by George Sand
I wanted to give myself up without reservation to the negligence of this state of exhaustion which was not without sweetness. I retired to the solitude. A large abandoned monastery, half knocked down by the storms of revolutions offered to me as a retreat imposing and deep. It was located in one of my lands. I grabbed a cell in the least devastated part of buildings. It was the one that the prior had once lived in. We
still saw on the wall the mark of the nails which had supported his crucifix and his knees used to prayer had carved their imprint on the pavement, below the symbol Redeemer. I no longer put on this room of austere insignia of the Catholic faith: a layer in the form of a coffin, an hourglass, a human skull and images of saints and martyrs raising their bloody hands to the Lord. AT
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those dismal objects that reminded me that I was now dead to human passions, I liked to mix attributes most laughing about a life of poet and naturalist: books, musical instruments and vases filled with flowers.
The country was without apparent beauties: I had loved it first for his uniform sadness, for the silence of his vast plains. I had hoped to detach myself entirely from any lively feeling, any exalted admiration. Eager for rest, I thought I could walk without fatigue and without danger my eyes on these leveled horizons, on these oceans of heather including a rare accident, a shriveled oak, a swamp bluish, a fall of colorless sands barely came interrupt the needy immensity.
I had also hoped that, in this absolute isolation, in these wild and poor customs that I created for myself, in this away from all the sounds of civilization, I would find forgetting the past, carefree about the future. I had little left strength to regret, still less to desire. I wanted to consider as dead and bury myself in these ruins, so to freeze myself entirely and return to the world in a state of complete invulnerability.
I resolved to start with stoicism of the body, so to arrive more surely at that of the spirit. I had lived in the
luxury, I wanted to make myself absolutely insensitive, by habit, to the material rigors of a life of cenobite. I dismissed all useless and unwanted servants food and items absolutely necessary for my existence only from the hands of an invisible person, who slipped every morning through the abandoned galleries of the cloister to a counter outside my home and
withdrew without having had any direct communication with me.
Reduced to the most frugal consumption, forced to work on the sanitation of my home myself and conservation of my life, surrounded by external objects of great severity, I wanted to impose even a harsher physical test. I was used to society in
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wealth. I liked the quick exercises, the fiery running horses, traveling, the great outdoors, noisy hunting.
I invented to mortify my flesh and turn off the heat of my brain, by submitting to voluntary confinement.
I raised in imagination the collapsed enclosures of the abbey.
I surrounded a covered courtyard open to all winds invisible and sacred. I set limits to my steps and I measured the space where I wanted to lock myself up for a whole year. The days when I felt agitated to the point where I could no longer recognize the imaginary dividing line drawn around from my prison, I established it by visible signs.
I tore from the decrepit walls the long twigs of ivy and clematis with which they were eaten away and I slept on the ground in places I had forbidden myself to cross. So, reassured by the fear of missing my
oath, I felt locked in my enclosure with as much rigor as I would have been in a Bastille.
There was a time of resignation and punctuality, which reminded me rested on past sufferings. There was a great calm in me and my body hardens through deprivation, while my mind fell asleep peaceful under the dominion of a resolution well stopped. But it happened that my faculties, renewed by the rest, woke up little by little and asked
impetuously to exercise; wanting to shoot it down, I had raised my power; covering a dying woman with ashes spark, I had kept her principles of life, I had incubated a fire intense enough to produce a large fire. In feeling reborn, I didn't get scared enough, I didn't not repressed by the memory of the judgments which I had pronounced on my grave. It would have been necessary to devote this hard work to destroy the importance of all things to me, to make everything void exterior effect on my senses. Instead, the loneliness and the reverie created new senses and faculties that I never didn't know me. I was not trying to stifle them in their principle, because I thought they would change those who had led me astray. I accepted them as a blessing from heaven, when I should have pushed them away like new suggestion from hell.
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Poetry returned to inhabit my brain; but, misleading, it took on other colors, crept in in other forms and decided to embellish things that I had believed until then without luster or worthless. I never thought that indifference inactive for certain aspects of life should inspire me to eagerness and interest in things once
unnoticed. This is what happened to me; regularity, that
I kissed like we put on a hair shirt, became good to me and soft like a soft bed. I took pride in
contemplate this passive obedience of a part of myself and this prolonged power of the other, this holy abnegation of matter and this magnificent reign of the calm will and persistent.
I used to despise the rule in studies. In me the imposing in my retirement, I flattered myself that my thoughts would lose their vigor. They doubled in strength by getting better organized in my brain. By isolating each other others took more complete forms; after having wandered for a long time in a world of vague perceptions, they developed by going back to the source of everything and took a singular energy in the habit and the need of research. This was my greatest misfortune; I arrived at skepticism through poetry, doubt through enthusiasm. So the systematic study of nature also led me to praise God and blaspheme him. Previously I was only looking in his works as the feeling of admiration; my complacent poetry repelled the hideous excesses of creation or strove to put them on a dark and wild grandeur. When I began to look more closely at nature, at the return under its various faces with a cold look and a impartial description thinking, I found more ingenious, more learned, more immense the genius which had presided over the creation. I knelt penetrated with a more lively faith and, blessing the author of this new universe for me, I begged him to reveal himself again. I continued to learn and analyze; but science is an abyss that we should dig with caution.
When after having examined with intoxication the magnificence of colors and shapes that contribute to the
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formation of the universe, I saw what each class to be incomplete, helpless and miserable; when I recognized that beauty was compensated in some by the weakness, that in others stupidity destroyed advantages of force, that no one was organized for security or for complete enjoyment, that all had a mission of unhappiness to accomplish on earth and that a fatal necessity presided over this appalling contest of sufferings, grabs; for a moment I felt the need to deny God in order to not to be forced to hate him.
Then I attached myself to him by examining my own strength, I found a divine principle in this wealth of energy physics which, in animals, supports the inclemencies of nature ; in this power of pride or devotion which, in man, brave or accept the merciless stops of the Divinity.
Divided between faith and atheism, I lost my rest. I passed several times in a day from a tender disposition to a hateful disposition. When we managed to position ourselves on the limits of negation and affirmation, when one believes oneself arrived at wisdom, one is very close to being mad; because we don't have anymore for means of advancement that perfection which is impossible or the instinctive reason which, not being subject to reflection, can lead us to delirium.
So I fell into violent turmoil and, like
all human suffering loves to contemplate and to complain, the dangerous poetry returned to stand between me and the objects of my re
view. The effect of poetic sense being mainly exaggeration, all the ills got bigger around me and all the goods were revealed by emotions
so vivid that they looked like pain; the pain itself even appearing to me in a broader and more terrible, dug deep abysses into me which were swallowed up my vain dreams of wisdom, my vain hopes of rest.
Sometimes I would watch the sunset from the top of a half-collapsed terrace, part of which still stood surrounded and as carried by these monstrous sculptures whose Catholicism once covered the places devoted to worship.
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Below me, these bizarre allegories lengthened their heads blackened by time and seemed like me getting lean towards the plain to watch silently flow waves, centuries and generations. These covered guivres of scales, these lizards with hideous trunks, these chimeras full of anguish, all these emblems of sin, illusion and suffering, lived with me a fatal, inert life, indestructible. When one of the red rays of the sunset came to play on their rough and capricious forms, I thought I saw their sides swell, their thorny fins expand, their horrible faces contract in new torture. And, contemplating their bodies engaged in these immense masses of stone that neither the hand of men nor that of time had not been able to shake, I identified with these images of an eternal struggle between pain and necessity, between rage and helplessness.
Far away, below the gray and angular masses of the monastery, the plain and bleak plain displayed its perspectives endless. The sun, lowering, projected the kindling of its vast gleams. When he had slowly disappeared behind elusive limits of the horizon, bluish mists, slightly purple, rising in the sky and the black plain
looked like a huge shroud stretched out under my feet; the wind curved the soft heather and made them wave like a lake. Often there was no other noise in this unbounded depth, than that of a simmering stream among the sandstones, the croaking of birds of prey and the voice trapped and plaintive breezes under the cloister hangers.
Rarely a stray cow came, worried and roaring, wander around these ruins and take a wild look at uncultivated land without asylum where she had recklessly risky. Once a young child came, guided by the sound of the bell, look for one of his goats inside
of the courtyard. I hid myself so that he would not see me. The night descended more and more dark under the damp galleries and sound; the young shepherd stopped first, as if struck by terror at the sound of his footsteps echoing under the vaults; then, coming back from his first surprise, he entered singing to the place where his goat savored the salted vegetation growing in the rubble. Another's movement
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no one that I in this sanctuary was hateful to me; the noise sand that cried under his feet, the echo that answered his voices seemed to me so many insults and desecrations for this temple whose cult I had mysteriously raised, where, alone, at the feet of God, I had re-established the commerce of the soul with the sky.
In the spring, when the wild broom was covered with flowers, when the mauves exhale their sweet smell around ponds and that the swallows filled with movement and of noise the most air spaces and heights
inaccessible from the towers, the campaign took on infinite majesty and aromas of intoxicating voluptuousness. The
distant voice of herds and dogs came more often awaken the echoes of the ruins and the lark had morning sweet and tender songs like hymns. The walls of monastery themselves put on a fresh ornament. The viperine and the counterpart grew green tufts sumptuous in damp crevices, yellow violiers embalmed the naves and, in the abandoned garden, a few centenary fruit trees, which had survived the devastation, adorned with white and pink buds their angular branches eaten away by moss. There was no up to the bole of massive pillars that do not cover these carpets with rich and varied nuances, including microscopic plants, caused by humidity, color ruins and
underground constructions.
I had studied the mystery of all these reproductions animal and plant and I thought I had frozen my imagination through analysis. But, by reappearing more beautiful and younger, nature made me feel its power. She laughed of my proud work and subjugated these restive faculties which boasted of belonging exclusively to science. It's a mistake to believe that science stifles admiration and that the eye of the poet goes out as the eye of the naturalist embraces a wider horizon. The exam, which destroys so many beliefs, also brings forth new beliefs with light.
The study had revealed treasures to me at the same time as it had taken away my illusions. My senses, far from being impoverished, were therefore renewed. The splendors and scents of Page 161
spring, the exciting influences of a warm sun and a clean air, the inexplicable sympathy which takes hold of man time when the working earth seems to breathe life and love
through every pore, threw me into new anxieties. I feel all the spurts of worry, vague desires and helpless. It seemed to me that I was becoming a woman, that I come back to life, which I could still love and now feel. A second youth, more vigorous and more feverish that the first one made my breast throb with violence unknown. I was both frightened and happy with what was happening going on inside me and I gave myself up to this ecstatic disorder without know what would be the awakening.
But soon the fear returned with reflection. I am recalled the deplorable misfortunes of my experience. The disasters of the past made me unable to take confidence in the future. I had everything to fear: the men, the things and me especially. Men wouldn't understand me and things would hurt me over and over, because I never could raise or lower myself to the level of men and women things ; and then the boredom of the present grabbed me, hugged me with all its weight. My retirement, so austere, so poetic and so beautiful, seemed scary to me on certain days. The wish that got me there voluntarily withheld presented itself to me as a horrible necessity. I suffered in this monastery without pregnant and without doors, the same tortures as a religious captive behind ditches and gates.
In these alternatives of desire and fear, in this struggle violent of my will against itself, I consumed my strength as it was renewed, I suffered fatigue and the discourages of experience without trying anything.
When the need to act and to live became too intense, I let it devour me until it ran out on its own.
Whole nights passed in the work of resignation.
Lying on the stone of the tombs, I abandoned myself to fury of my imagination. I dreamed of the hugs of a demon
unknown; I felt his warm breath burn my chest and I buried my nails in my shoulders, thinking I could feel it the imprint of his teeth. I called pleasure at the price of eternal damnation, like men did in these
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days of naive poetry, where the demon, more powerful and more generous to the living that God himself offered to them as one last hope, like a loan shark who delays and consumes the ruin.
Often a thunderstorm came to surprise me in the discovered enclosure of the chapel. I made it my duty to endure it and I hoped to get some relief. Sometimes, when the day appeared, he found me broken with fatigue, more pale as dawn, clothes soiled, and lacking strength to raise my scattered hair where the water was flowing.
Still often I tried to relieve myself by pushing screams of pain and anger. Night birds flew away frightened or answered me with wild moans.
The repeated noise from vault to vault shook these ruins tottering and gravel, crumbling from the roof, seemed to announce the fall of the building on my head. Oh !
I would have liked it to be so! I redoubled my cries and these walls, which sent back to me the sound of my voice more terrible and more heartbreaking, seemed to be inhabited by legions of damned, eager to answer me and join me for the
blasphemy.
As a result of these terrible nights, there were days of dismal stupor. When I managed to fix sleep for a few hours a deep numbness followed my
awakening and made me incapable, for a whole day, of will or of any interest. At those times, my life was like
that of religious stupid by habit and submission. I walked slow
ly and for a limited time. I sang psalms whose harmony put my suffering to sleep, without let no sense come from my lips to my soul. I liked to grow flowers on the escarpments of these harsh constructions where they found sand and cement sprayed to sink their roots. I was going to contemplate work of the swallow and defend its nest from invasions sparrow and chickadee. So any impact of
human passions faded into my memory. I followed mechanically and by custom the voluntary line of captivity traced by me on the sand and thought no more of crossing it only if the universe had not existed on the other side.
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I also had days of calm and well-reasoned reason. The religion of Christ, which I conformed to my intelligence and my needs, spread a sweet suavity, a tenderness true about the wounds of my soul. In truth, I never never much worried to see in my own eyes if the degree of divinity departed from the human soul authorized or not men to call themselves prophets, demigods, redeemer.
Bacchus, Moses, Confutzée, Mahomet, Luther have accomplished big missions on earth and printed with violent tremors to the progress of the human spirit in the course of the centuries.
Were they like us, these men by whom we
think, by whom we live today? These colossi, including moral power organized societies, weren't they of a more excellent, purer, more heavenly nature than ours? If we do not deny God and the divine essence of the intellectual man, do we have the right to deny his most beautiful works and ignore them? He who, born among
men, lived without weakness and without sin; the one who dictated the gospel and transformed human morals for the continuation of centuries, can't we say that this one is really the son of God ?
God alternately sends us mighty men
for evil and powerful men for good. The supreme will which governs the universe, when it pleases him to do the human mind a huge step forward or backward on a part of the globe, may, without waiting for the austere march of centuries and the late work of natural causes, operate these sudden transitions by the arm or the word of a created man all on purpose.