SAND George (1804-1876)

Lot 205
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SAND George (1804-1876)
L.A.S. "G. Sand", Nohant 17 January [18]69, to Gustave FLAUBERT; 7 pages in-8 to his number. Very beautiful and long letter to Flaubert. "The individual named G. Sand is well, enjoys the wonderful winter in Berry, picks flowers, reports interesting botanical anomalies, sews dresses and coats for his daughter-in-law, makes puppet costumes, cuts out scenery, dresses dolls, reads music, but above all spends hours with little Aurore who is an amazing little girl. There is no calmer and happier person in his interior than this old troubadour who is retired from business, who sings his little romance to the moon from tems to tems, without much concern for good or bad singing as long as he says the motif that pops into his head, and who, the rest of the tems, strolls deliciously. - It wasn't always that good. He had the foolishness of being young, but as he has done no harm, nor known bad passions, nor lived for vanity, he has the happiness of being peaceful and having fun of everything. This pale character has the great pleasure of loving you with all his heart, of not passing a day without thinking of the other old troubadour, confined in his solitude as a rabid artist, disdainful of all the pleasures of this world, enemy of the magnifying glass and its sweetness. We are, I believe, the two most different workers there are. But since we love each other like that, everything is fine. Since we're thinking about each other at the same time, we need our opposite. We complete ourselves by identifying ourselves at times with what is not ourselves". She wrote a play, L'Autre, "but I don't want it to be performed in printems, [...] I'm not in a hurry and my manuscript is on the board. I have the tems. I do my little novel every year [Pierre qui roule] when I have one or two hours a day to get back to it. I don't mind being prevented from thinking about it. It matures him. I always have, before going to sleep, a pleasant quarter of an hour to continue it in my head, that's it". Then she talks about sainte-BeuVe who left Le Moniteur, the official newspaper of the Empire, for Le Temps de l'opposition libérale: "Ste Beuve is extremely angry, and, in fact of opinions, so perfectly sceptical, that I will never be surprised, something he does one way or the other. He wasn't always like that, at least not that much; I've known him to be more religious and more Republican than I was then. He was skinny and pale and sweet. How you change! His talent, his knowledge, his spirit grew immensely. But I liked his character better. It doesn't matter, there's still a lot of good in him. There's love and respect for letters, and he'll be the last of the critics. The others are artists or morons. The critic himself will disappear. Maybe he no longer has a reason to exist. What do you think?". Then she adds: "I hear you're studying pignouf. I'm running away from it, I know it too well. I love the peasant berrichon who is not, who never is, even when he is not worth much; the word pignouf has its depth, it was created exclusively for the bourgeois, wasn't it? Out of a hundred provincial bourgeois women, ninety are pignouflardes reinforced, even with pretty little mines, which would announce delicate instincts. One is quite surprised to find a fund of gross smugness in these false ladies. Where's the woman now? It's becoming an eccentricity in the world"... She "loves" and "kisses" her "troubadour"... Correspondance (éd. G. Lubin), t. XXI, p. 311. Correspondence Flaubert-Sand (ed. A. Jacobs), p. 212. PROVENANCE Old collections Alfred Dupont (VI, 211), then Daniel Sickles (VII, 2899)
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