Roses & Cabbages

ROMANTIC REBEL, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GEORGE SAND--Felizia Seyd--Viking ($3).

In the autumn of 1836, tourists at Chamonix, Switzerland, were puzzled by a mysterious group of seven strangers who wore tight-fitting coats, slouch hats, vast cravats. It was next to impossible to tell which were men and which were women. The hotel blotter did not help. One of the strangers was registered simply as Fellowe; musical philosopher; birthplace--Parnassus; traveling from--Doubt to Truth. Others were registered as the Piffoel family; residence--Nature; Coming from--God; Going to--Heaven; Duration of passport--Eternity.

Fellowe was Hungarian Pianist Franz Liszt. One of the women was the Countess Marie d'Agoult. She had caused quite a scandal by leaving her husband and running away with Liszt after they had wept together over one of those novels by George Sand in which the heroines always prefer passion to domesticity. The Piffoel family was Authoress Sand and her children. Part of the confusion of genders came about because Liszt's brilliant pupil, Hermann Cohen, another of the party, insisted on wearing girl's clothes. Madame Sand insisted on wearing men's clothes. They were Romantics, and these were the signs of their emancipation.

Most people who know that George Sand (real name: Amantine Lucile Aurore Dudevant, nee Dupin) was a French novelist have seldom read one of her novels all the way through. This week appeared a full-length life of Authoress Sand.

George Sand was born with one great advantage over other Romantics--her great-great-grandfather was Augustus the Strong, King of Poland. Her great-grandfather was Augustus' bastard son, the famous soldier and tactician, Marshal Maurice de Saxe. Her grandmother married the Count de Horn, bastard son of Louis XV. Her mother was the daughter of a poolroom proprietor. Her husband was the bastard son of Baron Dudevant.

Their marriage lasted for nine one-sidedly faithful years in the country during which Husband Dudevant straightened garden paths, shot mangy dogs, shot the peacocks that soiled the lawns and the drawing-room rugs, drank, hunted, carried on affairs with the servants, speculated with his wife's money. At last George Sand dashed off to Paris and Author Jules San-deau, who greeted her with: "Welcome to Bohemia!"

Paris was undergoing all the horrors of a literary revolution. Shouting Victor Hugo's war cry, "The rose is as true as the cabbage!", young Romantics were shattering the classical drama. Plays like Hugo's Hernani, Dumas' Antony, Poet de Vigny's Chatterton ravished the intellectuals with lines like "Death to society; Death to reaction!", while white-robed heroines drank poison and bearded young heroes swung daggers.

The Romantics did not wage merely literary war. They roamed the streets at night intimidating tradesmen, yowling under citizens' windows, smashing panes, frightening cats and dogs. They drank unlimited quantities of beer and rum, smoked one pipe after another. When liquor and nicotine failed, they tried opium, morphine, hashish. Paris druggists were often completely sold out of these drugs. Sometimes the enthusiasts dined with skeletons. The elder Dumas drank cream out of a human skull. Spanish capes and berets were in fashion. Trousers were green, purple, lavender, and tight. Hair and beards were dyed. The Romantic diet consisted of lemon juice and vinegar to give an air of languor and anemia. Rooms were supposed to smell like burial vaults. Furniture was macabre. Paintings were of ruins, vampires, massacres.

Dressed in a man's top hat and boots, George Sand felt perfectly at home in this atmosphere. She was 26. Sandeau, delicate and dandified, was 20. She called him her "graceful and amiable hummingbird of the savannas." Soon they were collaborat ing on a novel. Soon Madame Dudevant took the pen name George Sand. Soon they brought Madame Sand's three-year-old daughter to share their romantic garret where Balzac sometimes called. He shocked Madame Sand by his realism. "You, madame," the author of Droll Stories would shout, "are a fool and a prude."

The fool and prude soon wrote a best seller, Indiana. She followed it up with two more successes. She was a leader of the Romantics. But one day she came home inopportunely, found the hummingbird of the savannas in the arms of the laundress.

To drown her grief, George Sand wrote Lelia, an episodic novel filled with secret societies, Utopias, graves, weeping willows, rocks, ravines, ghosts, lunatics. The book gave rhetorical utterance to all the mal du siecle, the sickness of a century in which too much thinking had gone on in a void. Romantics were ravished as they read: "Desire! Desire! . . . 0 silent Pythia! Let your head be smashed against the rocks of the cavern and your boiling blood be wed to the roaring sea!" The public bought it by the thousand.

Meantime George Sand looked for a replacement for Jules Sandeau. She tried Prosper Merimee. Said she: "My freedom was killing me. ..." The affair lasted only a week. Merimee's cynicism shocked her. Then Sainte-Beuve, the great critic, offered practical advice: Why not try Alfred de Musset?

As a child, Poet de Musset had been so sensitive that his mother could not punish him for cutting up the new curtains, smashing the mirrors with a billiard cue, smearing the family portraits with sealing wax. Later he took Byron for his model. He was 24 and George Sand was 30 when they went together to Italy. One day Musset told her: "I am sorry, George, I made a mistake. I don't love you any more." But she nursed him through 17 days of illness complicated by delirium tremens, then ran away with his Italian doctor. Said Balzac of George Sand: "... morally she is like a boy of twenty, for in her innermost heart she is pure and also a prude."

Alone again, Authoress Sand considered Pianist Liszt as a successor to Musset and the doctor. Replied the cautious virtuoso: Only God deserves to be loved. In 1836 George Sand wrote in her diary: "Farewell, Eros! You idol of my youth! . . . The present and future are free for the service of humanity. . . ." She began to write proletarian novels in which heroines no longer deserted their husbands for love but for the revolution and the socialist teachings of Saint-Simon and Louis Blanc.

But Eros had not said good-by to her. The same year Comrade Sand met Pianist Chopin. He was 27 and she was 33. Said he: "What an utterly unsympathetic woman!" Said she: He is "an angel with the face of a grieving woman." The angel had had a hard time in the world since his arrival from Warsaw. When the unsympathetic woman offered him the comforts of her home, the angel accepted. The arrangement was not altogether happy. "After all," wrote Balzac to his great friend, Madame Hanska, "she is a man and wants to be a man ... I am extremely-male myself. ..." She called tuberculous Chopin: "Mon cher cadavre (My dear corpse)." Comrade Sand's proletarian friends disgusted the pianist. "Chopin was pushed more and more into the role of a delicate, sensitive, and suffering wife, continually brutalized by a busy husband and his circle of coarse friends." One cold autumn morning, sick, coughing, wrapped to the eyes in blankets, Chopin left Authoress Sand forever.

Comrade Sand had been working for the revolution of 1848 for years, but she was somewhat surprised when it came. Soon she was acting minister of propaganda in the revolutionary government. She drew up plans for insurrection in the provinces, wrote bulletins, articles, proclamations. She was not even perturbed when her neighbors, conservative working people, marched on her country home, shouting: "Death to Madame Dudevant! Death to the Communists!" When the counterrevolution began and her friends were shot in batches, she retired to the country. For years she was all but forgotten.

But Authoress Sand was by no means finished. Suddenly at 46 she took to writing plays. Her Le Marquis de Villemer was a smash hit. Her anticlerical novel, Mademoiselle La Quintinie, was a bestseller. Napoleon III read all her books, went to the first nights of all her plays his censor did not ban. In 1863 she dined regularly with the Goncourts, Maupassant, Zola, Taine, Renan, Gautier, Flaubert. Most of them admired her as people admire a prehistoric skeleton. But with Flaubert she struck up a warm friendship. His genius was not yet recognized: she urged him to work, though she confessed in private that "all novels are ultimately written for chambermaids."

By 1876 she was at peace with the world. People spoke of the age as "the century of George Sand." Heine said: "Her writings put the world on fire." Dostoevski said: her writings gave the world new hope. Emerson called her a great genius. Ernest Renan called her: "the Aeolian harp of all time." Her reconciled neighbors called her "the good Madame Dudevant." She wrote: "I am not dreaming when, standing before a great edifice of rock, I feel that these mighty bones of the earth are mine and that the calmness of my mind shares their apparent death and dramatic immobility. 'The moon consumes the stone,' say the peasants. ... I, too, am a stone which time disintegrates. . . ." At 72 she disintegrated slowly, furtively, alone, since she believed her final ailment, gastroenteritis, made her loathsome to others. For weeks she seldom spoke, gazed vacantly into space. The night before she died, as the realization of death came to her, her resignation was torn by a last rush of rebellion and indomitable vigor; she screamed in terror in the dark: "Oh, God, death!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.