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There was, therefore, no room for penitence on the one side, for forgiveness on the other, and, through these, for a renewable moral relation between the two. The law took cognizance of these facts, when, some years later, M. Dudevant brought an action for civil divorce, wishing to recover possession of his children.
In the autumn, 1835, Madame Dudevant, under legal advice, and supported by the approval of friends of both parties, determined to apply to the courts for a judicial separation from her husband, on the plea of ill-treatment.
Her brother, Hippolyte Chatiron, now married, came with his family to settle in the neighborhood, and spent some time at Nohant. He had fallen into the fatal habit of drinking, in which he was joined by M. Dudevant to the degradation of his habits and, it would be charitable to suppose, to the confusion of his intelligence.
On the contrary, his pity was aroused by Sandeau's precarious position and by the recent separation between Madame Dudevant and this first of her lovers, who did his best to commit suicide by swallowing a dose of acetate of morphia. Luckily the dose was so large that Sandeau's stomach refused to digest it. George Sand herself Balzac admired but did not care for at this time.
In September, 1822, Aurore Dupin became Madame Dudevant, and shortly afterwards she and her husband established themselves at Nohant, there to settle down to quiet country life.
The present pecuniary arrangement left M. Dudevant some hold over Maurice and his education, concerning which his parents had long disagreed, and which for another year remained a source of contention.
We can grant him that, in fiction, his proper manner was as far in advance of his epoch as, in politics, his doctrine was behind it. George Sand was a medium in both, although she dwelt always a little too much in the clouds. At a dinner with her towards the end of January, the antagonism of their principles manifested itself over his recent visit to Russia. Madame Dudevant waxed angry.
All the way he continued to hold forth to them about four Arab horses, which he had not got yet, but meant to get soon, and of which, though he never got them at all, he firmly believed himself to have been possessed for some time. "He would have escorted us thus," says Madame Dudevant, "from one extremity of Paris to another, if we had let him."
In her novels of the first period, George Sand takes her Byronic revenge upon M. Dudevant.
It is perfectly idle to speculate on what might have happened had her lot in marriage turned out a fortunate one, or had she married for love, or had the moral character of the partner of her life preserved any solid claim on her respect, since the contrary was unhappily the case. Their situation, no doubt, was anomalous. In the young girl of barely eighteen, country-bred and intellectually immature, whom M. Dudevant had chosen to marry, who could have discerned one of the greatest poetical geniuses and most powerful minds of the century? Some commiseration might
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