How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance

by Marilyn Yalom

  Her novel Indiana is the story of one women’s struggle to free herself from an oppressive marriage and, of course, to find true love. The heroine, Indiana, is married to Colonel Delmare, a middle-aged man still loyal to his Napoleonic past. Two other men vie for her attention: Raymon de Ramière, an archetypical aristocratic seducer, who casts a spell over Indiana despite her resistance, and her cousin Sir Ralph, a silent soul mate, who reveals his true nature only at the end of the novel. It was characteristic of Sand at this period of her life to conceptualize women primarily in terms of their relationships with men. Indeed, Sand always believed that what distinguished women from men was the feminine capacity for boundless love.

  Sand’s much admired contemporary, the English poet Byron, understood the imaginative hold of romantic love over nineteenth-century women when he wrote: “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart; ’Tis women’s whole existence.” Today, women have other outlets, but in nineteenth-century France, it was possible for women of the upper classes to focus exclusively on love, if not romantic, then conjugal and maternal. And if we are to believe the novels, some Frenchmen also turned to love for the fabric of their “whole existence.”

  Certainly Raymon de Ramière in Indiana seems to have nothing to do beyond courting Indiana and her servant, Noun. And here we see the psychological genius of George Sand at work, for Indiana and Noun are doubles representing a basic duality in European culture—that of the idolized spiritual woman and her fleshly counterpart. Consider the following passage:

  Noun was Mme Delmare’s foster sister, and the two young women, who had been brought up together, loved each other dearly. Noun was tall and strong, vividly alive, full of the ardor and passion of her Creole blood, and strikingly beautiful in a way that far outshone the delicate, fragile charms of the pale Mme Delmare; but their tender hearts and mutual affection eliminated all possibility of feminine rivalry.4

  The words “foster sister” do not fully convey the original French expression soeur de lait (literally, “milk sister”), which indicates that Noun and Indiana had shared the same wet nurse, probably Noun’s mother. Having nursed at the same breast, they are symbolic sisters, despite the difference in their social positions. Each is endowed with the physical attributes deemed appropriate to her station: Noun is tall, strong, healthy, and passionate, whereas Indiana is pale, frail, and implicitly less hot-blooded than her Creole counterpart. Individually they are stereotypes of their respective classes; together they constitute a whole person who has been fragmented by social proscriptions. Indiana’s sense of sisterhood with Noun far exceeds the conventional bonds between mistress and maid. It suggests the union of a “respectable” woman and what the psychiatrist Carl Jung would have called her “shadow” self.

  It is Noun who carries on the behind-the-scenes affair with Raymon. She is the free, uninhibited female who delights in lovemaking. She is the body experiencing pleasure. Raymon loves her “with his senses,” but he loves Indiana “with all his heart and soul.” During the day he declares his chaste and undying love to Indiana: “You are the woman I have dreamed of, the purity I have worshiped.” But at night he returns to Noun to exchange “voluptuous caresses” that banish all vestiges of reason.

  Alone with Noun in Indiana’s bedroom while Indiana is out of the house, Raymon confuses the two women.

  Little by little a vague memory of Indiana began to float in and out of Raymon’s drunken consciousness. The two mirrored panels that reflected Noun’s image into infinity seemed to be peopled by a thousand phantoms, and as he stared into the depths of that double image he thought he could see, in the final and hazy and indistinct reflection of Noun, the slender, willowy form of Mme. Delamare.

  The confusion in Raymon’s mind between the two women is not accidental. They are complementary characters, each half of a full person. Despite their spiritual sisterhood, Indiana and Noun are, on the underground level of the novel, engaged in psychological warfare. That neither knows of the other’s involvement with Raymon adds to the tension and suggests the hidden reality of two hostile forces operating simultaneously within the writer’s psyche. In Indiana, as in Sand’s fourth novel Lélia, the double characters act out the author’s split self. In life, Sand was also struggling to reconcile her lofty ideals and her erotic appetite.

  In June 1833, approaching her twenty-ninth birthday, George Sand met Alfred de Musset, not yet twenty-three, at a literary dinner. Each had earned a coveted place at the table alongside other romantics. Musset the dandy, with his golden hair and supple body, was already famous for his poems and stories. He was also the darling of society ladies, courtesans, and prostitutes, and no enemy to alcohol, opium, and debauchery. In comparison, George Sand was a dark-headed, hardworking, tranquil saint. On July 26, Musset wrote to Sand: “I am in love with you.” On July 27, she responded: “I love you like a child.” On the night of July 28, the saint and the child slept together.

  The following month the lovers took off for Fontainebleau, where they could isolate themselves from curious onlookers. Sand’s novel, Lélia, was creating quite a stir in Paris, garnering both positive and negative press.5 Who was this G. Sand who dared to speak the unspeakable about a heroine’s sexual frigidity? The elderly writer René de Chateaubriand was already predicting that Sand would become France’s Lord Byron, high praise from one whose own novels had sounded the note of romanticism even before it had a name.

  Like Indiana, Lélia is another beautiful, superior woman, but she has lost some of the innocence of Sand’s earlier heroine. Having idolized a man she took for a demigod, only to discover his human imperfections, Lélia is left with a sense of anguished disillusionment. In despair because she no longer has the ability to love, she is drawn toward an ascetic existence.

  Lélia has a long-lost sister named Pulchérie (for “pulchritude,” physical beauty). During the years of their separation Pulchérie has become a courtesan. The unexpected meeting between Lélia and Pulchérie can be read as a symbolic dialogue between two parts of the divided self.

  Lélia is unwilling to accept the concept of love between the sexes in any form other than the most angelic and the most enduring. Pulchérie asks only for physical satisfaction. Yet neither the romantic nor the hedonist is a fully satisfying ideal. While professing to despise Pulchérie’s demeaned condition, Lélia nonetheless craves her sister’s experience of sexual pleasure.

  That neither sister represents for the author a complete person becomes evident in the weird episode when the poet Sténio is tricked into making love to Pulchérie, whom he mistakes for his beloved Lélia. The description of Pulchérie and Lélia leading the faithful Sténio into an underground grotto is a masterpiece of dédoublement (division into two) designed to confuse both the reader and Sténio as to the true identity of the woman he embraces. Just as Raymon in Indiana confounds Noun and her mistress, so Sténio swears that he has never loved Lélia as much as when he holds Pulchérie in his arms under the mistaken belief that she is someone else.

  Despite Sténio’s subsequent rejection of Pulchérie when he discovers the dupery, the implications of his experience are clear: his adoration of Lélia is less than perfect without physical consummation. Lélia and Pulchérie, mind and body, spirit and flesh, must be merged to create a fully endowed person. Apart, they are incomplete, unsatisfying to themselves and to a potential mate.

  It can be argued that Lélia represents the epitome of romanticism. Set in a fantastic convent containing grottos, marble fountains, rare birds, and dazzling flowers, Lélia’s sexual and spiritual adventures read like a hallucinatory fairy tale. The exotic setting is in harmony with the characters’ overwrought emotions, and this is exactly what Sand and Musset wanted for their own passion. What better place for a real-life idyll than Venice?

  Sand convinced Casimir that Italy would be good for her rheumatism. She also assured Musset’s mother that her son would be looked after with devoted maternal care. What about her own children? Solange, who had bee
n staying with Sand in Paris, was sent back to Nohant, while Maurice remained in boarding school. Sand’s new “child” took preference over everyone else.

  The couple’s flight to Venice has been narrated so often in biographies, novels, plays, and films that Musset and Sand, like Abélard and Héloïse, have become superstars in the history of French love. It is daunting to summarize what others have recounted at length, so let me just stick to the facts and, whenever possible, defer to the lovers’ own words.

  In her autobiography, Sand recalled how Venice, the city of her dreams, had greatly exceeded her expectations. She and Musset settled into the Hotel Danieli (still a favorite for lovers) on January 1, 1834. However, she had been sick during the Italian part of their long journey and soon succumbed to a violent fever. When she was barely back on her feet, Musset came down with typhoid fever, which brought him within “two fingers of death.” Sand anxiously nursed him for seventeen days “with no more than one hour of rest each day.”

  This was not how Musset had tended Sand during her illness. From sources other than Sand’s autobiography, including Musset himself, we know that he had used her sickness as an occasion to explore the city and, in particular, its prostitutes. The Sand-Musset fabled love affair was already showing its cracks. During Musset’s illness, he was “in a state of agitation and delirium,” according to Sand’s February 4 letter to her editor, Buloz. She had already seen instances of his mental instability, most notably when he had experienced a ghoulish nighttime hallucination during their stay at Fontainebleau, and she was now terrified. Even the most devoted nurse could not cope alone with Musset’s physical and mental deterioration.

  Enter Dr. Pietro Pagello, a twenty-seven-year-old Venetian who comes to Sand’s aid in caring for Musset and who manages to replace him as her lover. Musset begins to suspect their involvement and, in his delirium, strikes back. He calls her a strumpet (une catin), becomes furiously jealous, and destroys whatever vestiges of love Sand still feels for him, at least for now. Nonetheless, when Musset begins to recover, he and Sand leave the Danieli for a less expensive apartment, where she is able to write. After all, there are debts to be paid, and her writing has become their main source of income. After three months in Venice, Musset is well enough to make his way back to Paris on his own.

  Sand stays on with Pagello till the summer. After the storms of winter, life becomes milder, enabling her to finish the first of her Lettres d’un voyageur (Letters from a Voyager), which helps improve her finances. Musset, repentant, writes on April 4: “I still love you. . . . I know you are with a man you love, and yet I am tranquil.” Sand softens, but with no desire to give up Pagello. She writes Musset on June 2: “Oh, why can’t I live between the two of you and make you happy without belonging to one or the other.” The fantasy of the ménage à trois lives on.

  Perhaps that was what she had in mind when she returned to Paris in August, with Pagello in tow. She was happy to retrieve Maurice and bring him to Nohant, where Solange and Casimir were impatiently waiting. Surrounded by family and friends, she went so far as to invite Pagello to visit, but he had the good sense to decline. Then, sensing her dwindling interest, he said good-bye to Paris and went home.

  When Sand returned to Paris in October, she was greeted by a chastened Musset, eager to revive their earlier relations. He had written her impassioned letters during their separation and now swore that his only occupation would be to love her, “like Romeo and Juliet, like Héloïse and Abélard.” Their joint names would go down in history: “One will never speak of one without the other.” Musset’s concern to be remembered as a duo with Sand speaks for his grandiosity as well as his renewed devotion to her.

  Within a fortnight, he had another fit of jealousy, this one occasioned by the indiscreet revelations of a mutual friend, who convinced Musset that Sand had lied to him. Somehow she had managed to make him believe that the affair with Pagello had not been consummated until after Musset had left Venice. This was not the case. Sand had indeed been sleeping with Pagello while Musset was on his sick bed. Unable to control his rage, Musset bombarded Sand with bitter reproaches.

  In her Intimate Journal written during the month of November 1834, Sand bares her anguished soul, though it is difficult to know for whom. For herself as a form of therapy? For Musset to bring him back? For God? For posterity? The forty pages that have survived bring us as close as we may ever come to the obsessive thoughts of a sane woman tortured by love. They recall Julie de Lespinasse’s feverish letters, without the tragedy of death hovering in the wings.

  To Musset Sand cries out: “You are leaving me at the most beautiful moment of my life, on the truest, most passionate, cruelest day of my love. Is it nothing to have tamed the pride of a woman, and to have thrown her at your feet?”6

  To God she confesses: “Ah! the other night I dreamed he was next to me, that he was kissing me in a swoon of pleasure. What a rude awakening, dear God . . . that dark room where he will no longer place his feet, that bed where he will no longer sleep.”

  And to herself: “I’m thirty years old, I’m still beautiful, at least I would be in a fortnight, if I could stop crying.”

  She implores God: “Give me back the fierce vigor I had in Venice. Give me back that raw love of life which took hold of me like an outburst of anger in the midst of the most dreadful despair, let me love again. . . . I want to love, I want to be rejuvenated, I want to live.” In true romantic fashion, she equates loving and living. Only by loving will she be able to regain her vital force.

  She begs for God’s mercy. “Let your mercy begin by granting oblivion and rest to this heart devoured by grief. . . . Ah, give me back my lover, and I shall be devout and my knees will wear themselves out on church paving stones.”

  Then she asks Musset for his pardon and future friendship. “I shall go, my love, to ask you to shake my hand. . . . I know that when one no longer loves, one no longer loves. But your friendship, I must have it to bear the love in my heart, and to prevent it from killing me.”

  To God again: “No, Lord God, do not let me become wild and destroy myself . . . suffering from love should ennoble and not degrade.” Even at the nadir of despair, she clutches idealistic shards.

  The vision of her youthful lover continues to haunt her: “Oh, my blue eyes, you will never look at me again! Beautiful head, I shall not see you again! . . . My little body, supple and warm, you will not stretch out over me. . . . Good-bye my blond hair, good-bye my white shoulders, good-bye to all that I loved, all that once was mine.”

  Sand is inconsolable. She goes to Musset’s home on November 24, without finding him there. The next day he writes to their mutual friend, Sainte-Beuve, that it is impossible for him to maintain any relationship at all with his former mistress.

  Sand accepts defeat. “You do not love me any longer, it’s easy to see.”

  She acknowledges: “I behaved worse than you in Venice . . . at present I am very guilty in your eyes. But I am guilty in the past. The present is still beautiful and good. I love you, I would submit to all kinds of torture to be loved by you, and you are leaving me.”

  She entreats Musset one last time: “Love this poor woman. . . . What are you afraid of? She will not be demanding, that poor soul. The one who loves less is the one who suffers less. Now is the moment to love or never.”

  Sand’s willingness to be the one who loves more and consequently to suffer more had no effect on Musset. The moment passed without reconciliation. Sand shared her sorrows with friends like the writer Sainte-Beuve, the musician Liszt, the painter Delacroix, in the hope that their combined offensive might bring Musset around. All to no avail. In December, she returned to Nohant and put on a mask of happiness for her family. But the agonizing love story was not yet over.

  In January 1835, Musset and Sand would become lovers again in Paris, and once again they would begin to torture each other. This time it was Sand who could take it no longer. She would write him after two months: “I loved you
like my son, with the love of a mother, I’m still bleeding from it. . . . I forgive you everything, but we must part.”

  Musset wrote his version of their affair in a semiautobiographical novel titled La confession d’un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century).7 The idea was already in his head in a letter sent to Venice in April 1835, after his return to Paris. “I’ve a good mind to write our story: it seems that would cure me and do my heart good. I want to elevate an altar to you . . . but I shall wait for your permission.”

  Sand consented: “Dear angel, do what you like, novels, sonnets, poems, speak of me according to your desire; I give myself to you, blindfolded.” Not for a moment did either of them forget they were writers.

  Musset started the novel during the summer of 1835, after he had rushed through several other literary assignments, and it would be published in February 1836. This says something about his prolific ability to create poems, plays, and novels one after the other, as well as the rapidity of publication in France. Like Balzac, Hugo, Sand, and other romantics, Musset had prodigious inventive powers and great productivity, despite his dissolute ways. With literacy rising in France to over 80 percent for men and slightly less for women, there was a growing market of readers clamoring for emotionalistic literature.

  When Musset’s Confession appeared, it was indeed a kind of altar erected to the memory of Sand, though it was not erected exclusively to her. The first part of the novel corresponds to a period in Musset’s life before he met Sand. His literary surrogate, the young hero Octave, is caught up in a meaningless bohemian existence. He is “a child of the century,” one who has memories of Napoleonic glory that can no longer be realized. His sense of frustration with the political moment links him to Julien Sorel in The Red and the Black, but this is all the two heroes have in common since Julien lacks Octave’s upper-class birth and Octave lacks Julien’s steel will. Octave becomes the victim of a frivolous mistress, who betrays him with his best friend. Henceforth Octave will be ruled by alternating fits of cynicism and jealousy.