The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters

The George Sand-Gustave
Flaubert Letters

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Letters
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Title: The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters
Author: George Sand, Gustave Flaubert Translated by A.L. McKensie
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The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters
Translated by A.L. McKenzie (1921)
Introduction by Stuart Sherman

PREFATORY NOTE
This translation of the correspondence between George Sand and
Gustave Flaubert was undertaken in consequence of a suggestion by
Professor Stuart P. Sherman. The translator desires to acknowledge
valuable criticism given by Professor Sherman, Ruth M. Sherman, and
Professor Kenneth McKenzie, all of whom have generously assisted in
revising the manuscript.
A. L. McKenzie

INTRODUCTION
The correspondence of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, if
approached merely as a chapter in the biographies of these heroes of
nineteenth century letters, is sufficiently rewarding. In a relationship
extending over twelve years, including the trying period of the
Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, these extraordinary
personalities disclose the aspects of their diverse natures which are best
worth the remembrance of posterity. However her passionate and
erratic youth may have captivated our grandfathers, George Sand in the
mellow autumn of her life is for us at her most attractive phase. The

storms and anguish and hazardous adventures that attended the defiant
unfolding of her spirit are over. In her final retreat at Nohant,
surrounded by her affectionate children and grandchildren, diligently
writing, botanizing, bathing in her little river, visited by her friends and
undistracted by the fiery lovers of the old time, she shows an unguessed
wealth of maternal virtue, swift, comprehending sympathy, fortitude,
sunny resignation, and a goodness of heart that has ripened into
wisdom. For Flaubert, too, though he was seventeen years her junior,
the flamboyance of youth was long since past; in 1862, when the
correspondence begins, he was firmly settled, a shy, proud, grumpy
toiling hermit of forty, in his family seat at Croisset, beginning his
seven years' labor at L'Education Sentimentale, master of his art,
hardening in his convictions, and conscious of increasing estrangement
from the spirit of his age. He, with his craving for sympathy, and she,
with her inexhaustible supply of it, meet; he pours out his bitterness,
she her consolation; and so with equal candor of self-revelation they
beautifully draw out and strengthen each the other's characteristics, and
help one another grow old.
But there is more in these letters than a satisfaction for the biographical
appetite, which, indeed, finds ITS account rather in the earlier chapters
of the correspondents' history. What impresses us here is the banquet
spread for the reflective and critical faculties in this intercourse of
natural antagonists. As M. Faguet observes in a striking paragraph of
his study of Flaubert:
"It is a curious thing, which does honor to them both, that Flaubert and
George Sand should have become loving friends towards the end of
their lives. At the beginning, Flaubert might have been looked upon by
George Sand as a furious enemy. Emma [Madame Bovary] is George
Sand's heroine with all the poetry turned into ridicule. Flaubert seems
to say in every page of his work: 'Do you want to know what is the real
Valentine, the real Indiana, the real Lelia? Here she is, it is Emma
Roualt.' 'And do you want to know what becomes of a woman whose
education has consisted in George Sand's books? Here she is, Emma
Roualt.' So that the terrible mocker of the bourgeois has written a book
which is directly inspired by the spirit of the 1840 bourgeois. Their
recriminations against romanticism 'which rehabilitates and poetises the
courtesan,' against George Sand,