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Updated: May 3, 2025
Can anything be more enjoyable, and at the same time more vividly true, than George Sand's delineations of Venice; and, in the first of the Lettres d'un Voyageur, the pictures given of her wanderings on the shores of the Brenta, of Bassano, the Brenta valley, Oliero, Possagno, Asolo, a delicious land, till quite recently as little tourist-trodden as in 1834?
Mother Earth unrolled for them a corner of her magic show, and they took it like children at the play, now shouting, now spell-bound. David had George Sand's 'Mauprat' on his knee, but he read nothing the whole day. Never had he used his eyes so intently, so passionately.
But he could not make due allowance for the effect which Alfred's dissolute habits had produced upon his character: he was but twenty-three, and had run the round of vice; he had already depicted the moral result of such courses in his terrible allegory of "La Coupe et les Lèvres:" the idea recurs throughout his works, conspicuously in the Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle, which is Madame Sand's best apology.
For, notwithstanding his bourgeois birth, his sympathies were with the aristocracy; and notwithstanding his neglect of ritual observances, his attachment to the Church of Rome remained unbroken. Chopin does not seem to have concealed his dislike to George Sand's circle; if he did not give audible expression to it, he made it sufficiently manifest by seeking other company.
Here is the answer of Sand's mother; it will serve to show the character of the woman whose mighty heart never belied itself in the midst of the severest suffering; the answer bears the stamp of that German mysticism of which we have no idea in France:
The leading characters are all somewhat out of the common, but such exist in equal proportions in all classes of society, and there is ample evidence besides George Sand's of notable examples among the French peasantry.
Still it is possible that neither a novelist's characters nor their environment shall be in entire agreement with all observable facts. There may be arrangements, eliminations, additions, which, though pleasing to the reader, may remove the mimic world to a plane above that of the so-called real one. Thus removed, Balzac judged George Sand's production to be.
'I understand French very little, and I never read any, she said to him once, quietly, as he fell to comparing some peasant story she had told him with an episode in one of George Sand's Berry novels. It seemed to him that she knew her Wordsworth by heart.
But Sand's consent was necessary for this; for he could not be executed until three full days after the reading of his sentence, and as the sentence had not been read to him till half-past ten Sand had a right to live till eleven o'clock. Before four in the morning the officials went into the condemned man's room; he was sleeping so soundly that they were obliged to awaken him.
A month after this letter came tender answers from all the family. We will quote only that of Sand's mother, because it completes the idea which the reader may have formed already of this great-hearted woman, as her son always calls her. "DEAR, INEXPRESSIBLY DEAR KARL, How Sweet it was to me to see the writing of your beloved hand after so long a time!
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