book she set to work on the philosophers and essayists
Mably, Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bacon, Bossuet,
Aristotle, Leibnitz, Pascal, Montaigne, and then turned
to the poets and moralists La Bruyere, Pope, Milton,
Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare, &c. But she was not
a metaphysician; the tendencies of her mind did not
impel her to seek for scientific solutions of the
great mysteries. “J’etais,”
she says, “un etre de sentiment, et le sentiment
seul tranchait pour moi les questions a man usage,
qui toute experience faite, devinrent bientot les
seules questions a ma, portee.” This “le
sentiment seul tranchait pour moi les questions”
is another self-revelation, or instance of self-knowledge,
which it will be useful to remember. What more
natural than that this “being of sentiment”
should prefer the poets to the philosophers, and be
attracted, not by the cold reasoners, but by Rousseau,
“the man of passion and sentiment.”
It is impossible to describe here the various experiences
and doings of Aurora. Without enlarging on the
effects produced upon her by Byron’s poetry,
Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” and Chateaubriand’s
“Rene”; on her suicidal mania; on the
long rides which, clad in male attire, she took with
Deschartres; on the death of her grandmother, whose
fortune she inherited; on her life in Paris with her
extravagantly-capricious mother; on her rupture with
her father’s family, her aristocratic relations,
because she would not give up her mother—I
say, without enlarging on all this we will at once
pass on to her marriage, about which there has been
so much fabling.
Aurore Dupin married Casimir Dudevant in September,
1822, and did so of her own free will. Nor was
her husband, as the story went, a bald-headed, grey-moustached
old colonel, with a look that made all his dependents
quake. On the contrary, Casimir Dudevant, a natural
son of Colonel Dudevant (an officer of the legion of
honour and a baron of the Empire), was, according to
George Sand’s own description, “a slender,
and rather elegant young man, with a gay countenance
and a military manner.” Besides good looks
and youth—he was twenty-seven—he
must also have possessed some education, for, although
he did not follow any profession, he had been at a
military school, served in the army as sub-lieutenant,
and on leaving the army had read for the bar and been
admitted a barrister. There was nothing romantic
in the courtship, but at the same time it was far
from commonplace.
He did not speak to me of love [writes
George Sand], and owned that he was little inclined
to sudden passion, to enthusiasm, and in any case
no adept in expressing it in an attractive manner.
He spoke of a friendship that would stand any test,
and compared the tranquil happiness of our hosts [she
was then staying with some friends] to that which he
believed he could swear to procure me.
She found sincerity not only in his words, but also
in his whole conduct; indeed, what lady could question
a suitor’s sincerity after hearing him say that
he had been struck at first sight by her good-natured
and sensible look, but that he had not thought her
either beautiful or pretty?