XII — George Sand’s Childhood
The First Years
Much has been written about George Sand, but singularly little about her childhood. Yet she herself, when she set to work, between forty and fifty, to write the Histoire de ma Vie, thought it worth while to fill the best part of two volumes of that work with early reminiscences; and herein surely she judged wisely. Good descriptions of childish experience are rare enough. George Sand gives us a singularly full story of childhood; and, allowing for the fact of its author being a novelist, one may say that this story reads on the whole like a record of memory. That a narrative at once so charming and so pathetic should have been neglected, by English writers at least, can only be set down to the circumstance that it is not clearly marked off from the tediously full account of ancestors which precedes it.332
The early reminiscences of a great man or woman have a special interest. Schopenhauer has ingeniously traced out the essential similarity of the man of genius and the child. Whatever the value of this analogy, it is certain that the gifted child seems not less but more of a child because of his gifts. This is emphatically true of the little lady with whom we are now concerned, and of whom, since we are interested in her on her own account and not merely as the precursor of the great novelist, we shall speak by her rightful name, Aurore Dupin.
The reader need not be told that the child who was to become the representative among modern women of the daring irregularities of genius was an uncommon child. She would certainly have been set down as strange and as deficient in childish traits by a commonplace observer. Yet close inspection shows that the untamed and untamable ‘oddities’ were, after all, only certain common childish impulses and tendencies exalted, or, if the reader prefers, exaggerated. Herein lies the chief value of the story. To this it may be added that this exaggeration of childish sensibility was set in a milieu admirably fitted to stir and strain it to the utmost. It was a motley turbulent world into which little Aurore was unceremoniously pitched, and makes the chronicle of her experience a thrilling romance. And all this experience, it may be said finally, is set down with the untroubled regard and the patient hand of one of the old chroniclers. The forty years had left the memory tenacious and clear to a remarkable degree—in this respect the story will bear comparison with the childish recallings of Goethe and the other famous self-historians; at the same time these years had brought the woman’s power of quiet retrospect and the artist’s habit of calm complacent envisagement. Herein lies a further element of value. The writer feels her identity with the subject of her memoir: she lives over again the passion-storms and ennuis, the reveries and hoydenish freaks of little Aurore; yet she can detach herself from her heroine too, and discuss her and her surroundings with perfect artistic aloofness.
Aurore—or, to give her her full appellation, Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin—was born in 1804. Her father, a distinguished officer of the Empire, was grandson of Maurice de Saxe, natural son of Augustus II., King of Poland. Her mother was a daughter of a Parisian bird-seller, and a true child of the people. The student of heredity may, perhaps, find in this commingling of noble and humble blood a key to much of the wild and bizarre in the child as well as in the later woman. However this may be, it is certain that the disparate alliance gave the sombre and almost tragic hue to the child’s destiny. Through the precious years that should be given over to happy play and dreams, she was to hear the harsh and dismal contention of classes, and hear it, too, in the shape of a bawling strife for the possession of herself.
The first home was a humble lodging in Paris. The father was away. The mother, disdained by the father’s family, had to be hard at work, and the baby had its irregular career foreshadowed by being often handed over to a male nurse, one Pierret, an ugly and quarrelsome though really good-natured creature, whom an accident suddenly made a devoted friend of the small family, faithfully dividing his time between the estaminet and the Dupin ménage.
Beyond a recollection of an accident, a fall against the corner of the chimney-piece, which shock, she tells us, ‘opened my mind to the sense of life,’ the first three years yield no reminiscences. From that date onwards, however, her memory moves without a hitch, and gives us a series of delightful vignette-like pictures of child-life.
Her mother had a fresh, sweet voice, and the first song she sang to Aurore was the nursery rhyme:—
Allons dans la grange
Voir la poule blanche
Qui pond un bel œut d’argent
Pour ce cher petit enfant.
I was vividly impressed [she writes] with that white hen and that silver egg which was promised me every evening, and for which I never thought of asking the next morning. The promise returned always, and the naïve hope returned with it.
The legend of little Father Christmas, a good old man with a white beard, who came down the chimney exactly at midnight and placed a simple present, a red apple or an orange, in her little shoe, excited the infantile imagination to unusual activity.
Midnight, that fantastic hour which children know not, and which we point out to them as the unattainable limit of their wakefulness! What incredible efforts I made not to fall asleep before the appearance of the little old man. 1 had at once a great desire and a great fear to see him; but I could never keep awake.
The love of sound, so strong in children, found an outlet in playing with some brass wirework on the doors of an alcove near her bed.
My special amusement before going to sleep was to run my fingers over the brass network. The little sounds that I drew thence seemed to me a heavenly music, and I used to hear my mother say, “There’s Aurore playing the wirework.”
Her vivid recollection enables her to describe with a sure touch the oddly mixed and capriciously changeful feeling of children towards their dolls and other simulacra of living creatures. She somehow had presented to her a superb Punch, brilliant with gold and scarlet, of whom she was greatly afraid at first, on account of her doll. Before going to bed she securely shut up this last in a cupboard, and laid the brilliant monster on his back on the stove; but her anxieties were not yet over.
I fell asleep very much preoccupied with the manner of existence of this wicked being who was always laughing, and could pursue me with his eyes into all the corners of the room. In the night I had a frightful dream: Punch had got up, his hump had caught on fire on the stove, and he ran about in all directions, chasing now me, now my doll, which fled distractedly. Just as he was overtaking us with long jets of flame, I awoke my mother with my cries.
Her childish way of looking at dolls is thus described in another place:—
I do not remember to have ever believed that my doll was an animated being; nevertheless, I have felt for some of my dolls a real maternal affection.... Children are between the real and the impossible. They need to care for, to scold, to caress, and to break this fetish of a child or animal that is given them for a plaything, and with which they are wrongly accused of growing disgusted too quickly. It is quite natural, on the contrary, that they should grow disgusted with them. In breaking them they protest against the lie.
She only broke those, she adds, that could not stand the test of being undressed, or that proclaimed their unfleshly substance by falling and breaking their noses. The fluctuations of childish feeling in this matter, and the triumph of faith over doubt in the case of a real favourite, are prettily illustrated in a later story of how she parted from her doll when she was going from home on a long journey.
At the moment of setting out I ran to give it a last look, and when Pierret promised to come and make it take soup every morning, I began to fall into a state of doubt, which children are wont to feel respecting the reality of these creatures, a state truly singular, in which nascent reason on one side and the need of illusion on the other combat in their heart greedy of maternal love. I took the two hands of my doll and joined them over its breast. Pierret remarked that this was the attitude of a dead person. Thereupon I raised the hands, still joined, above the head, in the attitude of despair or of invocation. With this I associated a superstitious idea, thinking that it was an appeal to the good fairy, and that the doll would be protected, remaining in this position all the time of my absence.333
The gift of vivid imagination is probably quite as much a torment as a joy to a child, as the story of Punch suggests. Aurore’s finely strung nervous organisation exposed her to a preternatural intensity of fear, and made any clumsy attempt to ‘frighten’ by suggestion of ‘black hole,’ or other childish horror, more than ordinarily cruel. One day she had been with her mother and Pierret on a visit to her aunt. On returning towards the evening she was lazy and wanted the amiable Pierret to carry her. So to spur her on her mother threatened in fun to leave her alone if she did not come on. The child knew it was not meant, and daringly stopped while the others made a feint of moving on. It happened that a little old woman was just then lighting a lamp hard by, and, having overheard the talk, turned to the child and said in a broken voice, ‘Beware of me; it is I who take up the wicked little girls, and I shut them in my lamp all the night’.
It seemed as if the devil had whispered to this good woman the idea that would most terrify me. I do not remember ever experiencing such a terror as she caused me. The lamp, with its glittering reflector, instantly took on fantastic proportions, and I saw myself already shut in this crystal prison consumed by the flame which the Punch in petticoats made to burst forth at her pleasure. I ran towards my mother uttering piercing cries. I heard the old woman laugh, and the grating sound of the lamp as she remounted gave me a nervous shiver.
At bottom Aurore’s nature was a happy one, and if it encountered in the real world the terrors of childhood, it found in the ideal world of fiction its supreme delights. Before she learned to read (about four) she had managed to stock her small brain with an odd jumble of supernatural imagery, the outcome of fairy stories recited to her, and of picture-books setting forth incidents from classical mythology and the lives of the saints; and she soon began to make artistic use of this motley material. Her mother, she tells us, used to shut her within four straw chairs in order to keep her from playing with the fire. She would then amuse herself by pulling out the straws with her hands (she always felt the need of occupying her hands) and composing in a loud voice interminable stories. They were of course modelled on the familiar fairy-tale pattern. The principal characters were a good fairy, a good prince, and a beautiful princess. There were but few wicked beings, and never great misfortunes. ‘All arranged itself under the influence of a thought, smiling and optimistic as childhood.’ These stories, carried on day after day, were the subject of amusing comment. ‘Well, Aurore,’ the aunt used to ask, ‘hasn’t your prince got out of the forest yet?’
To Aurore’s ardent imagination, play, as the story of the doll suggests, was more than the half-hearted make-believe it often is with duller children. She was able to immerse her whole consciousness in the scene, the occupation imagined, so as to lose all account of her actual surroundings. One evening, at dusk, she and her cousin were playing at chasing one another from tree to tree, for which the bed-curtains did duty. The room had disappeared for these little day-dreamers; they were really in a gloomy country at the oncoming of night and when they were called to dinner they heard nothing. Aurore’s mother had finally to carry her to the table, and she could ever after recall the astonishment she felt on seeing the light, the table, and other real objects about her.
Even at this tender age the child came into contact with the large mysterious outer world. At her aunt’s home at Chaillot there was a garden, the one garden she knew, a small square plot, seeming a vast region to Aurore, shut in by walls. At the bottom of this garden, on a green terrace, she and her cousin used to play at fighting battles.
One day we were interrupted in our games by a great commotion outside. There were cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ marchings with quick step, and then retirings, the cries continuing all the while. The emperor was, in fact, passing at some distance, and we heard the tread of the horses and the emotion of the crowd. We could not look over the walls, but the whole thing seemed very beautiful to my fancy, and we cried with all our strength, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ transported by a sympathetic enthusiasm.
She first saw the Emperor in 1807, from the good Pierret’s shoulders, where, being a conspicuous object, she attracted Napoleon’s quick eye. ‘I was, as it were, magnetised for a moment by that clear look, so hard for an instant, and suddenly so benevolent and so sweet.’
The political storm that was then raging on the sea of Europe made itself felt even in the far-off and seemingly sheltered creek of Aurore’s small life. Her father was aide-de-camp to Murat at Madrid, and in 1808 the mother resolved to betake herself to him with her child. It was a singular experience for a girl just completing her fourth year, and the narrative of it is romantic enough. Her imagination was strangely affected by the sight of the great mountains, which seemed to shut them in and to forbid their moving forwards or backwards. Yet she felt no fear at the postillion’s malicious fictions about brigands which quite horrified her mother. In Madrid they found themselves quartered in a large and magnificent palace. The unaccustomed space and splendour at first troubled the child. She was tormented by the huge pictures from which big heads seemed to come out and follow her, and she was further alarmed by a low mirror which gave her the first sight of her whole figure and made her feel how big she was.
Murat was not over well pleased at the arrival of his aide-de-camp’s wife and child, so an attempt was made to propitiate him by decking the little maid in a gay and coquettish uniform. The child, who was no coquette, seems to have cared but little for this performance, though she soon began to find amusement in her new sumptuous dwelling.
As soon as I found myself alone in this large room I placed myself before the low glass, and I tried some theatrical poses. Then I took my white rabbit, and tried to force it to do likewise; or rather I pretended to offer it as a sacrifice to the gods, using a footstool as altar.... I had not the least feeling of coquetry; my pleasure came from the make-believe that I was playing in a quartette scene in which were two little girls and two rabbits. The rabbit and I addressed, in pantomime, salutations, threats, and prayers to the personages of the mirror, and we danced the bolero with them.
It was at Madrid that she first made acquaintance with one of Nature’s most fascinating mysteries, the echo.
I studied this phenomenon with an extreme pleasure. What struck me as most strange was to hear my own name repeated by my own voice. Then there occurred to me an odd explanation. I thought that I was double, and that there was round about me another “I” whom I could not see, but who always saw me, since he always answered me.
She then combined with this strange phenomenon another, viz., the red and blue balls (ocular spectra) that she got into her eyes after looking at the golden globe of a church glittering against the sky, and so found her way to a theory that everything had its double—a theory which, Mr. Tylor and others tell us, was excogitated in very much the same way by uncivilised man. She spent days in trying to get sight of her double. Her mother, who one day surprised her in this search, told her it was echo, ‘the voice in the air!’
This voice in the air no longer astonished me, but it still charmed me. I was satisfied at being able to name it, and to call to it, ‘Echo, are you there? Don’t you hear me? Good-day, Echo!’334
The next event of deep import for Aurore was the sudden death of her father by a fall from his horse, which occurred in the autumn of the same year. The first visit of the King of Terrors to a home has been a black landmark in many a child’s life. Aurore was at first ‘annihilated’ by excess of grief and fear, for, as she says, ‘childhood has not the strength to suffer’. The days that immediately followed the bringing in of the lifeless body were passed in a sort of stupor. Clear recollection dates only from the moment when she was to be clad in the conventional black.
The black made a strong impression on me. I cried in submitting to it; for though I had worn the black dress and veil of the Spaniards, I had certainly never put on black stockings, and the stockings frightened me terribly. I would have it that they were putting on me the legs of death, and my mother had to show me that she wore them also.335
The father’s death brought a profound change into the child’s life. The despised mother had already been recognised by the paternal grandmother, and a certain advance made towards a show of amity. Visits were paid to the grandmother’s château at Nohant, and it was, in fact, when they were staying there that the fatal accident occurred.
The common loss drew the two women together for a time, but the contrasts of temperament and of education were too powerful, and the jealousy which had first directed itself to the father now found a new object in his talented child. She has given us more than one excellent description of mother and grandmother. The latter, a blonde with white and red complexion, imposing air, always dressed in a brown silk robe and a white wig frizzled in front, was grave and quiet, ‘a veritable Saxon,’ a friend of the ancien régime, a disciple of Voltaire and Rousseau, albeit a stickler for the conventionalities of high life. The mother was a brunette, of an ardent temperament, endowed with considerable talent, yet timid and awkward before grand folk, a Spanish nature, jealous and passionate, a true democrat withal, and a worshipper of the Emperor. The problem of dividing poor little Aurore between two such women, habiting two distinct worlds, would have baffled Solomon himself. The grandmother insisted on the advantages of bringing up the child as a lady, and the mother, after a hard struggle, relinquished her claims, the girl being handed over to the grandmother and transported into the new world of Nohant.
The story of this struggle, which tore the heart of Aurore as much as that of her mother, is a tragedy of child-life. Aurore’s instincts bound her to her mother. She implored her not to give her up for money—she understood she was to be the richer for the change. She was beside herself with joy when her grandmother allowed her to visit the maternal home, and she has given us a charming account of these visits. The rooms were poor and ugly enough by the side of her grandmother’s salons; yet—
How good my mother seemed, how amiable my sister, how droll and agreeable my friend Pierret! I could not stop repeating, ‘I am here at home: down there I am at the house of my grandmother’. ‘Zounds!’ said Pierret; ‘don’t let her go and say chez nous before Madame Dupin. She would reproach us with teaching her to talk as they do aux-z-halles!’ And then Pierret would burst out into a fit of laughter, for he was ready to laugh at anything, and my mother made fun of him, and I cried out, ‘How we are enjoying ourselves at home!’
When she found that she was to live at Nohant she was beside herself with grief, and implored her mother to take her away, and to let her join her in some business enterprise. The mother seemed at first to yield to these entreaties; but the barriers of rank proved to be inexorable, and would not let the little orphan pass. The narrative of the final departure of the mother from Nohant is deeply pathetic. It was the eve of the parting: and the child resolved to write a letter to her mother in which for the last time she poured out her passionate love and her implorings to be taken with her. But the house was sentinelled with hostile maids, and how to get the letter to its destination? At last, lover-like, she bethought her of putting it behind a portrait of her grandfather in her mother’s room. To make sure of her finding it, she hung her nightcap on the picture, writing on it in pencil ‘Shake the portrait!’ The mother came, but a provoking maid stayed a long half-hour with her. Aurore dared not move. Then, having waited another half-hour for the maid to fall asleep, she crept to her mother, whom she found reading the letter and weeping. She pressed her child to her heart, but would listen to no more proposals of flight from Nohant.
I cried no more—I had no more tears; and I began to suffer from a trouble more profound and lacerating than absence. I said to myself, ‘My mother does not love me as much as I love her’.
In the distraction of her grief she resolved that if it was unbearable she would walk to Paris and rejoin her mother; and, with characteristic inventiveness, thought out, by help of her fairy stories, how she would avoid the anguish of begging by disposing of some precious trinkets.
But the grief, like many another that looks crushing at first, proved not unbearable. In time the child learnt to take kindly to her new home, and even to love the stately and severe-looking grandmamma.