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Updated: May 28, 2025
Even among those already in the secret were sceptics who questioned the author's power to sustain her success, since nearly everybody, it is said, can produce one good novel. "The success of Indiana has thrown me into dismay," writes Madame Dudevant, in July, 1832, to M. Charles Duvernet, at La Châtre.
His father, Colonel Dudevant, a landed proprietor in Gascony, whose marriage had proved childless, had acknowledged Casimir, though illegitimate, and made him his heir. It was reckoned not a brilliant parti for the châtelaine of Nohant, but a perfectly eligible one. It was not a mariage de convenance; the young people had chosen freely. Still less was it a love match.
No woman ever received such universal fame as a genius except, perhaps, Madame de Staël; or as an artist, if we except Madame Dudevant, who also bore a nom de plume, Georges Sand. She did not become immediately popular, but the critics from the first perceived her remarkable gifts and predicted her ultimate success.
She knew not the stormy ocean of life, nor the precious freight she carried, when she committed the vessel of her fortunes to so careless a hand as that of M. Dudevant. She throws no special blame or odium upon him, nor does he probably deserve any.
So that brief romance was over. An attachment of a different sort was that with Mme. Dudevant, known in literature as George Sand. The family at Nohant where she had spent her childhood, where her two children, Maurice and Solange, lived, and where her husband sometimes came, became distasteful to her; she wanted to see life. Paris offered it.
Meantime Madame Dudevant, whose position at Nohant was that of a visitor merely, and becoming untenable, felt her hold on her cherished home and her children becoming more precarious day by day. Some of her friends had strongly advised her to travel for a length of time, both as offering a mortal remedy, and as a temporary escape from the practical perplexities of the moment.
The powerful genius of Madame Dudevant, the elegant talent of the author of Mlle. de la Seiglière, are mostly conspicuous by their absence in Rose et Blanche, or La Comédienne et la Réligieuse, an imitative attempt, and not a happy one, in the style of fiction then in vogue. Madame Dudevant had stepped into the literary world at the moment of the most ardent activity of the Romantic movement.
The editor of Figaro put two of his critics upon the book to review it. They both condemned it as mediocre and without much interest. But the book had a wonderful success, and Paris was thrown into a state of excitement about the author. The journals added fuel to the fire by their remarks and criticisms, and at once Madame Dudevant was a great authoress.
She had sufficient grounds to allege for her claim, and had then every reason to hope that her demand would not even be contested by M. Dudevant, who, on former occasions, had voluntarily signed but afterwards revoked the agreement she hereby only desired to make valid and permanent, and which, ensuring to him a certain proportion of her income, gave her Nohant for a place of habitation, and established the children under her care.
The existence which she now led was a curious one. She still visited her husband at Nohant, so that she might see her son, and sometimes, when M. Dudevant came to town, he called upon her in the apartments which she shared with Jules Sandeau. He had accepted the situation, and with his crudeness and lack of feeling he seemed to think it, if not natural, at least diverting.
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