The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 49, November, 1861. Various
this dear woman, blushing, embarrassed, and casting on me a lingering look, expressive of fear, interest, love."
This fatal look, as the experienced will readily conceive, did the business. The young soldier dreamed only of a love affair like twenty others which had made the pastime of his oft-changing quarters; but this "dear woman," Sophie Victoire Antoinette Delaborde, daughter of an old bird-fancier, was destined to become his wife, and the mother of his daughter, Aurore Dupin, whom the world knows as George Sand. The circumstances of her youth had been untoward. She was at this period already the mother of one child, born out of marriage, and seems to have been making the campaign of Italy under the so-called protection of some rich man, whose name is not given us. This protection she hastened to leave, following thenceforward with devotion the precarious fortunes of the young soldier, and gaining her own subsistence, until their marriage, by the toil of the needle, to which she had been bred. Of course, Maurice's confidences to his mother under this head soon cease. An amour with a person in Victoire's position could be admitted; but a serious, solid affection, leading to marriage, this would break his mother's heart, and indeed not without reason. The reader must remember that this is a chapter out of French society, on which account we suppress all hysterical comment upon a state of things universally received and acknowledged therein. Maurice's trivial, and we should say, unprincipled pursuit of Victoire would be considered perfectly legitimate in the sphere which made the world to him. The sequel, perhaps, would not have been considered differently here and there; for, however we may recognize the sacredness of true affection, a marriage so unequal and with such sinister antecedents would be regarded in all society with little approbation, or hope of good. His mother soon grew alarmed, as various symptoms of an enduring and carefully concealed attachment became evident to her keen observation. In the years that followed, she left no means untried to break off this dangerous connection;—her remonstrances were by turns tender and violent,—her reasonings, no doubt, in great part just; but Maurice defended the woman of his choice from all accusations, from every annoyance, on the ground of her devoted and honorable attachment to him. After four years of continued trouble and irresolution, in which, George tells us, he had again and again made the endeavor to sacrifice Victoire to his mother's happiness, and after the birth of several children, who soon ceased to live, he wedded her by civil rite. The birth of his daughter soon followed. "And thus it was," says George, "that I was born legitimate."
"My mother had on a pretty pink dress that day, and my father was playing some contredanses on his faithful Cremona (I have it yet, that old instrument by the sound of which I first saw the light). My mother left the dance and passed into her own room. As she went out very quietly, the dance continued. At the last chassez all round, my Aunt Lucy went into my mother's room, and immediately cried,—
"Come, come here, Maurice! You have a daughter!"
"She shall be named Aurore, for my poor mother, who is not here to bless her, but who will bless her one day," said my father, receiving me in his arms.
"She was born in music and in pink," said my aunt. "She will be happy."
Not eminent, perhaps, has been the realization of this augury.
The young couple were so poor, at this moment of their marriage, that a slender thread of gold was forced to serve for the nuptial ring; it was not until some days later that they were able to expend six francs in the purchase of that indispensable ornament. The act once consummated, Maurice gave himself up to some hours of bitter suffering, made inevitable by what he considered a grave act of disobedience against the best of mothers. His conscience, however, on the whole, justified him. He had obeyed the Scripture precept, forsaking the old for the inevitable new relation, and surrounding her who was really his wife with the immunities of civil recognition. The marriage was concealed for some months from his mother,—who at a subsequent period left no stone unturned to prove its nullity. The religious ceremony, which Catholicism considers as the indissoluble tie, had not yet been performed, and Mme. Dupin hoped to prove some informality in the civil rite. In this, however, she did not succeed, and after long resistance, and ill-concealed displeasure, she concluded by acknowledging the unwelcome alliance. It was the little Aurore herself whose unconscious hand severed the Gordian knot of the family difficulties. Introduced by a stratagem into her grandmother's presence, and seated in her lap as the child of a stranger, the family traits were suddenly recognized, and the little one (eight months old) effected a change of heart which neither lawyer nor priest could have induced. St. Childhood is fortunately always in the world, working ever these miracles of reconciliation.
George speaks with admirable candor of the inevitable relations between these two women. She does full justice to the legitimacy of the grandmother's objections to the marriage, and her fears for its result, which were founded much more on moral than on social considerations. At the same time she nobly asserts her mother's claim to rehabilitation through a passionate and disinterested attachment, a faithful devotion to the duties of marriage and maternity, and a widowhood whose sorrow ended only with her life. She says,—"The doctrine of redemption is the symbol of the principle of expiation and of rehabilitation"; but she adds,—"Our society recognizes this principle in religious theory, but not in practice; it is too great, too beautiful for us." She says farther,—"There still exists a pretended aristocracy of virtue, which, proud of its privileges, does not admit that the errors of youth are susceptible of atonement. This condemnation is the more absurd, because, for what is called the World, it is hypocritical. It is not only women of really irreproachable life, nor matrons truly respected, who are called upon to decide upon the merits of their misled sisters. It is not the company of the excellent of the earth who make opinion. That is all a dream. The great majority of women of the world is really a majority of lost women." We must understand these remarks as applying to French society, in respect even of which we are not inclined to admit their truth. Yet there is a certain justice in the inference that women are often most severely condemned by those who are no better than themselves; and this insincerity of uncharity is far more to be dreaded than the over-zeal of virtuous hearts, which oftenest helps and heals where it has been obliged to wound.
At the risk of unduly multiplying quotations, we will quote here what George says of her mother in this, the flower of her days. At a later day, the ill-regulated character suffered and made others suffer with its own discords, which education and moral training had done nothing to reconcile. The manly support, too, of the nobler nature was wanting, and the best half of her future and its possibilities was buried in the untimely grave of her husband. Here is what she was when she was at her best:—
"My mother never felt herself either humiliated or honored by the company of people who might have considered themselves her superiors. She ridiculed keenly the pride of fools, the vanity of parvenus, and, feeling herself of the people to her very finger-ends, she thought herself more noble than all the patricians and aristocrats of the earth. She was wont to say that those of her race had redder blood and larger veins than others,—which I incline to believe; for, if moral and physical energy constitute in reality the excellence of races, we cannot deny that this energy is compelled to diminish in those who lose the habit of labor and the courage of endurance. This aphorism is certainly not without exception, and we may add that excess of labor and of endurance enervates the organization as much as the excess of luxury and idleness. But it is certain, in general, that life rises from the bottom of society, and loses itself in measure as it rises to the top, like the sap in plants.
"My mother was not one of those bold intrigantes whose secret passion is to struggle against the prejudices of their time, and who think to make themselves greater by clinging, at the risk of a thousand affronts, to the false greatness of the world. She was far too proud to expose herself even to coldness. Her attitude was so reserved that she passed for a timid person; but if one attempted to encourage her by airs of protection, she became more than reserved, she showed herself cold and taciturn. With people who inspired her with respect, she was amiable and charming; but her real disposition was gay, petulant, active, and, above all, opposed to constraint. Great dinners, long soirées, commonplace visits, balls themselves, were odious to her. She was the woman of the fireside or of the rapid and frolicking walk; but in her interior, as in her goings abroad, intimacy, confidence, relations of entire sincerity, absolute freedom in her habits and the employment of her time, were indispensable to her. She, therefore, always lived in a retired manner, more