My wife and I recently took a short vacation to Dijon and on the way back, we drove straight across France
to a little village named Nohant-Vic to visit the home of the French writer of the 19th Century, George Sand. It was a trip into the beautiful soft landscapes of a region called The Berry and the valley of the Indre River. A region that is still very agricultural and dotted with small towns, chateaus and ruins. Nohant-Vic is still almost the way it was back in the beginning of the 19th Century. George Sands grandmother was a French Noble woman named Aurore de Saxe who barely escaped the Terror of the French Revolution and fled from Paris with her son Maurice and used the remains of her fortunes to buy the modest chateau and lands of Nohant-Vic.
Maurice, who had the last name, Dupin married a common woman, Sophie and they had a daughter named Aurore Dupin. Maurice was an aide to Napoleon who rose in the ranks but was killed in a freak accident one night riding from La Chatre to Nohant. The young Aurore was raised by her grand mother at Nohant and educated by her grandmothers friend, Deschartres. She recieved a very eclectic education from the jack of all trades, Deschartres, even learning the rudiments of medicine and helped him pilfer graves for material to do research on.
She also ended up spending a few years in a very strict convent school for girls in Paris where she went from being an unruly rebel to one of the most admired of the classmates. After she left, as her grandmother grew older, the concern was to get her a proper husband and she was married at age 17 to Casimir Dudevant. Her grandmother died and she inherited the title of Baroness and Nohant.
While she was in the convent, she began to write. It grew into a passion. She also began to look for true love which her husband, Casmir was not able to give her.
Gradually, she assumed a more independant life. She began to write with a younger writer Jules Sandeau, who was a local lad. They began a torrid affair under the nose of her husband and moved to Paris to clandestinely live together and write in a true bohemian existance in the heady atmosphere of Post Napoleonic political life.
Soon she was publishing her own work, but ended up taking the name George Sand, an Anglicized male name. Her first major work, Indiana was a sensation which unlocked the gates of a torrent of novels, essays and plays that lasted a lifetime.
The work was radical and romantic. A truly liberated womans voice writing about love and the human condition. Much of her work had to do with the tragedy of relationships between classes.
She became a major star of the art world and dressed in her own eccentric style, sometime as a man and lived a life of one affair after another finally obtaining a separation from Casimir.
She was connected with Franz Lizt and lived with Frederic Chopin for 10 years. Chopin lived at Nohant and composed much of his work there in a beautiful room with double sound proofed doors that are still there today.
Meanwhile, France was going through the turbulence of the Restoration, the rule of Louis Phillipe and then the Revolution of 1848 and the proclamation of the Republic which lasted a few years until the seizure of power by Napoleons nephew, Louis Napoleon, who proclaimed himself Emperor. During this backdrop, Communism began to develop as a system of ideas. George Sands was a powerful political writer whose championing of the rights of the people put her in great peril!
On the other hand, she was the most read and admired woman writer in the world at the time and the esteem and admiration that Louis Napoleon had for her allowed her to intercede for many of her friends who were imprisoned under his initially repressive rule.
Meanwhile, life at Nohant pursued it's singularly eccentric artisitc course, with the painter Delacroix, Chopin in residence and a house full of writers like Dumas and Flaubert and their friends as well as her own children, Maurice and Sophie. Maurice was an eccentric eclectic young man who painted and wrote, but his passion at home was marionettes and for years he made and performed incredible plays and the entire household was part of an acting troup which put on performaces in the little theater in the house at Nohant!
So much of this can be experienced by touring the house. The table is set, the theater is still ready for its next performance. Maurices puppets are on display. The decor is basically unchanged from the time of George Sand due to the fact that her grand daughter lived in the house until she was in her 90's and willed it to the Beaux Arts in the 1960's. There are some nice tours you can take which take you through the beautiful country side past a lot of the places mentioned in her books. We stayed for 2 nights in a little village nearby in a hotel/bar-tabac/bakery and taxi service all under on roof which offered meals extra as well for around 30 Euros a night.
The site is easily reached by car from Paris, just a few hours. For us it would be a simple drive up past Limoges. It is not far from Bourges. The town of La Chatre is very close and offers a range of hotels and B&B accomodations. La Chatre has a George Sand Museum and few other sites as wel as being a charming place which is very well preserved on the banks of the Indre.
Now, I want to start reading some of her work in French. I have only read a few english translated novels and I have to do a lot of work if I am to enjoy the flavor in which they were originally written!
Our first contestants on tonights special presentations of
