Liberty and Libido

By Le Anne Schreiber

GEORGE SAND: A BIOGRAPHY by CURTIS GATE 812 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $15.

In an age that could boast more than its share of eccentric geniuses, George Sand remained almost unchallenged in her reputation as the most provocative woman of her time. In the 19th century, as now, her public image was that of a cigar-smoking iconoclast in top hat and trousers, an unabashed libertine of dubious sexual inclinations. She was also the writer whom Dostoyevsky dubbed "the Christian par excellence" and whom Elizabeth Barrett Browning hailed as "the first female genius of any country or age."

Trying to disentangle the woman, who was born Aurore Dupin in 1804, from the legendary creature known as George Sand could easily have proved a biographer's undoing. But Curtis Gate, whose previous work includes a biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, approaches the task with both the patience of a scholar and the relish of a storyteller. He manages to puncture the myth without deflating the life. From the moment she arrived in Paris in 1831, a 26-year-old berrichonne provincial fleeing from her small-spirited husband, rumor began placing her in bed with almost every author, artist, musician and revolutionary politician of her day. By Gate's count, however, Sand's liaisons numbered no more than 20 -and (contrary to gossip) they were all with men.

Tales of George Sand's amours with Liszt, Heine, Balzac and Flaubert are also dismissed as apocryphal. With the record thus cleared, Biographer Cate dramatically details the involvements that his scholarship can verify--including affairs with Prosper Merimeee, Alfred de Musset, Frederic Chopin, one Italian surgeon, two French lawyers and an international assortment of young men who entered Sand's household as tutors for her two children, Maurice and Solange.

There was a strange pattern to George Sand's passions. An initial period of frenzied erotic indulgence would lead her to fear that her lover would be literally consumed by the fiery intensity of their lovemaking. "What a frightful remorse it is to see the being one would give one's life for dying in one's arms ... to feel him growing thinner, wearing himself out, killing himself from day to day," she wrote of Jules Sandeau, the young medical student whose name she eventually borrowed and altered to make her own.

Compelled to forswear sex out of an exaggerated fear for her lovers' wellbeing, Sand would deliberately transform her passion into a chaste maternal solicitude for her beloved. Eventually the privation she imposed upon herself would sour and destroy the relationship. As seen in her letters and diaries, this emotionally exhausting, sexually unfulfilling pattern is endlessly repeated until her life begins to read like a cautionary tale on the excesses of romantic love.

Galley Slave. Sand's professional labors were at least as arduous as her love life. Like Balzac, Dickens and Dostoyevsky, she was one of the galley slaves of 19th century literature, constantly trying to keep one pen stroke ahead of her creditors. The result was some 60 novels, 25 plays, an autobiography and enough miscellaneous essays to fill a dozen bulging volumes. Her correspondence, which is still being uncovered, promises to fill another 25 volumes. An impassioned propagandist for the romantic movement, she used her writing to champion political as well as sexual revolution.

Sand's is a life that offers strong temptation for armchair psychologizing, and unfortunately Cate succumbs. Although his narrative does justice to Sand's complexity, his labels do not. She is diagnosed as "a do-good mystico-religious personality" with a "hairshirt complex," and her sexual frustrations are rather cavalierly attributed to a chronic case of "nympholepsy" -the desire for an ecstasy so sublime that no mortal can satisfy it. Gate also makes Sand do some special pleading for viewpoints that are clearly his own. He conjectures, for instance, that "were she alive today, Sand would regard the militant crusaders of women's liberation as 'mentally depraved'" -which is to say, if George Sand were alive today, she would still be living in the 19th century.

But if Cate occasionally overstates his case, he does not stack the evidence. All the pieces of the puzzle are there. The reader must put it together if he wants to find the answer to Balzac's potentially prophetic question: "What will become of the world when all women are like George Sand?"

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