Lucrezia Floriani, page 2
GEORGE SAND: CHRONOLOGY
1804
July 1 Birth at 15 Rue de la Meslay, Paris. Daughter of Maurice Dupin and Sophie Delaborde. Christened Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin.
Family moves to Rue de la Grange-Batelière, Paris.
1808
Aurore travels to Spain with her mother. They join her father at Palace de Goday in Madrid, where he is serving in Napoleon’s army under General Murat.
1809
The family goes to Nohant in France, the home of Maurice Dupin’s mother, born Marie-Aurore de Saxe, Comtesse de Horn, the daughter of the illegitimate son of King Frederic-Augustus II of Poland. Death of Maurice Dupin in a fall from a horse.
1810
Sophie Dupin gives custody of Aurore to Madame Dupin in return for a pension.
1810-1814
Winters in Paris at Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins with her grandmother and visits from Sophie. Summers at Nohant.
1817-1820
Educated at the English Convent des Augustines in Paris.
1820
Returns to Nohant. Studies with her father’s tutor Deschartres.
1821
Death of Madame Dupin. Aurore inherits some money, a house in Paris and the house at Nohant.
Moves in with her mother at 80 Rue St.-Lazare, Paris.
1822
Meets Casimir Dudevant on a visit to the Duplessis family.
September 10 Marries Dudevant, son of Baron Dudevant. They move to Nohant.
1823
June 30 Maurice is born at Hotel de Florence, 56 Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins, Paris.
1824
Spring and summer at the Duplessis’ at Plessis-Picard near Melun; autumn at a Parisian suburb, Ormesson; winter in an apartment at Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré.
1825
Spring at Nohant. Aurore is ill in the summer. Dudevants travel to his family home in Gascony. She meets Aurélian de Sèze, and recovers her health.
November 5 Writes long confession to Casimir about de Sèze. She gives him up. Winter in Gascony.
1826
Moves to Nohant. Casimir travels, Aurore manages the estate and writes to de Sèze.
1827
Illness again. The water cure at Clermont-Ferraud, where she writes Voyage En Auvergne, autobiographical sketch.
1827-1829
Winter at Le Châtre. Summer at Nohant.
1828
September 13 Birth of Solange.
1830
Visit to Bordeaux to Aurelian de Sèze. Their correspondence ceases. She writes a novel Aimée.
December Discovery of Casimir’s will, filled with antipathy to her.
1831
January 4 Moves to Paris to 31 Rue de Seine. Joins staff of Le Figaro. Writes three short stories: La Moli-nara (in Figaro); La Prima Donna (in Revue de Paris) and La Fille d’Albano (in La Mode).
April Returns to Nohant for three months. Writes Indiana. July Moves to 25 Quai Saint-Michel, Paris.
December Publishes Rose Et Blanche in collaboration with Jules Sandeau. Book is signed Jules Sand.
1832
Travel between Paris and Nohant.
April Solange is brought to Paris.
November Move to 19 Quai Malaquais with Solange.
Indiana and Valentine published. Maurice sent by Casimir to Henry IV Military Academy in Paris.
1833
January Break with Sandeau.
June Meets Alfred de Musset.
Publishes Lelia.
September Fontainebleau with de Musset.
December 12 To Italy with de Musset.
1834
January 19 The Hotel Danieli in Venice. Musset attempts a break with Aurore, becomes ill. His physician is Pietro Pagello.
March 29 de Musset returns to Paris. Aurore remains with Pagello.
Writes André, Mattéa, Jacques, Leone Leoni and the first Lettres d’Un Voyageur.
August 15 Return to Paris with Pagello.
August 24 de Musset goes to Baden.
August 29 Aurore to Nohant.
October Return to Paris. Musset return from Baden. Pagello returns to Venice.
November 25 Begins journal to de Musset.
December Return to Nohant.
1835
January Return to Paris.
March 6 Final break with Musset.
Meets Michel of Bourges, her lawyer and political mentor. Writes Simon.
Autumn Return to Nohant for Maurice’s holiday.
October 19 Casimir threatens her physically. Begins suit for legal separation.
December 1 Judgment in her favor won by default.
1836
February 16 She wins second judgment. Casimir bring suit.
May 10, 11 Another verdict in her favor from civil court of La Châtre. Casimir appeals to a higher court.
July 25, 26 Trial in royal court of Bourges. Jury divided. Out of court settlement. Her fortune is divided with Casimir.
August To Switzerland with Maurice and Solange and Liszt and d’Agoult.
Autumn Hotel de la France, 15 Rue Lafitte, Paris with Liszt and d’Agoult. Meets Chopin.
1837
January Return to Nohant. Publishes Mauprat in spring. Writes Les Maîtres Mosaïstes. Liszt and d’Agoult visit Nohant. Fatal illness of Sophie in Paris. Visit to Fontainebleau, writes La Dernière Aldini. Trip to Gascony to recover Solange, who has been kidnapped by Casimir.
1838
Writes L’Orco and L’Uscoque, two Venetian novels. May To Paris. Romance with Chopin. November Trip to Majorca with children and Chopin. Writes Spiridion.
1839
February Leaves Majorca for three months in Marseilles. Then to Nohant. Publishes Un Hiver À Majorque, Pauline and Gabriel-Gabrielle.
October Occupies adjoining apartments with Chopin until spring of 1841 at 16 Rue Pigalle, Paris, in winter. Summer is spent at Nohant with Chopin as guest.
1840
Writes Compagnon Du Tour De France and Horace. Influenced by Pierre Leroux.
1841
Moves from Rue Pigalle to 5 and 9 Rue St.-Lazare, Square d’Orléans, with Chopin.
1842
Consuelo published.
1843
La Comtesse De Rudolstadt published, a sequel to Consuelo.
1844
Jeanne published, a foreshadowing of pastoral novels.
1845
Têvérino, Péché de M. Antoine and Le Meunier D’Angibault, the latter two socialist novels.
1846
La Mare Au Diable published and Lucrezia Floriani. Solange married to Auguste-Jean Clésinger. Estrangement from Chopin.
1847
François Le Champi published.
1848
Writes government circulars, contributes to Bulletins de la Republique and publishes her own newspaper La Cause du Peuple, all for the Second Republic. Death of Solange’s son. La Petite Fadette published.
1849
Her play based on François Le Champi performed at the Odéon. First of a series of successful plays.
1850
Chateau des Désertes published in the Revue Des Deux Mondes.
1851
Republic falls. She uses her influence to save her friends from political reprisals. Plays Claudie and Le Mariage De Victorine presented.
1852
Return to Nohant.
1853
Published Les Maîtres Sonneurs. Play Le Pressoir presented.
1855
Four volume autobiography Histoire De Ma Vie published, carries her life to Revolution of 1848.
January 13 Death of Solange’s daughter Jeanne. Visit to Italy with Maurice and Alexandre Manceau.
1856
Does French adaptation of As You Like It.
1858
Holidays at Gargilesse on River Creuse at cottage given her by Alexander Manceau.
1859
Writes Elle Et Lui. Publishes Jean De La Roche and L’Homme De Neige.
1860
Writes La Ville Noire and Marquis De Villemer.
November Contracts typhoid fever.
1862
May 16 Marriage of Maurice Sand and Caroline Calametta.
1863
July 14 Marc-Antoine Sand born, son of Maurice and Caroline.
Mademoiselle La Quintinie published, anti-clerical novel. Begins friendship with Flaubert.
1864
Play Le Marquis De Villemer presented. Death of Marc-Antoine Sand. Moves from 3 Rue Racine near the Odéon to 97 Rue des Feuillantines. Exchanges Gargilesse for a house at Palaiseau with Manceau.
1865
Death of Manceau.
1866
Visits Flaubert at Croisset, dedicates Le Dernier Amour to him. Birth of Aurore Sand.
1867
Return to Nohant to live with Maurice and Caroline. Writes two novels a year.
1868
Birth of Gabrielle Sand.
1870
The play L’Autre with Sarah Bernhardt, presented at the Theatre Francais.
1870-1871
Franco-German War. Removal to Boussac because of a smallpox epidemic at Nohant.
1876
June 8 Dies.
1.
Young Prince Karol de Roswald had just lost his mother when he first met Madame Floriani.
He was still plunged in utter grief and nothing could distract him from it. Princess de Roswald had been a tender and perfect mother. As a child Karol was weak and ailing and she had lavished on him the most constant care and devotion. Brought up under the eye of this good and noble woman the young man had only one real passion in his entire life: filial love. This mutual love between son and mother had made them as it were exclusive, and possibly a little too absolute in their way of seeing and feeling things. It must be said that the Princess was highly educated and possessed a superior mind; the lessons she gave him and her conversations with him seemed capable of satisfying every one of young Karol’s needs. His delicate health had resisted the toil, rigour and harshness of classical studies which in themselves are not always as valuable as the lessons of an enlightened mother, but they have the indispensable merit of teaching us to work and are, so to speak, the key to knowledge of life. Acting on the advice of her son’s doctors Princess de Roswald had dismissed the idea both of tutors and books and had resolved to form the mind and heart of her son by her conversation, by the stories she narrated, by a kind of insufflation of his moral being which the young man had absorbed with great delight. Thus he had succeeded in acquiring much knowledge without ever having studied anything.
But nothing can replace experience; and the box on the ear which, when I was a child, was given to youngsters to impress on their memories a great emotion, a historical fact, a notorious crime or any other example to follow or avoid, was not so stupid a practice as it appears to us nowadays. We no longer give this box on the ear to our children; they have to seek it elsewhere, and the heavy hand of experience applies it much more harshly than ours would.
So young Karol de Roswald became acquainted with people and life early, possibly too early, – but only in theory.
With the praiseworthy object of elevating his mind his mother only allowed the proximity of distinguished people, whose words and actions could only be salutary to him. He was fully aware that outside there existed knaves and fools, but he was only taught to avoid them, never to get to know them. Of course he had learned to succour the unfortunate; the doors of the palace where he spent his youth were always open to the needy; but while helping them he grew accustomed to despising the cause of their condition and regarding it as an affliction of humanity which was incurable. Disorderliness, idleness, ignorance or lack of judgement, – the fatal causes of aberration and destitution – struck him as being obviously beyond remedy in the individual. He had not been taught to believe that the masses must and can gradually rid themselves of these ills and that by grappling with humanity, chiding and caressing it in turn, like a beloved child, by forgiving it for many lapses so as to gain some little progress, one does more for it than by dropping the limited succour of compassion before its crippled or gangrened limbs.
But it was not so in Karol’s case. He learned that the giving of alms was a duty; and one which no doubt will have to be performed as long as the social order makes alms necessary. But this is only one of the duties imposed on us by our concern for this immense human family of ours. There are many others, the principal one being not to pity but to love. He fervently embraced the maxim which told him to detest evil; but he clung to the letter of the law and merely pitied those who commit evil.
But again it must be said: pity is not enough. Above all one must love in order to be just and not to despair of the future. One must not be too delicate in one’s sensibilities, nor be lulled to sleep by the flattery of a clear, self-satisfied conscience. This good young man was sufficiently warmhearted not to enjoy his wealth without a feeling of guilt when he remembered that the majority of men lack the necessities of life; but he never applied this pity to the moral destitution of his fellows. He did not possess sufficient mental enlightenment to tell himself that vice can rebound on the innocent, too, and that to wage war on the ills of mankind is the foremost duty of those who have not been afflicted by them.
On the one hand he saw innate aristocracy, distinction of intelligence, purity of morals and nobility of instincts, and he said to himself “Let me be with them.” On the other hand he saw degradation, baseness, mental instability, but he did not say “Let me join them, to redeem them, if possible.” No, he had been taught to say “They are doomed. Let us give them food and clothes, but let us not compromise ourselves by contact with them. They are hardened and sullied; let us abandon their souls to the mercy of God.”
In the long run this habit of self-preservation becomes a kind of egoism and there was indeed a hint of coldness hidden in the princess’ heart She employed it on her son’s account far more than for herself Skilfully, she isolated him from young men of his own age when once she suspected they were irresponsible or merely frivolous. She feared associations for him with natures which were different from his; yet it is this contact which makes us men, gives us strength and results in the fact that instead of being led astray from the very outset, we can resist the example of evil and retain the power to bring about the triumph of good.
Without being narrowly and aggressively devout, the princess was somewhat rigid in her piety. A sincere and staunch Catholic, she was not blind to certain abuses, but she knew of no other remedy than to tolerate them for the sake of the great cause of the Church. “The Pope may err,” she would say, “he is a man; but the Papacy cannot fail; it is a divine institution.” As a result, her mind was hardly receptive to ideas on human progress and her son soon learned not to question them and to refuse to hope that the salvation of the human race could be accomplished on earth. Without being as punctual as his mother in the performance of his religious duties (for in spite of everything the youth of to-day soon bursts such bonds) he remained an adherent of the doctrine which saves men of good will and is unable to destroy the ill will of the rest; which is content with a few chosen and is reconciled to the sight of the many called falling into the Gehenna of eternal evil: a sad and dismal belief which agrees perfectly with the concept of nobility and the privileges of fortune. In heaven as on earth, paradise for the few, hell for the majority. Glory, happiness and rewards for the exceptions; shame, abjectness and chastisement for nearly all.
When characters which are naturally kind and noble fall into this error, they are punished for it by being eternally sad It is only the insensitive and the stupid who resign themselves to the inevitable. The Princess de Roswald suffered for this Catholic fatalism whose cruel decrees she could not shake off She had acquired a habit of solemn and sententious gravity which she gradually communicated to her son, inwardly if not outwardly. Thus it was that young Karol knew nothing of the gaiety, the abandon, the blind beneficent confidence of childhood Indeed, he had had no childhood; his thoughts turned towards melancholy, and even when he came to the age of being romantic, his imagination was nourished only by gloomy and mournful novels.
Yet in spite of the false track that it was pursuing the spirit of Karol was by nature delightful. Gentle, sensitive, exquisite in all things, at the age of fifteen he had all the graces of adolescence combined with the gravity of maturity. He remained physically delicate, as he was spiritually. But this very absence of muscular development had the advantage of preserving in him a charming beauty, an exceptional physiognomy which, so to speak, was without age or sex. It did not have the boldness and virility of one descended from that race of ancient grandees who knew of nothing but drinking, hunting and fighting nor was it the effeminate prettiness of a pink cherub. It was something like those ideal beings created by the poetic imagination of the Middle Ages to adorn Christian places of worship: an angel with the beautiful face of a sad woman, tall, perfect and slim of figure like a young Olympian god, and to add to all this, an expression both tender and severe, chaste yet ardent.
And in that lay the very root of his nature. Nothing was purer yet more impassioned than his thoughts; nothing was more tenacious, more exclusive and more scrupulously devoted than his affections. If one could have forgotten the existence of the human race and believed that it had been concentrated and personified in a single being, he was the one whom one would have adored over the ruins of the world.
But this being had insufficient contact with his fellows. He only understood what was identical with himself, his mother, whose pure, brilliant reflection he was; God, of whom he had a strange conception, appropriate to his particular kind of mind, and finally the vision of a woman whom he had created in his own image, whom he had not yet met, but would love one day.
All else only existed for him in a kind of wearisome dream from which he tried to escape by living alone in the midst of the world Forever lost in his reveries, he had no sense of reality. As a child, he could not go near a sharp instrument without cutting himself, when he grew up he could not face a man different from himself without coming into painful collision with this living contradiction of himself.
What saved him from perpetual antagonism was the deliberate and later confirmed habit of not seeing or hearing anything which broadly displeased him. People who did not think as he did became like phantoms to him and as he was always charmingly polite, the cold disdain or even unconquerable aversion he really felt could be easily mistaken for courtesy and amiability.
