The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters | Page 2

the Muse of Adultery, are to be found

in acts and facts in Madame Bovary."
Now, the largest interest of this correspondence depends precisely upon
the continuance, beneath an affectionate personal relationship, of a
fundamental antagonism of interests and beliefs, resolutely maintained
on both sides. George Sand, with her lifelong passion for propaganda
and reformation, labors earnestly to bring Flaubert to her point of view,
to remould him nearer to her heart's desire. He, with a playful deference
to the sex and years of his friend, addresses her in his letters as "Dear
Master." Yet in the essentials of the conflict, though she never gives
over her effort, he never budges a jot; he has taken his ground, and in
his last unfinished work, Bouvard and Pecuchet, he dies stubbornly
fortifying his position. To the last she speaks from a temperament
lyrical, sanguine, imaginative, optimistic and sympathetic; he from a
temperament dramatic, melancholy, observing, cynical, and satirical.
She insists upon natural goodness; he, upon innate depravity. She urges
her faith in social regeneration; he vents his splenetic contempt for the
mob. Through all the successive shocks of disillusioning experience,
she expects the renovation of humanity by some religious, some
semi-mystical, amelioration of its heart; he grimly concedes the greater
part of humanity to the devil, and can see no escape for the remnant
save in science and aristocratic organization. For her, finally, the
literary art is an instrument of social salvation--it is her means of
touching the world with her ideals, her love, her aspiration; for him the
literary art is the avenue of escape from the meaningless chaos of
existence--it is his subtly critical condemnation of the world.
The origins of these unreconciled antipathies lie deep beneath the
personal relationship of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert; lie deep
beneath their successors, who with more or less of amenity in their
manners are still debating the same questions today. The main currents
of the nineteenth century, with fluent and refluent tides, clash beneath
the controversy; and as soon as one hears its "long withdrawing roar,"
and thinks it is dying away, and is become a part of ancient history, it
begins again, and will be heard, no doubt, by the last man as a solemn
accompaniment to his final contention with his last adversary.
George Sand was, on the whole, a natural and filial daughter of the
French Revolution. The royal blood which she received from her
father's line mingled in her veins with that of the Parisian milliner, her

mother, and predestined her for a leveller by preparing in her an
instinctive ground of revolt against all those inherited prejudices which
divided the families of her parents. As a young girl wildly romping
with the peasant children at Nohant she discovered a joy in
untrammeled rural life which was only to increase with years. At the
proper age for beginning to fashion a conventional young lady, the
hoyden was put in a convent, where she underwent some exalting
religious experiences; and in 1822 she was assigned to her place in the
"established social order" by her marriage at seventeen to M. Dudevant.
After a few years of rather humdrum domestic life in the country, she
became aware that this gentleman, her husband, was behaving as we
used to be taught that all French husbands ultimately behave; he was, in
fact, turning from her to her maids. The young couple had never been
strongly united-- the impetuous dreamy girl and her coarse hunting
mate; and they had grown wide apart. She should, of course, have
adjusted herself quietly to the altered situation and have kept up
appearances. But this young wife had gradually become an
"intellectual"; she had been reading philosophy and poetry; she was
saturated with the writings of Rousseau, of Chateaubriand, of Byron.
None of the spiritual masters of her generation counselled acquiescence
in servitude or silence in misery. Every eloquent tongue of the
time-spirit urged self-expression and revolt. And she, obedient to the
deepest impulses of her blood and her time, revolted.
At the period when Madame Dudevant withdrew her neck from the
conjugal yoke and plunged into her literary career in Paris, the doctrine
that men are created for freedom, equality and fraternity was already
somewhat hackneyed. She, with an impetus from her own private
fortunes, was to give the doctrine a recrudescence of interest by
resolutely applying it to the status of women. We cannot follow her in
detail from the point where she abandons the domestic sewing-basket
to reappear smoking black cigars in the Latin Quarter. We find her, at
about 1831, entering into competition with the brilliant literary
generation of Balzac, Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Merimee, Stendhal, and
Sainte-Beuve. To signalize her equality with her brothers in talent, she
adopts male attire: "I had a