It is time once again to leave Merry Mount and time travel to a place called Nohant, a country estate approximately 155 miles south of Paris. Before setting down, it is appropriate to listen to Nocturne, No.21 in c minor, B. 108 by Frédéric Chopin performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy.
Aurore Dupin (pen name George Sand) inherited Nohant (the Manor House of George Sand) from her Grandmother Madame Dupin de Francueil (granddaughter of the King of Poland) in 1821. Although Aurore was from a family of nobility, her mother was a commoner (daughter of a birdcatcher) and Aurore’s political views were, therefore, shaped between her paternal nobility and her connections to the French proletariat.
Nohant was a very special place to Aurore. Having lived for several years in a convent, when Aurore returned to her grandmother’s manor house, she felt liberated and soon began to move counter to stylistic norms for young ladies. She learned to straddle a horse and ride like a man, shoot firearms and hunt, but her desire to read books from the family’s library was insatiable. She soon preferred loose fitting blouses, and pants to dresses, and enjoyed smoking tobacco.
Following a failed marriage (from which she had two children), Aurore moved to Paris and secured fame as a novelist under the pen name-George Sand. She quickly became friends with a network of Parisian artists (writers, musicians, painters, philosophers) that included Balzac, Heine, de Musset, Flaubert, Liszt, Nourrit, Malibran, and Delacroix. In Paris, she hosted soirees, often after attending the opera, where much food, drink, music making, and political discussion took place.
George Sand entered into a series of love affairs, the most famous being with the great Polish pianist, Frederic Chopin. Their romantic courtship was short-lived but evolved into a more maternal/child relationship. The two spent most summers at Nohant between 1837-1847, and many of Chopin’s works for piano were composed there.
Painting of George Sand and Frederic Chopin by Delacroix
Sand and Chopin became close friends with the great French painter, Eugène Delacroix, who was also in residence at Nohant during several summers. In a letter to a Paris friend, he described his experience at Nohant, “When we are not gathered for dinner, breakfast or billiards, or out on a walk, each of us stays in his room reading or lolling on his couch. At times through the window opening on to the garden, there waft in gusts of Chopin’s music, for he too is working; they mingle with the singing of the nightingales and the scent of the rose bushes.”
"George Sand's Garden at Nohant" by Delacroix
Sand developed a strong maternal friendship with Pauline Garcia Viardot whom she called, “the greatest female singer of our era, possessing as well a noble heart, daughter of an artistic genius, [and] sister of La Malibran.” Pauline visited Nohant numerous times and in 1842 Sand began one of her most successful novels-Consuelo-a work loosely based upon the operatic career of Pauline. Later in life, Sand welcomed the Russian writer, Ivan Turgenev to Nohant, where he could meet with the love of his life-Pauline Viardot.
Pauline Garcia Viardot (1821-1910)
Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883)
On one occasion during September 1873, Sand hosted Viardot and her three children (daughters Claudie, Marianne, and son Paul) and Turgenev. Evenings were filled with music and storytelling. The sixteen year old Paul displayed his talents as an accomplished violinist; Sand called the daughters "two nightingales"; and Pauline sang several lieder by Schubert that Sand had never heard before (Sand labeled Pauline's singing "sublime"). Turgenev impressed all with a dramatic story of a Russian shipwreck. (Cate, 723)
As Sand’s political views became more radical, and more sympathetic to the “downtrodden proletariat”, she encouraged an “open house” for a motley crew of humanitarian enthusiasts, gesticulating revolutionaries, and proletarian poets, whose casual behavior and attire were not exactly to the taste of the delicate Chopin and the fastidious Delacroix, both of whom were very particular about their dress and speech. (Cate, 521)
Sand was much more comfortable at Nohant than she was in the Parisian apartments she frequented as a young woman, and she lived out her later years and died at Nohant.
In conclusion, Sand at Nohant wrote the following words and I find them particularly appropriate for today at Merry Mount some one hundred and seventy years later:
There is but one truth in art, and that is beauty; there is but one moral truth, and that is goodness; there is but one truth in the political arena, and that is justice. But as soon as you set out individually to establish the framework from whence you claim to be excluding all, …that is not just, good, and beautiful, you succeed only in so narrowing or deforming your concept of the ideal, that you are fated to find yourself alone in your opinion. The framework of truth is vaster, vaster by far, than anything we as individuals can imagine.
CPW
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