SOURCE: "Articulating an Ars Poetica," in George Sand: Writing for Her Life, Rutgers University Press, 1991, pp. 221-41.

[In the following extract, Naginski argues that although Sand's contemporaries did not always see her as a serious writer, Sand had a well-developed and clearly articulated poetics, which emphasized the ideal over the real and the rural over the urban and which was founded upon an androgynous vision that revolted against socially sanctioned gender inequality.]

The great French writers of the Romantic generation—Hugo, Balzac, Michelet, Dumas—had at least one trait in common: the immensity of their literary output. The "vast nineteenth century," as Hugo called it, created a myth of the Gargantuan male writer, whose voluminous creation was synonymous with the greatness of his inspiration and the magnitude of his writing. To these Frenchmen, "ces formidables bûcherons" ("those masterful woodcutters") to use André Fermigier's words in his excellent preface to François le champi,¹ we could add other nineteenth-century European writers—George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Henry James, Anthony Trollope. More than merely the consequence of what has come to be defined as the economics of serialization, their sheer productivity is above all a sign of the exuberance of their century.

Significantly, the very element that marks the greatness of Balzac, the "forçat" condemned to the hard labor of the Comédie humaine, or is equated with virility in Hugo, that "force of nature [which] has the sap of trees in his blood,"² as Flaubert called him, has all too often been offered as a sign of failure in the case of George Sand. Her critics have repeatedly refused to see her astounding productivity as a virtue.³ Instead her voluminous output is educed to refute her genius, and to deny the seriousness of her writing. In spite of Sand's own comments regarding her staggering capacity for literary work, comments that have largely been ignored, clichés concerning her oeuvre still tend to equate her facility of style with artlessness. The same metaphor of the literary "forçat" applied to Balzac and others can also be found in Sand's writings, as Francine Mallet notes, citing the following images: "un âne," "un pauvre âne," "une bête," "un nègre," "un vieux nègre," "un boeuf du Berry," "un manoeuvre," "un esclave," "un galérien," "un cheval de pressoir" ("a donkey," "a poor donkey," "a beast of burden," "a Negro," "an old Negro," "an ox from the Berry," "a laborer," "a slave," "a galley slave," "a workhorse").⁴ In sharp contrast to the resolutely masculine references with which Sand alludes to her craft, critics have preferred to substitute derogatory feminine images of creativity. Noble potency in Balzac or in Hugo is transmuted as bovine fecundity in Sand. The virile ox is metamorphosed into a common cow. Sand as the milking cow of literature certainly constitutes a negative version of the Gargantuan myth of the writer. Nietzsche called her "that terrible writing cow," Jules Renard "the milk cow of literature" ("la vache bretonne de la littérature").⁵ Sand's literary production is identified with lactic fluids; her creative mind reduced to a milk-producing organ. If both male myth and female antimyth highlight the phenomenon of writing facility, the former sees in it a true sign of inspiration, divine or at the very least cerebral; the latter associates it with an uncontrollable and slightly repulsive natural body function.

Théophile Gautier expanded on the idea of lack of control in the very process of Sand's writing. He saw her as a kind of monster whose presence unwittingly generated alarming mounds of paper: "She cannot sit down in a room without there popping up quill pens, blue ink, cigarette paper, Turkish tobacco, and lined writing paper."⁶ Yet the comic vignette conjured up by Gautier does not do justice to Sand's attested dedication to her craft, a dedication voiced with particular intensity throughout the correspondence. As early as 1831, in a letter to Jules Boucoiran, she describes writing as a "violent and almost indestructible" vocation: "my existence is from now on filled with purpose. I have a goal, a task . . . a passion" (Corr., 1:817-818). In 1846 she complains to Pauline Viardot of being "clouée à mon encrier de 7 heures du matin à 5 heures du soir" ("chained to my inkwell from 7 A.M. till 5 P.M."; 3 June 1846; Corr., 7:369). In 1851 she repeats "I am working, I am working day and night" (Corr., 10:381). And the hours pay off: ten chapters of Consuelo in eleven days, La Mare au diable finished in four nights;⁷ the mammoth Histoire de ma vie composed in record time. In the memoirs we find the same refrain: "For several years, I allowed myself only four hours of sleep. .. . I fought against atrocious migraines to the point of fainting over my work" (HV, 2:406). But the critical discourse has paid little attention to statements such as these, preferring to describe her writing as an irrepressible, almost physical need. The young Flaubert represents this school of thought in an obscene comment he made to Louise Colet. This was years before he met and came to admire Sand in 1866. Not only did he suggest that Colet could reach the height of her talent only by shedding her gender, but he used Sand as a countermodel: "her writing oozes, and the idea seeps out between the words as from between flabby thighs"⁸ (16 Nov. 1852). In our time, the malicious Guillemin has also gone beyond the boundaries of decency when he discusses Sand's style:

George Sand's style crushes me. .. . I experience a physical repugnance before this outpouring . . . waves and waves of dirty water pushing along . . . handfuls of big words; the whole reminding me much less of the gushing of a mountain torrent than the unstoppable overflow of a septic tank.⁹

Baudelaire's misogynist evaluation of Sand's style emphasizes what he calls her "style coulant" ("flowing style") which is "dear to the bourgeois." Interestingly, the liquid metaphor is counterbalanced by another, since in his opinion only holy water can exorcize the unholy flow of "that woman Sand":

. . . she is stupid, clumsy, she babbles; she has the same profundity in her opinions on moral issues and the same delicacy of feeling as a concierge or a courtisan. . . . She is above all . . . a stupid goose. .. . I cannot think of this stupid creature without a shiver of horror. If I were to meet her, I would not be able to stop myself from emptying a font of holy water on her head.¹⁰

The derogatory myth of Sand's writing, then, incorporates three major points of attack. The first is its very liquidity, metonymized by milk or murky water. The second is the dubious nature of this liquid, seen as the very antithesis of pure spring water, that standard image for a divinely inspired prose or poetry. The third is the uncontrollable nature of the writing which emerges without shape or style.

No doubt Sand herself contributed to her own myth. She seemed to enjoy the pretense of dashing things off and made it a point to appear as if she did not take her writing occupation very seriously. Was this modesty or a certain understated elegance? In a letter to Charles Duvernet, for instance, she explained that she really wrote for the money it provided: "For me . . . the writer's trade is an income of three thousand pounds" (Corr., 2:88). She seemed amused by the idea that her writing was just another domestic task: "Ce ne sont pas . . . les travaux de l'esprit qui me fatiguent," she writes to her friend Emile Regnault on 13 August 1832. "J'y suis tellement habituée à présent que j'écris avec autant de facilité que je ferais un ourlet" (Corr., 2:135-136; "It is not the . . . mental exertion that tires me out. I am so used to it now that I write as easily as I would sew a hem"). Rather than taking her statements at face value, I detect an underhanded form of bravado in them, which is remarkable in such a young writer (after all, she had only just finished Indiana when she wrote this). Her remark highlights her painless entrance into the literary cénacle and reinforces our sense that, already as a young novice, she had mastered her craft and internalized its exigencies so that the discipline of composing for hours on end had become second nature.

This attitude of apparent frivolity toward her work only intensified with the passing of time. During the composition of Histoire de ma vie, Sand continued to further her own myth by insisting that she ascribed so little weight to her own literary output that she actually forgot what she had written:

cet oubli où mon cerveau enterre immédiatement les produits de mon travail n'a fait que croître et embellir. Si je n'avais pas mes ouvrages sur un rayon, j'oublierais jusqu'à leur titre. .. . On peut me lire un demi-volume de certains romans que je n'ai pas eu à revoir en épreuves depuis quelques semaines sans que .. . je devine qu'ils sont de moi.

(Histoire de ma vie, in Oeuvres autobiographiques, ed. Lubin, 2:168)

(This forgetting where my brain immediately buries what it has produced has only intensified with time. If I did not have my works on a shelf, I would forget even their titles. . . . You can read me half a volume of some novels I have not had to revise in proof for several weeks . . . without my realizing that they are by me.)

As late as 1867, in a letter to Flaubert, she insisted: "Consuelo, La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, qu'est-ce que c'est que ça? Est-ce que c'est de moi? Je ne m'en rappelle pas un traître mot" "Consuelo, La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, what is that? Is it by me? I do not remember one blessed word of it").¹¹ She also maintained that she never revised: "Excepté un ou deux [livres] je n'ai jamais pu rien y refaire" ("Except for one or two [books], I have never been able to rewrite anything"; HV, 2:168). That Sand deliberately misrepresents her case is made clear in Georges Lubin's lucid commentary to Histoire de ma vie where he notes that many of Sand's novels were written twice, sometimes in radically different versions (Indiana, Leone Leoni, Mauprat, and Spiridion) and that at times she totally reworked her text (Lettres d'un voyageur and, as we know, Lélia are striking examples).¹²

Why, we may wonder, did Sand enjoy misrepresenting and damaging her case? A possible answer lies in a letter she wrote to the critic Fortoul in 1835, just after he had published a laudatory article about Lélia in Le Droit:

les chemins des vallées et les fleurs des montagnes ont plus d'attrait que toute la littérature du monde, et il faut avoir divorcé avec la nature pour se vouer exclusivement à la muse. .. . Il y a, sur cette terre, mille choses qui valent mieux, la maternité, l'amour, l'amitié, le beau temps, les chats et mille autres choses encore.

(late Dec. 1836; Correspondance, ed. G. Lubin, 3:196)

(the paths of the valleys and the wild flowers of the mountains are more appealing than all the literature in the world, and one has to be divorced from nature in order to devote oneself exclusively to the muse. . . . There are on this earth, so many more worthy things: motherhood, love, friendship, fine weather, cats, and a thousand other things.)

Sand seems to be articulating her firm sense of priorities here. Unlike Flaubert, she was never willing to remove herself from life so as to devote all of her energies to art. Sand, for her part, claimed never to have "buried" herself in literature.¹³ In opposition to Flaubert, whom she describes as "confiné dans la solitude en artiste enragé, dédaigneux de tous les plaisirs de ce monde" ("confined in the solitude of a frenzied artist, disdainful of all the pleasures of this world"),¹⁴ she insisted on maintaining an equilibrium between the delights of the world and the exigencies of her art (which she spelled with a small a, in opposition to Flaubert's capitalization). When she compared her art to the sewing of a hem, she was not so much reducing the artistic to the domestic as attempting to incorporate it into a vital and rich system in which the values of life were praised, its exuberant flow accepted generously and enjoyed. Not only had she integrated life and art in her massive ten-volume Histoire de ma vie, she could not absent herself from her milieu. In the 1851 preface to her complete works, for example, she firmly stated: "Quel est donc l'artiste qui peut s'abstraire des choses divines et humaines, se passer du reflet des croyances de son époque, et vivre étranger au milieu où il respire?" ("What kind of artist can distance him- or herself from divine and human affairs, pay no heed to the aura of beliefs which the period has articulated, and live estranged from the milieu in which he or she lives?")¹⁵ This affirmation of integrating one's writing career into a harmonious whole is a reiterated Sandian principle.

In addition, there is much material in Sand's works themselves to disclaim her own statements. A set of coherent and deeply thought-out reflections on her art can be extracted from a number of texts. Through a careful study of documents relating to the formulation of an ars poetica, the reader becomes firmly convinced that Sand articulated the guidelines for a genuine "prosaics" of the novel. It was not always in agreement with the fashion of the time, and often at a significant remove from what today we so narrowly call nineteenth-century Realism. It corresponded instead to a personal cri du coeur and posited the author's responsibility to both the reader and the social order. Sand displayed a fundamentally dialogic attitude vis-à-vis her sphere of readers. Her considerable attention to her lecteur or lectrice is a sign of her propensity to see in the act of writing a turning outward. Very little of her output was wittingly destined for the drawer. And so the ideal reader occupies a prominent place in her fictional universe—witness the numerous cases of direct address in the novels ("madame la lectrice," Consuelo; "messieurs," Lettres d'un voyageur; "lecteur bénévole," Indiana, orig. ed.; "vous," Horace) and outside the novelistic frame itself (the large number of prefaces).

Furthermore, the evidence of genuine reflection on art in Sand's works is extensive and compelling. Over thirty prefaces to her novels; numerous reflections on her craft in her autobiographical works, both Histoire de ma vie and Lettres d'un voyageur; numerous critical articles about her fellow-writers; a rich correspondence with many of her literary contemporaries in which she does not shy away from discussions of literature and its aims, as the letters to Latouche, Balzac, Fromentin, and Hugo, for example, attest.¹⁶ Her correspondence with Flaubert especially gives the reader a privileged entrance into the novelist's "creative laboratory." Sand took literature seriously but she never used it as a pretext to take herself seriously. As a result, there is never the slightest hint of pomposity or self-satisfaction in any of her literary discussions.

La Mare au diable

One of the fundamental principles of Sand's poetics, already discussed in Chapter 2, is the principle of a spatial imagination, representative of what Albert Sonnenfeld has called "a vision-crazed nineteenth century." The "Notice"¹⁷ and the first two chapters of La mare au diable perhaps constitute the clearest synopsis of Sand's ars poetica in miniature. This text, written in four nights at the end of September 1845, was first published two months later in Leroux's Revue sociale. The simple and slender story, for all its delicate charm, takes on full meaning only when considered in relation to the critical and scholarly metatexts surrounding the core plot. The beginning pages are made up of a "Notice," a first chapter entitled "L'Auteur au lecteur" ("From the Author to the Reader"), and a second chapter "Le Labour" ("Plowing"). The end of the story is rounded out by a four-chapter appendix entitled "Les Noces de campagne" ("A Country Wedding"). The beginning betrays an aesthetic preoccupation just as the ending demonstrates Sand's ethnographic or sociological concerns. Both metatexts, which are situated in the margins of the actual plot, employ similar novelistic devices. The characters remain anonymous for the most part. Chapter 2 describes an "old laborer," "a young man," "a child six or seven years old," who in the actual story will come to be identified as Père Maurice, Germain, and Petit Pierre. The participants in the peasant wedding (of Germain and Marie), described in the appendix, tend to be defined by their function rather than by their name. The dialogue between the two anonymous peasant-poets—the "fossoyeur" (the gravedigger) and the "chanvreur" (the hemp-dresser)—is characteristic in this respect. Furthermore, both metatexts are situated outside history, as well as outside the narrative. Time is portrayed as primitive and cyclical, marked only by the passing of seasons and annual festivities. The laborer's circular vision of time constitutes an agricultural chronotope, where the passage of time is divided up by natural cycles and by the modest festivities of a peasant society—weddings, baptisms, funerals, and religious holidays. Significantly, the beginning of La Mare au diable deploys a specific moment in the agricultural cycle, the plowing of the fields in readiness for planting, while the appendix lingers on the festivities surrounding the wedding feast. Thus a locus—the pastoral landscape—and a class—the peasantry—are privileged. Both figure as exceptions in the predominantly urban and middle-class novel of the nineteenth century. Although in the "Notice" Sand denies any attempt on her part to depict a new subject matter or to propose a new novelistic chronotope—"Je n'ai voulu ni faire une nouvelle langue, ni me chercher une nouvelle maniè e" (La Mare, 27; "I never wanted either to fashion a new language, or to forge for myself a new style")—this is precisely what she does.

Lazarus's Dung Heap

Leaving the appendix to the sociologists, I want to concentrate on the critical texts of the beginning. The epigraph, a quatrain in old French, is the somber commentary to a woodcut by Holbein the younger from the series entitled Les Simulachres de la mort (The Dance of Death). The woodcut of "Le Laboureur," which Sand describes in detail in the incipit, constitutes plate 38 in Holbein's series:

La gravure représente un laboureur conduisant sa charrue au milieu d'un champ. Une vaste campagne s'étend au loin, on y voit de pauvres cabanes; le soleil se couche derrière la colline. C'est la fin d'une rude journée de travail. Le paysan est vieux, trapu, couvert de haillons. L'attelage de quatre chevaux qu'il pousse en avant est maigre, exténué; le soc s'enfonce dans un fonds raboteux et rebelle. Un seul être est allègre et ingambe dans cette scène de sueur et usaige. C'est un personnage fantastique, un squelette armé d'un fouet, qui court dans le sillon à côté des chevaux effrayés et les frappe, servant ainsi de valet de charrue au vieux laboureur. C'est la mort . . .

(La Mare, 29-30)

(The engraving represents a laborer steering his plow in the middle of a field. A vast countryside stretches out in the distance, dotted by modest cottages; the sun is setting behind the hill. It is the end of a hard day's work. The peasant is old, thick-set, dressed in tatters. The team of four horses he drives in front of him is thin, wornout. The plowshare catches the coarse and obdurate ground. One single being is lightfooted and carefree in this scene of sweat and toil. He is a spectral character, a skeleton armed with a whip, who is running in the furrow next to the frightened horses and whipping them, thereby playing the plowboy to the old plowman. He is death . . . )

She continues to ponder on Holbein's woodcuts, remarking that the figure of death is absent¹⁸ only in the one illustrating the parable from Luke about a rich man and a beggar named Lazarus. This woodcut (no. 47) shows him, as she puts it, lying "on a dung heap" at the rich man's door.¹⁹ Although this is a standard iconographic representation of Lazarus (as it is of Job), this image of the dung heap becomes under Sand's pen a metaphor for a certain kind of contemporary writing, the first element in what will constitute for her an opposition of two different kinds of fictional representation. The series of woodcuts taken together, Sand tells us, constitutes "the painful satire, the true painting of the society that Holbein had before his eyes" (La Mare, 30-31). With this pivotal remark Sand turns to concentrate on the present epoch and its representational repertoire: "Mais nous, artistes d'un autre siècle, que peindrons-nous? Chercherons-nous dans la pensée de la mort la rémunération de l'humanité présente?" (La Mare, 31; "But we, artists of another century, what will we paint? Will we look for the recompense of contemporary humanity in the meditation of death?") Holbein's woodcut, with its dystopian vision of the world, is used here as an exemplification of certain modern tendencies in art. Some of her contemporaries continue to depict reality through the prism of gloom and decay, and she finds their vision to be wanting: "Certains artistes de notre temps, jetant un regard sérieux sur ce qui les entoure, s'attachent à peindre la douleur, l'abjection de la misère, le fumier de Lazare" (emphasis added; La Mare, 31; "Certain artists of our time, taking a serious look at what surrounds them, dedicate themselves to painting the pain, the wretchedness of poverty, the dung heap of Lazarus").

To counteract this literature of gloom, she proposes a "utopian" vision of literature which denounces the perverse enjoyment of those writers who linger on the misery of Lazarus (Eugène Sue is Sand's main unnamed target). The laborer must no longer be seen through Holbein's eyes as eeking out an existence on the brink of starvation and despair, but must be depicted as an optimistic and productive contributor to the social good. I use the term Utopian in the Baudelairian sense of the absolute power of poetry to put the world on its head. In L 'Art romantique, he had praised the power of literature to "contradict the fact":

The destiny of poetry is a great one! Joyous or painful, it always bears within it the divine utopian character. It endlessly contradicts fact. .. . In the prison cell, it becomes a revolt; at the hospital window, it is the ardent hope of cure; in the broken-down and dirty attic room, it decks itself out, like a fairy, with luxury and elegance; not only does it take notice, it repairs. Everywhere it makes itself the negation of iniquity.²⁰

In keeping with Baudelaire's call for literature to transform claustration into liberation and illness into health, Sand proclaims the necessity for Lazarus to get off his dung heap. The will to life must overcome the death instinct so often expressed in modern literature:

nous n'avons plus affaire à la mort, mais à la vie. .. . Il faut que Lazare quitte son fumier, afin que le pauvre ne se réjouisse plus de la mort du riche. Il faut que tous soient heureux, afin que le bonheur de quelques-uns ne soit pas criminel et maudit de Dieu. Il faut que le laboureur, en semant son blé, sache qu'il travaille à l'oeuvre de vie, et non qu'il se réjouisse de ce que la mort marche à ses côtés.

(La Mare, 31)

(we are no longer dealing with death but with life. . . . Lazarus must leave his dung heap, so that the poor man no longer rejoices in the rich man's death. Everyone must be happy, so that the happiness of some is not criminal and accursed by God. The plowman must know, when sowing his wheat, that he is contributing to the work of life, and not rejoice that death is walking at his side.)

Counteracting the realists' tendency to insist on the ugly, repugnant, filthy aspects of life, Sand proposes the eudaemonistic mission of art, and its duty to construct the Utopian possibilities of the future. Here, unlike Baudelaire, Sand is not merely content to identify the utopian powers of literature which separate it from real life, she wants literature's direct impact on the quotidian, its aid in bringing about the metamorphosis of society. As her vision parts ways with Baudelairian art for art's sake, Sand pronounces her now famous literary credo:

Nous croyons que la mission de l'art est une mission de sentiment et d'amour, que le roman d'aujourd'hui devrait remplacer la parabole et l'apologue des temps naïfs, et que l'artiste a une tâche plus large et plus poétique que celle de proposer quelques mesures de prudence et de conciliation pour atténuer l'effroi qu'inspirent ses peintures. Son but devrait être de faire aimer les objets de sa sollicitude, et au besoin, je ne lui ferais pas un reproche de les embellir un peu.

(La Mare, 33)

(We believe that the mission of art is one of feeling and of love, that the novel of today should replace the parable and the fable of a more primitive time, and that artists have a broader and more poetic task than that of proposing prudent and conciliatory measures to attenuate the fright that their paintings elicit. Their goal should be to inspire love for the objects of their concern, and if pressed, I would not reproach the artists for embellishing them a little.)

The allowance for embellishment, just like the allowance for simplifying, is not purely in the service of making art more attractive or more accessible. Both are deliberate stratagems in the author's determination to give a meaning to literary representations beyond the narrowly aesthetic, above the purely entertaining. Literature for Sand is not only for the consumption of other poets; it must also inspire generalized audiences to visualize better worlds, to conjure up the Utopian parameters of future societies. It is in this light that her famous line—"l'art n'est pas une étude de la réalité positive; c'est une recherche de la vérité idéale" (La Mare, 33; "art is not a study of positive reality; it is a search for the ideal truth")—must be understood. For Sand art is not pure escape or reversal of reality, as it is in Baudelaire's quote, nor is it the systematic search for the most despicable aspects of life as it is for certain contemporary novelists. It is the quest for a language that can elevate its readers temporarily and inspire them, as they return to their daily round, to put the vision into action.

The Fertile Furrow

Having stated her position, Sand sets out to illustrate her point in the following chapter. "Le Labour" represents a putting into action of her theory of literature's quest for "ideal truth." The narrator is transformed from a theoretician to a promeneur. The masculine "I" has just put the Holbein woodcut aside and is now strolling in the fields, meditating on the implications of the German artist's message. Putting in opposition what Sand calls "the man of leisure," who has both the education and the free time to write but lacks the poetic inclination, and "the man of the fields," who has neither the time nor the ability to write, in spite of the poetic atmosphere surrounding him, the narrator remarks:

le plus heureux des hommes serait celui qui, possédant la science de son labeur, et travaillant de ses mains, puisant le bien-être et la liberté dans l'exercice de sa force intelligente, aurait le temps de vivre par le coeur et par le cerveau, de comprendre son oeuvre et d'aimer celle de Dieu.

(La Mare, 36)

(He would be the happiest of men who, possessing the knowledge of his labor, and working with his hands, deriving well-being and freedom from the exertion of his intelligent strength, would have the time to live according to his heart and his head, to understand his work and to love the work of God.)

Sand's dream here is to establish a harmony between manual labor and poetic toil, between the laborer's privileged knowledge of life and the artist's deep understanding. In this Utopian view of the writer, such a "holy harmony" would ensure the substitution of life for death: "au lieu de la piteuse et affreuse mort, marchant dans son sillon, le peintre d'allégories pourrait placer à ses côtés un ange radieux, semant à pleines mains le blé béni sur le sillon fumant" (La Mare, 36-37; "instead of pitiful and horrible death, walking in his furrow, the allegorical painter could place at the laborer's side a radiant angel, sowing with both hands the blessed wheat onto the steaming furrow").

Sand is about to become this painter of allegories. The sinister furrow of Holbein's woodcut, with its rocky and steriled bed, is about to be replaced with a "sillon fumant" which is the metonymic representation of the new writing preconized by the author. Setting up against Holbein's "desolation making"²¹ the principle of "ideal truth," she proceeds to create a landscape, a pastoral vision which, by its epiphanic quality, is equivalent to a natural tableau. The narrator constructs a Utopian antithesis to the woodcut that quite literally deconstructs the Holbein image in the reader's mind. Her visual counterpoint has poetic ramifications and a central meaning. Moving from the Holbein woodcut to her own privileged landscape, she attempts to paint a master image that will mask the other. Acting like a palimpsest, her own text superimposes itself, thus rubbing out all traces of the woodcut. The panorama, she reminds us, is as vast as Holbein's; the season is the same. But whereas bleakness dominated the woodcut, here a synthetic sense of well-being permeates the text: "La journée était claire et tiède, et la terre, fraîchement ouverte par le tranchant des charrues, exhalait une vapeur lé ère" ("The day was clear and warm, and the earth freshly opened by the passage of the plows, exhaled wisps of steam"). Holbein's peasant is replaced by a more prosperous and noble figure:

Dans le haut du champ un vieillard, dont le dos large et la figure sévère rappelaient celui d'Holbein, mais dont les vêtements n'annoncaient pas la misère, poussait gravement son areau de forme antique, traîné par deux boeufs tranquilles, á la robe jaune pâle, véritables patriarches de la prairie.

(emphasis added; La Mare 38)

(On the high ground, an old man, whose broad back and severe face recalled that of Holbein, but whose clothes did not suggest wretchedness, solemnly pushed along his old-fashioned plow, drawn by two quiet yellow-coated oxen, true patriarchs of the prairie.)

Not content to simply replace Holbein's dismal peasant with a more prosperous-looking laborer, Sand turns her attention to the old man's son, who now draws four oxen. And in a movement of apotheosis, she dwells at length on yet another and even younger laborer, whose team is now made up of eight oxen. The amplification from two to eight animals is significant and emphasizes the seme of fertility and épanouissement which Sand is purposefully constructing:

Mais ce qui attira ensuite mon attention était véritablement un beau spectacle, un noble sujet pour un peintre. A l'autre extrémité de la plaine labourable, un jeune homme du bonne mine conduisait un attelage magnifique: quatre paires de jeunes animaux à robe sombre mêlée de noir fauve à reflets de feu, avec ces têtes courtes et frisées qui sentent encore le taureau sauvage.

(La Mare, 39)

(But what then drew my attention was a truly beautiful sight, a noble subject for a painter. At the other end of the field, a robust young man was driving a magnificent team: four pairs of young oxen with dark coats of tawny black mottled with glints of fire, their short and curly haired heads recalling wild bulls.)

To deconstruct the hideous allegory of death of Holbein's text, Sand introduces an angelic child, "his shoulders covered . . . with a sheepskin," who is reminiscent of the "little Saint John the Baptist of Renaissance painters" (39-40). The small boy who walks alongside the bulls, encouraging them on with a long pole, thus represents one artistic figuration taking over for another. Finally, the young father's song replaces the sinister quatrain that commented on the Holbein scene.

Thus, the series of substitutions is complete: "Il se trouvait donc que j'avais sous les yeux un tableau qui contrastait avec celui d'Holbein, quoique ce fut une scène pareille" (42; "And so it happened that I had before my eyes a painting that contrasted with Holbein's, although it was the same scene"). The miserable peasant has been replaced by a young man in the bloom of health; the exhausted and ragged horses are exchanged for eight robust oxen; a cherubic boy takes the place of Death; the picture of despair and destruction is canceled out in favor of a vision of energy and prosperity. Sand has drawn a symbolic landscape in which she rejects naturalistic realism and creates a viable poetic vision. True to her own credo, in the tableau that she has depicted, life replaces death, beauty and happiness displace the macabre desperation of the woodcut.

In a final paragraph, Sand proposes a countermetaphor to that of the realists, in order to displace or banish permanently "Lazarus's dung heap." Wishing to mark the transition between her theoretical prologue and the story she wants to tell, she comments that Germain's tale was "une histoire aussi simple, aussi droite et aussi peu ornée que le sillon qu'il traçait avec sa charrue" (44; "a story as simple, straightforward, and plain as the furrow he was marking with his plow"). The word "furrow" takes on metaphoric resonance as it gradually becomes synonymous with the word "story." The linguistic slide from sillon meaning furrow to sillon meaning story is marked by the repetition of the word:

L'année prochaine, ce sillon sera comblé et couvert par un sillon nouveau. Ainsi s'imprime et disparaît la trace de la plupart des hommes dans le champ de l'humanité. Un peu de terre l'efface, et les sillons que nous avons creusés se succèdent les uns aux autres comme les tombes dans le cimetière. Le sillon du laboureur ne vaut-il pas celui de l'oisif. .. . Eh bien! arrachons, s'il se peut, au néant de l'oubli, le sillon de Germain, le fin laboureur.

(emphasis added; La Mare, 44-45)

(Next year, this furrow will be filled in and covered by a new furrow. Similarly, the traces of most men in the fields of mankind are laid down and then disappear. A little earth will cover it, and the furrows that we have dug succeed one another like tombs in a cemetery. Is not the plowman's furrow worth that of a man of leisure? . . . Well then! let us pull up, if possible, from the nothingness of oblivion, the furrow of Germain, the skillful plowman.)

Using an agricultural code for the act of writing, the "furrow" becomes the product of Sand's prosaics. "The furrow of Germain" refers to the story about to be related to us by Sand. The furrow, metonymically associated with fecundity, thus replaces the dung heap of putrid hopelessness and sterility. Germain, as the peasant hero of the tale, is the new Lazarus who has risen from his dung heap. By associating plowing with writing, and the furrow that results from the laborer's work with the story issuing from the writer's pen, Sand also reconciles the link between the laborer and the poet. Her Utopian desire that expresses the hope for a peasant-artist ("A day will come when a plowman can also be an artist," La Mare, 37) is not entirely realized. But the artist, by becoming a kind of laborer, a plower of words, temporarily at least, bridges the gap between "the man of leisure" and "the man of labor."

Elsewhere Sand proclaimed the right of authors to contemplate the world and to write about what they saw: "Qu'il soit donc permis à chacun et à tous de voir avec les yeux qu'ils ont" ("May each one and all therefore be allowed to see with the eyes they have").²² That Flaubert could have accused her of looking at the world "à travers une couleur d'or" ("through a golden haze") demonstrates that he had not sufficiently understood her propensity not so much for embellishing what she saw, but for choosing to dwell on and describe the privileged visions she considered to be of inspirational value for her readers.²³

Creating a New Pastoral Language

The pastoral novel is a fertile vein in Sand's oeuvre, making its early entrance into her fictional world with her second novel. If Valentine as a precursor pastoral novel, witnessed the uneasy cohabitation of the nobility with the peasantry, the roman champêtre developed into a veritable roman paysan, in which the peasant class came to occupy entirely and dominate the fictional stage. Sand then concentrated her efforts on the elaboration of a new hero and the articulation of a new language.

We can follow this evolution in Sand's prefaces to her pastoral novels. The margins of these deceptively simple stories have a significant bearing on her vision of literature. In the "Notice" to Le Compagnon du tour de France she clarified once and for all her literary position by contrasting it, albeit somewhat schematically, to Balzac's:

Depuis quand le roman est-il forcément la peinture de ce qui est, la dure et froide réalité des hommes et des choses contemporaines? Il en peut être ainsi, je le sais, et Balzac, un maître devant lequel je me suis toujours incliné, a fait la Comédie humaine. Mais, tout en étant lié d'amitié avec cet homme illustre, je voyais les choses humaines sous un tout autre aspect, et je me souviens de lui avoir dit . . .—Vous faites la Comédie humaine. Ce titre est modeste; vous pourriez aussi bien dire le drame, la tragédie humaine.—Oui, me répondit-il, et vous, vous faites l'épopée humaine.—Cette fois, repris-je, le titre serait trop relevé. Mais je voudrais faire l'églogue humaine, le poëme, le roman humain. En somme, vous voulez et savez peindre l'homme tel qu'il est sous vos yeux .. . ! Moi, je me sens porté à le peindre tel que je souhaite qu'il soit . . . ²⁴

(Since when is the novel necessarily a depiction of what is, the cold and hard reality of contemporary people and things? It may be this, I know; after all Balzac, a master whom I have always greatly esteemed, produced the Human Comedy. But even while I had a friendship with this famous man, I saw human concerns from a completely different angle, and I remember telling him . . . —You are writing the Human Comedy. Your title is overly modest; you could equally well say the drama, the human tragedy.—Yes, he replied, and you are writing the human epic.—That title, I said, would be too grand. But I would like to write the human eclogue, the human poem, the human novel. In sum, you want to and know how to paint man as you see him before you .. . I feel impelled to paint him as I wish he were . . . )

Thus two antithetical visions are expressed, the idealist and the realist, representing two poles of the nineteenth-century French novel. Sand's idealizing portrayal of characters as she wishes they were, as opposed to Balzac's way of depicting his heroes as they really are, conjures up the traditional antithesis drawn between Racine and Corneille (and subsequently taught to generations of French school children). In opposition to Racine's depiction of human passion and failings, Corneille had constructed a heroic and moral universe in which the character's choice always elevated him or her above baser instincts. If the two novelists repeated the great opposition articulated by the two classical tragedians, then Balzac explored Racine's way, while Sand went the way of Corneille.

It was precisely the pastoral mode that allowed Sand to travel the road of idealization. Sensing her predilection for what she called "bergeries," that is to say, romances in the style of Daphnis and Chloë, she identified in them the yearning for the Ideal:

J'ai vu et j'ai senti par moi-même . . . que la vie primitive était le rêve, l'idéal de tous les hommes et de tous les temps. Depuis les bergers de Longus jusqu'à ceux de Trianon, la vie pastorale est un Eden parfumé où les âmes tourmentées et lassées du tumulte du monde ont essayé de se réfugier. L'art, ce grand flatteur, ce chercheur complaisant de consolations .. . a traversé une suite ininterrompue de bergeries. Et sous ce titre: Histoire des bergeries, j'ai souvent désiré faire un livre .. . où j'aurais passé en revue tous ces différents rêves champêtres.

("Avant-Propos," Francois le Champi, 48)

(I have seen and I have myself experienced that the primitive life was the dream, the ideal of all men and of all times. From the shepherds of Longus to those of Trianon, the pastoral life is a perfumed Eden where souls tormented and wearied by the world's tumult have tried to find refuge. Art, that great flatterer, that obliging seeker of consolation . . . has passed through an uninterrupted series of pastorals. And under the title Histoire des bergeries I have often wished to write a book . . . wherein I would review all these different pastoral dreams in turn.)

While she never accomplished this desire to make a catalogue of shepherd's tales, she did explore the pastoral dream in several of her novels. In Jeanne, for instance, where the visual inspiration for the main character seems to have stepped out of a Holbein painting of the Virgin, Sand's emphasis lies precisely in the exploration of pastoral simplicity in a modern setting, with the resulting clash collapsing into tragedy. "Cette femme primitive, cette vierge de l'âge d'or, où la trouver dans la société moderne?" ("This primitive woman, this virgin of the golden age, where is she to be found in modern society?") the narrator asks in the preface. While this model is finally found in a peasant woman of the Berry region, Sand experiences a linguistic discomfort, a kind of gap between the narrative's modern idiom, which is at once literary, urban, and bourgeois, and the world she is trying to depict. Although she wanted to make her reader "forget the modern world and the present life," she senses that her language creates a barrier between form and content: "Mon propre style, ma phrase me gênait .. . il me semblait que je barbouillais d'huile .. . les peintures sèches . . . naïves et plates des maîtres primitifs . . . que je profanais le nu antique avec des draperies modernes" (Jeanne, 29; "My own style, my phrasing bothered me .. . it semed to me that I was dabbing with oils .. . the matte, naive, and flat paintings of the primitive masters . . . that I was profaning the nude of antiquity with modern clothing"). She felt her linguistic repertoire inadequate to the subject she was trying to depict. She likened herself to a primitive painter using the wrong kind of paint; the medium did not suit the message.

The problem of increasing concern to her is language. Several years later, in the preface to François le champi, the narrator and François Rollinat are depicted strolling through the countryside, discussing the problem of peasant representation in the nineteenth-century novel. Rollinat asks the writer to identify the missing link between his own overly active intelligence and the peasant's quiescent mind: "quel est le rapport possible . . . entre deux états opposés de l'existence des choses et des êtres, entre le palais et la chaumière, entre l'artiste et la création, entre le poète et le laboureur . . . entre la langue que parlent cette nature, cette vie primitive . . . et [la langue] que parlent l'art, la science, la connaissance, en un mot" ("what is the possible relationship . . . between two opposite states of things and of living beings, between the palace and the cottage, between the artist and the creation, between the poet and the plowman . . . between the language of nature, of this primitive life .. . and that spoken by art, science, knowledge, in short"). The opposition already articulated in La Mare au diable between the laborer and the man of leisure, that is, between primitive life and "la vie factice," appears again here. The architectural gap between the palace and the peasant cottage ("la chaumière") is identical to the linguistic gap between the two antithetical language systems. Rollinat identifies in the novelist's earlier pastoral novels precisely this lack of correspondence between a language that describes and a language that belongs to the world described: "ton langage fait avec [celui des personnages] un effet disparate . . . l'auteur y montre encore de temps en temps le bout de l'oreille" (François le champi, 51; "your language clashes with that of the characters . . . traces of the writer still poke through from time to time"). If it is true that the peasants' language necessitates a translation into French so as to be accessible to all, how shall the narrator speak at once "clairement pour le Parisien" and "naïvement pour le paysan" (François le champi, 53)? The question is formulated but the answer not provided. The impossible dream for a hybrid language that would incorporate both a popular and a cultivated idiom had already been proposed in Mauprat by the peasant-sage, Patience, when he talked about the need for an "idiome mélangé" ("mixed idiom") which would allow each one "sans dégrader sa raison, de peupler l'univers et de l'expliquer avec ses rêves" ("without degrading one's mind, to populate the universe and to make sense of it with one's own dreams").²⁵ Patience did not specify the way this actually would be realized, but Sand's novels, especially in the pastoral period, can be viewed as a series of attempts to provide such a synthetic language.

Sand by her very interest in language shows her modernity. As we have seen, as early as Indiana, she was concerned with the issues concerning literary language. Having exorcized once and for all the temptation of a rhetoric of power such as it was represented by her character, Raymon de Ramière, she never ceased questioning the nature of literary language itself—what kind of discourse entered into literature, which discourse was marginalized, what verbal power could mean. She was very much a believer in the predominance of parole (the spoken word) over mot (the written word), and considered the former as the basis for any analysis of language. From a Bakhtinian perspective, one could equate Sand's value system with a predominance in her work of dialogical over monological structures. More precisely, her predilection for oral over written language emphasizes the primacy of spontaneity in her writing. This improvisatory quality must not be equated with literary sloppiness or indifference to style on her part, but rather can be ascribed to what she called the "delights of composition." Her friend Flaubert once claimed that art was not a matter of inspiration but of patience. Sand's vision, which she designates as a modern Abbaye de Thélème in Nouvelles lettres d'un voyageur, expresses just the opposite opinion. The idealized inhabitants of the Abbaye, most of them artists, have invented a language as rapid as thought ("aussi rapide que la pensée"), which they use to conceive "sublime books."²⁶ Sand's ideal contradicts Flaubert's credo of artistic patience (etymologically linked with suffering) since it insists that the language of inspiration is essentially im-patient, that is, not linked to pain, but associated with joy and swiftness.

Sand's conviction that such a language must exist is inextricably linked to Corambé, the mythopoeic creation of her childhood psyche. This mysterious and androgynous deity is identified in Histoire de ma vie as the Godlike voice that she heard when she improvised her first stories (see ). Many years later, when Sand became a novelist, Corambé ceased to exist as a separate autonomous voice (see ). But by internalizing Corambé's voice and appropriating the deity's essence, Sand came to incorporate into her concept of literary craft certain crucial elements culled from Corambé—namely a privileging of orality and a confident attitude toward the act of creation. In a word, she chose as her model the bigendered discourse of a being who epitomized the elegant ease of literary composition and thus rejected the arduous and painstaking "agonies of style" characteristic of a writer such as Flaubert.

This set of priorities is evident in Sand as early as the autumn of 1831, when she was writing one of her first ébauches, La Marraine. More important than the actual work was the discovery of her literary temperament, her realization that she wrote very much as Corambé had improvised, with speed and with ease. "Je reconnus," she explains in Histoire de ma vie, "que j'écrivais vite, facilement, longtemps sans fatigue; que mes idées, engourdies dans mon cerveau, s'éveillaient et s'enchaînaient .. . au courant de la plume" (2:101; "I realized that I wrote quickly, easily and for long periods without tiring; that my ideas, which were sluggish in my brain, came alive and fell naturally into place under my pen").

What Ann Berger has called Sand's "phonocentrism,"²⁷ that is, her faith in the voice as instrument and source of truth, explains at once the writer's elevation of language to divine status, and our sense as readers that Sand's fiction is based on a dialogue between her inner voices and an idealized reality. In the novel André (1835), for example, the heroine's sudden understanding of the rapport between the inner "impressions of the mind" and the outer "beauties of nature" provokes a moment of epiphany. Geneviève's vertigo upon discovering that the feeling for art is a form of religious experience expresses itself in an image of poetic sublimatio: "elle s'éleva au-dessus d'ellemême et de toutes les choses réelles qui l'entouraient pour vouer un culte enthousiaste au nouveau Dieu du nouvel univers déroulé devant elle" ("she rose above herself and all the real things surrounding her in order to declare an enthusiastic cult to the new God and the new universe that unfolded before her").²⁸ This scene can also be read as the expression of the writer's own artistic fervor. The hearing of voices and the feeling of spiritual elevation are Sand's two preferred metaphors for expressing artistic creation. In this sense, Corambé truly is the Sandian god of language.

Madame Dudevant, homme de lettres 29

Although it may be disappointing to some that Sand never articulated a feminine poetics per se, it is important to understand the extent to which androgyny was the fundamental basis upon which she constructed her fictional universe. Although her artistic theories can often be seen as the feminization of a traditionally male canon, up to the end of her long literary life, Sand resolutely refused to restrict herself to a single-gendered vision. When Flaubert wrote to her toward the end of her life that he possessed "both sexes," she promptly and unequivocally retorted that there was only one sex when it came to writing.³⁰ One can witness the emergence of this androgynous Sandian vision especially in her novels from the 1840s on. But she was not a system maker and her theories were not systematized anywhere. Balzac was right when he claimed that Sand was the great eclectic of the century, eager to explore the divergent paths on the fictional map of possibilities, and daring to probe difficult literary problems and articulate innovative solutions.

With the exception of the black period, there is a basic "serenity of writing" in Sand. She knew that writing does not necessarily issue from indignation, although she acknowledged that Indiana, Valentine, and Lélia had been in part molded by feelings of anger. Her 1842 "Préface" to Indiana, for instance, stressed that she had written her novel "avec le sentiment non raisonné .. . de l'injustice et de la barbarie des lois qui régissent encore l'existence de la femme . . . j'ai cédé à un instinct puissant de plainte et de reproche" (emphasis added; Indiana, 46; "with an overwhelming and almost irrational feeling . . . of the injustice and barbarity of laws that still rule over women's lives .. . I yielded to a powerful instinct of lamentation and reproach"). Subsequently she discovered that one could write outside of the body, from a place of mental composure, beyond feelings of fury.

In the years when Sand was articulating her ars poetica, her writing expresses most a deep sense of equilibrium, whereby she stresses the harmony between the poet and his or her fictional world, and posits the possibility of a synthesis of nature and creativity, of ideology and style. This metaphysical search for a synthesis may appear surprising in a writer with such a diverse oeuvre. On the other hand, this search gives coherence to her eclectic fictional universe. One main theme running through her writings focuses on the bridging of chasms, the synthesis of opposites. How to find the common measure between the ailments of her age and the solutions to those personal and social ills; how to better integrate the individual and society; how to respond to both the demands of physical life and the search for the absolute; how, in a word, to effect the magical reunification of the various fragmented selves—psychological, social, philosophical. With the pastoral period, Sand reached full literary integration and her final words on her deathbed, "Laissez verdure," make clear the culminating force of this androgynous pastoral vision.

This serenity of writing and sense of harmony may in part be due to Sand's own facility of composition—we know that regularly she was capable of writing up to fifty pages a day—and also may stem, essentially, from her rejection of a formalist aesthetic. Whereas her friend Flaubert created highly structured and exhaustively organized texts, she was able to write without a plan, letting inspiration take her where it wished. This capacity for improvisation is especially manifest in her discussion of the Other, as she counteracts Flaubert's notion of "le mot juste" with the concept of multiplicity, of endless possibility. The delights of free-form composition replace his "affres du style:"

Vous m'étonnez toujours avec votre travail pénible. Est-ce une coquetterie? . . . Ce que je trouve difficile, moi, c'est de choisir entre mille combinaisons de l'action scénique qui peuvent varier à l'infini, la situation nette et saisissante qui ne soit pas brutale ou forcée. Quant au style, j'en fais meilleur marché que vous. Le vent joue de ma vieille harpe comme il lui plaît d'en jouer. Il a ses haut et ses bas, ses grosses notes et ses défaillances, au fond ça m'est égal pourvu que l'émotion vienne, mais je ne peux rien trouver en moi. C'est l'autre qui chante à son gré, mal ou bien.... Laissez donc le vent courir un peu dans vos cordes. Moi je crois que vous prenez plus de peine qu'il ne faut, et que vous devriez laisser faire l'autre plus souvent.³¹

(You always astonish me with your painstaking work; is it coquetry? . . . What I find difficult to choose from the thousand combinations of scenic action, which can vary infinitely, the clear and striking situation that is not brutal nor forced. As for style, I attach less importance to it than you do. The wind plays my old harp as it wishes. It has its high notes, its low notes, its heavy notes, and its faltering notes, in the end it is all the same to me provided the emotion comes, but I can find nothing in myself. It is the Other who sings at will, badly, or well. Let the wind blow a little over your strings. I think that you take more trouble than you need, and that you ought to let the Other do it more often.)

This is not the first time Sand has conjured up this "Other." Already in the item of juvenilia, "Nuit d'hiver" the writer had described the sensation of an inner doubling. Remarkably, Sand can still allude to its existence over forty years later in Nouvelles lettres d'un voyageur, where she gives as clear a definition of "l'autre" as one could ever hope to find. What artists call the Other, she explains, is a kind of "troisième âme." In the case of musical inspiration, the third soul "chante quand le compositeur écoute et . . . vibre quand le virtuose improvise" ("sings when the composer listens and . . . vibrates when the virtuoso improvises"). In the literary sphere the third soul "pense quand la main écrit et . . . fait quelquefois qu'on exprime audelà de ce que l'on songeait à exprimer"³² ("thinks when the hand writes and .. . is responsible that the writer sometimes expressed beyond what he or she tried to express"). The Other, then, designates in Sand's terms the inner voice of inspiration which she never ceased to hear.

Sand's remarks regarding the Other may explain her attitude of modesty about her own genius. She always defined artistic genius as a natural, unexceptional occurrence. Since genius was part of nature, there was no need for the writer to sever the bond between the artifice of the book and its inspirational source. Here is how she put it to Flaubert:

Nous sommes de la nature, dans la nature, par la nature et pour la nature. Le talent, la volonté, le génie, sont des phénomènes naturels comme le lac, le volcan, la montagne, le vent, l'astre, le nuage. Ce que l'homme tripote est gentil ou laid, ingénieux ou bête; ce qu'il reçoit de la nature est bon ou mauvais, mais cela est. Cela existe et subsiste. .. . La nature seule sait parler à l'intelligence, une langue impérissable, toujours la même, parce qu'elle ne sort pas du vrai éternel, de beau absolu.³³

(We are of nature, in nature, by nature, and for nature. Talent, will, genius, are natural phenomena like the lake, the volcano, the mountain, the wind, the star, the cloud. What man dabbles in is pretty or ugly, ingenious or stupid; what he gets from nature is good or bad, but it is, it exists and subsists. . . . Nature alone knows how to speak to the intelligence in a language that is imperishable, always the same, because it does not depart from the eternally true, the absolutely beautiful).

This refusal to be alienated from nature, a stance already apparent in the 1835 letter to Fortoul cited earlier in this chapter, marks Sand's entire oeuvre with grace. It points to her extraordinary success in creating a genuinely coherent fictional world that was also socially fluid and free of gender biases.

Significantly, in a mature novel, Isidora (1846), Sand would coin a double metaphor, with which to express the trajectory of her own mental development and her increasing sense of harmony with the natural world. She grounded this double image in nature, using two antithetical landscapes to designate the two stages of life, youth and old age. The former, which she compares to "an admirable Alpine landscape," is primarily apprehended as the uneasy cohabitation of opposites, where gentle phenomena struggle against violent forces: "partout le précipice est au bord du sentier fleuri, le vertige et le danger accompagnent tous les pas du voyageur . . . nature . . . sublime aux prises avec d'effroyables cataclysmes"³⁴ ("Everywhere the precipice stands on the edge of the flowered path, vertigo and danger accompany the voyageur's every step . . . sublime nature .. . in the throes of terrifying cataclysms"). In opposition stands "the beautiful, well-planted garden" (168) in which one can reap and enjoy the benefits of old age. Isidora's "jardin de vieillesse," stamped with the seal of equilibrium and serenity, perhaps also alludes to Sand's increasing self-discovery and psychic integration. The trajectory from the volcanic landscape of Histoire du rêveur to the "garden of old age" in Isidora can be understood as Sand's path toward harmony with herself. To follow her on her travels is to admire the itinerary from uncertainty and fear to self-assurance and self-knowledge. It is to follow in the footsteps of one of the most open-minded and free-spirited writers of her age.

Notes

¹ André Fermigier, "Préface" François le Champi 7.

² Cited by L éopold Mabilleau, Victor Hugo (Paris: Hachette, 1925), 145.

³ An important exception is Francine Mallet who aptly remarks: "Her greatest love is perhaps the love of work" (George Sand, 12).

⁴ Ibid., 107.

⁵ Cited by Fermigier, "Préface," 9. Per Nykrog uses the same image to discuss Balzac: "The current view of Balzac seems to be that he was a sort of brute force of Nature . . . a human machine for painting pictures of contemporary moeurs, rather in the manner that one considers a cow as a machine for producing milk" (La Pensée de Balzac, 5). The difference is that Balzac has since been exonerated of this accusation, while critics continue to make it about Sand. Her rehabilitation lags behind Balzac's by at least a generation.

⁶ Cited by Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt, 3 vols. (Paris: Charpentier, 1888), 2:146. The rest of the passage reads: "Well, you know what happened. Something monstrous! One day she finished a novel at one in the morning . . . and she started right in on another that same night . . . churning out text is a function with Mme Sand."

⁷ Sand writes: "J'ai fini mon petit roman, je l'ai fait en quatre jours .. . et cela m'a remise en goût de travail" (Corr., 7:151).

⁸ Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau, 2 vols. (Paris: Pléiade, 1973-1980), 2:177.

⁹ Henri Guillemin, La Liaison Musset-Sand, 10-11.

¹⁰ Baudelaire, "Mon Coeur mis à nu," Oeuvre complètes, 1:686-687. See also Barbey d'Aurevilly whose misogynistic point of view incorporates all the attacks found in Baudelaire: as a woman who dares to write, Sand is a phenomenon contre nature; her "style coulant" makes of her a representative of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. She lacks originality; her popularity makes her suspect; her style if vulgar and prosaic. Cf. Philippe Berthier, "L'Inquisiteur et la dépravatrice: Barbey d'Aurevilly et George Sand," Part I (1833-1850), Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, 78 (1978):736-758; followed by Part II (1850-1889), Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, 79 (1979):50-61.

¹¹ 15 Jan. 1867; Correspondance Flaubert-Sand, 120.

¹² See HV, 2:1342.

¹³ "Moi qui ne me suis jamais enterrée dans la littérature" (Correspondance Flaubert-Sand, 205).

¹⁴ Ibid., 212-213.

¹⁵ "Préfaces générales," Questions d'art et de littérature, 8.

¹⁶ The following prefaces are especially noteworthy: the Préfaces générales of 1842 and 1851; the prefaces to Le Château des Désertes; Le Compagnon du Tour de France; Consuelo; Francois le champí; Indiana (1832, 1842, 1852); Iacques; Jean de la Roche; Jeanne; Lélia (1833 and 1839); Légendes ruestiques; Lettres a Marcie; Lettres d'un voyageur; Lucrezia Floriani; Mademoiselle la Quintinie; Les Maîtres sonneurs; Les Maîtres mosaïstes; La Mare au diable; Le Péché de Monsieur Antoine; La Petite Fadette; Valentine.

As for Sand's literary criticism, many articles can be found in three collections: (1) Questions d'art et de littérature, vol. 93 of the Oeuvres complétes (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1878), which includes articles on Senancour's Obermann; "popular poets" and proletarian poetry; Lamartine; Victor Hugo; Hamlet; Flaubert's Salammbô and L 'Education sentimentale; realism; theater. (2) Autour de la table, vol. 5 of the Oeuvres complétes (1876). Selected contents: the first two installments are entirely devoted to Hugo's Contemplations; also contains articles on "le drame fantastique" in Goethe, Byron, and Mickiewicz; Balzac; Béranger; Fenimore Cooper; Harriet Beecher Stowe; Eugéne Fromentin. (3) Impressions et souvenirs (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1904) includes many of her prefaces and writings about the theater. See also Souvenirs de 1848 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1880) and Souvenirs et idées (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1904).

¹⁷ Albert Sonnenfeld, "George Sand: Music and Sexualities," Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 16/2-3 (spring/summer 1988): 313.

¹⁸ In fact, as Cellier notes, death is absent also from several other woodcuts. It is significant that Sand singles out the woodcut depicting Lazarus as the only one that deploys a "realistic," even naturalistic, set of artistic criteria. The figure of death is absent; only the hideous details of decay and filth are present.

¹⁹ See Luke 16:19-31. This Lazarus is not to be confused with the betterknown Lazarus whom Jesus rose from the dead and instructed to walk.

²⁰ Emphasis added. Baudelaire, L'Art romantique, in Oeuvres complètes, 2:35.

²¹Correspondance Flaubert-Sand, 511 ("faire de la désolation," letter dated 18-19 Dec. 1875).

²² George Sand, "Le réalisme," Questions d'art et de littérature, 293.

²³Correspondance Flaubert-Sand, 348 (letter dated 8 Sept. 1871).

²⁴ Strangely the "Notice" is not included in the Editions des introuvables which I have used, but is in the old Calmann-Lévy edition (1900).

²⁵ George Sand, Mauprat, ed. Claude Sicard (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), 119. Cited by Yvette Bozon-Scalzitti, "Mauprat, ou la Belle et la Bête," Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 10/1-2 (fall/winter 1981-1982): 15.

²⁶ Sand, "De Marseille à Menton" Nouvelles lettres d'un voyageur, 156.

²⁷ Ann Berger, "Ce que dit le ruisseau," in George Sand: Voyage et écriture, special issue of Etudes françaises 24/1 (1988): 102.

²⁸ George Sand, André, ed. H. Burine and M. Gilot (Meylan: Editions de l'Aurore, 1987), 99.

²⁹ Thus was George Sand listed in the Almanach général parisien in 1837; cited by Georges Lubin, Corr., 3:853.

³⁰ "J'ai les deux sexes." "II n'y a qu'un sexe." Correspondance Flaubert-Sand, 118, 121.

³¹Correspondance Flaubert-Sand, 102-103, 29 Nov. 1866.

³² George Sand, "A propos de botanique," Nouvelles Lettres d'un voyageur, 188.

³³Correspondance Flaubert-Sand, 476.

³⁴ George Sand, Isidora (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1894), 167.