 The Story of the Carlisles Volume 4 of Famous Affinities of History This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Famous Affinities of History by Lyndon Orr Volume 4 The Story of the Carlisles To most persons, Tennyson was a remote and romantic figure. His homes in the Isle of Wight and at Ileworth had a dignified seclusion about them, which was very appropriate to so great a poet and invested him with a certain awe through which the multitude rarely penetrated. As a matter of fact, however, he was an excellent companion, a ready talker and gifted with so much wit that it is a pity that more of his sayings have not been preserved to us. One of the best known is that which was drawn from him after he and a number of friends had been spending an hour in company with Mr. and Mrs. Carlisle. The two Carlisles were unfortunately at their worst and gave a superb specimen of domestic nagging. Each caught up whatever the other said and either turned it into ridicule or tried to make the author of it an object of contempt. This was, of course, exceedingly uncomfortable for such strangers as were present and it certainly gave no pleasure to their friends. On leaving the house, someone said to Tennyson, Isn't it a pity that such a couple ever married? You know, no, said Tennyson, with a sort of smile under his rough beard. It's much better that two people should be made unhappy than four. The world has pretty nearly come round to the verdict of a poor laureate. It is not probable that Thomas Carlisle would have made any woman happy as his wife or that Jane Bailey Welsh would have made any man happy as her husband. This sort of speculation would never have occurred had not Mr. Froud in the early 80s given his story about the Carlisles to the world. Carlisle went to his grave, an old man, highly honoured and with no trail of gossip behind him. His wife had died some sixteen years before, leaving a brilliant memory. The books of Mr. Froud seemed for a moment to have desecrated the grave and to have shed a sudden and sinister light upon those who could not make the least defence for themselves. For a moment Carlisle seemed to have been a monster of harshness, cruelty and almost brutish feeling. On the other side, his wife took on the colour of an evil-speaking, evil-thinking shrew who tormented the life of her husband and allowed herself to be possessed by some demon of unrest and discontent such as few women of her station are ever known to suffer from. Nor was it merely that the two were apparently ill-mated and unhappy with each other. There were hints and invendos which looked towards some hidden cause for this unhappiness and which aroused the curiosity of everyone that they might be clearer. Froud afterward wrote a book bringing out more plainly, indeed too plainly, his explanation of the Carlisle family's skeleton. A multitude of documents then came from every quarter and from almost everyone who had known either of the Carlisles. Perhaps the result today has been more injurious to Froud than to the two Carlisles. Many persons unjustly speak of Froud as having violated the conference of his friends in publishing the letters of Mr. and Mrs. Carlisle. They take no heed of the fact that in doing this he was obeying Carlisle's express wishes left behind in writing and often urged on Froud while Carlisle was still alive. Whether or not Froud ought to have accepted such a trust, one may perhaps hesitate to decide. That he did so is probably because he felt that if he refused, Carlisle might commit the same duty to another who would discharge it with less delicacy and less discretion. As it is, the blame, if it rests upon anyone, should rest upon Carlisle. He collected the letters. He wrote the lines which burn and scorch with self-reproach. It is he who pressed upon the reluctant Froud. The duty of printing and publishing a series of documents which, for the most part, should never have been published at all and which have done equal harm to Carlisle, to his wife and to Froud himself. Now that everything has been written, that is likely to be written by those claiming to possess personal knowledge of the subject, let us take up the volumes and likewise the scattered fragments and seek to penetrate the mystery of the most ill-assorted couple known to modern literature. It is not necessary to bring to light and in regular order the external history of Thomas Carlisle or of Jane Bailey Welch who married him. There is an extraordinary amount of rather fanciful gossip about this marriage and about the three persons who had to do with it. Take first the principal figure, Thomas Carlisle. His life, until that time, had been a good deal more than the life of an ordinary countryman. Many persons represent him as a peasant, but he was descended from the ancient lords of a Scottish manor. There was something in his eye and in the dominance of his nature that made his lordly nature felt. Mr. Froud notes that Carlisle's hand was very small and unusually well-shaped, nor had his earliest appearance as a young man been commonplace, in spite of the fact that his parents were illiterate so that his mother learned to read only after her sons had gone away to Edinburgh in order that she might be able to enjoy their letters. At that time in Scotland, as in Puritan New England, each family, the son who had the most notable parents, was sent to the university that he might become a clergyman. If there were a second son, he became an advocate or a doctor of medicine, while the sons of less distinction seldom went beyond the parish school but settled down as farmers, horse dealers or whatever might happen to come their way. In the case of Thomas Carlisle, nature marks him out for something brilliant, whatever that might be. His quick sensibility, the way in which he acquired every sort of learning, his command of logic and, with all, his swift, unerring gift of language made it certain from the very first that he must be sent to the university as soon as he had finished school and could afford to go. At Edinburgh, where he matriculated in his fourteenth year, he astonished everyone by the enormous extent of his reading and by the firm hold he kept upon it. One hesitates to credit these so-called reminiscences, which tell how he absorbed mountains of Greek and immense quantities of political economy and history and sociology and various forms of metaphysics, as every Scotsman is bound to do, that he read all night is a common story told of many a Scottish lad at college. We may believe, however, that Carlisle studied and read as most of his fellow students did, but far beyond them in extent. When he had completed about half of his divinity course, he assured himself that he was not intended for the life of a clergyman, one who reads his mocking sayings or what seemed to be a clever string of jeers directed against religion, might well think that Carlisle was throughout his life an atheist or an agnostic. He confessed to Irving that he did not believe in the Christian religion and it was vain to hope that he would ever so believe. Moreover, Carlisle had done something which was unusual at that time. He had taught in several local schools, but presently he came back to Edinburgh and openly made literature his profession. It was a daring thing to do, but Carlisle had unbounded confidence in himself. The confidence of a giant striding forth into a forest, certain that he can make his way by sheer strength through the tangled meshes and the knotty branches that he knows will need him and try to beat him back. Furthermore, he knew how to live on very little. He was unmarried and he felt a certain ardour which besieged his age and gifts. Through the kindness of friends, he received some commissions to write in various books of reference and in 1824, when he was 29 years of age, he published a translation of Le Genre's Geometry. In the same year, he published, in the London magazine, his Life of Schiller and also his translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. This successful attack upon the London periodicals and reviews led to a certain complication with the other two characters in this story. It takes us to Jane Welsh and also to Edward Irving. Irving was three years older than Carlisle, the two men were friends and both of them had been teaching in country schools where both of them had come to know Miss Welsh. Irving's seniority gave him a certain prestige with the younger men and naturally with Miss Welsh. He had won honours at the university and now, as assistant to the famous Dr Shalmers, he carried his silk robes in a jaunty fashion of one who has just ceased to be an undergraduate. While studying, he met Miss Welsh at Haddington and there became her private instructor. This girl was regarded in her native town as something of a personage. To read what has been written of her, one might suppose that she was almost a miracle of birth and breeding and of intellect as well. As a matter of fact, in the little town of Haddington, she was simply Prima Inter Paris. Her father was the local doctor and while she had a comfortable home and doubtless a chair at her disposal, she was very far from the opulence which Carlisle, looking up at her from his lowly surroundings, was accustomed to ascribe to her. She was no doubt a very clever girl and judging from the portraits taken of her at about this time, she was an exceedingly fritty one with beautiful eyes and an abundance of dark glossy hair. Even then, however, Miss Welsh had traits which might have made it certain that she would be much more agreeable as a friend than as a wife. She had become an intellect well, quite prematurely, at an age, in fact, when she might better have been thinking of other things than the inwardness of her soul or the folly of religious beliefs. Even as a young girl, she was beset by a desire to criticise and to ridicule almost everything and everyone that she encountered. It was only when she met with something that she could not understand or someone who could do what she could not that she became comparatively humble. Unconsciously, her chief ambition was to be herself distinguished and to marry someone who could be more distinguished still. When she first met Edward Irving, she looked up to him as her superior in many ways. He was a striking figure in her small world. She was known in Edinburgh as likely to be a man of mark and, of course, he had had a careful training in many subjects of which she, as yet, knew very little. Therefore, insensibly, she fell into a sort of admiration for Irving, an admiration which might have been transmuted into love. Irving, on his side, was taken by the young girl's beauty, her vivacity and the keenness of her intellect. What he did not at once become her suitor is probably due to the fact that he had already engaged himself to a Miss Martin of whom not much is known. It was about this time, however, that Carlisle became acquainted with Miss Welch. His abundant knowledge, his original and striking manner of commenting on it, his almost gigantic intellectual power came to her as a revelation. His studies with Irving were now interwoven with her admiration for Carlisle. Since Irving was a clergyman and Miss Welch had not the slightest belief in any form of theology, there was comparatively little that they had common. On the other hand, when she saw the profundities of Carlisle, she at once half feared and was half fascinated. Let her speak to him on any subject, and he will at once thunder forth some striking truth, or it might be some puzzling paradox. But what he said could never fail to interest her and to make her think. He had too an infinite sense of humour, often whimsical and short through its archasm. It is no wonder that Miss Welch was more and more infatuated with the nature of Carlisle. If it was her conscious wish to marry a man whom she could reverence as a master, where should she find him, in Irving or in Carlisle? Irving was a dreamer, a man who, she came to see, was thoroughly one-sided and whose interests lay in a different sphere from hers. Carlisle, on the other hand, had already reached out to be on the little Scottish capital and had made his mark in the great world of London, where men like Dick Quincy and Geoffrey thought it worth their while to run a tilt with him. Then, too, there was the fascination of his talk, in which Jane Welch found up a perpetual source of interest. The English have never had an artist, except in poetry, no musician, no painter. Purcell and Hogarth are not exceptions, for only such has confirmed the rule. Is the true scotchman the peasant and yeoman, chiefly the former? Every living man is a visible mystery. He walks between two eternities and two infinitudes. Were we not blind as moulds, we should value our humanity at infinity, and our rank, influence, and so forth, the trappings of our humanity at nothing. Say, I am a man, and you say all, whether king or tinker is a mere appendix. Understanding is to reason as the talent of a beaver, which can build houses and use its tail for a trowel, to the genius of a prophet and poet. Reason is all but extinct in this age. It can never be altogether extinguished. The devil has his elect. Is anything more wonderful than another, if you consider it maturely? I have seen no men rise from the dead. I have seen some thousands rise from nothing. I have not force to fly into the sun, but I have force to lift my hand, which is equally strange. Is not every thought properly an inspiration? Or how is one thing more inspired than another? Examine by logic the import of thy life and of all lives. What is it? A making of meal into manure and of manure into meal? Do the quipo know there is no answer from logic? In many ways, Jane Welch found the difference of range between Carlisle and Irving. At one time, she asked Irving about some German works, and he was obliged to send her to Carlisle to solve her difficulties. Carlisle knew German almost as well as if he had been born and raised in, and the full and almost overflowing way in which he answered her gave her another impression of his potency. Thus she weighed the two men who might pick up her lovers, and little by little she came to think of Irving as partly shallow and partly narrow-minded, while Carlisle loomed up more of a giant than before. It is not probable that she was a woman who could love profoundly. She thought too much about herself. She was too critical. She had too intense an ambition for showing off. I can imagine that in the end she made her choice quite coolly. She was flattered by Carlisle's strong preference for her. She was perhaps repelled by Irving's engagement to another woman, yet at the time few persons thought that she had chosen well. Irving had now gone to London and had become the pastor of the Caledonian Chapel in Hattengaden. Within a year by the extraordinary power of his eloquence, which was in a style peculiar to himself, he had transformed an obscure little chapel into one which was crowded by the rich and fashionable. His congregation built for him a handsome edifice on Regent Square, and he became the leader of a new cult which looked to a second personal advent of Christ. He cared nothing for the charges of heresy which were brought against him, and when he was deposed his congregation followed him and developed a new Christian order known as Irvingism. Jane Welch, in her musings, might rightfully have compared the two men and the future which each could give her. Did she marry Irving? She was certain of a life of ease in London and an association with men and women of fashion and celebrity among whom she could show herself to be the gifted woman that she was. Did she marry Carlisle? She must go with him to a desolate, wind-beaten cottage far away from any of the things she cared for, working almost as a housemaid, having no company save that of her husband who was already a dispeptic and who was wont to speak of feeling as if a rat were tearing out his stomach. Who would have said that in going with Carlisle she had made the better choice? Anyone would have said it who knew the three Irving, Carlisle and Jane Welch. She had the penetration to be certain that whatever Irving might possess at present it would be nothing in comparison to what Carlisle would have in the coming future. She understood the limitations of Irving but to her keen mind the genius of Carlisle was unlimited and she foresaw that after he had toiled and striven he would come into his great reward which she would share. Irving might be the leader of a petty sect but Carlisle would be a man whose name must become known throughout the world. And so in 1826 she had made her choice and had become the bride of the rough-spoken, domineering Scotsman who had to face the world with nothing but his creative reign and his stubborn independence. She had put aside all immediate thought of London and its lures. She was going to cast in her lot with Carlisle's largely as a matter of calculation and believing that she had made the better choice. She was 26 and Carlisle was 32 when after a brief residence in Edinburgh they went down to Craig and Patock. Froud has described this place as the dreariest spot in the British dominions. The nearest cottage is more than a mile from it. The elevation 700 feet above the sea stunts the trees and limits the garden produce. The house is gaunt and hungry looking. It stands with the scanty fields attached as an island in a sea of morass. The landscape is unredeemed by grace or grandeur mere undulating hills of grass and heather with peat bogs in the hollows between them. Froud's agreement description has been questioned by some. Yet the actual pictures that have been drawn of the place in later years make it look bare, desolate and uninviting. Mrs. Carlisle who owned it as an inheritance from her father saw the place for the first time in March 1828. She settled there in May but May in the Scottish Hills is almost as repellent as winter. She herself shrunk from the adventure which she had proposed. It was her husband's notion and her own that they should live there in practical solitude. He was to think and write and make for himself a beginning of real fame while she was to hover over him and watch his minor comforts. It seemed to many of their friends that the project was quixotic to a degree. Mrs. Carlisle's delicate health, her weak chest and the beginnings of a nervous disorder makes them think that she was unfit to dwell in so wild and bleak a solitude. They felt too that Carlisle was too much absorbed with his own thought to be trusted with the charge of a high-spirited woman. However, the decision had been made and the newly married couple went to Craig and Patock with wagons that carry their household goods and those of Carlisle's brother, Alexander, who lived in a cottage nearby. These were the two redeeming features of their lonely home, the presence of Alexander Carlisle and the fact that although they had no servants in the ordinary sense, they had several farmhands and a dairymaid. Before long there came a period of trouble which is easily explained by what has been already said. Carlisle, thinking and writing some of the most beautiful things that he ever thought or wrote, could not make allowance for his wife's high spirit and physical weakness. She on her side, nervous, fitful and hard to please, thought herself a slave, the servant of a harsh and brutal master. She screamed at him when her nerves were too unstrung and then with a natural reaction she called herself a devil who could never be good enough for him. But most of her letters were harsh and filled with bitterness and no doubt his conduct to her was at times no better than her own. But it was at Craig and Patock that he really did lay fast and firm the road to fame. His wife's sharp tongue and the knowings of his own dyspepsia were lived down with true Scottish grimness. It was here that he wrote some of his most penetrating and sympathetic essays which were published by the leading reviews of England and Scotland. Here too he began to teach his countrymen the value of German literature. The most remarkable of his productions was that strange work entitled Sartor Risatis, 1834, an extraordinary mixture of the sublime and the grotesque. The book quivers and shakes with tragic pathos, with inward agonies, with solemn aspirations and with riotous humour. In 1834, after six years at Craig and Patock, the Carlisles moved to London and took up their home in Shanerow, Chelsea, a far-from-fashionable retreat, but one in which the comfort of life could be more readily secured. It was there that Thomas Carlisle wrote what must seem to us the most vivid of all his books, The History of the French Revolution. For this he had read and thought for many years, parts of it he had written in essays, and parts of it he had jotted down in journals. But now it came forth as someone has said, a truth clad in hellfire, swirling amid clouds and flames and mist, a most wonderful picture of the accumulated social and political falsehoods which preceded the revolution, and which was swept away by anemesis that was the rightiest judgement of God. Carlisle never wrote so great a book as this. He had reached his middle style, having passed the clarity of his early writings, and not having yet reached the thunderous, strange-masked German expletives which marred his later work. In the French Revolution he bursts forth here and there into furious Gallic oaths and gargantuan epithets. Yet this apocalypse of France seems more true than his hero-worshipping of old Frederick of Prussia, or even of English Cromwell. All these days Thomas Carlisle lived a life which was partly one of seclusion and partly one of pleasure. At all times he and his dark-haired wife had their own sets and mingled with their own friends. Jane had no means of discovering just whether she would have been happier with Irving, for Irving died while she was still digging potatoes and complaining of her lot at Traygan Patak. However this may be the Carlisle's man and wife lived in existence that was full of unhappiness and ranker. Jane Carlisle became an invalid and sought to allay her nervous sufferings with strong tea and tobacco and morphine. When a nervous woman takes to morphine it almost always means that she becomes intensely jealous and so it was with Jane Carlisle. A shivering, palpitating, fiercely loyal bit of humanity she took it into her head that her husband was infatuated with Lady Ashburton or that Lady Ashburton was infatuated with him. She took to spying on them and at times when her nerves were all a jangle she would lie back in her armchair and yell with proxisms of anger. On the other hand Carlisle, eager to enjoy the world, sought relief from his household cares and sometimes stole away after a fashion that was hardly guileless. He would leave false addresses at his house and would dine at other places than he had announced. In 1866 Jane Carlisle suddenly died and somehow then the conscience of Thomas Carlisle became convinced that he had wronged the woman whom he had really loved. His last fifteen years was spent in wretchedness and despair. He felt that he had committed the unpardonable sin. He recalled with anguish every moment of their early life at Reagan-Patock, how she had toiled for him and waited upon him and made herself a slave and how later she had given herself up entirely to him while he had thoughtlessly received the sacrifice and trampled on it as on a bed of flowers. Of course in all this he was intensely morbid and the diary which he wrote was no more sane and wholesome than the screaming with which his wife had horrified her friends. But when he had grown to be a very old man he came to feel that this was all a sort of penance and that the selfishness of his past must be expiated in the future. Therefore he gave his diary to his friend, the historian, Froud and urged him to publish the letters and memorials of Jane Welsh Carlile. Mr. Froud, with an eye to the reading world, readily did so, furnishing them with abundant footnotes which made Carlile appear to the world as more or less of a monster. First there was set forth the almost continual unhappiness of the pair. In the second place, by Hint, by Envendo and sometimes by explicit statement there were given reasons to show why Carlile made his wife unhappy. Of course his knowing dyspepsia which she strove with all her might to drive away was one of the first and greatest causes. But again another cause of discontent was stated in the implication that Carlile in his bursts of temper actually abused his wife. In one passage there is a hint that certain blue marks upon her arm who bruises the result of blows. Most remarkable of all these accusations is that which has to do with the relations of Carlile and Lady Ashburton. There is no doubt that Jane Carlile disliked this brilliant woman and came to have dark suspicions concerning her. At first it was only a sort of social jealousy. Lady Ashburton was quite as clever a talker as Mrs. Carlile and she had a prestige which brought her more admiration. Then, by degrees, as Jane Carlile's mind began to wane she transferred her jealousy to her husband himself. She hated to be outshone and now in some misguided fashion it came into her head that Carlile had surrendered to Lady Ashburton with her own attention to his wife and had fallen in love with her brilliant rival. On one occasion she declared that Lady Ashburton had thrown herself at Carlile's feet but that Carlile acted like a man of honour while Lord Ashburton, knowing all the facts had passed them over and had retained his friendship with Carlile. Now when Froud came to write My Relations with Carlile it was Froud who was very eager to furnish him with every sort of gossip. The greatest source of scandal upon which he drew was a woman named Geraldine Juesbury a curious neurotic creature who had seen much of the late Mrs. Carlile but who had an almost morbid love of offensive tattle. Froud describes himself as a witness for six years at chain row of the enactment of a tragedy as a woman and real as the story of Oedipus. According to his own account I stood by consenting to the slow martyrdom of a woman whom I have described as bright and sparkling and tender and I uttered no word of remonstrance. I saw her involved in a perpetual blizzard and did nothing to shelter her. But it is not upon his own observations that Froud relies for his most sinister evidence against his friend. To him comes Mrs. Juesbury with a lengthy tale to tell. It is well to know what Mrs. Carlile thought of this lady, she wrote. It is her besetting sin and her trade of novelist has aggravated it the desire of feeling and producing violent emotions. Geraldine has one besetting weakness and is unhappy unless she has a grand passion on hand. There were strange manifestations on the part of Mrs. Juesbury to her Mrs. Carlile. At one time when Mrs. Carlile had shown some preference for another woman it led to a wild outburst of what Mrs. Juesbury herself called tiger jealousy. There are many other instances of violent emotions in her letters to Mrs. Carlile. They are often highly charged and erotic. It is unusual for a woman of 32 to write to a woman friend who is 43 years of age in these words which Mrs. Juesbury used in writing to Mrs. Carlile. You are never out of my thoughts one hour together. I think of you much more than if you were my lover. I cannot express my feelings even to you vague undefined yearnings to be yours in some way. Mrs. Carlile was accustomed in private to speak of Mrs. Juesbury as Mrs. Gooseberry while Carlile himself said that she was simply a flimsy tatter of a creature. But it is on the testimony of this one woman who was so morbid and excitable that the most serious accusations against Carlile rest. She knew that Froward was writing a volume about Mrs. Carlile and she rushed to him eager to furnish any narratives in which improbable, a salacious they might be. Thus she is the sponsor of the Ashburton story in which there is nothing whatsoever. Some of the letters which Lady Ashburton wrote to Carlile have been destroyed but not before her husband had perused them. Another set of letters had never been read by Lord Ashburton at all and they are still preserved friendly, harmless, usual letters. Lord Ashburton always invited Carlile to his house and there is no reason to think that the Scottish philosopher wronged him. There is much more to be said about the charge that Mrs. Carlile suffered from personal abuse. Yet when we examine the facts the evidence resolves itself into practically nothing that in his self-absorption he allowed her to do household work and wait upon him like a servant in the dreary hovel of Craig and Buttock may well be true. She had married him with just that hope that he would, by his pen and brain, become a genius whom all the world should know. That she grew nervous and that he became dyspeptic was only what might have been expected. That her tongue was sharp and that he was often rough. This is no strange thing. Mr. Froud hints that he actually struck her but there is no evidence of this. The only other charge that has been made against him is one that has been whispered about in nooks and corners and was spoken of quite frankly by the imaginative Geraldine. Briefly stated it is to the effect that Carlile's constitution was such that he should never have married and that much of his wife's unhappiness in her early years came from this source of childlessness. It is not well to say much on this head for the evidence all rests upon the Tigris Geraldine Jewsberry. It seems to me that a single letter written by Jane Carlile at the end of her first 12 months at Craig and Buttock during a brief absence from home disproves this theory and shows that in the early years of their married life her heart overflowed toward a man a very loving lover. She calls him by the name by which he called her a homely Scottish name Goodie, goodie, dear goodie you said you would bury and I do hope in my heart you are varying it will be so sweet to make it all up to you in kisses when I return you will take me and hear all my bits of experiences and your heart will beat when you find how I have longed for you darling, dearest, loveliest the Lord bless you I think of you every hour every moment I love you and admire you like anything oh if I was there I could put my arms so close about your neck and hush you into the softest sleep you have had since I went away goodnight dream of me goodie it seems most fitting to remember Thomas Carlisle as a man of strength of honour and of intellect and his wife is one who was sorely tried but who came out of her suffering into the arms of death purified and calm and worthy to be remembered by her husband's side end of the story of the Carlisle the story of the Hugos volume 4 of famous affinities of history this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org famous affinities of history by Lyndon Orr volume 4 the story of the Hugos Victor Hugo after all criticisms have been made stands as a literary colossus he had imaginative power which makes his finest passages fairly crash upon the reader's brain like blasting thunderbolts his novels even when translated are read and re-read by people of every degree of education there is something vast something almost titanic about the grandeur and gorgeousness of his fancy his prose resembles the gorgeous blair of an immense military band readers of English care less for his poetry yet in his verse one can find another phase of his intellect he could write charmingly in exquisite cadences poems for lovers and for little children his gifts were varied and he knew thoroughly the life and thought of his own countrymen and therefore in his later days he was almost at the same time there were defects in his intellect and character which are perceptible in what he wrote as well as in what he did he had the Gaelic wit in great measure yet he was absolutely devoid of any sense of humor that is why in both his prose and his poetry his most tremendous page is often comparulously near to bombast and this is why in his vanity was almost as great as his genius he had good reason to be vain and yet if he had possessed a gleam of humor he would never have allowed his egotism to make him arrogant as it was he felt himself exalted above other mortals whatever he did or said or wrote was right because he did it or said it or wrote it and showed itself in rather whimsical ways thus after he had published the first edition of his novel The Man Who Laughs an English gentleman called upon him and after some courteous compliments suggested that in subsequent editions the name of an English peer who figures in the book should be changed from Tom Jimjack four said the Englishman Tom Jimjack is a name that could not possibly belong to an English noble or indeed to any Englishman the presence of it in your powerful story makes it seem to English readers a little grotesque Victor Hugo drew himself up with an air of high disdain who are you he asked I am an Englishman was the answer and naturally I know what names are possible in English Hugo drew himself up higher and on his face there was a smile of utter contempt yes he said you are an Englishman but I am Victor Hugo in another book Hugo had spoken of the Scottish bagpipes as bugpipes this gave some offence to his Scottish admirers a great many persons told him that the word was bagpipes and not bugpipes but he replied with irritable obstinacy I am Victor Hugo and if I choose to write it bugpipes it is bugpipes it is anything that I prefer to make it it is so because I call it so so Victor Hugo became a violent republican because he did not wish France to be an empire or a kingdom in which an emperor would be his superior in rank he always spoke of Napoleon III as M. Barnaparte he refused to call upon the gentle-mannered emperor of Brazil because he was an emperor although Don Pedro expressed an earnest desire to meet the poet when the German army was besieging Paris Hugo proposed to fight a duel with the king of Prussia and to have the result of it settle the war for, said he the king of Prussia is a great king but I am Victor Hugo the great poet we are therefore equal in spite however of his ardent republicanism he was very fond of speaking of his own noble descent again and again he styled himself a peer of France and he and his family made frequent allusions to the knights and bishops and counsellors of state and ancestral relation this was more than inconsistent it was somewhat ludicrous because Victor Hugo's ancestry was by no means noble the Hugo's of the 15th and 16th centuries were not in any way related to the poet's family which was eminently honest and respectable but by no means one of distinction his grandfather was a carpenter one of his aunts was the wife of a baker while the third earned her living as a provincial dressmaker if the poet had been less vain and more sincerely democratic he would have been proud to think that he sprang from good sound, sturdy stock and would have laughed at titles as it was he jeered at all pretensions of rank and other men while he claimed for himself distinctions that were not really his his father was a soldier who rose from the ranks until under Napoleon he reached the grade of general his mother was the daughter of a shipowner in Nantes Victor Hugo was born in February 1802 during the Napoleonic wars and his early years were spent among the camps and within the sound of canon thunder it was fitting that he should have been born and reared in an age of upheaval, revolt and battle essentially the laureate of revolt and in some of his novels as in 93 the drum and the trumpet roll and ring through every chapter the present paper has of course nothing to do with Hugo's public life yet it is necessary to remember the complicated nature of the man all his power all his sweetness of disposition and likewise all his vanity and his eccentricities must remember also that he was French so that his story may be interpreted in the light of the French character at age of fifteen he was domiciled in Paris and though still a schoolboy and destined for the study of law he dreamed only of poetry and of literature he received honorable mention from the French Academy in 1817 and in the following year took prizes in a poetical competition at 17 he began the publication of a literary journal which survived until 1821 his astonishing energy became evident in the many publications which he put forth in these boyish days he began to become known although poetry then as now was not very profitable even when it was admired one of his slender volumes brought him the sum of 700 francs which seemed to him not only a fortune in itself but the forerunner of still greater prosperity it was at this time while still only twenty years of age that he met a young girl of 18 with whom he fell rather tempestuously in love her name was Adele Fouchet and she was the daughter of a clerk in the war office when one is very young and also a poet it takes very little to feed the flame of passion Victor Hugo was often a guest at the apartments of Monsieur Fouchet where he was received by that gentleman and his family French etiquette of course forbade any direct communication between the visitor and Adele she was still a very young girl and was supposed to take no share in conversation therefore while the others talked she sapped him yearly by the fireside and sowed her dark eyes and abundant hair and the face of manner and the very picture which he made as the firelight played about her kindled the flame in the susceptible heart of Victor Hugo though he could not speak to her he could at least look at her and before long his share in the conversation was very slight this was set down at first to his absent mindedness but looks can be as eloquent as spoken words Madame Fouchet with a women's intelligence noted the adoring gaze of Victor Hugo as he silently watched her daughter the young Adele herself was no less intuitive than her mother it was very well understood in the course of a few months that Victor Hugo was in love with Adele Fouchet her father and mother took counsel about the matter and Hugo himself in a burst of lyrical eloquence confessed that he adored Adele and wished to marry her her parents naturally objected the girl was but a child she had no dowry nor had Victor Hugo any settled income they were not to think of marriage but when did a common sense decision such as this ever separate a man and a woman who have felt the thrill of first love Victor Hugo was insistent with his supreme self-confidence he could be clear that he was bound and that in a very short time he would be illustrious Adele on her side created an atmosphere at home by weeping frequently and by going about with hollow eyes and wistful looks the Fouchet family removed from Paris to a country town Victor Hugo immediately followed them fortunately for him his poems had attracted the attention of Louis the 18th who was flattered by some of the verses he sent Hugo 500 francs for an ode and soon afterwards settled upon him a pension of a thousand francs here at least was an income a very small one to be sure but still an income perhaps Adele's father was impressed not so much by the actual money as by the evidence of the royal favour at any rate he withdrew his opposition and the two young people were married in October 1822 both of them being underage unformed and immature their story is another warning against too early marriage it is true that they live together until Madame Hugo's death a married life of 46 years yet their story presents phases which would have made this impossible had they not been French for a time Hugo devoted all his energies to work the record of his steady upward progress is part of the history of literature and need not be repeated here the poet and his wife were soon able to leave the latter's family abode and to set up their own household god in a home which was their own around them they were gathered in a sort of salon where they would be dramatists, critics, poets and romancers the Hugo's knew everybody unfortunately one of their visitors cast into their new life a drop of corroding bitterness the intruder was Charles Augustine Saint-Bouvet a man two years younger than Victor Hugo and one who blended learning imagination and a gift of critical analysis Saint-Bouvet was remembered as a critic and he was perhaps the greatest critic ever known in France but in 1830 he was a slender insinuating youth who cultivated a gift for sensuous and somewhat morbid poetry he had won Victor Hugo's friendship by writing an enthusiastic notice of Hugo's dramatic works Hugo in turn styled Saint-Bouvet as an eagle a blazing star and paid him other compliments no less gorgeous and Hugo-esque but in truth if Saint-Bouvet frequented the Hugo's salon it was less because of his admiration for the poet than from his desire to win the love of the poet's wife it is quite impossible to say how far he attracted the serious attention of Adèle Hugo Saint-Bouvet represents a curious type which is far more common in France and Italy than in the countries of the North human nature is not very different in cultivated circles anywhere man loves seeks to win the object of his love or as the old English proverb has it it's a man's part to try and a woman's to deny but only in the Latin countries do men who have tried make their attempts public to produce an impression that they have been successful and that the woman has not denied this sort of man in English-speaking lands is set down simply as a cad and excluded from other people's houses but in some other countries the thing is regarded with a certain amount of toleration we see it in the two books written respectively by Alfred de Mousset and George Sand later in our own times in that strange and half repulsive story in which the Italian novelist and poet Gabrielle di Ananzio under very thin disguise revealed his relations with the famous actress Eleonora Ducey Anglo-Saxons thrust such books aside with a feeling of disgust for the man who could so betray a sacred confidence and perhaps exaggerate a simple indiscretion into actual guilt but it is not so in France and Italy and this is precisely what Saint-Bouvet attempted Dr. George McClain Harper in his lately published study of Saint-Bouvet has summed the matter up admirably in speaking of the Book of Love he had the vein of emotional self-disclosure the vein of romantic or sentimental confession this last was not a rich load and so he was at pains to charge it secretly with oar which he exhumed gloatingly but was really base-metal the impulse that led him along this false route was partly ambition partly sensuality many a worse man would have been restrained by self-respect in good taste and with a sense of honour would have permitted the Book of Love to see the light a small collection of verses recording his passion for Madame Hugo and designed to implicate her he left 205 printed copies of this book to be distributed after his death a virulent enemy of Saint-Bouvet was not too expressive when he declared that its purpose was to leave on the life of this woman the gleaming and slimy trace which the passage of a snail leaves on a rose abominable in either case whether or not the implication was unfounded Saint-Bouvet's numerous innuendos in regard to Madame Hugo are an indelible stain on his memory and his infamy not only cost him his most precious friendships but crippled him in every high endeavor how monstrous was this violation of both friendship and love may be seen in the following quotation from his writings in that inevitable hour when the gloomy tempest and the jealous golf shell roll over our heads a sealed bottle belched forth from the abyss will render immortal our two names their close alliance and our double memory aspiring after union whether or not Madame Hugo's relations with Saint-Bouvet justified the latter even thinking such thoughts as these one need not inquire too minutely evidently though Victor Hugo could no longer be the friend of the man who most openly boasted that he had dishonored him there exist some sharp letters which passed between Hugo and Saint-Bouvet their intimacy was ended but there was something more serious than this Saint-Bouvet had in fact succeeded in leaving a taint upon the name of Victor Hugo's wife that Hugo did not repudiate her makes it fairly plain that she was innocent yet a high spirited sensitive soul like Hugo's could never forget that in the world's eye she was compromised the two still live together as before but now the poet felt himself released from the strict obligations of the marriage bond it may perhaps be doubted whether he would in any case have remained faithful all his life he was as Mr. H. W. Wack well says quote a man of powerful sensations physically as well as mentally Hugo pursued every opportunity for new work new sensations he desired to absorb as much on life's eager forward way as his great nature craved his range in all things mental physical and spiritual was so far beyond the ordinary that the gauge of average cannot be applied to him the cavalry of the moralists did not disturb him end quote hence it is not improbable that Victor Hugo might have broken the bonds of marital fidelity even had son pouvet never written his abnormal poems but certainly these poems hastened a result which may or may not have been otherwise inevitable Hugo no longer turned wholly to the dark-haired, dark-eyed Adele as summing up for him the whole of womanhood a veil was drawn, as it were from before his eyes and he looked on other women it was in 1833 soon after Hugo's play Lucrice Borgia had been accepted for production that a lady called one morning at Hugo's house in the Place Royal she was then between twenty and thirty years of age slight a figure winsome in her bearing and one who knew the arts which appealed to men for she was no inexperienced ingenue the name upon her visiting card was Madame Druet and by this name she had been known in Paris as a clever and somewhat gifted actress Theophile Gautier whose cult was the worship of physical beauty wrote in almost lyric prose of her seductive charm at nineteen after she had been cast upon the world dowered with that terrible combination poverty and beauty she had lived openly with a sculptor named Pradaire this has a certain importance in the history of French art Pradaire had received a commission to execute a statue representing Strasbourg the statue which stands today in the Place de la Concorde and which patriotic French men and French women drape in mourning and half bury in immortels in memory of that city of Alsace which so long was French but today is German one of Germany's great prizes taken in the War of 1870 five years before her meeting with Hugo Pradaire had rather brutally severed his connection with her and she had accepted the protection of a Russian nobleman at this time she was known by her real name Julien Josephine Gaubin but having gone upon the stage she assumed the appellation by which she was there after known that of Juliet Drouet her visit to Hugo was for the purpose of asking him to secure for her a part in his forthcoming play the dramatist was willing but unfortunately all the major characters had been provided for and he was able to offer her only the minor one of the Princess Negroni the charming deference with which she accepted the offered part attracted Hugo's attention such amiability is very rare in actresses who have had engagements at the best theatres he resolved to see her again and he did so time after time until he was thoroughly captivated by her she knew her value and as yet was by no means infatuated with him at first he was to her simply a means of getting on in her profession simply another influential acquaintance yet she brought to bear upon him the arts at her command her beauty and her sympathy and last of all her passionate abandonment Hugo was overwhelmed by her he found that she was in debt and he managed to see that her debts were paid he secured her other engagements with her though she was less successful as an actress after she knew him there came for a time a short break in their relations for partly out of need she returned to her Russian nobleman or at least admitted him to a manage à trois Hugo underwent for a second time a great disillusionment nevertheless he was not too proud to return to her he was not fearful anymore touched by his tears and perhaps foreseeing his future fame she gave her promise and she kept it until her death nearly a half century later perhaps because she had deceived him once Hugo never completely lost his prudence in his association with her he was by no means lavish with money and he installed her in a rather simple apartment only a short distance from his own home he gave her an allowance that was relatively small though later he provided for her amply in his will but it was to her that he brought all his confidences to her he entrusted all his interests she became to him thenceforth much more than she appeared to the world at large for she was his friend and as he said his inspiration the fact of their intimate connection became gradually known through Paris it was known even to Madame Hugo but she, remembering the affair of Saint Bouvier or knowing how difficult it is to check the will of a man like Hugo made no sign and even received Juliet Drouet in her own house and visited her in turn when the poet's sons grew up to manhood they too spent many hours with their father in the little salon of the former actress it was strange and to an Anglo-Saxon mind an almost impossible position yet France forgives much to genius and in time no one thought of commenting on Hugo's manner of life in 1851 when Napoleon III seized upon the government and when Hugo was in danger of arrest she assisted him to escape in disguise and with a forged passport across the Belgian frontier during his long exile in Guernsey she lived in the same close relationship to him and his family Madame Hugo died in 1868 having known for 33 years that she was only second in her husband's thoughts was she doing penance or was she merely accepting the inevitable in any case her position was most pathetic though she uttered no complaint a very curious and poignant picture of her just before her death has been given by the pen of a visitor in Guernsey he had met Hugo and his sons he had seen the great novelist eating enormous slices of roast beef and drinking great goblets of red wine at dinner and he had also watched him early each morning divested of all his clothing about in a bathtub on the top of the house in view of all the town one evening he called and found only Madame Hugo she was reclining on a couch and was evidently suffering great pain surprise he asked where her husband and her sons were oh! she replied they've all gone to Madame duets to spend the evening and enjoy themselves go also you will not find it amusing here one ponders over this sad scene with conflicting thoughts was there really any truth in the story at which Saint-Bouvet 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 dear and deep he betrayed her confidence by an intrigue with a girl who was spoken of as Claire the knowledge of it caused her infinite anguish but it all came to an end and she lived past her 80th year long after the death of Madame 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 Juliet drew it 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 genius end of the story of the Hugo's the story of George Sand volume 4 of Famous Affinities of History this is a LibriVox recording a LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Linda Dodge Famous Affinities of History by Lyndon Orr volume 4 the story of George Sand to the student of Feminine Psychology there is no more curious and complex problem than the one that needs 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 but voluminously with a fluid rather than 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 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 didn't 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 but also a spiritual imaginative side to her nature and she could be a far better comrade than anything more intimate the name given to the strange genius at birth was Amantine Lucille Aurora 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 Sax who was himself the illegitimate son of Augustus the strong of Poland and of the bewitching countess of Poningsmark this was a curious pedigree it meant strength of character eroticism, stubbornness imagination, courage and recklessness her father complicated the matter by marrying suddenly the origin of the lower classes a bird fancier named Sophie Dellebord his daughter who was born in 1804 used afterward to boast that on one side she was sprung from kings and nobles while on the other she was a daughter of the people able therefore to understand the sentiments of the aristocracy and of the children of the soil or even of the gutter she was fond of telling too of the omen which attended on her birth her father and mother worked at a country dance in the house of a fellow officer of Dupin's suddenly Madame Dupin left the room nothing was thought of this in the dance went on in less than an hour Dupin was called aside and told that his wife had just given birth to a child it was the child's aunt who brought the news with the joyous comment she will be lucky for she was born among the roses and to the sound of music this was at the time of the Napoleonic Wars Lieutenant Dupin was on the staff of Prince Murad and little Aurora as she was called at the age of three accompanied the army as did her mother the child was adopted by one of those hard fighting veteran regiments the rough old sergeants nursed her and petted her Prince took notice of her and to please him she wore the green uniform of a hussar but all this soon passed and she was presently sent to live with her grandmother at the estate now intimately associated with her name Nohan in the valley of the Indra in the midst of a rich country a love for which she then drank in so deeply that nothing in her later life could lessen it she was always the friend of the peasant and of country folk in general at Nohan she was given over to her grandmother to be reared in a strangely desultory sort of fashion doing and reading and studying those things which could best develop her native gifts her father had great influence over her teaching her a thousand things without seeming to teach her anything of him George Sand herself has written character is a matter of heredity if anyone desires to know me he must know my father her father however was killed by a fall from a horse and then the child grew up almost without any formal education a tutor who also managed the estate believed with Rousseau that the young should be reared according to their own preferences therefore Aurora read poems and childish stories she gained a smattering of Latin and she was devoted to music and the elements of natural science for the rest of the time she rambled with the country children learned their games and became a sort of leader in everything they did her only sorrow was the fact that her mother was excluded from Nohan the aristocratic old grandmother would not allow under her root her son's low born wife but she was devoted to her little grandchild the girl showed a wonderful degree of sensibility this life was adapted to her nature she fed her imagination in a perfectly healthy fashion and living so much out of doors she acquired that sound physique which she retained all through her life when she was 13 her grandmother sent the girl to a convent school in Paris one might suppose that the sudden change from open woods and fields to the primness of a religious home would have been a great shock to her and that with her disposition she might have broken out into wild ways that would have shocked the nuns but here as elsewhere she showed her wonderful adaptability it even seemed as if she were likely to become what the French called a devotee she gave herself up to mythical thoughts and expressed a desire of taking the veil her confessor however was a keen student of human nature and he perceived that she was too young to decide upon the renunciation of earthly things moreover her grandmother who had no intention that Aurora should become a nun hastened to Paris and carried her to Laurent the girl was now 16 and her complicated nature began to make itself apparent there was no one to control her because her grandmother was confined to her own room and so Aurora Dupin now in superb health rushed into every sort of diversion with all the zest of youth she read voraciously religion poetry philosophy she was an excellent musician playing the piano in the harp once in a spirit of unconscious egotism she wrote to her confessor do you think that my philosophical studies are compatible with Christian humility the shrewd ecclesiastic answered with a touch of wholesome irony I doubt my daughter whether your philosophical studies are profound enough to warrant intellectual pride this stung the girl and led her to think a little less of her own abilities but perhaps it made her books distasteful to her for a while she seems almost to have forgotten her sex she began to dress as a boy and took to smoking large quantities of tobacco her natural brother who was an officer in the army came down to no home and taught her to ride like a boy seated astride she went about without any chaperone and flirted with the young men of the neighborhood the prim manners of the place made her subject to a certain amount of scandal and the village priest chided her in language that was far from tactful in return she refused any longer to attend his church thus she was living when her grandmother died in 1821 leaving to Aurora her entire fortune of 500,000 francs as the girl was still but 17 she was placed under the guardianship of the nearest relative on her father's side a gentleman of rank when the will was read Aurora's mother made a violent protest and caused a most unpleasant scene I am the natural guardian of my child she cried I can take away my rights the young girl well understood that this was really the parting of the ways if she turned toward her uncle she would be forever classed among the aristocracy if she chose her mother who though married was essentially a grizzette then she must live with the grizzettes and find her friends among the friends who visited her mother she could not belong to both worlds she must decide once and for all whether she would be a woman of rank or a woman entirely separated from the circle that had been her father's one must respect the girl for making the choice she did understanding the situation absolutely she chose her mother and perhaps one would not have had her do otherwise yet in the long run it was bound to be a mistake Aurora was clever she was kind well read and had had the training of a fashionable convent school the mother was ignorant in course as was inevitable with one who before her marriage had been half shop girl and half courtesan the two could not live long together and hence it was not unnatural that Aurora Dupin should marry to enter upon a new career and yet not large enough to attract men who were quite her equals presently however it brought her to a sort of country squire named Casimir de Nevant he was the illegitimate son of the Baron de Nevant he had been in the army and had studied law but he possessed no intellectual taste he was outwardly eligible but he was of a course type and who with passing years would be likely to take to drink and vicious amusements and in serious life cared only for his cattle, his horses and his hunting he had however a sort of jollity about him which appealed to this girl of 18 and so a marriage was arranged Aurora Dupin became his wife in 1822 and he secured the control of her fortune and in the years after her marriage were not unhappy she had a son Maurice de Nevant and a daughter Solange and she loved them both but it was impossible that she should continue vegetating mentally upon a farm with a husband who was a fool a drunkard and a miser he deteriorated his wife grew more and more clever de Nevant resented this it made him uncomfortable her talk is brilliant he bluntly told her that it was silly and that she must stop it when she did not stop it he boxed her ears this caused a breach between the pair which was never healed de Nevant drank more and more heavily and jeered at his wife because she was always looking for noon at 14 o'clock he had always flirted with the country girls but now he openly consorted to his wife's chambermaid Madame de Nevant on her side would have nothing more to do with this rustic rape she formed what she called a platonic friendship and it really was so with a certain Monsieur de Cise who was advocate general at Bordeaux with him this clever woman could talk without being called silly and he took sincere pleasure in her company and much further had not both of them been in an impossible situation Aurora de Nevant really believed that she was swayed by a pure and mystic passion de Cise on the other hand believed that this mystic passion to be genuine love coming to visit her at Nevant he was revolted by the clownish husband with whom she lived it gave him an aesthetic shock he had born children to this bore therefore he shrank back from her and in time their relation faded into nothingness it happened soon after that she found a packet in her husband's desk marked not to be opened until after my death she wrote of this in her correspondence I had not the patience to wait till widowhood no one can be sure of surviving anybody I assumed that my husband had died and I was very glad to learn what he thought of me while he was alive since the package was addressed to me it was not dishonorable for me to open it and so she opened it it proved to be his will but containing as a preamble with his curses on her expressions of contempt and all the vulgar outpouring of an evil temper and an angry passion she went to her husband as he was opening a bottle and flung the document upon the table at her glance at her firmness and at her cold hatred he grumbled and argued and entreated but all that his wife would say in answer was I must have an allowance I am going to Paris and my children are to remain here at last he yielded and she went at once to Paris taking her daughter with her and having the promise of 1500 francs a year out of the half million that was hers by right she developed into a thorough-paced bohemian she tried to make a living in sundry hopeless ways and at last she took to literature she was living in a garret with little to eat and sometimes without a fire in winter she had some friends who helped her as well as they could but though she was attached to the figaro her earnings for the first month amounted to only 15 francs nevertheless she would not despair the editors and publishers might turn the cold shoulder to her but she would not give up her ambitions she went down into the latin quarter and there shook off the proprieties of life she assumed the garb of a man and with her quick perception she came to know the left bank of the Seine just as she had known the countryside at noah or the little world at her convent school she never expected again to see any woman of her own rank in life her mother's influence became strong in her she wrote the proprieties are the guiding principle of people without soul and virtue the good opinion of the world is a prostitute who gives herself to the highest bidder she still pursued her trade of journalism calling herself a newspaper mechanic sitting all day in the office of the figaro and writing whatever was demanded while at night she would prowl in the streets haunting the cafes and continuing to dress like a man drinking sour wine and smoking cheap cigars one of her companions in the sort of hand-to-mouth journalism was a young student and writer named Jules Sando a man seven years younger than his comrade he was at that time as indigent as she and their hardship shared in common brought them very close together he was clever boyish and sensitive and it was not long before he had fallen at her feet and kissed her knees begging that she would re-quite the love he felt for her according to herself she resisted him for six months and then at last she yielded the two made their home together and for a while they were wonderfully happy their work and their diversions they enjoyed in common the first time she experienced emotions which in all probability she had never known before probably not very much importance is to be given to the early flirtations of George Sand though she herself never tried to stop the mouth of scandal even before she left her husband she was credited with having four lovers but all she said when the report was brought to her was this that her lovers are none too many for one with such lively passions as mine this very frankness makes it likely that she enjoyed shocking her prim neighbors at no home but if she only played at love making then she now gave herself up to it with entire abandonment intoxicated fascinated satisfied she herself wrote how I wish I could impart to you and joyousness of life that I have in my veins to live how sweet it is and how good in spite of annoyances husband's debts relations, scandal mongers, sufferings and irritations to live it is intoxicating to love and to be loved it is happiness it is heaven in collaboration with Jules Sandow who wrote a novel called Rose et Blanche the two lovers were uncertain what name to place upon the title page but finally they hit upon the pseudonym of Jules Sand the book succeeded but there after each of them wrote separately Jules Sandow using his own name and Madame Doudiment styling herself George Sand a name by which she was to be illustrious ever after as a novelist she had found her real vocation she was not yet well known but she was on the verge of fame as soon as she had written Indiana and Valentine George Sand had secured a place in the world of letters the magazine which still exists as the review de Doudemans gave her a retaining fee of 4000 francs a year and many other publications begged her to write serial stories for them the vein which ran through all her stories was new and peckant as was said of her in George Sand whenever a lady wishes to change her lover God is always there to make the transfer easy in other words she preached free love in the name of religion this was not a new doctrine with her after the first break she had made up her mind about certain matters and wrote one is no more justified in claiming the ownership of a soul than in claiming the ownership of a slave according to her the ties between a man and a woman are sacred only when they are sanctified by love and she distinguished between love and passion in this epigram love seeks to give while passion seeks to take at this time George Sand was in her 27th year she was not beautiful there there was something about her which attracted observation of middle height she was fairly slender her eyes were somewhat projecting and her mouth was almost sullen when in repose her manners were peculiar combining boldness with timidity her address was almost as familiar as a man's it was easy to be acquainted with her yet a certain haughtiness and a touch of aristocratic pride made it plain that she had drawn a line which none must pass without her wish when she was deeply stirred however she burst forth into an extraordinary vivacity showing a nature richly endowed and eager to yield its treasures the existence which she now led was a curious one she still visited her husband at Nauhan so that she might see her son and sometimes when Monsieur du Dement came to town he called upon her in the apartments which she shared with Jules Sandow he had accepted the situation and with his crudeness and lack of feeling he seemed to think it if not natural at least diverting at any rate so long as he could retain her half million francs he was not the man to make trouble about his former wife's arrangements meanwhile there began to be perceptible the very slightest rift within the lute of her romance was her love for Sandow really love or was it only passion in his absence at any rate the old obsession still continued here we see first of all intense pleasure shading off into a sort of maternal fondness she sends Sandow adoring letters she is afraid that his delicate appetite is not properly satisfied yet again there are times when she feels that he is irritating and ill those who knew him said that her nature was too passionate and her love was too exacting for him one of her letters seems to make this plain she writes that she feels uneasy and even frightfully remorseful at seeing Sandow pine away she knows she avows that she is killing him that her caresses are a poison and her love a consuming fire it is an appalling thought and Jules will not understand it he laughs at it and when in the midst of his transports of delight the idea comes to me and makes my blood run cold it is the death that he would like to die at such moments he promises whatever I make him promise this letter throws a clear light upon the nature of George Sand's temperament it will be found all through her career not only that she sought to inspire passion but that she strove to gratify it after fashions of her own one little passage from a description of her written by the younger Dumas will perhaps make this phrase of her character more intelligible without going further than is strictly necessary Madame Sand has little hands without any bones soft and plump she is by destiny a woman of excessive curiosity always disappointed always deceived in her incessant investigation but she is not fundamentally ardent in vain would she like to be so but she does not find it possible her physical nature utterly refuses the reader will find in all that has now been said the true explanation of George Sand abounding with life but incapable of long stretches of ardent love she became a woman who sought conquests everywhere without giving in return more than her temperament made it possible for her to do she loves Sando as much as she loved any man and yet she left him with a sense that she had never become wholly his perhaps this is the reason why the romance came to an end abruptly and not altogether fittingly she had been spending a short time at Noha and came to Paris without announcement she intended to surprise her lover and she surely did so she found him in the apartment that had been theirs with his arms about an attractive laundry girl thus closed what was probably the only true romance in the life of George Sand afterward she had many lovers but to no one did she so nearly become a true mate as it was she ended her association with Sando and each pursued a separate path to fame Sando afterward became a well-known novelist and dramatist he was in fact the first writer of fiction who was admitted to the French Academy the woman to whom he had been unfaithful became greater still because her fame was not only national but cosmopolitan for a time after her deception by Sando she felt absolutely devoid of all emotions she shunned men and sought the friendship of Marie D'Orval a clever actress who was destined afterward to break the heart of Alfred de Vigny the two went down into the country and there George Sand wrote hour after hour senting by her fireside and showing herself a tender mother to her little daughter Solange this life lasted for a while but it was not the sort of life that would now content her she had many visitors from Paris among them Saint Bouvet the critic who brought with him Prosper Merame then unknown but later famous as master of rebels to the third Napoleon and as the author of Carmen Merame had certain fascination of manner and the predatory instincts of George Sand were again aroused one day when she felt bored and desperate Merame paid his court to her and she listened to him this is one of the most remarkable of her intimacies since it began continued and ended all in the space of a single week when Merame left Noha he was destined never again to see George Sand except long afterward at a dinner party where the two stared at each other sharply but did not speak this affair however made it plain that she could not long remain at Noha and that she pined for Paris returning thither she is said to have set her cap at Victor Hugo who was however too much in love with himself to care for anyone especially a woman who was his literary rival she is said for a time to have been allied with Gustave Planche a dramatic critic but she always denied this and taken as quite truthful soon however she was to begin an episode which has been more famous than any other in her curious history for she met Alfred de Mousset then a youth of 23 but already well known for his poems and his plays Mousset was of noble birth he would probably have been better for a plebeian strain since there was in him a touch of the degenerate his mother's father had published a humanitarian poem on cuts his great uncle had written a peculiar novel young Alfred was nervous, delicate slightly epileptic and it is certain that he was given to dissipation which so far had affected his health only by making him hysterical he was an exceedingly handsome youth with exquisite manners dreamy rather than dazzling eyes dilated nostrils and vermilion lips half opened such was he when George Sand then seven years his senior met him there is something which to the Anglo-Saxon seems far more absurd than pathetic about the event which presently took place a woman like George Sand at 30 was practically twice the age nervous boy of 23 who had as yet seen little of the world at first she seemed to realize the fact herself but her vanity led her to begin an intrigue which must have been almost wholly without excitement on her part but which to him for a time was everything in the world experimenting as usual after the fashion described by Dumont she went with de Mousset for a honeymoon to Fountain Bleu but they could not stay there forever and presently they decided upon a journey to Italy before they went however they thought it necessary to get formal permission from Alfred's mother naturally enough Madame de Mousset refused consent she had read George Sand's romances and had asked scornfully has the woman never in her life met a gentleman she accepted the relations between them but that she should be asked to sanction the sort of affair was rather too much even for a French mother who has become accustomed to many strange things then there was a curious happening at nine o'clock at night George Sand took a cab and drove to the house of Madame de Mousset to whom she sent up a message that a lady wished to see her Madame de Mousset came down and finding a woman alone in a carriage she entered it then George Sand burst forth in a torrent of sentimental eloquence she overpowered her lover's mother promised to take great care of the delicate youth and finally drove away to meet Alfred at the coach yard they started off in the mist their coach being the 13th to leave the yard their lovers were in a merry mood and enjoyed themselves all the way from Paris to Marseille by steamer they went to Leghorn and finally in January 1834 they took an apartment in a hotel at Venice what had happened that their arrival in Venice should be the beginning of a quarrel no one knows George Sand has told the story and Paul de Mousset Alfred's brother has told the story each of them has doubtless admitted a large part of the truth it is likely that on their long journey each had learned too much of the other thus Paul de Mousset says that George Sand made herself outrageous by her conversation telling every one of her mother's adventures in the army of Italy including her relations with the general in-chief she also declared that she herself was born within a month that's wedding day very likely she did say all these things whether they were true or not she had set herself to wage war against conventional society and she did everything to shock it on the other hand Alfred de Mousset fell ill having lost 10,000 francs in a gambling house George Sand was not fond of persons who were ill she herself was working like a horse riding from 8 to 13 hours a day when Mousset collapsed she sent for a handsome young Italian doctor named Pagiello with whom she had struck up a casual acquaintance he finally cured Mousset but he also cured George Sand of any love for Mousset before long she and Pagiello were on their way back to Paris leaving the poor fevered whimpering poet to bite his nails and think unutterable things but he ought to have known George Sand after that everybody knew her they knew just how much she cared when she professed to care and when she acted as she acted with Pagiello no earlier lover had anyone but himself to blame only sentimentalist can take this story seriously to them it has a sort of morbid interest they like to picture Mousset raving and shouting in his delirium and then to read how George Sand sat on Pagiello's knees kissing him and drinking out of the same cup but to the healthy mind the whole story is repulsive from George Sand's appeal to Madame de Mousset down to the very end when Pagiello came to Paris where his broken French excited polite ridicule there was a touch of genuine sentiment about the affair with Jules Sandot but after that one can only see in George Sand a half libidinous grisette such as her mother was before her with a perfect willingness to experiment in every form of lawless love as for Mousset whose heart she was supposed to have broken within the year he was dangling after the famous singer Madame Malabron and writing poems to her which advertised their intrigue after this episode with Pagiello it cannot be said that the life of George Sand was edifying in any respect because no one can assume that she was sincere she had loved Jules Sandot as much as she could love anyone but all the rest of her intrigues and affinities were in the nature of experiments she even took back Alfred de Mousset although they never could again regard each other without suspicion George Sand cut off all her hair and gave it to Mousset so eager was she to keep him as a matter of conquest but he was tired of her and even this theatrical trick was of no avail she proceeded to other less known and less humiliating adventures she tried to fascinate the artist Delacroix she set her cap at Franz Leist who rather astonished her by saying that only God was worthy to be loved she expressed a yearning for the affections of the Elder Dumas but that good natured giant laughed at her and in fact gave her some sound advice and let her smoke unsentimentally in his study she was a good deal taken with a noisy demagogue named Miquel a lawyer at Bourges who on one occasion shot her up in her room and her rang her on sociology until she was as weary of his talk as of wooden shoes his shapeless great coat his spectacles and his skullcap Balzek felt her fascination but cared nothing for her since his love was given to Madame Hanska in the meanwhile she was paying visits to her husband at Noa where she wrangled with him ever money matters and where he would once have shot her had the guest present not interfered she secured her dowry by litigation so that she was well off even without her literary earnings these were by no means so large as one would think from her popularity from the number of books she wrote it is estimated that her whole gains amounted to about a million francs extending over a period of 45 years it is just half the amount that Trollup earned in about the same period and justifies his remark adequate but not splendid one of those brief and strange intimacies that mark the career of George Sand came about in a curious way Octave Foulet, a man of aristocratic birth had set himself to write novels which portrayed the cynicism and hardness of the upper classes in France one of these novels, Sebel excited the anger of George Sand she had not known Foulet before yet now she sought him out at first in order to berate him for his book but in the end to add him to her variegated string of lovers it has been said of Foulet that he was sort of a quote domesticated miset unquote at any rate he was far less sensitive than miset and George Sand was about 17 years his senior they parted after a short time she going her way as a writer of novels that were very different from her earlier ones while Foulet grew more and more cynical and even stern and he lashed the abnormal neuropathic men and women about him the last great emotional crisis in George Sand's life was that which centers around her relations with Frederick Chopin Chopin was the greatest genius who ever loved her it is rather odd that he loved her she had known him for two years and had not seriously thought of him though there is a story that when she first met him she kissed him before he had even been presented to her she waited two years and in those two years she had three lovers then at last she once more met Chopin when he was in a state of melancholy because a Polish girl had proved unfaithful to him it was the psychological moment for this other woman who was a devourer of hearts found him at a piano improvising a lamentation George Sand stood beside him listening when he finished and looked up at her she bent down without a word and kissed him on the lips what was she like when he saw her then Grenier has described her in these words she was short and stout but her face attracted all my attention the eyes especially they were wonderful eyes a little too close together it may be large with full eyelids and black, very black but by no means lustrous they reminded me of unpolished marble or rather a velvet and this gave a strange, dull even cold expression to her countenance her fine eyebrows and these great placid eyes gave her an air of strength and dignity which was not borne out by the lower part of her face her nose was rather thick and not over shapely her mouth was also rather coarse and small she spoke with great simplicity and her manners were very quiet such as she was she attached herself to Chopin for eight years at first they traveled together very quietly to Mallorca and there just as Moussette had fallen ill at Venice Chopin became feverish and an invalid Chopin coughs most gracefully George Sand wrote of him one is the most inconstant of men there is nothing permanent about him but his cough it is not surprising if her nerves sometimes gave way acting as a sick nurse writing herself with rheumatic fingers robbed by everyone around her and viewed with suspicion by the peasants because she did not go to church she may be perhaps excused for her sharp words when in fact her deeds were kind afterwards with Chopin she returned to Paris and the two lived openly together for seven years longer and immense literature has grown around the subject of their relations to this literature George Sand herself contributed very largely Chopin never wrote a word but what he failed to do his friends and pupils did unsparingly probably the truth is somewhat as one might expect during the first period of fascination George Sand was to Chopin what she had been to Sando and Musette and with her strange and subtle ways she had undermined his health but afterward that sort of love died out and was succeeded by something like friendship at any rate this woman showed as she had shown to others a vast maternal kindness she writes to him finally as quote your old woman unquote and she does wonders in the way of nursing and care but in 1847 came a break between the two whatever the mystery of it may be it turns upon what Chopin said of Sand I have never cursed anyone but now I am so weary of life that I am near cursing her yet she suffers too and more because she grows older as she grows more wicked in 1848 Chopin gave his last concert in Paris and in 1849 he died according to some he was the victim of a Messalina according to others it was only Messalina that had kept him alive for so long however with his death came a change in the nature of George Sand finally she was an extinct volcano intellectually she was at her very best she no longer tore passions into tatters but wrote naturally simply stories of country life and tales for children in one of her books she has given an enduring picture of the Franco-Prussian war there are many rather pleasant descriptions of her then living at Noah bustling about in ill-fitting costumes and smoking interminable cigarettes she had lived much and she had drunk deep of life when she died in 1876 one might believe her to have been only a woman of perpetual liaisons externally she was this and yet what did Balzac that great master of human psychology write of her in the intimacy of a private correspondence she is a female bachelor she is an artist she is generous she is devoted she is chaste her dominant characteristics are those of a man and therefore she is not to be regarded as a woman she is an excellent mother adored by her children morally she is like a lad of twenty for in her heart of hearts she is more than chaste she is a prude it is only in externals that she comports herself as a bohemian all her follies are titles to glory in the eyes of those whose souls are noble a curious verdict this her love life seems almost that of neither man nor woman but of an animal yet whether she was in reality responsible for what she did when we consider her strange heredity her wretched marriage the disillusions of her early life who shall sit in judgment on her since who knows all end of the story of George Sand