Chapter Fourteen
“MY SOUL HAS GROWN OLD AND WEARY”
The coincidence between Nini’s passing and the completion of Story of My Life was striking. The last words were addressed to the little girl, who was joined together in the same thought with George’s, her friend Marie Dorval’s grandson whose disappearance ended in death. Penned between two painful events, two fractures—the falling out with her daughter in 1847 and Jeanne’s death—these memoirs provided George Sand with an opportunity for introspection. She created a character of herself in this fiction. By ending the story of [her] life, she marked the beginning of a period of time off, toying with the idea of an after. Besides the conclusion, written in June 1855, as she returned from Italy, Story of My Life came just before the long stretch of shock, silence, and creative paralysis that seized her after the death of her “beloved child.” The girl had revived a part of what the woman had been, and her living memory was recorded in ink while the woman felt a part of herself become erased.
Italy had restored George to health. She had recovered her physical energy. She seemed happy. But only a few weeks had passed since her mourning period. The house in Nohant was still haunted by memories of the child, and she couldn’t stand it. The months following her return would offer up scattered image after rippled image, trying to shake her life up enough to prevent the weight of her sadness from settling heavy on her shoulders. She only spoke of Nini with Manceau, who “had also been mad about her,” and still not enough to make him sad, too. “My soul has grown old and weary in a year,” she observed.244
As soon as summer ended, George and Alexandre were off to Paris again for the performances of Master Favilla at the Odéon. It was a mediocre play, as the ones that followed would be, stuffed with feel-good moments. It seemed to have more in common with Diderot’s maudlin drama than with contemporary theater, even though it had been inspired by Hoffmann. They only stayed a dozen days, but returned to the capital in November for the entire winter. They wouldn’t return to Nohant until the end of April 1856, in spring. Theater was once again their excuse for the long stay in Paris, as Sand was required at rehearsals for many of her plays. But nothing would go down in theatrical history: not Lucie or Françoise, both performed at the Gymnase; not her adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It at the Théâtre-Français, the first of the English playwright’s works adopted by the Comédie-Française; and not the revival of Mauprat, either. The audiences were equally underwhelmed.
Still, she loved the theater passionately and felt drawn to it like “a magnet.”245 She was crazy about the actors and actresses, who made up her inner circle for those months. Perhaps she was drawn to them because they were the opposite of her taciturn nature, dragging her out from under her usual melancholy. Maybe they were a distraction for her, a permanent show. She was blind to their faults, but as she explained, “they seem more like children than people, and I love children.”246 She wrote to a chosen few constantly, showering them with a slew of compliments, and had them over to her apartment on the rue Racine, just down the street from the Odéon. Philibert Rouvière, a fiery brunette with a southern accent, won all of her attention. A talented painter turned actor, he was a rousing success in Hamlet and played the title role in Master Favilla. She saw him every day—quite a bit, which did not escape Manceau’s notice.
By immersing herself in the world of theater, George Sand was able to regain her footing in the rest of her life, and work past this painful period. After returning to Nohant, she wrote a letter to the actress Sylvanie Arnould-Plessy in May 1856: “I have also rediscovered the child’s presence here, whom it seems I will never be able to forget. In this house, in this garden, I cannot believe that she won’t return to us one of these days. I see her everywhere, and this illusion breaks my heart over and over again.”247
A few months earlier, she had fought a fierce battle with Solange over the anniversary of Nini’s death. Her daughter had wanted to pray over her little girl’s tomb and have a white marble cross erected there. First, her mother had tried to dissuade her from even making the trip. What significance would an anniversary have for such a loss? “Genuine sorrow . . . does not mourn at a scheduled hour.”248 She also prohibited her from entering the grounds of Nohant accompanied by any man and wrote the same warning to Emile Aucante, who was responsible for the property. She also instructed him to lock up every room which led to her own and take away the keys. She didn’t want anyone rummaging through her drawers. Convinced she was playacting, she also harshly forbid Solange from setting up any cross on her daughter’s tomb. “She doesn’t have to convince me that she has a heart. She would do much better to leave me alone, as overburdened as I am with work. She shouldn’t go out and catch a cold; heaven forbid it would prevent her from attending a ball or a romantic dinner the night she returned, or the night after.”249 Such was her letter to Emile Aucante, who shared it with Manceau. Even the engraver was slightly shocked, although he tried to justify her behavior. Still, it was only a year later when George Sand grudgingly allowed a cross to be laid on Jeanne’s tomb.
Beneath her anticlericalism shone her deep-seated aggression towards Solange. She refused to believe in the sincerity of her daughter’s emotions, banishing her not only from her child’s tomb but from her own house by locking up the rooms. Locked out from her heart, or from her place in the family, perhaps? It was a new wound for the young woman. George also couldn’t stand her daughter’s liaisons, her love of drinking, and her frivolity—especially after mourning.
All of this was fundamentally represented in the tomb, and in Jeanne herself. Just as her own grandmother had seized the young Aurore and shut out Sophie Dupin, George saw herself as a guardian of Nini’s memory, of her grave (“the patch of earth where I will be sooner or later”), and of the right way to mourn her. Maybe, Manceau thought, Solange was going about it the wrong way. Or maybe George was actually tired and annoyed at the poor reception of her plays. Yet once again, it became a complicated game of identities. By rejecting her daughter in this way, George Sand behaved exactly as her own mother before her. Her letter to Aucante had ended abruptly with “Maurice is feeling better, he had been very ill,”250 which says everything about where her priorities lied. When Solange came to pray over the tomb in January 1857, George shut herself up in her room and refused to even see her daughter.
Because of Solange’s excessive behavior and marital spats, George Sand unconsciously held her responsible for Jeanne’s death. She may even have considered herself as the child’s true mother. In one of her texts, she describes a dream-like state, in which the child appeared to her as a young woman with the phrase “Mother, let’s go see the kids’ party!”251 The girl then acknowledged the little garden that a woman, a mother, had planted for her (alluding, of course, to Trianon in Nohant’s park).
It would also have been a matter of some importance at the time for her to read Contemplations, written by Victor Hugo following the death of his daughter, Léopoldine. The work appeared in 1856 and sold every one of its 3,000 copies in one day. George was deeply touched by its reception: “The poor man, to have experienced what we have and to have produced such a sublime work. Yes, Villequier’s play is a masterpiece. This is how it is,”252 she wrote to Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who had also lost his own daughter.
When Nini died, she was the same age as George Sand when the latter lost her father. Her grief for Nini was as though she had lost her own child. Nini had been the perfect daughter. The other one, the real one, remained.
Constantly seeking her mother’s approval, Solange started writing poetry and sent it to . . . Manceau. He served as the arbitrator in the matter, but George couldn’t help but share her opinions. “The form is nice, the meaning is a little shallow.” Then, in the same letter, she once again tried to dissuade Solange from coming to Nohant. The daughter’s reply shows she was not fooled: “Oh, my God, so many things stand in the way of my spending a week with you! No cook, no male servant, Pistolète in poor shape, Sylvain sick, Madame Caillaud hasn’t done her work, Emile is away! How could I ever overcome all these obstacles. I’d best forget the whole thing, especially since you don’t seem to be particularly entertained by the idea of my presence.”253
In reality, George Sand’s reluctance was partially due to her writer’s incubation—she would finally start a new novel a few days later. The relief was immediately apparent: “Once my work has been checked, I can finally live again; otherwise, melancholy takes over,” she explained triumphantly to her daughter, two weeks later, pressing her this time to hurry over for a visit.254 Solange would stay at Nohant for the entire summer. That December, George would have a cross laid on Nini’s grave.
She hadn’t written a novel in three years, since The Master Pipers. The creative process was launched, her imagination ran wild, and a text inspired by her trip to Italy flew out: La Daniella.
With its complex setting, conventional characters, and twists and turns of plot, the novel follows normal conventions. This Bildungsroman was fed by her Italian memories, where she describes the social utopia that George Sand held so dear. The hero, a young painter from a good family, secretly marries Daniella, an Italian servant, whose natural artistic talent foreshadows a career as an opera singer. The child they’re expecting avoids illegitimacy, too. The novel’s themes were sometimes critical of the Church’s morals and of Roman politics, which sparked a lively debate and earned both the author and La Presse, which published the novel in installments, a warning from the Ministry of the Interior.
George Sand had entered a new stage of her life. In a letter to Emile Aucante on May 11, 1856, her handwriting suddenly changed, smack in the middle of a sentence. She stopped using her right-slanting English-style cursive she had learned in the convent and adopted a straighter, rounded script, leaning slightly to the left.255 To her contemporaries, this new handwriting would have seemed shockingly modern and feminine. A later letter to Pauline Viardot explains the change: “My dear Sweetie, you should get accustomed to my new handwriting. My hand had been stiff and broken, but I discovered that I could write much faster this way without smearing the ink.”256 This also shows how strong her flow of writing was, barely keeping up with her thoughts, that her hand would be “broken.”
The most explicit goal of this change was comfort. “Our handwriting can be however we like, and we can change it without changing views or behaviors,” she later argued to Abbé Michon, who wrote the highly popular The System of Graphology (Système de graphologie).257
Yet the handwriting on the paper still revealed a serious evolution.
In his graphology analysis, Frédéric Dubois explains that the change shows “a progressive liberation of the physical act of writing, correlating to a reduction of her own inconsistencies.” Concerns of form fade before freedom of movement, a greater harmony between her impulses and her self-image, a calm self-affirmation, and a recognition of her femininity.258 After years of often bitter experiences and the death of some very close friends and family, George Sand had finally come to fully accept herself. She stopped hiding her true self from others. Her change in handwriting, as her earlier name change, could have signaled a significant evolution in her personality. Writing Story of My Life was probably another important component, as well as her relationship with Alexandre Manceau.
This more mature woman had finally reached the path to serenity.