Part 2 (1/2)
CHAPTER III.
DeBUT IN LITERATURE.
In the first days of January 1831, the Rubicon was pa.s.sed. The step, though momentous in any case to Madame Dudevant, was one whose ultimate consequences were by none less antic.i.p.ated than by herself, when to town she came, still undecided whether her future destiny were to decorate screens and tea-caddies, or to write books, but resolved to give the literary career a trial.
For actual subsistence she had her small fixed allowance from home; for credentials she was furnished with an introduction or two to literary men from her friends in the country who had some appreciation, more or less vague, of her intellectual powers. Though courageous and determined, she was far from self-confident; she asked herself if she might not be mistaking a mere fancy for a faculty, and her first step was to seek the opinion of some experienced authority as to her talent and chances.
M. de Keratry, a popular novelist, to whom she was recommended, spoke his mind to her without restraint. It was to the crus.h.i.+ng effect that a woman ought not to write at all. Her s.e.x, Madame Dudevant was informed, can have no proper place in literature whatsoever. M. Delatouche, proprietor of the _Figaro_, poet and novelist besides, and cousin of her old and intimate friends the Duvernets, of La Chatre, was a shade more encouraging, even so far committing himself as to own that, if she would not let herself be disgusted by the struggles of a beginner, there might be a distant possibility for her of making some sixty pounds a year by her pen. Such specimens of her fiction as she submitted to him he condemned without appeal, but he encouraged her to persevere in trying to improve upon them, and advised her well in advising her to avoid imitation of any school or master, and fearlessly to follow her own bent.
Meantime he took her on to the staff of his paper, then in its infancy and comparative obscurity. Journalism however was the department of literature least suited to her capabilities, and her fellow-contributors, though so much less highly gifted than Madame Dudevant, excelled her easily in the manufacture of leaders and paragraphs to order. To produce an article of a given length, on a given subject, within a given time, was for her the severest of ordeals; here her exuberant facility itself was against her. She would exhaust the s.p.a.ce allotted to her, and find herself obliged to break off just at the point when she felt herself ”beginning to begin.” But she justly valued this apprentices.h.i.+p as a professional experience, bringing her into direct relations with the literary world she was entering as a perfect stranger. Once able to devote herself entirely to composition and to live for her work, she found her calling begin to a.s.sert itself despotically. In a letter to a friend, M. Duteil, at La Chatre, dated about six weeks after her arrival in Paris, she writes:--
If I had foreseen half the difficulties that I find, I should not have undertaken this enterprise. Well, the more I encounter the more I am resolved to proceed. Still, I shall soon be returning home again, perhaps without having succeeded in launching my boat, but with hopes of doing better another time, and with plans of working harder than ever.
Three weeks later we find her writing to her son's tutor, M. Boucoiran, in the same strain:--
I am more than ever determined to follow the literary career. In spite of the disagreeables I often meet with, in spite of days of sloth and fatigue that come and interrupt my work, in spite of the more than humble life I lead here, I feel that henceforth my existence is filled. I have an object, a task, better say it at once, a pa.s.sion. The profession of a writer is a violent one, and so to speak, indestructible. Once let it take possession of your wretched head, you cannot stop. I have not been successful; my work was thought too unreal by those whom I asked for advice.
But still she persisted, providing, as best she could, ”copy” for the _Figaro_, at seven francs a column, and trying the experiment of literary collaboration, working at fictions and magazine articles, the joint productions of herself and her friend and fellow-student, Jules Sandeau, who wrote for the _Revue de Paris_. It was under his name that these compositions appeared, Madam Dudevant, in these first trial-attempts, being undesirous to bring hers before the public.
”I have no time to write home,” she pleads, pet.i.tioning M. Boucoiran for news from the country, ”but I like getting letters from Nohant, it rests my heart and my head.”
And alluding to her approaching temporary return thither, in accordance with the terms of her agreement with M. Dudevant, she writes to M.
Charles Duvernet:--
I long to get back to Berry, for I love my children more than all besides, and, but for the hopes of becoming one day more useful to them with the scribe's pen than with the housekeeper's needle, I should not leave them for so long. But in spite of innumerable obstacles I mean to take the first steps in this th.o.r.n.y career.
In her case it was really the first step only that cost dear; whilst against the annoyances with which, as a new comer, she had to contend, there was ample compensation to set in the novel interests of the intellectual, political, and artistic world stirring around her. Country life and peasant life she had had the opportunity of studying from her youth up; of middle-cla.s.s society she had sufficient experience; she counted relatives and friends among the _n.o.blesse_, and had moved in those charmed circles; but the republic of art and letters, to which by nature and inclination she emphatically belonged, was a land of promise first opened up to her now. She was eager and impatient to deprovincialize herself.
In the art galleries of the Louvre, at the theatre and the opera, in the daily interchange of ideas on all kinds of topics with her little circle of intelligent acquaintance, her mind grew richer by a thousand new impressions and enjoyments, and rapidly took fresh strength together with fresh knowledge. The heavy practical obstacles that interfere with such self-education on the part of one of her s.e.x were seriously aggravated in her case by her narrow income. How she surmounted them is well known; a.s.suming on occasion a disguise which, imposing on all but the initiated, enabled her everywhere to pa.s.s for a collegian of sixteen, and thus to go out on foot in all weathers, at all hours, alone if necessary, unmolested and un.o.bserved, in theatre or restaurant, boulevard or reading-room. In defense of her adoption of this strange measure, she pleads energetically the perishable nature of feminine attire in her day,--a day before double-soles or ulsters formed part of a lady's wardrobe,--its incompatibility with the incessant going to and fro which her busy life required, the exclusion of her s.e.x from the best part of a Paris theatre, and so forth; the ineffable superiority of a costume which, economy and comfort apart, secured her equal independence with her men compet.i.tors in the race, and identical advantages as to the rapid extension of her field of observation. The practice, though never carried on by her to such an extent as very commonly a.s.serted, was one to which she did not hesitate to resort now and then in later years, as a mere measure of convenience--a measure the world will only tolerate in the Rosalinds and Violas of the stage. The career of George Sand was, like her nature, entirely exceptional, and any attempt to judge it in any other light lands us in hopeless moral contradictions. She had extraordinary incentives to prompt her to extraordinary actions, which may be condemned or excused, but which there could be no greater mistake than to impute to ordinary vulgar motives. It must also be remembered that fifty years ago, the female art student had no recognized existence. She was shut out from that modic.u.m of freedom and of practical advantages it were arbitrary to deny, and which may now be enjoyed by any earnest art aspirant in almost any great city. However unjustifiable the proceeding resorted to for a time by George Sand and Rosa Bonheur may be held to be, it cannot possibly be said they had no motive for it but a fantastic one.
Writing to her mother from Nohant, whither she had returned in April for a length of time as agreed, Madam Dudevant speaks out characteristically in defense of her love of independence:--
I am far from having that love of pleasure, that need of amus.e.m.e.nt with which you credit me. Society, sights, finery, are not what I want,--you only are under this mistake about me,--it is liberty. To be all alone in the street and able to say to myself, I shall dine at four or at seven, according to my good pleasure; I shall go to the Tuileries by way of the Luxembourg instead of going by the Champs Elysees; this is what amuses me far more than silly compliments and stiff drawing-room a.s.semblies.
Such audacious self-emanc.i.p.ation, she was well aware, must estrange her from her friends of her own s.e.x in the upper circles of Parisian society, and she antic.i.p.ated this by making no attempt to renew such connections. For the moment she thought only of taking the shortest, and, as she judged, the only way for a ”torpid country wife,” like herself, to acquire the freedom of action and the enlightenment she needed. Those most nearly related to her offered no opposition. It was otherwise with her mother-in-law, the _baronne_ Dudevant, with whom she had a pa.s.sage-of-arms at the outset on the subject of her literary campaign, here disapproved _in toto_.
”Is it true,” enquired this lady, ”that it is your intention to _print books_?”
”Yes, madame.”
”Well, I call that an odd notion!”
”Yes, madame.”
”That is all very good and very fine, but I hope you are not going to put the name that I bear on the _covers of printed books_?”
”Oh, certaintly not, madame, there is no danger.”
The liberty to which other considerations were required to give way was certainly complete enough. The beginning of July found her back at work in the capital. On the Quai St. Michel--a portion of the Seine embankment facing the towers of Notre Dame, the Sainte Chapelle, and other picturesque monuments of ancient Paris--she had now definitely installed herself in modest lodgings on the fifth story. Accepted and treated as a comrade by a little knot of fellow _literati_ and colleagues on the _Figaro_, two of whom--Jules Sandeau and Felix Pyat--were from Berry, like herself; and with Delatouche, also a Berrichon, for their head-master, she served thus singularly her brief apprentices.h.i.+p to literature and experience;--sharing with the rest both their studies and their relaxations, dining with them at cheap restaurants, frequenting clubs, studios, and theatres of every degree; the youthful effervescence of her student-friends venting itself in such collegians' pranks as parading deserted quarters of the town by moonlight, in the small hours, chanting lugubrious strains to astonish the shopkeepers. The only great celebrity whose acquaintance she had made was Balzac, himself the prince of eccentrics. Although he did not encourage Madame Dudevant's literary ambition, he showed himself kindly disposed towards her and her young friends, and she gives some amusing instances that came under her notice of his oddities. Thus, once after a little Bohemian dinner at his lodgings in the Rue Ca.s.sini, he insisted on putting on a new and magnificent dressing-gown, of which he was exceedingly vain, to display to his guests, of whom Madame Dudevant was one; and not satisfied therewith, must needs go forth, thus accoutred, to light them on their walk home. All the way he continued to hold forth to them about four Arab horses, which he had not got yet, but meant to get soon, and of which, though he never got them at all, he firmly believed himself to have been possessed for some time. ”He would have escorted us thus,” says Madame Dudevant, ”from one extremity of Paris to another, if we had let him.”
Twice again before the end of the year, faithful to her original intentions, we find her returning to her place as mistress of the house at Nohant, occupying herself with her children, and working at the novel _Indiana_, which was to create her reputation the following year.
Meanwhile, a novelette, _La Prima Donna_, the outcome of the literary collaboration with Jules Sandeau, had found its way into a magazine, the _Revue de Paris_; and was followed by a longer work of fiction, of the same double authors.h.i.+p, ent.i.tled _Rose et Blanche_, published under Sandeau's _nom de plume_ of Jules Sand.