George Sand & Her Lovers

This woman from the past, I would have literally loved to have had as a patient!  She never would have given me a chance though because she only valued men above women.  From cross dressing to multiple scandalous affairs , she was completely unconventional for her time.  She is just an astonishing complex personality to read about and compose a case study.

Let me set the stage of time for George, her pen name, who was born Amadine  Aurore Lucie Dupin in Paris in 1804.  It had been only a few years since the French revolution.  Her father was a handsome aristocrat and her mother working class, said to be the granddaughter of a bird seller in Paris, where the market still exists today.

Her parents married just before her birth.  Her paternal grandmother tried in every way to find laws to make it illegal due to her son’s dubious choice of a woman who they say was rough, vulgar and had no graces about her.

Her father who served in Napoleon’s army died in a  accident when Aurore was 4.  With the death of her father she became more under the care of her devoted aristocratic grandmother and lived in their stately mansion in central France, where one can still visit today.

The grandmother had already lived through the French revolution and had even been imprisoned for hiding family jewels.  She  was strongly opinionated about Aurore’s upbringing and determined not to let granddaughter succumb to the lowly ways of the mother.

The mother eventually left Aurore to return to Paris when she was around 10, which had profound consequences upon her psyche as you can imagine.   So by such a tender age our heroine who had already suffered the loss of her father, now had been abandoned to the total care of  her dominating grandmother.

At age 13 she was sent to a prominent convent in Paris.  She would write later that it was there that she finally found kind maternal care from the nuns and the stability  and peace she craved.

In 1822 at the age of 18 she married a wealthy baron and shortly after gave birth to her son Maurice.   Her daughter Solange came later and was rumored to have had a different father. She eventually left Casimir  Dudevant and like her own mother she left her two children to the care of her grandmother and headed to Paris to pursue her writing career.

She often dressed in men’s clothes and took up smoking cigars!  She knew that only men were actually engaged as journalists and writers, and her disguises paid off with being hired to write for Le Figaro, still in print today.   She assumed the pen name of George Sand in effort to publish and sell, as only men were regarded worthy of writing novels.

Her bohemian lifestyle was shocking to the mores of what was expected of women of her class, but George nevertheless swam in social circles of accomplished artists of her day.  Alexander Dumas ,Balzac and Victor Hugo, and later Gustave Flaubert were all friends.  She did not really have women friends, preferring exclusively men, who she considered to be much more interesting and intelligent.  An exception to this was her strong admiration of an actress Marie Dorval, that some hint as lesbian desires.

While still married but separated she took up with a young man named Jules Sandeau but quickly tired of him, and fell in love with Alfred de Musset.   He was said to have been very enamoured of her and she of him.

She and Alfred then took off  to sejour in Venise, where  he developed what sounded like delirium tremors .  A Doctor Pagello was called to treat poor Alfred, but before long George ended up in the arms of his doctor, which sent Alfred back to Paris brokenhearted.

More scandalous love affairs ensued, including a quick dalliance with the painter Delacroix and Prosper Merimee.    By this time she had become a focus of gossip in Parisian society.  She started separation procedures against her estranged husband, M. Dudevant procuring a lawyer Michel de Bourges who won her a separation with monetary compensation.  Her appreciation had no boundaries with men, and even he became another brief lover.

In 1836 at the home of Franz Liszt, dressed in her typical masculine attire, she met the pianist composer Frederic Chopin.  He was said to ask in astonishment  “is she really a girl?” George nevertheless succeeded in seducing him .  Initially lovers, their relationship became more of a mother son existence with George nursing poor Chopin through his chronic respiratory disease.  Some said it tuberculosis, but  I go with other theories that is was a form of cystic fibrosis, since neither George nor her children never caught TB, which is quite infectious.

Chopin was able to bring out the only feminine characteristic she valued and allowed herself to have; maternalism.  She is credited for keeping him alive and encouraging him to compose and give concerts which he supposedly hated.   She would refer to him as her “patient”.   Chopin’ s personality was difficult, and their relationship was often turbulent,  but he formed a paternal alliance with George’s children who he seemed to nurture more than she.  They  divided their time between her mansion in the country and Paris.

It was exactly his warm alliance with her daughter Solange, who was rebellious and difficult to manage that caused them to abruptly break up.  Against her mother’s wishes Solange married a young man beneath her class.   When George  heard that Chopin had enabled Solange  to arrange to use his carriage, that she had previously denied, there was a huge blowup.  She had his belongings removed and promptly severed all contact up until Chopin’s death the following year.

We all have to deal with whatever life throws our way during childhood and George’s life is a fascinating study of the consequence of parental abandonment.  Looking at her string of lovers that never lasted very long except that of Chopin, she like so many other women abandoned by fathers, she had deep-seated intimacy fears camouflaged with oversexualiztion.

An unusual twist is that George’ over idealization of men resulted in her internalizing her deceased father into a created image of herself.  Perhaps in her psyche that was her way of keeping him alive.  Freud would have  probably labeled her with penis envy, since his theories were all so genital focused.  Of course it was only men’s power and recognition that she craved, not adoption of their genitals.

From her mother’s abandonment, she suffered a lifelong repulsion and distrust of feminine attributes of the day.  I see that distrust often today in women who have been deprived of maternal love .   Like George they often prefer the company of men and disavow women.

Another characteristic George flagrantly displayed was the inability to mother with warmth her own daughter Solange ,who later wrote of this suffering and deprivation she endured.  George only felt safe mothering her son and men, though she would be more available to Chopin than her own Maurice.

Her autobiography makes for a fascinating read and she starts out saying that “to know me , was to know my father”  And in that aspect she was very succesful in adopting his persona as her own. Sadly her conflictual relationship with her daughter remained so  till her death.  Unfortunately she had recreated the same maternal abandonment that she endured.

George Sand as a writer is very acclaimed. She was one the first to breakthrough conventual male domination in publishing .  Victor Hugo and Dumas gave her rave reviews.   She was certainly talented and leaves us with many wonderful novels, but for me I find her personality and the course of her life more astonishing and real.