The Dream Lover: A Novel of George Sand

by Elizabeth Berg

  Eventually, I did fall asleep, though not for long. I was roused by a boy of about nine years old, a big boy with thick black hair and full red cheeks, thrusting a ragged bouquet into my face. “Here, girl, these are for you,” he said.

  I raised my eyes to my grandmother, who stood with her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “This is Hippolyte, who has come to meet you, and whose manners I daresay need improving!” She did not tell me at the time, but this was my half brother, from my father’s relationship with the peasant girl.

  “Do you want to come outside to play?” Hippolyte asked. He blinked once, twice, then reached his finger up to dig inside his nose.

  “Ah là là!” my grandmother said, tsking, and yanked his hand down from his face. She asked me, “What do you think, my dear? Would you like to go outside?”

  I nodded, and within the space of a few minutes, Hippolyte and I were out in the beautiful day, the sky nearing sapphire in its depth of blue, clouds moving slowly, nearly hypnotically, above us. I saw acres of black earth, tall trees, and many varieties of flowers, both wild and cultivated. I stood staring at the star-shaped grass-of-Parnassus, which had delicate, veinlike etchings on each petal, until Hippolyte pulled on my arm, impatient to take me elsewhere.

  There was a large vegetable garden, a vine arbor, and thick-trunked walnut trees, whose gentle deterioration only added to their great beauty. There were enclaves of little houses where peasants lived, and Hippolyte showed me his, only a few steps away from my grandmother’s house.

  The Indre River ran through the land, and Hippolyte brought me to it. He told me he caught fish there with his bare hands. When I looked askance at him, he said, “It is true; I shall show you someday. And then we shall make a fire and cook the poor fellow! I shall pick my teeth with his bones!”

  He looked with satisfaction at my face, hoping, I think, that he would see fear. But I was only intrigued and eager to catch a fish myself.

  “And now we shall play war,” Hippolyte said, picking up a long stick that I thought would serve as a sword. “I shall be Napoleon.”

  “No,” I said. I had had quite enough of war.

  “Very well—then I shall be a dog, as I was in a previous life. You will be a cat, and I shall chase you.” He tilted his chin to the sky and barked, then waved his hand imperiously, giving me a head start. “You must run with your tail straight in the air and your back arched. You must be very afraid. You might spit at me a little.”

  I considered this, then said, “I shall be a dog as well.”

  “Don’t be silly. Only boys can be dogs. Girls are cats.”

  I stood taller and spoke with great authority: “I am a dog because that is what I want to be, never mind that I am a girl! We shall find a squirrel to be a cat.”

  After about half an hour, I came back inside. My grandmother was playing the harpsichord in the drawing room, and I stood shyly at the threshold of the room, watching her. When she saw me there, she called me over to sit beside her on the bench. “Do you play?” she asked. I shook my head. “Never mind,” she said. “You will learn. For now, just listen.”

  I sat still, listening, enraptured. After a while, I slid off the bench and lay on the floor beneath the instrument so that I could feel completely enveloped by the music. I closed my eyes and soon fell asleep. I was awakened by my father’s laughter as he gently pulled at my ankles, then stood me up. “You must offer your apologies to your grandmother for being inattentive to her wonderful performance!”

  “No apology is necessary,” my grandmother said. “She is still tired, and anyway, you used to do the same thing, Maurice, you used to lie there in that same spot to listen—do you remember?”

  He looked down at me, smiling, a light in his black eyes. “Are you feeling better, little cabbage?” He put his hand to my forehead. “No fever!”

  “I am cured!” I said.

  Not so for my baby brother, who mostly lay in my mother’s lap, crying in a reedy wail so very different from the robust cries I’d heard from him before. He was like a little animal in a trap who despaired of any help arriving, whose only solace was to make sound out of his suffering.

  That night, I awakened in my grandmother’s bedroom. I was for a moment completely disoriented. Then I remembered where I was and tried to be glad of my soft bed, to appreciate the beauty of the bright stars I could see out the window. But I missed the presence of my parents. I tiptoed to their room and stood watching as they slept, my mother with my father’s arm about her, my baby brother silent in his cradle nearby. I tiptoed over to my brother’s cradle and started to lie down on the floor beside him. My mother sat up in bed.

  “Aurore!” she whispered.

  “Yes, Maman.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  I didn’t answer, merely hung my head.

  “Come here,” she said.

  When I got to the bed, she moved over to make room for me. I climbed under the covers and nestled close to her. “There,” she said. “Better?”

  “Better.”

  From that night on, I let myself be put to bed in my grandmother’s room, then snuck into my parents’ bed. Downstairs, my grandmother slept on a bed made up for her in an otherwise empty space that my father dreamed of turning into a billiards parlor. She would not have approved of my sleeping in my parents’ bed. She herself had lived a life largely devoid of passion or even touch. She reportedly had never had relations with her first husband, who died quite suddenly very early in their marriage. She adored her second husband, my father’s father, whom she married when she was just over thirty and he sixty-two, but naturally he was more like a father to her—he even asked her to call him “Papa.” My grandmother, ever on the side of being coddled and cared for, only too readily acquiesced. In addition to that, she was a rationalist, closer to Deschartres in that respect than to her quite romantic and sentimental son. So the kind of natural warmth and openness that was for my parents second nature was to my grandmother something both foreign and distasteful.

  But for me, sleeping with my parents was blissful. Oftentimes, before I drifted off, I heard my parents talking about their hopes for my father to quit the military in favor of staying home and pursuing music and theater. I would try to imagine what that would be like. To be able to see both my father and my mother every day!

  My mother was in much better spirits when my father was with us, and at those times I suffered far fewer slaps and admonishments from her. As for my father, he never was anything but gentle and loving with me; he had not been shown the rough examples for child rearing that my mother had.

  Sometimes my parents lay in bed and talked about me. They praised my intelligence and my inquisitiveness, the way that I charmed my grandmother, even my occasionally imperious attitude toward Hippolyte and the other children from the village with whom we played. My parents also enjoyed it immensely when I irritated Deschartres, fond as my father was of him.

  Lying in bed with my parents, I naturally heard, as well, their worries about my brother, but when they started talking about Louis failing, I let myself fall asleep. There was nothing I could do about it.

  February 1831

  QUAI DES GRANDS-AUGUSTINS

  PARIS

  I stood looking out at the city from the room that Jules and I were sharing. The view was of the Pont Neuf, the towers of Notre Dame, the rows of little houses on the Île de la Cité. But I was not really seeing any of those beautiful things. My arms were tightly crossed, and my foot tapped against the floor so relentlessly I feared the neighbors below might complain. The sky was dark, full of rapidly moving clouds, and I was as unsettled as the weather.

  I had just finished reading a letter I had picked up at my half brother’s apartment, one he had written to me. In it, he told me that the most admirable thing I had done in my life was to have given birth to Maurice, and that my son loved me with all his heart. Hippolyte warned me that staying away from Maurice for such long intervals would test that love, and
it was likely that it would soon go away entirely.

  When I had left Nohant, two-year-old Solange had been reassured by the fact that her father was there, and by my telling her that I would see her soon. Maurice, at seven, was more anxious, and I had finally made him smile by promising him that I would send him a uniform just like the policemen in Paris wore. Then, when I watched him walk away from me that morning, my heart ached so hard I nearly canceled my plans.

  But I had come to see that a life not lived in truth is a life forfeited. I believed that what I intended to do for myself in Paris was ultimately better for all of us than my staying home and trying to pretend that I was content sewing and cooking and overseeing dinner parties, all the while turning a blind eye to my husband’s cruelty and betrayals.

  Had I had known what passion would be born in me around living the life of an artist, had I known what absorption and dedication it would require, I might never have married and had children. But I had married. I had borne children. One could not retract the birth of a child or the love for them that came with it. Now I needed to think of the best way to manage all of our needs.

  If letters from the children’s tutor and even from Casimir could be believed, Maurice and Solange were not suffering at all but thriving. Hadn’t my own life served as evidence that the love one had for one’s mother could survive her absence?

  In contrast to my mother, I wrote to my children every day. But letters did not pull a blanket up higher before a good-night kiss, or listen to progress in reading, or ferret out hiding places in a game of hide-and-seek, or soothe the fears brought on by a nightmare.

  Hippolyte’s letter, in which he had, as usual, felt so free to criticize me, burned in my hand.

  Did he ever tell Casimir that his frequent absences from our children—his vaguely described “business trips”—would threaten their love of him? I knew the answer to that: of course not. It was men’s privilege and pleasure to travel away from home whenever they wanted to, so long as they could afford it (and sometimes when they could not). It seemed a woman never had a good enough reason to leave her post. It was another part of the great hypocrisy that existed between men and women that was held as a natural law. But it was not a natural law; it was man-made.

  I would stay with the plan Casimir and I had formulated. In April, I would be back with the children. Until then, I would hold them in my heart and write to them daily but remain here, where I had real business to attend to.

  I resolved to approach another man of letters. Hyacinthe Thabaud de Latouche, called Henri, had been a friend of my father’s. He had just taken over as publisher of a satiric journal called Le Figaro. He was forty-five years old, quite overweight, and arrogant, I was told; and he had a reputation for being very difficult. But he was a great admirer of Rossini, and the first Frenchman to embrace the genius of Beethoven and Berlioz. In addition, he had introduced Goethe to French readers, which in itself was enough for me to overlook the criticisms I had heard.

  I sent him my manuscript, asking him to read it and let me know if there was any way he could help me.

  The next morning, I got a note from him, inviting me to meet with him in his office in Montmartre that very afternoon.

  September 1808

  NOHANT

  My parents and I had been back at Nohant for several weeks, and the three of us had regained our health. But my baby brother, Louis, continued to decline. For weeks, my mother had tried valiantly to nurse her son back to health. She ate so well she embarrassed herself, but my grandmother seemed to understand the reason for Sophie’s apparent greed and often put more on my mother’s plate without her asking. My mother ate between meals, as well: thick slabs of bread spread with pale yellow butter and red jam, raw vegetables she pilfered from the kitchen when the cook’s back was turned, fruit she pulled from the branches of trees, pastries she kept wrapped in hankies in her pockets. She ate and ate and ate, and all of it was an apology to her son for the neglect he had suffered on our wartime travels—my mother feared her inadequate diet then had affected her milk—and all of it, too, was a prayer for him not to leave her.

  She took walks and she spent long stretches of time working on a children’s garden she was cultivating beneath a pear tree. Nearby, Louis lay in a basket silently staring up, his tiny hands motionless. I used to kneel beside him and stare at him, trying to will him back to good health.

  At night, my mother held Louis close and rocked him and rubbed his back and sang to him, but as he continued to lose weight and decline, she stopped doing that. It was as though just being held required more energy than he had to give, as though he were too fragile to bear any touch at all. Once I came upon her tenderly bathing him as he lay in her lap, and the sight of his prominent rib cage made for a stab of pity in my heart. I saw what my mother had not yet accepted: Louis was not going to recover. He was going to die.

  Finally, on September 8, came the awful moment when Louis started growing cold and mottled before my mother’s eyes. It was just after dinner; she had been on her way upstairs to nurse him to sleep. Instead, she rushed back to the dining room and sat by the fireplace, imploring my father to build a fire as quickly as he could. This he did, and then he kept stoking the flames as the baby grew colder and colder to the touch. My mother moved as close to the fire as she safely could and wrapped Louis in more and more blankets. She was wild-eyed with panic; she kept calling his name, kissing the top of his head, massaging him through the blankets, rocking him faster and faster. My father knelt beside his wife and son, trying to comfort both of them, wiping at his tears. My grandmother and I stood silently a fair distance away, and I remember that she wrapped part of her long skirt around me in a way of which she seemed unaware.

  After a short while, Louis stopped breathing. My mother cried out, one sharp cry, and then began to keen. My grandmother ran for Deschartres, to see if there was anything to be done.

  There was nothing he could suggest. Not yet three months old, the baby was dead. Deschartres lifted him from my mother’s arms, gave him the briefest of examinations, and nodded at her. “My condolences,” he said.

  “No!” my mother screamed, lunging for Deschartres in a violent way, as though he were the cause of Louis’s death.

  My father reached for her, and she turned to sob in his arms. I crept closer but did not attempt to touch either of my parents.

  “I have killed him,” my mother sobbed. “I have killed our son!”

  “No, Sophie. Shhhhh,” my father said. I saw him squeeze his own eyes shut, and I saw the resolve pass over his face. He would comfort my mother now; later, he would tend to his own wounds.

  My mother wept, the sounds so loud and heartrending it seemed to me that the house would collapse around us. Finally, my grandmother convinced us all to sit again at the table, where the remains of dinner still were; the servants had not dared to enter the room. My mother had stopped crying by then, but every breath she took was a shudder. She sat blankly staring, her hands open in her lap as though something had just flown out of them. Finally she looked at my grandmother and asked dully, “Where is he?”

  “He is dead, my dear,” my grandmother said, her usually clear voice thick with pain.

  “But where is he?”

  “Deschartres has buried him,” she said. “And now we must endeavor to move forward.”

  My mother rose so abruptly she knocked over several glasses. “Buried him! So soon? But I have not prepared him!” She meant washing him, perfuming him, then binding him, as was the custom.

  “It is best this way,” my grandmother said.

  My mother looked quickly over at my father, who only stared into his plate. Then she ran upstairs to their bedroom and slammed the door. My father followed her.

  “Come to me,” my grandmother said, patting her lap, and I went to sit with her. “Shall I sing you a little song? Are you still hungry?”

  I said nothing. A song, a bite of food, the moon and the stars—what difference did i
t make what she offered me? But she sang. And eventually, I closed my eyes and leaned back against her. From upstairs came the voices of my parents: my mother screaming, raging, weeping; my father calmly responding.

  When I was put to bed, I had no thought to give my parents privacy. I went to them as usual; as usual, they let me in.

  In the middle of the night, I was awakened by the sounds of my parents arguing in loud whispers. My mother was pacing back and forth, gesturing wildly. My father sat at the side of the bed, his head hanging low. “But we didn’t see him before Deschartres took him away!” she said. “How can we be sure? Ah, Maurice, he was persecuted from the moment he was born. I swear to you I saw that Spanish doctor press hard against Louis’s eyes with his thumbs, I heard him say, ‘Here’s one who will never see the Spanish sun.’ I heard it, I tell you! And now he has been taken from his mother’s arms and put in the cold ground, and we are not even sure he is dead!”

  “I am sure!” my father said. “It wounds me as it does you to think that we have lost our son, but he is dead! There is no doubt! You saw it yourself, Sophie, you saw him grow cold, you saw him stop breathing. He is dead! Do not make me say it again and again; each time I do, he dies once more.”

  She wept, with the smallest of sounds now, and my father went to her and knelt on the floor before her. I kept my eyes mostly closed so that they would not see that I was awake.

  “Sophie,” my father said, weeping himself, pushing his face into her legs.

  My mother abruptly stopped crying. “I want to see him. You must bring him to me. I must be certain he is dead. He might merely have lapsed into a coma. As you well know, people have been buried alive! What if he is out there in the blackness and the cold, all alone and still alive?”