Chapter Six

“I PREFER TO KEEP PRESSING FORWARD”

“The good Lady of Nohant.” Condescending and patronizing words veiled the artist under the faded glory of an old patron. Yes, George Sand was generous with her money; yes, she lived in the Nohant chateau. But she refused to be labeled and trapped in such a formulaic rut. It would stifle her, bury her alive.

To some, George Sand’s return to the region after 1848 was perceived as an old woman’s retirement, filled only with acts of charity and a few scrawled pastoral stories to amuse other elderly Berrichon. Was the whirling devil reduced to a recluse?

Of course not! This woman of forty-six years, who moved back into her autumn quarters at Nohant, was a prolific writer, a woman overflowing with life. Her newfound love helped her take flight. Alexandre Manceau had awakened a new sentiment within her, one of trust. Yes, it was still a fragile thing, but distinct enough to show in her letters to Hetzel, her favorite confidant, in July 1850. “Oh yes, I am well, and I am very happy, incredibly happy. I truly think that I am coming to this realization for the first time in my entire life. I can give myself over to this feeling with just a bit of pride. . . . I can’t be bothered to wonder if this will last, or if it should. I’d rather not think about it. This thing I have found, I did not seek, although perhaps I’ve deserved it, after an unhappy life of patiently waiting. But I am not owed more than can be given, and when much can be given, I have no right to demand more. I can resign myself to losing everything, but never to boredom, that much I know. But, by God in Heaven, it is so good to be loved, and to love fully, and such a love! I would be a fool to predict its end.”75

This is a mature woman possessed of happiness, with the capacity to enjoy it and an understanding of its delicacy. Also, someone with the intention of changing, of learning to be comfortable with her place on the receiving end, no longer just the constant giver. To love and be loved. No drama, no neuroses. This is what George Sand discovered thanks to a man who was neither brilliant nor mad, neither bizarre nor bad, and above all, certainly not “weak.”76 (How many different ways had that word deceived her?) Finally, she could depend upon something against her own anguish. This love would last. She felt immense gratitude for such a noble young man.

But what of her own age? At thirty, she was praised by Balzac. Now, she was said to have one foot already in the grave. “I am forty-six years old, and I have a few white hairs. What of it? Older women are better loved than younger women; I see that now. It isn’t the person which must last, it is love. May God look down, see that it is good, and let it endure!”77

Alexandre Manceau offered George Sand the privilege of enjoying her life to the fullest, even in middle age. So what if he was thirteen years her junior? She had decided to take advantage of as much of life as possible and to make her love endure.

This period marked a fertile time of great creativity. George Sand published no fewer than twenty-six novels, out of fifty total books, and about twenty plays (seventeen of which were staged in Paris) between 1850 and 1865, along with her memoirs and hundreds of letters, articles, and prefaces. But this abundance of writing, paired with her enormous capacity to work, was scorned by a few misogynist writers, including Baudelaire and Nietzsche. The former outdid himself by referring to her as a “dump;”78 the latter used “writing pack mule.” Edmond de Goncourt was equally inspired by the four-legged metaphor and called her “a brooding sphinx, the bull Apis,” or even better, “an abyss of talent.” Apparently, her good health and calm demeanor made others green with envy! She was an easy target for this sort of thing, whether through humility or blissful ignorance. She had, after all, once written to her good friend Bocage, “My garden is full of beautiful flowers, and I find it appallingly easy to slap down novel after novel.”79

Up until then, for the longest time, writing was not an accepted and respectable career for women. If some of the sarcastic remarks may betray a certain lack of respect towards George Sand, it remained clear that she had actually earned the right over the years to call herself a professional writer, one who made a living with her pen and ink. Even so, she usually underplayed her talent. She shied away from taking her own creative power seriously. This set her apart from most of her male colleagues, particularly Balzac, of whom she gave a rich description in Story of My Life: “Everyone knows how self-satisfied he is, a satisfaction so innate in him that we excuse its gushing forth.” She, on the other hand, suffered from an excess of modesty.

“My work is only botched stuff,” she wrote to Flaubert, for whom writing was a completely engaging process.80 Was this part of her belief that literature was just one of life’s many pursuits,81 not any more or less noble than gardening or sewing? “If I write a bad novel, the damage will not be much,” she wrote to Pierre Leroux. She did not put her writing on a pedestal, which may explain why George Sand was often relegated to the role of a lover or lady of the house, even caricaturized. It is clear, however, that George Sand was not wiling away her days jarring gooseberry preserves.

For the moment, she was diving headlong into her next theatrical adventure. But why theater? Plays earned money, which she needed. The post-revolution years were hard, business was slow, and she had a large household to run. She lived day by day, barely managing to pay her debts. The previous winter, she had gone without heat in her bedroom and had walked around in slippers instead of buying new shoes. She hadn’t invited her friends to Nohant nor given her usual contributions to charity.”82 She was counting on her memoirs to lift her financially, but her publisher was also suffering hard times and wasn’t ready. Her Story of My Life wouldn’t appear for a few more years. Still, she had already written the first volume and had taken up her pen once more in June 1848.

François the Waif, her play, had a promising success at the Odéon. On March 20, 1850, they celebrated its hundredth performance. The Théâtre des Variétés tried to jump on the bandwagon by producing an unauthorized adaptation of Little Fadette. She was beside herself. Her texts were her intellectual property, and they had been violated. This prompted her to bang out a new play, Marielle, which she sent to her actor/director friend Bocage in June.

Pierre Tousé, called “Bocage,” had carved out a name for himself in literary roles. He had been hugely successful in Hugo’s Marion de Lorme, Alexandre Dumas’ Nesle Tower (La Tour de Nesle), and opposite the sublime Marie Dorval in Antony. He was also the manager of the Odéon theater. This aging seducer with eyes of fire shared George Sand’s socialist convictions—and also her bed, for a brief period in 1837, from whence sprung a recurring ex-lover’s jealousy. She called him a “stuffed shirt;” he called her a “nagging genius.” She trusted him completely and was unfailingly loyal to him as an author, which of course gave him free reign to complicate matters. This time, he turned his nose up at the offering. He wanted another pastoral theme over this inspired play about the lives of actors.

“I don’t wish to write two plays in a row about my countryside. I don’t have to,” she protested. “I prefer to keep pressing forward as an artist and avoid retracing my footsteps.”83

She wouldn’t budge an inch. Well, not yet, anyway.

Bocage then went and gave a free performance of François the Waif for the working class on the anniversary of the founding of the Republic. They sang La Marseillaise, the anthem of the “Reds.” And, well, that didn’t go over well: by July, he was dismissed from the Odéon—a national theater on the same level as the Comédie-Française. The Republic of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte did not fool around with law and order. Sand tried in vain to withdraw her play from their repertory. A court representing commercial businesses ruled that François the Waif belonged to the Odéon, and prohibited Bocage from mounting a production in any other theater.

Undeterred, she wrote a new play, Claudie, which was performed in Nohant in August. Berrichon, of course. Extraordinarily bucolic. It told the story of a poor young woman, seduced then abandoned, whose child died of starvation. This theme—the reform of a young mother—may seem overly dramatic, but it lined up beautifully with the social issues of 1850, a vehement protest against the “low-down nouveau riche.” The issue was near and dear to her heart, and it would still cause a scandal over a century later. Claudie was far from a pitiful victim. She was a proud young woman, flooded with suffering, forced to be suspicious of men. There would have been many such Claudies, abused by the village Don Juan.

Theater was just another facet of George Sand’s prolific talent. Writing for theater, she was able to indulge in improvisation, multiple roles, costumes, game playing, farce, and burlesque. Plus, at Nohant, the freedom and lack of constraints from “high-society theater” was a breath of fresh air. They performed what they wished, for and among friends. That intimate stage inspired many of her scenes.

The Théâtre de Nohant quickly evolved from a simple parlor game to a serious workshop. The “salon theater” let the author see her work “in person,” giving her the opportunity to polish it and, as she explained, “to above all hear its style, which I’ve had in my mind but not in my ear.”84 An interesting insight into her creative process.

Alexandre Manceau’s role in the theater was becoming more apparent each day. Their common ground, a shared passion, the chance for the engraver to be actively involved in a wonderful adventure, which would grow with him. From that point forward, the rehearsals and workshops at Nohant played an integral part in Sand’s theatrical writing. Maurice too had a chance to explore his own talent as an actor and artist.

Bocage would attend one of these intimate workshops and share his opinions, before his own professional troupe started rehearsing Claudie. The play opened in January 1851 at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin to wild acclaim. It depicted “la Gerbaude,” the harvest festival in Berry, very accurately, with expressions and manners borrowed directly from a bricklayer who worked for Sand, who sang “in the true Berrichon style.”85 But the censors defaced it unrecognizably, and it wouldn’t run for more than forty performances. Marielle became Molière and opened in May that year at the Théâtre de la Gaîté on the boulevard du Temple, along the famous stretch dubbed the “Boulevard du Crime.” A third play was scheduled to open on November 26, 1851, at the Théâtre du Gymnase on the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, whose manager was hedging his bets on the feel-good genre. Unfortunately for Sand, another drama and other crimes intervened—Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup d’état would be played out at the same time, on an infinitely larger stage, bringing an end to the performances.

In spite of the offers from the Comédie-Française, George Sand swore her allegiance to street theater, where the “more open and naïve” public seemed “more malleable.” She wanted to make them laugh and cry. She also had a political goal: “to provide the people with moral, moving, and comforting plays”86 which would speak to their very souls. Theater was a platform for her, and she would continue to “preach goodness and honor in the face of censors and committees,”87 as she explained to the revolutionary Armand Barbès, imprisoned at the Doullens fort. This political and pedagogical freedom was inseparable from Sand’s idealistic nature, and she would have sacrificed anything for it. Reality was a bit, well, disappointing. But with Manceau at her side, a man of the people and a lover of theater in his own right, her convictions only grew stronger. The Boulevard du Crime had its theaters, outdoor stages, stalls, peddlers, animal trainers, mimes, acrobats, cabarets, cafes, and thousands of Parisians wandering around every night. That was her public. This “lady of Nohant” intended to be heard among these “children of the revolution.”

She also agreed to participate in a collection organized by her friend, publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel. The collection was entitled “Le Magasin des enfants.” Jules Verne’s future publisher proudly showed his editorial prowess by asking some of the best authors of the day to write children’s stories. Alexandre Dumas, Charles Nodier, Paul de Musset, and Arsène Houssaye all made contributions, and so did as P. J. Stahl, which was of course the penname of the publisher himself (he wrote the well-known Adventures of Tom Thumb)!

For him, she wrote The Mysterious Tale of Gentle Jack and Lord Bumblebee (Histoire du veritable Gribouille), a fairytale with characters borrowed from a world she knew quite well: the insect world. Ants, honeybees, hornets, beetles, and spiders drew the poor Gribouille, whose naiveté bordered on stupidity, into a fantasy world. Maurice Sand provided the illustrations for the volume. This time, at least, the mother had succeeded in promoting her son’s talent.

A lifelong republican, Pierre-Jules Hetzel had made a name for himself as a publisher with the 1839 Scenes from the Public and Private Lives of Animals (Scènes de la vie publique et privée des animaux), a satirical series of studies on contemporary morals. He had collaborated with Honoré de Balzac, the Musset brothers, Louis Viardot, Jules Janin, and George Sand, whom he had met for the first time through the project. She had penned the Story of a Parisian Sparrow (Histoire d’un moineau de Paris). That book’s success had given Hetzel the opportunity to co-edit the first volumes of The Human Comedy (La Comédie humaine) with Dubochet and Furnes. Perceptive, accommodating, generous, Hetzel was a god among his authors. Trust had been established almost instantaneously between him and Sand, and soon she was coming to him for advice. He became her unofficial literary agent almost before being her publisher.

Hetzel had participated in the 1848 revolution and was named chief secretary for foreign affairs under Lamartine. Filling both of his roles simultaneously, he retained his governmental post until December 20, 1848, when Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was elected. One of his final acts as chief secretary was to recommend Gerard de Nerval as France’s ambassador to Germany.

The correspondence between Sand and Hetzel, over the years, became gradually more personal. She shared with him her family issues, her daily life, her duties, her loves. But she could just as easily ask him to publish one of her books, to pull some strings for one of her protégés—the mason-poet Charles Poncy or the husband of her cousin Augustine de Bertholdi, for example—or even to help her find a new cook or a furry Marquise for her own dog, Marquis. The patience of this man with his authors was without bounds. Although he had been born in Chartres, this sturdy man with his well-groomed beard, full head of hair, and meticulous dress was a true Parisian who loved the cafes and the cobblestones. Sand made sure to waft the countryside his way. But this naturally courteous publisher was not bereft of pride or a strong character. “He will never kneel before anyone, and recognizes no man as his master . . . Even among the most important people, he retains his free will and frank manner. He behaves as an editor in every situation and will always take the trouble to correct everyone,” wrote one of his many friends, Edouard Grenier, a poet.88

He was always very open with his opinions, like in the case of Sand’s Molière. Its stage adaptation had disfigured it. A critical failure, it would only run for twelve performances.

“Thank you for telling me what you think,” Sand reassured him, “and please, never handle me with kid gloves. Whether or not I will yield to your advice, I always know that you care about me with all of your being.”89 Besides, she already had another play in the bag! Nothing about her literary career would ever prove discouraging for her.

From 1851 on, Pierre-Jules Hetzel would manage all of George Sand’s affairs, including sitting in on the rehearsals for her plays. In that first year alone, she wrote over eighty letters to him, most of them lengthy.

But what better way did George Sand have to prove her trust in her publisher friend than to share her thoughts, her secret about Alexandre?