Famous Women: George Sand Part 11

But it was a time when they could be sure of nothing except of their distress. The telegraph wires were cut; rumors of good news they feared to believe would be succeeded by tales of horror they feared to discredit. Tidings would come that three hundred thousand of the enemy had been disposed of in a single engagement and King William taken prisoner; then of fatal catastrophes befallen to private friends--stories which often proved equally unfounded.

She had friends shut up in Paris of whom she knew not whether they were alive or dead. The strain of anxiety and painful excitement made sleep impossible to her except in the last extremity of fatigue. Yet she had her little grandchildren to care for; and when they came around her, clamoring for the fairy tales she was used to supply, she contented them as well as she could and gave them their lessons as usual, anxious to keep them from realizing the sadness the causes of which they were too young to understand.

It was the first time that she had known a distress that forbade her to find a solace in nature. She describes how one day, walking out with some friends and following the course of the river Tarde, she had half abandoned herself to the enjoyment of the scene--the cascade, the dragon-flies skimming the surface, the purple scabious flowers, the goats clambering on the boulders of rock that strewed the borders and bed of the stream--when one of the party remarks: "Here's a retreat pretty well fortified against the Prussians."

And the present, forgotten for an instant in reverie, came back upon her with a shock.

Letters in that district took three or four days to travel thirty miles.

Newspapers were rarely to be procured; and when procured, made up of contradictions, wild suggestions, and the pretentious speeches of national leaders, meant to be rea.s.suring, but marked by a vagueness and violence from which Madame Sand rightly augured ill.

The red-letter days were those that brought communications from their friends in Paris by the aerial post. On October 11, two balloons, respectively called "George Sand" and the "Armand Barbes," left the capital. "My name," she remarks, "did not bring good luck to the first--which suffered injuries and descended with difficulty, yet rescued the Americans who had gone up in it." The "Barbes" had a smoother but a more famous flight; alighting and depositing M. Gambetta safely at Tours.

As the autumn advanced Madame Sand and her family were enabled to return to Nohant. But what a return was that! The enemy were quartered within forty miles, at Issoudun; the fugitives thence were continually seen pa.s.sing, carrying off their children, their furniture and their merchandise to places of security. Already the enemy's guns were said to have been heard at La Chatre. Madame Sand walked in her garden daily among her marigolds, snapdragon and ranunculus, making curious speculations as to what might be in store for herself and her possessions. She remarks:--

You get accustomed to it, even though you have not the consolation of being able to offer the slightest resistance.... I look at my garden, I dine, I play with the children, whilst waiting in expectation of seeing the trees felled roots upwards; of getting no more bread to eat, and of having to carry my grandchildren off on my shoulders; for the horses have all been requisitioned. I work, expecting my scrawls to light the pipes of the Prussians.

But the enemy, though so near, never pa.s.sed the boundaries of the "Black Valley." The department of the Indre remained uninvaded, though compa.s.sed on all sides by the foreign army; and George Sand was able to say afterwards that she at least had never seen a Prussian soldier.

A sad Christmas was pa.s.sed. On the last night of 1870 a meeting of friends at Nohant broke up with the parting words, "All is lost!"

"The execrable year is out," writes Madame Sand, "but to all appearances we are entering upon a worse."

On the 15th of January, 1871, her little drama _Francois le Champi_, first represented in the troublous months of 1849, was acted in Paris for the benefit of an ambulance. She notes the singular fate of this piece to be reproduced in time of bombardment. A pastoral!

The worst strain of suspense ended January 29, with the capitulation of Paris. Here the _Journal d'un Voyageur_ breaks off. It would be sad indeed had her life, like that of more than one of her compeers, closed then over France in mourning. Although it was impossible but that such an ordeal must have impaired her strength, she outlived the war's ending, and the horrible social crisis which she had foreseen must succeed the political one. Happier than Prosper Merimee, than Alexandre Dumas, and others, she saw the dawn of a new era of prosperity for her country, whose vital forces, as she had also foretold, were to prevail in the end over successive ills--the enervation of corruption, of military disaster, and the "orgie of pretended renovators" at home, that signalized the first months of peace abroad.

In January, 1872, we again find her writing cheerily to Flaubert:--

Mustn't be ill, mustn't be cross, my old troubadour. Say that France is mad, humanity stupid, and that we are unfinished animals every one of us, you must love on all the same, yourself, your race, above all, your friends. I have my sad hours. I look at my blossoms, those two little girls smiling as ever, their charming mother, and my good, hard-working son, whom the end of the world will find hunting, cataloguing, doing his daily task, and yet as merry as Punch in his rare leisure moments.

In a later letter she writes in a more serious strain:--

I do not say that humanity is on the road to the heights; I believe it in spite of all, but I do not argue about it, which is useless, for every one judges according to his own eyesight, and the general outlook at the present moment is ugly and poor. Besides, I do not need to be a.s.sured of the salvation of our planet and its inhabitants in order to believe in the necessity of the good and the beautiful; if our planet departs from this law it will perish; if its inhabitants discard it they will be destroyed. As for me, I wish to hold firm till my last breath, not with the certainty or the demand to find a "good place" elsewhere, but because my sole pleasure is to maintain myself and mine in the upward way.

The last five years of her life saw her pen in full activity. In the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, _Malgretout_, the novel of 1870, was succeeded by _Flamarande_ and _Les Deux Freres_--compositions executed with unflagging energy and animation of style; _La Tour de Percemont_, and a series of graceful fairy-stories ent.i.tled _Contes d'une grand'mere_.

_Nanon_ (1872), a rustic romance of the First Revolution, is a highly remarkable little work, possibly suggested by her recent experiences of the effect of public disturbances on remote country places.

She was also a constant contributor to the newspaper _Le Temps_. A critical notice by her hand of M. Renan's _Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiques_, reprinted from those columns, bears date May, 1876, immediately before she succ.u.mbed to the illness which in a few days was to cut short her life.

At the beginning of this year she had written on this subject to Flaubert, in the brave spirit she would fain impart to her weaker brethren:--

Life is perhaps eternal, and work in consequence eternal. If so, let us finish our march bravely. If otherwise, if the individual perish utterly, let us have the honor of having done our task. That is duty, for our only obvious duties are to ourselves and our fellow-creatures. What we destroy in ourselves we destroy in them.

Our abas.e.m.e.nt abases them; our falls drag them down; we owe to them to stand fast, to save them from falling. The desire to die early is a weakness, as is the desire to live long.

George Sand, like most persons of an exceptional const.i.tution, had little faith in the efficacy for herself of medical science. She was persuaded that the prescribed remedies did her more harm than good, and on more than one occasion, when her health had caused her children uneasiness, they had had to resort to an affectionate _ruse_ to induce her to take advice. Her habit of disregarding physical ailments, fighting against them as a weakness, and working on in their despite, led her to neglect for too long failing health that should have been attended to. During the whole of May, 1876, Madame Sand, though suffering from real illness, continued to join in the household routine and to proceed with her literary work as usual. Not till the last days of the month did she, unable any longer to make light of her danger, at length consent to send for professional advice. It was then too late.

She was suffering from internal paralysis. The medical attention which, sought earlier, might, in the opinion of the doctors, have prolonged her life for years, could now do nothing to avert the imminent fatal consequences of her illness. "It is death," she said; "I did not ask for it, but neither do I regret it." For beyond the sorrow of parting it had no particular terrors for her; she had viewed and could meet it in another spirit. "Death is no more," she had written; "it is life renewed and purified."

She lingered for a week, in great suffering, but bearing all with fort.i.tude and an unflinching determination not to distress those around her by painful complaining. Up to her last hour she preserved consciousness and lucidity. The words, "_Ne touchez pas a la verdure_,"

among the last that fell from her lips, were understood by her children, who knew her wish that the trees should be undisturbed under which, in the village cemetery, she was soon to find a resting-place--a wish that had been sacredly respected.

Her suffering ceased a short while before death, which came to her so quietly that the transition was almost imperceptible to the watchers by her side. It was on the morning of the 8th of June. She was within a month of completing her seventy-second year. Although her life's work had long since been mainly accomplished, yet the extinction of that great intelligence was felt by many--as fitly expressed by M.

Renan--"like a diminution of humanity."

Two days later she was buried in the little cemetery of Nohant, that adjoins her own garden wall. The funeral was conducted with extreme simplicity, in accordance with her taste and spirit. The scene was none the less a memorable one. The rain fell in torrents, but no one seemed to regard it; the country-people flocking in from miles around, old men standing bare-headed for hours, heedless of the deluge. The peasant and the prince, Parisian leaders of the world of thought and letters, and the humblest and most unlearned of her poorer neighbors, stood together over her grave.

Six peasants carried the bier from the house to the church, a few paces distant. The village priest came, preceded by three chorister-boys and the venerable singing-clerk of the parish, to perform the ceremony. A portion of the little churchyard, railed off from the rest and planted with evergreen-trees, contains the graves of her grandmother, her father, and the two little grandchildren she had lost. A plain granite tomb in their midst now marks the spot where George Sand was laid, literally buried in flowers.

A great spirit was gone from the world; and a good spirit, it will be generally acknowledged: an artist in whose work the genuine desire to leave those she worked for better than she found them, is one inspiring motive. Such endeavor may seem to fail, and she affirmed: "A hundred times it does fail in its immediate results. But it helps, notwithstanding, to preserve that tradition of good desires and of good deeds, without which all would perish."

FOOTNOTES:

[A] The biography of Alfred De Musset, by Paul De Musset, translated from the French by Harriet W. Preston. Boston, Roberts Brothers.

[B] Mauprat, translated by Miss Vaughan. Boston, Roberts Brothers.

[C] The Miller of Angibault. Translated by M. E. Dewey. Boston, Roberts Brothers.

[D] The "Snow Man," translated by Virginia Vaughan. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

GEORGE SAND'S NOVELS.

I. MAUPRAT. Translated by VIRGINIA VAUGHAN.

II. ANTONIA. Translated by VIRGINIA VAUGHAN.

III. MONSIEUR SYLVESTRE. Translated by FRANCIS GEORGE SHAW.

IV. THE SNOW MAN. Translated by VIRGINIA VAUGHAN.

V. THE MILLER OF ANGIBAULT. Translated by MARY E. DEWEY.

VI. MY SISTER JEANNIE. Translated by S. R. CROCKER.

_A standard Library Edition, uniformly bound, in neat 16mo volumes. Each volume sold separately. Price $1.50._

SOME NOTICES OF "MAUPRAT."

"An admirable translation. As to 'Mauprat,' with which novel Roberts Brothers introduce the first of French novelists to the American public, if there were any doubts as to George Sand's power, it would for ever set them at rest.... The object of the story is to show how, by her (Edmee's) n.o.ble nature, he (Mauprat) is subsequently transformed from a brute to a man; his sensual pa.s.sion to a pure and holy love."--_Harper's Monthly._

"The excellence of George Sand, as we understand it, lies in her comprehension of the primitive elements of mankind. She has conquered her way into the human heart, and whether it is at peace or at war, is the same to her; for she is mistress of all its moods. No woman before ever painted the pa.s.sions and the emotions with such force and fidelity, and with such consummate art. Whatever else she may be, she is always an artist.... Love is the key-note of 'Mauprat,'--love, and what it can accomplish in taming an otherwise untamable spirit. The hero, Bernard Mauprat, grows up with his uncles, who are practically bandits, as was not uncommon with men of their cla.s.s, in the provinces, before the breaking out of the French Revolution. He is a young savage, of whom the best that can be said is, that he is only less wicked than his relatives, because he has somewhere within him a sense of generosity and honor, to which they are entire strangers. To sting this sense into activity, to detect the makings of a man in this brute, to make this brute into a man, is the difficult problem, which is worked out by love,--the love of Bernard for his cousin Edmee, and hers for him,--the love of two strong, pa.s.sionate, n.o.ble natures, locked in a life-and-death struggle, in which the man is finally overcome by the unconquerable strength of womanhood. Only a great writer could have described such a struggle, and only a great artist could have kept it within allowable limits. This George Sand has done, we think; for her portrait of Bernard is vigorous without being coa.r.s.e, and her situations are strong without being dangerous. Such, at least, is the impression we have received from reading 'Mauprat,' which, besides being an admirable study of character, is also a fine picture of French provincial life and manners."--_Putnam's Monthly._

"Roberts Brothers propose to publish a series of translations of George Sand's better novels. We can hardly say that all are worth appearing in English; but it is certain that the 'better' list will comprise a good many which are worth translating, and among these is 'Mauprat,'--though by no means the best of them. Written to show the possibility of constancy in man, a love inspired before and continuing through marriage, it is itself a contradiction to a good many of the popular notions respecting the author,--who is generally supposed to be as indifferent to the sanct.i.ties of the marriage relation as was her celebrated ancestor, Augustus of Saxony.... The translation is admirable. It is seldom that one reads such good English in a work translated from any language. The new series is inaugurated in the best possible way, under the hands of Miss Vaughan, and we trust that she may have a great deal to do with its continuance. It is not every one who can read French who can write English so well."--_Old and New._