the characteristics of the persons with whom she had any intercourse. This Pagello, thanks to his adventure with her, has become in the eyes of the world a personage as comic as one of Moliere's characters.
Musset and George Sand still cared for each other. He beseeched her to return to him. "I am
As soon as she was with him once more, their torture commenced again, with all the customary complaints, reproaches and recriminations. "I was quite sure that all these reproaches would begin again immediately after the happiness we had dreamed of and promised each other. Oh, God, to think that we have already arrived at this!" she writes.
What tortured them was that the past, which they had believed to be "a beautiful poem," now seemed to them a hideous nightmare. All this, we read, was a game that they were playing. A cruel sort of game, of which Musset grew more and more weary, but which to George Sand gradually became a necessity. We see this, as from henceforth it was she who implored Musset. In her diary, dated December 24, 1834, we read: "And what if I rushed to him when my love is too strong for me. What if I went and broke the bell-pull with ringing,
It now remains for us to explain the singularity of this adventure, which, as a matter of fact, was beyond all logic, even the logic of passion. It is, however, readily understood, if we treat it as a case of acute romanticism, the finest case of romanticism, that has been actually lived, which the history of letters offers us.
The romanticism consists first in exposing one's life to the public, in publishing one's most secret joys and sorrows. From the very beginning George Sand and Musset took the whole circle of their friends into their confidence. These friends were literary people. George Sand specially informs Sainte-Beuve that she wishes her sentimental life from thenceforth to be known. They were quite
Romanticism consists next in the writer putting his life into his books, making literature out of his emotions. The idea of putting their adventure into a story occurred to the two lovers before the adventure had come to an end. It was at Venice that George Sand wrote her first Lettres d'un voyageur, addressed to the poet--and to the subscribers of the Revue des Deux Mondes. Musset, to improve on this idea, decides to write a novel from the episode which was still unfinished. "I will not die," he says, "until I have written my book on you and on myself, more particularly on you. No, my beautiful, holy fiancee, you shall not return to this cold earth before it knows the woman who has walked on it. No, I swear this by my youth and genius." Musset's contributions to this literature were Confession d'un enfant du siècle, Histoire d'un merle blanc, Elle et Lui, and all that followed.
In an inverse order, romanticism consists in putting literature into our life, in taking the latest literary fashion for our rule of action. This is not only a proof of want of taste; it is a most dangerous mistake. The romanticists, who had so many wrong
"You have said it a hundred times over," writes George Sand, "and it is all in vain that you retract; nothing will now efface that sentence: `Love is the only thing in the world that counts.' It may be that it is a divine faculty which we lose and then find again, that we must cultivate, or that we have to buy with cruel suffering, with painful experience. The suffering you have endured through loving me was perhaps destined, in order that you might love another woman more easily. Perhaps the next woman may love you less than I do, and yet she may be more happy and more beloved. There are such mysteries in these things, and God urges us along new and untrodden paths. Give in; do not attempt to resist. He does not desert His privileged ones. He takes them by the hand and places them in the midst of the sandbanks, where they are to learn to live, in order that they may sit down at the banquet at which they are to rest. . . ." Later on she writes
This was pure frenzy, and yet there were two beings ready to drink in all this pathos, two living beings to live out this monstrous chimera. Such are the ravages that a certain conception of literature may make. By the example we have of these two illustrious victims, we may imagine that there were others, and very many others, obscure and unknown individuals, but human beings all the same, who were equally duped. There are unwholesome fashions in literature, which, translated into life, mean ruin. The Venice adventure shows up the truth of this in bright daylight. This is its interest and its lesson.
Consult: Rocheblave, La fin d'une Legende; Maurice Clouard, Documents inédits sur A. de Musset; Dr. Cabanès, Musset et le Dr. Pagello; Paul Mariéton, Une histoire d'amour; Vicomte Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, La vrai histoire d'Elle et Lui; Decori, Lettres de George Sand et Musset.
On one of George Sand's unpublished letters to Buloz the following lines are written in the handwriting of Buloz: "In the morning on getting up he discovered, in an adjoining room, a tea-table still set, but with only one cup.
"`Did you have tea yesterday evening?'
"`Yes,' answered George Sand, `I had tea with the doctor.'
"`Ah, how is it that there is only one cup?'
"`The other has been taken away.'
"`No, nothing has been taken away. You drank out of the same cup.'
"`Even if that were so, you have no longer the right to trouble about such things.'
"`I have the right, as I am still supposed to be your lover. You ought at least to show me respect, and, as I am leaving in three days, you might wait until I have gone to do as you like.'
"The night following this scene Musset discovered George Sand, crouching on her bed, writing a letter.
"`What are you doing?' he asked.
"`I am reading,' she replied, and she blew out the candle.
"`If you are reading, why do you put the candle out?'
"`It went out itself: light it again.'
"Alfred de Musset lit it again.
"`Ah, so you were reading, and you have no book. Infamous woman, you might as well say that you are writing to your lover.' George Sand had recourse to her usual threat of leaving the house. Alfred de Musset read her up: `You are thinking of a horrible plan. You want to hurry off to your doctor, pretend that I am mad and that your life is in danger. You will not leave this room. I will keep you from anything so base. If you do go, I will put such an epitaph on your grave that the people who read it will turn pale,' said Alfred with terrible energy.
"George Sand was trembling and crying.
"`I no longer love you,' Alfred said scoffingly to George Sand.
"`It is the right moment to take your poison or to go and drown yourself.'
"Confession to Alfred of her secret about the doctor. Reconciliation. Alfred's departure. George Sand's affectionate and enthusiastic letters."
Such are the famous episodes of the tea-cup and the letter as Buloz heard them told at the time.
IV: THE ROMANTIC ESCAPADE
THE VENICE ADVENTURE George Sand; Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings | ||