Nouvelles: La Marquise, Lavinia, Metella, Mattea, Pauline

by George Sand

« C’est la première fois que l’on réunit en volume ces nouvelles écrites en différents pays et à différentes époques. Si quelques-unes sont des fantaisies du moment, d’autres sont des études un peu plus approfondies et mieux faites pour résister aux changements de mode ou d’opportunité dans la forme et la donnée…

Les nouvelles qu’on va lire appartiennent presque toutes à une jeunesse de l’auteure, et on est toujours indulgent pour la jeunesse. On sent qu’il serait injuste de conclure dogmatiquement contre ce qui est spontané, par conséquent naïf. » G.S., Préface à la première édition.

George Sand n’avait pas encore trente ans lorsqu’elle écrivit ces cinq nouvelles qui marquèrent le début de sa carrière d’écrivaine. Beaucoup plus tard, en 1861, elle réunit pour les publier ces œuvres de jeunesse qu’elle aimait tout particulièrement et qui, depuis, ne furent plus rééditées.

441 pages, Paperback

First published February 10, 2010

About the author

Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil, best known by her pen name George Sand, was a French novelist, memoirist and journalist. One of the most popular writers in Europe in her lifetime, being more renowned than either Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s, Sand is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era. She wrote more than 50 volumes of various works to her credit, including tales, plays and political texts, alongside her 70 novels.
Like her great-grandmother, Louise Dupin, whom she admired, George Sand advocated for women's rights and passion, criticized the institution of marriage, and fought against the prejudices of a conservative society. She was considered scandalous because of her turbulent love life, her adoption of masculine clothing, and her masculine pseudonym.

Reviews

[Helynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

These first short writings of George Sand are not among her most memorable or respected novels, but they are, nonetheless, bold early representations of her literary sensibilities as well as her feminist convictions. In the short novellas, La Marquise and Lavinia, Sand presents a preliminary foray into her life-long quest to champion 19th-century French women--especially married women--and the various injustices and plights that the government and social mores thrust upon them. Sand was often accused by critics of speaking out against marriage just because she had had a bad experience herself, and advised to keep quiet about a lifestyle that well bring happiness to other young ladies. Actually, even right after she left her husband Casimir Dudevant, Sand still saw marriage a holy institution, her utopia, her dream and her poetry. She believed that, in order for marriage to exist at its ideal level, it should be governed by a love based upon reason rather than by a tyrannical love based upon passion, and that equality and liberty were essential for both partners in marriage. Furthermore, Sand abhorred the idea of marriage for convenience. She herself had married for love, and even though that love did not last, she believed that love should always be the basis for marriage. As a woman of 80, the title character in La Marquise (1832) looks back on her life and explains to a young male listener why she remained the mistress of the same man for 60 years, although she never loved him. She describes how an arranged marriage to a 50-year-old marquis when she was 16, left her disgusted with men. When she was widowed just a few months later, she refused to consider remarrying. The marquise is bitterly criticized for her stand--especially by other women--so to defend herself against such abuse, she eventually took a lover (as a mother, she could not remarry even if she wished to do so, without losing her child's inheritance from his father), the dull and boorish Vicomte de Larrieux, whom she stays with--and supports--for the next 60 years. The marquise relates how once in her early widowhood, she fell in love with a handsome actor named Lélio, who reciprocated her feelings. She resisted his advances, however, because she wished to conservee the purity of their feelings for one another (which she was sure would be ruined if they were to marry). "Restez pur dans mon coeur et dans ma mémoire! Séparons-nous pour jamais, et emportons d’ici tout un avenir de pensées riantes et de souvenirs adorés.”
The heroine in Lavinia makes a similar choice in the next novella. Courted by wealthy count as well as by a man she once loved who has come back into her life, Lavinia tells both men she will never marry. She has decided that it cannot be in her emotional interest to take a chance even on the most promising of marriage proposals. Lavinia explains that men of rank and fortune, who seem the best propsects as husbands, only "sell" their protection to a wife at too high a price. Sand, then, sees Lavinia's choice as a sane act of a thinking woman toward her own self-preservation. Indeed, giving up the possibiltiy of a marriage of love seems a minimal sacrifice when she considers the emotional pain she well may be avoiding by staying celebate. Experience has taught her that a refusal to marry is her only workable option in life because it is the only way that she can maintain a sense of the person she truly is.