by Lauren Elkin
When I look for the marks of time in the Paris streets, the scars of revolution and upheaval, I’m looking for evidence that Parisians fought back against what was imposed on them, that they weren’t all trying to keep their lives as undisturbed as possible. Between 1789 and 1871 these people saw a bloody uprising every twenty years or so. I’m trying to understand how they could rise up, how a collection of everydays can overturn a king and remake a world.
* * *
Where I come from, you don’t just move abroad. No one I knew had ever done such a thing, except for my Italian family, but they were fleeing Mussolini. I was not escaping a fascist regime, so why pry myself loose from the place I was born, from my family, my friends, my city, my language? It’s only a six-hour flight, but for many years when I flew to Paris from JFK, it felt like I was jumping off a cliff at the edge of the world. I would arrive in Paris in a depressed stupor that would linger for days with the jet lag. What am I doing here? What is it that keeps me here? The effect of having travelled too far, too quickly, left me feeling physically bereft, as if I had swallowed the distance between myself and the people I loved, and it split open my insides. It got me interested in logistics, but also in distances, in families that stretched across them. I kept thinking about George Sand, of all people, who in 1831 left her no-good husband and beloved children at Nohant, her estate in central France, to go and become a writer in Paris. In her day it took ten hours to travel from Nohant to Paris.That was a different kind of distance. There was no jet lag, but there were no telephones. She couldn’t call her children to wish them goodnight. She was in the same country, completely cut off from them. Many women of her class were separated from their children, having sent them off as babies to the wet nurse, and when they were a little older, to school. But for the mother to leave her home – this was a scandal.
Revolution. The word implies movement, back to where one began, like a turn around an axis, like celestial bodies in the sky. In French, that which is révolu is completed, over. But speaking historically, temporally, it is impossible to come back to where we started. Even if a revolution is perceived to have failed, and not to have changed anything, like the events of 1832, I prefer the more unusual meaning of ‘a turn or a twist, a bend or a winding’. The OED refers us to William Whiston’s 1737 translation of Josephus: ‘For these roads are not straight, but have several revolutions.’
I think of George Sand as this kind of revolution: a turn in the road.
* * *
We think we know the story: the cross-dressing, the cigars, the lovers, the many, many novels. Yet although her mythology is engraved on our cultural consciousness, we don’t talk very much about her work. That’s partly because it’s not readily available in English – but partly because when her novels have been translated, readers have found them sentimental and disappointing; there is much weeping and fainting. We are light years away from the stream of black liquid running out of the dead Emma Bovary’s mouth as she rots on a table, though Flaubert’s masterpiece was published at the peak of Sand’s career. Unlike Balzac and Flaubert, who were her friends and contemporaries, and who strove to render men and women on the page as they were, warts and all, Sand was trying to paint a picture of what people could be: emancipated from all social chains, including those of family, marriage, the Church and society. Her novels have that Romantic predilection for exotic locales, like Italy (she was very inspired by Madame de Staël’s 1807 novel Corrine, ou l’Italie) and Reunion Island, and take place on some other plane of possibility, instead of the world we actually live in. Where one of her heroines, Indiana, is ready to throw her honour aside for love, another, Consuelo, tries to maintain her chastity and honour above all else, including love. In both novels, there is much weeping and fainting. They’re not exactly what we expect from the trouser-wearing, cigar-smoking bohemian image we have of Sand.
Sand wrote passionately in favour of equality between men and women, but was not exactly a feminist. Indiana’s greatest hope is that ‘a day will come when everything in my life will be changed, when I shall do good to others, when someone will love me, when I shall give my whole heart to the man who gives me his; meanwhile, I will suffer in silence and keep my love as a reward for the man who will set me free’.10 Yet because this is a character who has left her husband and run off with another man, this vision of marital equality is very daring for 1832. Asked by feminist groups of her day to join their cause, she retorted that she worked for the rights of all, not just of women.
In spite of these limitations, Sand’s attempt to reconcile everyday life with her great ideals, and her refusal to live her life the way she was expected to, were inspiring in her own day – Alexander Herzen called her the ‘incarnation of the revolutionary idea’ and her novels would influence an entire generation of Russian radicals (the spread of her ideas in Russia would come to be known as Zhorshzandism) – and ought to inspire us today as well. But in our lunge for Sand the bohemian, we’ve missed the more interesting version of her: Sand the everyday radical. Especially in her autobiographical writings, Sand shows us that in the interstices of history are women eking out daily revolutions, and the emancipatory role of the city. Sand’s problem was she could not quite imagine what a liberated woman looked like.
* * *
It’s hard to place George Sand: she refused to be placed. She was born Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin in 1804, and known as Aurore. Her father, Maurice Dupin, was an officer in Napoleon’s army. Her mother, Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, was a dancer in one of the ‘humblest theatres in Paris’. Born into the niche between democratic idealism and royalist luxury, Sand herself was politically contradictory. On one side her grandfathers were the King of Poland and the Maréchal de Saxe. On the other, a Parisian bird seller. In George Sand, wrote John Sturrock in the London Review of Books, ‘the Ancien Régime was crossed, give or take a bar sinister, with the Paris proletariat’.11 She took the part of the worker, of the common man, and woman, and though she lived a comfortable life in Paris and Nohant, it was mainly by the efforts of her own inexhaustible pen. Always moving between the country and the city, she longed for one in the other and the other in the one. Pragmatic and rational, she made an enemy of excess, yet she had more lovers and produced many more novels, long, long novels, the length of a nineteenth-century night, than anyone has been able to understand since. (‘How the devil did George Sand do it?’ wondered Colette in her memoirs.)12
Her life was punctuated by revolutions. She was born the year Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, putting an imperial end to the endless factioning and in-fighting that had prevailed since the Revolution fifteen years before, and turning the bloodletting on the rest of Europe. In his Confession of a Child of the Century, Alfred de Musset, Sand’s lover, would write of their generation, ‘Conceived in the intervals between battles, raised in schools to the beat of drums, thousands of boys exchanged grim looks as they flexed their puny muscles. From time to time blood-splattered fathers would appear, hold them up against chestfuls of golden metals, then put them down again and get back on their horses.’13 Great Caesar commanded the youth of France to his side, and soon it fell. Yet, for its children, ‘Something in that word liberty made their hearts beat with the memory of a terrible past and the hope of a glorious future.’ The ‘sons of the Empire and grandsons of the Revolution’ gave themselves over to debauchery, ‘plung[ing] into the dissipation of wine and courtesans’: the ‘malady of the age’. As for Sand, she got to work trying to cure it. ‘You produce desolation,’ she would later write to Flaubert, ‘and I produce consolation.’
* * *
This was the nineteenth century in France: forever healing from one bloodshed only to inflict another, in the hope it would truly, this time, birth a more just world. It never arrived, though France is not done waiting for it.
* * *
In 1830, stuck in a loveless marriage out in the sticks, Aurore Dudevant’s life was unbearable. All her illusions about love, marriage an
d respect were eradicated by her disappointing match; her marriage was not a beautiful union of souls, but cohabitation with someone she didn’t have much in common with after all, besides a love of riding. She would rail against the ‘marriage of reason’ – and marriage itself – for the rest of her life. Her husband Casimir wasn’t much to brag about in the bedroom, and wasn’t shy about giving her a good slap. She had an idealised (that is, unconsummated) affair with Aurelien de Sèze, and an ‘unidealised’ one with Stéphane de Grandsagne, who some think fathered her second child. Casimir messed around with the chambermaid, but no one took much note. It was Aurore people gossiped about. Aurore felt humiliated and unfulfilled. Her brother told her to hang in there; he tended to take her husband’s side. There were the children; she had to stay for their sake. But the situation was untenable. Any exit plan was going to have to include them at some point.
That dry hot summer, rumours of revolution in the city sparked rebellion at Nohant as well. Her blood heated up, as she told her friend Jules Boucoiran. ‘I feel within me an energy I didn’t think I had. The soul develops with these events.’14 Boucoiran, who was staying in Paris, sent her letters describing what was happening. Charles X (the second Bourbon king since the restoration of the monarchy in 1814) had grown ever more unpopular; he favoured the Church and the nobility, which violated the constitution of 1814, and he introduced certain measures to censor the press, which the Chamber of Deputies violently protested. In March of 1830 they passed a vote of ‘no confidence’ against the king and his key ministers.
The ambiance was tense; the people were just waiting for Charles to make a misstep so they could rise up against him. Charles gave them the excuse they needed on 25 July, when he signed the ordinances suspending the freedom of the press, dissolving the newly formed parliament before it could even meet, and barring the middle class from voting or running for office. On the 26th through the 28th, the people took to the barricades, in what became known as the Trois Glorieuses, or ‘Three Glorious Days’. But however impassioned Sand felt by the people’s cause, she was pragmatic by nature, and worried they had only ‘mistaken words for ideas’, leaving ‘plenty of room for a future return to absolutism’.15 That return came rather more quickly than anticipated: the revolution only succeeding in replacing one king with another, as Louis-Philippe of the House of Orléans ascended to the throne after Charles X abdicated.
Riding almost every day to nearby La Châtre to hear the news from Paris, Aurore encountered a young man called Jules Sandeau, who was visiting his father in La Châtre for the summer holidays. He was only nineteen to her twenty-six. They fell in love and had a passionate affair, with promises to reunite quickly when he went back to Paris at the end of the summer, leaving Aurore behind with her husband and children.
Things came to a head when, one day, looking for something in her husband’s desk, she came across a sealed packet of letters, addressed to her and marked ‘Only open after my death’. Though he was alive and well, Aurore opened the letters (wouldn’t you?) and found them filled with vitriol. That’s when she decided to leave. ‘I want an allowance,’ she announced to Casimir. ‘I am going to Paris forever, my children will stay at Nohant.’
She was bluffing; it was a negotiating tactic. What she wanted – and what she eventually got – was to take her daughter with her, to spend half the year in Paris in three-month increments, and to receive an allowance of 3,000 francs a year. In early 1831, she went to live in her brother’s apartment in Paris, at 31 rue de Seine. Within a short time she moved in with Jules, where they lived in a tiny garret with a view over the Pont Neuf. Later they moved to 25 Quai Saint-Michel, in a three-room flat with a view over Notre-Dame. When Sand describes this time in her autobiography, she leaves out her bedmate completely.
In her version, she came to Paris, penniless, with the intention of becoming a writer. She recounts how she lived in a fifth-floor walk-up (‘I have never been able to climb stairs, but I had to, and often with my big daughter in my arms’) and had no servant, only a faithful female porter, who served as a kind of cleaning woman for fifteen francs a month. The owner of the nineteenth-century equivalent of a greasy spoon brought Sand her meals for two francs a day. ‘I myself scrubbed and ironed the linen underwear.’ (Whatever would she make of our twenty-first-century lives, doing our own laundry and making our own meals? Would she be appalled or envious?)
For so many young men and women over the centuries a move to the city from the country has been an opportunity for self-reinvention. The great French novelists of the nineteenth century have all chronicled this story, from Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) and Balzac’s Illusions Perdues (1843) to Flaubert’s Education Sentimentale (1869) and Zola’s L’Oeuvre (1886). Sand saw that as a woman she wouldn’t have the freedom to become an artist that Julien Sorel, Lucien de Rubempré, Frédéric Moreau or Claude Lantier possessed the moment they set foot in the city. She had to do something about all those skirts, those dainty shoes, her general appearance of vulnerability. In her autobiography, she writes:
So I had made for myself a rédingote-guérite in heavy grey cloth, pants and vest to match. With a grey hat and large woollen cravat, I was a perfect first-year student. I can’t express the pleasure my boots gave me: I would gladly have slept with them on, as my brother did in his young age, when he got his first pair. With those little iron-shod heels, I was solid on the pavement. I flew from one end of Paris to the other. It seemed to me that I could go round the world. And then, my clothes feared nothing. I ran out in every kind of weather, I came home at every sort of hour, I sat in the pit at the theatre. No one paid attention to me, and no one guessed at my disguise … No one knew me, no one looked at me, no one found fault with me; I was an atom lost in that immense crowd.16
Her fine lady’s clothing just wasn’t designed for the kind of knocking around town she got up to with her coterie of artistically inclined young men from the Berry.
Literary and political events, the excitement of the theatres and the museums, the clubs and the streets – they saw everything, they went everywhere. My legs were as strong as theirs, and so were my good little Berrichon feet, which had learned to walk on bad roads, balancing on thick wooden clogs. But on the pavements of Paris I was like a boat on ice. Delicate footwear cracked in two days; overshoes made me clumsy; I wasn’t used to lifting my skirts. I was muddy, tired, runny-nosed, and I saw my shoes and clothing – not to mention the little velvet hats – splattered in the gutters, falling into ruin with frightening rapidity.17
Aurore had already cross-dressed in the country, mainly to ride horseback; that was something of a local tradition for young women in the Berry. But in Paris she took it a step further, trying – successfully – to pass for a man, or at least for a boy. In trousers and boots she could ‘fly’ from one end of the city to the other, in spite of the weather, the hour and the setting, blending with the crowd, like a true flâneur. How ironic that a trick to blend in would cause Sand to stand out. Cross-dressing turned Aurore Dudevant into George Sand, and she would remain conspicuous for the rest of her life.
I like this portrait of Sand so much better than the swaggering defiant cross-dresser with her cigar and her lover; I like the decision coming from pure frustration instead of lofty idealism. I can see her tossing her little velvet hat on the floor and stamping on it, growling and swearing. Another inspiration came from her mother, who had also lived in Paris on a tiny budget as a young woman. She confided that to save money Sand’s father used to dress her like a boy: ‘Our cost of living was reduced by half.’18
You can just see the wheels turning in Sand’s head. Walking is a constant theme in her autobiography; in fact it ends on the word marcher, to walk, as in marching forward on the path of ‘charity towards all’. Being able to walk on her own, true to her own spirit, was the basic declaration of independence, for Sand. Her beloved and very chic grandmother never walked anywhere, Sand recalls, except on days of mourning. ‘Ma fille, vous mar
chez comme une paysanne,’ her grandmother once told her – ‘you walk like a peasant’.19 A jab at Sand’s mother, the bird seller’s daughter.
So Sand learned to walk like a lady. Then she learned to walk like a man.
Her heroines would adopt similar measures: Consuelo dresses like a boy for protection as she and Joseph Haydn walk, two vagabonds with faces younger than their years, from Bohemia to Vienna. The title character in Gabriel, a play, is born a woman but raised a man, until at seventeen years old s/he discovers the truth. ‘I do not feel that my soul has a sex,’ Gabriel declares.20 Dressing like a man allows Sand’s characters access to other experiences of life, other mindsets, or to point out inequalities between the sexes. Writing from a male perspective, as Sand often did, was another kind of cross-dressing, and allowed her to glimpse a different way of living.
* * *
Sand’s trouser-wearing was in its way an act of revolution; at the very least, it was illegal. In the year 1800, a law had been passed forbidding women to wear them in public. This law is still in effect today, though of course ignored; but even in 1969, an attempt to overturn it failed. When the law was still actively defended, a woman who wanted to change out of her skirts had to apply for a cross-dressing permit. To obtain one, she would have to demonstrate, using medical records, that she had some kind of hideous deformity which made it unsightly for her to appear in skirts. And then once obtained, the permit still did not license be-trousered women to appear at balls, at the theatre or at public meetings.21 A culture struggling to redefine itself against the blood-soaked Place de la Revolution fixated on the female body as a tool for instilling certain values in the heart of the new Republic.
