It begins by a scene in a coach, rather like certain novels by Balzac, but accompanied by insignificant details in the worst taste imaginable.  Two girls are travelling in the same coach.  Rose is a young comedian, and Sister Blanche is about to become a nun.  They separate at Tarbes, and the scene of the story is laid in the region of the Pyrenees, in Tarbes Auch, Nerac, the Landes, and finishes with the return to Paris.  Rose, after an entertainment which is a veritable orgy, is handed over by her mother to a licentious young man.  He is ashamed of himself, and, instead of leading Rose astray, he takes her to the Convent of the Augustines, where she finds Sister Blanche once more.  Sister Blanche has not yet pronounced her vows, and the proof of this is that she marries Horace.  But what a wedding!  As a matter of fact, Sister Blanche was formerly named Denise.  She was the daughter of a seafaring man of Bordeaux, and was both pretty and foolish.  She had been dishonoured by the young libertine whom she is now to marry.  The memory of the past comes back to Blanche, and makes her live over again her life as Denise.  In the mean time Rose had become a great singer.  She now arrives, just in time to be present at her friend’s deathbed.  She enters the convent herself, and takes the place left vacant by Sister Blanche.  The whole of this is absurd and frequently very disagreeable.

It is quite easy to distinguish the parts due to the two collaborators, and to see that George Sand wrote nearly all the book.  There are the landscapes, Tarbes Auch, Nerac, the Landes, and a number of recollections of the famous journey to the Pyrenees and of her stay at Guillery with the Dudevant family.  The Convent of the Augustines in Paris, with its English nuns and its boarders belonging to the best families, is the one in which Aurore spent three years.  The cloister can be recognized, the garden planted with chestnut trees, and the cell from which there was a view over the city.  All her dreams seemed so near Heaven there, for the rich, cloudy sky was so near—­“that most beautiful and ever-changing sky, perhaps the most beautiful in the world,” of which we read in Rose et Blanche.  But together with this romance of religious life is a libertine novel with stories of orgies, of a certain private house, and of very risky and unpleasant episodes.  This is the collaborator’s share in the work.  The risky parts are Sandeau’s.

Such, then, is this hybrid composition.  It was, in reality, the monstrosity announced by George Sand.

It had a certain success, but the person who was most severe in her judgment of it was Sophie-Victoire, George Sand’s mother, who had very prudish tastes in literature.  This woman is perfectly delightful, and every time we come across her it is a fresh joy.  Her daughter was obliged to make some excuse for herself, and this she did by stating that the work was not entirely her own.

“I do not approve of a great deal of the nonsense,” she writes, “and I only let certain things pass to please my publisher, who wanted something rather lively. . . .  I do not like the risky parts myself. . . .”  Later on in the same letter, she adds:  “There is nothing of the kind in the book I am writing now, and I am using nothing of my collaborator’s in this, except his name."(15)