A cluster of French

What I find the most fascinating about literature is to know how it all links. Here are some selections from Wikipedia, but hopefully also showing some links:


Gustave Flaubert:
(December 12, 1821 – May 8, 1880) was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.
From 1846 to 1854, Flaubert had a relationship with the poet Louise Colet (his letters to her survive). After leaving Paris, Flaubert returned to Croisset, near the Seine, close to Rouen, and lived with his mother in their home for the rest of his life; with occasional visits to Paris and England, where he apparently had a mistress.
Flaubert never married. According to his biographer Émile Faguet, his affair with Louise Colet was his only serious romantic relationship. He sometimes visited prostitutes. Eventually, the end of his affair with Louise Colet led Flaubert to lose interest in romance and seek platonic companionship, particularly with other writers.


Louise Colet (August 15, 1810 – March 9, 1876), born Louise Revoil, was a poet born in Aix-en-Provence in France. In her twenties she married Hippolyte Colet, an academic musician, partly in order to escape provincial life and live in Paris.

At her salon she associated with many of her contemporaries in the Parisian literary community, such as Victor Hugo.
In 1840 she gave birth to her daughter Henriette, but neither her husband nor her lover, Victor Cousin, would acknowledge paternity. Later she became the paramour of Gustave Flaubert, Alfred de Musset, and Abel Villemain. After her husband died, Colet supported herself and her daughter with her writing.


Though married to Hyppolite Colet, Louise had a steamy eight-year affair with Gustave Flaubert. The relationship turned sour, however, and they broke up. Louise is said to be inspiration for Gustave Flaubert's famous book, Madame Bovary a story of an adulterous woman whose ideals and desires lead to her own ruin. I have read somewhere she was not thrilled about it.


Her love affair with Alfred de Musset was more towards the end of his life, after de Musset's celebrated love affair with George Sand. The affair lasted from 1833 to 1835 from early despair to final resignation, and is told from his point of view in his autobiographical novel, La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Age, made into a film, Children of the Century).
Now, the same affair is told from George Sand's point of view in her Elle et Lui. It is very interesting indeed to read about the same journey to Italy, the same illness that de Musset had as a fact and about the factual circumstances, and how G.S. had an affair with the doctor who was curing de Musset during his illness, from the two perspectives.
In 1859, two years after the death of his brother, Paul de Musset published Lui et Elle, a parody of the autobiography of George Sand, Elle et Lui, published six months previously and dealing with his relationship with Alfred de Musset.
Louise Colet, de Musset's later mistress, had evidently heard from him about his previous experiences and represented her version of the affair in her publication called Lui. I know wikipedia says she wrote this book in a rage to attack Flaubert because he had written Madame Bovary, but if one has read the book, it becomes evident that it is retelling Sand's and de Musset's story, so I am taking this stance here.
Here we are with four books and four slightly different accounts of the beginning and deterioration of the relationship between George Sand and Alfred de Musset:

- La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Age) - Alfred de Musset, 1836

- Elle et Lui (Her and Him) - George Sand, 1859

- Lui et Elle (Him and Her) - Paul de Musset (brother of Alfred), 1859 

- Lui (Him) - Louise Colet, 1880

As to George Sand:
She married in the country but then left her provincial husband to live in Paris: In 1822, at the age of nineteen, she married Baron Casimir Dudevant. She and Dudevant had two children: Maurice (1823–1889) and Solange (1828–1899). In early 1831, she left her prosaic husband and entered upon a four- or five-year period of "romantic rebellion." In 1835, she was legally separated from Dudevant and took her children with her.


George Sand was actually called Aurore Dupin.


Sand's reputation came into question when she began sporting men's clothing in public — which she justified by the clothes being far sturdier and less expensive than the typical dress of a noblewoman at the time. In addition to being comfortable, Sand's male dress enabled her to circulate more freely in Paris than most of her female contemporaries, and gave her increased access to venues from which women were often barred — even women of her social standing.


Also scandalous was Sand's smoking tobacco in public; neither peerage nor gentry had yet sanctioned the free indulgence of women in such a habit, especially in public (though Franz Liszt's paramour Marie d'Agoult affected this as well, smoking large cigars). These and other behaviors were exceptional for a woman of the early and mid-19th century, when social codes—especially in the upper classes—were of the utmost importance.


As a consequence of many unorthodox aspects of her lifestyle, Sand was obliged to relinquish some of the privileges appertaining to a baroness — though, interestingly, the mores of the period did permit upper-class wives to live physically separated from their husbands, without losing face, provided the estranged couple exhibited no blatant irregularity to the outside world.


Poet Charles Baudelaire was a contemporary critic of George Sand: "She is stupid, heavy and garrulous. Her ideas on morals have the same depth of judgment and delicacy of feeling as those of janitresses and kept women.... The fact that there are men who could become enamoured of this slut is indeed a proof of the abasement of the men of this generation."


Other writers of the period, however, were more favorable in their assessments of Sand. Flaubert, who was by no means an indulgent or forbearing critic, held unabashed admiration for her, as did Marcel Proust. Honoré de Balzac, who knew Sand personally, once said that if someone thought George Sand wrote badly, it was because their own standards of criticism were inadequate. He also noted that her treatment of imagery in her works showed that her writing had an exceptional subtlety, having the ability to 'virtually put the image in the word'.


Sand conducted affairs of varying duration with Jules Sandeau (1831), Prosper Mérimée, Alfred de Musset (summer 1833 – March 1835), Louis-Chrystosome Michel, Pierre-François Bocage, Félicien Mallefille and Frédéric Chopin (1837–47). Later in life, she corresponded with Gustave Flaubert. Despite their obvious differences in temperament and aesthetic preference, they eventually became close friends.


She was engaged in an intimate friendship with actress Marie Dorval, which led to widespread but unconfirmed rumors of a lesbian affair. Letters written by Sand to Dorval mentioned things like "wanting you either in your dressing room or in your bed."


In Majorca one can still visit the (then abandoned) Carthusian monastery of Valldemossa, where she spent the winter of 1838–39 with Chopin and her children. This trip to Majorca was described by her in Un Hiver à Majorque (A Winter in Majorca), published in 1855. Chopin was already ill with incipient tuberculosis (or, as has recently been suggested, cystic fibrosis) at the beginning of their relationship, and spending a winter in Majorca - where Sand and Chopin did not realize that winter was a time of rain and cold, and where they could not get proper lodgings - exacerbated his symptoms.


They split two years before his death, for a variety of reasons. Sand's insecurities at forty probably contributed to her boredom and sexual dissatisfaction with Chopin. In Lucrezia Floriani, a novel, Sand used Chopin as a model for a sickly Eastern European prince named Karol. He's cared for by a middle-aged actress past her prime, Lucrezia, who suffers a great deal by caring for Karol. Though Sand claimed not to have made a cartoon out of Chopin, the book's publication and widespread readership may have exacerbated their antipathy to each other.
However, the tipping point in their relationship involved her daughter Solange. Chopin continued to be cordial to Solange after she and her husband, Auguste Clesinger, had a vicious falling out with Sand over money. Sand took Chopin's support of Solange as outright treachery, and confirmation that Chopin had always "loved" Solange. Sand's son Maurice also disliked Chopin. Maurice wanted to establish himself as the 'man of the estate,' and did not wish to have Chopin as a rival for that role. Chopin was never asked back to Nohant.
In 1848, he returned to Paris from a tour of the UK and died at the Place Vendôme. Chopin was penniless at that point; his friends had to pay for his stay there, as well as his funeral at the Madeleine. The funeral was attended by over 3,000 people, including Delacroix, Liszt, Victor Hugo and other famous people. George Sand, however, was notable by her absence.


To Recap:

Flaubert + Colet = letters amazing to read if you read French

Colet + Musset = Lui, 1880

Musset + Sand = La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle, 1836 and Elle et Lui, 1859
Sand + Chopin = Un Hiver à Majorque, 1855

The links go on and on....................