Copyright © 2019 by Actes Sud (France)
English translation © 2024 by Emma Ramadan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Seven Stories Press
www.sevenstories.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lacamp, Ysabelle, author. | Ramadan, Emma, translator.

Title: George Sand : no to prejudice / Ysabelle Lacamp ; translated by Emma Ramadan.

Other titles: George Sand. English

Description: New York : Triangle Square Books for Young Readers/Seven Stories Press, [2023] | Series: They said no | Includes bibliographical references. | Audience: Ages 10-14. | Audience: Grades 7-9.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023010723 | ISBN 9781644212592 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781644212608 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Sand, George, 1804-1876--Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Sand, George, 1804-1876--Fiction. | Women authors--Fiction. | Authors--Fiction. | Reformers--Fiction. | Prejudices--Fiction. | Women’s rights--Fiction. | France--Social life and customs--19th century--Fiction. | LCGFT: Biographical fiction. | Novels.

Classification: LCC PZ7.1.L168 Ge 2023 | DDC [Fic]--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023010723

Cover illustration: François Roca

Teachers may order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles.
Visit https://www.sevenstories.com/pg/resources-academics or email academic@sevenstories.com.

Printed in the USA.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Caspar

“No one makes a revolution
by himself, and there are some
revolutions which humanity
accomplishes without quite
knowing how, because it is
everybody who takes
them in hand.”

george sand

Contents

1 1815

2 1823–1830

3 Paris, 1832

4 1833

5 February 16, 1836

6 Nohant, June 1, 1839

7 Nohant, winter, 1847

8 1848

9 Dear stranger

Afterword: They Too Said No

Chronology

For More Information

About the Author and Translator

1

1815

Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin de Francueil . . .

Your mouth rounds comically in the mirror as you say each part of your name.

Ugh! A never-ending name! A name that unfolds like an expandable dining room table! But what does it really say about me?

The oval framed by black curls draws in close to the mirror now, and you scrutinize each of your features with equal parts avidity and perplexity:

“Who am I?”

All you know is that you’re eleven and the product of love. The love of Maurice Dupin, leader of the Hussars, grandson of Marshal de Saxe—himself none other than the natural-born son of the King of Poland—and Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, daughter of a simple bird breeder from the Quai de la Mégisserie, whom he met during one of Bonaparte’s campaigns in Italy. A strange mix of social classes for the time. “A prince and a bohemian,” you’ll go on to write. But for now, Amantine Aurore Lucile doesn’t care a bit: the fairies leaning over your crib taught you from a very young age that one plus one has never made two.

The proof! Aren’t you yourself a full being made from two halves?

With all due respect to mathematicians.

And suddenly, superimposed on your reflection, a memory so haunting, so incredibly joyous! You are four and have just arrived in Madrid with your mother. Oof . . . What a perilous journey to reach your dear Papa, named Prince Murat’s aide-de-camp after Napoleon sent his men to Spain for fear of an English landing in Portugal!

You are in a splendid palace that the family is sharing with Murat.

Damask hangings and furniture inlaid with gold. Quite the contrast after crossing Asturias and its villages in ruins, still in smoke, pillaged by French soldiers.

Especially because your mother, with her fairy fingers, fashioned you a miniature uniform just like your father’s: a white cashmere tunic with a little coat adorned with fur and thin gold stripes, red Moroccan leather boots, a saber hanging from a belt, and pants too, of course.

You were stupefied to find yourself thus transformed into a boy, then to see yourself five minutes later as a grande dame of Spain in the replica of the outfit worn by your mother with its mantilla and finery trimmed with velvet!

Such intoxication: you, one single person, could be so many dazzling characters! There were so many possibilities on the horizon for you.

Alas, who would have imagined that the first color offered by destiny would be the black of mourning, just one month after your return from Spain?

This is what you repeat to yourself as you walk to the thirteenth poplar bordering the left side of the road on the way from your grandmother’s estate to La Châtre.

The tawny roofs of Nohant silhouetted behind you, you kneel at the edge of the road and remain prostrated there for a long time, listening to the wind howl mournfully through the trees bending beneath the inky sky, just like that September night when your father’s horse—a diabolical thoroughbred gifted to him by the King of Spain—had reared up in this very spot and fatally thrown its rider to the ground.

You launch your imaginary steed like a lunatic and thrust yourself against the tree, that cursed tree, to punish yourself for failing to protect your father. But hadn’t you already been punished?

As if that tragedy, which had put you in the middle of the rivalry between your mother Sophie and your grandmother, hadn’t upturned her life enough!

“Maman, my little Maman, why won’t you come to see me in Nohant this summer? Why did Grandma separate us? Why did you trade me? So that Grandma could give me the proper education suited to her rank, so that your daughter might one day have a handsome husband and a large fortune?”

An angry pebble crashes into a flowerbed.

“Never, do you hear me, never will I be the puppet you want to turn me into. I’d rather become a washerwoman than a mummified noblewoman in taffeta on the arms of a husband who is ashamed of you!”

You sniffle and clench your fists.

You leave the main alleyway of the park, take the path that joins the little wood bordered with lilacs and hawthorns, and approach the dark mass of a thicket.

Seven years since, and your father continues to be dead, six years, and after endless disputes and trips between Paris and le Berry, your paternal grandmother and your mother have finally agreed that you be raised in Nohant in exchange for an income guaranteeing your mother’s move to the capital.

You block your ears so as not to hear Sophie, your beloved mother, explain to you that she must not complain or act out because she needed the money.

You must restrain yourself from screaming when you miss her arms. Sophie, your only love!

Pushing aside thorns and bushes, you shrug your shoulders. No one can stop you from going to find your mother in Paris. You’ll flee. Better to eat beans in your little loft, as your grandmother’s maid jeers mockingly, than rot under the yoke of old Deschartres, the private tutor who has served the house since your father was a child.

As you make your way through the magic of the thicket, your sadness diminishes.

Your face caressed by the plump spindle leaves, your nose in the trumpet-shaped morning glories, your mind races furiously at the idea of reaching Corambé, your confidante, your sole refuge. The god you yourself created, the god you come to worship at the foot of an old maple tree, an altar crumbling with shells and flowers.

Pfft . . . How could you not invent your own god when you’re unsatisfied with what they teach you at bible study? When you dream of an ideal humanity and a different god, capable of loving all beings and thus all religions?

Heart racing, filled with a fervor that warms up your senses like a thick liqueur, you get on your knees in front of the small edifice constructed in secret out of river pebbles and moss laced with ivy.

Corambé, sometimes a god, sometimes a goddess, a consoling friend, or a sister, because, of course, we all have two sexes! You smile, busy gathering new flower offerings, and suddenly call out:

“Corambé, since You possess the power to free the lizards, frogs, thrushes, and butterflies I bring you, couldn’t You grant my freedom, too?”

At the same time, in the distance, the anguished voice of your grandmother: “Maurice, Maurice!” You prick up your ears and suddenly, strangely disturbed, hastily take your leave of Corambé:

“Poor Grandma,” you sigh, “I know that I resemble him, but when will you stop mistaking me for your son?”

Your hostility? Evaporated.

Abruptly, you’re nine years old: there you are transported under the yellow quilt, nestled against your mother, who comes only rarely to see you in Nohant. You feel as if it were yesterday, the slightly coarse texture of the silk under your fingers, associated with their laughter. A door slams. The voice, the voice of your grandmother like the ripping of fabric, proclaiming that it is neither sound nor chaste for a child of your age to sleep with her mother. To which Sophie retorts, vibrating with indignation: “If anyone lacks chastity, it’s certainly you for having such ideas!”

Stunned, you squeeze yourself against your mother. Although that scene signals the end of your innocence, she will at least derive a lesson from it: morality is nothing but a hodgepodge of conventions!

Two days later, when your grandmother tries to break the ice by pulling you onto her lap, you extricate yourself and coldly declare, “Since it’s not chaste, I will no longer kiss my grandmother.”

Thus rejected, your grandmother stands up and leaves the room without saying a word. You picture yourself wiping away the condensation from the window to better watch the hunched silhouette walking the pathway up to the cypress tree whose shadow lies over her son’s tomb, before getting on her knees to cry. Something stirs in your heart, something that makes you think that nothing is entirely black or white in a human being and that even the soul of your worst enemy could not be as dark as you might imagine. Your first lesson of relativity, in a way. Perhaps that’s what it means to grow up.

As often happens, between the grammar and Latin lessons in old Deschartres’s office, or botany lessons in the fields, running around with a magnifying glass in your hand and wearing farmer’s pants, you are elsewhere. Your imagination boils over. A thousand characters, a thousand stories dance through your brain. So you write. In your head, since your mother mocks your flowery writing style. You have in fact never stopped writing since those happy afternoons on rue de la Grange-Batalière in Paris where you lived with your mother and half-sister Caroline until you turned four. A modest lodging where your father joined you in his fancy aide-de-camp uniform between campaigns: a tiled room with an alcove made from a fine brass trellis and a tiny dining room where your mother—to sew in peace or cut vegetables for the eternal pot-au-feu—would invariably set up four straw chairs facing each other, thus demarcating the imaginary play area at the center of which you recounted your stories, sitting on the furnace for lack of a cushion.

It was a happy time. Back when you enjoyed your mother’s company and were able to see your sister . . . Thinking of it, something cowers in you and you shut your eyes: your second epiphany! The one that will govern your life as much as your loathing of conventions in your war on prejudice: the injustice of class discrimination!

A trip to Paris. Grandma’s townhouse on rue Neuve-des-Mathurins. The visits to your mother’s small apartment. The contrast between luxury and poverty. And then one night, your sister’s sneaky visit to your grandmother’s. The woman’s cold rage, her irrevocable demand that “that girl never again step foot in this house!” and above all Caroline’s sobs from behind the door, her scream. That lacerating scream that rips through your soul and awakens the call of blood. Why? Why?

The sky-blue damask hangings that decorate the room spin and spin, the Oriental rugs sway, you want to throw yourself into the flames of that fire crackling in the chimney. Isn’t Caroline too the daughter of Sophie Delaborde, the granddaughter of the bird breeder, great-granddaughter of Mother Cloquard? No different from you, her sister.

How can adults behave with so little humanity?

2

1823–1830

Behind the windows with the shaky reflections in your grandmother’s bedroom, it’s bone-splittingly cold.

Pregnant with Maurice, who will bear the name of his grandfather, you—now Baroness Dudevant after your marriage to Casimir—rest. Forced bedrest on the advice of Deschartres after a bad fall that caused bleeding. No matter: destined to remain the arena of your life for a few months, your grandmother’s Louis XV bed has become your winter garden: a pretty green canvas replaces the dusty canopy and valance, and branches of freshly cut pine trees replace the sinister panaches* at the four corners of this bed whose frame resembles a hearse.

Most importantly, this garden brings you birds seeking refuge to keep you company! You ask and you receive. Each day brings its share of sparrows, chickadees, chaffinches and robins numb with cold, which you like to heat up against your burning body. In the end, Corambé is never far. But this gift of speaking to birds, haven’t you always had it, like your mother and your grandfather, who ran a tavern before becoming a bird breeder?

Casimir does all he can to cheer you up during your pregnancy. The irony! He who gets agitated when you sit at the piano has gone so far as to order you new sheet music from Paris! How can he feel such languor, such pernicious disgust with life, and also feel such tenderness at the idea of having a child?

You yawn and put down Reveries of the Solitary Walker by your dear Rousseau because you’ve been rereading the same page for the umpteenth time. The book so illuminated your adolescence that you once compared its enchantment to the music of Mozart. Sigh. The images blur but always magically reconstruct themselves around your grandmother’s round feathered cap hanging above the bed where she tucked in young Aurore, covered in lice upon your return from Spain.

God! How you used to detest your grandmother’s severe calm, which clashed with the fantastic gaiety of your mother, and detested especially those good manners that your grandmother strove to inculcate in you! Even so, you learned over the years to cherish your grandmother, who suffered from your all-consuming passion for Sophie, and cared for your grandmother so passionately during her illness that her last words had been: “So you’re losing a friend.”

And it was true.

Today, you can’t stop thinking of that righteous, proud woman who, despite the conventions of her time, had lived audaciously, with a certain freedom of mind. For example, her belief in God that wasn’t wed to a religion, asking the king to allow her to replace her deceased husband in his post of governor, and finally, surmounting her class prejudices by allowing you to play with the young peasants of Nohant and teaching you Latin which was normally reserved only for boys.

To think that that woman had even found happiness with a second spouse thirty-two years older than her. And when her granddaughter, wide-eyed, had asked her how someone could love an old man, her face covered in pale wrinkles had lit up: “My girl, your grandfather possessed every good quality, I never had a second of boredom by his side!”

Boredom. The word resounds and ricochets in your head like a long yawn. Oh well, it wasn’t fair to expect your Casimir to have as much ingenuity as her painter-musician grandfather who also knew how to philosophize, mend shoes, cook, sew . . . but if only they shared the slightest thing in common! If only the sound of the piano didn’t send him running and books didn’t fall from his hands!

But you are prepared to try to make your marriage a success. After all, Casimir is not the worst man. But why is total power always ceded to the one with the beard? Why was it up to the wife to renounce her opinions and put herself aside for the proper functioning of the household?

You picture Casimir barking orders in his boastful tone—for the dead trees in the garden to be burned, for the paths to be redone, for the tired dogs and horses to be slaughtered, in sum, for the wonder of your childhood to be annihilated, even demanding that the majestic peacock who had once eaten strawberries out of your grandmother’s hand be plucked—and your heart inexorably constricts.

One year later, du Plessis estate, 50 km from Paris

Drunk off the air, you fill your lungs with blue, those tons of dizzying blue over the dome of the tall beech trees. How good it feels to be wild, to play with the children of their friends, the du Plessis! To find the light again after that nightmarish winter in Nohant, that long tunnel of anguish and emptiness where for months the slightest thing made you cry, rendering Casimir powerless to cheer you!

Around you, people run, laugh, throw themselves onto the sand. Of course, these are games that some might think not very worthy of a young bride and mother who has just turned twenty, but no matter, it’s wonderful to let yourself go!

Out of the corner of your eye, you glimpse your husband in his puce-colored, too-tight vest (you guffaw), having coffee on the terrace with Adèle and James du Plessis who took you under their wing when your relationship with Sophie deteriorated. How funny your husband is with his long white nose, looking like a turnip!

It’s then that Monsieur du Plessis stands up halfway and seems to mumble in your direction: a bit of sand has just landed in his cup. Casimir calls for you to stop your ridiculous game. Just then, a powerful spray of golden grains collides with your petticoat and you burst into laughter.

Impossible not to guffaw.

Red with rage, Casimir hurtles down the three terrace steps, approaches the spinning green velvet dress and, in front of the astonished onlookers, slaps the rebel who refuses to obey him.

Curtain.

A life-saving slap? In any case, it’s done.

Henceforth, you will refuse to be the property of any man. You gave it a shot . . .

Is financial independence not the first condition for a woman to gain her freedom? Casimir became the owner of all your possessions through your marriage. You try to earn a few cents by painting watercolors or decorating snuffboxes with flower patterns when you’re not combing the countryside on your mare to suture wounds or perform small operations as Deschartres taught you (he was also a surgeon). But the years pass and you don’t feel any more free.

Your relationship didn’t take long to disintegrate. Despite the birth of Solange and your love for little Maurice who is now seven, you’re suffocating, sinking into depression. Casimir drinks, cheats on you with your chambermaids, and the walls resound with your arguments. No doubt he has guessed that you’ve been planning your escape. But you couldn’t care less. Today, you are in love.

Troubled, you glance around your “hovel,” as you call it: the little first floor room, formerly your dear grandmother’s boudoir, where it has become so difficult to navigate between your herbariums, your pipe, rock, and butterfly collections, and where you even hung up a hammock that has served as your bed since your daughter was born.

The lucky man is someone you met in La Châtre, Jules Sandeau. And it seems like a good omen that you share a love of writing which, for some reason, you vaguely intuit is the key to your freedom.

Tonight, after coming across Casimir’s diary in which he unleashed his hatred and scorn, you made your decision: you will demand that he let you take a three-month trip to Paris twice each year. You will manage a small income. On your own. You will bring your daughter, Maurice will stay with him, together with the private tutor you chose. He can have Nohant, since he loves overseeing it so much. And you will have Paris, since it is your dream to become an artist and to live a bohemian lifestyle. Even if it means abandoning your son.

______________

* A decorative plume of feathers.

3

Paris, 1832

The young twenty-seven-year-old woman, standing cavalierly in front of the large oval mirror in the apartment on Quai des Grands Augustins that you share with your lover Jules Sandeau, has stopped asking herself who she is.

George Sand—that is the pseudonym you have chosen—is a young writer at the height of success.

Inspired by your experience as an unsatisfied spouse, Indiana, your first novel published under this pseudonym, has been praised by the critics and its triumph with the public has even eclipsed that of your fellow writer Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame!

But success does not go to your head. At most it will earn you some spending money. The masculine name that you, a woman of letters, currently find yourself saddled with, corresponds perfectly with your aim to create an identity that is beyond gender!

With a wave of your hand, you dreamily dust off the collar of your new uniform: a redingote* of gray cloth, matching trousers and vest, and of course a cap and wool tie.

To think you had to ask permission from the prefect of Indre to “cross-dress”!

As for the gossip raining down on you—bring it on! For a long time now you’ve been wiping away the drizzle of insults from the bourgeoisie of La Châtre who are horrified to see you galloping astride your brave Colette, bathing nude in the Indre River, cigar dangling from your lip, or firing your pistol with your lovers . . .

Provocation?

You shrug your shoulders and go on your way without worrying about how your metamorphosis will come off to others or seep into your soul.

Why shouldn’t you be able to don masculine clothing, which operates as a kind of master key, so practical and so much more comfortable than those corseted dresses that you have to replace after each outing?

You’re finished with the ridiculous expense entailed by women’s outfits: the hems that get dirtied, the shoes that fall to pieces! Now you move anonymously through the streets of Paris, through theaters and concert halls without fear of being approached or attracting salacious looks. When you’re dressed like a man, who would imagine judging you? Even better, they ignore you—such peace!

After all, your mother and other ordinary women don’t fret about wearing trousers. As if it made them any less seductive!

Oh, how beautiful she is, your minuscule Solange sleeping on your mattress on the ground, Turkish style. Tired from her excursions to the zoo or the Jardin du Luxembourg where Jules brings her so you can write. Happy to be pampered by all these substitute papas, namely the group from the Duchy of Berry, hurtling at all hours into your suite of attic rooms that you wallpapered blue. It was in fact with your friends from La Châtre—who have come to Paris along with Sandeau—and under the guidance of Latouche, also originally from Indre, that you began to earn your living as a journalist for Figaro, a small satirical newspaper that is all the rage with its four fiendishly polemical pages that poke fun at the royalists. You love this crazy communal life; you reign like a queen even though you describe it as your “boyish lifestyle”!

After all, what is the use of a name if not to render homage to your ancestors or alienate yourself from a spouse with whom you share no common interests? Picking up speed, you take rue de l’Université to join the boys. With a flourish of your cane you sweep the air, fragrant with fresh sawdust and blooming chestnut trees.

A professional journalist and now a successful novelist: ha! It makes you laugh! In 1832, what other woman can boast of living off her quill? How many times have old fogies sneered at you: “My dear, make children, not books!”

No disrespect to those gentlemen, but you owe your pseudonym to good Latouche. Since the editor insisted on keeping the signature J. Sand from your novels written with Jules, why not simply modify the first name?

“George!” you exclaimed.

The name erupted spontaneously from your mouth.

It suited you well; doesn’t George mean “man of the earth” in Latin? It called to mind Berry and your gallops with the peasants in Nohant. And your new status as neither dame nor monsieur perfectly suited your idea of yourself as an author.

Just then, the pretty face of a linen maid encumbered with a laundry basket coming from an adjacent side street. Slight collision.

Propelled out of your thoughts, as you try to regain your balance, the young girl stammers an excuse and then, with a short curtsy, gives you a mischievous wink: “You ought to pay more attention, monsieur is much too distracted!”

You burst out laughing.

You said to yourself that Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin de Francueil, Baroness Dudevant was well and truly dead that May day.

Alas, the Parisian parenthesis imposed on Casimir every three months has come to a close. You are back in Nohant with its rose garden and three-hundred-year-old trees!

Goodbye to wild laughter, endless discussions and escapades with exuberant students. Goodbye to intoxication and freedom.

You have to admit, though, that in your excitement crisscrossing Paris, arm in arm with your friends and bellowing with laughter between concerts and cafés, you missed Berry.

In waves.

Especially at the approach of spring. The taste of honey blossoms, the echoes of trills in the abyssal depths of the garden, that green, that green with all its subtle nuances . . . Meanwhile today, reunited with the nice familiar furniture in Nohant and even the love of your little Maurice, you feel the atrocious lack of Paris and its festive atmosphere. Odor of lilacs and lilies of the valley notwithstanding, you are crushed by solitude.

Must the human soul be so volatile? Maybe that’s your trademark: shifting from spirited desire, passion and devilish euphoria, to melancholy and persistent ennui . . . The only remedy is to write. Take out your famous, cherished inkwell from the cupboard and traverse the night astride your goose feather. Until your next trip to Paris.

______________

* A long knee-length coat typically worn by men.

4

1833

Today, your notoriety as a writer is at its peak.

You ended up leaving Sandeau, you became friends with Sainte-Beuve and Delacroix, you moved to Quai Malaquais with Solange, and you almost lament being the victim of your success as visitors besiege your antechamber daily, keeping you from spending time with your quill, your little girl, and your piano.

Because writing is vital to you. Your only way to breathe.

Especially because the public feverishly awaits each of your novels, stories, and other publications. Your quill currently graces the Revue des deux mondes, Sainte-Beuve worships you, Balzac adores you.

But being famous has never been your goal. At best it’s a source of comfort, a means of attaining that damn freedom.

The price of success, you exploit a press greedy to satisfy the curiosity that your slightest gesture or appearance unleashes. The fact that you are a very pretty woman with such free mores is certainly a draw. You are aware of it and you don’t care: the only things that matter are your path and your sincerity.

Why would mentalities have changed since Pericles, according to whom “the greatest glory for a woman is not being talked about”?

For the narrow-minded, you are nothing but a female Don Juan whose love affairs inspire snickering. Your latest lover set tongues wagging. These days you’re spotted at the theater, sighing with love over the beautiful eyes of Marie Dorval, the famous actress currently enchanting the romantic stage.

What? The mistress of Alfred de Vigny, the author of Chatterton? You mean George Sand is in love with a woman?

Yes, a woman—so what? Since when does love have to have a gender? O marvelous and generous Marie, the only genuine person you’ve met in ages!

For in the end, isn’t it the soul we fall in love with before we imagine caressing the body?

But the Parisian salons are already abuzz with another rumor. At the end of June 1833, a new couple has formed, and not just any couple: the famous George Sand and the author of The Moods of Marianne, the brilliant Alfred de Musset, that flamboyant dandy six years younger than her, whom everyone is already saying is a literary genius. Star-crossed lovers. He is young, spoiled, impetuous, known for fits of debauchery. But you sense, behind the cynicism, vulnerability, the fragility of the insecure artist, of the wounded young lad grasping for the ideal and the pure, so easy for you to mother.

As for you, you’re on the hunt for your writing soulmate. You dream of a physical and intellectual communion, a fusing of mind, body, and heart! From his first declaration of love, it seems that this man has already understood you by speaking to both the woman he desires and the “frank and loyal companion” for whom he yearns! Your ideal conception of a woman’s place in a partnership.

The muse whom he lovingly sketches in dozens of portraits and regularly lavishes with verse—“Never has a beloved lover, dying atop his mistress, / In two darker eyes sipped your celestial drunkenness”—is also the literary companion of his dreams. Would Lorenzaccio, his most famous play, have come to fruition if you hadn’t conceived of it first?

Your novel Lélia, published in July, is all the rage. Its daring subject matter, your explorations of the place of sexuality in love and the meaning of existence are shocking. People praise you to the skies or they loathe you. But those disgraceful attacks that don’t hesitate to brand your work as filth and prostitution, you toss them aside, you whom Musset calls “my monsieur George, my man of great genius”!

You’re overflowing with energy and inspiration. You’re in love, you’re happy. You hardly sense the chaos to come during the first hallucinatory crisis of your poet in the forest of Fontainebleau: it’s a fact, Alfred is fragile, but doesn’t his genius stem from his tortured soul? Alfred moved to Quai Malaquais where he regularly brings all his friends. He reigns there with a wild gaiety. Cut off from the rest of the world, the conversations there last until deep in the night, music is played, people draw, while, vestal virgin in Moroccan slippers and surrounded by cushions, your red madras cotton scarf twisted through your hair, you smoke from a hookah, write feverishly, sew: even with a few imperfections, love always tastes like a sweet mirabelle plum.

Winter finds you back in Venice, captured once more by Musset’s demons.

Melancholy of the sky, of its languid lagoon with waters the color of rust reflecting the leprosy of its decomposing palaces. A striking vision. A mirror landscape.

Suddenly, things take a turn . . .

As soon as you fall ill in that large suite in the Danieli Hotel, Alfred runs off to drown himself in alcohol and the shameful intoxication of the ghettos.

The spoiled brat comes out, declares one night at the foot of the bed where you lie that he has thought about it, that he never loved you. Predictable Musset, double-faced Musset who says he desires women “not for happiness but to torment them until their deaths.”

If he hadn’t depended on you, you would have left him on the spot! But now he is the one annihilated by fever, and here you are day and night at his bedside. Is it out of indignation or fatigue that you then become enamored with the young Italian doctor who cares for the dying man?

Of course, once back in Paris, between the drama, apocalyptic ruptures, and passionate reconciliations, you and Alfred find each other again. But in a few months, the power has shifted. This time, you are the one ensnared by reawakened passion.

And so one November afternoon, drying his hands covered in turpentine, the painter Delacroix, whom the publisher commissioned to do your portrait, opens the door of his workshop and finds you, haggard and unrecognizable, on his landing. And for good reason! You’ve just sacrificed your magnificent mane of hair in order to send it to Musset as a token of despair. Speechless, he contemplates the ravaged face that he hardly recognizes.

“Musset left me,” you say simply.

Delacroix doesn’t respond. He is stunned. Who other than George Sand would commit such a sacrilegious gesture? Cutting off your hair in order to offer your lost lover the symbol of your femininity, thus renouncing your beauty! When suddenly, he understands. He understands to what extent the person who stands before him, defeated and downtrodden, this great George whose virility is mocked by all the shameless gossips, is simply, in the depths of her soul and above all . . . a woman!

5

February 16, 1836

A sound of galloping in your head. Free.

Drunkenness, drunkenness of a sky swaying over the fields full of warblers taking flight from the wet clods of earth. The wind, the purple wind that flattens your blouse sticky with sweat, your heels spurring on Colette’s hardened flanks, her nostrils steaming.

Free. At last!

Separated from Casimir. Rid of marriage. As if love could be summed up by a calculation of sheer will! You exult: what a battle in this regressive world, since the divorce law adopted during the Revolution has since been repealed by the ultra-royalists.

You who always dreamed of a connection more human but just as sacred as marriage, one that would protect the children without restricting the adults. You have always insisted: it’s not a husband that you became enslaved to, but a situation . . .

You owe your liberty to the lawyer Michel de Bourges, that unfailing Republican, leader of the radical opposition whose ideas you have passionately shared since the revolution of 1830, whom you followed feverishly each morning, galloping to La Châtre at full speed: not only will the final judgment restore all your possessions to you in a few months, but you will also have custody over your dear Maurice and Solange. A real victory!

Conqueror against all odds. Independence suddenly seems to open its celestial floodgates. You feel like a plug shoved into a dam. You must plan, you formulate. First step, reclaim Nohant: as best you can, restore the original furnishings, order (perhaps?) gray and pink fabric to upholster the living room armchairs yourself, put on your clogs to replant your garden . . . And more seriously, finally undertake the cultivation of the property by informing the farmers of the new agricultural methods in order to restore value to the lands and lighten their labor . . .

Ideas come together. What is clear now is that it is out of the question to sacrifice your family life. No matter what society thinks, working does not make a woman a bad mother. Maurice never liked the boarding school? So be it! He will return home and you will give him lessons yourself, as well as to the indomitable Solange who needs them most. And then the Piffoël family (a surname you give your family because of the length of your nasal appendages) will go on holiday! You’ll bring the children to Chamonix this summer to spend time with your dear Liszt and the lovely Marie d’Agoult.

When you met Michel de Bourges, something ripened in you. A sort of clamor rumbles and swells in your chest. As if that visceral love of the people that buzzes in your veins were now crackling like a fire ready to engulf the forest.

A year ago, you witnessed the trial of the Canuts, those weaver artists who rose up together in Lyon against the price of their labor, set permanently low by the silk merchants. The courtroom, which you were able to enter because of your men’s clothing, is full. You’re warm, the collar of your redingote chokes you. You don’t like the unhealthy electricity that seems to run through the audience, as if they were preparing for a killing. And for good reason.

Despite the impassioned defense by Bourges, Ledru-Rollin, and Barbès, the hundred and twenty-one workers and leaders of the opposition accused of starting the insurrection will be deported. The powerlessness you feel when the verdict is announced, that mute rage stuck in your throat when faced with the injustice imposed on the most destitute, it brings tears to your eyes. An infinite sadness yo-yos in your chest, you recognize it immediately, it has never left you. Crouching in you, mixing with the fragrance of the musky wall coverings, it has pursued you ever since that winter night when, in a cutting voice, your grandmother closed her door on Caroline. Now you are certain: from here on out, your indignation will go into your novels.

6

Nohant, June 1, 1839

Heaven, Hell . . .

You yawn. Your gaze wanders. Examine the faded rosette on the Louis XV rug that once decorated your grandmother’s living room on rue Thiroux. Trace the motifs of garlands, pineapples, and flames that inspired your wildest childhood voyages.

Hell, Heaven . . .

That sums up your life nicely. Your novels come one after another, but what about your lovers? After the crash of your rupture with the unfaithful Michel de Bourges came the full and vibrant relationship with that piano god Chopin, which has lasted for two years now.

Your dear Liszt introduced you to him. Your first meeting didn’t bode well. You even found yourselves frankly uncongenial. But a mysterious communion of senses, galvanized by the music that you adore more than anything, reunited you. The most ecstatic moments of your life take place curled up in fetal position under the piano—as you used to do under your grandmother’s. Like tonight, back from six months in Mallorca with Maurice and Solange, when Chopin, whom you call Chip, asks you to listen to the Funeral March that he has just composed.

What an atrocious trip to Spain! Morbid. Nerve-racking, with its climate that in no way agreed with his sickly nature. It was a good idea to come back to Nohant! You will need to pad the door to his room. It’s true, the large staircase creaks too loudly!

Anyway . . . it’s high time that you got to work.

Every day, from ten at night to five in the morning, convivial guests or not, whether rain, wind, or snow, you sit at your table, take out your quill, and sink into your writing. Everyone knows, even your guests, that they won’t see you again in the salon or on the terrace before four in the afternoon the next day.

First, you feverishly set about responding to your copious mail. Today, no less than twelve missives, including one to your dear Balzac who visited Nohant a year ago, and to your publisher, several critics, and finally, among the artisan poets you’re so fond of, a long letter to Agricol Perdiguie, a leader of a French workers’ group in Avignon, a marvelous being who has more ideas on his own than the entire herd in your salon!

“Is it true that you dared, as a young wife, to dress up as a farmer while your husband slept to go dance the bourrée* in La Châtre to the sounds of the carnival violins?”

Your eyes widen. Unbelievable! What are all these sinister faces lined up like toy soldiers doing in your bedroom? Are you on trial?

“Yes,” you answer tit for tat, “with a friend who disguised himself as a villager. What exactly is the problem?”

In the shadow of the wall hanging, Balzac stifles a laugh in his heavy robe. You lift your chin, your black eyes riveted on your accusers:

“Are you reproaching me for cross-dressing? Or because my daughter was asleep on my shoulder at such an hour, or because I enjoyed myself while my unfaithful husband was snoring? Or perhaps you’re flaying me for waking up the bourgeoisie of La Châtre? Tell me, rather than pointing your fingers at me, how many libertines and wags lurk behind closed shutters?”

An agitated gesture from the would-be prosecutor.

“What are we reproaching you for? For your provocation, madame!”

“You mean my lack of hypocrisy?”

Then, like a yelping fawn, the journalist Adolphe Guéroult stands up and bares his head looking like an old candle draped in wax:

“We were talking about your male clothing, madame.”

Heavens, aren’t we past this?

“I assure you,” you retort coldly, “if you think that with my boyish accessories I aspire to the dignity of a man, you are mistaken! On the contrary, I demand equity: can you tell me why women are still excluded from politics?”

Uproar in the room.

“. . . What bothers you,” you continue haughtily, “is that the person facing you finally possesses all the independence that you believe should be enjoyed by you alone!”

“So that you can accumulate lovers at a pace as frantic as the publication of your books,” snickers Capot de Feuillide.

Whore . . . Filth . . . A cow pissing ink . . .

“Silence!” the prosecutor yells, red as a rooster comb.

This has turned into a trial, you murmur to yourself, will I finally be able to wake up in peace?

My God, you have to tell the cook, that old tortoise Catherine, to add a baby rabbit to the soup tomorrow.

Exasperated, because you would really like to be done with these Sunday performances, you search all over for where you stashed your last cigar.

What are they going to accuse you of now? Setting a bad example for women, because the most brazen are now wearing trousers like you and disguising their quills under false masculine names?

Indeed, where do we go from here?

“Messieurs,” you hear yourself say in a loud voice, “in your eyes I am a lost woman because I write! If women were recognized as real writers, they wouldn’t need to resort to such subterfuge. You know perfectly well that women have no place in the moral order, nor in the social order!”

Order . . . Order . . . The echo amplifies. Rustling of wings. Or rather of sleeves. Muera . . . Die . . .

You block your ears.

Muera . . . You protect yourself from the horrible cawing, one of your first childhood terrors, a magpie glimpsed on a trip to Spain in its cage at the end of an inn corridor.

Die . . . Die . . . But this time, it’s not a magpie but ten black grimacing crows, swooping down on you to better lacerate you in the name of their pathetic privileges . . .

You open your eyes, glance at the dusty furniture. Silence. A silence disturbed only by Chopin’s coughing in the next room. What time is it? It’s freezing in here.

______________

* A French folk dance.

7

Nohant, Winter 1847

You wrote in your notebook: Annus horribilis.

To start, those terrible hunger pangs that rattled your Berry and Buzançais. How can you tolerate a government whose ringleaders guillotine people in the town square? Then, Solange’s wedding to that dreadful sculptor Clésinger. Family drama, blows and violence from Clésinger after you refused to fork over money for his debts. And finally, your separation from Chopin, who took the side of your foolish daughter. The “long poem” thus came to an end. Nine years of “exclusive friendship” up in smoke.

You caress the blonde curls of Luce, your chambermaid’s little girl, whom you are teaching to read at the living room table. A mess of fabric, with boxes of ribbons and buttons, surrounds her. Her frail voice is lost in the big house. You look at the park through the French door and you recall Chip feverishly writing his scores. Sadness. At least this genius, who describes music as “the language of the infinite,” will have composed his most beautiful works in Nohant!

How far away it seems to you now, the age of the Square d’Orléans with its sandy courtyard and its imposing architecture! To each his own wing and his freedom. Chip, his two Pleyel pianos, monsieur George and his pool table. For you, craving a society that cultivates unfailing fraternity, that communal life in which illustrious friends and artists came together was a dream come true. Better yet, the capital in winter, the countryside in the summer, the life of a spoiled sedentary nomad!

Sigh.

Fortunately, there’s Maurice. Your beloved son. Maurice who works in the workshop of dear Delacroix and who has developed an interest in puppets. And so you had the inspired idea to transform the west wing of the château into a theater and, why not, to put on real performances. Even the servants participate. The theater as social weapon. As a means of instruction. To perform in front of an audience of friends and villagers. To gauge their reactions as you rehearse one of your plays before Paris. You’re enchanted by the project. Now Nohant buzzes like a beehive. You design costumes, you sew, you embroider. Under your leadership, the entire house is put to work, you will turn Nohant into that ideal miniature society of which you’ve always dreamed. And since ignorance is an evil to be combatted, the one that leads to blind prejudices, you’ve been teaching your servants to read for some time now with the method of whole-language approach and reading aloud! Otherwise, how would they learn their lines?

Trying to grab your attention, Luce lifts her chin and insists:

“Bur-nace . . .”

You come back down to earth.

“No, Luce, read it again . . . Fur-nace.”

“I know . . . ,” the little girl looks at you out of the corner of her eye, “but a stove burns you, so ‘burnace’ makes more sense!”

You burst out laughing: you’ve been praising the miracle of education, and now your protégée is writing her own lines!

8

1848

February

Snow or no snow, it’s time to celebrate, Louis-Philippe, king of the bourgeois and the bankers, finally abdicates!

An exciting time! Since the establishment of the temporary government shared between the moderate republicans of Lamartine and your socialist friends more inclined to social reforms, there is no more hesitation. You sing at the top of your lungs while fastening your suitcases. You’ll do whatever it takes to win the general elections on May 23!

You rush to Paris. Yearning with every cell of your being for social progress and labor reform, you give your all for a few months at the sides of your revolutionary friends Barbès, Blanqui, Arago, and Louis Blanc. You organized dinners, meetings, you ran around a boiling Paris going to clubs, cafés, newsrooms, galvanizing each other, and above all writing, writing, accumulating articles, plays, editorials, columns, bulletins, appeals to the general public . . . You collaborate with the newspapers La Réforme, run by your friend Ledru-Rollin, and La Vraie République, you even launch your own weekly La Cause du peuple, and while you shuttle between the small apartment on rue de Condé and the Luxembourg Palace where you speak with all the members of the government, you laugh thinking about Maurice, the new mayor of Nohant, obliged to carry out the official orders written by his mother in the Bulletin de la République at the demand of . . . the Minister of the Interior. Meanwhile, you don’t even have the right to vote!

June

Will time now be divided into a before and an after?

Sitting in the shadow of the enormous gingko tree that seems to preside over the skillfully organized expansion of the garden, you glance wearily over the dusty paths bordered by flowerbeds of carnations and clove that you design each year.

Thus the revolution came to an end. Goodbye dream for a better world, mirage of a more just society trampled by the foolishness and greed of humanity!

Since those appalling June days that nipped the young Republic in the bud by pitting its children against each other, you feel as though your soul has died, crushed beneath the barricades . . .

Ah, but what a romantic burst, what fervor, what burning desire of brotherhood had lifted the people’s spirits since February! For you, moved by the Liberty Trees* planted in all of France, it was a lifelong dream that was unfurling: universal suffrage (well, a start, even if it was not yet granted to women), the freedom of the press, but also the abolition of the death penalty, and of slavery . . .

After so much hope, so much joy, it leaves a bitter taste.

How did we end up here? At this mess, this repression? At this escalation after the deceiving victory of the half-hearted in the elections? At these flags trampled during the large protest of the unemployed in May, led by Barbès and Blanqui who were immediately imprisoned. Then the National Workshops* closing, the growing anger of the unemployed workers unleashed during the June insurrection, violently suppressed by the brand new government: Paris under siege, deaths, executions, thousands of arrests and deportations . . . my God!

A slight haze flitters across your eyelids. You shiver. Stare at the landscape, this familiar landscape suddenly covered in rust, without being able to suppress a long and painful moan . . .

How can you believe in a Republic that massacres its own working class, the blindness of a people that rises up together and runs singing to shoot its brothers? Your friends? Deported to Algeria, exiled! It is however not for lack of trying; you moved heaven and earth to lay the foundations for the “fraternal republic” to which you aspired by battling against prejudice. Those prejudices that bring about the scorn of one class for another, the rich for the poor, the bourgeois for the workers, the capital for the provinces, the cities for rural society. You had recommended that each list of candidates for the elections of the National Assembly include at least one worker candidate and one farmer candidate!

A warbler emits its trill. You open your eyes, submerged with air and sky, and suddenly a minuscule gleaming morning glory tickles your sight and . . . a miracle! The simple spectacle of that fragile and trembling stain shakes up the ashes covering the park. Suddenly you remember the blaze of nature in the beginning of summer.

Your head spins, painful. Your head full of black mud and blood clots in which your friends, deported or shot, scream. It crackles like a fat insect faced with so much green and blue. My God, my God, your soul might have died along with the Revolution, but did they kill Nature?

Did they kill Corambé?

______________

* During and after the French Revolution (c. 1789–1799), “Liberty Trees” were planted throughout France to celebrate the overthrow of the monarchy.

* A short-lived government employment project.

9

Dear stranger,

Perhaps you’re amazed that I’m not gearing up to fight again right away? Well, at risk of disappointing you, know that I am choosing to let others devote themselves to that political wasteland. I believe that the childish dream, in which I deployed my wings and flew over Napoleon’s army in the hope of saving it, has left me for good. Surely there is a time for everything, even for love! After forty novels and stories born during moments of passion or indignation, today I aspire to nothing but to recount nature. The dream of the good, of the simple and of the true! Even if championing the lowly and the excluded will remain my signature.

You wonder if I have any regrets? None, except maybe not having been able to save the cricket that used to keep me company in my nights of writing! I have always been true to myself, whether in my relationships, my commitments, or my novels.

But if one day people remember me only as that “good woman from Nohant,” I confess that it would make me laugh. I would prefer that they spit as I pass and call me a dirty “communisse” as a few charming people from La Châtre did recently.

The human soul is often very reductive. We must remain cognizant of easy prejudices, those vectors of hatred and discrimination.

I don’t believe in evil, you see, I believe in ignorance. As for the future, my ambition will be to liberate women from their shame by living and writing as I intended. My conviction, nevertheless, is that it’s useless to imagine a woman’s legitimacy in the political sphere when she has still not obtained the right to exist as a citizen. That is the beginning of equality. Woman’s fight joins that of the people. Their emancipation is linked to our own.

Finally, you will ask whether I owe to my birth my acute awareness of class injustices and my passion for a better world beyond conventions and prejudices. I have always been proud of my roots, those two halves that make me a whole being. What has often stopped me from throwing myself into the cold waters of the Indre is my hearty love for life, life that continues at any cost and exists at the intersection of two threads: joy and sadness, hope and disillusion, exuberance and melancholy, dream and reality . . .

Friend, in the depths of the most extreme despair, listen to the vibrant song that rises from the earth . . .

Afterword: They Too Said No

Prejudice is unfortunately inherent to human thought. Who hasn’t formed preconceived notions about a neighbor, a country, or a subject, because it’s easier to generalize than to break from what is accepted by the general public, by one’s own culture, or by the current fashion?

Isn’t it disheartening, for example, to note that George Sand herself—whom we remember for her scandalous life, her masculine clothing, and an oeuvre reduced to a few pastoral stories—became the victim over time of prejudices that she had combatted so fiercely?

The prejudice against the “free” woman is founded in the belief that a woman is intellectually inferior to a man. For centuries, women were not allowed to make decisions for themselves and live by their own means. It was nearly impossible for a woman to claim civil status, divorce, enter the political sphere, or be a successful published writer, read by men and women alike.

The scandals of George Sand’s life remain in our collective memory, but she was more than a caricature. For who remembers that, after writing more than seventy novels, 40,000 letters, forty plays, hundreds of articles and political essays, George Sand was one of the most important authors of the 19th century, exerted considerable influence over women, and was the muse of the Revolutions of 1848? Who remembers her indictments of the married woman—subject to man, the object of his sexuality—her fight for education and social progress, the newspaper she created, or the modernity of her communal bohemian life?

Though during her life George Sand was able to transcend the constraints placed on members of her sex, her relative freedom was not enjoyed by all women. And even after her time, prejudice against women persists in France. Women had to wait until 1946 for the right to vote, until 1965 to obtain legal authority, and until 1970 to work in a profession without the authorization of their husbands. Until 1968, wearing trousers in France was forbidden to girls in the majority of schools! In the United States, women experienced similar prejudices. Women did not have the right to vote until 1920 and had to wait until The Equal Pay Act of 1963 to have the right to be paid the same amount for doing the same job as men (though pay equity still has not been achieved to this day). It took until 1974 for a woman to be elected as governor of a state and until 1981 for a woman justice to be appointed to the Supreme Court.

Prejudices have existed in every time and every culture, condemning anyone who does not adhere to accepted social norms. Differences lead to misunderstanding, which in turn causes fear and thus constitutes a threat. Let’s consider the social, religious, racist, anti-Semitic, ethnic, misogynist, homophobic, or physical (stigmatizing the overweight, the underweight, the disabled, the elderly, etc.) prejudices. Based on negative and reductive stereotypes, the scourge of prejudice is at the root of all intolerance and has often lent an easy alibi to persecution. It is thus of utmost importance to combat it in order to fight against discrimination.

“the most common disposition among men” (voltaire)

Prejudices create a barrier between cultures. People tend to fear those who they cannot easily understand, those who do not look or act and dress like them and have very different customs. Stereotypes are created as an us vs. them mindset which insists that “us” is normal and “them” is any variety of negative adjectives: weird, dirty, stupid, greedy, and ugly, to name a few. Instead of celebrating diversity, many people throughout history have feared and loathed it without realizing that they themselves were once the “them” to a different “us.” In numerous countries, widespread prejudice has served as justification for horrible injustices and systems of oppression such as slavery, colonization, and genocide.

The history of prejudice goes back to the very beginnings of human civilization, and there are many ways of understanding how prejudice has changed and been combatted. Many see the birth of humanism during the Renaissance as a turning point. The emphasis on critical thinking and scientific experimentation led to a spread of knowledge that helped free people from prejudices. But it was not until the Enlightenment that the fight in Europe really grew against these preconceived beliefs, considered by philosophers as irrational and thus as an impediment to progress and reason. The Enlightenment interest in reason and the pursuit of self-understanding can be seen as a step towards coming to understand the prejudices that we each hold deep within ourselves.

For Voltaire (1694–1778), author of the Treatise on Tolerance, the fallacious evidence of prejudice is a result of intellectual laziness that happens when individual reason prefers to agree with “what social pressure asks it to accept.” This brings about “intolerance, ostracism, and a call for persecution.”

Among the Enlightenment philosophers, the Chevalier de Jaucourt (1704–1779), a doctor who only treated the poor and gave away all his possessions, wrote for Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s famous Encyclopedia denouncing those false judgments that prefer “error to doubt, simplicity to complexity, the apparent to the real and, at times, the ancient to the new, in the name of tradition, then the new to the ancient, in the name of fashion.”

There are many who had to fight against prejudices to better combat discrimination that they may or may not have been subjected to themselves.

Rosa Parks (1913–2005), an emblematic figure in the fight against the segregation of Black people in the United States, became famous in 1955 for refusing to give up a bus seat reserved for white passengers, which spurred the Supreme Court to outlaw segregation.

Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793), guillotined during the Revolution for having dared to defend the equality of the sexes (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen), also spoke out against the treatment of Black citizens. But we forget that this autodidact had all the more reason to make her voice heard because she faced all kinds of prejudice because she was a woman, an illegitimate daughter and had a poor upbringing. Her refusal to marry even earned her a reputation of being immoral (not that she cared). Through her political plays, she denounced injustices against marginalized groups. She gave us this famous phrase: “Woman has the right to mount the scaffold, so she should have the right equally to mount the rostrum!”

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), published in 1949, had a considerable influence on the representation of women by showing that none of the myths about them (whether anthropological, biological, psychoanalytical, historical, or literary) could explain their oppression at the hands of men.

The names of those who fought against the discrimination of women abound, including feminists and activists from Séverine (1855–1929), to Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), Simone Veil (1927–2017) to Gloria Steinem (1934–present). But even without being activists, numerous women simply braved taboos and prejudices in the name of passion and liberty, thus helping to change public opinion and social norms. Examples include the aviator Amelia Earhart (1897–1937), the scientist Marie Curie (1867–1934), and the intellectual Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) who, openly proclaiming her homosexuality, helped to make it less taboo. Journalist Nellie Bly (1864–1922) worked as an undercover reporter for years, exposing women’s poor working conditions and taking on dangerous assignments.

Even Annie Oakley (1860–1926), a famous sharp-shooter and Wild West entertainer, helped break the stereotype of men being the only talented and athletic Western “heroes.”

More recently, in August 2018, a young German member of parliament, Madeleine Henfling, was chased out of a session by the president of the Thüringian parliament for bringing her baby to the assembly room. Thanks to the protests of her party, not only is bringing a child to the assembly room now accepted, but an area for members of parliament to breastfeed and change their children has been created, showing that being a mother does not have to stop women from doing their jobs.

art, powerful against prejudices

Art is a powerful form of resistance to combat prejudices on the terrain of the unconscious.

It’s thanks to literature that prejudices—often personally experienced—are better understood.

For example, French writer Annie Ernaux’s (1940–present) novels and memoirs show the discrimination faced by women, especially women of a lower social class, and the denial of a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body. In his autobiographical novel, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990), Hervé Guibert (1955–1991) writes bravely about the stigmatization of AIDS.

But the shock of images is also a powerful tool for understanding ideas.

In her self-portraits, the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) toys with Western understandings of beauty and the female form. As for cinema, who has not cried over the extraordinary sensibility and intelligence of David Lynch’s (1946–present) Elephant Man (1980)? And what about Oasis, a 2002 film by the Korean director Lee Chang Dong (1954–present), narrating the devastating love story of a woman with severe cerebral palsy and a developmentally disabled man, which accomplishes the tour de force of rendering “monstrous” the dehumanizing society around them?

the fight continues

And today? Major political, artistic, and athletic figures utilize their fame to fight against discrimination, and numerous organizations are actively fighting for causes such as poverty, the support of migrants, and women’s reproductive rights.

The present moment is also, sadly, a time where injustice and prejudice persist. The year 2020 brought a new wave of discrimination, this time against Asian-Americans, who were blamed for the Covid-19 pandemic. In America, the protests against teaching Black history, and the increasing restrictions on women’s bodily autonomy, indicate that we still have a long way to go. But our global community offers us the opportunity to know others better and to judge them less. And thankfully, many individuals and organizations have become increasingly aware of the persistence of such prejudices and are pushing back. These days, there are more and more school activities and lessons aimed at eradicating prejudices in early childhood. In France, a “medication,” (a box that looks like it contains pills but instead has a number of pamphlets with games and activities to promote tolerance) called Préjugix 200 mg, was even created to heal us of our prejudices.

If only it could be so easy! In a world where discrimination and violence abounds, to say no to prejudice is to make a bold gesture of solidarity and to assert our shared humanity. When we say no to prejudice, we are often flying in the face of the pervading values of society. This, George Sand knew well: “The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women.”

Chronology

July 1, 1804: Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin (George Sand) is born in Paris, France.

1808 (September): Maurice, George’s father, dies.

1809 to 1818: George is raised in Nohant by her grandmother in exchange for an income paid to her mother Sophie.

1821: Marie-Aurore de Saxe, George’s grandmother, with whom she lived in Nohant after two years in the Dames Augustines Anglaises convent, dies.

1822 (September 17): George Sand marries Casimir Dudevant, who by law inherits all of his wife’s possessions, including Nohant.

1823: George Sand and Casimir Dudevant’s son Maurice is born.

1828: Their daughter, Solange, is born.

1832: Dividing her time between Nohant and Paris according to an agreement with Casimir, George earns her living as a journalist for Figaro and takes the name “George Sand” upon the publication of her first novel, Indiana, which will be a success.

1833: George’s novel Lélia is published. She begins a relationship with Alfred de Musset (which will last until 1835). They travel to Venice.

1836: With the help of the lawyer Michel de Bourges, a legal separation between George and her husband is obtained. George recovers the Nohant property.

1838: George begins a relationship with composer Frédéric Chopin. She travels to Mallorca; life between Paris and Nohant.

1847: The marriage of Solange; George’s subsequent falling out with Solange; and George’s separation from Chopin.

1848: The abdication of Louis-Philippe. George leaves for Paris and becomes the face of the revolution at the sides of Barbès and Ledru-Rollin. She founds a revolutionary newspaper called La Cause du peuple. She writes and publishes François le Champi, followed by La Petite Fadette, which is published the following year.

1850: Sand meets the printmaker Manceau, who will be her last partner until his death in 1865.

June 8, 1876: Sand dies in Nohant.

For More Information

BOOKS

Story of My Life, George Sand (1855)

Indiana, George Sand (1832)

Mauprat, George Sand (1837)

Elle et Lui [She and He], George Sand (1859); and all of George Sand’s works.

Mordechai Anielewicz: No to Despair, Rachel Hausfater, trans. Alison L. Strayer (2022)

Harvey Milk: No to Homophobia, Safia Amor, trans. Ruth Diver (2023); and all of the books in Triangle Square Books for Young Readers’ They Said No Series.

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (1960)

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck (1937)

The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank (1947)

FILM AND VIDEO

Billy Elliot, Stephen Daldry (2000)

Elephant Man, David Lynch (1980)

Speak Up, Stéphane de Freitas (2016)

Once in a Lifetime, Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar (2014)

We Want Sex Equality (Made in Dagenham), Nigel Cole (2010)

Crip Camp, James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham (2020)

GO ONLINE

The Anne Frank House: https://www.annefrank.org/

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons: https://naacp.org/

Stop AAPI Hate (Asian American and Pacific Islander): https://stopaapihate.org/

The George Sand Organization: https://www.georgesandassociation.org/

UN Women: https://interactive.unwomen.org/multimedia/timeline/womenunite/en/index.html#/

about the author and translator

YSABELLE LACAMP (1954–2023) is a French novelist, actress, and singer. Her first novel was Le Baiser du dragon (1986) and she co-organized the Racines de ciel literary meetings. Within the They Said No series, Lacamp is the author of George Sand: No to Prejudice and Marie Durand: No to Religious Intolerance.

EMMA RAMADAN was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying, and has also received the Albertine Prize. Her other translations include Anne Garréta’s Sphinx, Kaoutar Harchi’s As We Exist, Marguerite Duras’s The Easy Life, and Barbara Molinard’s Panics.

new and forthcoming
they said no titles

Mordechai Anielewicz: No to Despair by Rachel Hausfater

Anna Politkovskaya: No to Fear by Dominique Conil

Harvey Milk: No to Homophobia by Safia Amor

Rosa Luxembourg: No to Borders by Anne Blanchard

Chico Mendes: No to Deforestation by Isabelle Collombat

Léonard Peltier: No to the Massacre of Indigenous Peoples by Elsa Solal

Primo Levi: No to Forgetting by Daniele Aristarco and Stéphanie Vailati

Aimé Césaire: No to Humiliation by Nimrod

Janusz Korczak: No to Contempt for Childhood by Isabelle Collombat

George Sand: No to Prejudice by Ysabelle Lacamp

Victor Hugo: No to the Death Penalty by Murielle Szac