Yearning for the Unattainable

...An evil law makes you the mere half of man...

...Alfred de Musset and Pietro Pagello, the handsome attending physician with whom she started an affair while Musset lay stricken in Venice...

...Cate accepts his subject's protestations that she never had an affair with Franz Liszt, whom she described as having "nothing on his mind but God and the Holy Virgin, who does not absolutely resemble me...

...Though a property owner herself, she did not precipitously get rid of her estates...

...She participated in hand-picking the new republican candidates from her own district of Berry (only to find that the conservative citizenry preferred their reactionary mayor...

...Though in which, indeed, in which indeed, my dear, did she not...

...But the effort resulted in her being called a turncoat and she finally gave up on politics in disgust...

...Cate dismisses the usual charges that George Sand was a nymphomaniac, but he offers as an alternative the suggestion that she suffered from "nympholepsy," defined rather euphemistically as "a yearning for the unattainable...

...One might say of it what Henry James said of its subject: "What a crew, what moeurs, what habits, what conditions and relations every way—and what an altogether mighty and marvelous George...

...It takes a national event of some importance, the revolution of 1848, to rouse George Sand from the sensual and domestic torpor of Nohant...

...she entered into a 14-year affair with her dedicated and fussing secretary, literary agent and general factotum, Alexandre Manceau, 13 years her junior...

...Thanks to Curtis Cate's George Sand, a mammoth life-and-times biography, with its vivid details, its pertinent and impertinent gossip, its scores of jealous lovers (and a jealous husband), and its liberal quotations from the author's frank letters, we know a good deal more than James might have suspected about the bedrooms in which George Sand did sleep—as well as those, contemporary rumors notwithstanding, in which she did not...

...Even odder was her practice—usually in the late stages of an affair—of imposing sexual abstinence on her lovers out of fear, she claimed, that they might die of rapture in her arms...

...The reader is aware of a shaping hand and gets a feeling for the passage of time...

...She had little sympathy for the Jacobins of her own party, and in the bloody reaction that followed the uprising she returned to Nohant, disaffected and a little fearful of reprisals...

...She visited and was visited by the literary greats of her time—Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Sainte-Beuve, Gautier?who debated her literary merits at their regular dinners at Magny's...

...tastes shift, morals change, the romantic ardor of youth is trimmed to a steadier flame...

...In Paris, she wrote and edited almost single-handedly the new government's official propaganda sheet, the "Bulletin de la Republique," and contributed fiery manifestos to the local papers...

...After the establishment of the conservative Second Empire, she journeyed to the Elysee Palace to intercede personally with Napoleon III for her radical friends in prison or exile...

...She had always had a penchant for the theater and now her plays were being regularly performed at the Odeon...

...When she died in 1876, at the age of 72, Turgenev, another of her admirers, remarked, "What a brave man she was, and what a good woman...

...Despite the formidable length and detail of Cate's biography, it is not one of those computer affairs where, at the touch of a button marked with a date, every fact and name tumbles out of information-storage...

...Despite these criticisms, George Sand is a vivid achievement, a lively and readable book...

...She had a strange habit, for example, of insisting that two rival lovers treat each other as gentlemen and brothers: Aurelien de Size and her husband, Casimir Dudevant...

...He also discounts the rumor that George Sand was a lesbian, attributing that canard to Alfred de Vigny's insane jealousy when she developed a more than passing infatuation for his mistress, the actress Marie Dorval...

...Considering the wealth of the evidence, one wishes that Cate had speculated more about the psychological quirks of his heroine...

...Instead of agitation for women's suffrage, she plumped for reform of the French marital code: "What...

...Still, she went on record with this optimistic prophecy: "No, alas...

...She was, after all, a hard-working mother, with a pampered and leeching son and daughter to support...

...Her scandalous liaisons—with Aurelien de Seze, Stephane Ajasson de Grand-sagne, Jules Sandeau, Prosper Meri-mee, Alfred de Musset, Pietro Pagello, Michel de Bourges, Frederic Chopin, to name only her more tempestuous and most illustrious affairs—are reported on at length...

...Nor was she beyond passion...

...Yet France is destined to be Communist before a century is up.' When a new feminist paper proposed Sand's name for election to the National Assembly, she promptly squelched the groundswell and disdainfully rejected association with "ladies who form clubs and edit newspapers...

...Reviewed by James R. Mellow Author, "Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company" Henry James, standing in the green garden of Nohant, George Sand's country estate, looked up at the upper-story windows of the famous French author's mansion and mused to his companion, Edith Wharton: "And in which of those rooms, I wonder, did George herself sleep...

...In her old age, a plump and dowdy lion, she continued her nightly vigils fortified with coffee and cigarettes, grinding out novels and plays...

...Berry, she concluded, "is asleep...

...It was a view repeated by a French librarian of Cate's acquaintance who, contemplating the more than 60 novels, the 25 plays, the essays and articles that would fill another 12 volumes—to say nothing of the estimated 40,000 lengthy letters she scribbled to friends—pronounced her France's most formidable "pisseuse d'encre...

...Nevertheless, somewhere around the writer's middle years both the book and the life grow tedious, what with all that relentless bedding down...

...George Sand's literary efforts were no less amazing...

...The People are not Communist...

...Turning out copy is a natural function with Madame Sand," Gautier observed...

...At Nohant, amateur theatricals and puppet shows were a strict regimen that lasted until her death...

...The view seems to support Cate's distinction, but in more down-to-earth terms...

...Cate is particularly good at sketching in the tangled political and social issues of the period...

...She had become an institution...

...The poet Theophile Gautier, a visitor at Nohant, claimed that when Sand had the misfortune of finishing a novel at 1 a.m., she started another immediately...

...Writing to a friend about her interview, Margaret Fuller observed: "She needs no defense, but only to be understood, for she has bravely acted out her nature...

...She might have loved one man permanently, if she could have found one contemporary with her who could interest and command her throughout her range...

...The 19th century grows old with its subject...

...For 40 years, writing every night from midnight to four (plus two or three hours during each day), she produced a stream of novels, plays and tracts that made her the most celebrated woman writer of her time...

...Although Cate records innumerable meetings, he has missed a significant one with Margaret Fuller, George Sand's paler and more puritanical American counterpart, who called on the French author in Paris in 1847...

...Your husband will be seated on one bench, your lover perhaps on another, and you will claim to represent something when you are not even the representation of yourselves...

...The revolution, however, turned sour before her eyes...