“Oh,” she replied, “they’ve all gone to Mme. Drouet’s to spend the evening and enjoy themselves.  Go also; you’ll not find it amusing here.”

One ponders over this sad scene with conflicting thoughts.  Was there really any truth in the story at which Sainte-Beuve more than hinted?  If so, Adele Hugo was more than punished.  The other woman had sinned far more; and yet she had never been Hugo’s wife; and hence perhaps it was right that she should suffer less.  Suffer she did; for after her devotion to Hugo had become sincere and deep, he betrayed her confidence by an intrigue with a girl who is spoken of as “Claire.”  The knowledge of it caused her infinite anguish, but it all came to an end; and she lived past her eightieth year, long after the death of Mme. Hugo.  She died only a short time before the poet himself was laid to rest in Paris with magnificent obsequies which an emperor might have envied.  In her old age, Juliette Drouet became very white and very wan; yet she never quite lost the charm with which, as a girl, she had won the heart of Hugo.

The story has many aspects.  One may see in it a retribution, or one may see in it only the cruelty of life.  Perhaps it is best regarded simply as a chapter in the strange life-histories of men of genius.

THE STORY OF GEORGE SAND

To the student of feminine psychology there is no more curious and complex problem than the one that meets us in the life of the gifted French writer best known to the world as George Sand.

To analyze this woman simply as a writer would in itself be a long, difficult task.  She wrote voluminously, with a fluid rather than a fluent pen.  She scandalized her contemporaries by her theories, and by the way in which she applied them in her novels.  Her fiction made her, in the history of French literature, second only to Victor Hugo.  She might even challenge Hugo, because where he depicts strange and monstrous figures, exaggerated beyond the limits of actual life, George Sand portrays living men and women, whose instincts and desires she understands, and whom she makes us see precisely as if we were admitted to their intimacy.

But George Sand puzzles us most by peculiarities which it is difficult for us to reconcile.  She seemed to have no sense of chastity whatever; yet, on the other hand, she was not grossly sensual.  She possessed the maternal instinct to a high degree, and liked better to be a mother than a mistress to the men whose love she sought.  For she did seek men’s love, frankly and shamelessly, only to tire of it.  In many cases she seems to have been swayed by vanity, and by a love of conquest, rather than by passion.  She had also a spiritual, imaginative side to her nature, and she could be a far better comrade than anything more intimate.

The name given to this strange genius at birth was Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin.  The circumstances of her ancestry and birth were quite unusual.  Her father was a lieutenant in the French army.  His grandmother had been the natural daughter of Marshal Saxe, who was himself the illegitimate son of Augustus the Strong of Poland and of the bewitching Countess of Konigsmarck.  This was a curious pedigree.  It meant strength of character, eroticism, stubbornness, imagination, courage, and recklessness.