She gives us warning that it is “a sad story and sorrowful truth” that she is telling us.  She has herself the better role of the two naturally.  It could not have been on that, account that Chopin’ was annoyed.  He was a Pole, and therefore doubly chivalrous, so that such an objection would have been unworthy of a lover.  What concerns us is that George Sand gives, with great nicety, the exact causes of the rupture.  In the first place, Karol was jealous of Lucrezia’s stormy past; then his refined nature shrank from certain of her comrades of a rougher kind.  The invalid was irritated by her robust health, and by the presence and, we might almost say, the rivalry of the children.  Prince Karol finds them nearly always in his way, and he finally takes a dislike to them.  There comes a moment when Lucrezia sees herself obliged to choose between the two kinds of maternity, the natural kind and the maternity according to the convention of lovers.

The special kind of sentiment, then, between George Sand and Chopin, Just as between Lucrezia and Prince Karol, was just this:  love with maternal affection.  This is extremely difficult to define, as indeed is everything which is extremely complex.  George Sand declares that her reason for not refusing intimacy with Chopin was that she considered this in the light of a duty and as a safeguard.  “One duty more,” she writes, “in a life already so full, a life in which I was overwhelmed with fatigue, seemed to me one chance more of arriving at that austerity towards which I felt myself being drawn with a kind of religious enthusiasm."(30)

     (30) Histoire de via vie.

We can only imagine that she was deceiving herself.  To accept a lover for the sake of giving up lovers altogether seems a somewhat heroic means to an end, but also somewhat deceptive.  It is certainly true that there was something more in this love than the attraction she felt for Musset and for Michel.  In the various forms and degrees of our feelings, there is nothing gained by attempting to establish decided divisions and absolute demarcations for the sake of classifying them all.  Among sentiments which are akin, but which our language distinguishes when defining them, there may be some mixture or some confusion with regard to their origin.  Alfred de Vigny gives us in Samson, as the origin of love, even in man, the remembrance of his mother’s caresses: 

Il revera toujours a la chaleur du sein.

It seems, therefore, that we cannot apply the same reasoning, with regard to love, when referring to the love of a man or of a woman.  With the man there is more pride of possession, and with the woman there is more tenderness, more pity, more charity.  All this leads us to the conclusion that maternal affection in love is not an unnatural sentiment, as has so often been said, or rather a perversion of sentiment.  It is rather a sentiment in which too much instinct and heredity are mingled in a confused