I have often been present for hours whilst she gave her children a lesson in French, and it is a pity that the whole of the French Academy could not have been present too, as it is quite certain that they might have derived great profit from it.
I have often been present for hours whilst she gave her children a lesson in French, and it is a pity that the whole of the French Academy could not have been present too, as it is quite certain that they might have derived great profit from it.
Not all the distractions of fame and work, of passionate pleasure or passionate sorrow, ever relaxed her active solicitude for the present and future welfare of her two young children. "They give me the only real joys of my life," she repeats again and again.
Lélia, begun immediately afterValentinewas published in the spring of 1833, and created an immense sensation. Hailed by her admirers as a sign of an accession of power, of power exerted in quite a new direction, it brought down on the writer's head a storm of hostile criticism, as a declared enemy of religion and domestic morality—enhancing her celebrity not a little.
Lélia, a lyrical novel—an outburst of poetical philosophy in prose, stands alone among the numerous productions of George Sand. Here she takes every sort of poetical license, in a work without the restrictions of poetic form, which are the true conditions of so much latitude. "Manfred" and "Alastor" are fables not further removed from real life than isLélia. The personages are like allegorical figures, emblematic of spiritual qualities on a grand scale, the scenes like the paradisiacal gardens that visited the fancy of Aurore Dupin when a child. There is no action. The interest is not in the characters and what they do, but in what they say. The declamatory style, then so popular, is one the taste for which has so completely waned thatLéliawill find comparatively few readers in the present day, fewer who will not find its perusal wearisome, none perhaps whose morality, however weak, will be seriously shaken by utterances ever and anon hovering on the perilous confines of the sublime and the ludicrous.
Lélia, a female Faust or Manfred, a mysterious muse-like heroine, who one night sleeps on the heathery mountain-side, the next displays the splendor of a queen in palaces and fairy-like villas; her sorely tried and hapless lover, Sténio, the poet, who pours forth odes to his own accompaniment on the harp, and lingers the night long among Alpine precipices brooding over the abyss; Trenmor, the returned gentleman convict and Apostle of the Carbonari, whose soul has been refreshed, made young and regenerated at the galleys; and the mad Irish priest, Magnus, are impossible personages, inviting to easy ridicule, and neither wisdom nor folly from their lips is likely to beguile the ears of the present generation.
It is no novel, but a poetical essay, fantastically conceived and executed with thesans gêneof an improvisatore. For those who admire the genius of George Sand its interest as a psychological revelation remains unabated. IntoLélia, she owns, she put more of her real self than into any other of her books—of herself, that is, and her state of mind at the dawn of a period of moral disturbance and revolt. All must continue to recognize there an extraordinary exhibition of poetical power and musical style. As a work of art George Sand has herself pronounced it absurd, yet she always cherished for it a special predilection, and, as will be seen, took the trouble to rewrite it some years later, when in a happier and healthier frame of mind than that which inspired this unique and most characteristic composition.
The note of despair struck inLélia, the depth of bitter feeling, the capacity for mental and moral speculation and suffering it seemed to disclose, astounded many of her familiar acquaintance. "Léliais a fancy-type," so writes to the author her friend and neighbor in Berry, Jules Néraud, an ardent naturalist, whose botanical and entomological pursuits she had often shared: "it is not like you—you who are merry, dance thebourrée, appreciate lepidoptera, do not despise puns, who are not a bad needlewoman, and make very good preserves. Is it possible you should have thought so much, felt so much, without anyone having any idea of it?"
Léliawas certainly the expression of a new phase in her mind's history, a moral crisis she could not escape, which was all the more severe for her having, as she remarks, reached her thirtieth year without having opened her eyes to the realities of life. Till the time of her coming to Paris, for very dearth of outward impressions, she had lived chiefly in dreams, the life of all others most favorable to the prolongation of ignorance and credulity. The liberty and activity she had enjoyed for the last two years were fatal to Utopian theories.
It was not only the bitterness that springs from disenchantment in individuals, the sense of the miserable insufficiency of human love to satisfy her spiritual aspirations producing "that widely concluding unbelief which," as her sister in greatness has said, "we call knowledge of the world, but which is really disappointment in you and in me." George Sand was one to whom scepticism was intolerable. Pessimistic doctrines were fatal to her mind's equilibrium, and private experience and outward intellectual influences were driving her to distrust all objects of her previous worship, human and divine. The moment was one when the most fundamental social and religious principles were being called in question.
"Nothing in my old beliefs," she writes, "was sufficiently formulated in me, from a social point of view, to help me to struggle against this cataclysm; and in the religious and socialistic theories of the moment I did not find light enough to contend with the darkness." The poet's creed, with which her mind had hitherto rested satisfied, was shaken, and appeared to prove a false one. She was staggered by the infinity of evil, misery, and injustice, which dwellers in great cities are not allowed to forget, the problem of humanity, the eternal mystery of suffering and wrong predominant in a world on the beneficence of whose Supreme Power all her faiths were founded.
Her mental revolt and suffering found vent inLélia, which it was an immense relief to her to write. Characteristic as an exhibition of feeling and of mastery of language, it is not in the least typical of her fiction. Yet, but forLélia, and its successorJacques, it is impossible to point to a work of hers that would ever have lastingly stamped her, in the public mind, as an expounder of dangerous theories. InLélia, however, which is strongly imbued with Byronic coloring, she had chosen to pose somewhat as the proud angel in rebellion; and the immediate effect of hostile criticism was to confirm her in the position taken up. NeitherLélianorJacquescombined the elements of lasting popularity with those of instant success; but they roused a stir and strife which created an impression of her as a writer systematically inimical to religion and marriage—an impression almost ludicrously at variance with facts, taking her fiction as a whole, but which has only recently begun to give way, in this country, to a juster estimate of its tendencies.
The morality ofLélia, which it is rather difficult to discuss seriously in the present day, both the personages and their environment being too preternatural for any direct application to be drawn from them, as reflecting modern society, found indiscreet champions as determined as its aggressors. Violently denounced by M. Capo de Feuillide, of theEurope littéraire, it was warmly defended by M. Gustave Planche, in theRevue des Deux Mondes. The war of words grew so hot between them that a challenge and encounter were the result—surely unique in the annals of duelling. The swords of the critics fortunately proved more harmless than their words.
From the morbid depression that had tormented her mind and imagination, and has its literary memorial inLélia, she was to find a timely, though but a temporary rescue, in the charm of a new acquaintance—the delighting society of a poetic mind of an order not inferior to her own.
It was in August, 1833, at a dinner given by Buloz to the staff of theRevue des Deux Mondes, that George Sand first made the personal acquaintance of Alfred de Musset, then in his twenty-third year, and already famous through his just published poem,Rolla, and his earlier dramas,Andrea del SartoandLes Caprices de Marianne. He rapidly became enamored of the author ofLélia, who for her part felt powerfully the attraction of his many admirable qualities, mutual enchantment leading them so far as to believe they could be the hero and heroine of a happy love tale. In a letter of September 21, addressed to her friend and correspondent Sainte-Beuve, whom she had made the confidant of her previous depression and strange moods of gloom, she writes of herself as lifted out of such dangers by a happiness beyond any she had imagined, restoring youth to her heart—the happiness accorded her by the poet's society and his preference for her own. De Musset, at this time, would have given the world to have been able to make her his wife.
The story of their short-lived infatuation and of the swift-following mutual disenchantment,—a story which, says Sainte-Beuve, has become part of the romance of the nineteenth century,—is perhaps of less consequence here than in the life of De Musset,[A]in whom the over-sensitiveness of genius was not allied with the extraordinary healthy vitality which enabled George Sand to come out of the most terrible mental experiences unembittered, with the balance of her mind unshaken, and her powers unimpaired. Yet that he acquired an empire over her no other ever acquired there is much to indicate. It took her from France for a while, from her children, her friends—and the breaking of the spell set her at war, not only with him, but for a while with herself, with life, and her fellow creatures.
In the last days of 1833, she and the author ofRollastarted on a journey to Italy, where George Sand spent six months, and where she has laid the scene of a number of her novels: the first and best part ofConsuelo,La Dernière Aldini,Leone,Leoni,La Daniella, and others. The spirit of that land she has caught and reproduced perhaps more successfully than any other of the many novelists who have chosen it for a frame—of Italy as the artist's native country, that is—not the Italy of political history, nor of the Medici, but the Italy that is the second home of painters, poets, and musicians. Can anything be more enjoyable, and at the same time more vividly true, than George Sand's delineations of Venice; and, in the first of theLettres d'un Voyageur, the pictures given of her wanderings on the shores of the Brenta, of Bassano, the Brenta valley, Oliero, Possagno, Asolo, a delicious land, till quite recently as little tourist-trodden as in 1834? What a contrast to the purely imaginary descriptions inLélia, written before those beauties had appeared to her except in dreams!
From Genoa the travellers journeyed to Pisa, Florence, and thence to Venice, where first George Sand felt herself really at home in Italy. The architecture, the simplicity of Venetian life and manners, the theatres—from the opera-houses, where Pasta and Donzelli were singing, down to the national drama of Pulchinello—the pictures, the sea, the climate, combined to make of it a place of residence so perfectly to her mind, that again and again in her letters she expresses her wish that she could bring over her children and there fix her abode.
"It is the only town I can love for its own sake," she says of it. "Other cities are like prisons, which you put up with for the sake of your fellow-prisoners." This Italian journey marks a fresh stage in her artistic development, quite apart from the attendant romantic circumstances, the alleged disastrous consequences to a child of genius less wise and fortunate than herself, which has given an otherwise disproportionate notoriety to this brief episode.
George Sand was no doubt fatally in error when she persuaded herself, and even succeeded in persuading the poet's anxious mother, that she had it in her to be his guardian angel, and reform him miraculously in a short space of time; and that because he had fallen in love with her she would know how to make him alter a way of life he had no abiding desire to abandon. Such a task demands a readiness not merely for self-sacrifice, but for self-suppression; and her individuality was far too pronounced to merge itself for long in ministering to another's. She never seems to have possessed the slightest moral ascendancy over him, beyond the power of wounding him very deeply by the change in her sentiments, however much he might feel himself to blame for it.
The history of the separation of the lovers—of De Musset's illness, jealousy, and departure from Venice alone—is a thrice-told tale. Like the subject of "The Ring and the Book," it has been set forth, by various persons, variously interested, with correspondingly various coloring. The story, as told by George Sand in her later novel,Elle et Lui, is substantially the same as one related by De Musset in hisConfession d'un Enfant du Siècle, published two years after these events, and in which, if it is to be regarded as reflecting personal idiosyncrasies in the slightest degree, the poet certainly makes himself out as the most insupportable of human companions. None the less did the publication ofElle et Lui, a quarter of a century later, provoke a savage retort from the deceased poet's brother, inLui et Elle. Finally, inLui, a third novelist, Madame Colet, presented the world with a separate version of the affair from one who imagined she could have made up to the poet for what he had lost.
But it needs no deep study of human nature, or yet of these novels, to understand the impracticability of two such minds long remaining together in unity. Genius, in private life, is apt to be a torment—its foibles demanding infinite patience, forbearance, nay, affectionate blindness, in those who would minister to its happiness, and mitigate the worst results of those foibles themselves. Certainly George Sand, for a genius, was a wonderfully equable character; her "satanic" moods showed themselves chiefly in pen and ink; her nerves were very strong, the balance of her physical and mental organization was splendidly even, as one imagines Shakespeare's to have been. But the very vigor of her character, its force of self-assertion, unfitted her to be the complement to any but a very yielding nature. The direct influence a passive, merely receptive spirit would have accepted, and gratefully, was soon felt as an intolerable burden by a mind in many ways different from her own, but with the same imperious instinct of freedom, and as little capable of playing anvil to another mind for long. He rebelled against her ascendancy, but suffered from the spell. She was no Countess Guiccioli, content to adore and be adored, and exercise an indirect power for good on a capricious lover. Her logical mind, energetic and independent, grew impatient of the seeming inconsistencies of her gifted companion; and when at last she began to perceive in them the fatal conditions of those gifts themselves, only compassion survived in her, as she thought, and compassion was cold.
How could De Musset, with such an excellent example of prudence, regular hours, good sense, calm self-possession, and ceaseless literary industry as hers before his eyes, not be stirred up to emulate such admirable qualities? But her reason made him unreasonable; the indefatigability of her pen irritated his nerves, and made him idle out of contradiction; her homilies provoked only fresh imprudences—as though he wanted to make proof of his independence whilst secretly feeling her dominion—a phenomenon with which highly nervous people will sympathize not a little, but which was perfectly inexplicable to George Sand.
His genius was of a more delicate essence than hers; he has struck, at times, a deeper note. But his nature was frailer, his muse not so easily within call, his character as intolerant of restraint as her own, but less self-sufficing; and the morbid taint of thought then prevalent, and which her natural optimism and better balanced faculties enabled her to throw off very shortly, had entered into him ineffaceably. Whether or not she brought a fresh blight on his mind, she certaintly failed to cure it.
The spring had hardly begun when De Musset was struck down by fever. George Sand, who had previously been very ill herself, nursed him through his attack with great devotion; and in six weeks' time he was restored to health, if not to happiness. Theirs was at an end, as they recognized, and agreed to part—"for a time, perhaps, or perhaps for ever," she wrote,—with their attachment broken but not destroyed.
It was early in April that De Musset started on his homeward journey. George Sand saw him on his way as far as Vicenza, and ere returning to Venice, made a little excursion in the Alps, along the course of the Brenta. "I have walked as much as four-and-twenty miles a day," she writes to M. Boucoiran, "and found out that this sort of exercise is very good for me, both morally and physically. Tell Buloz I will write some letters for theRevue, upon my pedestrian tours. I came back into Venice with only seven centimes in my pocket, otherwise I should have gone as far as the Tyrol; but the want of baggage and money obliged me to return. In a few days I shall start again, and cross over the Alps by the gorges of the Piave."
And the spring's delights on the Alpine borders of Lombardy are described by hercon amore, in the promised letters:—
The country was not yet in its full splendor; the fields were of a faint green, verging on yellow, and the leaves only coming into bud on the trees. But here and there the almonds and peaches in flower mixed their garlands of pink and white with the dark clumps of cypress. Through the midst of this far-spreading garden the Brenta flowed swiftly and silently over her sandy bed, between two large banks of pebbles, and the rockydébriswhich she tears out of the heart of the Alps, and with which she furrows the plains in her days of anger. A semi-circle of fertile hills, overspread with those long festoons of twisting vine that suspend themselves from all the trees in Venetia, made a near frame to the picture; and the snowy mountain-heights, sparkling in the first rays of sunshine, formed an immense second border, standing, as if cut out in silver, against the solid blue of the sky.
The country was not yet in its full splendor; the fields were of a faint green, verging on yellow, and the leaves only coming into bud on the trees. But here and there the almonds and peaches in flower mixed their garlands of pink and white with the dark clumps of cypress. Through the midst of this far-spreading garden the Brenta flowed swiftly and silently over her sandy bed, between two large banks of pebbles, and the rockydébriswhich she tears out of the heart of the Alps, and with which she furrows the plains in her days of anger. A semi-circle of fertile hills, overspread with those long festoons of twisting vine that suspend themselves from all the trees in Venetia, made a near frame to the picture; and the snowy mountain-heights, sparkling in the first rays of sunshine, formed an immense second border, standing, as if cut out in silver, against the solid blue of the sky.
None of these excursions, however, were ever carried very far. For the next three months she remained almost entirely stationary at Venice, her head-quarters. She had taken apartments for herself in the interior of the city, in a little low-built house, along the narrow, green, and yet limpid canal, close to the Ponte dei Barcaroli. "There," she tells us, "alone all the afternoon, never going out except in the evening for a breath of air, working at night as well, to the song of the tame nightingales that people all Venetian balconies, I wroteAndré,Jacques,Mattea, and the firstLettres d'un Voyageur."
None can read the latter and suppose that the suffering of the recent parting was all on one side. The poet continued to correspond with her, and the consciousness of the pain she had inflicted she was clearly not sufficiently indifferent herself to support. But neither De Musset nor any other in whom, through the "prism of enthusiasm," she may have seen awhile a hero of romance, was ever a primary influence on her life. These were two. Firstly, her children, who although at a distance were seldom absent from her thoughts. Of their well-being at school and at home respectively, she was careful to keep herself informed, down to the minutest particulars, by correspondents in Paris and at Nohant, whence no opposition whatever was raised by its occupier to her prolonged absence abroad. Secondly, her art-vocation. She wrote incessantly; and independently of the pecuniary obligations to do so which she put forward, it is obvious that she had become wedded to this habit of work. "The habit has become a faculty—the faculty a need. I have thus come to working for thirteen hours at a time without making myself ill; seven or eight a day on an average, be the task done better or worse," she writes to M. Chatiron, from Venice, in March. Sometimes, as withLeone Leoni, she would complete a novel in a week; a few weeks later it was in theRevue des Deux Mondes. Such haste she afterward deprecated, and, like all other workers, she aspired to a year's holiday in which to devote herself to the study of the masterpieces of modern literature; but the convenient season for such suspension of her own productive activity never came. And whilst at Venice she found herself literally in want of money to leave it. Buloz had arranged with her that she should contribute thirty-two pages every six weeks to his periodical for a yearly stipend of £160. She had anticipated her salary for the expenses of her Italian journey, and must acquit herself of the arrears due before she could take wing.
Jacques, the longest of the novels written at Venice, afforded fresh grounds to those who taxed her works with hostility to social institutions. Without entering into the vexed question of the right of the artist in search of variety to exercise his power on any theme that may invite to its display, and of the precise bearing of ethical rules on works of imagination, it is permissible to doubt thatJacques, however bitter the sentiments of the author at that time regarding the marriage tie, ever seriously disturbed the felicity of any domestic household in the past or present day. It is too lengthy and too melancholy to attract modern readers, who care little to revel in the luxuries of woe, so relished by those of a former age. We cannot do better than quote the judgment pronounced by Madame Sand herself, thirty years later, on this work of pure sentimentalism—generated by an epoch thrown into commotion by the passionate views of romanticism—the epoch of René, Lara, Childe Harold, Werther, types of desperate men; life weary, but by no means weary of talking. "Jacques," she observes, "belonged to this large family of disillusioned thinkers; they had theirraison d'être, historical and social. He comes on the scene in the novel, already worn by deceptions; he thought to revive through his love, and he does not revive. Marriage was for him only the drop of bitterness that made the cup overflow. He killed himself to bequeath to others the happiness for which he cared not, and in which he believed not."
Jacques, taken as aplaidoyeragainst domestic institutions, singularly misses its aim. As critics have remarked, some of the most eloquent pages are those that treat of married bliss. Our sympathies are entirely with the wronged husband against his silly little wife. It is a kindred work toLélia, and its faults are the same; but whilst dealing ostensibly with real life and possible human beings it cannot, likeLélia, be placed apart, and retain interest as a literary curiosity.
Andréis a very different piece of work and a little masterpiece of its kind. The author, in her preface, tells us how, whilst mechanically listening to the incessant chatter of the Venetian sempstresses in the next room to her own, she was struck by the resemblance between the mode of life and thought their talk betrayed, and that of the same class of girls at La Châtre; and how in the midst of Venice, to the sound of the rippling waters stirred by the gondolier's oar, of guitar and serenade, and within sight of the marble palaces, her thoughts flew back to the dark and dirty streets, the dilapidated houses, the wretched moss-grown roofs, the shrill concerts of the cocks, cats, and children of the little French provincial town. She dreamt also of the lovely meadows, the scented hay, the little running streams, and the floral researches she had been fond of. This tenacity of her instincts was a safeguard she may have sometimes rebelled against as a chain; it was with her an essential feature, and, despite all vagaries, gave a great unity to her life.
"Venice," she writes to M. Chatiron in June, "with her marble staircases and her wonderful climate, does not make me forget anything that has been dear to me. Be sure that nothing in me dies. My life has its agitations; destiny pushes me different ways, but my heart does not repudiate the past. Old memories have a power none can ignore, and myself less than another. I love on the contrary to recall them, and we shall soon find ourselves together again in the old nest at Nohant."Andréshe considered the outcome of this feeling of nostalgia. In it she has put together the vulgar elements of inferior society in a common-place country town, and produced a poem, though one of the saddest. If the florist heroine, Genevieve, is a slightly idealized figure, the story and general character-treatment are realistic to a painful degree. There is more power of simple pathos shown here than is common in the works of George Sand.Andréis a refreshing contrast, in its simplicity and brevity, to the inflation ofLéliaandJacques. It was an initial essay, and a model one, in a style with better claims to enduring popularity.
As the summer advanced, George Sand found herself free to depart, and started on her way back to France, famishing, as she tells us, for the sight of her children. Her grand anxiety was to reach her destination in time for the breaking-up day and distribution of prizes at the College Henri IV. "I shall be at Paris before then," she writes from Milan, to her son, "if I die on the way, and really the heat is such that one might die of it." From Milan she journeyed over the Simplon to the Rhone valley, Martigny, Chamounix, and Geneva, performing great part of the way on foot. She reached Paris in the middle of August, and a few days later started with her boy for Nohant, where Solange had spent the time during her mother's absence, and where they remained together for the holidays. Here too she was in the midst of a numerous circle of friends of both sexes, in whose staunch friendliness she found a solace of which she stood in real need.
MENTAL DEVELOPMENT.
Theperiod immediately following George Sand's return from Italy in August 1834, was a time of transition, both in her outer and inner life. If undistinguished by the production of any novel calculated to create a fresh sensation, it shows no abatement of literary activity. This, as we have seen, had become to her a necessity of nature. Neither vicissitudes without nor commotions within, though they might direct or stimulate, seem to have acted as a check on the flow of her pen.
During the first twelvemonth she continued to reside alternately at Nohant, whither she came with her son and daughter for their holidays—Solange being now placed in a children's school kept by some English ladies at Paris,—and her "poet's garret," as she styled her third floorappartementon the Quai Malplaquet.
This winter saw the ending for herself and De Musset of their hapless romance. An approach to complete reconciliation—for the existing partial estrangement had been discovered to be more unbearable than all besides—led to stormy scenes and violent discord, and resulted before very long in mutual avoidance, which was to be final. It is said that forgiveness is the property of the injured, and it should be remembered that whenever De Musset's name is mentioned by George Sand it is with the admiring respect of one to whom his genius made that name sacred, and who refused to the end of his life to use the easy weapon offered her by his notorious frailties for vindicating herself at his expense. And, however pernicious the much talked of effect on De Musset's mind, it is but fair to the poet to recollect that it is no less true of him than of George Sand that his best work, that with which his fame has come chiefly to associate itself, was accomplished after this painful experience.
Into her own mental state—possibly at this time the least enviable of the two—we get some glimpses in theLettres d'un Voyageurof the autumn 1834, and winter 1834-35. Here, again, we should be content with gathering a general impression, and not ingenuously read literal facts in all the self-accusations and recorded experiences of the "voyageur"—a semi-fictitious personage whose improvisations were, after all, only a fresh exercise which George Sand had invented for her imagination taking herself and reality for a starting-point merely, a suggestive theme.
But the despair and disgust of life, to which both these and her private letters give such uncompromising and eloquent expression, indubitably reflect her feelings at this moral crisis—the feelings of one who having openly braved the laws of society, to become henceforward a law unto herself, recognizes that she has only found her way to fresh sources of misery. Never yet had she had such grave and deep causes of individual mental torment to blacken her views of existence, and incline her to abhor it as a curse. "Your instinct will save you, bring you back to your children," wrote a friend who knew her well. But her maternal love and solicitude themselves were becoming a source of added distress and apprehension.
The extraordinary arrangement she and M. Dudevant had entered into four years before with regard to each other, was clearly one impossible to last. It will be recollected that she at that time had relinquished her patrimony to those who had thought it no dishonor to continue to enjoy it; and the terms of that agreement had since been nominally undisturbed. But besides that, the control of the children remained a constant subject of dissension. M. Dudevant was beginning to get into pecuniary difficulties in the management of his wife's estate. Sometimes he contemplated resigning it to her, and retiring to Gascony, to live with his widowed stepmother on the property which at her death would revert to him. But unfortunately he could not make up his mind to this course. No sooner had he drawn up an agreement consenting to a division of property, than he seemed to regret the sacrifice; upon which she ceased to press it.
Meantime Madame Dudevant, whose position at Nohant was that of a visitor merely, and becoming untenable, felt her hold on her cherished home and her children becoming more precarious day by day.
Some of her friends had strongly advised her to travel for a length of time, both as offering a mortal remedy, and as a temporary escape from the practical perplexities of the moment. Her rescue, however, was to be otherwise effected, and a number of new intellectual interests that sprang up for her at this time all tended to retain her in her own country.
It was in the course of this spring that she made the acquaintance of M. de Lamennais, introduced to her by their common friend, the composer, Franz Liszt. The famous author of theParoles d'un Croyanthad virtually severed himself from the Church of Rome by his recent publication of this little volume, pronounced by the Pope, "small in size, immense in perversity!" The eloquence of the poet-priest, and the doctrines of the anti-Catholic and humanitarian Christianity of which he came forward as the expounder, could not fail powerfully to impress her intelligence. Here seemed the harbor of refuge her half-wrecked faiths were seeking, and what the abbé's antagonists denounced as the "diabolical gospel of social science," came to her as the teachings of an angel of light. Christianity as preached by him was a sort of realization of the ideal religion of Aurore Dupin—faith divorced from superstition and the doctrine of Romish infallibility. Complete identity of sentiments between herself and the abbé was out of the question. But his was the right mind coming to her mind at the right moment, and exercised a healing influence over her troubled spirits. ForLe Monde, a journal founded by him shortly after this time, she wrote theLettres à Marcie, an unfinished series, treating of moral and spiritual problems and trials. Finally, the position M. de Lamennais had taken up as the apostle of the people further enlisted her sympathies in his cause, which made religious one with social reform, and amalgamated the protest against moral enslavement with the liberation-schemes then fermenting in young and generous minds all over Europe.
The belief in the possibility of their speedy realization was then wide-spread—a conviction that, as Heine puts it, some grand recipe for freedom and equality, invented, well drawn up, and inserted in theMoniteur, was all that was needed to secure those benefits for the world at large. If George Sand, led afterwards into searching for this empirical remedy for the wrongs and sufferings of the masses, believed the elixir to have been found in the establishment of popular sovereignty by universal suffrage, it was through the persuasive arguments of the leaders of the movement, with whom at this period she was first brought into personal relations. Her own unbiassed judgment, to which she reverted long years after, when she had seen these illusions perish sadly, was less sanguine in its prognostications for the immediate future, as appears in her own reflections in a letter of this time:—
What I see in the midst of the divergencies of all these reforming sects is a waste of generous sentiments and of noble thoughts, a tendency towards social amelioration, but an impossibility for the time to bring forth through the want of a head to that great body with a hundred hands, that tears itself to pieces, for not knowing what to attack. So far the struggles make only dust and noise. We have not yet come to the era that will construct new societies, and people them with perfected men.
What I see in the midst of the divergencies of all these reforming sects is a waste of generous sentiments and of noble thoughts, a tendency towards social amelioration, but an impossibility for the time to bring forth through the want of a head to that great body with a hundred hands, that tears itself to pieces, for not knowing what to attack. So far the struggles make only dust and noise. We have not yet come to the era that will construct new societies, and people them with perfected men.
She had recently been introduced to a political and legal celebrity of his day, the famous advocate Michel, of Bourges. He was then at the height of his reputation, which, won by his eloquent and successful defense of political prisoners on various occasions, was considerable. Madame Sand had been advised to consult him professionally about her business affairs, and for this purpose went over one day with some of her Berrichon friends to see him at Bourges. But the man of law had, it appears, been readingLélia, and instead of talking of business with his distinguished client, dashed at once into politics, philosophy, and social science, overpowering his listeners with the strength of his oratory. His sentiments were those of extreme radicalism, and he carried on a little private propaganda in the country around. The force of his character seems to have spent itself in oratorical effort. He could preach revolution, but not suggest reform; denounce existing abuses, but do nothing towards the remodelling of social institutions; and in after years he failed, as so many leading men in his profession have failed, to make any impression as a speaker in Parliament. The author ofLéliawas overwhelmed, if not all at once converted, by the tremendous rhetorical power of this singular man. She was a proselyte worth the trouble of making, and Michel was bent on drawing her more closely into active politics, with which hitherto she had occupied herself very little. He began a correspondence, writing her long epistles, the sum of which, she says, may thus be resumed:—"Your scepticism springs from personal unhappiness. Love is selfish. Extend this solicitude for a single individual to the whole human race." He certainly succeeded in inspiring her with a strong desire to share his passion for politics, his faith, his revivifying hopes of a speedy social renovation, his ambition to be one of its apostles. To Michel, under the sobriquet of "Everard," are addressed several of theLettres d'un Voyageurof the spring and summer of 1835, letters which she defines as "a rapid analysis of a rapid conversion."
But Michel's work was a work of demolition only; and when his earnest disciple wanted new theories in place of the old forms so ruthlessly destroyed, he had none to offer. There were others, however, who could. She was soon to be put into communication with a number of the active workers for the republican cause throughout the country. They counted many of the best hearts and not the worst heads in France, and were naturally eager to enlist her energies on their side.
Foremost, by right of the influence exercised over her awhile by his writings, was the philosopher Pierre Leroux, with whom her acquaintance dates from this same year. In spite of the wide divergence between her pre-eminently artistic spirit and a mind of the rougher stamp of this born iconoclast, he was to indoctrinate her with many new opinions. His disinterested character won her admiration; he was a practical philanthropist as well as a critical thinker, one whose life and fighting power were devoted to promoting the good of the working classes to whom he belonged, having been brought up as a printer. He was regarded as the apostle of communism, as then understood, or rather not understood—for the form under which it suggested itself to the social reformers of the period in question was entirely indefinite.
Meantime the novelist's pen was far from idle. One or two pleasant glimpses she has given us into her manner of working belong to this year. In the summer the heat in her "poet's garret" becoming intolerable, she took refuge in a congenial solitude offered by the ground-floor apartments of the house, then in course of reconstruction, dismantled and untenanted. The works had been temporarily suspended, and Madame Sand took possession of the field abandoned by the builders and carpenters. The windows and doors opening into the garden had been taken away, and the place thus turned into an airy, cool retreat. Out of the apparatus of the workmen, left behind, she constructed her writing-establishment, and here, secure from interruption, denying herself to all visitors, never going out except to visit her children at their respective schools, she completed her novel with no companions but the spiders crawling over the planks, the mice running in and out of the corners, and the blackbirds hopping in from the garden; the deep sense of solitude enhanced by the roar of the city in the very heart of which she had thus voluntarily isolated herself.
As an artistic experience she found it refreshing, and repeated it more than once. Soon after, a friend offered her the loan of an empty house at Bourges, a town that had been suggested to her as a desirable place of residence, should the circumstances at Nohant ever force her to abandon it entirely. As a home she saw and disapproved of Bourges, but she thoroughly enjoyed a brief retreat spent there in an absolutely deserted, vine-covered dwelling, standing in a garden enclosed by stone walls. Her meals were handed in through a wicket. A few friends came to see her in the evenings. The days, and often the nights, she passed in study and meditation, shut up in the library reading Lavater, expatiating on her impressions of his theories in a letter addressed to Franz Liszt (inserted among theLettres d'un Voyageur), or strolling in the flower garden—"forgotten," she tells us, "by the whole world, and plunged into oblivion of the actualities of my own existence."
Of her numerous letters of advice to her boy at school, we quote one written during this summer of 1835, when their future relations to each other were in painful uncertainty:—
Work, be strong and proud; despise the little troubles supposed to belong to your age. Reserve your strength of resistance for deeds and facts that are worth the effort. If I am here no longer, think of me who worked and suffered cheerfully. We are like each other in mind and in countenance. I know already from this day what your intellectual life will be. I fear for you many and deep sorrows. I hope for you the purest of joys. Guard within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness. Know how to replace in your heart, by the happiness of those you love, the happiness that may be wanting to yourself. Keep the hope of another life. It is there that mothers meet their sons again. Love all God's creatures. Forgive those who are ill-conditioned, resist those who are unjust, and devote yourself to those who are great through their virtue. Love me. I will teach you many, many things if we live together. If that blessing (the greatest that can befall me, the only one that makes me wish for a long life) is not to be, you must pray for me, and from the grave itself, if anything remains of me in the universe, the spirit of your mother will watch over you.
Work, be strong and proud; despise the little troubles supposed to belong to your age. Reserve your strength of resistance for deeds and facts that are worth the effort. If I am here no longer, think of me who worked and suffered cheerfully. We are like each other in mind and in countenance. I know already from this day what your intellectual life will be. I fear for you many and deep sorrows. I hope for you the purest of joys. Guard within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness. Know how to replace in your heart, by the happiness of those you love, the happiness that may be wanting to yourself. Keep the hope of another life. It is there that mothers meet their sons again. Love all God's creatures. Forgive those who are ill-conditioned, resist those who are unjust, and devote yourself to those who are great through their virtue. Love me. I will teach you many, many things if we live together. If that blessing (the greatest that can befall me, the only one that makes me wish for a long life) is not to be, you must pray for me, and from the grave itself, if anything remains of me in the universe, the spirit of your mother will watch over you.
In the autumn, 1835, Madame Dudevant, under legal advice, and supported by the approval of friends of both parties, determined to apply to the courts for a judicial separation from her husband, on the plea of ill-treatment. She had sufficient grounds to allege for her claim, and had then every reason to hope that her demand would not even be contested by M. Dudevant, who, on former occasions, had voluntarily signed but afterwards revoked the agreement she hereby only desired to make valid and permanent, and which, ensuring to him a certain proportion of her income, gave her Nohant for a place of habitation, and established the children under her care.
Pending the issue of this suit, which, unexpectedly protracted, dragged on until the summer of the next year, she availed herself of the hospitality of a family at La Châtre, friends of old standing, and from under whose roof she awaited, as from a neutral ground, the decision of her judges. During this year she saw little of Paris, and less of Nohant, except for a brief visit which, profiting by a moment when its walls were absolutely deserted by every other human being, she paid to her house—not knowing then whether she would ever, so to speak, inhabit it again in her own right.
On the result of the legal proceedings depended her future home and the best part of her happiness. Sooner than be parted from her children, she contemplated the idea, in case of the decision going against her, of escaping with them to America! Yet, in the midst of all this suspense, we find her industrious as ever, joining in the daytime in the family life of the household with which she was domesticated, helping to amuse the children among them, retiring to her room at ten at night, to work on at her desk till seven in the morning, according to her wont. A more cheerful tone begins to pervade her effusions. The clouds were slowly breaking on all sides at once, and a variety of circumstances combining to restore to her mind its natural tone—faith, hope, and charity to her heart, and harmony to her existence. She began to perceive what she was enabled afterwards more fully to acknowledge as follows:—
As to my religion, the ground of it has never varied. The forms of the past have vanished, for me as for my century, before the light of study and reflection. But the eternal doctrine of believers, of God and His goodness, the immortal soul and the hopes of another life, this is what, in myself, has been proof against all examination, all discussion, and even intervals of despairing doubt.
As to my religion, the ground of it has never varied. The forms of the past have vanished, for me as for my century, before the light of study and reflection. But the eternal doctrine of believers, of God and His goodness, the immortal soul and the hopes of another life, this is what, in myself, has been proof against all examination, all discussion, and even intervals of despairing doubt.
It is significant that during these months, spent for the most part at La Châtre, we find her rewritingLélia, trying, as she expressed her intention, "to transform this work of anger into a work of gentleness."Engelwald, a novel of some length on which she was engaged, was destined never to see the light.
To the Comtesse d'Agoult, better known by hernom de plumeof Daniel Stern, whose acquaintance she had recently made in Paris, she writes in May, 1836:—
I am still at La Châtre, staying with my friends, who spoil me like a child of five years old. I inhabit a suburb, built in terraces against the rock. At my feet lies a wonderfully pretty valley. A garden thirty feet square and full of roses, and a terrace extensive enough for you to walk along it in ten steps, are my drawing-room, my study, and gallery. My bed-room is rather large—it is decorated with a red cotton curtained bed—a real peasant's bed, hard and flat, two straw chairs, and a white wooden table. My window is situated six feet above the terrace. By the trellised trees on the wall I can get out and in, and stroll at night among my thirty feet of flowers without having to open a door or wake anyone.Sometimes I go out riding alone, at dusk. I come in towards midnight. My cloak, my rough hat, and the melancholy trot of my nag, make me pass in the darkness for a commercial traveller, or a farm-boy.One of my grand amusements is to watch the transition from night to day; it effects itself in a thousand different manners. This revolution, apparently so uniform, has every day a character of its own.
I am still at La Châtre, staying with my friends, who spoil me like a child of five years old. I inhabit a suburb, built in terraces against the rock. At my feet lies a wonderfully pretty valley. A garden thirty feet square and full of roses, and a terrace extensive enough for you to walk along it in ten steps, are my drawing-room, my study, and gallery. My bed-room is rather large—it is decorated with a red cotton curtained bed—a real peasant's bed, hard and flat, two straw chairs, and a white wooden table. My window is situated six feet above the terrace. By the trellised trees on the wall I can get out and in, and stroll at night among my thirty feet of flowers without having to open a door or wake anyone.
Sometimes I go out riding alone, at dusk. I come in towards midnight. My cloak, my rough hat, and the melancholy trot of my nag, make me pass in the darkness for a commercial traveller, or a farm-boy.
One of my grand amusements is to watch the transition from night to day; it effects itself in a thousand different manners. This revolution, apparently so uniform, has every day a character of its own.
The summer that had set in was unusually hot and sultry. Writing to Madame d'Agoult, July 10, 1836, she thus describes her enjoyment of a season that allowed of some of the pleasures of primitive existence:—
I start on foot at three in the morning, fully intending to be back by eight o'clock; but I lose myself in the lanes; I forget myself on the banks of the river; I run after butterflies; and I get home at midday in a state of torrefaction impossible to describe.
I start on foot at three in the morning, fully intending to be back by eight o'clock; but I lose myself in the lanes; I forget myself on the banks of the river; I run after butterflies; and I get home at midday in a state of torrefaction impossible to describe.
Another time the sight of the cooling stream is more than she can resist, and she walks into the Indre fully dressed; but a few minutes more and the sun has dried her garments, and she proceeds on her walk of ten or twelve miles—"Never a cockchafer passes but I run after it."
You have no idea of all the dreams I dream during my walks in the sun. I fancy myself in the golden days of Greece. In this happy country where I live you may often go for six miles without meeting a human creature. The flocks are left by themselves in pastures well enclosed by fine hedges; so the illusion can last for some time. One of my chief amusements when I have got out to some distance, where I don't know the paths, is to fancy I am wandering over some other country with which I discover some resemblance. I recollect having strolled in the Alps, and fancied myself for hours in America. Now I picture to myself an Arcadia in Berry. Not a meadow, not a cluster of trees which, under so fine a sun, does not appear to me quite Arcadian.
You have no idea of all the dreams I dream during my walks in the sun. I fancy myself in the golden days of Greece. In this happy country where I live you may often go for six miles without meeting a human creature. The flocks are left by themselves in pastures well enclosed by fine hedges; so the illusion can last for some time. One of my chief amusements when I have got out to some distance, where I don't know the paths, is to fancy I am wandering over some other country with which I discover some resemblance. I recollect having strolled in the Alps, and fancied myself for hours in America. Now I picture to myself an Arcadia in Berry. Not a meadow, not a cluster of trees which, under so fine a sun, does not appear to me quite Arcadian.
We give these passages because they seem to us very forcibly to portray one side, and that the strongest and most permanent, of the character of George Sand: the admixture of a child's simplicity of tastes, a poet's fondness for reverie, and that instinctive independence of habits—an instinct stronger than the restraints of custom—which her individuality seemed to demand.
In the letter last quoted to Madame d'Agoult, the new ideal which was arising out of these contemplations is thus resumed:—
To throw yourself into the lap of mother nature: to take her really for mother and sister; stoically and religiously to cut off from your life what is mere gratified vanity; obstinately to resist the proud and the wicked; to make yourself humble with the unfortunate, to weep with the misery of the poor; nor desire another consolation than the putting down of the rich; to acknowledge no other God than Him who ordains justice and equality upon men; to venerate what is good, to judge severely what is only strong, to live on very little, to give away nearly all, in order to re-establish primitive equality and bring back to life again the Divine institution: that is the religion I shall proclaim in a little corner of my own, and that I aspire to preach to my twelve apostles under the lime-trees in my garden.
To throw yourself into the lap of mother nature: to take her really for mother and sister; stoically and religiously to cut off from your life what is mere gratified vanity; obstinately to resist the proud and the wicked; to make yourself humble with the unfortunate, to weep with the misery of the poor; nor desire another consolation than the putting down of the rich; to acknowledge no other God than Him who ordains justice and equality upon men; to venerate what is good, to judge severely what is only strong, to live on very little, to give away nearly all, in order to re-establish primitive equality and bring back to life again the Divine institution: that is the religion I shall proclaim in a little corner of my own, and that I aspire to preach to my twelve apostles under the lime-trees in my garden.
The judgment of the court, first pronounced in February, 1836, and given in her favor by default, no opposition having been raised to her claims to the proposed partition of property by the defendant, placed her in legal possession of her house and her children. Appeal was made, however, prolonging and complicating the case, but without affecting its termination. In the war of mutual accusations thus stirred up, M. Dudevant'srôleas accuser, yet objecting in the same breath to the separation, had an appearance of insincerity that could not fail to withdraw sympathy from his side, irrespective of any judgment that might be held on the conduct of the wife, whose absence and complete independence he had authorized or acquiesced in. Before the actual conclusion of the law-suit his appeal was withdrawn. As a result, the previous judgment in favor of Madame Dudevant was virtually confirmed, and the details were settled by private agreement.
It is almost impossible to overrate the importance to George Sand of a conclusion that gave her back her old home of Nohant, and secured to her the permanent companionship of her children. The present pecuniary arrangement left M. Dudevant some hold over Maurice and his education, concerning which his parents had long disagreed, and which for another year remained a source of contention.
The affair thus concluded, Madame Sand entered formally into possession of Nohant; and early in September she started with her two children for Switzerland, where they spent the autumn holidays in a long-contemplated visit to her friend the Comtesse d'Agoult, then at Geneva. This tour is fancifully sketched in a closing number of theLettres d'un Voyageur, a volume which stands as a sort of literary memorial of two years of unsettled, precarious existence, material and spiritual—a time of trial now happily at an end.
Simon, a tale dedicated to Madame d'Agoult, and published in theRevue des Deux Mondes, 1836—a graceful story, of no high pretentions—is noticeable as marking the commencement of a decided and agreeable change in the tone of George Sand's fiction. Hitherto the predominant note struck had been most often one of melancholy, if not despair—the more hopelessly painful the subject, the more fervent, apparently, the inspiration to the writer. InIndianashe had portrayed the double victim of tyranny and treachery; inValentine, a helpless girl sacrificed to family ambition and social prejudice; inLéliaandJacques, the incurableWeltschmerz, heroism unvalued and wasted; inLeone Leoni, the infatuation of a weak-minded woman for a phenomenal scoundrel; inAndré, the wretchedness which a timid, selfish character, however amiable, may bring down on itself and on all connected with it. Henceforward she prefers themes of a pleasanter nature. InSimonshe paints the triumph of true and patient love over social prejudice and strong opposition. InMauprat,[B]written in 1837, at Nohant, she exerts all the force of her imagination and language to bring before us vividly the gradual redemption of a noble but degraded nature, through the influence of an exclusive, passionate and indestructible affection. The natural optimism of her temperament, not her incidental misfortunes, began and continued to color her compositions.
From Switzerland she returned for part of the winter to Paris. She had given up her "poet's garret," and occupied for a while a suite of rooms in the Hôtel de France, where resided also Madame d'Agoult. Thesalonof the latter was a favoriterendezvousof cosmopolitan artistic celebrities, whose generalrendezvousjust then was Paris. A very Pantheon must have been an intimate circle that included, among others, George Sand, Daniel Stern, Heine, the Polish poet Mickiewicz, Eugène Delacroix, Meyerbeer, Liszt, Hiller, and Frédéric Chopin.
The delicate health of her son forced Madame Sand to leave with him shortly for Berry, where he soon became convalescent. Later in the season, some of the same party of friends that had met in Paris met again at Nohant. It was during this summer that George Sand wrote for her child the well-known little tale,Les Maîtres Mosaïstes, in which the adventures of the Venetian mosaic-workers are woven into so charming a picture. "I do not know why, but it is seldom that I have written anything with so much pleasure," she tells us. "It was in the country, in summer weather, as hot as the Italian climate I had lately left. I have never seen so many birds and flowers in my garden. Liszt was playing the piano on the ground floor, and the nightingales, intoxicated with music and sunshine, were singing madly in the lilac-trees around."
The party was abruptly dispersed upon the intelligence that reached Madame Sand of her mother's sudden, and, as it proved, fatal illness. She hurried to Paris, and remained with Madame Maurice Dupin during her last days. The old fond affection between them, though fitful in its manifestations on the part of the mother, had never been impaired, and the breaking of this old link with the past was very deeply felt by Madame Sand.
Before returning to Nohant, she spent a few weeks at Fontainebleau with her son, from whom she never liked to separate. They passed their days in exploring the forest, then larger and wilder than now, botanizing and butterfly-hunting. At night she sat up writing, when all was quiet in the inn. Just as, whilst at Venice, her fancy flew back to the scenes and characters of French provincial life, andAndréwas the result, so here, amid the forest landscapes of her own land, her imagination rushed off to Venice and the shores of the Brenta, and producedLa Dernière Aldini.
This constant industry, which had now become her habit of life, was more of a practical necessity than ever. Nohant, as already mentioned, barely repaid the owner the expenses of keeping it up. Madame Sand, who desired to be liberal besides, to travel occasionally, to gratify little artistic fancies as they arose, must look to her literary work to furnish the means.
"Sometimes," she writes from Nohant, in October, 1837, to Madame d'Agoult, then in Italy, "I am tempted to realize my capital, and come and join you; but out there I should do no work, and the galley-slave is chained up. If Buloz lets him go for a walk it is onparole, andparoleis the cannon-ball the convict drags on his foot."
Nor was it for herself only that she worked in future, but for her children, the whole responsibility of providing for both of whose education she was now about definitely to take on her own shoulders. The power of interference left to M. Dudevant by the recent legal decision had been exercised in a manner leading to fresh vexatious contention, and continual alarm on Madame Sand's part lest the boy should be taken by force from her side. These skirmishes included the actual abduction of Solange from Nohant by M. Dudevant during her mother's absence at Fontainebleau; a foolish and purposeless trick, by which nothing was to be gained, except annoyance and trouble to Madame Sand, whose right to the control of her daughter had never been contested. A final settlement entered into between the parties, in 1838, placed these matters henceforward on a footing of peace, fortunately permanent. By this agreement Madame Sand received back from M. Dudevant—who had lately succeeded to his father's estate—some house property that formed part of her patrimony, and paid down to him the sum of £2,000; he ceding to her the remnant of his paternal rights; she freeing him from all charges for Maurice's education, her authority over which, in future, was recognized as complete.
SOLITUDE, SOCIETY AND SOCIALISM.
Thecharge of both children now resting entirely in her hands, Madame Sand was enabled to fulfill her desire of permanently removing her boy, now fourteen years of age, from the college Henri IV. Not only was she opposed to the generalrégimeand educational system pursued in French public schools of this type, she felt persuaded of its special unsuitability to her son, whose tastes and temperament were artistic, like her own, and whose classical studies had been repeatedly interrupted by illness. His delicate health determined her to spend the winter of 1838-9 abroad with her family. Having heard the climate and scenery of Majorca highly praised, she selected the island for their resort; tempted herself by the prospect of a few months absolute quiet, where, with neither letters to answer, nor newspapers to read, she would enjoy some rare leisure, which she proposed to spend in studying history and teaching French to her children.
Just at this time her friend and ardent admirer, Frédéric Chopin, was recovering from a chest attack, the first presage of the illness that caused his early death. The eminent pianist and composer had also been recommended to winter in the South, and greatly needed repose and change of air to recruit him from the fatigues of the Parisian season. It was arranged that the convalescent should make one of the expedition to Majorca. He joined Madame Sand and her children at Perpignan, and they embarked for Barcelona, whence the sea-voyage to the island was safely accomplished, the party reaching Palma, the capital, in magnificent November weather, and never suspecting how soon they would have cause to repent their choice of a retreat.
But their practical information about the island proved lamentably insufficient. With the scenery, indeed, they were enraptured. "We found," says Madame Sand in her little volume,Un Hiver à Majorque, published the following year, "a green Switzerland under a Calabrian sky, with all the solemnity and stillness of the East." But though a painter's Elysium, Majorca was wanting in the commonest comforts of civilized life. Inns were non-existent, foreigners viewed and treated with suspicion. The party thought themselves fortunate in securing a villa some miles from Palma, furnished, though scantily. "The country, nature, trees, sky, sea, and mountains surpass all my dreams," she writes in the first days, "it is the promised land; and as we have succeeded in housing ourselves pretty well, we are delighted."
The delight was of brief duration. That Madame Sand's manuscripts took a month to reach the editor of theRevue des Deux Mondes; that the piano ordered from Paris for Chopin took two months to get to Majorca, were the least among their troubles. A rainy season of exceptional severity set in, and the villa quickly became uninhabitable. It was not weatherproof. Chopin fell alarmingly ill. Good food and medical attendance were hardly to be procured for him; and finally, the villa proprietor, having heard that his tenant was suffering from consumption—an illness believed to be infectious by the Majorcans—gave the whole party notice to quit. The invalid improving somewhat, though still too weak to attempt the return journey to France, Madame Sand transported her ambulance, as she styled it, to some tolerable quarters she had already discovered in the deserted Carthusian monastery of Valdemosa—"a poetical name and a poetical abode," she writes; "an admirable landscape, grand and wild, with the sea at both ends of the horizon, formidable peaks around us, eagles pursuing their prey even down to the orange-trees in our garden, a cypress walk winding from the top of our mountain to the bottom of the gorge, torrents over-grown with myrtles, palm-trees below our feet, nothing could be more magnificent than this spot."
Parts of the old monastic buildings were dilapidated; the rest were in good order, being frequented as a summer retreat by the inhabitants of Palma. Now, in December, the Chartreuse was entirely abandoned, except by a housekeeper, a sacristan and a lone monk, the last offshoot of the community—a kind of apothecary, whose stock-in-trade was limited to guimauve and dog-grass.
The rooms into which the travellers moved had just been vacated by a Spanish family of political refugees departing for France. These lodgings were at least provided with doors, window-panes, and decent furniture; but the luxury of chimneys was unknown, and a stove, which had to be manufactured at an enormous price on purpose for the party, is described as "a sort of iron cauldron, that made our heads ache and dried up our throats." Continuous stormy weather having suspended steam traffic with the mainland, the visitors had no choice but to remain prisoners some two months more, during which the deluge went on with little intermission.
Still, to young and romantic imaginations the island and life in the ex-monastery offered considerable charm. Madame Sand and her children were delighted with the unfamiliar vegetation, the palms, aloes, olives, almond and orange trees, the Arab architecture, and picturesque costumes. Valdemosa itself was splendidly situated among the mountains, in a stone-walled garden surrounded with cypress trees and planted with palms and olives. In the morning, Madame Sand gave lessons to the children; in the afternoon, they ran wild out of doors whilst she wrote—when the invalid musician was well enough to be left. In the evenings she and the young people went wandering by moonlight through the cloisters, exploring the monkish cells and chapels. Maurice had fortunately recovered his health completely, but poor Chopin's state, aggravated by the damp weather and privations—for the difficulties in obtaining a regular supply of provisions were immense—remained throughout their stay a constant and terrible cause of anxiety and responsibility to Madame Sand. From the islanders no sort of help or even sympathy was forthcoming, and thievish servants and extortionate traders were not the least of the annoyances with which the strangers had to contend. In a letter to François Rollinat she gives a graphic account of their misfortunes:—