The Venice Adventure
George Sand did not have to wait long for success. She won fame with her first book. With her second one she became rich, or what she considered rich. She tells us that she sold it for a hundred and sixty pounds! That seemed to her the wealth of the world, and she did not hesitate to leave her attic on the Quay St. Michel for a more comfortable flat on Quay Malaquais, which de Latouche gave up to her.
There was, at that time, a personage in Paris who had begun to exercise a sort of royal tyranny over authors. Francois Buloz had taken advantage of the intellectual effervescence of 1831 to found the Revue des Deux Mondes. He was venturesome, energetic, original, very shrewd, though apparently rough, obliging, in spite of his surly manners. He is still considered the typical and traditional review manager. He certainly possessed the first quality necessary for this function. He discovered talented writers, and he also knew how to draw from them and squeeze out of them all the literature they contained. Tremendously headstrong, he has been known to keep a contributor under lock and key until his article was finished. Authors abused him, quarrelled with him, and then came back to him again. A review which had, for its first numbers, George Sand, Vigny, Musset, Merimee, among many others, as contributors, may be said to have started well. George Sand tells us that after a battle with the Revue de Paris and the Revue des Deux Mondes, both of which papers wanted her work, she bound herself to the Revue des Deux Mondes, which was to pay her a hundred and sixty pounds a year for thirty-two pages of writing every six weeks. In 1833 the Revue des Deux Mondes published Lelia, and on January 1, 1876, it finished publishing the Tour de Percemont. This means an uninterrupted collaboration, extending over a period of forty-three years.
The literary critic of the Revue des Deux Mondes at that time was a man who was very much respected and very little liked, or, in other words, he was universally detested. This critic was Gustave Planche. He took his own role too seriously, and endeavoured to put authors on their guard about their faults. Authors did not appreciate this. He endeavoured, too, to put the public on guard against its own infatuations. The public did not care for this. He sowed strife and reaped revenge. This did not stop him, though, for he went calmly on continuing his executions. His impassibility was only feigned, and this is the curious side of the story. He suffered keenly from the storms of hostility which he provoked. He had a kindly disposition at bottom and tender places in his heart. He was rather given to melancholy and intensely pessimistic. To relieve his sadness, he gave himself up to hard work, and he was thoroughly devoted to art. In order to comprehend this portrait and to see its resemblance, we, who knew our great Brunetiere, have only to think of him. He, too, was noble, fervent and combative, and he sought in his exclusive devotion to literature a diversion from his gloomy pessimism, underneath which was concealed such kindliness. It seemed with him, too, as though he took a pride in making a whole crowd of enemies, whilst in reality the discovery of every fresh adversary caused him great suffering.
When Lelia appeared, the novel was very badly treated in L'Europe litteraire. Planche challenged the writer of the article, a certain Capo de Feuillide, to a duel. So much for the impassibility of severe critics. The duel took place, and afterwards there was a misunderstanding between George Sand and Planche. From that time forth critics have given up fighting duels for the sake of authors.
About the same time, George Sand made use of Sainte-Beuve as her confessor. He seemed specially indicated for this function. In the first place, he looked rather ecclesiastical, and then he had a taste for secrets, and more particularly for whispered confessions. George Sand had absolute confidence in him. She considered that he had an almost angelic nature. In reality, just about that time, the angelic man was endeavouring to get into the good graces of the wife of his best friend, and was writing his Livre d'Amour, and divulging to the world a weakness of which he had taken advantage. This certainly was the most villainous thing a man could do. But then he, too, was in love and was struggling and praying. George Sand declares her veneration for him, and she constituted herself his penitent.
She begins her confession by an avowal that must have been difficult for her. She tells of her intimacy with Merimee, an intimacy which was of short duration and very unsatisfactory. She had been fascinated by Merimee's art.
"For about a week," she says, "I thought he had the secret of happiness." At the end of the week she was "weeping with disgust, suffering and discouragement." She had hoped to find in him the devotion of a consoler, but she found nothing but cold and bitter jesting."[16] This experiment had also proved a failure.
[16] Compare Lettres a Sainte-Beuve.
Such were the conditions in which George Sand found herself at this epoch. Her position was satisfactory; she might have been calm and independent. Her inner life was once more desolate, and she was thoroughly discouraged. She felt that she had lived centuries, that she had undergone torture, that her heart had aged twenty years, and that nothing was any pleasure to her now. Added to all this, public life saddened her, for the horizon had clouded over. The boundless hopes and the enthusiasm of 1831 were things of the past. "The Republic, as it was dreamed of in July," she writes, "has ended in the massacres of Warsaw and in the holocaust of the Saint-Merry cloister. The cholera has just been raging. Saint Simonism has fallen through before it had settled the great question of love."[17]
[17] Histoire de ma vie.
Depression had come after over-excitement. This is a phenomenon frequently seen immediately after political convulsions. It might be called the perpetual failure of revolutionary promises.
It was under all these influences that George Sand wrote Lelia. She finished it in July, and it appeared in August, 1833.
It is absolutely impossible to give an analysis of Lelia. There really is no subject. The personages are not beings of flesh and blood. They are allegories strolling about in the garden of abstractions. Lelia is a woman who has had her trials in life. She has loved and been disappointed, so that she can no longer love at all. She reduces the gentle poet Stenio to despair. He is much younger than she is, and he has faith in life and in love. His ingenuous soul begins to wither and to lose its freshness, thanks to the scepticism of the beautiful, disdainful, ironical and world-weary Lelia. This strange person has a sister Pulcherie, a celebrated courtesan, whose insolent sensuality is a set-off to the other one's mournful complaints. We have here the opposition of Intelligence and of the Flesh, of Mind and Matter. Then comes Magnus, the priest, who has lost his faith, and for whom Lelia is a temptation, and after him we have Trenmor, Lelia's great friend, Trenmor, the sublime convict. As a young man he had been handsome. He had loved and been young. He had known what it was to be only twenty years of age. "The only thing was, he had known this at the age of sixteen" (!!) He had then become a gambler, and here follows an extraordinary panegyric on the fatal passion for gambling. Trenmor ruins himself, borrows without paying back, and finally swindles "an old millionaire who was himself a defrauder and a dissipated man" out of a hundred francs. Apparently the bad conduct of the man Trenmor robs, excuses the swindling. He is condemned to five years of hard labour. He undergoes his punishment, and is thereby regenerated. "What if I were to tell you," writes George Sand, "that such as he now is, crushed, with a tarnished reputation, ruined, I consider him superior to all of us, as regards the moral life. As he had deserved punishment, he was willing to bear it. He bore it, living for five years bravely and patiently among his abject companions. He has come back to us out of that abominable sewer holding his head up, calm, purified, pale as you see him, but handsome still, like a creature sent by God."
We all know how dear convicts are to the hearts of romantic people. There is no need for me to remind you how they have come to us recently, encircled with halos of suffering and of purity. We all remember Dostoiewsky's Crime and Punishment and Tolstoi's Resurrection. When the virtue of expiation and the religion of human suffering came to us from Russia, we should have greeted them as old acquaintances, if certain essential works in our own literature, of which these books are the issue, had not been unknown to us.
The last part of the novel is devoted to Stenio. Hurt by Lelia's disdain, which has thrown him into the arms of her sister Pulcherie, he gives himself up to debauch. We find him at a veritable orgy in Pulcherie's house. Later on he is in a monastery at Camaldules, talking to Trenmor and Magnus. In such books we must never be astonished. . . . There is a long speech by Stenio, addressed to Don Juan, whom he regrets to have taken as his model. The poor young man of course commits suicide. He chooses drowning as the author evidently prefers that mode of suicide. Lelia arrives in time to kneel down by the corpse of the young man who has been her victim. Magnus then appears on the scene, exactly at the right moment, to strangle Lelia. Pious hands prepare Lelia and Stenio for their burial. They are united and yet separated up to their very death.
The summing up we have given is the original version of Lelia. In 1836, George Sand touched up this work, altering much of it and spoiling, what she altered. It is a pity that her new version, which is longer, heavier and more obscure, should have taken the place of the former one. In its first form Lelia is a work of rare beauty, but with the beauty of a poem or an oratorio. It is made of the stuff of which dreams are composed. It is a series of reveries, adapted to the soul of 1830. At every different epoch there is a certain frame of mind, and certain ideas are diffused in the air which we find alike in the works of the writers of that time, although they did not borrow them from each other. Lelia is a sort of summing up of the themes then in vogue in the personal novel and in lyrical poetry. The theme of that suffering which is beneficent and inspiring is contained in the following words: "Come back to me, Sorrow! Why have you left me? It is by grief alone that man is great." This is worthy of Chateaubriand. The theme of melancholy is as follows: "The moon appeared. . . . What is the moon, and what is its nocturnal magic to me? One hour more or less is nothing to me." This might very well be Lamartine. We then have the malediction pronounced in face of impassible Nature: "Yes, I detested that radiant and magnificent Nature, for it was there before me in all its stupid beauty, silent and proud, for us to gaze on, believing that it was enough to merely show itself." This reminds us of Vigny in his Maison du berger. Then we have the religion of love: "Doubt God, doubt men, doubt me if you like, but do not doubt love." This is Musset.
But the theme which predominates, and, as we have compared all this to music, we might say the leit-motiv of all, is that of desolation, of universal despair, of the woe of life. It is the same lamentation which, ever since Werther, was to be heard throughout all literature. It is the identical suffering which Rene, Obermann and Lara had been repeating to all the echoes. The elements of it were the same: pride which prevents us from adapting ourselves to the conditions of universal life, an abuse of self-analysis which opens up our wounds again and makes them bleed, the wild imagination which presents to our eyes the deceptive mirage of Promised Lands from which we are ever exiles. Lelia personifies, in her turn, the "mal du siecle." Stenio reproaches her with only singing grief and doubt. "How many, times," he says, "have you appeared to me as typical of the indescribable suffering in which mankind is plunged by the spirit of inquiry! With your beauty and your sadness, your world-weariness and your scepticism, do you not personify the excess of grief produced by the abuse of thought?" He then adds: "There is a great deal of pride in this grief, Lelia!" It was undoubtedly a malady, for Lelia had no reason to complain of life any more than her brothers in despair. It is simply that the general conditions of life which all people have to accept seem painful to them. When we are well the play of our muscles is a joy to us, but when we are ill we feel the very weight of the atmosphere, and our eyes are hurt by the pleasant daylight.
When Lelia appeared George Sand's old friends were stupefied. "What, in Heaven's name, is this?" wrote Jules Neraud, the Malgache. "Where have you been in search of this? Why have you written such a book? Where has it sprung from, and what is it for? . . . This woman is a fantastical creature. She is not at all like you. You are lively and can dance a jig; you can appreciate butterflies and you do not despise puns. You sew and can make jam very well."[18]
[18] Histoire de ma vie.
It certainly was not her portrait. She was healthy and believed in life, in the goodness of things and in the future of humanity, just as Victor Hugo and Dumas pere, those other forces of Nature, did, at about the same time. A soul foreign to her own had entered into her, and it was the romantic soul. With the magnificent power of receptivity which she possessed, George Sand welcomed all the winds which came to her from the four quarters of romanticism. She sent them back with unheard-of fulness, sonorous depth and wealth of orchestration. From that time forth a woman's voice could be heard, added to all the masculine voices which railed against life, and the woman's voice dominated them all!
In George Sand's psychological evolution, Lelia is just this: the beginning of the invasion of her soul by romanticism. It was a borrowed individuality, undoubtedly, but it was not something to be put on and off at will like a mask. It adhered to the skin. It was all very fine for George Sand to say to Sainte-Beuve: "Do not confuse the man himself with the suffering. . . . And do not believe in all my satanical airs. . . . This is simply a style that I have taken on, I assure you. . . ."
Sainte-Beuve had every reason to be alarmed, and the confessor was quite right in his surmises. The crisis of romanticism had commenced. It was to take an acute form and to reach its paroxysm during the Venice escapade. It is from this point of view that we will study the famous episode, which has already been studied by so many other writers.
No subject, perhaps, has excited the curiosity of readers like this one, and always without satisfying that curiosity. A library could be formed of the books devoted to this subject, written within the last ten years. Monsieur Rocheblave, Monsieur Maurice Clouard, Dr. Cabanes, Monsieur Marieton, the enthusiastic collector, Spoelberch de Lovenjoul and Monsieur Decori have all given us their contributions to the debate.[19] Thanks to them, we have the complete correspondence of George Sand and Musset, the diary of George Sand and Pagello's diary.
[19] Consult: Rocheblave, La fin dune Legende; Maurice Clouard, Documents inedits sur A. de Musset; Dr. Cabanes, Musset et le Dr. Pagello; Paul Marieton, Une histoire d'amour; Vicomte Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, La vrai histoire d'Elle et Lui; Decori, Lettres de George Sand et Musset.
With the aid of all these documents Monsieur Charles Maurras has written a book entitled Les Amants de Venise. It is the work of a psychologist and of an artist. The only fault I have to find with it is that the author of it seems to see calculation and artifice everywhere, and not to believe sufficiently in sincerity. We must not forget, either, that as early as the year 1893, all that is essential had been told us by that shrewd writer and admirable woman, Arvede Barine. The chapter which she devotes to the Venice episode, in her biography of Alfred de Musset, is more clear and simple, and at the same time deeper than anything that had yet been written.
It is a subject that has been given up to the curiosity of people and to their disputes. The strange part is the zeal which at once animates every one who takes part in this controversy. The very atmosphere seems to be impregnated with strife, and those interested become, at once, the partisans of George Sand or the partisans of Musset. The two parties only agree on one point, and that is, to throw all the blame on the client favoured by their adversary. I must confess that I cannot take a passionate interest in a discussion, the subject of which we cannot properly judge. According to Mussetistes, it was thanks to George Sand that the young poet was reduced to the despair which drove him to debauchery. On the other hand, if we are to believe the Sandistes, George Sand's one idea in interesting herself in Musset was to rescue him from debauchery and convert him to a better life. I listen to all suchpious interpretations, but I prefer others for myself. I prefer seeing the physiognomy of each of the two lovers standing out, as it does, in powerful relief.
It is the custom, too, to pity these two unfortunates, who suffered so much. At the risk of being taken for a very heartless man, I must own that I do not pity them much. The two lovers wished for this suffering, they wanted to experience the incomparable sensations of it, and they got enjoyment and profit from this. They knew that they were working for posterity. "Posterity will repeat our names like those of the immortal lovers whose two names are only one at present, like Romeo and Juliette, like Heloise and Abelard. People will never speak of one of us without speaking of the other."
Juliette died at the age of fifteen and Heloise entered a convent. The Venice lovers did not have to pay for their celebrity as dearly as that. They wanted to give an example, to light a torch on the road of humanity. "People shall know my story," writes George Sand. "I will write it. . . . Those who follow along the path I trod will see where it leads." Et nunc erudimini. Let us see for ourselves, and learn.
Their liaison dates from August, 1833.
George Sand was twenty-nine years of age. It was the time of her greatest charm. We must try to imagine the enchantress as she then was. She was not tall and she was delightfully slender, with an extraordinary-looking face of dark, warm colouring. Her thick hair was very dark, and her eyes, her large eyes, haunted Musset for years after.
Ote-moi, memoire importune,
Ote-moi ces yeux que je vois toujours!" he writes.
And this woman, who could have been loved passionately, merely for her charm as a woman, was a celebrity! She was a woman of genius! Alfred de Musset was twenty-three years old. He was elegant, witty, a flirt, and when he liked he could be irresistible. He had won his reputation by that explosion of gaiety and imagination, Les Contes d'Espagne el d'Italle. He had written some fine poetry, dreamy, disturbing and daring. He had also given Les Caprices de Marianne, in which he figures twice over himself, for he was both Octave the sceptic, the disillusioned man, and Coelio, the affectionate, candid Coelio. He imagined himself Rolla. It was he, and he alone, who should have been styled the sublime boy.
And so here they both are. We might call them Lelia and Stenio, but Lelia was written before the Venice adventure. She was not the reflection of it, but rather the presentiment. This is worthy of notice, but not at all surprising. Literature sometimes imitates reality, but how much more often reality is modelled on literature!
It was as though George Sand had foreseen her destiny, for she had feared to meet Musset. On the 11th of March, she writes as follows to Sainte-Beuve: "On second thoughts, I do not want you to bring Alfred de Musset. He is a great dandy. We should not suit each other, and I was really more curious to see him than interested in him." A little later on, though, at a dinner at the Freres provencaux, to which Buloz invited his collaborators, George Sand found herself next Alfred de Musset. She invited him to call on her, and when Lelia was published she sent him a copy, with the following dedication written in the first volume: A Monsieur mon gamin d'Allred; and in the second volume: A Monsieur le vicomte Allred de Musset, hommage respectueux de son devoue serviteur George Sand. Musset replied by giving his opinion of the new book. Among the letters which followed, there is one that begins with these words: "My dear George, I have something silly and ridiculous to tell you. I am foolishly writing, instead of telling you, as I ought to have done, after our walk. I am heartbroken to-night that I did not tell you. You will laugh at me, and you will take me for a man who simply talks nonsense. You will show me the door, and fancy that I am not speaking the truth. . . . I am in love with you. . . ."
She did not laugh at him, though, and she did not show him the door. Things did not drag on long, evidently, as she writes to her confessor, Sainte-Beuve, on the 25th of August: "I have fallen in love, and very seriously this time, with Alfred de Musset." How long was this to last? She had no idea, but for the time being she declared that she was absolutely happy.
"I have found a candour, a loyalty and an affection which delight me. It is the love of a young man and the friendship of a comrade." There was a honeymoon in the little flat looking on the Quay Malaquals. Their friends shared the joy of the happy couple, as we see by Musset's frolicsome lines
George est dans sa chambrette,
Entre deux pots de fleurs,
Fumiant sa cigarette,
Les yeux baignes de pleurs.
Buloz assis par terre
Lui fait de doux serments,
Solange par derriere
Gribouille ses romans..
Plante commme une borne,
Boucoiran tout crott,
Contemple d'un oeil morne
Musset tout debraille, etc.
It is evident that, as poetry, this does not equal the Nuits.
In the autumn they went for a honeymoon trip to Fontainebleau. It was there that the strange scene took place which is mentioned in Elle et Lui. One evening when they were in the forest, Musset had an extraordinary hallucination, which he has himself described:
Dans tin bois, sur une bruyere,
Au pied d'un arbre vint s'asseoir
Un jeune homme vetu de noir
Qui me ressemnblail comme un frere.
le lui demandais mon chemin,
Il tenait un luth d'ue main,
De l'autre un bouquet d'eglantine.
Il me fit tin salut d'ami
Et, se detournant a demu,
Me montra du doigt la colline.
He really saw this "double," dressed in black, which was to visit him again later on. His Nuit de decembre was written from it.
They now wanted to see Italy together. Musset had already written on Venice; he now wanted to go there. Madame de Musset objected to this, but George Sand promised so sincerely that she would be a mother to the young man that finally his own mother gave her consent. On the evening of December 12, 1833, Paul de Musset accompanied the two travellers to the mail-coach. On the boat from Lyons to Avignon they met with a big, intelligent-looking man. This was Beyle-Stendhal, who was then Consul at Civita-Vecchia. He was on his way to his post. They enjoyed his lively conversation, although he made fun of their illusions about Italy and the Italian character. He made fun, though, of everything and of every one, and they felt that he was only being witty and trying to appear unkind. At dinner he drank too much, and finished by dancing round the table in his great fur- lined boots. Later on he gave them some specimens of his obscene conversation, so that they were glad to continue their journey without him.
On the 28th the travellers reached Florence. The aspect of this city and his researches in the Chroniques florentines supplied the poet with the subject for Lorenzaccio. It appears that George Sand and Musset each treated this subject, and that a Lorenzaccio by George Sand exists. I have not read it, but I prefer Musset's version. They reached Venice on January 19, 1834, and put up at the Hotel Danieli. By this time they were at loggerheads.
The cause of their quarrel and disagreement is not really known, and the activity of retrospective journalists has not succeeded in finding this out. George Sand's letters only give details about their final quarrel. On arriving, George Sand was ill, and this exasperated Musset. He was annoyed, and declared that a woman out of sorts was very trying. There are good reasons for believing that he had found her very trying for some time. He was very elegant and she a learned "white blackbird." He was capricious and she a placid, steady bourgeois woman, very hard-working and very regular in the midst of her irregularity. He used to call her "personified boredom, the dreamer, the silly woman, the nun," when he did not use terms which we cannot transcribe. The climax was when he said to her: "I was mistaken, George, and I beg your pardon, for I do not love you."
Wounded and offended, she replied: "We do not love each other any longer, and we never really loved each other."
They therefore took back their independence. This is a point to note, as George Sand considered this fact of the greatest importance, and she constantly refers to it. She was from henceforth free, as regarded her companion.
Illness kept them now at Venice. George Sand's illness first and then Musset's alarming malady. He had high fever, accompanied by chest affection and attacks of delirium which lasted six consecutive hours, during which it took four men to hold him.
George Sand was an admirable nurse. This must certainly be acknowledged. She sat up with him at night and she nursed him by day, and, astonishing woman that she was, she was also able to work and to earn enough to pay their common expenses. This is well known, but I am able to give another proof of it, in the letters which George Sand wrote from Venice to Buloz. These letters have been communicated to me by Madame Pailleron, nee Buloz, and by Madame Landouzy, veuve Buloz, whom I thank for the public and for myself. The following are a few of the essential passages:
"February 4. Read this when you are alone.
MY DEAR BULOZ,--Your reproaches reach me at a miserable moment. If you have received my letter, you already know that I do not deserve them. A fortnight ago I was well again and working. Alfred was working too, although he was not very well and had fits of feverishness. About five days ago we were both taken ill, almost at the same time. I had an attack of dysentery, which caused me horrible suffering. I have not yet recovered from it, but I am strong enough, anyhow, to nurse him. He was seized with a nervous and inflammatory fever, which has made such rapid progress that the doctor tells me he does not know what to think about it. We must wait for the thirteenth or fourteenth day before knowing whether his life is in danger. And what will this thirteenth or fourteenth day be? Perhaps his last one? I am in despair, overwhelmed with fatigue, suffering horribly, and awaiting who knows what future? How can I give myself up to literature or to anything in the world at such a time? I only know that our entire fortune, at present, consists of sixty francs, that we shall have to spend an enormous amount at the chemist's, for the nurse and doctor, and that we are at a very expensive hotel. We were just about to leave it and go to a private house. Alfred cannot be moved now, and even if everything should go well, he probably cannot be moved for a month. We shall have to pay one term's rent for nothing, and we shall return to France, please God. If my ill-luck continues, and if Alfred should die, I can assure you that I do not care what happens after to me. If God allows Alfred to recover, I do not know how we shall pay the expenses of his illness and of his return to France. The thousand francs that you are to send me will not suffice, and I do not know what we shall do. At any rate, do not delay sending that, as, by the time it arrives, it will be more than necessary. I am sorry about the annoyance you are having with the delay for publishing, but you can now judge whether it is my fault. If only Alfred had a few quiet days, I could soon finish my work. But he is in a frightful state of delirium and restlessness. I cannot leave him an instant. I have been nine hours writing this letter. Adieu, my friend, and pity me.
"GEORGE.
"Above everything, do not tell any one, not any one in the world, that Alfred is ill. If his mother heard (and it only needs two persons for telling a secret to all Pari