Always a Woman

THE LIFE OF THE HEART--Frances Winwar--Harper ($3).

When the woman who called herself George Sand died in 1876, she was regarded as France's most brilliant woman novelist. She was also the world's most talked-about feminist. No woman writer since Sappho had made such an impression on her male contemporaries, or left in her wake such a tumult of debate. The public had heard her called everything from whore to angel. Now Biographer Frances Winwar (who changed her own name from Vinciguerra) has retold the story of George Sand with a tenderness, knowledge and enthusiasm that are likely to stir up the old debate and make The Life of the Heart a bestseller.

Aurore Dupin was a center of controversy from the day she was born. Her mother, Sophie, daughter of a Paris bird-seller, bore several illegitimate children (they all died) to her aristocratic lover, Captain Maurice Dupin, before he was persuaded into marriage a month before Aurore's birth. Then mother and daughter hooked themselves onto the baggage train of Napoleon's Peninsular armies and trailed around after the captain, who was aide-de-camp to Marshal Murat.

When bold Captain Dupin was killed by a fall from his horse, the captain's haughty mother methodically set to work to get possession of her beloved son's child. She offered destitute Sophie the choice of starving to death with Aurore, or living on a handsome allowance without her. Sophie chose the allowance and handed Aurore over to grandmother.

Prayers & Tears. Aurore's dead father was the idol of Grandmother Dupin's house. Once, in the dead of night, Aurore was wakened by her tutor and led to the family burial plot. "Do you believe," the tutor asked the shivering girl, "that the dead deserve more from us than prayers and tears?" Then he bent over the newly opened plot, detached Captain Dupin's skull from the rotting skeleton and held it out to Aurore, saying: "Kiss this relic that was your father." Aurore obeyed.

It did not take many years of such episodes to turn the young girl into a half-hysterical bundle of nerves. She became morbidly religious, wore spiked necklaces to mortify her flesh, built altars in the woods. She lived in a dreamworld peopled with overwrought heroes and heroines. But when her grandmother died, 18-year-old Aurore promptly married Casimir Dudevant, whom acid Poet Heinrich Heine later described as having "the tepid vulgarity, the banal nullity, the porcelain stare of a Chinese pagoda."

Their married life was not a happy one. Aurore soon became pregnant and spent most of her time alone in bed, sick with nervous despair and turning pale at sight of her husband.

After her son Maurice was born, she began to write--and to live--romantic fiction. One day she introduced into the household a pallid young man who, she explained, was henceforth to be her second "spiritual husband."

Loutish Casimir was so awed by his wife's determined personality that he gave in to her whim. For two years the "spiritual husbands" dwelt beneath the same roof. Aurore played to them on the harp, read aloud to them from edifying books, praised the noble example they were setting to future generations of too-fleshly husbands. In fact, all went well until the day when the spiritual husbands observed that their spiritual bride was expecting another child. The father turned out to be a young, unspiritual medical student from Paris.

Two years later, abandoning married life, Aurore gathered up her two children and her unfinished novels, and went to Paris.

"To Live! It Is Delirium!" She could not have arrived at a more opportune moment. The Romantic movement was in full swing. Idolaters of Victor Hugo climbed the towers of Notre Dame by moonlight and imagined that they were looking out over the glorious Paris of the troubadours. Dandies and rakes in flowered waistcoats and flowing locks fought duels over sonnets. The talk of the town was Novelist Honore de Balzac's story of a man who fell in love with a tigress. "Even the most reputable writers sought to outdo one another with accounts of necrophilia, nymphomania . . . vam ires . . . bleeding ghosts."

In this literary turmoil, Aurore was ecstatic. At 27, she was half-crazy with excitement over the freedom of Paris: "If only I could convey to you," she wrote to one of her friends, "this faculty of feeling alive, joyous, ardent, as it runs through my blood and bubbles in my breast. ... To live! It is delirium!"

She became the mistress of frail, small Poet Jules Sandeau --first of a series of ailing artists to whom she was instinctively drawn. (She had a passionate fear of aggressively masculine men.) From his name she fabricated her own famed pseudonym, and at the same time devised the costume for which she was notorious forever after: trousers, vest, a huge grey topcoat that fell nearly to her heels, a woolen muffler, a splendid tall hat with furry nap, boots with iron heels. Parisians were once astonished by the spectacle of burly Novelist Balzac conducting petite Novelist Sand back home in the small hours--she in her high hat and greatcoat, he with one hairy paw holding high a glowing candle, the other holding together his own favorite costume-- a bathrobe.

To a Chambermaid's Taste. The handsome, high-hatted romantic poured out novels as naturally and easily as she breathed. In Indiana, Valentine, Lelia --first of the 80 novels she was to write in the next 45 years--the public thrilled to the half-tragic, half-ecstatic adventures of debonair, noble heroes. The heroines struggled against monster husbands, intruding villains, and their own passions, half-died for love, leaped over precipices for duty's sake -- or very nearly leaped: Novelist Sand was too shrewd to disap point her mass audience. "Knowing the passion of chambermaids for novels," she once observed with candor, "I often bear them in mind when I write my own."

She stirred the hearts of the most un likely people. Cold, calculating Charles Sainte-Beuve, the greatest critic of his day, became her closest confidant. One sedate, elderly book reviewer, who had never before held anything more dangerous than a pen, fought a pistol duel with a colleague who had sneered at George Sand. Neither reviewer was harmed by the furious fusillade, but a nearby cow dropped dead, and the critics' publisher had to pay damages to the angry farmer.

George soon rid herself of Lover Sandeau, by the simple expedient of warning him that fleshly passion was ruining his health. Then, in a disastrous moment, she decided to attach herself to a masterful man, Novelist Prosper Merimee, a callous Parisian rake. Merimee gave her the coldly brutal treatment he gave all women, and tossed her a five-franc tip when he left her. George Sand never got over this insult. "Had he loved me," she wrote sadly to Sainte-Beuve, "he might have dominated me. . . . My independence is a canker that is killing me."

"Love Means Tears." Poet Alfred de Musset, her next lover, was more her usual type : a nerve-shattered, impassioned Romantic. "I love you like a child," he told George. They rarely had a quiet moment together. They traveled through France, Germany, Italy, quarreling, raging, hating one another, reveling in passion and bitter suffering. "Mother!" he would scream at her sarcastically, "You're boredom personified!" He would rush off on violent orgies and accuse her of wanting to put him in an insane asylum.

"I want no more of love," gasped exhausted George at last. She consulted her friends in Paris. "Love means tears," Saint-Beuve told her. "If you weep, you love." Devout Pianist Franz Liszt advised her that only God was worth loving. "It may be true," said George, "but if one has loved a man it is very hard to love God."

"She Is Adorable." Throughout all these emotional upheavals she wrote stead ily, often twelve hours a day, drinking cup after cup of black coffee. Each new tumult, each fresh ecstasy and misery of her private life instantly formed the substance of a new novel -- which were sometimes turned out at 30-day intervals. With the proceeds, she supported her self, her children, her lovers, her friends -- and beggars.

Half of France followed her doings with interest. When she divorced her husband Casimir and won custody of her children, the whole court burst into roars of applause, and the jury wept.

The last great affair of her life was with Composer Frederic Chopin. Like his predecessors, Chopin was young, frail, sick. His friends were horrified.

Nonetheless, for nine years the strange Sand-Chopin union endured. Though they had scarcely one friend or one idea in common, they regarded one another with great respect--and a secret, slightly amused condescension. "His advice on matters of fact," wrote George, "one cannot possibly take very seriously. He never sees things as they are--his soul js so full of poetry and music." "She is adorable," confided Chopin, "but she hasn't a groat's worth of common sense."

She was to outlive her lover by 27 years--years of feverish activity in politics and writing. Just as she had captured her own generation as romantic and lover, she thrilled a new generation as radical and feminist. Author Winwar, who is something of a radical and a feminist herself, sees in this change of emphasis George Sand's splendid transition from the life of self to the life of "common humanity." Most readers may prefer the calmer summing-up of Novelist Henry James: "There is something very liberal and universal in George Sand's genius, as well as very masculine; but our final impression of her always is that she is a woman, and a Frenchwoman."

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