December 1833

VENICE, ITALY

When Alfred de Musset and I traveled from Paris to Italy, I was well until we reached Genoa. There, I became aware of feeling feverish. I also had stomach pains but did not want to mention them to Alfred. But that night, there was no hiding the fact that I had dysentery. Alfred had wanted to see the ballet and did nothing to hide his disappointment that we could not go. I told him to go alone, that I would be all right without him. I made that selfless offer hoping he would refuse it, but he took me up on it and returned at such a late hour that I was sure he had done more than watch women dance. I was too sick to care.

In the morning, I was far from recovered, but well enough to travel. We were driven down the coast to Pisa, which I saw through a kind of fog. By evening, when we were in the hotel and Alfred asked whether I would prefer next to go to Rome or to Venice, I no longer cared. “Flip a coin,” I told him, feeling as though I were speaking from the bottom of a barrel.

He did flip a coin: heads for Rome, tails for Venice, and it came up tails. Then he flipped it again, for good measure: Venice. He flipped it seven times in all, and it came up Venice every time. He lay on the bed beside me and kissed my forehead. “It seems it is our destiny to go to Venice! That means we can visit Florence on the way.” He began to list all the sites we would visit in that historic city. I did not hear them all; I fell into a sound sleep, from which I hoped to awaken refreshed and well.

In the morning, I felt better, although weak and a bit unsteady on my feet. When we arrived in Florence, we saw far too many museums and churches for the state of my health, but I did not want to complain.

When we finally arrived at Mestre, that mainland part of Venice on the Adriatic, it was ten o’clock at night, and I nearly wept with relief to learn that we were one gondola ride away from the Albergo Reale. This was a beautiful hotel that had once been a palazzo, and I had booked us a two-bedroom apartment there. We climbed into the hooded black gondola, which in my state reminded me of nothing so much as a coffin. There were curtains that provided privacy to riders, and were I feeling better, I would have covered my lover with kisses. As it was, Alfred drew the curtains aside and I lay against the colorful eiderdown cushions, watching the world glide by. Even in my condition, I was dazzled by the sight of the city: the rising of the moon over the still waters, the domes and terraces and the intricate fretwork. In the darkness there, the sky held on to blue, and the stars shone down with a different kind of luster.

Our rooms at the hotel were magnificent. We had our own ornate balcony, high Gothic windows looking out over the quay and the lagoon, and a blue-wallpapered drawing room complete with piano. I fell gratefully into bed and prayed for a complete recovery so that we could enjoy this place together.

—

FOR SEVERAL DAYS, I felt well and we enjoyed exploring the sites. The city, though toned down from its previous independent status and Byronic lasciviousness by the straitlaced Austrian government, was still a delight. It was like a Turner painting come to life; and the changing colors of the sky alone were enough to provide ample entertainment. Add to that the delicious character of the Venetians (what joy to hear the gondoliers exchange insults about each other’s circumstances of birth and then, once safely separated by a significant distance, vow to murder one another using their oars as weapons!), the sumptuousness of the food, the muted roar of the Adriatic crashing onto the shores of the Lido, the cannon shot that announced a new day, followed by the tolling of the church bells, and one felt that one did not want ever to leave.

At night, I lay in the arms of my lover, soothed into sleep by recalling the wheeling seagulls I had seen against a cobalt-blue sky, or the towers and domes of the city whose silhouette at night suggested a kind of magical forest, or the little lights that beckoned at the end of the canalettos.

Then I woke with a crippling migraine, which plagued me off and on for days. A physician named Pietro Pagello was called to bleed me, which offered some relief. But the bleeding did nothing to affect the attitude of my lover, who had become distinctly unloving. He sat slouched in a chair and pouted one evening as I lay resting on the bed before dinner, saying it was frustrating and dispiriting traveling with someone who was sick all the time. My response was an aggrieved silence. Had I not given him permission to go out alone and enjoy himself? All I had asked was that he stay away from gambling at the Lido. But did he honor that request? No, and then I had to beg Buloz to send me money to cover his debts.

He stood abruptly. “Let us at least go to La Fenice tonight,” he said. “All you will have to do is sit up straight in a chair and listen to music. Do you think you can manage that?”

“I have no desire to see opera that will pale next to that which I see regularly in Paris,” I said. “What I can manage, as you put it, is dinner in the hotel, which I would hope to enjoy with the man who purports to love me—the same man who is traipsing around Venice in the footsteps of his heroes, Byron and Shelley, in search of inspiration, which has so far eluded him, and whose efforts—or lack thereof—are being financed by me! We’ve been gone for over a month, and you have produced nothing!”

His face turned bitter. “I wondered how long it would take for your anger to show. Well then, as long as you have seen fit to speak your mind, I shall do the same. Let me bare my soul to you, as you are always insisting you want me to do.

“I feel I have made a mistake, George, and that I do not love you after all. What I have experienced with you on this trip would make anyone understand why I have come to this conclusion. Rooms reeking from gastric assaults and a woman who cannot bear the unearthly beautiful light of this place because her head hurts and, when she does feel marginally well, holds back in love because of some prudish nature she heretofore had not revealed. I want spicy, wild sex, not this! The only thing you are passionate about is locking yourself up at night and writing your precious fiction, ignoring all that is before you here, which, if you would pay attention to it, would make your stories infinitely richer! You write on demand, like a parlor trick, and expect me to do the same. But I require inspiration to write, and inspiration comes from living life!” He took a breath after this long-winded barrage, then spoke quietly: “No, I do not think I am made for this.”

It was as if I had been shot in the chest. I sat wide-eyed, unmoving.

“I’m going out,” he said, and he left. I did not see him for days. I waited, and I worked. Parlor trick! No, it was survival.

When Alfred finally appeared again one morning, he looked terrible. He was feverish and pale and said that he believed he had contracted a social disease. No doubt he had, but this was more than that. Any anger I held toward him fell away; he was the man I loved and the precious son of the woman to whom I had made a promise to care for him. He and I were stranded here together. In his gay times, he belonged to all; in illness, he had only me.

I sat him on the balcony in the sun and covered him with a blanket. I arranged for food to be sent up, but he could eat nothing. That night, he was delirious, sweating, occasionally leaping out of bed and moving monsterlike about the room, naked and yelling at the top of his lungs. He was a small man, not much taller than I, but when I tried to restrain him, I failed. All I could do was hang back in fright and wait for the episode to pass.

The next day was even worse; his skin burned to the touch, and he was barely responsive. I called upon the hotel staff to help me, to once more send a doctor to our apartment. Pagello came again and diagnosed typhoid fever. “He is dangerously ill, madame,” he said. “I feel I must stay here with him.”

And so Pagello and I together stayed at Musset’s bedside for eight days and nights. I did not leave him even to change my clothes. I kept close to him, alert to his every move.

When Musset slept, Pagello and I often talked in whispers; we had need of passing the time in some way other than regarding the rise and fall of our patient’s chest.

Musset was ill for weeks. After the critical first week, Pagello began coming only twice a day, in the morning and in the evening. I began to look forward to these visits very much. I knew he found me attractive: in one of our low-voiced conversations, he had told me he had seen me the first day I was there, sitting out on the balcony with Alfred, smoking. “You were wearing a scarlet turban, and that is what at first attracted my attention. But then I saw your eyes, and I could not move. I asked my companion, ‘Who is that woman?’ When I learned you were the great writer, I was further impressed.” I looked away and did not respond, but I confess that his words felt comforting, in the wake of the tongue-lashing I had been given by Alfred. In addition to that, Pagello was a very handsome man, with wavy hair and large, expressive eyes and a gentle voice. He was rumored to be much in demand by the women of the city.

Once when Musset lay sleeping, Pagello pulled me gently onto his lap and kissed me. I did not resist him. It was such pleasant relief from my role as nursemaid, and in any case, Musset and I were through—had he not told me as much? Eventually, the handsome doctor and I began spending time together in the room adjoining Alfred’s, each of us attuned to any sound that might come from our patient. I luxuriated in the attentions of a stable, even-tempered, and practical man who was a gifted healer in more ways than one.

One night, as Pagello and I sat talking in low tones, we heard Alfred raging, making accusations about Pagello seducing me. I rushed to his bedside and told him that the doctor and I were just talking—about him! Alfred was right in what he suspected, of course. But I did not feel I could admit to these altogether justified transgressions when he was still so ill.

By the time Alfred fully recovered, in mid-March, I was convinced that I was in love with Pagello. And so when my old lover attempted to renew our physical relationship, I wanted no part of it. I would not then or ever be involved with more than one man at a time.

Alfred and I made plans for him to go back to Paris. I told him I would accompany him to Mestre, then bid him adieu. I would stay on in Venice another few months, to finish my novel.

Now the shoe was on the other foot. Alfred said he was resigned to my decision, but with his wounded eyes, his sorrowful smiles and his frequent sighs, he seemed devastated. In a letter he sent me first thing upon arriving in Paris, he told me he had gone to my apartment and put to his lips a cigarette that, on the evening of our departure, I had smoked half of, then stubbed out in a flowered saucer. He had smoked the rest of it, and he told me it was because he had wanted to feel what I had felt; he had wanted, in this strange and long-distance way, to have the feel of my lips on his.

He wrote that he had been wrong to say he did not love me, for he did; and he ached in his despair at having lost me. But because he loved me, he said, he would wish me well in my new relationship. He knew I would not be returning to Paris until August, and he hoped he might see me then, even if it was in the company of my new lover. He thanked me for finding him a child and making him a man.

When his letter arrived at the hotel, I read it on the balcony and then bowed my head and wept. For from the moment he departed, I had missed him. It came to me that I was able to love Pagello only as counterpoint to Musset.

But when I looked up, I was soothed by the beauty around me. In late afternoon, the light turned the lagoon into liquid copper. Every day, I could hear the songs of the gondoliers and the cries of the fishermen and the good-natured arguing by housewives over the price of melons. There were beautiful gowns and exotic masks worn at balls, lavender clouds at sunset. I could take walks in narrow alleys or lie back in a gondola for an evening ride that passed beneath the Bridge of Sighs. From the window behind the desk where I wrote at night, I could see lambent lights reflected in the dark waters, the luminescence seeming to ride the waves; and on foggy nights, veils of mist rose and swirled on journeys of their own. Spring was coming soon, and Pagello had said the moss would turn emerald green, flowers would overflow from the balconies, and the caged nightingales people kept there would sing.

—

IN JUNE, I DELIVERED my latest novel, Jacques, to Buloz. I also penned an essay, “A Letter from Venice,” to be published in the Revue. Then, in fourteen days, I wrote a novella called Leone Leoni. It featured a character based on Musset who was extremely complicated, to put it kindly, but also divine, and another character based on Pagello, whom I described as a simple savior. Buloz, particularly captivated by the character based on Musset, said it was the “strongest and most vigorous” character I had ever written. The praise sat uneasily in me, for I had drawn more heavily on a real person for that character’s portrayal than I ever had before. What would all of my readers in Paris make of this thinly disguised Musset?

I considered not publishing the book after all. But then I decided that, like it or not, this was unalterably my profession. Love, hate, betrayal, adoration, deceit, truth, lies—it was all grist for the mill. It took many years for me to learn that all need not be—indeed should not be—said. But by then, of course, much ink was out of the bottle, and one could not pour published lines back into it.

At the end of July, I made my way back to Paris. But I was miserable there. Without a love relationship, I found the city cold, even mocking. I could find no comfort, even in my work. In desperation, I decided to go to Nohant.

It was not my turn to be at the estate, and so Casimir would be there as well. Ironic, I thought, to be fleeing Paris and going back to the husband I had so decisively left on that January day three years ago.

All the way back to Nohant, I stared out the window at the landscape, taking the most private of inventories, wondering if I should have done anything differently, reviewing again the slow fall that had led Casimir and me to the place we found ourselves in now. I thought of Aurélien and Cauterets, and all that had come to pass in Casimir’s family’s home afterward.

September 1825

GUILLERY, NEAR NÉRAC

GASCONY

After the glories of Cauterets, the country house of the Dudevants had, in my opinion, little to recommend it. It was dark, furnished roughly, and the quarters were cramped: Casimir, Maurice, and I were given two rooms on the main floor where we were always in one another’s way. It rained ferociously, causing both the river and its tributaries to overflow. Fog enshrouded the woods we bordered, where wild pigs ran over the mossy earth. At night, the wolves howled, and I never got used to it; each time, the sound made for a sensation like needles pricking my backbone. Sometimes they were right outside our bedroom window, gnawing at the wooden shutters.

The meals were heavy and greasy, the sauces too rich for my constitution. There is little more tedious than sitting for hours at a table and eating virtually nothing, while those around you grunt in satisfaction.

While I adored my father-in-law as much now as when I’d first met him, the baroness, my mother-in-law, was a different story. Without saying a word, she made it clear that she believed Casimir needed to do more to take his wife in hand. I knew she found me demanding and moody, unwilling to graciously play the proper submissive role. My heart aching with missing Aurélien, I would not accommodate her: I gave her cold remark for cold remark, silence for silence.

I was restless, stuck there for many long hours without the company of my husband, unless I chose to accompany him on hunting expeditions. Though the hunts alleviated the boredom, they were not something I wanted to devote my life to, and Casimir never seemed happy that I was along, anyway. I was without my books, without my harp or piano or guitar, without friends. The people in the area, though kind in many respects, were uncultured, and I found no one with whom I could engage in conversation. I would often sit alone at the edge of the bed, holding back tears. “Casimir hunts, and I age,” I wrote to Zoé. I wrote to Aurélien, as well, through Zoé, and it was through her that he wrote back to me. This epistolary relationship made survival in that bleak place possible.

One day I received a letter from Zoé inviting me to visit her in La Brède, where her family had a house. She suggested that Casimir and I pick her up in Bordeaux, and we could travel together from there. I was anxious to accept, because Aurélien was in Bordeaux.

I convinced Casimir that we should go because of the number of his relatives living in Bordeaux. We could stay there for a few days before continuing on to La Brède, I told him, giving him plenty of time to visit all of them.

Despite the letters that had flown back and forth between Aurélien and me, I had been worrying about losing the love I was suddenly so dependent upon. Aurélien had vowed that our relationship could remain platonic, but I feared that if I did not eventually submit to him, I would lose him entirely. And if I submitted to him, I believed I would not be able to live with myself. How to embrace my child, Maurice, who every day came running into my arms, when those arms had held a man other than his father? I wanted to see Aurélien and talk openly to him about this dilemma.

Casimir agreed to this visit, in part, I’m sure, because of my flagging spirits. I believed he looked at me as he might a problematic wheel on a carriage: something that he would rather not spend time on but that needed to be fixed in order that he could go on with his life. So it was that in early October, we left Maurice with my in-laws and journeyed to Bordeaux. With every mile that brought us closer to Aurélien, I felt better.

Yet it was with a mix of joy and despair that I first saw him. Zoé had told him where I was staying, and on the second day, when Casimir had gone out to visit an uncle, Aurélien came to the hotel room.

When I opened the door to him, all my plans for how to receive him—gladly, but with restraint—fell away. I burst into tears. He rushed to me and took me into his arms, and I leaned into him for support, my head on his shoulder. And then I closed my eyes and stayed there, because the feel of him was so wondrous and so welcome. When I at last opened my eyes, I saw Casimir standing at the threshold. On his face was a look of incredulity that rapidly turned to rage.

“Leave this place immediately!” he told Aurélien, who started to speak but was quickly silenced by Casimir repeating the command, much louder. I feared that all the guests in the hotel would hear. Aurélien gave me a helpless glance, then quickly strode off.

Now Casimir turned to me.

I backed away from him. “No, you misunderstand. I have not…we have not…”

“You will never see him again. Ever!”

I fell to my knees, sobbing. I could find no measure of control. I wept so hard, I could scarcely breathe.

“Please, please,” I said. “I have not dishonored you. He is only…It is an innocent…” Again, I began to sob. I tried to get up to make my way over to my husband, who stood a few feet away with his arms crossed, his eyes narrowed, but I fell again, and then lay still on the floor. “What have I done?” I moaned, and I meant losing Aurélien, for I thought I surely had.

Casimir took my words as a confession and an apology to him. He crouched down and patted my shoulder and spoke with a gruff tenderness: “Now, now. We shall overcome this. There are troubles that come in the course of a marriage; we shall be strong and carry on.”

I had thought, when he came over to me, that he was going to strike me, and I had turned my face away and covered it with my hands.

He did not strike me this time, but I wept on and on. Finally, from what seemed like a faraway place, I heard Casimir say, “Enough. Let me help you up, Aurore.” There was some fear in his voice.

Then Aurélien appeared again at the still-open door, and Casimir moved toward him, his hands balled into fists. I was too hysterical to hear what the two men said to each other. But in a few minutes, Casimir closed the door, then came to sit in a chair near me. I sat up, but did not yet trust myself to stand.

Casimir spoke quietly, calmly: “I understand now what has transpired between the two of you, and I forgive you, Aurore. I forgive you both, and I grant you the same freedom you had before. It will be upon your head if you choose to deceive me; but I know you as an honorable woman, and I believe you will uphold your true values. Come now, stop crying; it is over. We shall carry on as before, all three of us.”

“Thank you, Casimir,” I said, over and over. I moved to sit on the floor beside him and gingerly laid my hand upon his knee. After a while, he put his hand over mine. I thought, I will give Aurélien up, I will not see him again.

By morning, though, my feelings had changed. When Aurélien had first come to the room, he had given me two letters, which I had stuffed into my bodice before I fell into his arms. That night, when I changed clothes before bed, I hid the letters in a book I had brought along. At dawn, I tiptoed to the window and read the letters, standing with my back to Casimir, who lay sleeping.

What Aurélien told me in those pages made it clear that he neither expected nor desired a consummation of our relationship. Out of his great respect for me and my morals, he was prepared to continue with what we had: a chaste and, as he and I both saw it, a superior love. I cherished the idea that I could still have him.

Thus it was that, astonishingly, the four us—Zoé, Aurélien, Casimir, and I—set out for La Brède the next day. We chatted pleasantly, enjoying the beautiful fall day, and when my husband took my hand in front of Aurélien, he and I only stared levelly at each other.

When we arrived at La Brède, Zoé and I went upstairs to refresh ourselves. There, I told her all that had happened the previous day.

“Ah! It will be all the more interesting, then, to see what is written here,” Zoé said, pulling from her bag a letter that Aurélien had given to her that morning to pass on to me.

I read it immediately, my hands trembling. Then, with tears in my eyes, I told Zoé that Aurélien said he had stood outside the whole night, looking up at my hotel room window to see if a light came on, worrying about whether or not I was all right. He said that he would do anything he needed to in order to take all the blame for what had passed between us. He would allow himself to be called or would call himself a rebuffed seducer, he would sacrifice anything for my safety, he loved me, adored me, now and forever. Our relationship was the centerpiece of his life, but if I wanted him to, he would let me go; he would always sacrifice his happiness for mine. Only tell him what I wanted; he would do it.

I looked at Zoé, who shrugged. “Well, what do you want?”

The truth sprang from my mouth: “To give myself to him.”

“Tomorrow, then,” Zoé said, as blithely as if I had requested to take a leisurely stroll on the grounds. “After Casimir goes hunting. He will go hunting, will he not?”

I nodded.

“I’ll tell Aurélien. I am glad for the two of you.”

Leaving me to dress for dinner, she turned suddenly at the threshold, grinning. “Alert me when you awaken; I will help you prepare.”

—

I WORE WHITE. ZOÉ LAUGHED, calling it overly obvious, but I liked the way I looked in that dress. She had come to my room before the sun was up and had helped me with my hair, with the selection of my undergarments.

“Do you suppose he is being as meticulous?” I asked Zoé.

“Of course! Just now, I imagine he’s looking into the mirror, saying, ‘Top hat or not? Pearl stickpin or…oh no, look, a nose hair gone wild!’ ”

We laughed, but I was nervous; my mouth was sticking to itself, and one hand continually massaged the other. Zoé poured me water and cautioned me not to drink all of it. She stood back and regarded me when I had finished dressing. My dress was ankle-length and had a pleated bodice. A black velvet belt accentuated my small waist, and a round neckline showed off my bosom. The sleeves were puffed and ended with a frill at the wrist. I wore the double-stranded pearls my grandmother had given me, trying not to think of what she might say about what was going to occur. My shoes were black and dainty, and I reminded myself to take small steps and not go running to Aurélien the moment I saw him. Zoé dabbed perfume at the back of my neck, straightened a ringlet at the side of my head. She handed me a beautiful silk shawl, something she had recently purchased and had yet to wear herself.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She kissed my cheek. “He awaits you in the garden, beneath the oak closest to the back of the house.”

I descended the staircase quietly, aware that with each step I was getting closer to something I could never undo and might profoundly regret. I kept on.

Once outside, despite the dimness, I saw him immediately. He stood with his back to me, and I could tell by his complete immobility, his overly correct posture, that he was nervous, as well.

When I got closer, he spun around. “Aurore. My God, how beautiful you are!” He held his arms out, and I stepped into them. I closed my eyes and luxuriated in the scent of him.

He said my name again, softly.

I stepped back and looked up into his face. He smiled tenderly. “I have worried so about you. Tell me what happened after I left you in Bordeaux. He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

“No. He forgave me. He forgave us both.”

His face was uncomprehending.

“He has left it to us to behave in a way that will not dishonor us. He says he trusts us.”

As soon as I said the words, I knew I should not have. Aurélien stepped back, away from me, and hung his head. “I did not sleep last night, for worrying about the pain we might cause if we were found out. But now…Ah, Aurore, what nobility he has shown, in leaving it to us to decide whether or not to betray him! What a great heart we would wound if we were to go forward with what we long to do! And however much pleasure we would enjoy, what agitated guilt we would harbor afterward!”

“But then…what shall we do?”

He sighed. “There is no answer. I cannot have you; I cannot be without you.”

“Aurélien,” I began, in the calmest, most reasonable voice I could muster, but he seemed not to hear.

“In giving us our freedom, your husband has made us prisoners of our conscience. Aurore, we cannot go on with this. We must cease even from exchanging letters.”

“But then you love him more than me!”

“No, no, my darling, of course not. But surely you see what an impossible situation we find ourselves in. Let us live in the memory of our love, but also in peace. In time…”

I knew there was no persuading him away from his decision. He looked deeply into my eyes, then motioned for me to go back to the house.

When I climbed the stairs to my room, I encountered Zoé in the hallway. “Aurore! What has happened?”

I offered the smallest movement of my hand.

“Shall I come with you?”

“Not just now,” I said, surprised by the calmness of my voice.

I wanted to sit by myself for a while. Then I would change out of my white dress and black shoes and into the simple blue dress Casimir favored. I would fold the beautiful shawl so that I might return it to Zoé.

Soon, though, I heard a light tapping at my door, and when I opened it I found Zoé and Aurélien standing there. I ushered them in, and all three of us wept, then laughed together. Aurélien said we would maintain an innocent correspondence and, in that way, our platonic love; Zoé had persuaded him to do so.

When Casimir and I departed to go back to my in-laws’, I left the white dress hanging in the armoire. I vowed to make every attempt to change my attitude toward what I saw as my fate, to live out my life with a man I did not love.

—

BACK IN GUILLERY, I endeavored with all my heart to love my child and my husband and married life, even the little hunting lodge in which we were living. It was not the kind of countryside I was used to, with its sandy soil and dark woods of evergreens and cork trees, their deep shadows unrelieved by shafts of light. But the weather had warmed, and I followed winding paths beneath the saplings and found small streams running alongside gigantic ferns. The babbling sound of the water delighted both Maurice and me. Occasionally, when the air was right, one caught sight of the Pyrénées, which lay ninety miles away. They presented themselves in a kind of pink haze with a silver overlay, and whenever I saw them I had to steel myself against a kind of crushing melancholy. But I did that. I also made efforts to get along better with my mother-in-law, and Casimir and I went to parties and visited people who lived in the grand manors nearby. I did not turn away from my husband in bed. Still in all, it is a lie for me to say I truly cared for anything there but Maurice.

To Zoé, I wrote of my frustration at not being able to say in letters to Aurélien all that was in my heart, to find a place for passion at least upon the page. I had made a promise to Casimir that he was free to read the letters that passed between Aurélien and me, and so I was careful to keep them neutral in tone. Zoé, ever practical, and ever on the side of true love, freed me with a single question: Did you promise Casimir that you would let him read your journal?

Delighted, relieved, I began pouring my heart and soul onto the pages of a journal that I would eventually pass on to Zoé to give to Aurélien. It was a perfect way to honor my promise and still express to Aurélien everything I wanted to. I wanted him to know me as completely as possible, and so I shared with him memories of growing up at Nohant as well as things about my day-to-day life in Guillery. I took particular pains to describe the way my flesh longed for the touch of his.

On the rainy morning of November 6, Casimir was on his way to Nohant, where he was going to check on things. He was looking for some papers regarding our property in the desk in our room, and he found my journal pages, meant for Aurélien. From the tone of his voice when he called me into our bedroom, I suspected what had happened.

“Sit down,” he told me, and I sat at the edge of the bed, trying to keep my face impassive, though my heart was racing. I laced my fingers together to keep my hands from shaking. He reached into a drawer, pulled out the pages, and waved them before me.

“What are these?” His face was florid; he struggled to keep his voice low.

“I gather you already know,” I said. What defense could I offer? I waited for him to mete out some sort of punishment.

But he only flung the papers to the floor and left the room, then the house. He was off to Nohant as planned, and I sat in a hunting lodge where I did not want to be, the pages in disarray at my feet.

After a while, I picked the pages up and put them in order. I would not destroy them. They were only the truth. I put them back in the desk drawer and left the bedroom to tend to my son.

I found him sitting with his grandfather, who was regaling him with a story about when he’d gone out riding through the woods to visit a friend, and by the time he arrived at the gate of the house, fourteen wolves surrounded him. Fourteen! Yes, he counted all the tails, and that’s how many there were. Fourteen. This was a story I had heard many times, and I was glad to see my father-in-law was telling it in a way that served to amuse and not frighten my son.

I sat down a distance away and listened to the ending, the part where one of the wolves leapt up and snapped at the hem of my father-in-law’s cloak. There was nowhere to run. So my father-in-law coolly confronted the danger head-on. He dismounted, removed his cloak, and snapped it in the faces of the wolves, scaring them all away. “A mere waving of a cloth, and they ran home to their mothers, their tails between their legs,” he said. “They climbed into their beds and pulled the covers over their heads. ‘Oh, I am so frightened, wee wee wee!’ So you see? Sometimes the things we fear are as afraid of us as we are of them!”

Maurice beamed, then said, “Again!”

My father-in-law smiled at me over the top of Maurice’s head, and I smiled back.

Then the sun suddenly pushed through the windows, a welcome bit of warmth and light. The rain had stopped, and my father-in-law told Maurice to come with him; they would go outside for a bit of roughhousing. I was very glad of this, for I had just gotten an idea for something I wanted to do, and I did not want to be interrupted.

In the bedroom, I laid out paper on the desk and began a letter to my husband. I would not offer my throat to the wolf. I would stand up and defend myself.

Soon afterward, I received a letter back from Casimir, one full of love and hope. He had read certain demands I had made and found them fair. He had wandered about at Nohant, and when he stood in the library, he was full of regret for the way he had never made any real attempt to read the books there. He saw that he had taken me for granted and had not ever really understood who I was. But he would no longer be so blind; he would cooperate with me in trying to revitalize our marriage.

I recall reading that letter, my head bowed over the page, my heart full of hope. Easy to say I should have known better.

Fall 1826

NOHANT

Less than one year after we had vowed to repair our marriage, I sat with Casimir in the parlor after dinner, trying not to let anger overtake reason. I had just learned that he had lost thirty thousand francs of my marriage settlement by investing it in a nonexistent merchant ship; he had been swindled. Casimir’s father had died the past winter, and his stepmother had not seen fit to give my husband anything. He was totally reliant on my fortune, and now he had lost a significant amount of it.

A number of things came to my mind, but in the end I elected to say only this: “We are finished with you running this place. Starting now, I will take over.”

I expected an argument, but I did not get one. Instead, Casimir rose heavily from his chair and walked out of the room. Then I heard the front door slam, followed by the pounding of his horse’s hooves. He would be going to Château de Montgivray to see my brother, I was sure of it, and he and Hippolyte would drink themselves into oblivion. Or at least that is what he would tell me. In fact, it was more likely that he would be going to see Hippolyte’s wife’s maid, a young and beautiful Spanish woman who had once worked at Nohant, and with whom I knew Casimir was intimate. I had found her in bed with him on a day when I returned home earlier than expected from one of my shopping trips to Paris. I fired her immediately, fired her as she stood in the middle of the room weeping, a sheet wrapped hastily around herself. Later that night, Casimir tried to persuade me to take her back. “Be reasonable,” he said. “You know these things happen.” I would not take her back, and so Hippolyte hired her.

Most of the time, my marriage felt like trying to hold on to fog. Worse, at least so far as I was concerned, there was little to Aurélien and me any longer, either. His letters had cooled markedly in tone; I felt sure that he had found someone with whom his passions need not be sanitized or relegated to black lines on a white page.

A year passed this way. My health began to suffer; I had frequent chest pains and migraines. I resolved to go to Paris for medical consultations and found someone willing to accompany me there. That was Jules de Grandsagne, the brother of Stéphane, the young man with whom, as a girl, I had delved into the mysteries and glories of the body when he had instructed me in my room at Nohant. I would go in late December, and Jules said he was sure Stéphane would like to see me. As I would him.

December 27, 1827

PARIS

“Aurore!” Stéphane de Grandsagne stepped aside from the door and gestured to the interior of his apartment. I came in and moved a pile of books from a tattered gold velvet settee so that I could sit there. Then I took full measure of a man who had lost none of his attractiveness, despite his gauntness and the dark circles beneath his eyes. His muttonchops made still more pronounced the height of his cheekbones. His dark hair was still thick and curly, his nose straight, and his lower lip full. Nor had he lost a way of looking at me that was thrilling.

“How goes the collection?” I asked. On the way to Paris, his brother had told me of the efforts Stéphane was making toward building a people’s library. “He’s working himself to death!” Jules had said. Stéphane wanted to provide at least two hundred books, on every subject, so that working men and women who were otherwise denied access to advanced schooling could educate themselves. I had come to visit Stéphane to congratulate him on his enterprise and to see if there was anything I might do to help. But I also came because I remembered him as someone to whom I could speak intimately and openly, a true friend.

“We have made great progress, and I am pleased,” Stéphane said. “But you, Aurore, I see that you are…Are you unwell?”

To my chagrin, tears began to stream down my face.

He pulled me up from the settee and into his arms, and kissed me.

I protested not at all. Not in the slightest. And a full hour later, when I arose from his bed, I observed with wonder that nothing in my body or soul hurt; it was as though Asclepius had laid his hand upon my brow and offered me his mythical cure.

But the next day, on the way back to Nohant, I stared out the window of the coach and was overwhelmed with remorse. I knew immediately, as I had known with Maurice: I was pregnant.

When Solange was born, I saw that Stéphane’s features were unmistakably in her face: she looked nothing like Casimir and not even like me. Yet the only one who directly questioned me about this was Aurélien de Sèze, who happened to visit us at the time of Solange’s birth. Casimir bore him no jealous grudges any longer.

As Aurélien sat alone with me in my room and Solange lay sleeping on my breast, he gently laid his hand on the top of the baby’s head and stroked her hair with his little finger. I was reminded of the softness of his touch.

“She is beautiful,” he said. Then he sat back in his chair and regarded me seriously. “Behind your back, people are saying that the child is Stéphane de Grandsagne’s.”

“Yes. I know they are.”

“Is it true?”

I didn’t answer.

“Do you love him?” he asked, and I heard the pain in his voice.

My eyes filled. “It’s you I love,” I whispered. “Still.”

Now it was his turn to be silent. I didn’t know if it was because his own feelings had changed or if he simply had not heard me. I did not repeat myself. He stood, started to speak, but then did not. He kissed my forehead gently and left the room. I continued to stare at the chair where he had been sitting and quietly wept, until Solange awakened and I turned all of my attention to her. Never mind that it was someone else who had conceived her with me; Casimir was her father and my husband. I would persevere. I would overcome. This deception would be woven into Casimir’s and my life together; after a while, we would not notice it. We were civil enough. But from now on, Casimir and I would have separate bedrooms. That much truth I had to allow.

December 1830

NOHANT

The writing I did in my little room at nohant was progressing. What once had been random observations and journal entries were becoming pieces of fiction that took on a kind of authority of their own. I learned that wind informed, that memory informed, that hopes and dreams did. So, too, a fork on a plate, an unopened letter, the shine of wet on cobblestoned streets—all of these could help shape a story.

Solange was now two, an imperious toddler who at bathtime inspected her belly button with the gravitas of a field marshal sizing up his troops. She offered me toys with an emphatic thrust that on occasion nearly knocked me down.

Maurice was a young philosopher who told me on his seventh birthday, “Now I have entered my first old age.”

Together, they ran and shouted and played all day; at night, when I tucked them into bed, I was grateful for the fact that they had both a mother and a father here with them.

Sometimes, when there was peace between Casimir and me—if, say, we sat together in the parlor while the wind lashed the trees and rain drummed hard on the roof and thunder boomed and lightning lit up the sky so brightly one needed to close one’s eyes against it, or if one of our children did something that made us smile at each other—at such times, I would chastise myself for ever wanting anything more, or for having made declarations and demands one moment that I only regretted making the next. From the time I’d been a child, I had wanted to probe and comprehend the mysteries of life. I had wanted an elemental loneliness to be taken away by an abiding and comprehensive love; I had wanted, too, to know an ecstasy that would last forever.

But perhaps I needed to think about what I had. And perhaps I needed to understand that one could not look for a constant when life—and people—were ever changing.

January 1831

NOHANT

One morning when I was on my way to Paris to visit my mother, I went into Casimir’s study to tell him goodbye. He was not there, but on his desk was an envelope with my name on it, with instructions not to open it until his death. It was his will, I was sure, and for a moment my heart was full of tenderness for him. I was moved as one always is when considering the death of someone near. Casimir had told me he was writing a new will, so as to include certain provisions for the children.

I opened the envelope, feeling that, since it was addressed to me, it was my privilege. But when I saw what he had written, the blood left my head. It was not a will at all. Rather, it was a letter to be given to me after his death, and it was full of vitriol. He had detailed transgressions fueled by my “perversity.” He had expressed his disgust and total disregard for my person.

I had brought myself to a kind of peace in our marriage. But now I had to admit the truth: we were a couple ill-bound by strained tolerance on one side and hatred on the other. Casimir did not occasionally find me disappointing or irritating or vexing and then return to an abiding affection for me. I saw now that he had stayed with me for my fortune, nothing more.

He lacked the courage to speak the truth to me in life, but he had no compunction about saying it after his death, when his letter, so full of rage and maledictions, would hurt me more—and when he would not have to defend himself against any response of mine. He was cruel, and he was a coward.

It was enough. I thought, I will leave him. Whatever sorrow or defeat may have been in that decision, it was overshadowed by relief.

I considered my options. If I told Casimir I wanted the children half of the time, he would fight me. So as a ruse, I would tell him I was going to live full-time in Paris, without the children. This would frighten him into some sort of compromise I would not be able to effect otherwise.

My old habit of optimism took over: I moved quickly to the door and out, the letter in my hand. In the hallway, I came upon Casimir, his cheeks red from the cold, his spirit jaunty. When he saw what I was holding, he stopped in his tracks. “Aurore,” he began, his tone split between reprimand and apology.

I handed him the letter and said calmly, “I’m leaving you and the children to go and live alone in Paris.”

So it was that the day came when I heard the sound of the carriage wheels crunching on the gravel, and I walked out of the house at Nohant to start a new life, to start living.

September 1834

NOHANT

Having left my life in Paris to come to Nohant, I lay by the river, very near the place where Marie and I had bathed the summer when she’d visited. The children were playing in the woods. I had kissed them many times before I’d separated from them that morning, until they’d finally pulled away from me in exasperation. Maurice was eleven, and outgrowing his tolerance for what he saw as excessive maternal affection, and six-year-old Solange was ever in the habit of pulling away from me.

I had kissed my children so earnestly because I was saying goodbye. A melancholy more extreme than any I had ever felt had come upon me. I could find no relief even in writing. The fantasies that had flowed effortlessly from me from the time I sat in my improvised playpen were coming to me no longer. I sat at night before the white pages I used to fill with stories, and nothing came. Nothing.

I was thirty years old and felt old as time. I had failed in every love relationship I had attempted: with my mother, with God, with marriage, with Aurélien, with lovers, with my children. And with Marie, whose light still shone brightest for me, who still seemed the one with whom I might have been enduringly happy. These days, I enjoyed her company in friendship and no longer aspired to anything beyond it; I would have embarrassed myself in attempting it, and I had no doubt that any attempt at rekindling romantic love would have turned her away from me entirely. She had finished with that the day she’d left Nohant, and I knew perhaps better than anyone that it was always easy for Marie to leave behind what no longer engaged or amused her.

Marie was gone. Musset was gone. One is not living when one does not use the parts of oneself that are most vital, most especially the need to love and be loved. In that respect, I was already dead.

I stood and watched the river run past, imagining lying on the silty bottom and letting my lungs fill with water. I imagined the peace of nothingness, a lifting of the weight I found lying across my chest when I awakened every day. I took a step closer to the water’s edge.

And then something happened that was as startling as what I experienced in the convent chapel. I heard above me a great and sudden rising up of sound, a euphoric trilling of what must have been one hundred birds in the tree beneath which I had lain. I watched them fly away as though on cue, and the despair I had been feeling seemed to fly off with them. At first I stood immobile, afraid to believe that this had happened. But then I became full of an invigorating resolve and walked quickly back to the house.

At the beginning of October, I would return to Paris and put Maurice back in school. I would enroll Solange at a boarding school I knew of where the classes were small, and where I hoped she would profit from the discipline and the structure. I saw that I had been making that most common mistake of a parent who feels unappreciated: that of being lax and indulgent in an effort to be loved, when it is the opposite behavior that encourages a child’s adulation.

That morning, I had received a letter Musset had sent me a few days ago from Baden, where he was trying to cure himself from the effects of his hard living. Over and over again, I had read his grieving lines:

Tell me that you give to me your lips, your teeth, your hair yes, all of them, and that head which I have held between my hands. Say, oh say, that you embrace me—you—me. Oh God! When I think of these things a lump comes into my throat, my eyes grow dim, my knees tremble. It is horrible to love as I love! How thirsty, George, how thirsty I am for you!

I had felt it best not to encourage him and, nearly numb, had written that we must never meet again. Now I would tell him otherwise.

October 1834

PARIS

Alfred and I met again and very soon afterward resumed our physical relationship. But then he began drinking in excess, and he told me it was because he had learned—from Pagello telling everyone—that the good doctor and I had been intimate before Musset left Italy, not only afterward; I had lied to Alfred. And so I admitted it, thinking that this would be the end of it. Instead, it started a new cycle of abuse.

Without warning, Alfred would go into a sulk and at those times pepper me with questions about the lovemaking between Pagello and me. At first, I tried to remain calm, but then I grew angry. What right, I asked, had he to chastise me about being with another after he had rejected me?

We had been back together for only a few days when I hurled this question to him, and he erupted into one of his famous rages and stood nose to nose with me to scream, “You will never understand me or, indeed, any man! My God, George, your naïveté astounds me! How I regret my time with you—all of it! Again we are come to this: I no longer love you. Who could love such an unfaithful and selfish being whose only thought is for herself and her desires? At least the other whores I see admit to their true natures and professions! I am finished with you. Do not attempt to contact me.”

He slammed out of the apartment. For weeks, I stayed in Paris, hoping we would resolve things. After all, he had done this before: denounced me and then rushed back to me to proclaim his love. I thought Musset did love me, and it was the devils in his nature (and of his acquaintance) who sometimes talked him into pushing me away. I sent him notes of love, then of anguish, to which he made no reply.

For diversion and to lift my spirits, I agreed to sit for the artist Eugène Delacroix, who had been commissioned to paint my portrait for the Revue. I felt an instant bond with that great and handsome man. He seemed leonine to me, with his overhang of brow, his great head of tousled black hair, and the narrow strip of beard he wore directly down the line of the deep dimple in his chin. There was wisdom and compassion in his dark eyes, as well as a kind of knowingness that made one feel seen to one’s core. It was a disquieting ability he had. Marie once said of him, “Most men look at me clothed and imagine my body naked; he looks past my body straight to my naked soul.”

Although Delacroix was inordinately perceptive, he had the strength of character not to use what he saw in any sort of manipulative way. I trusted him from the moment I laid eyes upon him, and when I sat for him that first time I began to pour my heart out to him about Alfred. But I had hardly begun my story when he exclaimed, “Ah, yes, Alfred Musset, the poet. An extraordinarily gifted young man, not only in literature but in art. He could make his living as an artist, I have no doubt. Did he ever mention wanting to do so to you? For if he would like, I could take him under my wing.”

“No, he only amuses himself with drawing. He does not want to commit himself to it. His first love…” My throat tightened, and Delacroix looked up from his easel.

“His first love is poetry.” And then, to save myself, I changed the subject: “I should like to invite you to come sometime to my country home at Nohant. I believe you would enjoy painting there in any season.”

“Perhaps this winter, I shall.”

“Do; I shall set up studio space for you.”

I made sure we avoided the subject of Alfred for the rest of our visits, and at the last sitting I secured Delacroix’s address so that I could write to him when I was back at Nohant.

A few nights later, I visited Marie in her dressing room. We spoke about Alfred and me. As jilted lovers do, I looked for my mistakes, wondered aloud about how things might have gone in a different direction if only, examined aspects of the relationship from every side.

How many broken women, I wonder, begin sentences with, “But he said…”

When I said that to Marie, she burst out loudly, “ ‘But he said,’ ‘But he said,’ ‘But he said!’ When did he say it? In your arms! Or seeking to be in your arms!

“Ah, George. In this state of arousal men are as wild-eyed as a dog with a steak over his head, and as the dog will do any trick he knows to get his meat, so will a man. He will tell you anything. And when he has spilled himself inside you, you will swear it was his brains that were left there, for he will have little or no memory of the amorous words that sprang forth from him. Or if he does remember, it will be because he has memorized them to use on such occasions.” She laughed. “I tell you, their acting ability at such times makes me look like an amateur! If only I could watch them and take notes. See how he lowers his lids to murmur these words of love! See how he runs his fingers through her hair! And this growl, emanating from deep within; how he has perfected the tone so as not to be frightening but exciting! Regard le tigre! And now cue the trumpets, here comes the charge of the penis, the wild clenching and unclenching of the buttocks! What exhilaration in the rhythm of the ride, what calculated intensity, how this maestro conducts his little orchestra of body parts!”

I said nothing. She knew what I was thinking; she knew the way a woman in love wants to believe that her man is not anything like the others.

She spoke quietly then: “George. When it comes to the treatment of women, one man is like any other. You don’t want to believe it. I don’t want to believe it. But it’s true. Your poets answer to the call of their groins even as do the peasants in the fields. Women long for words to sear their souls; men offer them the best they can do in that regard and then immediately forget what they have said. They have their way and then go out to piss against a wall and think about what they might have to eat.”

I sat still, thinking that Alfred did not forget his words of love; he was in thrall to his own utterings at least as much as I was. Then Marie said, “What you must do is ignore him. For another well-known fact is that men want what they cannot have. We have talked about this before, George. My advice to you is that you do not endeavor to see him. Do not write him. Ignore him! Then see how fast he comes scratching at your door.” She yawned and apologized for doing so.

“It is I who should apologize,” I said. “I forget that people do not stay up all night as I do.” I hoped she would beg me to stay; but she did not. Instead, she sleepily escorted me to the door.

I walked out into the empty streets, where the fog lay in a thin blanket over the Seine. I walked with my head down, my hands in my pockets.

Marie had tried to help me, but the only friend’s words I had heard and resonated to lately were those of Sainte-Beuve. I had passed him recently on the street on a rainy day, and we had sought warmth and shelter in a café. Over steaming cups of café au lait, we began talking about the break between Alfred and me. “Poor George,” he said. “I must tell you: in some ways, I feel responsible. I should never have arranged for the two of you to meet.”

I shook my head. “Even in pain, I feel grateful that Alfred and I shared our love, though it was so full of strife it makes me wonder if it really was love. I confess that oftentimes I don’t think I understand love. How would you define it?”

He stared out the window at the rain sluicing down from the awning. Then he smiled sadly and looked over at me. “Tears. If you weep, you love.”

Well, then, I thought, I have loved a great deal.

I ignored Marie’s advice to ignore Alfred. I wrote to him again, telling him that he could spurn me as often as he liked but begging him to say that he was not forever closed to the idea of us seeing each other again, if only sometimes, if only on occasion and with no conditions attached. I begged him to say that he had not really meant “never again.”

Again, my note went unanswered. And then I heard he was out in the bars, laughing, carrying on, and often saying spiteful things about me. Finally, in deepest despair, I again returned to Nohant, but not before again inviting Delacroix to visit me there.

December 1834

NOHANT

I was not a week at Nohant when I received a note from Alfred, a sincere and naked apology for his outbursts, his temper, his cruelty. He included a lock of his hair, something I had asked him for long ago.

I sent him back a leaf from my garden and nothing else. It was all I wanted to say: once alive, now dead, still beautiful.

And then I received news in a letter from one of my Berry friends that Musset was telling everyone that the breach was final: he and I were never to be together again. He had been seen in the company of the same woman several times, a petite blonde, quite beautiful and apparently also well bred.

Delacroix was outside painting the day I got that letter; I read it sitting on a bench in the garden near the place where he was capturing the deep gold of late-afternoon light through the naked boughs of the trees.

I felt a great surge of emotion and longed to speak with him, but I did not want to disturb him. I would tell him at dinner what had transpired. Quietly, I took my leave and went off to my bedroom. I sat holding Musset’s lock of hair and then went to the gardener’s shed for a pair of shears.

Back in my room, staring into the mirror without really seeing myself, I chopped a great hunk from my black hair, which Musset had so loved and praised, which he had gathered it into his hands to kiss. I cut another piece, then another, then another still, until I looked like an ill-kempt peasant boy; my shorn locks fell unevenly around my face and stuck up in the back. I bundled the hair I had cut off in a package. I addressed it to Musset and laid it on a table in the hallway. Tomorrow it would be posted.

In the hall, I passed a maid, who tried not to show her shock at my appearance but failed. Her eyes widened, and I heard the sharp intake of her breath. I stood my ground until she curtsied and moved on. Then I went back to my room, sat at the edge of my bed, and sobbed, my hand pressed hard into my chest.

We are all fools in love, all of us, even the strongest among us. Anyone who claims otherwise is worse than a fool: he is a liar.

—

“Mon dieu!” Delacroix said as we sat down to dinner that night.

I looked calmly over at him.

“George.”

He moved to my chair, tenderly kissed my forehead, and stared into my eyes, reading at once my sorrow. Friend that he was, he did not ask me to explain. He knew that I would tell him what I wanted when I was ready. All he said was “Let me do your portrait. Never have I seen such terrible beauty.”

I let him. He captured my pain in the way my eyes stared off at nothing and, somehow, even in the empty space around me. He drew my lips gone thin and pale. He drew the irregular lines of hair that now barely reached the bottom of my neck, framing a woebegone face whose flesh seemed to droop. I had carelessly folded the ascot above my redingote; it almost resembled a hangman’s noose. What Delacroix created was a portrait of hopelessness.

Yet it wasn’t long after Musset received the package with my hair that we were locked once more in a desperate embrace. “How I wept that day!” he told me. He had come to see me at Nohant at the end of December, and in January, I had returned with him to Paris.

For six weeks we both enjoyed and suffered through the last gasps of a dying love. Finally, due mostly to his ongoing jealousy and increasingly abusive treatment of me, we really had finished with each other.

In March 1835, I returned to Nohant without telling Musset I was going. I knew if I did tell him, he would come over and create a scene.

My first night back there, in a state of great tranquillity, I produced twenty pages of writing. I had found myself again, and as well my voice on the page. I no longer loved Musset, but I did not hate him. In a letter of farewell I wrote to him, I said:

But your heart, your good heart, do not destroy it, I beg of you. Give your whole heart or as much as you can to every love of your life, but let it play its part with dignity, so that you can look back and say as I do, I have often suffered, I have sometimes been deceived, but I have loved. It is I who have loved and not some artificial being driven by ego and ennui.

I meant to soothe him, to restore some sense of equanimity to both of us. But my words did more than soothe him. Later, in one of his plays, I heard one of his characters say:

One is often deceived in love, often wounded and often unhappy, but one loves, and when one is on the edge of the grave, one looks back and says: I have often suffered, I have sometimes been deceived, but I have loved. It is I who have loved, and not some artificial being driven by ego and ennui.

When I heard that, I only smiled. My last gift to him. That play by Musset, incidentally, was called Don’t Fool with Love.

There were times when I wondered what it said of Musset that he so often and easily deserted me, that upon our final break he immediately began a romance with another, while I was for so long unable to recover. But then what did it say of me that it took a young man weeping in my lap, wiping his nose with his fist in the fashion of a schoolboy—what did it say of me that this is what he needed to present to me before I could fall in love with him?

Late March 1835

NOHANT

That spring, I found myself exhausted—physically, mentally, spiritually. Even nature did not offer its customary solace. I turned to Plato, to Shakespeare, to the Koran and found no relief. I played the piano, dull-eyed, and ate without tasting. I knelt at my bedside once again, bowed my head, and begged to feel Corambe. I called out in silence to a being who seemed to have abandoned me.

I continued to work, however, filling pages with a tranquil penmanship that belied the tumult inside. But there had been a change in the way that I wrote. My popularity and deadlines and financial obligations meant that I could not take all the time I wanted to finish my stories and novels. Now, as ever, I dismissed the thought of my being a great writer. Nonetheless, I wanted to do my best. But toes tapped, and hands grabbed pages before I was quite ready to let them go. I envied the writers who could let everyday events, random encounters, memories, and dreams weave themselves into their work. I knew I did my best work when I let that second mind, that unconscious force, take over, when it felt as though I were drifting along in a boat that guided itself. But that kind of writing was impossible to do with the pressure I now felt.

I was turning my short story “Mauprat” into a novel. Like my other books, it reflected my life, this time the future as well as the past. For although I wrote about mental anguish and entanglements and a disturbed way of thinking, which reflected aspects of my time with Musset, I also focused on things beyond the individual. I addressed myself to problems in society that prefigured the politics I was soon to be actively engaged in.

Writing served to lift me away from myself and the sadness I was feeling. But when I wasn’t at my desk, the pain could be excruciating. Most of my Berry friends seemed to be of one mind, and the advice they gave me was to try to reconcile with Casimir. Wouldn’t living in a kind of placid peace with him be better than what I was enduring now? Where had all my lofty ideas about passion and romance gotten me?

Over and over again, I tried to explain my own sense of ethics when it came to love and sex: one needed the former to engage in the latter, or else one was a prostitute. “Then be one!” my friend Alexis Dutheil implored me. “Be Casimir’s mistress, for the sake of your children, for the sake of your own mental health!”

He said this even after I told him about an incident when friends were over and Casimir, in a drunken sulk, had ordered me out of the drawing room for the crime of comforting our son, to whom Casimir had spoken cruelly. I did not comply. “I’ll box your ears!” he said, and I laughed at him. Bad enough that I reacted this way, but my response prompted the other guests to laugh as well. At that, he catapulted out of his chair and then returned to the room with his hunting rifle. His face was flushed, his eyes wide; I all but expected him to froth at the mouth. He was subdued by one of the guests, and I do not think any among us believed that he would actually shoot me. But he had gone to the gun cabinet. He had had the weapon in his hands.

—

IN THE YEARS SINCE I had left, Casimir had kept to the same routine: hunting, drunkenness, and women. He managed Nohant poorly, constantly losing money, but erupted in anger if anyone tried to suggest things that might help. He did not care to converse on any topic but local politics and the weather, and the latter only insofar as it pertained to his ability to hunt.

I, on the other hand, had built up a life full of painters and writers and musicians and philosophers and dissidents. Yes, I had been devastated by Musset, but at least it was a poet I had loved, not a man who had no appreciation for the arts.

In Paris, my dinner parties often lasted all night; my guests made their way home at dawn, silly with drink but deeply inspired by all they had shared with one another. There was always much laughter, shouts of appreciation, even applause. Franz Liszt could sometimes be persuaded to play, and when he did, we all felt enraptured and elevated.

It was Alfred who had introduced me to Liszt and his mistress, Marie d’Agoult, whom I nicknamed Arabella. She had left her husband and children to be with Liszt, and she served as inspiration for a very different kind of revolution that was being talked about ceaselessly in the streets of Paris. Bad enough that she had abandoned her husband and family for another man, but to have a child out of wedlock with him and show not a flicker of remorse!

Having children changed everything, but it did not decide everything. And so I vowed that instead of staying with a husband I could not abide for the sake of my children, I would try to teach them to live by their consciences, no matter what the world around them might think, or say, or do. I would teach them by my example.

April 17, 1835

BOURGES

I had at last found myself without ambivalence about the direction in which I wanted to go. Now I was sitting in a restaurant forty-five miles north of Nohant in Bourges, where I had been brought by my childhood friend Alphonse Fleury. He knew the brilliant lawyer Louis-Chrysostom Michel, known as Michel de Bourges, and had suggested I meet with him here, to see if he would represent me in a process that should have been started long ago.

Divorce had been abolished by Napoleon, but one could secure a formal, legal separation with specific terms; one was barred only from remarriage. I had no interest in remarriage, but the idea of being given an equitable settlement—of having Nohant returned to me as my own and having a fair share of the money that had, after all, been mine in the first place—was greatly appealing. I wanted also a kind of sexual freedom I did not now enjoy: when one was separated from one’s husband, one was not condemned for other pursuits.

Fleury thought Michel would be the best person to represent me. “He never loses!” he said. I had heard this. I had also heard that in addition to his eloquence in the courtroom, Michel had a reputation for a fierce intelligence and a charisma that had made this militant republican the much-admired leader of the current government opposition. I very much looked forward to meeting him.

When he walked into the room, I was startled into silence by the size of his head; it was as though he had two brains fused together, fore to aft. He was thirty-seven to my thirty-one, but he looked like an old man: bald, stooping, and myopic.

Michel later told me that for his part, he had expected me to be dressed as a young man. He had thought of me as a child poet whom he had long admired from afar, and that upon meeting me he might offer to make me his “son.” Though I did still often dress in men’s clothes, I would also, either by whim or necessity, wear dresses and bonnets, and a finely made dress of peacock-blue silk was what I had on that night. There was no mistaking the fact that I was a woman.

He took my hand and bowed. “George Sand. May I tell you first that I am a great admirer of yours. Lélia is a work of genius.”

“From what I have been told, you are the genius.”

Fleury had told me Michel was married to a rich widow. I saw that he dressed like the peasantry he came from, in clogs and a rough greatcoat—though I noticed beneath that a blindingly white shirt made from the finest linen. Upon his head, he wore handkerchiefs fashioned into a kind of cap that would be permissible to wear indoors; it helped to keep him warm, for he was always cold. Something about this humble garb on such a fiery personality made me able to immediately relax. And there was an occasional softness to his eyes that suggested that somewhere inside this radical was a gentle spirit.

“Tell me the purpose of your meeting with me,” he said, and I told him far more than that.

I told him about my upbringing, about the relationships I’d had, finally about the way that on the face of it, I lived an aristocratic life, but my heart and my politics were ever on the side of the people. “I am not one of those who look down upon their servants,” I said, and he threw back his head and laughed. I recognized the irony and blushed.

“Understand, it is more than that,” I said. “I have always tried to see the worth of the individual despite the clothes he wears, the place he resides, or the accent with which he speaks. I grew up playing with peasant children, and I—”

“Bah! Because you drop into their world now and then does not make you one of them. You find them interesting, charming, you pick from what they offer to suit your own needs. Then you go home to a plate full of fine food and sleep in imported linens.”

I looked pointedly at his white shirt, and he smiled. “I suppose we can all be caught out in hypocrisy one way or another,” he said. “But my wearing a linen shirt is not tantamount to your blowing kisses from the balcony of the privileged to those who suffer below. If you speak kindly to your house staff, if you write a few articles in a newspaper about the rights that should be given to every person, you have not done your duty.”

“And what is my duty?”

He studied my face. “Your duty is to use whatever talent you have to make for a kind of equality among people that we are nowhere close to achieving, and that many people do not want to have. Your duty is to persuade those who do not want it to, if not embrace it, at least accept it; and if one method does not work, you must engage fully in another.”

“You mean radicalism, fighting in the streets.”

“And perhaps more than that.” He grabbed hold of my wrist and spoke quietly but with great earnestness: “Life is difficult enough in and of itself, George. Is it not incumbent on us to create a social order where we do not let the weakest fall and the strongest survive?”

I pushed my empty wineglass away from me, staring into the burgundy residue at the bottom. “I listen in shame to your ideas of revolution and reform. You are right to suggest I have led a life of solipsism. Despite my mother’s blood, which runs in my veins, I have watched from a distance the people’s struggles and have reported their anguish without real understanding. I have allowed romantic passion to rule my life and have committed myself to faithless individuals rather than worthwhile causes.”

“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa. You remain solipsistic in excoriating yourself for your solipsism! Have done with that, George! You are here and alive, are you not?”

I said nothing, full of a rising hope that prevented speech.

“Your life is not over; it is about to begin! You will never be satisfied with the love of an individual; that kind of love will only disappoint. Turn your gaze outward, away from yourself, and toward a noble goal. It is that kind of purpose that brings lasting content, that speaks to the truest desires of the heart and the needs of the soul.”

I was galvanized by Michel’s words, inspired in a way that seemed superior to the passions I had known before. I committed my writing talents to the cause and then, inevitably perhaps, to Michel himself. For his part, he gave me a ring to serve as a symbol of what we might look forward to when we were both free.

After a few months, though, I began to see that I did not always agree with Michel. I began to think he was similar to those he wished to overthrow: a despot who demanded a slavish loyalty and affection from his followers. It seemed that Michel invoked the name of the people in order to bring glory to himself.

—

CASIMIR HAD INITIALLY AGREED to our separation. Then he changed his mind and fought against it for over a year. But finally Michel secured for me a legal separation that left me with Nohant, with custody of Solange (later, I also obtained custody of Maurice), and with ninety-four hundred francs annually. Casimir received less. My fiery lawyer argued brilliantly for me, Madame Aurore Dudevant, sitting demurely in the courtroom in a white hood and a white dress with a collar of flowered lace.

Michel addressed himself to Casimir with a kind of deadly irony. He looked at a paper in his hand and said, “You list here Madame Dudevant’s many faults. To name a few, you say that she often dressed like a man and smoked cigars. I assume that you found that very…Well, I confess I have a hard time guessing. Was it frightening? Dangerous? Did it break a law of which I am unaware?

“Never mind—we shall move on to the next complaint, which is that she had relationships outside the marriage.” Here he looked up. “Perhaps in imitation of you, who only weeks into your marriage pursued and easily conquered your wife’s maid? Is not imitation the sincerest form of flattery? Or did she perhaps seek comfort with another after episodes such as the time you struck her across the face in full view of others?

“But I digress. We were talking about your wife’s many flaws, not yours. So, let us see what other sins she has committed. Ah, here is a brash demand: she asks for money from her own inheritance! A wonder you waited so long to bring her to court!

“Now, here is a vexing problem. Your wife wrote Lélia, recognized as a work of genius. You poor fellow, I’m sure it is utterly exasperating to be married to an artist whose income pays the bills when one’s own inclination is to not work at all.

“Well. Rather than bore the court with the rest of this long list of grievances, I feel compelled to ask you about something I find very confusing. Perhaps you can enlighten me. With all these faults displayed by that diminutive woman sitting there, why would you go to court to keep her from separating from you?”

He won for me easily, and Casimir moved to his family’s hunting cottage in Guillery.

Despite our differences in politics, I still had feelings for Michel. But after I was free, he began to retreat from me. Mauprat, which was about a wounded beast of a man being subdued—transformed, really—by a woman’s love, after which they marry and live happily ever after, I now saw as the wishful thinking it had been.

I was at odds with myself. On the one hand, I had written to a friend, “I will lift women up from their abject state, both in my life and in my writings.” And yet, embarrassingly, I had also written a letter to Michel begging him simply to let me do all that I could to make him happy. I told him in that gushing missive that he would find me much like a faithful dog, a study in devotion.

What drew me to Michel was a passion grounded in politics. But politics will not forgive what love can; nor will politics endure what love will. Politics will not give a close embrace; it will not press upon a mouth a kiss that satisfies the beggar inside. It will not say to another: I will protect you from what frightens you; I will bring wild strawberries to your bedside; I will not betray you. Never mind that those words are often found to be lies; one longs to hear them anyway, one needs to; and one persists in trying to hear them in order to find a certain peace, without which one feels half of something meant to be whole. Even God was lonely: we, His children, are the evidence.

My affair with Michel lasted less than a year. What followed were several halfhearted love affairs with other men that died for lack of fuel to feed the flames. Finally, I told myself and others that I was too old for the ups and downs of romantic relationships and would henceforth devote myself to things that mattered and upon which I could depend. I could not have been more sincere—or relieved. Or wrong.

May 1836

NOHANT

After all the acrimony in fighting for my separation from Casimir, after all the charges and defenses, all the lies and half-truths—of which, I readily admit, both parties were guilty—I was at last home again, and in rightful possession of the place where I had grown up. I took up permanent residence at Nohant on a day when the bagpipes played and there was dancing under the great elms. This was because it was the feast day of a saint, but I let myself enjoy the fantasy that the celebration was also to welcome me home. Those servants whom I had not fired for their allegiance to Casimir I released to join in the festivities.

I was alone, standing before one of the windows in the dining room. I had toured the great house, I had wandered through every room, and in every room memories had assaulted my senses. I saw myself lying between my parents at night in the bedroom they had shared; I saw my baby brother, Louis, dead in his cradle. I saw Deschartres pacing before me, his hands clasped behind his stooped back; I saw my grandmother dressed in her lace and silk, her cockade trembling upon her head, instructing me on the harpsichord; I smelled her vetiver.

In my old bedroom, I had sat in a chair and spoken to the ghost of my child self, who lay on the floor in her peasant’s play clothes, reading books with a great hunger and appreciation, mouthing the words to herself for the pleasure of their cadence. I’d remembered how it had been my habit to gently flick the corners of the pages back and forth as I read them, and how I had sometimes pressed my face into the folds of the books. Julie, my grandmother’s maid, had once punished me for this.

Now I pressed my forehead to the glass and, with eyes closed, listened to the music being played here in the place where I most belonged. And then I wept copious tears, for all that had befallen me, and all that had not.

—

A FEW MONTHS LATER, I received a letter from Maurice that tore at my heart. He had been made fun of by other boys at his school, who told him of stories written about me in the newspaper:

They said all sorts of things, because you are a woman who writes, because you are not a prude like most of the other boys’ mothers. They call you, I can’t tell you the word because it is too wicked…. You must know what is happening in the heart of a good son and a true friend.

Must history always repeat itself, not only in the larger ways of politics but upon the personal playing field of the self? Of course I knew what was happening in Maurice’s heart; the same feelings had been in me when my own mother was attacked and derided. I vowed to find a tutor for Maurice and pull him from a school where he did not belong, even before such vicious attacks had befallen him. I knew he would not fight back against such cruelty; he would only bear it in an elegant manner completely foreign to his tormentors. In the morning, I would go to Paris to collect my son.

I went outside and wandered among the trees and the flowers, then went to the cemetery to visit the graves of my father and Louis and my grandmother. I wondered, if my father had lived, what he would have thought of my success, as well as my notoriety. I thought he would have been more understanding, more forgiving, than my mother had been.

My father had defended my mother against her accusers, my grandmother among them. He believed that the moral compass of an individual was the true gauge by which one should measure and live one’s life. If that compass was in keeping with what others thought, so be it. But if not, one was meant to answer to oneself: that was the way to come to a true and lasting peace. Perhaps the only way, I thought now.

October 1836

HÔTEL DE FRANCE

RUE LAFFITTE

PARIS

In September, I had taken the children to Switzerland to spend six weeks in the company of Franz Liszt and Arabella and their newly born daughter. I was in high spirits, we all were. In addition to my children, I had brought my maid and some friends; Franz and Arabella had surrounded themselves with a gay coterie as well. We lived in a way that both inflamed my senses and calmed my nerves. I saw how the balance of work, friendship, and family made for a satisfying happiness. Absent the tension caused by my years-long friction with Casimir, I was able to focus on my children in a different way.

Thirteen-year-old Maurice was the soulful artist, the one I found easier to love. A mother wants to love her children equally, but she is human, and she can favor the child who is more like her, or at least who fights less against her.

Solange, now eight years old, had long bedeviled me. Since her birth, there had been a strange kind of dissonance between us. When I smothered her with attention, she pulled away. When I put space between us, she resented me. When I begged for access to her soul, she ignored me. She was rude to my friends. She was unwilling to cooperate with figures of authority, and yet when they became exasperated and used punitive measures, she immediately bent to their will. It was as though she rejected kindness and invited harsh behavior toward herself.

I would have been willing to assume the blame, to think that my temperament and proclivities disallowed my being a good mother, but Maurice dispelled that theory: he adored me, and I him. Being with him was like swimming in a placid pool of water; spending time with Solange was like going over the falls.

There were times when I lay in bed worrying about her, and I would resolve to do all I could to make things better between us. The next day I would approach her with my heart open, and she would hurl insults at me. She would turn her back and walk away, and I would stare after her, my love transformed into a mix of despair and—it must be admitted—a feeling like hatred.

But late that summer, I came to understand something about her. We were out in the mountains climbing one day. I was struck by her beauty: her long blond curls, the pure whiteness of her skin despite the sun. She ran up the steep inclines over and over again, complaining only if any one of us tried to help her. Once she turned to me after I had expressed a great appreciation for everything around us and said, “Don’t worry; when I’m queen, I’ll give you the whole of Mont Blanc.”

I thought, then, that what Solange wanted, what she needed, was to be credited with her own strength and ambition. In this respect, I thought, she was like me. I let go of a kind of wariness and believed that Solange and I would finally be able to love each other openly, freely, lastingly.

—

When I returned to Paris, I gave up my apartment and moved into the hotel where Franz and Arabella lived, to the room below them. We shared a common sitting room, and it was filled with writers and artists and musicians and the wailing of Franz and Arabella’s baby. Our regulars included the radical priest Abbé de Lamennais, the poet Heinrich Heine, the novelist Eugène Sue, and the socialist philosopher Pierre Leroux. So many interesting individuals, all of whom offered a kind of nourishment, both individually and collectively.

On November 5, I was invited to a musical soirée at the home of Frédéric Chopin. It was on the fashionable Right Bank, on Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin. I saw how true the rumors were that he adored the color gray: the wallpaper was a light version of that color, beautiful against the white trim, and the brocade furniture was a shade of oyster. He liked his luxuries: he had a silver tea service displayed against a white silk hanging, and his dinner service was Sèvres, in turquoise and gold. I knew that the fresh flowers he had in abundance were replaced daily. The whole apartment, though small, gave the illusion of airy space and was a study in understated elegance.

That evening was the first time I had heard him play—he almost never gave concerts, preferring instead to earn money by charging outrageous amounts to teach and by selling sheet music of his pieces. That night, I lost my heart to his music before I lost it to the man. He played first a duet with Liszt, a sonata for four hands, then performed an improvisation, something for which he was famous. In its minor chords, I heard what I believed was a mourning for a love that he could not have. I knew about such things, and I understood the lasting melancholy that came with it. My eyes filled with tears. I put down my wineglass, walked over to the piano, and kissed him full on the mouth. The you that I hear in this music, I understand and love—instantly and wholly.

His feelings toward me were not precisely the same. They were, in fact, quite the opposite. After we had become lovers, he told me of the letter he had written to his family after he had first made my acquaintance. “I said you were a coarse and ungainly and crude woman who wore men’s clothes and smoked cigars in public, then expressed my doubt that you were a woman at all. I said I found distasteful your devouring eyes and deep silences, and your frankness about sex I found absolutely unnerving.”

The journey from that point of view to one quite different took two years. In the meantime, my busy life as a free woman went on.

January 1837

NOHANT

Arabella, Liszt’s lover, came to stay with me at NOHANT that winter when Franz was touring. We were not the best of friends. She was under the mistaken assumption, as were so many, that I was ever a fearsomely independent figure who had a well-deserved reputation for bold behavior, the consequences be damned.

I saw Arabella as a person with a cold heart and a suspicious mind who was overly concerned with appearances. She rarely wore the same thing twice, and she spent an inordinate amount of time styling her hair each day. She would mouth the words of others as though they were her own in order to make herself appear intelligent. We tried hard to get along for the sake of Liszt, whom we both loved. But when we embraced, it was with the light of day between us.

One evening, after we had had what I think both of us would have described as a surprisingly pleasant day together, we sat before the fireplace after dinner. The children, exhausted, were in bed. “You know, George, Maurice is a very sensitive young man,” Arabella said.

I smiled. “Yes.”

“And talented; only thirteen, but he could easily make his living as an artist.”

“So I have told him. As has Delacroix.”

“A wonder that Casimir so blithely handed him over to you; he is such a devoted son, such a pleasure to be around.”

“Casimir is one of those lucky individuals who is rarely bedridden. He has no patience for those who suffer from various illnesses, as Maurice does. He thought Maurice hypochondriacal and all but punished him for his weakness. When he found out his son had an enlarged heart and rheumatism, he took it as an affront to his own masculinity. He was only too happy to give custody of Maurice to me. And I was glad to have it.”

“Of course you were.”

A silence fell. I waited for Arabella to comment on eight-year-old Solange. It had been a tiring day with my daughter, complete with displays of explosive behavior one might see in a toddler. At one point, Solange had flung her hairbrush across her room, nearly breaking a window. I wasn’t sure how much my guest had overheard of all that.

Finally, I said, “I must apologize if you were bothered by any unpleasantness today.”

One finely shaped eyebrow raised. She murmured something I could not hear, then turned to face me and said, “May I speak frankly?”

“Please do.”

“One hesitates to criticize a friend’s child. But I must say that I find Solange to be very difficult. She is a natural and unrepentant rebel, one who seems to delight in extremes of emotions. I doubt that she will ever be able to go along with commonsense rules.”

I flushed, then defended my daughter in a mother’s automatic way, saying, “I should be happy for her if that is so. A woman in a man’s world needs to be rebellious.”

Arabella turned her sherry glass slowly in her hand, and I watched the flames from the fireplace cast colors on the liquid. When she looked back at me, her expression was empty of malice; I saw that she felt genuinely sympathetic. She said, “Perhaps what you say is so. Perhaps what I see as Solange’s faults may turn out to be heroic. Please understand that I know she is not without her virtues. She is also unusually beautiful. But…” She leaned forward. “There is a kind of manipulation she has already mastered. She has a preternatural ability to spot one’s weaknesses. You will have to exercise your own strength against hers.

“Also, if you will permit me to say this, I believe she is jealous. I suppose no one could be the daughter of one so famous and not be resentful of time taken away from her, of attentions shared by others when she wants them for herself alone. Far be it from me to advise you to deny yourself for her sake. But you must be prepared for the revenge she will take on you.”

I said nothing. Already I had seen evidence of this. The carefree relationship Solange and I had enjoyed in Switzerland was now only a memory. A few days ago, when I had awakened and begun looking over my work from the night before, I saw that three consecutive pages from the middle of my pile were missing. I looked around my room, under the bed, even on the ground outside the window I had left cracked open. The pages were nowhere to be found. But when I came into the dining room, I saw that they had been thrown into the fireplace and burned: a quarter of one page lay with its charred edges off to one side, in the ashes. I knew who had done it, and I called Solange into my bedroom to account for herself. “Was it you who burned my manuscript pages?” I asked.

She stared at me, her face cold and unyielding.

“Why?”

Again, I was met with silence, and I dismissed her. I knew why she had burned the pages. She craved her mother’s love the same way I had craved my own mother’s—and still did. And as I was never satisfied, so Solange was destined to be always wanting. My mother was a slave to her need for love and attention. As an artist, I belonged primarily to my work. But whereas I, for the most part, had suffered in silence from the wrongdoings of my mother, Solange would not. Perhaps could not.

I rewrote the pages and found them better than before.

Living with me that winter, Arabella discovered other things about me. My capriciousness was revealed in all its glory; every day gave her another example of how indecisive I could be; she remarked upon it humorously, but with her brows knit. She came to understand that what many people misinterpreted as coldness or disdain was actually my shyness. She, who outfitted herself in wildly expensive dresses and jewels every morning, whose hair needed to be styled just so, saw that what I preferred most was a peasant’s smock.

Most tellingly, though, she saw my weakness and hypocrisy in love. Despite having renounced romantic love in general and Michel de Bourges in particular, I still wrote passionate letters to him, begging to simply cast my eyes upon him. One night, I showed her one in which I had written,

The delights of love are to be found not only in those fleeting hours of furious passion which send the soul careening madly to the stars, but also in the innocent and persevering tenderness of intimacy.

She looked up from reading, and I expected her to express sympathy, or agreement that the best part of love was indeed that gentle intimacy, or at least admiration for the way I had with words. But she only said, “I should have thought you would have preferred Chopin.”

She leaned over and touched my hand, and her eyes softened. “Poor George. Such a fire in your soul, and nothing for it to lay hold upon.”

It is one thing to keep the shadow of love’s humiliation hidden in a corner of one’s soul; it is another to have someone bring it out into the open. Being revealed in this way is devastating, but it is a relief, too; one has no choice then but to acknowledge the truth, and begin the process of moving forward.

—

LISZT CAME BACK IN MAY, and the house was full of sublime pleasures. He and Arabella were in the bedroom below me. Near their window, I had stationed a piano for him, and I often wrote to the sounds of his composing. I thought the birds must be in thrall to his music, for they fell silent whenever he played. Sometimes I paused in my storytelling to listen to the broken phrases he began, then left suspended in the air; and it seemed as though the breezes outside carried the music onward, where it brushed against the nodding blossoms in the garden before lifting itself heavenward.

After dinner, we would gather on the patio to talk and smoke, and one evening Arabella, who loved to dress dramatically, came outside in a diaphanous white gown and a long white veil that fell to her heels. She talked with us for a while, then rose to walk around the grounds. She was like a ghost; she would vanish behind the trees and then silently appear again. Franz and I watched her as if in a dream, beneath a rising moon that finally settled, seemingly caught in the branches of the pines. In the stillness, one could almost hear the heartbeat of the earth. I sought out Franz’s eyes and understood that he heard music in what we were seeing. As for me, phrases floated into my brain. I believed that the next day each of us would translate some part of the experience into our respective art.

—

MY GUESTS AND I had had a very pleasant day. The weather was fine for hiking, and Franz and Arabella had accompanied Maurice, Solange, and me for a long walk. The countryside offered gifts at every step: a slight give to the warm earth, wildflowers grouped like freestanding bouquets, clear running streams, birdsong of every variety, the inviting darkness and spicy pine scent of the woods.

Afterward, we had a dinner of roast chicken stuffed with lemon and garlic, fingerling potatoes, and a mix of lovely vegetables from the garden, followed by an apple tart. Then we adjourned to the drawing room, where we enjoyed piano music from Franz, card games, and charades. Maurice and Solange, who were exhausted, went to bed after that, but Arabella lingered with Franz and me. Then she, too, began to yawn and excused herself.

“I suppose I should try to work a bit,” I told Franz, “but I am enjoying your company.”

“I have work to do as well,” he said. “Why don’t we do so together? I shall sit at one end of the dining room table, you at the other.”

I was not sure we could work in each other’s company, but I agreed to it. Anyway, my work had been going so poorly I doubted I’d get much done no matter where I sat.

We gathered our materials, took our places, and tended to our individual endeavors. Franz worked on a score; I worked on an as yet unnamed novel. There were the sounds of quiet, for quiet is rarely absolute: the clock ticking, the house creaking, the wind rising up now and again, the owls hooting. I tightened my shawl about myself as the night deepened and the air grew cool. Once, I silently brought tea to both of us.

There was in Liszt’s company a rare peace. I knew that he would not interrupt me, and I knew, too, that he would not be jealous of work that took me away from paying attention to him. It is to be expected that people who are not artists might not understand the need for one to immerse oneself totally in one’s work; but it also sometimes happens that other artists feel no compunctions about interrupting, or in feeling slighted that one’s attention is not focused on them first and foremost. What jealousy can be inspired by a person’s singular devotion to something the other cannot share! It was a concern for Liszt, I knew, who had once confided to me that it was difficult to play the piano with a woman’s arms around his neck.

Just as the sky was beginning to lighten, I wrote a few lines to finish a scene. Then, as quietly as I could, I began to gather my papers so that I might retire.

“Don’t go,” Franz said.

I looked up at him. “I don’t want to disturb your work.”

He smiled. “I have been finished with my work for some time. I have been watching you.”

I was embarrassed. “I’m afraid there is not much to see.”

“Ah, you are wrong. The words you are writing play out upon your brow. It is fascinating to behold.”

“As music is represented in your face when you play.”

“Without a doubt. But you also sigh quite often.”

“Do I?”

He nodded solemnly, then imitated me, arranging his features into what I suppose he thought was a reasonable facsimile of feminine expression and heaving a sigh.

I burst out laughing, quickly covering my mouth; I did not want to wake the others.

Then I said, “Do you know, Franz, some mornings I sit in my room when I awaken, waiting to hear the sounds of your piano. And I often grow quite impatient that you have not yet started when I am ready for you to!”

“I thought you slept the mornings away.”

“Only when I am working well. I am not working well lately. Tonight was an exception. When I am happy, my pen can barely keep up with my thoughts. When I am in despair, my imagination is as flat and lifeless as my spirit.”

“Tell me, dear friend. What is the sorrow that fills you with such despair?”

“It is simple. I am not loved.”

“But your friends, your children, your many admirers! And surely you must know how much I love you!”

“I am grateful for that. But I need romantic love as I need air to breathe. I need someone to offer body, heart, and soul and to accept mine in return.”

Franz rose from his chair and came to sit closer to me. He took hold of my hands. “George, the soul of a man belongs only to God. And that is how it should be.”

“I know you believe that, Franz. I know that you have not lost the ardor for God that you had as a child.”

It was one of the things that made us immediately close, the similarities Franz and I shared with regard to mysticism. Early on, he had confided in me, somewhat shyly, how he used to speak aloud to the statue of the Virgin that was at his bedside as a boy. I had told him about Corambe and even shown him the spot where I had made my altar. He had moved forward into the space and stood quietly, his back to me. Then he had turned around to say, “I can feel what this place was to you.” I had nodded, my heart full. How glad I had been to have met someone who as a youth had longed for the same transcendence, who had read the same books as I, who had considered devoting his life to the church even as I once had.

“Imagine, Franz,” I said now, “if we had followed our earliest longings, you would now be a priest and I a nun!”

Franz smiled wryly. “It seems we have strayed far from that course. I fear you and your bold demands for personal freedom have had a corrupting influence on me!”

“Not fair, for you are your own bad influence! Your mind is divided between aesthetic ideals and lust for women, and your heart cannot choose between the need for freedom and the need for love.”

He sighed. “You are right.”

We were quiet for a long moment, enjoying the comfortable silence the way good friends can. But then a kind of melancholy came upon me and I said, “We both long for something bigger than ourselves. But whereas you still seek that in God, I now search for it in love. Perhaps we are both irrational and destined always to be disappointed.”

Franz began to speak, then stopped himself.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Please understand that I say this with love, George. With love and great concern. I may sometimes be disappointed, but I do not despair as you do. I fear that in your romantic relationships, you tend toward the self-destructive. You choose men because they need you, not because you love them. You begin in passion but move quickly to maternal feelings.”

I thought for a moment. “If that is so,” I said, “perhaps it is because I feel that if they depend on me, they will not leave me. If they will not leave me, I can open my heart to them.”

“But where in this equation is there room for you to be cared for? You give disproportionately, and then you suffer the consequences.”

I had heard these words before. I pulled my hands away and sat straighter in my chair. “You have been talking with Arabella. I see that she has shared her conclusions about my heart’s concerns with you.”

He started to defend her, but I held up my hand. “You are more of a friend to me than she. Had you not been away on tour, I would no doubt have shared my feelings with you rather than her.”

“But do you agree with what you call her conclusions?”

“Do you?”

“Ah, George. I am afraid I do.”

I wanted to argue vigorously, but the words rang true. How much of the failure of my love affairs lay squarely with me? How much did I contribute to the end of things because of habit, or example, or fear? How much did what I shared with Marie Dorval make the failure of any other relationship a foregone conclusion? I did not know. It is an ongoing and exasperating truth about our species that one can be remarkably astute about others but blind to oneself.

But Franz had problems of his own. I leaned forward and looked directly into his eyes to say, “We both are ill-suited for love. You want a woman to be a golden-haired angel fallen to earth. Then, when your fantasy is inevitably revealed as being all too human, you want to run away.”

Franz’s stomach growled just then. “The body speaks,” he said. “The body begs us to move from anguish to bread.”

Over breakfast, we changed our conversation to something less threatening to both of us. I suggested that language was limited for creative expression, but music was not.

“No, music is limited, too: to the power of the instrument, to the power of the musician’s imagination, to one’s ability to let go of conscious thought in favor of an unseen power.”

“It seems we are back to mysticism,” I said, and then, hearing rapid footsteps above us, I added, “And to the start of a new day.”

“Before you go, if I may be a priest after all, peace be with you,” Franz said.

“And with my spirit,” I answered. I did wish for it, truly.

August 1837

PARIS

On a lovely summer afternoon, my mother died. She was unaware of the seriousness of her condition, a liver that failed her. Her doctors had told my half sister, Caroline, and me that her pain was now over and there was no need to let her know that she had not long for the world. He advised us to let her last days be happy ones, and indeed they had seemed to be. We took her for a carriage ride through Paris, despite her dramatic weakness, and she smiled throughout. Her last words, to Caroline, were “Please tidy my hair.” Afterward, she looked at herself in the hand mirror, smiled, and her soul flew away.

She was buried in Montmartre Cemetery. The next day, before I returned to Nohant, I stood by her grave and let wash over me all the memories of her I could recall. Flowers and butterflies were everywhere; it seemed incongruous to have tears on my face and a leaden ache in my heart that made it hard to breathe. My mother had been as difficult in her later years as she ever had been; I never knew, when I visited her, what face I would be met with. But she had been the first one to hear the stories I made up and, when she was in the mood, the one who most ardently praised them. I remembered clearly her pulling me onto her lap and kissing me what seemed like thousands of times, then putting my hands together to make me applaud my own ingenuity. She had taken me to the theater when we had no money for bread. She had instilled in me respect for honesty, and she had been a fierce defender of my actions when I had gone to court to separate from Casimir.

There was a flame in my heart for my mother that burned steadily all my life, regardless of the way she treated me. Overall, I believe that she tried her best. She was a deeply passionate woman, one who in another life would have had her many talents broadened and widely praised. She was broken irretrievably by the death of the truest love she had known, all but mortally wounded; yet she lived on as best she could.

And I was her daughter.

June 1838

PARIS

A kind of turning point came between me and Chopin. Though months had gone by without any contact between us, we had long had an interest in each other. But that spring I came to Paris often, and he and I saw each other then. He would play for me, and afterward we would talk long into the night.

It was on one of those evenings that I had come close to achieving the kind of intimacy I sought. We shared a kiss, and afterward I pressed against him, letting him know that I was eager for more. But the mood evaporated when Chopin stepped back from me, flustered, and said, “Certain deeds could spoil the remembrance.”

By then I knew the man as tidy, fastidious; he was exacting, with his insistence on lavender kid gloves, silk waistcoats, muted cravats, the finest leather boots, and hats made light so as not to bear down too heavily upon him. When he was out, his shirts were white batiste; when he taught, he wore white muslin blouses with mother-of pearl buttons. He would not be without his good soaps and his scented water. He was extraordinarily sensitive: a rose petal in a snowstorm. His manners were exquisite; he was a model of discretion and had a truly kind heart. But he was also full of contradictions: he would “fall in love” with three women in one evening and not go home with or even follow up with a single one. He loved his homeland, Poland, passionately; he had relished living in a household where intellectuals connected to the European Enlightenment gathered; but he made himself an exile rather than live under Russian rule. He knew himself to be possessed of frail health because of his numerous respiratory problems (some said he was consumptive), yet he refused to eat well or get enough rest.

Most bafflingly, he seemed to want out of a self-imposed prison regarding the display of his affection, yet he did nothing about it. Liszt said that Chopin gave everything but himself. I knew Chopin had been hurt in love by a young Polish girl whose parents had disallowed their marriage, but that had been long ago.

I wrote for help to Count Albert Grzymala, our mutual friend and Chopin’s countryman, asking for guidance. If Chopin’s affections were bound up with another, I said, I would desist in my attempts to forge an intimate relationship with him. But otherwise, what would compel him to open himself to me? What lay behind his inability to indulge in the joys of an intimate and exclusive relationship? I wanted to care for him, who needed care; did Grzymala think he would let me?

It was a very long letter, and in it I did a great deal of soul-searching. I wanted to be fair, to be honorable, to be honest. I did not want to force myself upon someone who would rather I not do so. But Chopin’s responses to me had varied so much I was lost in confusion.

The letter I got back from Grzymala was nothing less than an exhortation to accelerate my efforts. And so I did. One evening in the summer of 1838, alone with Frédéric in his apartment, I took him by the hand and led him to his bed. I laid him down gently, lay beside him, and kissed him. When I pulled away, I saw in his face a kind of sadness, but then he put his hand to the back of my neck and gently drew me down to him, and one thing—eventually, tenderly—led to the other. Afterward, when I lay beside him, our breathing a melody in counterpoint, he idly ran his fingers through my hair. There was in the gesture a kind of distractedness, and I could sense that there was something he felt unable to say.

I spoke softly: “I know that there is now and will always be something that keeps you from me completely. I will not ask you what it is, but I will tell you that I, too, have a certain inability to offer myself wholly. As I would never ask from you something I am incapable of giving, I suggest that we serve as comfort and shelter for each other, that this be our form of love.”

With that, there came from him a great sigh of relief. When I looked up at him, he nodded.

November 1838

MAJORCA, SPAIN

I once wrote to a friend that my most beautiful, my sweetest journeys have been made “at my own fireside, my feet in the warm ashes and my elbows pressed on the worn arms of my grandmother’s chair.” But with winter approaching and my concerns about Maurice developing rheumatism, I decided to take the children away for the season, to a warmer climate. When Chopin heard I was going, he argued jealously that he himself would benefit from such a trip, perhaps more than my son would.

“Come with us, then,” I said, pleasantly surprised, for Frédéric found disquieting any disruption of his routine. Still, after some wrist-rubbing thought, he agreed that he would. We considered Italy, but then some Spanish friends enthusiastically recommended Majorca, the largest island in the Mediterranean’s Balearic archipelago.

We decided to travel separately to Perpignan. Though my separation from Casimir was legal, Frédéric still feared the gossip that swirled around us at any provocation. And he had not yet met my children. In Spain, he said, we would all be on equal footing, for none of us had been to Majorca before.

We arrived in Palma, the island’s capital, in mid-November. It was nearly comical to see aloes and lemon trees when we knew how the wind was whistling through the bare branches lining the boulevards in Paris. The warm air against our exposed skin had us closing our eyes in hedonistic pleasure. The colors were so saturated, so primary, they reminded one of a child’s drawing: blue seas, red pomegranates, yellow lemons, green mountains. During the day, one heard the beguiling tinkle of the bells on the donkeys, and at night came the romantic and far-reaching sound of guitars.

My children were immediately charmed by Chopin. He was kind and gentle and sensitive to the fluctuations in their moods, perhaps because he, too, was victim of such fluctuations. They also very much appreciated his music—Solange, especially; and he promised that once we were settled, he would give her piano lessons. “When I get back to Paris, I shall play just like him,” she told me, and I thought she actually believed it. I said nothing to dissuade her from that belief: her behavior had been very agreeable from the outset of this trip, and I did not want to disturb the equilibrium.

Our rooms were not clean or comfortable (our mattresses were slabs of slate), nor was the food delectable—one had a choice of fish and garlic or garlic and fish—and it was cooked in rancid oil. I hastened to find us a house to rent with more forgiving beds, where we might prepare dishes more satisfying and nutritious. I located one soon enough, but then the weather abruptly changed to cold and rain, and Frédéric began coughing in such a violent way that the owner of the house, fearing contagion, not only evicted us but charged us for a new mattress, as he said he would have to burn the old one.

I found us another place, one far out in the country. It was three rooms in an abandoned Carthusian monastery, on a mountain in Valldemosa. The Charterhouse was a collection of well-constructed buildings with a large enclosed area. It overlooked the sea on two sides, and the children and I loved exploring its mysterious passages: it brought me back to my convent days. A sacristan visited daily, and an apothecary-monk rented a cell a long way from ours, but he rarely came out. He sold us marsh mallow herb or couch grass (the only medicines he had) for exorbitant prices.

Otherwise we were alone but for the woman next to us, named Maria-Antonia, who rented a room in the monastery and offered to let us use it for cooking, as she had a stove. She also volunteered to be our housekeeper. She refused compensation, saying that she preferred to help us for the love of God, but she mostly helped herself to our meager supplies. Most of the work she was meant to do fell to me; it was a case of it being easier to do it myself than to explain to Maria-Antonia what I needed done. I would clearly state my objectives, and she would stare at me as if I were a talking portrait.

My days were spent tutoring the children and exploring the monastery and the island with them, cooking, talking with and nursing Frédéric, and fitting in writing when I could—there were, after all, bills to be paid and the publisher’s hand reaching across the miles.

As for Frédéric, despite his ill health, he was remarkably prolific in his work, composing, on the piano we had brought in, mazurkas, scherzos, and, most notably, his preludes: he, too, had taken an advance against promised works. In some of those preludes, I thought he evoked the place we were in. The darker ones suggested his terror of phantoms in the cloisters: they conjured long-dead monks and death and funerals and the heavy scent of incense caught in the folds of clothes. The sweeter ones I thought must have been inspired by the high cries of the children playing outside, or by the farmworkers’ cantilenas rising up from the foothills, or by the nestling sounds of the birds who sought shelter in the dripping boughs next to our window while thunder rumbled out its long complaints. Once, I remarked on the way that Frédéric had incorporated the patter of rain into a composition and made the mistake of referring to it as imitative harmony.

“Imitative!” he said. “No, it was not rain that inspired me; it is the tears of heaven that fall upon my heart!”

“Imitative!” echoed Solange, in her haughtiest tone.

I let it alone. I did not remind Frédéric of the times I had seen his creativity directly influenced by something other than himself. At Nohant one afternoon, we were out walking and I spoke rather poetically about the verdant countryside around us. Frédéric stopped walking. “Do you know how beautiful that is, what you just said?”

“Do you really think so?”

He nodded.

“Well, then. Put it into music.”

We went inside, eager as children who have been called to open gifts, and he sat at the piano and immediately began improvising a pastoral symphony. I stood behind him as he played, my hand on his shoulder.

Another time he was sitting at the piano late at night, idly improvising, and he suddenly fell silent. Delacroix, who was visiting us and had been listening to him, said, “Go on! You are not at the end yet.”

“Nor even at the beginning!” Frédéric said. “Nothing comes to me. Nothing but shadows. To put it in your terms, I’m trying to find the right color, but I can’t get the form.”

“Yes, you must have both,” Delacroix said, “and usually you find them together.”

Frédéric stared out the window, shaking his head. “Suppose I find only…moonlight.”

Delacroix leaned forward, his eyes shining. “If you find moonlight, you ask it to speak and you play what it says.”

I was sitting in a chair doing some needlework, and I smiled, pondering this interesting statement, wondering how such a concept would show itself in my work.

Suddenly Frédéric began to play, nearly formlessly at first, then in a way that had us nearly swooning. Describing it later, I wrote:

He begins again, without seeming to, so uncertain is the shape. Gradually quiet colors begin to show. Suddenly the blue note sings out, and the night is all around us, azure and transparent. Light clouds take on fantastic shapes and fill the sky. They gather about the moon which casts upon them great opalescent discs, and wakes the sleeping colors. We dream of a summer night, and sit there waiting for the song of the nightingale.

The unrelenting rain and cold in Majorca made Frédéric more and more ill and, finally, confined him to his bed. A Frenchwoman on the island gave me goosefeathers so that I could have pillows made for him. I called in three different doctors, none of whom helped him and one of whom, with his wide eyes and nervous manner, had Frédéric convinced he would not make it through the night. He ate very little, and I could not blame him: we were once delivered a skinny cooked chicken that came complete with a flea hopping upon its scorched back. “See how he dances the tarantella!” Solange said, and the children laughed, and I thanked God for their good natures at such a moment. I paid exorbitant prices—well over four times what they were worth—for the fish and vegetables and eggs I was able to procure; the locals laughed behind their hands at me when they departed. I learned early not to haggle; when I did, the offended merchant would pack the merchandise back up and refuse to sell it to me, and the next time the price would be even higher.

From the moment we arrived, we were not well regarded: I with my man’s name and men’s clothes, and even my daughter in trousers. Worse than that, we did not go to church! No, no favors were forthcoming from the people on whom we so desperately depended. When it rained very hard—which was often—no one would risk coming up the road to deliver anything. At those times, we made do with bread so hard it could have served as a minor weapon of war.

We were stuck there; Frédéric’s steadily deteriorating health made it imprudent for us to attempt to return to Paris. But there is something about untoward circumstances that can bind people closely together, and that is what happened to our little group in Majorca. Sometimes things were so bad that we could only laugh helplessly, then wipe our eyes of tears.

We made up stories, we recited poems, we exulted on rare sunny days when the lingering raindrops bejeweled the least blade of grass. But when Frédéric stopped eating altogether, I became fearful that he would die. On the day in February that I arranged for passage on the very next boat out—a boat carrying pigs!—he filled a basin with blood he had coughed up.

After an arduous and anxious journey, we checked into a hotel in Marseilles—Frédéric did not have the strength to make it to Paris.

I directed my attentions to restoring Frédéric’s health, and soon he stopped spitting blood and began eating again. I was able to return to producing fifteen or twenty pages of prose a day. I was rewriting Lélia, creating the more sanitized version of the novel that my publisher had requested for a reissue, and was working, as well, on a new book, called Spiridion, which incorporated elements both mystical and revolutionary. It was not what my publisher had hoped for, but it was what I wanted to write. He sighed and put it into print; my readers waited impatiently for me to return to a form more like my earlier works, ones more romantic and richly detailed, like those written by Balzac. (He, incidentally, had come back into my life after he had suffered his own frustrations in trying to help my fickle former lover Jules.) But I could serve only one master; and it was not my publisher I chose, but myself.

May 1839

NOHANT

Finally, Chopinet, as we often affectionately called him, was plump and healthy again, and we and the children were back at Nohant. Life was lovely there, at first. I created an appartement for Frédéric next to my bedroom, with his own bedroom and a library. I wallpapered the space with a gay Chinese print in red and blue, and although at first I could see he was holding his tongue, he came to like it very much—it was, after all, au courant.

Downstairs was a new Pleyel piano I had gotten for him, and while he sat composing, I took the children out for expeditions in a much more forgiving countryside than the one we had just left. Chopin’s output was prodigious in those months. Relieved that everyone’s health was good—Frédéric’s lungs, Maurice’s joints, Solange’s pulse, which had a tendency to race—I, too, worked well.

It was at that time that I wrote my novel Gabriel, and I did it using only dialogue. It concerned a princess who is given a boy’s education. As an adult, she dresses as a man except for three months a year, when she dresses as a woman to please her lover. He is named Astolphe, that name borrowed from a man who was openly homosexual and in love with Chopin.

It was ever mysterious to me the ways writing could excavate things from the secret corners of the soul. Oddly, sometimes I could not see what my writing placed directly before me—in this case, a moving back and forth between the sexes. Balzac praised that novel’s psychological acuity; most others left it alone as an iconoclastic oddity.

One night I sat writing at my little desk, a candle lit with a high and steady flame. I put down my pen and moved to the window, suffused with a kind of contentment. Outside, clouds floated peacefully past the moon, and I stared up into the firmament with a prayer that this life would continue, that for once I would be able to count on something lasting. The love Frédéric and I enjoyed had moved entirely to the spiritual, and I found I preferred it to the wild fluctuations of the earlier passions I had known. Delacroix had recently done a painting of the two of us, where I was listening to Frédéric play and in my face was a rich contentment. I was looking off to the side, and there was a smile playing about my lips of which I was unaware. I seemed (and was) totally entranced by the music. Long after that painting had been seen by others, it amused me to learn that people said I was sewing. They saw one of my hands holding fabric, another raised in midair to hold something they assumed was a needle. Had they looked more closely, they would have seen the truth: in one hand I held a handkerchief, which I used for tears when the music overcame my emotions. In the other hand was the butt end of the cigar I was smoking.

That night at Nohant, however, I beseeched whatever power might be listening to keep safe these three beings I loved most in the world: Maurice, Solange, Frédéric Chopin. My family. I vowed to devote my life to them, to care solely for them and my art. I commemorated this promise by scratching on my windowsill a line in English from one of my favorite poets, Lord Byron—All who joy would win must share it—followed by the date: June 19, 1839.

Those words were a variation of what I was always saying, one way or another. When one takes the long view, one sees that I did not say much else.

September 1839

16 RUE PIGALLE

PARIS

That fall, Chopin had to get back to his students, and it was too expensive for me to stay at Nohant, where uninvited guests came nearly every day to my table—sometimes a dozen at a time!—and I was too softhearted to turn anyone away. We decided to move back to the city.

Frédéric dispatched his friends to find us places to live, and we were lucky enough that they turned up paired pavilions at the back of a garden, offering us the privacy we both longed for. For propriety’s sake, now that we were in the crowded city and fodder for the gossipmongers, we did not live together.

Solange stayed with me when she visited from school. My daughter had once again been sent away to school because shortly after we got back to Nohant from Majorca, she had returned to her exasperating moody and often hostile behavior. Once Chopin’s darling, she began making fun of him, insinuating things about his character and sexuality; she called him “Sans Testicules.” Such outbursts made no sense to me; my daughter was once again walking through a garden and decapitating flowers. When I tried to give her more attention, thinking that her rude behavior reflected a need for that, she only grew more hostile toward me. I no longer knew what to offer her. The stricter environment at school did not seem to help her, either; but I was hopeful that, in time, it would.

As for Maurice, he was sixteen now and would soon be finished with school and in need of finding a vocation. We were both thrilled when Delacroix took him on as a studio assistant.

Frédéric and I lived a happy lifestyle, with our combined friends. On my side were Delacroix, Balzac, the poet Heine, the actors Bocage and Marie Dorval, and the usual rowdy and unkempt journalists. I had also new friends who visited regularly: a locksmith, a baker, a weaver, a stone carver whose poetry I helped get published, and a cabinet maker. Frédéric’s friends were musicians, singers, princesses, countesses, and Polish expatriates.

We often had community dinners together and lingered long at the table discussing again and again how best to approach the “social question.” I would be lost in the ideas of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, in discussions about how, if one assumed the world was rational, certain principles could be applied to the management of people, no matter what their social standing. I would postulate that the future of the world was in the hands of the working class, that in time the masses would rise up from where the so-called enlightened had chained them down. Frédéric would sit silently with a frozen smile on his face, asleep with his eyes open, and eventually disappear. He tolerated my dissident friends, but at heart he was an unapologetic aristocrat. Still, he relied on me, a woman whose sympathies lay with the people, to help him with his work.

Before Frédéric knew me, he would start things and let them languish; he had a great deal of trouble finishing things. I saw why; sometimes when we were out for a walk, he would hum or whistle a captivating phrase. When we got home and he sat at the piano, he would frustrate himself trying to remember what the notes were. But I remembered. I would stand a distance away, watching, and if he agonized for too long a time, I would walk quietly over to strike the appropriate keys, to unloosen and remind him. “Yes, yes, of course; I know,” he would say, shooing my hands from the keyboard.

Chopin composed half of his oeuvre at Nohant. And at the end of 1841, I served as his manager, in spite of his general unwillingness to perform in public. Liszt had just returned from a wildly successful solo tour, and so a jealous Chopin grudgingly allowed me to arrange for a concert for him, albeit with a violinist and a singer to share the bill. From the moment he agreed to do it, he plagued me with doubt and questions and demands I found hard to tolerate. At first, I laughed off his concerns, but then one day I got angry and stood inches from his face to tell him of my frustrations.

“You don’t want posters. You don’t want programs. You don’t want too big an audience. You don’t want anyone talking about the concert to you. I suggest when the day comes, you play in total darkness, on a silent keyboard!”

At this, he finally stopped interfering and let me go on with my plans.

The concert was a great success. I arranged for hothouse flowers to bank the double grand staircase of the Salle Pleyel, and it was an illustrious audience that ascended the red carpet up to the concert hall. When Chopin first came out on stage, I could feel his nervousness as though it were my own. But when he began playing, he disappeared into his own genius. He closed his eyes, and I closed mine. Then it felt as though the audience breathed as one. He had chosen an extremely challenging program featuring pieces he had written since we had come together, among them the four mazurkas of Opus 41 and the extremely difficult Third Scherzo, which he played with such force I feared he would break the piano.

His performance was met with calls for encores, with loud bravos, with women actually fainting from appreciation. Liszt published a review in which he spoke politely of the other performers that night, but he called Chopin the king of the evening. (About which my oversensitive Chopinet said, “Yes, I am the king for one night, raising the question of who is the king for all the other days! I am king, but only within his empire!”)

The “king” netted six thousand francs from the concert and immediately dispatched orders to his manservant, Jan, asking for suede gloves, two new colognes, a pair of dark gray pants—in the current fashion, but with no stripes!—and two new waistcoats, velvet, with a minute pattern.

—

IN 1842, finding that our apartments on Rue Pigalle were cold and damp, and that the climb up to them made Chopin short of breath, we moved to Square d’Orléans. It was just off Rue Saint-Lazare and, to my proletariat heart’s delight, was a kind of commune, presided over by Countess Charlotte Marliani and her husband, Emmanuel. There were eight structures built around a central courtyard. Other artists lived here, among them dancers, painters, actors, and musicians. I rented the roomiest place and painted my drawing room walls a coffee brown. Frédéric’s quarters, much smaller but quite elegant, were across the courtyard. Maurice had a tiny studio on a high floor, as befitted his bachelor status.

I relished the stimulation of being around like-minded people, and, as I became increasingly politicized, I began spending more and more time away from Frédéric, going to the kinds of meetings that led me to start my own journal, La Revue Indépendante.

Most summers, we returned to Nohant, and I worked continuously to make it better for my family and my guests. Chopin devised a tiny puppet theater; I created an art studio for Delacroix, and he and his cat, Cupid (whom I daresay he loved better than any woman), came to stay for ten days. What a joyful time we had then, the house noisy with talk and laughter and the echo of footsteps coming down the stairs. There were hikes around the grounds and through the forests, horseback rides in the fields; there was eating and drinking all hours of the day.

Whenever we were at Nohant, I invited people to visit, lest Chopin become bored. Whereas I could be content for long periods of time in the quiet of nature and was, in fact, restored by it, Frédéric needed constant stimulation. He needed the theater and the opera, the business of the streets. To the extent that I could, I created that for him in the country. He loved it when the famous soprano Pauline Viardot came, as she often did. He would play Mozart’s operas and she would stand at the piano and sing, and at those times I thought the angels in heaven envied us mortals who sat transfixed before her.

When Frédéric’s father died, he isolated himself in his room and fell into a black despair from which I began to think nothing would lift him. But then I invited his sister Ludwika to come from Poland. During her visit, she and I got on famously, each of us deeply appreciative of the other not only for the ways in which we cared for Chopin but for each other’s beings. Something about our mutual regard restored Frédéric’s spirits. After Ludwika went back to Poland, our friendship continued—and deepened—in letters.

The years went by, and I breathed easily; I thought I was done with looking for happiness and peace.

July 1844

NOHANT

I turned forty, the age at which one was considered officially old. And Maurice turned twenty-one, the age for becoming a man and stepping into his role of master of Nohant. With this he developed a certain animosity toward Frédéric, for it seems men lack the ability to live peacefully side by side when their need to dominate is challenged. Frédéric had a generally kind nature, but he also had his distinct preferences. A kind of tension announced itself: Maurice began to hold his head a different way when he was around Frédéric, and the lift in his chin spoke volumes.

In Maurice’s first act as master, he fired Frédéric’s manservant. Then he fired the ancient gardener at Nohant, who had been there when my grandmother was in charge, and finally he discharged a housekeeper whom we all knew as lazy but tolerated for her musical laugh and cheerful high coloring.

I understood that Maurice needed to make some dramatic decisions, both to establish his claim and to be financially responsible. I sent away with generous compensation the people he had discharged. I hurt for them, but I had to let my son run Nohant the way he saw fit. He also asked me not to take Frédéric away for the winter; he said he needed my help to complete the transfer of power from me to him.

As for Solange, her animosity toward me grew. This was because I took into my care a distant cousin on my mother’s side, a twenty-year-old girl named Augustine Brault whose mother was a prostitute and who I feared was being pressured into becoming the same: I had heard that her mother frequently brought her daughter along on her assignations. I knew the girl to be bright, kind, and talented, with a remarkable singing voice. She had unruly black hair, clear green eyes, and the classical kind of bone structure that would assure her beauty into old age. She was tall for a woman and moved with an easy grace. What I thought best about her was that she was full of energy. I could not help but feel it would be a pleasure to have her in the household, and in any case, I wanted her not to fall to circumstances that would ruin her life.

I spoke to Maurice about taking her in. He, too, cared very much about her and agreed that she would be a welcome addition. And so I offered to pay her parents to allow me to assume her care.

I had often worried that Solange felt alone in the family and that she seemed not to be skilled at making or keeping friends. I hoped that Augustine might serve as an older sister to her, a confidante, but after she arrived, all Solange seemed to feel for her was jealousy and contempt.

Frédéric did not like Titine, as we called her, either. He found her uncouth: too loud, too outspoken, too direct, and he thought she was calculating and scheming. He was openly rude to her. “She is only here because of her desire to marry Maurice,” he told me one night as we sat alone in the drawing room after dinner.

“I would welcome it.”

“Surely you are not sincere in saying this!”

I kept silent.

He turned in his chair to face me more directly. “You agonize about your relationship with your daughter, and then you do this. Can you not see that she will view this as a threat? She will feel that you prefer this relative stranger to her!”

To be honest, I had to admit that I did prefer someone whose gaze went out into the world rather than focusing relentlessly on herself. Deep in my heart was a stubborn—if battered—love for Solange, but I could not say that I admired her. I attributed her narrow vision, her constant preening, and her self-adulation to her youth, and hoped that she would soon grow into the capable and giving young woman I still believed she could be.

“You may think you are arranging to have two daughters who can help and learn from one another,” Frédéric said. “In fact, you are only arranging to lose one. Solange is desperate for your attention, and again and again you turn her away.”

It is she who turns from me! I wanted to say, because it was true. It had always been that way between her and me.

Generally speaking, it is the adult’s place to side with the child, who is not well equipped with tools for self-defense, and whose needs and vulnerabilities are great. I would do the same myself. But Arabella had been correct in saying that my daughter was highly skilled in manipulation. Frédéric could not see it. And in the end, he sided with an increasingly voluptuous and flirtatious—and, yes, ever more manipulative—Solange against me. Thus were the battle lines drawn for what would prove to be our undoing.

—

IN MAY OF 1846, in what I believed was an effort to get away from me, seventeen-year-old Solange made a rapid match, agreeing to marry the first suitor she had, a Berry man named Fernand de Preaulx. I found him pleasant but nothing more. On the evening she accepted him, Frédéric congratulated her warmly. I asked her to come into my room so that we might have privacy.

There, I sat her on the bed with me and took her hands into mine. I looked directly into her eyes to say, “There is something I must ask you, and I hope that you will answer truthfully. Woman to woman, I will tell you that I married your father without being in love with him, and nothing but trouble followed. Trouble and heartbreak.”

“As I very well know.”

“I don’t want the same for you. And so it is in this spirit that I ask you to tell me truly if you love Fernand.”

She pulled her hands from mine and spoke in a flat voice, devoid of warmth or feeling. “Yes. I love him.”

“Solange, whatever has been between us…it is important that you speak honestly now, that you not betray yourself simply to leave here. Our differences can be resolved, as they have been in the past. Perhaps we are too much alike. Perhaps we have both been too headstrong to—”

“I told you that I love him! Why must you now insinuate that I do not? Does it suit your own peculiar need for drama? I love him and I will marry him!”

I waited, but nothing more was forthcoming. Finally, I said, “Very well. Then I, too, offer you my congratulations. And if you like, I shall take you to Paris for your trousseau.”

“Is that all?”

I nodded. She brushed roughly past me and was gone.

I was the first woman to become a bestseller in France and had achieved worldwide fame. My work had been praised to the skies by critics who found fault with Victor Hugo. Almost every day’s post brought letters of praise. But my own daughter despised me. What had I done, I wondered. What had I done?

Maman! I suddenly heard Solange’s child’s voice say. Watch me! Look, Maman, look at me, why aren’t you watching? I pushed my face into my hands and wept.

February 1847

PARIS

Solange was sitting before her mirror when I entered her room.

“I have been invited to the studio of the sculptor Auguste Clésinger,” I told her. “Why don’t you come with me?”

“Why are you visiting him?” she asked my image in the mirror. She finished with her hair and turned around.

“He is an admirer. He has asked to do a bust of me.”

Her face filled with scorn. I saw that she was ready to refuse me, so I told her quickly, “But I would like him to do you, instead.”

It wasn’t true, at least not until that moment. For a year, I had been flattered by this young artist’s requests to sculpt me, and finally I had agreed that when I next went to Paris I would accommodate him. He sent a letter expressing what seemed to be sincere gratitude. It was full of misspellings, but it had a rough charm. And it showed the sort of unselfconscious passion I was ever unable to resist.

I had seen the thirty-three-year-old sculptor once in a café with Marie Dorval; she had pointed out the man with the dark good looks and muscular build who was hunched over his coffee, gesturing dramatically to the man with whom he was speaking. “Paris’s latest irresistible rogue,” Marie said. “He is a sculptor of some distinction, and his most recent work caused a scandal: it was of a writhing nude lying on her back. He called it Woman Bitten by a Serpent, but we all know it was more properly Woman in the Throes of an Orgasm.” Staring at him and biting into a pastry as though it were his shoulder, she added, “He is a former cavalryman; you can see the evidence. One can forgive a questionable reputation when one can enjoy such a physique.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But because of Clésinger?” I persisted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Heavens, no!” She giggled.

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

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

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

“I hardly think it is egregious.”

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

“Who told you this?”

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

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

“I won’t have it.”

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

He opened his mouth to speak.

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

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

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

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

June 1847

NOHANT

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

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

He shrugged in a way that aroused my wrath.

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

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

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

I closed my eyes and let go a huge sigh.

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

“It is a different situation.”

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

I had no answer. We resumed walking.

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

“I was not the first.”

“How do you know there have been others?”

He only looked at me.

I turned my gaze forward and walked on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 1847

NOHANT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then mortgage this place!” Clésinger said.

My mouth fell open.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, I received a letter from Frédéric:

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

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

I wrote him back:

Do as your heart tells you, and take its instinctive promptings for the language of your conscience. I quite understand.

As to my daughter…she has the bad taste to say that she needs the love of a mother whom, in fact, she hates and slanders, whose most sacred actions she sullies. You have undertaken to lend a willing ear to her, and perhaps you really do believe what she tells you. I would rather see you go over to the enemy than myself take arms against that same enemy who was born of my body and fed of my milk.

Take good care of her, since you seem to have decided that it is your duty to devote yourself to her. I will not hold it against you, but you will, I hope, understand me if I say that I shall stick to my role of outraged mother. To have been a dupe and a victim is quite enough. I forgive you, and will not, from this day forward, address so much as a single word of reproach to you, since you have confessed frankly what is in your mind.

Goodbye, my friend. May you soon be cured of all your ills, as I hope that now you may be (I have my reasons for thinking so). If you are, I will offer thanks to God for this fantastic ending of a friendship which has, for nine years, absorbed both of us. Send me news of yourself from time to time. It is useless to think that things can ever again be the same between us.

And then, as I have the fragile and contrary heart of a woman, I waited for him to come to me, or to at least respond. He did neither. We marched forward into our separate lives.

March 4, 1848

PARIS

I was on my way to see Charlotte Marliani when I ran into Chopin in her anteroom, coming out from having just visited her himself.

“George!” he said.

“Frédéric.” I kept my tone neutral, and I tried not to let my eyes devour him in the way he used to make fun of me for. He was pale, thin. I took his hand briefly; it was cold as ice.

“How do you fare?” he asked.

“Well, and you?”

“The same. Have you any news from Solange?” he asked.

“Last week I heard from her.”

“Not yesterday or the day before?”

“No.”

He smiled: half joy, half sorrow. “Then let me tell you that you are a grandmother. Solange has had a little girl, and I am delighted to think that I am the first to inform you of that fact. Her name is Jeanne-Gabrielle.”

“But then she came early!”

“Yes.”

I stood still; he bowed and made his way downstairs with his companion, an Abyssinian man named Combes.

I was turning to go into the apartment when I heard Combes calling my name as he bounded up the stairs again. I waited for him to reach me. “Frédéric wanted me to tell you that Solange and the baby are in good health,” he said breathlessly and smiled.

“And this he would not tell me himself?”

Combes spoke softly, “He could not climb the stairs again, madame.”

I rushed downstairs and asked Frédéric all about Solange, though I wanted desperately to inquire about him as well. He dutifully answered every question about my daughter, ending by saying that Solange had had a difficult labor but that the sight of her child had made her forget her pain.

I looked into his eyes. “As it ever goes. If given a chance, true love will always vanquish pain.”

“So it is said. Well. Good evening.” He bowed and started to turn away, and I quickly said, “And you, Frédéric? How is your health?”

“I am well,” he said, but he would not meet my eyes and instead bade the porter to open the door to his carriage. He did not turn around. He climbed in, and Combes followed him, the carriage creaking with his greater weight; and then it drove away. I stood at the edge of the street on a clear evening, the stars a rebuke, the memories falling like rain.

I thought, Love begins as a rhapsody and ends as a dirge.

I never saw him again. And most unfortunately, Solange’s baby died within days.

May 1848

PARIS

Michel de bourges and I may have come to a bad end, but his political proselytizing was not entirely in vain. After the July Monarchy was overthrown early in ’48, it seemed that at last a socialist republic would rise up. Undone by love (though what I declared was that I was through with it), I went to Paris and immersed myself in politics, giving it the same hectic energy and trusting heart I had offered my paramours.

I was called “the mind and the pen of the new regime.” I wrote government circulars, and I had access to all members of the provisional government at any time. I was privileged to award friends of mine temporary positions as commissaries of the republic at Châteauroux and La Châtre, and I even appointed my son as mayor of Nohant. What hope I had for the elevation of the masses! What faith I put in the courage of the people! But how far we fell in our efforts to grant freedom, and in such a short length of time. By May, the general elections showed us that the cause of the socialist republic was lost. All our efforts for the creation of a grand republic had failed.

Back at Nohant, I was greeted by men with tipped hats and straight lines for smiles; these same men wanted to burn my house down for my liberal politics. They were not like the protesters in Paris, who had barricaded the streets with everything from chairs and paving stones to broken cups and saucers. The people of Berry were more conservative than I had imagined them to be. The new mayor of Nohant, who was a political adversary but a personal friend, even suggested I leave town for a while. I shared this advice with some friends and received a letter back from Delacroix, in which he wrote:

Liberty purchased at the cost of pitched battles is not liberty at all, seeing that true liberty consists in the freedom to come and go in peace, to think as one will and eat as one likes, and enjoy a great many other advantages to which political upsets pay no attention.

He was right, I thought.

Not long afterward, I was out for a walk in the country one day with my old friend François Rollinat. He reminded me of how, a year ago, we had walked there and I had told him a story called “The Waif.” I had told it in the same easy, conversational style as an old village woman had told it to me, so long ago.

“I remember,” I said. “And it seems that in one year, we have aged ten. So much has changed from that day when we spoke here.”

François nodded sadly and looked out over the land. He drew in a breath, as though pulling the vision of all he was seeing deep into his lungs. Then he said, “Yet the stars shine on and the smell of the air is still sweet. Perhaps that is the only offering we can make. Let us use art again as we once understood it, and treat the anguish of the soul with the balm of the natural world.”

“Yes,” I said. “Let the cobbler return to his last, and the novelist to her pen.”

My next book was La Petite Fadette, which was praised for its evocation of the beauty of the rustic life, and it put me back in the good graces of the public, where I stayed.

October 1849

PARIS

October 17, 1849, FrÉdÉric FranÇois Chopin died. Solange was among those at his bedside; in fact, I heard that he died in her arms.

People said I did not care enough to go to him or to attend his funeral, but I was not told he was dying. I knew he was ill; I had heard that his sister Ludwika had come to care for him. After she arrived in Paris, I wrote to her, inquiring after Frédéric, but heard nothing back. Therefore I assumed it was nothing serious, and that he would recover the way he always had.

He had often said that he wanted to die in my arms; I had responded that if the fates decreed he went first, I would be the one to hold him then. My name may not have crossed his lips as he lay on his deathbed, but I know beyond knowing that I was in his thoughts and deep in his heart, and that if he did not call for me, he wanted to.

In the years that followed, I would be reviled for having caused his death, when in fact I’d extended his life. Without me, the world would have far fewer of his mazurkas, polonaises, preludes, and waltzes. It would be without his ravishing B-flat Minor Sonata, which he completed on a stormy afternoon at Nohant, after which he called me from the kitchen, where I had been putting up plum jam, to hear it. I stood at the piano with my fingers stained blue, with minute blossoms that had fallen in the wind on my walk that morning still dotting my hair. After he lifted his hands from the keys and the room fell abruptly silent, I opened my eyes and smiled at him through tears. And the breath he had been holding came rushing from him.

The world will ever love Chopin’s music. I loved not only his music but, to the bones, I loved that shy and private man, he with his constant cough and listless appetite, his nervous complaints and the raised veins in his feet, the tenderest of tributaries. And he loved me. We were not the thing each of us privately longed for; but our understanding of that made it possible for us to be to each other what we were. Our souls met and mingled in our love for music, in the grace and transcendence it provided us both. For all those years we were together, I listened daily as he played out his rapture, his questioning, his suffering; I knew him as well as he knew himself and perhaps better. However unconventional the manifestation of love between us, it was a true love. And even after it was over, it lasted.

It was Chopin who began our ritual of theater: it became incorporated into the house’s routine as much as were the lavish breakfasts followed by walks, followed by work, followed by dinner, followed by fun. We might read aloud or play dominoes or cards, but mostly we loved play-acting.

Later, Maurice built a marionette theater and carved from willow wood twenty different characters, including a theater manager, policemen, Bamboula the Negress, and the Comtesse de Bombrecoulant, who made a show of displaying her ample bosom. The puppets’ faces were painted by Maurice and his artist friends, and I sewed elaborate costumes for them: silk gowns and little frock coats and waistcoats enhanced with starched ruffs, embroideries, and feathered hats

Two years after Frédéric’s death, I combined the billiard room and Solange’s former bedroom into a large space that I made into a real theater, complete with a raised stage, proscenium, and benches for the audiences. To the left of that was Maurice’s marionette theater, which I made high enough to hide the bodies of the people who animated the puppets.

There was beautiful, hand-painted scenery. I had equipment for sound effects: piano and trumpets and the horns used for hunting; and I had machines for making the sound of rain, wind, thunder, cowbells, ocean waves, carriage wheels, and birdsong. Long after Frédéric had left Nohant and even long after he’d died, I often saw him sitting in the audience watching the shows, erect in posture, the crease lines in his pants legs undisturbed, every soft hair on his head in place, his hands folded lightly in his lap, his lips pursed to let escape a whisper of the music he was putting to the scenes being played out before him, his delight muted but obvious; his love contained, yet given.

—

FACED WITH GROWING OLDER, one is consoled by things both predictable and surprising. Grandchildren are expected to bring joy, and I lost my heart to all of mine: first to Jeanne, Solange’s second daughter, who, to my great sorrow, died young of scarlet fever. But then came Marc-Antoine, Maurice’s son, who was born after my son had the good sense to marry Lina Calamatta, who became a true daughter to me. The couple had two more children, Aurore and Gabrielle, and they offered me boundless joy. Those little ones and I made a nest of the wild thyme that came up year after year. They sat in my lap and I rested my chin on their heads, and I taught them to read, and the birds sang, and the wind parted the grasses, and the flowering gorse rose up next to water colored pink by a setting sun. What else better was there? What else better had there ever been?

February 1866

PARIS

“Ah! So tonight we are graced with George Sand in her peach silk dress, here to rape Flaubert.”

This is the comment I overheard as I sat down with a group of men in a private dining room at Magny’s restaurant. This group, made up of various artists and writers, had been founded by Sainte-Beuve, and they gathered bimonthly to dine and to enjoy vigorous conversation. After having received many invitations to join them, this was the first time I had come. It was for the express purpose of being with Gustave Flaubert, though not for the reason suggested.

In 1862, I had given Flaubert a good review of his historical novel, Salammbô. He had written me to thank me, and I had invited him to visit me at Nohant. At the time of this dinner, he had yet to come, but in the letters we sent back and forth a great friendship developed, in spite of our differences in worldview and character.

Over and over again I invited him to Nohant; over and over again he made his excuses—he was very much a recluse. In one letter, I told him: “You fancy that the work of the spirit is only in the brain, but you are very much mistaken, it is also in the legs. You live in your dressing gown—the great enemy of freedom and the active life.”

And he wrote back to me: “I wonder why I am so fond of you. Is it because you are a great man or a charming creature?” (This because I often assumed a male persona in my letters to him, just as I did in my private journals.)

On the night of the dinner, after a few minutes of my sitting silent and stiff-backed at the table, my glass of wine untouched before me, Flaubert finally blew in with the winter wind and came to sit beside me, close enough that I could feel the cold coming off his coat. I was becalmed by his open, handsome face. He was in his mid-forties then, tall, blond, green-eyed, and one of those men who have about them a sense of coiled strength. I was in my early sixties, beginning to show age in my graying hair and in a certain drooping at the jowls, though my energy had not diminished.

He acknowledged the rest of the group, then turned to me with a kind of mischief in his eyes. “George,” he said, lifting the lace at my sleeve to kiss my hand.

“Gustave,” said I, and kissed his. Because of the warmth and camaraderie we had developed over the last six months through letters, I felt comfortable being playful.

I leaned close to him to whisper into his ear: “You are the only man here who doesn’t scare me.”

“And you are the only woman who does scare me.”

“It isn’t so,” I said, smiling, and began rolling a slim cigarette in my customary pink paper, using the Turkish tobacco I loved.

“It is. I find myself practically tongue-tied.”

“You must know that you can say whatever you like. I would welcome your taking chances.”

He watched me finish rolling the cigarette and said softly, “Such delicate hands for such a strong woman. They invite a caress.”

I held the cigarette out to him and looked directly into his eyes. “Are you so inclined?”

He laughed. “And you say you are not a coquette!”

“I assure you, I am not a coquette! But neither am I the strong woman that people make me out to be.”

Gustave signaled for a glass of wine. Then he turned back to me and smiled. “To be with you, and to feel that I am with an old friend! What a pleasure. I find myself exceedingly happy at this moment. And you know from my letters how rare that is!”

“I do indeed. And tonight I hope to lead you to embrace the idea that life is more joyful than you allow it to be.”

“Ah, so that I am able to ‘let the wind play in my strings a bit,’ as you suggested that I do in my work.”

“Precisely. Do away with any system for writing. Simply obey your inspiration.”

He leaned back as our plates were put before us, then raised his wineglass. “To you, and to your efforts to improve my life, even to making my writing as painless and flowing as it is for you. Though here I very much doubt you will succeed.”

It is true that in all our years of friendship, I did not succeed in moving Gustave from one who agonized over every word, who doubted himself at every turn. With his first great success, Madame Bovary, he had encountered full force the arbitrary nature of publishing and criticism, and the bewildering frustration that could cause. The novel first came out as a serialization in the Revue de Paris, which was at the time being watched by the government for any writing that could be seen as scandalous. It was said that when a friend of Gustave’s who was an editor at the magazine told him the publisher wanted cuts, including the scene of Léon and Madame Bovary making love in a closed carriage traveling the streets of Rouen, Gustave gave that friend a message to give to the publisher in return:

I don’t care. If my novel upsets the bourgeois, I don’t care. If we end up in court, I don’t care. If they suppress the Revue de Paris, I don’t care. You had only to reject Bovary. You took it on, so much the worse for you. You’ll have to publish it as is.

Naturally, he did not succeed in refusing all cuts, and the novel was not much liked when it came out in serialization. When it became a book, however, with those scenes reinstated, it was, after a few mixed reviews, very highly praised and sold well.

I visited Gustave several times at his mother’s house in Croisset, near Rouen. I always found the view from that fine house on the banks of the Seine beautiful, even when the river’s waters were a muddy yellow. When I was there, we worked all day and talked much of the night away, usually in his study, with its green leather sofa and bearskin rug before the fire, with its stuffed parrot and gilded statue of Buddha and bowl full of sharpened goose quills. He had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with volumes he had read—the man devoured books, often reading three in a day, and he took great offense at being interrupted while he did so. Reading was nearly as sacred to him as writing.

We spoke a great deal about our works in progress, which we read aloud to each other. He called me “Dear Master,” for the assistance I provided him with his work on L’Éducation Sentimentale and Un Coeur Simple. In acknowledgment of our friendship, I dedicated my novel Le Dernier Amour to him—that one with a theme of adultery not weighted down by guilt!

Whereas work was Gustave’s highest priority, I had never attached nearly as much importance to mine, because what consumed me most was the search for the absolute in love. First it was my mother I dedicated myself to, then God, then a series of lovers. In old age, my brain centered more than anything else on the love of my grandchildren. And also, because of Flaubert, on chaste love.

During one of my early visits to him, Gustave and I sat warming ourselves at the fire late into the night, and at my urging we shared many stories about our lives. When I returned home, I had a letter from him that said:

We parted at a moment when many things were about to pass our lips. All the doors between us are not yet open. You inspire a great respect in me, and I do not dare to ask you questions.

I answered:

I was very happy in the week I spent with you. I feel an infinitely kind protectiveness in you. I didn’t want to leave, but I was keeping you from your work. From a distance I can tell you how much I love you without overdoing it. You are one of the rare kind, still impressionable, sincere, in love with art, uncorrupted by ambition, not intoxicated by success.

He responded:

They were very fine, our nocturnal chats. There were moments when I had to restrain myself from giving you little kisses as though you were a big child.

Despite rumors that I was out to “rape Flaubert,” the love we shared, in which we found an intimacy both of us had long desired, was completely innocent.

Our relationship did suffer somewhat toward the end, as I grew weary of Flaubert’s frequent complaining. He was a terrible pessimist, and I had my life’s work cut out for me to persuade him that one could hold on to optimism even as one moved toward death. I did not look upon aging as a downward spiral. I did not fear it. I saw it not as movement toward a dark and frightening thing but, rather, as a natural goal. There is a dignity in death; one does well to meet it halfway with calmness and acceptance and, if one can, rest assured in the knowledge that when the veil is lifted one will see that God possesses a caring hand after all.

I still believed in life eternal, though, as ever, my faith was of my own making. I was long done with the way that man attempted to represent what religion should be and to make it in his own image. I knew my time was coming, and I did not despair. Instead, I enjoyed the deepest happiness I had ever known. My mind was active, I was able to go out for long walks, I was even able to stay up for more hours of the day than I had when I was younger.

There was no longing for the days of my youth. I had lost all interest in fame. I wanted money only to secure my ability to leave behind something for the grandchildren. Perhaps most important, I still felt useful—in fact, more useful than I had been in my younger years, because what I offered was more direct: a heartfelt embrace, a pretty blue dress I had made, a winter stew, a story still wet upon the page that I shared with those young ones gathered at my feet, having written it just for them.

All of this I tried to explain to the Old Troubadour, as I called Flaubert—because of his love of Gypsies. But the troubadour also sings of love, and I believe that at heart Gustave was as susceptible to the charms of romance and the quest for joy as the rest of us, no matter what he might have said. How else to explain the apparent hypocrisy he displayed when he finally came for the first time to visit us at Nohant? He took a seven-hour train ride followed by a one-hour carriage ride, no doubt grumbling all the way. Then, when he stepped into the happy cacophony of our house full of people, what a change I witnessed!

The first day, with a grand flourish, he presented the grandchildren with dolls, which were wonderfully well received. The next day he relaxed enough to take a walk outside and look at a ram I wanted him to see.

“His name is Gustave,” I said and saw a little smile flicker beneath Flaubert’s monstrous mustache.

On his last night there, astonishingly, Flaubert appeared before dinner dressed as a woman and proceeded to dance the cachucha. It was both grotesque and delightful, and we were a most appreciative audience, laughing and applauding until, in splendid falsetto, he bade us stop.

The next day, he went home and returned to his hermitlike ways, and became immediately depressed.

Yes, we all need love, perhaps most especially those who argue against the need for it.

April 1873

NOHANT

Inside, the music has started and my guests are beckoning. But I do not go back to the house just yet. For I have found the answer I was seeking, the answer to what was most vital of all the things in my life, and it is the deep love I had for Marie Dorval. Having called her into my consciousness now, I want to stay with her longer.

I saw her many times after she left Nohant that day; we met for coffee and conversation, we went to plays and concerts and had dinners together, she came to my salons in Paris. In the spring of 1840, I wrote a play for her to star in, which closed in a week. She was deemed too old and too fat to play a romantic heroine; she was booed off the stage.

Naturally, this devastated her. And she grew very afraid of what her fate might be. I invited her to live with me; I told her I would always take care of her. I confess I hoped that we could find love again, that what had been snuffed out between us might now, because of this misfortune, resurrect itself. “Come to Nohant,” I told her. “We can leave everything in Paris behind.”

She smiled. “It is a lovely dream, the two of us together there again. But I must continue to tour to provide for my family. And you know my work is in my blood, as is yours; I cannot separate it from myself.”

She played in smaller and smaller towns, in smaller and smaller roles, for sums so minute I wondered that she could feed herself. Despite her objections, I often sent her money, so that she could afford to keep her beloved grandson, Georges, with her when she was in warmer climes. From one such small venue, she sent me a letter that ended this way: “Isn’t it curious, all of our lives, we long to know what our future will be. It is a mercy we do not know.”

She died on May 20, 1849, at fifty-one years of age, her health ruined from life on the road, her great beauty and fame a distant memory. She died, too, from a broken heart, for she was inconsolable after Georges died, the year before. “I do not expect to recover from seeing one so young die so nobly,” she told me. “I do not expect to, nor do I want to.” She had always told me that the only love she was helpless against was that she had for children.

I was informed of her death one morning in a letter from René Luguet, her son-in-law. He had invited her to come to Caen, but she wanted first to go to the Français Theater in Paris, in an attempt to find work that might pay her five hundred francs a month and enable her to survive. The director did not mince words: he told her that her request was absurd. He might be able to find her something for far less money, he said, but he would have to overcome the resistance of the board. How humiliating for my dear Marie, who once had all of Paris at her feet! I imagined her small person standing before him, her head bent in shame, those little hands holding on to each other for want of anything else to steady her.

She went to Caen after that but had no sooner arrived than she fell seriously ill. A doctor was summoned; her condition was pronounced critical, and it was advised that she not be moved. Luguet reserved a coach nonetheless; Marie wanted to die in Paris. She made it to her beloved city and her familiar bed. She asked for Dumas fils, and he came immediately. He reassured her that she would not lie in a pauper’s grave; he would pay for a proper place for her to take her rest. “Even in death, they will flock to see you,” he said. She died with a smile on her lips.

“You were her last and latest poet,” Luguet wrote. “I read Fadette aloud at her bedside, and we had a long talk about all the wonderful books you have written. We wept as we recalled the many moving scenes that they contain. Then she spoke to me of you, of your heart…. Ah, dear Madame Sand, how deeply you loved Marie, how truly you understood her spirit.”

There was a black cross over her grave, Luguet said. On it were these words: MARIE DORVAL: SHE DIED OF GRIEF.

I secluded myself in my bedroom for the rest of the day. I sat quietly before my window, looking out as day progressed into night, and the terrible pain that lay in my heart refused to lessen. I had promised myself to take care of her family, to bring them to Nohant for every holiday; but this did nothing to help. And so I turned to my imagination.

In my mind, I created a scene of me at her deathbed. I made the room dark, lit with candles that cast a flattering glow on the face of my vain beloved. I put myself bending over her, clutching her hands, as we talked in low voices about the life we might have had together. Marie’s face brightened in playfulness at one point. “But tell me, would we have had donkeys? For you know I love donkeys. They are so gay and comical.”

“We would have had many donkeys, and in winter I would have made them fat and in summer I would have braided garlands of daisies for them to wear around their necks. I would have used cook’s grease to polish their hooves. And we would have ridden them to the river, to that place where we bathed.”

“Ah. I was beautiful then.”

I leaned closer. “You are more beautiful now than ever, because you are more revealed.”

I saw her close her eyes in peace; I saw her soul materialize like a thin white vapor, then rise. I saw myself closing my own eyes, and then opening them to a world that was forevermore without Marie Dorval. I saw myself kiss her forehead, her cheeks, her mouth, each knuckle on each hand. And then I left her to the heavens.

It was this fantasy, finally, that let me breathe.

I would have done anything, if it could have kept her. Then and now. But there was no holding on to her, any more than one can hold on to a setting sun. Yet in my imagination, at least, I was beside her as she left this life, the last thing she saw and touched.

I stood, lit a lamp, and made my way to the kitchen, because I was hungry. I did not want to be, but I was.

A few days later, I was delivered a letter Marie herself had written. She must have known her time was short. The note was brief, and the handwriting labored. It said, “In our time, I gave you all I could, and more than you know. Now the curtain closes. Live with the perfect memory of what we shared and be glad that we suffered no disappointments in each other, that we had only love. My darling, be happy!”

If we are pained by memories of what we have loved and lost, then we are also gifted by them. I think often of how, in the years that followed our night at Nohant, there were times when fire still passed between us. Her eyes beneath her bonnet, a deliberate swish of her skirt, a certain hesitation in her gait when she passed by me. And there is this: Whenever I stand before the Indre, it is not only the river I see. It is Marie Dorval, naked upon the bank, preparing herself to come to me.

Be happy!

I move toward the music and the lights in the house, toward those I love and who love me.

A stitch in my side, a sharp pain. I gasp and hold tightly to the branch of a tree, wait until the pain passes, and go on.

June 8, 1876

NOHANT

It is difficult to speak. For weeks now, something has raked at my insides; sometimes I cannot help but cry out. Last night I said to those gathered round my bedside, “Farewell, I am dying.” But here I still am.

It is early morning; outside, the sky is dark and the trees move dramatically in the wind. Soon a storm will come. I want to live to see it. This is the way of nature: to persuade us around one more bend, to beckon us to behold one more vista.

I close my eyes and try to move my thoughts from my pain to the memory of the things I so loved witnessing here: the furrows of turned earth, the sun-shot clearings in the forest, the winding rivers, the canvas of the skies, the minute architecture of the wildflowers. And always the birds. And always the green. Green! It is the color of hope given by God to His children—all of them: the long dead, the living, those yet to be born.

The need to speak rises up so powerfully in me it is as though something has pushed hard against my spine. I feel my midsection rise; my shoulders press back against the pillows.

“It hurts her so!” I hear Solange say, weeping, and I open my eyes to look at her. It is not pain, I want to tell her. It is not pain; I am beyond pain now. I try to speak and fail; only my lips move. I try again, and she leans closer. “Laissez verdure,” I whisper. Keep the greenery. Incomplete, but all I can manage now. Laissez verdure: Let nature inspire and sustain you, and comfort you to the end. It is the truest sacrament, and—I see it now—the only perfect love.

I lean back, and a great peace comes to me. A widening. A settling. And then I am there.

It is Solange who closes my eyes, the bitterness between us at last departed, even as my soul has.

June 10, 1876

NOHANT

The peasant women have come to my grave site, and they kneel in the wet grass. I see their lips moving as they say the rosary, I hear their murmurs and their weeping, their cries of despair. If only I could lift their hearts as mine has been lifted, in my passing. My darling Flaubert, sobbing so he can scarcely breathe, his shoulders hunched, rainwater running down his back. Now comes Paul Meurice, reading the words sent by Victor Hugo:

I weep for the dead and I salute the deathless. Can it be said that we have lost her? No. Great figures such as she may disappear—they do not vanish. Far from it. One might almost say that they take on a new reality. By becoming invisible in one form, they become visible in another. Sublime transfiguration. The human form eclipses what is within, masking the true, the divine visage, which is the “idea.” George Sand was an “idea.” She has been released from the flesh, and now is free. She is dead, and now is living.

A nightingale sings. I turn toward the heaven in its breast, and am gone.

And so, what of it all? What of me and my passions and personas, my great loves and failures of love, my writing, my politics? What of the clanging opinions, the endless queries as to the whys and wherefores of how I chose to conduct myself? In the end, there is but one answer to every question, whether it is spit at me or made as gentlest inquiry: I was I.