LÉLIA: THE LIFE OF GEORGE SAND (482 pp.)—André Maurois—Harper ($5).
If walls could speak, the manor house of Nohant in the French province of Berry would be a Niagara of sound. Chopin and Liszt set their music echoing through it; Flaubert and the younger Dumas produced puppet plays (music by Chopin) on its floor. Delacroix painted in Nohant's garden studio, and such famous guests as Balzac, Theophile Gautier and Alfred de Vigny argued and tittle-tattled in its drawing room. In the middle years of the 19th century, Nohant's halls, echoed to the thump of packed bags as estranged lovers and mistresses stormed down them—and if Nohant's old walls could speak, many a French family tree would require botanical reclassification.
Hostess, mistress, mother of Nohant was the famed George Sand, the beautiful woman who walked like a handsome man. It was far more than her literary eminence that drew the brilliant men of a generation to Nohant—though she fascinated a wide public with what she wrote, and left collected works that ran to 96 volumes. Her personality and the world she built around it were of such fascination and complexity that scores of guidebooks have served only to complicate the intricacy. France's André Maurois has now written a biography that is both the finest study ever made of George Sand and by far the best book ever written by André Maurois.
Female Don Juan. Maurois' title, Lélia, is taken from the partly autobiographical novel of that name that George Sand wrote in 1833 when she was 29. By then, she was already a popular author, a doting mother of two children and an emancipated hybrid who wore trousers and smoked cigars. But, above all, she was a woman who sought sexual satisfaction as vainly and desperately as her male counterpart, Don Juan. "When I was with [my lover]," the Sandian heroine Lélia confesses, "I was seized with a strange, delirious hunger which no embrace could satisfy . . . Desire, in my case, was an ardor of the spirit which paralyzed the power of the senses ... a savage ecstasy which took possession of my brain, and became exclusively concentrated there."
This terrible impotence ("This marble envelope," Sand called it) affected so many lives that it is still considered a small but essential feature of French history. Sand's enemies declared that in her struggle to overcome it she devoured men like an insatiable ogress. She imposed her own frigidity, they said, as a punishment upon the other sex, never happy until she had reduced her lovers to a condition as hopeless as her own.