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The Unforgivable. Maurois is not a member of the ogress school. He believes that George Sand was "a woman thirsting for love and worthy to be loved, yet incapable of that humility without which no love is possible." As Aurore Dupin, she was the daughter of a dashing and aristocratic officer who was killed in a fall from his horse while Aurore was a child. Her mother was a dancer—"or, rather," said Sand, "something lower than a dancer, in one of the most disreputable of the Paris theaters." Aurore was raised at the Dupin estate at Nohant by a strict grandmother and educated in Paris by English nuns. At 18, strait-laced but bursting with romantic ideas, she married Casimir Dudevant, an amiable but entirely unimaginative fellow who spent his days hunting, his evenings snoring.
When Casimir caught her in the act of swooning on a young man's shoulder, his spontaneous comment was as disillusioning as a snore. "Nobody," he said, "must know . . . That must be our chief concern."
"What is really unforgivable in marriage," says Maurois, "is not adultery, but repudiation." The repudiated Casimir took to drink. He also seduced one of the maids, and Aurore found him out a few hours before the birth of her second child. Soon after, Aurore met a young lawyer-writer named Jules Sandeau, prototype of a string of future lovers, and went to live in Paris with him. Out of their literary collaboration came the pen name George
Sand; out of their relationship came the Sand characteristics—the billowing cigar, the tasseled boots, the incurable, paradoxical habit of seeking perfect love only in the arms of men who were too feeble or feminine to supply it.
"Poor little Jules" was no dynamo. He could not, like his mistress, write for 14 hours at a stretch and then mount a horse and gallop to a lovers' tryst. Soon he was dropped by the wayside, and George moved on to Novelist Prosper Merimee. Merimee, as Maurois vouches, "was of the race from which the Devil picks his Don Juans," and spoke of love "with all the coarseness of a medical student"; George hoped that his cynicism would cure her "childish susceptibilities." But "Don Juan failed utterly to come up to scratch."
Poet Alfred de Musset was next on the list. She sat on a cushion at his feet, puffing a long pipe of Bosnian cherrywood, while he murmured that "his genius was a poor, frail thing." It was. George left Alfred half dead in a Venetian hotel and took up with his Italian doctor. "Is it in you, my Pietro," Sand wrote to her medico, "in you at long last that I shall see my dream fulfilled?" It was not in Pietro.
The Walking Graveyard. "What it all comes to," said Balzac in his brusque way, "is that she is a man: all the more so since she wants to be one." Pianist Chopin agreed. "How antipathetic this Sand woman is!" he complained after meeting her. "Is she really a woman at all?" Soon after, he wrote in his diary: "She gazed deep into my eyes while I played . . . My heart was captured! . . . She loves me!"