GEORGE SAND: A BIOGRAPHY by CURTIS GATE 812 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $15.
In an age that could boast more than its share of eccentric geniuses, George Sand remained almost unchallenged in her reputation as the most provocative woman of her time. In the 19th century, as now, her public image was that of a cigar-smoking iconoclast in top hat and trousers, an unabashed libertine of dubious sexual inclinations. She was also the writer whom Dostoyevsky dubbed "the Christian par excellence" and whom Elizabeth Barrett Browning hailed as "the first female genius of any country or age."
Trying to disentangle the woman, who was born Aurore Dupin in 1804, from the legendary creature known as George Sand could easily have proved a biographer's undoing. But Curtis Gate, whose previous work includes a biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, approaches the task with both the patience of a scholar and the relish of a storyteller. He manages to puncture the myth without deflating the life. From the moment she arrived in Paris in 1831, a 26-year-old berrichonne provincial fleeing from her small-spirited husband, rumor began placing her in bed with almost every author, artist, musician and revolutionary politician of her day. By Gate's count, however, Sand's liaisons numbered no more than 20−and (contrary to gossip) they were all with men.
Tales of George Sand's amours with Liszt, Heine, Balzac and Flaubert are also dismissed as apocryphal. With the record thus cleared, Biographer Cate dramatically details the involvements that his scholarship can verify—including affairs with Prosper Mérimeée, Alfred de Musset, Frédéric Chopin, one Italian surgeon, two French lawyers and an international assortment of young men who entered Sand's household as tutors for her two children, Maurice and Solange.
There was a strange pattern to George Sand's passions. An initial period of frenzied erotic indulgence would lead her to fear that her lover would be literally consumed by the fiery intensity of their lovemaking. "What a frightful remorse it is to see the being one would give one's life for dying in one's arms ... to feel him growing thinner, wearing himself out, killing himself from day to day," she wrote of Jules Sandeau, the young medical student whose name she eventually borrowed and altered to make her own.
Compelled to forswear sex out of an exaggerated fear for her lovers' wellbeing, Sand would deliberately transform her passion into a chaste maternal solicitude for her beloved. Eventually the privation she imposed upon herself would sour and destroy the relationship. As seen in her letters and diaries, this emotionally exhausting, sexually unfulfilling pattern is endlessly repeated until her life begins to read like a cautionary tale on the excesses of romantic love.