The Dream Lover: A Novel of George Sand Page 9

  “I know what is best for me! And that is to live with my mother! Look into my eyes and tell me you do not agree.”

  For a long time, she did look at me. Then she said, “All right, all right! I have thought of a solution. You know I can make charming hats and that I used to be a milliner. I’m going to save some money and open my own shop. Why not? It will not be in Paris—that would be too expensive. Instead, I’ll start my place in Orléans, where I worked before. You and Caroline can help me. We will have many customers; we will make enough money to keep ourselves comfortable. In time, you will have enough of a dowry to marry a worker like yourself, who no doubt will make you happier than the namby-pambies your grandmother would pair you with. You are full of passion, like me; you should marry your equal in that respect.”

  “A hat shop, yes, the most wonderful hat shop!” I cried, and my mother put her fingers to her lips to silence me.

  “You must tell no one,” she said. “And you must be patient—can you do that for me? For us!”

  “I can. But how long before I can come with you? How many days?”

  She frowned. “Is this your display of patience? Starting right now, show me what forbearance is in you. Trust in me. Be a good girl for your grandmama, do all she says, and soon you will no longer have to listen to her at all.”

  I was enormously relieved and spent the rest of the day happily amusing myself, imagining days at the store, evenings in the small but charming place where my mother, my sister, and I would live.

  But that night, while I lay in bed listening to the voices below, doubt crept in. My mother had displayed a great deal of sadness when she’d kissed me good night, and I feared she had changed her mind and would not honor her words; instead, she would go away and gradually forget about me. I rose from bed and by the light of my candle wrote her a letter that was an outpouring of my feelings. I asked her to come to my room and tell me again that she would do all that she had promised.

  After I had finished, I crept into the hall and down to her bedroom. Hanging on the wall of that room was a pencil drawing of my grandfather, and as it was not a very flattering portrait (it had been done in his old age, when he was fat and jowly), it had been put in a place where, when the door was open, it was hidden. I put my letter behind it. Included in it was a request that my mother leave her response here as well. Then I found her nightcap, put a note in it telling her to move the portrait to look for a note from me, and put her nightcap on her pillow.

  After that, I could not sleep, and when I heard my mother go into her bedroom, I went there. She was sitting at the edge of the bed with my letter in her hands, and her eyes were full of tears. I ran into her arms, fearful of her telling me that my suspicions were correct: she was leaving me forever. It was not as bad as all that, but she did confess to feeling a terrible sense of ambivalence. Once again, I employed all my gifts as an orator—even at six years old, I knew I could be quite persuasive—and begged her to follow through on her plans for taking me with her. Finally, she agreed again to our plan.

  “Put it in writing,” I said. Not for nothing had I heard the negotiations that had gone on when my mother signed the contract giving up her rights to me. I wanted something binding as well, and I also wanted something I could read and reread to boost my spirits while I waited for her to come for me.

  “I shall write it,” my mother said, “but not now. It is late—you should be asleep. Come, I will tuck you in and kiss you good night and you will have beautiful dreams.”

  When she tucked me in, she sat for longer than usual at the side of my bed. She was quiet, holding my hands in hers.

  “Don’t forget to write the letter,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, in the morning.”

  “Promise me with all your heart.”

  “I promise,” she said and kissed me once more, then crept out of my room. I lay awake for some time, then closed my eyes, certain I had done all I could.

  In the morning, I missed her leave-taking; I had slept through it. I ran to her room, where there was still the indentation of her head on the pillow of her unmade bed. I lay down and put my head where hers had been, my heart aching. Then I remembered the letter she had promised to write: there would be her words, her inviolable promise.

  I went to the portrait and, with my heart banging in my chest, moved it slightly to the side. Nothing there. Perhaps it had fallen? I looked on the floor: nothing. I looked everywhere in the room, but there was no letter.

  Rose, my mother’s maid, came in to clean the room. I sat dry-eyed in a chair and watched her strip the bed, air out the mattress, and then close the shutters.

  I dressed and had breakfast, and then I heard my grandmother in the parlor, clapping her hands, which is how she signaled to me that it was time for my lessons. I turned to go to her obediently but with a heart full of bitterness.

  January 1832

  PARIS

  In winter, when I returned again to Paris, it was with the novel I had produced without Jules while I was at Nohant. I wrote Indiana all of a piece, in a kind of trance, from a place deep within me. I had no outline; I had no idea where I was going. It was only when I was finished that I saw what I had been about: I wanted to speak of my horror of enslavement, and the way I chose to do it was to write a domestic novel, a novel of manners.

  The story centers on Indiana, a woman who is sold into marriage, and her unhappiness with a husband who essentially uses and then ignores her, then a lover she takes who does the same. It featured passionate encounters and suicidal pacts and a woman who drowns herself in her despair after a love affair gone wrong. The material was weighted with feelings I had about love and marriage—and Casimir—that I had been loath or unable to articulate. But in the form of fiction, those feelings revealed themselves clearly.

  Characters who had been vague suggestions before I began writing—who had revealed themselves only as shadows behind a screen, whose voices were indistinct murmurs in my ears—came alive upon the page. Contrary to accusations that were leveled against me after the book’s publication, however, those characters were not anyone I knew. Parts of Indiana were like me; other parts were not. Some of the other characters were inspired by people I knew but were filled out in ways that were not like people I knew at all. The story had gone its own way.

  Once I began opening myself to the truth of one idea through the steady stream of ink upon the page, there was nothing for it but to open myself to all the secrets of my unconscious. Night after night, I wrote steadily for long hours; pages fell to the floor and covered the carpet like snow. It was typical for me to write twenty pages at a session.

  When at last I finished the book, I gathered up the pages and stacked them into a neat pile whose height surprised me. Outside, the sun shone and the birds were singing; I had written all night. My fingers were stiff, my back ached, my shoulders, too. Yet I felt awakened from a deep sleep, energized, right with the world, and fully birthed into the proper profession. It might have pleased me if I had known at that time that, between the years of 1832 and 1835, I would have ten novels published, and in my lifetime, more than eighty.

  But that day I left my study and called for my children, and when they came running to me, they embraced me with joy. I bent to kiss the tops of their heads and thought, There, you see? You make yourself happy, and they are happy, too.

  April 1832

  OFFICES OF J.-P. RORET ET H. DUPUY

  PARIS

  I had sold Indiana to the publisher Henri Dupuy, and it was soon to be released. I needed a new pen name, and now I sat with Dupuy to talk about what that name should be.

  I could not use my married name, but neither could I use my maiden name. My mother feared shame coming to the family if I did so, and to herself in particular. It was very common for women who were relaxed about their own morals to want the heroines in their novels to cleave to another standard. My mother, the former courtesan, wanted the books she read to be “clean.” I had shown her the manus
cript, and she had taken dramatic exception to the risqué passages. “Of course you must not entertain any thought of using the name Dupin!” she said, and I did not argue.

  I sat in my publisher’s office trying to think of possibilities, all men’s names. I knew full well the value of not using a woman’s name—the work would not be taken seriously, for one.

  “The name Sand is recognizable now,” Dupuy said, “because of the success of your Rose et Blanche. You would do well to keep it; it could help sales. Why not simply change the first initial?”

  My editor at the paper, Henri Latouche, had suggested the same thing.

  I got up and moved to the window to look out at the busy street below. The sound of English rose up; a man was speaking rather loudly to the woman on his arm. I turned around suddenly with an idea.

  “G,” I said.

  “G for…?”

  “George.”

  “Good. Georges it is.”

  “No, George. The English spelling.”

  “Why English?”

  “I like it.” In truth, it was a nod toward the English spoken in the convent school my grandmother had sent me to, hoping for a refinement of my manners. George was also the name of my favorite poet, George Gordon, called Lord Byron. And george was the Greek word for “farmer,” and so in that way I could honor Nohant.

  “Very well: Indiana, by G. Sand.” He looked over at me, squinting. “George. It suits you.”

  I bowed. “I agree.”

  When the first copy of the book arrived at my apartment, Latouche happened to be there. We were out on my balcony, appreciating the unusually warm day. There was a knock on the door. I answered and found a package tied with string.

  I tore the paper off the book and, breathless with joy, examined it: the front, the back, the spine, the endpapers, the even lines of print upon the pages. Then I inscribed it to Latouche and went out to the balcony to hand it to him with a flourish.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “My novel!”

  He flipped through a few pages, then a few more. He read with his eyebrows furrowed, a scowl on his face. “But this is nothing more than a pastiche!” he said. “I must say, you owe a great deal to Balzac.”

  His words stung, but I said nothing. I appreciated the fact that he was always honest.

  The next day, however, he sent a note telling me something altogether different. He had stayed up all night to read my book. He praised my originality and even went so far as to say that Mérimée and Balzac suffered in comparison to the author of Indiana.

  As for Balzac, he had become a friend to Jules and me; and after I mailed him a copy of the book, he sent a note saying he had read the preface and found it “well written and full of sense, but as I had to work, I wanted to hold out against my pleasure, and to judge by the samples I have read, I considered it very dangerous for my imagination.”

  This ran counter to his behavior when he came huffing and puffing up the stairs to see us. He would boldly pick up pages of whatever Jules and I were working on and, without asking permission, read them. Then he would launch into a long-winded discussion of whatever he was writing. But he ended his note by adding, “It has given me great pleasure to see my friend G. Sand launched, and I shall give him my opinion about the book once read.” I knew Balzac read very few other books because he was so busy with his own, and so I found this very flattering.

  The arrival of the book into stores brought me overwhelming success literally overnight. It was astonishing. For several weeks, I could barely take in all that had happened—one critic called my book “the masterpiece of the century,” which prompted none other than a jealous Victor Hugo to ask, if my book was a masterpiece, “what did that make his Notre-Dame de Paris, a whore?” Hugo was a god to me; to be noticed by him even to be insulted was more than I ever could have hoped for.

  No matter that we were in the midst of a cholera epidemic; people flocked to bookstores to buy Indiana. It sold out time and again, even after multiple printings.

  The critics (all male) gave me favorable reviews. Gustave Planche, who was called Gustave the Cruel for the contempt with which he treated writers, praised my “eloquence of the heart,” my limpid style. Some critics took exception to my portrayal of marriage as a union that turned women into “domestic animals,” but I was also compared to Balzac, for my unstinting way of showing the reality behind the illusion. And to think that before we became friends and colleagues, I had once said that I would walk ten miles just to see Balzac pass by!

  There was a kind of androgynous quality in my work that was commented upon: it was said that I had feminized the hero but that certain harsh passages revealed a masculine mind at work. At first, I took umbrage; then I laughed at this observation. It was, after all, not so surprising that when a woman had written a book completely by herself, men were still given credit for it.

  For the most part, women were galvanized by reading the book. They seemed to intuit what a man’s intellect could not let them fully understand, something I had tried to explain in the preface:

  Indiana is a type. She is woman, the weak creature who is given the task of portraying passions repressed, or, if you prefer, suppressed by the law. She is desire at grips with necessity; she is love dashing her blind head against all the obstacles of civilization. But the serpent wears out his teeth and breaks them when he tries to gnaw a file. The powers of the soul become exhausted when they try to struggle against the realities of life.

  Naturally, I was grateful for my success. But aspects of it were strange and uncomfortable. I did not like the reporters who sought me out and often came to my door—I could not speak the way I could write, and to be peppered with questions made me wish I were a tortoise who could withdraw into a built-in hiding place. And it was not just reporters but admirers who came as well. One woman asked what I thought about as I wrote the novel. I said that I thought about it. “Ah,” she said. “So you cannot think when you are writing?”

  Anyone in Paris who achieved a great deal of success could not maintain their privacy. Many people knocked on my door asking for money, and some of them came up with stories far better than I ever could for why they needed it. At first, I fell for many of the ruses; later I learned to be more discerning. But I would often worry that I had missed one who legitimately deserved my help.

  It was also discomfiting to be approached on the street by a stranger as though he or she were a friend. When I had read the philosophers and poets who seemed to have a clear sight line into my heart and soul, I used to think that if I could meet them, we would admire each other; we would be companions, we would want to spend time together.

  Now I saw the error of that kind of thinking. Now I understood that a poet whose words sent me into a kind of rapture was also a man whose soup dripped from his beard. A human being writes the book, but what writes for him or her is more spirit than physical being, and that spirit lives only in solitude.

  There was nothing I wanted to say about Indiana; I had already said it in the book. But in keeping with my publisher’s wishes, I did speak about it, to the best of my ability.

  I was able to parlay my success with my first novel into a contract with another publisher, François Buloz, which would oblige me to make a contribution every six weeks to his Revue des Deux Mondes. This was originally a travel and foreign affairs journal with a mild and inoffensive tone. With Buloz in charge, though, it was to become a link between France and the United States, and it would now focus on culture, politics, and economics. I would earn four thousand francs a year, and I could continue to write novels, as well. In fact, I had a contract for my as yet unfinished second novel, one of many books I would set in the Berry countryside, to which I gave the fictional name Black Valley. I negotiated it myself, and it gave me twice the amount I had received for Indiana—three thousand francs. I was suddenly wealthy from money I had earned myself, and it was exhilarating. I decided that, henceforth, I would use my full pen name on m
y books: George Sand. And I would use it not only for my books but in my personal life.

  With a guaranteed salary, I could now afford to bring my children to live with me in Paris. Casimir had decided upon military school for Maurice, who would soon be turning nine. I didn’t like the idea; I wept until my eyes were red over it because I did not believe that a boy as sensitive as Maurice belonged there. But even though Maurice begged to live with me, Casimir exercised his legal authority and said no; it was military school for our son. My rage was buried beneath the dull weight of helplessness. What could I do? It was only three-year-old Solange who would be joining me.

  Though I was happy to have her, I knew that my life would change when she was there. I knew it might be difficult to give her the attention she was entitled to and do my work as well. But it had taken hold of me now, the trade of authorship; there was no going back. I hoped both my children would come to understand what I was doing—if not now, in time.

  —

  LIVING WITH ME IN PARIS, Solange, I had thought, might become someone my artist and journalist friends would find enchanting, amusing, someone they might help me raise. Jules did help raise her: he adored Solange and delighted in telling me stories about what she had said and done. Once, when he took her on a walk to the Jardin des Plantes to see the giraffe, she told him straight-faced that there were many giraffes at Nohant and that they ate from her hand. He found that fabrication utterly charming. Other friends played children’s games with Solange, coddled her, spoiled her with treats of one sort or another.

  She was a very different child from Maurice. Already I could see how they would develop: Maurice would be like a strong woman, resembling me much more than Solange did; she would be like an unsuccessful man. She did not have the sensitivity of Maurice, nor did she profit from his powers of observation or his natural tendencies toward kindness and patience. She was extremely willful and seemed to take a perverse delight in hurting people’s feelings. No matter our love for each other, no matter the times I missed her only moments after she had gone out with Jules or another friend; from a very early age Solange was a child at war within herself and with me.