Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician

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From her mother Aurora received her first instruction in reading
and writing. The taste for literary composition seems to have
been innate in her, for already at the age of five she wrote
letters to her grandmother and half-brother (a natural son of her
father's). When she was seven, Deschartres, her grandmother's
steward, who had been Maurice Dupin's tutor, began to teach her
French grammar and versification, Latin, arithmetic, botany, and
a little Greek. But she had no liking for any of these studies.
The dry classifications of plants and words were distasteful to
her; arithmetic she could not get into her head; and poetry was
not her language. History, on the other hand, was a source of
great enjoyment to her; but she read it like a romance, and did
not trouble herself about dates and other unpleasant details. She
was also fond of music; at least she was so as long as her
grandmother taught her, for the mechanical drilling she got from
the organist of La Chatre turned her fondness into indifference.
That subject of education, however, which is generally regarded
as the foundation of all education--I mean religion--was never
even mentioned to her. The Holy Scriptures were, indeed, given
into the child's hands, but she was left to believe or reject
whatever she liked. Her grandmother, who was a deist, hated not
only the pious, but piety itself, and, above all, Roman
Catholicism. Christ was in her opinion an estimable man, the
gospel an excellent philosophy, but she regretted that truth was
enveloped in ridiculous fables. The little of religion which the
girl imbibed she owed to her mother, by whose side she was made
to kneel and say her prayers. "My mother," writes George Sand in
her "Histoire de ma Vie," from which these details are taken,
"carried poetry into her religious feeling, and I stood in need
of poetry." Aurora's craving for religion and poetry was not to
remain unallayed. One night there appeared to her in a dream a
phantom, Corambe by name. The dream-created being took hold of
her waking imagination, and became the divinity of her religion
and the title and central figure of her childish, unwritten
romance. Corambe, who was of no sex, or rather of either sex just
as occasion might require--for it underwent numberless
metamorphoses--had "all the attributes of physical and moral
beauty, the gift of eloquence, and the all-powerful charm of the
arts, especially the magic of musical improvisation," being in
fact an abstract of all the sacred and secular histories with
which she had got acquainted.

The jarrings between her mother and grandmother continued; for of
course their intercourse did not entirely cease. The former
visited her relations at Nohant, and the latter and her
grandchildren occasionally passed some weeks in Paris. Aurora,
who loved both, her mother even passionately, was much harassed
by their jealousy, which vented itself in complaints, taunts, and
reproaches. Once she determined to go to Paris and live with her
mother, and was only deterred from doing so by the most cruel
means imaginable--namely, by her grandmother telling her of the
dissolute life which her mother had led before marrying her
father.

I owe my first socialistic and democratic instincts to the
singularity of my position, to my birth a cheval so to speak
on two classes--to my love for my mother thwarted and broken
by prejudices which made me suffer before I could comprehend
them. I owe them also to my education, which was by turns
philosophical and religious, and to all the contrasts which
my own life has presented to me from my earliest years.

At the age of thirteen Aurora was sent to the convent of English
Augustines in Paris, the only surviving one of the three or four
institutions of the kind that were founded during the time of
Cromwell. There she remained for the next three years. Her
knowledge when she entered this educational as well as religious
establishment was not of the sort that enables its possessor to
pass examinations; consequently she was placed in the lowest
class, although in discussion she could have held her own even
against her teachers. Much learning could not be acquired in the
convent, but the intercourse with other children, many of them
belonging, like the nuns, to English-speaking nations, was not
without effect on the development of her character. There were
three classes of pupils, the diables, betes, and devotes (the
devils, blockheads, and devout). Aurora soon joined the first,
and became one of their ringleaders. But all of a sudden a change
came over her. From one extreme she fell into the other. From
being the wildest of the wild she became the most devout of the
devout: "There was nothing strong in me but passion, and when
that of religion began to break out, it devoured everything in my
heart; and nothing in my brain opposed it." The acuteness of this
attack of religious mania gradually diminished; still she
harboured for some time the project of taking the veil, and
perhaps would have done so if she had been left to herself.

After her return-to Nohant her half-brother Hippolyte, who had
recently entered the army, gave her riding lessons, and already
at the end of a week she and her mare Colette might be seen
leaping ditches and hedges, crossing deep waters, and climbing
steep inclines. "And I, the eau dormante of the convent, had
become rather more daring than a hussar and more robust than a
peasant." The languor which had weighed upon her so long had all
of once given way to boisterous activity. When she was seventeen
she also began seriously to think of self-improvement; and as her
grandmother was now paralytic and mentally much weakened, Aurora
had almost no other guidance than that of chance and her own
instinct. Thomas a Kempis' "Imitation of Christ," which had been
her guide since her religious awakening, was now superseded, not,
however, without some struggles, by Chateaubriand's "Le Genie du
Christianisme." The book was lent her by her confessor with a
view to the strengthening of her faith, but it produced quite the
reverse effect, detaching her from it for ever. After reading and
enjoying Chateaubriand's book she set to work on the philosophers
and essayists Mably, Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bacon,
Bossuet, Aristotle, Leibnitz, Pascal, Montaigne, and then turned
to the poets and moralists La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante,
Virgil, Shakespeare, &c. But she was not a metaphysician; the
tendencies of her mind did not impel her to seek for scientific
solutions of the great mysteries. "J'etais," she says, "un etre
de sentiment, et le sentiment seul tranchait pour moi les
questions a man usage, qui toute experience faite, devinrent
bientot les seules questions a ma, portee." This "le sentiment
seul tranchait pour moi les questions" is another self-
revelation, or instance of self-knowledge, which it will be
useful to remember. What more natural than that this "being of
sentiment" should prefer the poets to the philosophers, and be
attracted, not by the cold reasoners, but by Rousseau, "the man
of passion and sentiment." It is impossible to describe here the
various experiences and doings of Aurora. Without enlarging on
the effects produced upon her by Byron's poetry, Shakespeare's
"Hamlet," and Chateaubriand's "Rene"; on her suicidal mania; on
the long rides which, clad in male attire, she took with
Deschartres; on the death of her grandmother, whose fortune she
inherited; on her life in Paris with her extravagantly-capricious
mother; on her rupture with her father's family, her aristocratic
relations, because she would not give up her mother--I say,
without enlarging on all this we will at once pass on to her
marriage, about which there has been so much fabling.

Aurore Dupin married Casimir Dudevant in September, 1822, and did
so of her own free will. Nor was her husband, as the story went,
a bald-headed, grey-moustached old colonel, with a look that made
all his dependents quake. On the contrary, Casimir Dudevant, a
natural son of Colonel Dudevant (an officer of the legion of
honour and a baron of the Empire), was, according to George
Sand's own description, "a slender, and rather elegant young man,
with a gay countenance and a military manner." Besides good looks
and youth--he was twenty-seven--he must also have possessed some
education, for, although he did not follow any profession, he had
been at a military school, served in the army as sub-lieutenant,
and on leaving the army had read for the bar and been admitted a
barrister. There was nothing romantic in the courtship, but at
the same time it was far from commonplace.

He did not speak to me of love [writes George Sand], and
owned that he was little inclined to sudden passion, to
enthusiasm, and in any case no adept in expressing it in an
attractive manner. He spoke of a friendship that would stand
any test, and compared the tranquil happiness of our hosts
[she was then staying with some friends] to that which he
believed he could swear to procure me.

She found sincerity not only in his words, but also in his whole
conduct; indeed, what lady could question a suitor's sincerity
after hearing him say that he had been struck at first sight by
her good-natured and sensible look, but that he had not thought
her either beautiful or pretty?

Shortly after their marriage the young couple proceeded to
Nohant, where they spent the winter. In June, 1823, they went to
Paris, and there their son Maurice was born. Their only other
offspring, the daughter Solange, did not come into the world till
fiveyears later. The discrepancies of the husband and wife's
character, which became soon apparent, made themselves gradually
more and more felt. His was a practical, hers a poetic nature.
Under his management Nohant assumed an altogether different
aspect--there was now order, neatness, and economy, where there
was previously confusion, untidiness, and waste. She admitted
that the change was for the better, but could not help regretting
the state of matters that had been--the old dog Phanor taking
possession of the fire-place and putting his muddy paws upon the
carpet; the old peacock eating the strawberries in the garden;
and the wild neglected nooks, where as a child she had so often
played and dreamed. Both loved the country, but they loved it for
different reasons. He was especially fond of hunting, a
consequence of which was that he left his wife much alone. And
when he was at home his society may not always have been very
entertaining, for what liveliness he had seems to have been
rather in his legs than in his brain. Writing to her mother on
April i, 1828, Madame Dudevant says: "Vous savez comme il est
paresseux de l'esprit et enrage des jambes." On the other hand,
her temper, which was anything but uniformly serene, must have
been trying to her husband. Occasionally she had fits of weeping
without any immediate cause, and one day at luncheon she
surprised her husband by a sudden burst of tears which she was
unable to account for. As M. Dudevant attributed his wife's
condition to the dulness of Nohant, the recent death of her
grandmother, and the air of the country, he proposed a change of
scene, which he did the more readily as he himself did not in the
least like Berry. The pleasant and numerous company they found in
the house of the friends with whom they went to stay at once
revived her spirits, and she became us frolicsome as she had
before been melancholy. George Sand describes her character as
continually alternating between "contemplative solitude and
complete giddiness in conditions of primitive innocence." It is
hardly to be wondered at that one who exhibited such glaring and
unaccountable contrasts of character was considered by some
people whimsical (bizarre) and by her husband an idiot. She
herself admits the possibility that he may not have been wrong.
At any rate, little by little he succeeded in making her feel the
superiority of reason and intelligence so thoroughly that for a
long time she was quite crushed and stupefied in company. Afraid
of finding themselves alone at Nohant, the ill-matched pair
continued their migration on leaving their friends. Madame
Dudevant made great efforts to see through her husband's eyes and
to think and act as he wished, but no sooner did she accord with
him than she ceased to accord with her own instincts. Whatever
they undertook, wherever they went, that sadness "without aim and
name" would from time to time come over her. Thinking that the
decline of her religiousness was the cause of her lowness of
spirits, she took counsel with her old confessor, the Jesuit Abbe
de Premord, and even passed, with her husband's consent, some
days in the retirement of the English convent. After staying
during the spring of 1825 at Nohant, M. and Madame Dudevant set
out for the south of France on July 5, the twenty-first
anniversary of the latter's birthday. In what George Sand calls
the "History of my Life," she inserted some excerpts from a diary
kept by her at this time, which throw much light on the relation
that existed between wife and husband. If only we could be sure
that it is not like so much in the book the outcome of her
powerful imagination! Besides repeated complaints about her
husband's ill-humour and frequent absences, we meet with the
following ominous reflections on marriage:--

Marriage is beautiful for lovers and useful for saints.

Besides saints and lovers there are a great many ordinary
minds and placid hearts that do not know love and cannot
attain to sanctity.

Marriage is the supreme aim of love. When love has left it,
or never entered it, sacrifice remains. This is very well for
those who understand sacrifice. The latter presupposes a
measure of heart and a degree of intelligence which are not
frequently to be met with.

For sacrifice there are compensations which the vulgar mind
can appreciate. The approbation of the world, the routine
sweetness of custom, a feeble, tranquil, and sensible
devotion that is not bent on rapturous exaltation, or money,
that is to say baubles, dress, luxury--in short, a thousand
little things which make one forget that one is deprived of
happiness.

The following extracts give us some glimpses which enable us to
realise the situation:--

I left rather sad. * said hard things to me, having been told
by a Madame *** that I was wrong in making excursions without
my husband. I do not think that this is the case, seeing that
my husband goes first, and I go where he intends to go.

My husband is one of the most intrepid of men. He goes
everywhere, and I follow him. He turns round and rebukes me.
He says that I affect singularity. I'll be hanged if I think
of it. I turn round, and I see Zoe following me. I tell her
that she affects singularity. My husband is angry because Zoe
laughs.

...We quickly leave the guides and the caravan behind us. We
ride over the most fantastic roads at a gallop. Zoe is mad
with courage. This intoxicates me, and I at once am her
equal.

In addition to the above, we must read a remark suggested by
certain entries in the diary:--

Aimee was an accomplished person of an exquisite distinction.
She loved everything that in any way is elegant and ornate in
society: names, manners, talents, titles. Madcap as I
assuredly was, I looked upon all this as vanity, and went in
quest of intimacy and simplicity combined with poesy. Thanks
to God, I found them in Zoe, who was really a person of
merit, and, moreover, a woman with a heart as eager for
affection as my own.

M. and Madame Dudevant spent the greater part of autumn and the
whole winter at Guillery, the chateau of Colonel Dudevant. Had
the latter not died at this time, he might perhaps have saved the
young people from those troubles towards which they were
drifting, at least so his daughter-in-law afterwards thought. In
the summer of 1826 the ill-matched couple returned to Nohant,
where they continued to live, a few short absences excepted, till
1831. Hitherto their mutual relation had left much to be desired,
henceforth it became worse and worse every day. It would,
however, be a mistake to account for this state of matters solely
by the dissimilarity of their temperaments--the poetic tendency
on the one side, the prosaic on the other--for although it
precluded an ideal matrimonial union, it by no means rendered an
endurable and even pleasant companionship impossible. The real
cause of the gathering clouds and imminent storm is to be sought
elsewhere. Madame Dudevant was endowed with great vitality; she
was, as it were, charged with an enormous amount of energy,
which, unless it found an outlet, oppressed her and made her
miserable. Now, in her then position, all channels were closed
up. The management of household affairs, which, if her statement
may be trusted, she neither considered beneath her dignity nor
disliked, might have served as a, safety-valve; but her
administration came to an untimely end. When, after the first
year of their married life, her husband examined the accounts, he
discovered that she had spent 14,000 francs instead of 10,000,
and found himself constrained to declare that their purse was too
light for her liberality. Not having anything else to do, and her
uselessness vexing her, she took to doctoring the poor and
concocting medicines. Hers, however, was not the spirit that
allows itself to be fettered by the triple vow of obedience,
silence, and poverty. No wonder, therefore, that her life, which
she compared to that of a nun, was not to her taste. She did not
complain so much of her husband, who did not interfere with her
reading and brewing of juleps, and was in no way a tyrant, as of
being the slave of a given situation from which he could not set
her free. The total lack of ready money was felt by her to
constitute in our altogether factitious society an intolerable
situation, frightful misery or absolute powerlessness. What she
missed was some means of which she might dispose, without
compunction and uncontrolled, for an artistic treat, a beautiful
book, a week's travelling, a present to a poor friend, a charity
to a deserving person, and such like trifles, which, although not
indispensable, make life pleasant. "Irresponsibility is a state
of servitude; it is something like the disgrace of the
interdict." But servitude and disgrace are galling yokes, and it
was not likely that so strong a character would long and meekly
submit to them. We have, however, not yet exhausted the
grievances of Madame Dudevant. Her brother Hippolyte, after
mismanaging his own property, came and lived for the sake of
economy at Nohant. His intemperance and that of a friend proved
contagious to her husband, and the consequence was not only much
rioting till late into the night, but occasionally also filthy
conversations. She began, therefore, to consider how the
requisite means might be obtained--which would enable her to get
away from such undesirable surroundings, and to withdraw her
children from these evil influences. For four years she
endeavoured to discover an employment by which she could gain her
livelihood. A milliner's business was out of the question without
capital to begin with; by needlework no more than ten sous a day
could be earned; she was too conscientious to make translation
pay; her crayon and water-colour portraits were pretty good
likenesses, but lacked originality; and in the painting of
flowers and birds on cigar-cases, work-boxes, fans, &c., which
promised to be more successful, she was soon discouraged by a
change of fashion.

At last Madame Dudevant made up her mind to go to Paris and try
her luck in literature. She had no ambition whatever, and merely
hoped to be able to eke out in this way her slender resources. As
regards the capital of knowledge she was possessed of she wrote:
"I had read history and novels; I had deciphered scores; I had
thrown an inattentive eye over the newspapers....Monsieur Neraud
[the Malgache of the "Lettres d'un Voyageur"] had tried to teach
me botany." According to the "Histoire de ma Vie" this new
departure was brought about by an amicable arrangement; her
letters, as in so many cases, tell, however, a very different
tale. Especially important is a letter written, on December 3,
1830, to Jules Boucoiran, who had lately been tutor to her
children, and whom, after the relation of what had taken place,
she asks to resume these duties for her sake now that she will be
away from Nohant and her children part of the year. Boucoiran, it
should be noted, was a young man of about twenty, who was a total
stranger to her on September 2, 1829, but whom she addressed on
November 30 of that year as "Mon cher Jules." Well, she tells him
in the letter in question that when looking for something in her
husband's writing-desk she came on a packet addressed to her, and
on which were further written by his hand the words "Do not open
it till after my death." Piqued by curiosity, she did open the
packet, and found in it nothing but curses upon herself. "He had
gathered up in it," she says, "all his ill-humour and anger
against me, all his reflections on my perversity." This was too
much for her; she had allowed herself to be humiliated for eight
years, now she would speak out.

Without waiting a day longer, still feeble and ill, I
declared my will and mentioned my motives with an aplomb and
coolness which petrified him. He hardly expected to see a
being like me rise to its full height in order to face him.
He growled, disputed, beseeched. I remained immovable. I want
an allowance, I shall go to Paris, my children will remain at
Nohant.

She feigned intractability on all these points, but after some
time relented and consented to return to Nohant if her conditions
were accepted. From the "Histoire de ma Vie" we learn what these
conditions were. She demanded her daughter, permission to pass
twice three months every year in Paris, and an allowance of 250
francs per month during the time of her absence from Nohant. Her
letters, however, show that her daughter was not with her during
her first three months at Paris.

Madame Dudevant proceeded to Paris at the beginning of 1831. Her
establishment there was of the simplest. It consisted of three
little rooms on the fifth story (a mansarde) in a house on the
Quai Saint-Michel. She did the washing and ironing herself, the
portiere assisting her in the rest of the household work. The
meals came from a restaurant, and cost two francs a day. And thus
she managed to keep within her allowance. I make these and the
following statements on her own authority. As she found her
woman's attire too expensive, little suited for facing mud and
rain, and in other respects inconvenient, she provided herself
with a coat (redingote-guerite), trousers, and waistcoat of
coarse grey cloth, a hat of the same colour, a large necktie, and
boots with little iron heels. This latter part of her outfit
especially gave her much pleasure. Having often worn man's
clothes when riding and hunting at Nohant, and remembering that
her mother used to go in the same guise with her father to the
theatre during their residence in Paris, she felt quite at home
in these habiliments and saw nothing shocking in donning them.
Now began what she called her literary school-boy life (vie
d'ecolier litteraire), her vie de gamin. She trotted through the
streets of Paris at all times and in all weathers, went to
garrets, studios, clubs, theatres, coffee-houses, in fact,
everywhere except to salons. The arts, politics, the romance of
society and living humanity, were the studies which she
passionately pursued. But she gives those the lie who said of her
that she had the "curiosite du vice."

The literary men with whom she had constant intercourse, and with
whom she was most closely connected, came, like herself, from
Berry. Henri de Latouche (or Delatouche, as George Sand writes),
a native of La Chatre, who was editor of the Figaro, enrolled her
among the contributors to this journal. But she had no talent for
this kind of work, and at the end of the month her payment
amounted to perhaps from twelve to fifteen francs. Madame
Dudevant and the two other Berrichons, Jules Sandeau and Felix
Pyat, were, so to speak, the literary apprentices of Delatouche,
who not only was much older than they, having been born in 1785,
but had long ago established his reputation as a journalist,
novelist, and dramatic writer. The first work which Madame
Dudevant produced was the novel "Rose et Blanche"; she wrote it
in collaboration with Jules Sandeau, whose relation to her is
generally believed to have been not only of a literary nature.
The novel, which appeared in 1831, was so successful that the
publishers asked the authors to write them another. Madame
Dudevant thereupon wrote "Indiana", but without the assistance of
Jules Sandeau. She was going to have it published under the nom
de plume Jules Sand, which they had assumed on the occasion of
"Rose et Blanche." But Jules Sandeau objected to this, saying
that as she had done all the work, she ought to have all the
honour. To satisfy both, Jules Sandeau, who would not adorn
himself with another's plumes, and the publishers, who preferred
a known to an unknown name, Delatouche gave Madame Dudevant the
name of George Sand, under which henceforth all her works were
published, and by which she was best known in society, and
generally called among her friends. "Valentine" appeared, like
"Indiana," in 1832, and was followed in 1833 by Lelia. For the
first two of these novels she received 3,000 francs. When Buloz
bought the Revue des deux Mondes, she became one of the
contributors to that journal. This shows that a great improvement
had taken place in her circumstances, and that the fight she had
to fight was not a very hard one. Indeed, in the course of two
years she had attained fame, and was now a much-praised and much-
abused celebrity.