'French Novelist and Memoirist'

George Sand

Matthew Arnold

Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin (1 July 1804 8 June 1876), best known by her pseudonym George Sand, was a French novelist and memoirist. She is equally well known for her much publicized romantic affairs with a number of artists, including the composer and pianist Frederic Chopin and the writer Alfred de Musset.

 

Sand wrote: "My name is not Marie-Aurore de Saxe, Marquise of Dudevant, as several of my biographers have asserted, but Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, and my husband, M. Francois Dudevant, claims no title: the highest rank he ever reached was that of infantry second lieutenant."

 

Always known simply as "Aurore" she was born in Paris, but raised for much of her childhood by her grandmother, Marie-Aurore de Saxe, Madame Dupin de Francueil, at her grandmother's estate, Nohant, in the French province of Berry (see House of George Sand). Sand later used the setting in many of her novels. It has been said that her upbringing was quite liberal. Her father, Maurice Dupin, was the grandson of the Marshal General of France, Maurice, Comte de Saxe, an illegitimate son of Augustus II the Strong, King of Poland and a Saxon elector, and a cousin to the sixth degree to the kings of France Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X. Sand's mother, Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, was a commoner.

 

In 1822, at the age of eighteen, Sand married Casimir Dudevant (1795 & 1871; first name "Francois"), illegitimate son of Baron Jean-François Dudevant. She and Dudevant had two children: Maurice (1823 1889) and Solange (1828 1899). In early 1831, she left her 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.