The Last Love of George Sand by Evelyne Bloch-Dano

Author:Evelyne Bloch-Dano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2013-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

“MY SOUL HAS GROWN OLD AND WEARY”

The coincidence between Nini’s passing and the completion of Story of My Life was striking. The last words were addressed to the little girl, who was joined together in the same thought with George’s, her friend Marie Dorval’s grandson whose disappearance ended in death. Penned between two painful events, two fractures—the falling out with her daughter in 1847 and Jeanne’s death—these memoirs provided George Sand with an opportunity for introspection. She created a character of herself in this fiction. By ending the story of [her] life, she marked the beginning of a period of time off, toying with the idea of an after. Besides the conclusion, written in June 1855, as she returned from Italy, Story of My Life came just before the long stretch of shock, silence, and creative paralysis that seized her after the death of her “beloved child.” The girl had revived a part of what the woman had been, and her living memory was recorded in ink while the woman felt a part of herself become erased.

Italy had restored George to health. She had recovered her physical energy. She seemed happy. But only a few weeks had passed since her mourning period. The house in Nohant was still haunted by memories of the child, and she couldn’t stand it. The months following her return would offer up scattered image after rippled image, trying to shake her life up enough to prevent the weight of her sadness from settling heavy on her shoulders. She only spoke of Nini with Manceau, who “had also been mad about her,” and still not enough to make him sad, too. “My soul has grown old and weary in a year,” she observed.244

As soon as summer ended, George and Alexandre were off to Paris again for the performances of Master Favilla at the Odéon. It was a mediocre play, as the ones that followed would be, stuffed with feel-good moments. It seemed to have more in common with Diderot’s maudlin drama than with contemporary theater, even though it had been inspired by Hoffmann. They only stayed a dozen days, but returned to the capital in November for the entire winter. They wouldn’t return to Nohant until the end of April 1856, in spring. Theater was once again their excuse for the long stay in Paris, as Sand was required at rehearsals for many of her plays. But nothing would go down in theatrical history: not Lucie or Françoise, both performed at the Gymnase; not her adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It at the Théâtre-Français, the first of the English playwright’s works adopted by the Comédie-Française; and not the revival of Mauprat, either. The audiences were equally underwhelmed.

Still, she loved the theater passionately and felt drawn to it like “a magnet.”245 She was crazy about the actors and actresses, who made up her inner circle for those months. Perhaps she was drawn to them because they were the opposite of her taciturn nature, dragging her out from under her usual melancholy.

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