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

Flaubert wrote to her in 1866. “Where do they come from, do you think, these black moods that engulf us like this? They rise like a tide, you feel as if you are drowning and you have to escape somehow. What I do is lie, floating, letting it all wash over me.” In 1876, a few months before she died, Flaubert wrote: “[Y]ou’ve never done me anything but good and I love you most tenderly.”
    At the end of the summer of 1831, Aurore and Jules began work on the bawdy Rose et Blanche , a planned five-volume novel for which they’d secured a publishing contract, and which they’d signed with the joint pseudonym “J. Sand.” (Latouche, who had become a devoted mentor to Aurore, invented the name.) But Aurore ended up doing the bulk of the writing.
    The novel was released to mixed reviews, yet it had moderate success and gave Aurore the confidence to publish entirely on her own. The following year, she published Indiana —a semi-autobiographical novel, and an unapologetic denunciation of marriage that she expected “to please very few people.” Instead, it won international acclaim and became a best seller. An envious Victor Hugo (her rival for the status of France’s best-selling author) called it “the finest novel of manners that has been published in French for twenty years.” The author of this lauded novel was “George Sand,” a name that would not only endure as her nom de plume but serve as her identity for the rest of her life. After completing Indiana , “I was baptized,” she explained. “The [name] I was given, I earned myself, after the event, by my own toil. . . . I do not think anyone has anything to reproach me for.”
    She was amused by the number of reviewers who spoke enthusiastically of “Mr. G. Sand,” but insisted that a woman must have had a hand in refining some of the novel’s more emotional aspects. They were stumped because “the style and discrimination were too virile to be anything but a man’s.”
    In 1832, her romantic relationship with Sandeau collapsed, and just as she was beginning to achieve professional success, she felt increasingly isolated. But in January 1833, she met Marie Dorval, a famous stage actress in her mid-thirties whose presence toppled and intoxicated Sand, and who would become—as she later described it—the one true love of her life. Both women were married (and had other lovers) at the time, but Sand legally separated from her husband in 1835. She pursued Dorval—initially, in the name of “friendship”: “For my part I feel I love you with a heart brought back to life and rejuvenated by you,” Sand wrote to her early on. “If it is a dream, like everything else I have wished for in life, do not steal it from me too quickly. It does me so much good.” Meanwhile, Dorval’s lover at the time, Alfred de Vigny, gave a detailed assessment of his rival: “Her hair is dark and curly and falls freely over her collar, rather like one of Raphael’s angels,” he wrote of Sand. “She has large black eyes, shaped like those of mystics whom one sees in paintings, or in those magnificent Italian portraits. Her face is severe and gives little away, the lower half is unattractive, the mouth ill-shaped. She has no grace of bearing, and her speech is coarse. In her manner of dress, her language, her tone of voice and the audacity of her conversation, she is like a man.” Vigny had good cause to be concerned.
    Sand played a male role in public because doing so offered her a much broader range of experience, and she loved freedom. Elizabeth Barrett Browning affectionately called her “thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man.” She wrote a sonnet, “To George Sand: A Recognition,” in 1844:
    True genius, but true woman! dost deny
    Thy woman’s nature with a manly scorn,
    And break away the gauds and