Read Online Nom de Plume by Carmela Ciuraru - Free Book Online

recognized it as an essential but unpleasant aspect of her union. “In marrying, one of the two must renounce himself or herself completely,” she noted. “All that remains to be asked, then, is whether it should be for the husband or the wife to recast his or her being according to the mould of the other.” On a family trip to the Pyrenees on her twenty-first birthday, she wrote in her diary: “I have to get used to smiling though my soul feels dead.”
    Despite periods of depression, she delighted in motherhood and gave birth to a daughter, Solange, in the fall of 1828. Aurore was dissatisfied with her marriage intellectually, emotionally, and sexually. It was a functioning partnership, nothing more. She was slowly recasting herself, but hardly as the dutiful wife—though she had genuinely tried: “I made enormous efforts to see things through my husband’s eyes and think and do as he wished,” she later wrote. “But the minute I had come to agree with him, I would fall into dreadful sadness, because I no longer felt in agreement with my own instincts.”
    The headstrong young woman was keenly interested in exploring other, more flamboyant and expansive roles. Just a year before she married, Aurore had made her first public appearance in a male disguise. She’d been riding her horse, Colette, one day, dressed in equestrian clothes, and was mistaken for a man. In a nearby village, she’d been addressed as “monsieur” by a woman, who had blushed and narrowed her eyes in “his” presence. Aurore was thrilled about her cross-dressing experiment and delighted by her own power. The illicit erotic charge wasn’t bad, either.
    Although she was certainly adjusting to the mold of another, her new form did not belong to the dull Casimir but to George Sand, her literary persona, who would become France’s best-selling writer and would be among its most prolific authors. In considering what Sand accomplished, and the inspiring way she went about it, a dictum from the inimitable artist Louise Bourgeois comes to mind: “A woman has no place in the art world unless she proves over and over again she won’t be eliminated.”
    Both Aurore and Casimir had casual affairs during their marriage, but at twenty-six, Aurore met a young Parisian who would play an important role in her life. When they fell in love, Jules Sandeau was nineteen and, like her, a writer. The first syllable of his surname (Sand) would become the surname of her pseudonym. Though their love affair didn’t last long, Sandeau proved enormously influential and helped her find her path toward a wholly independent life. “Inspiration can pass through the soul just as easily in the midst of an orgy as in the silence of the woods,” she wrote in her autobiography, “but when it is a question of giving form to your thoughts, whether you are secluded in your study or performing on the planks of a stage, you must be in total possession of yourself.” By 1830, she was well on her way.
    The following year, she decided to assert her will rather forcefully. She told Casimir that she would live in Paris for half the year with Solange, returning in the other months to care for Maurice. Yet she went through many periods of replicating her own mother’s treatment of her—abandoning both children for long (and damaging) stretches to caretakers and tutors, in the single-minded pursuit of her own desires and ambitions. She wrestled with this but did not always remedy the situation to her children’s liking.
    Aurore’s loneliness in Paris, at first, was “profound and complete.” She felt useless. There was no doubt in her mind that literature alone “offered me the most chance of success as a profession.” The few people she confided in about it were skeptical that writing and monetary concerns could successfully coexist—at least for a woman.
    She