The Dream Lover: A Novel of George Sand Read online

  The Dream Lover is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Elizabeth Berg

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint excerpts from Lelia: The Life of George Sand by André Maurois, translated from the French by Gerald Hopkins, copyright © 1953 by André Maurois and copyright renewed 1981 by Gerald Maurois. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Berg, Elizabeth.

  The dream lover: a novel/Elizabeth Berg.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-8129-9315-8

  eBook ISBN 978-0-679-64470-5

  1. Sand, George, 1804–1876—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.E6996D73 2014

  813′.54—dc23 2014043629

  eBook ISBN 9780679644705

  www.atrandom.com

  eBook design adapted from printed book design by Barbara M. Bachman

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover image: De Agostini/A. Dagli Orti

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2: July 1804

  Chapter 3: January 1831

  Chapter 4: January 1805

  Chapter 5: May 1808

  Chapter 6: January 1831

  Chapter 7: July 1808

  Chapter 8: February 1831

  Chapter 9: September 1808

  Chapter 10: February 1831

  Chapter 11: September 1808

  Chapter 12: April 1831

  Chapter 13: October 1808

  Chapter 14: July 1831

  Chapter 15: September 1831

  Chapter 16: July 1810

  Chapter 17: January 1832

  Chapter 18: April 1832

  Chapter 19: Winter 1813

  Chapter 20: August 1832

  Chapter 21: November 1832

  Chapter 22: October 1817

  Chapter 23: January 1833

  Chapter 24: November 1817

  Chapter 25: January 1818

  Chapter 26: February 1833

  Chapter 27: March 1820

  Chapter 28: May 1820

  Chapter 29: February 1833

  Chapter 30: September 1821

  Chapter 31: March 1833

  Chapter 32: January 1822

  Chapter 33: March 1833

  Chapter 34: March 1822

  Chapter 35: June 1833

  Chapter 36: June 1833

  Chapter 37: April 1822

  Chapter 38: June 1833

  Chapter 39: September 1822

  Chapter 40: July 1833

  Chapter 41: Spring 1824

  Chapter 42: August 1833

  Chapter 43: December 1833

  Chapter 44: Spring 1825

  Chapter 45: June 1825

  Chapter 46: December 1833

  Chapter 47: September 1825

  Chapter 48: Fall 1826

  Chapter 49: December 1830

  Chapter 50: January 1831

  Chapter 51: September 1834

  Chapter 52: October 1834

  Chapter 53: December 1834

  Chapter 54: May 1836

  Chapter 55: October 1836

  Chapter 56: January 1837

  Chapter 57: August 1837

  Chapter 58: June 1838

  Chapter 59: November 1838

  Chapter 60: May 1839

  Chapter 61: September 1839

  Chapter 62: July 1844

  Chapter 63: February 1847

  Chapter 64: June 1847

  Chapter 65: July 1847

  Chapter 66: May 1848

  Chapter 67: October 1849

  Chapter 68: February 1866

  Chapter 69: April 1873

  Afterword

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Elizabeth Berg

  About the Author

  The finest female genius of any country or age.

  —Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  She is beyond doubt or comparison the strongest woman and the most astonishingly gifted.

  —Franz Liszt

  When my submission has been claimed, no longer in the name of love and friendship but by reason of some right or power, I have drawn upon the strength that is buried in my nature, I have straightened my shoulders and thrown off the yoke. I alone know the latent force hidden within me. I alone know how much I grieve and suffer and love.

  —George Sand

  April 1873

  COUNTRY ESTATE AT NOHANT

  CENTRAL FRANCE

  In the dining room, the men are eating roses. The small bouquet I placed at the table’s center will soon be naked stems. A wreath of cigar smoke hangs in the air above my guests’ heads, moving ever upward toward the Venetian glass chandelier, where the pink and turquoise colors will give in further to the dimming of their clarity.

  The men—Gustave Flaubert, Ivan Turgenev, Alexandre Dumas fils, and my darling son, Maurice—are pushed back in their velvet chairs, sated; and the conversation has gone languorous. But not for long! Soon we will be dancing, singing, playing at charades, and making a great deal of noise, though Gustave will no doubt sulk and complain that we have too quickly turned our attentions away from literature, his raison d’être. The rest of us—Ivan especially—greatly enjoy the kind of raucousness that takes us back to the easy pleasures of childhood. I love doing my work and the reverie it requires, but too much contemplation turns to melancholy, and gaiety must then come to the rescue.

  Before we begin our evening’s amusements, our puppet show and readings and bagatelles, I have sought the out-of-doors and a temporary reprieve from my role as hostess. I stand now in a mantilla of shade, beneath a tree here so long its mere presence dwarfs the idle happenings or musings of those who seek out its shelter.

  The light is amber, the air still; the daylilies have folded in on themselves. Soon the hooded blue of dusk will fall, followed by the darkness of night and the sky writing of the stars, indecipherable to us mortals, despite our attempts to force narrative upon them.

  I sense the beginning of my end. At random moments I find myself in sudden need of an intense privacy. Then I excuse myself from my own table, from the trilling conversation in the bookshop, from the darkened theater or the street market, with its bins of fish and chard. I stand somewhere alone to calm myself, to draw breaths past the knot in my chest. I lose focus of my surroundings in order to accommodate a more compelling vision in which I undress my life, searching for the vital place, the beating heart of what I most truly was and am.

  I am in agreement with Goethe, who said that every day one ought to “hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.” I would add to this the need to love. Without it, the rest is dust.

  January 1831

  NOHANT

  Outside, I heard the crunch of gravel as the horses pulled into the driveway. I moved to the window and saw the driver climb down to open t
he carriage door, then stand aside to wait for me. The morning sky was a dull gray, leaking pale yellow light here and there; thick clouds hung low. I picked up the small bag I had packed; I was not taking much. Later, after I had moved from the pied-à-terre on Rue de Seine that my half brother was reluctantly lending me and into my own place, I would send for my things.

  The horses’ breath rose up in the air as nearly solid-looking columns of white, and the driver in his heavy coat shivered. I must go, I thought, and took one last look around the bedroom, disallowing myself any sense of sorrow.

  I descended the winding staircase. It was so oddly quiet, the children—seven-year-old Maurice and two-year-old Solange—off with the servants, no sounds coming from the halls or the drawing room or the dining room or even the kitchen. It was as though the house were holding its breath. I missed my children already, though my husband, Casimir, and I had arranged to alternate caring for them.

  When I opened the front door to go out, I saw Casimir, standing coatless on the porch. I raised my chin and moved quickly past him. He kept his arms crossed and made no move to touch me. The driver hesitated, looking to my husband for direction. Casimir nodded brusquely, and the driver put out his hand to help me into the carriage.

  Once I was settled, I tightened my gloves and leaned my head out the window to speak to Casimir. “You should go inside. You must be cold.”

  “I am not.” But clearly he was.

  “Well, then. Au revoir.”

  “You will write to me immediately upon your arrival in Paris,” Casimir said.

  I nodded, then faced forward and rapped on the wall of the carriage to let the driver know I was ready to go. The vehicle lurched forward, as did I. There was in it a moment of indignity, nearly comedic—a feeling that I had lost my balance. But I had not.

  We rolled slowly through the gates of the estate, and then the driver turned the carriage onto the main road, made a clicking sound, and the horses began a rapid trot. When we passed the cemetery that lay directly to our right, I looked over at the graves of my father and my grandmother. I thought about the ways in which one is shaped, starting from birth and even before, into the person one becomes. One cannot stand isolated from those who came before him, and fate decrees that there are many other things over which one has no control. Yet if one has courage and resolve, there are ways to make changes in one’s life.

  I pushed my hand into my valise to rest it upon the manuscript I had tucked in there—a novel I had completed, called Aimée, which I intended to show to a publisher with whom I had a connection through a mutual friend. I would need to find a way to support myself, for the allowance of 250 francs a month that Casimir would be giving me would not go far in a city where I had been told one needed at least 25,000 a year to live. I had inherited most of the money we had, as well as the house here at Nohant, but the law stipulated that my husband controlled both.

  A light snow began to fall, then rapidly intensified. I kept my hand upon the pages, closed my eyes, and gave myself over to my thoughts. Into my head came the sounds of violin music, my father playing on the day I was born.

  My father’s name was Maurice Dupin. His great-grandfather was Augustus II, king of Poland; and his grandfather was Maurice de Koenigsmark, later called the Maréchal de Saxe when he was the most exalted field marshal in Napoleon’s army. This maréchal was renowned not only for his cunning and bravery upon the battlefield but for a particular kind of bonhomie he demonstrated in war. For instance, he commonly arranged for women and theater for himself and his men to enjoy after a good day of battle—never, he believed, would they appreciate such things more. All of France knew his name.

  And so it was in my father’s blood, his great love of the military, and he joined the army in 1798, when he was twenty years old, never mind his mother twisting her handkerchief. Two years later, he was transferred to Milan, Italy, as an aide-de-camp, and it was there that he met my mother.

  She was Antoinette-Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, called Sophie, a courtesan currently living with a general who’d been smitten by her great beauty, her passion, and her gaiety. As was my father. He stole her away from the general, apparently with little ill will, for he was later promoted.

  In many letters written to his mother at this time, my father spoke of his love for his fine mistress, and my grandmother worried and fretted, frightened to death that her son might marry someone so far beneath him. She knew that my mother was four years older than Maurice and of a lower class, born to a poor man who sold songbirds on the quays of the Seine, and that in addition to working as a camp follower, she had a young daughter. It was not the match my grandmother had in mind for her beloved son.

  There was in this no small measure of hypocrisy. My grandmother may have had illustrious aristocrats in her family, but she came from a long line of illegitimate births, including her father’s. And she herself was illegitimate—her mother, ironically, was a courtesan who had captured the Maréchal de Saxe’s attention.

  My father went on to distinguish himself in battle, as his grandfather had, but then he was captured by the enemy and held for two months as a prisoner of war. In May 1801, after his release, he returned home to my grandmother at Nohant. His normally buoyant personality had changed; he had about him an air of melancholy. One would expect such a change after a man is subjected to the ills of imprisonment—vile treatment, near starvation, and only straw upon the ground for a bed. Add to this the mental distress of my father coming to understand that he was perhaps not destined always to be lucky, as he had often told his mother—he was as vulnerable as anyone else. But what beleaguered my father most in those days was the thought that he would have to choose between two women, both of whom he loved.

  My grandmother had been my father’s only parent since, when he was nine years old, his father died, leaving the little family enough of a fortune that my grandmother had a comfortable yearly income. In 1793, when the eleven months of the Reign of Terror began and the ruling Jacobins were ordering mass executions by guillotine in order to compel obedience to the state, she had fled her apartment in Paris and bought a peaceful country estate 150 miles south of the city. It was in the Berry region, a gently hilly, largely agricultural area of central France, and the estate lay just outside the little village of Nohant-Vic, population 272. Nohant was situated between the larger towns of Châteauroux and La Châtre.

  The house itself, done in the style of Louis XVI, was commodious without being ostentatious. It had once been the site of a fourteenth-century feudal castle, and the bell tower still stood, its dusty, tile-lined belfry serving as a gathering place for doves. On the estate’s acreage were the smaller houses of peasants, tenant farmers who worked the land. With its fields, expansive gardens, acres of forests, and the Indre River running through it, it was a beautiful place in which to grow up.

  In the absence of his own father, my father displayed toward his mother the protective attitude that is understandable in such situations. Their correspondence to each other revealed a mutual affection and appreciation as well as a deep level of trust; and oftentimes the language my father used in expressing his longing to see his mother bordered more than a little on the romantic.

  But Sophie! Literally from the time my father first saw her, he was obsessed with her. He had had plenty of opportunities to delight in the charms of highborn, beautiful, and cultured women. Sophie offered something different, something more. He—and many others, I might add—found her irresistible. The more time he spent with her, the more his love intensified.

  After he’d been released from prison, my father had gone to see Sophie in Paris. At that time, she was again living with a general, but she begged my father to take her with him when he went back to Nohant. Because he was at that point a penniless soldier (he did not then or ever like to rely upon his mother for his support), she even offered to lend him money to fund the trip. My father’s response was that my mother should think carefully and without his influence about whe
ther she truly wanted to be with him, leaving behind a man who kept her in a manner most comfortable. My father’s charm would not buy bread.

  It took almost no time for my mother to make her decision: she elected to throw in her lot with my father, the man she truly loved. And so the two of them set out for Nohant.

  My father had a plan: rather than introducing the two women right away, he would set Sophie up three miles away in La Châtre, at an inn called the Tête Noire. When the time was right, he would make the introduction.

  After he spent a few days at Nohant, my father began disappearing for long stretches of time, telling his mother he was visiting relatives. But she suspected he was seeing a woman and finally confronted her son.

  My father admitted that it was Sophie he was seeing, that he was keeping her at the inn. He said, “She has sacrificed everything in order to be with me. I am full of gratitude toward her, full of joy that she has chosen to be by my side.”

  My grandmother’s feelings were hardly the same. Bosom heaving, lace cockade trembling at the top of her head, she told her son that she refused to meet Sophie. She berated him for the scandal such a woman’s presence would cause and requested that he immediately send Sophie back to Paris, without him.

  “For so many long days and nights I turned away food, I could not sleep, for worry about you,” she told him. “I rejoiced that when you came home on leave you would be with me until you had to return to the service. Now even when you are with me, you are not; your thoughts are always with her. Please, I beg you, send her away; give yourself time to think carefully about your future!”

  My father’s response was uncharacteristically strident. “You ask me to turn her away as though she were a vulgar mistress, when I tell you over and over again that in fact I adore her! Was it not you who made me an acolyte of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who said that we are all born good and capable of self-improvement? Have you not all your life taught me to appreciate the noble attributes of people regardless of their class?”

  My grandmother only stared at him, helpless to explain the difference between what is in a mother’s head and what is in her heart.