George Sand: Pedestrian and Passionate

...Yet, who today reads more than one or two of Sand's lengthy and often lachrymose chronicles, the pedestrian prose broken by purple passages and pseudo-mystical revelations, the innumerable pages churned out, in moods of ecstasy and despair alike, with the remorseless regularity of a housewife performing her knitting stint...

...George Sand??more renowned for the energy and range of her affective life than for her stodgily passionate prose??so obviously lends herself to the literary mortician's art...

...After the first wave of reprisals were over, she was not afraid to use her influence to save many of her friends from prison, exile and even execution...

...As she wrote to Flaubert (a close friend of her later years): "This is no time to be sick, old troubadour, no time to grumble...

...The obvious conclusion would seem to be that M. Maurois has as determinedly decided to disengage himself from his epoch as most of his colleagues have resolved to "engage" themselves in it...

...While her sympathies, despite her background as the Lady of Nohant, lay entirely with the Left, she remained above all a humanist and an enlightened bourgeois...

...In this age of fierce factionalism, Andre Maurois has done well to choose George Sand as his latest subject, and the reviewers are right in placing Lelia among the best of his work...

...Reviewed by Keith Irvine British journalist and critic With all the richness of French culture to choose from, one cannot help wondering why, at this particular moment in the crisis of the West, Andre Maurois has singled out so minor and untimely a figure as George Sand to "sit" for his latest biographical study...

...Characteristically, Montaigne and Benjamin Franklin were, in her formative years, her best beloved authors...

...All the elements of the Sand legend are to hand??the cigar-smoking, top-hatted, be-trousered woman...

...She appears, rather, as a highly civilized being??unsentimentally warm-hearted, fundamentally moral and self-disciplined, energetic and a little pedantic??who managed somehow to burn the candle at both ends and yet make it last almost throughout the entire nineteenth-century "night," from the Napoleonic wars to the threshold of our age...

...After 200 pages of M. Maurois's biographical prose??however penetrating the light it throws upon the comedie humaine of nineteenth-century France??one can no longer suppress the question of how an eminent Frenchman, writing in the 1950s, can avoid any hint of a contemporary theme...

...For he reveals that George Sand, the social and literary butterfly, was also active in politics...

...What we have to do is to cough, wipe our noses, get well, and declare that France is mad, humanity stupid, and we ourselves no more than a lot of badly designed and half-bungled animals...

...Through her love affair with Michel de Bourges??perhaps the only liaison into which she entered with a man who was stronger than herself and whom, in consequence, she did not have to mother??she defined herself politically...

...A quarter of a century later, after the hated "middle of the road" regime of Napoleon III had developed into a police state, and its reactionary policies had culminated in the twin tragedies of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, she had no wish for recrimination...

...However, this conclusion is wrong, and does both author and subject less than justice...

...Politics, however, was not of final importance in her scale of values...

...A true disciple of Montaigne, her aim was balance and reason...

...In danger after the Revolution of 1848 (she had been an avowed Socialist, and had penned at least one controversial governmental proclamation to the people), she was protected from arrest by her friendship with Louis Napoleon...

...For it reveals George Sand's importance not in her romantic life, or in her novels, her political activities, her friendships, or even the cultural atmosphere that she helped to generate...

...It is difficult to stifle the feeling that, avoiding every current problem, he has become a mere maker of belles lettres engaged in laying out distinguished literary corpses...

...the successful novelist...

...the indefatigable lover, whose interminable psychological wrestling matches with Musset, Chopin and others were fought out to the last tear, the last gasp, the last drop of ink, and the last ragged nerve...

...The detailed detective work M. Maurois has put in on the Baroness Dudevant's love affairs for the benefit of those who saw A Song to Remember is paralleled by the efforts he has made to placate the socially conscious readers of Jean-Paul Sartre...