Memoirists From France

"Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, Self-called George Sand! whose soul, amid the lions Of thy tumultuous senses, moans defiance And answers roar for roar, as spirits can: I would some mild miraculous thunder ran Above the applauded circus, in appliance Of thine own nobler nature's strength and science, Drawing two pinions, white as wings of swan, From thy strong shoulders, to amaze the place With holier light! that thou to woman's claim And man's, mightst join beside the angel's grace Of a pure genius sanctified from blame Till child and maiden pressed to thine embrace To kiss upon thy lips a stainless fame"

"I have to confess that when I began translating Horace, I was not aware of George Sand's many gifts as a novelist. Of course I admired her outlandish behavior, that cigar-smoking woman who bushwhacked her way through the nineteenth century, wearing men's clothes when she went out hunting or when she attended the Paris theater. I enjoyed the stories of her amorous adventures, how she became the lover of famous composers, revolutionaries, writers, and actors, not all of them male. All of that is part of George Sand. But I discovered in reading this book that George Sand the historical figure is only a small corner of the picture. Sand...had a style and vocabulary that were the admiration of her literary colleagues, a wide-ranging knowledge of politics and religion, and a wonderfully catty wit, all of which she used ably in her work. Horace is one of the best examples of these skills in her oeuvre. One of Sand's most winning qualities as a novelist, though, is her empathy for her characters, an empathy that leaps over barriers of gender, class, and age."

"Women have crucified the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Fanny Wrights, and the George Sands of all ages. Men mock us with the fact and say we are ever cruel to each other... If this present woman must be crucified, let men drive the spikes."

"[He] was a good man but no where near as good a philosopher. His mind was lofty, rather than broad; that is to say that he had more capacity for enthusiasm than for investigation. There was only room in that ardent brain for one idea, and that was the idea of revolution. (Chapter 21)"

"...her soul began to blossom and, within her soul, the drama of her life began to unfold. (III)"

"the French common people, particularly in the major cities, are considered to have infinite wit. I question the epithet. Wit only exists when one is purified by a taste that the people cannot have, this taste itself being the result of certain vices of civilization which are not those of the people. So the people have no wit, from my point of view. They have more than that: they have poetry, they have genius. With them, form is nothing. They don't waste their minds hunting for it; they take it as it comes to them. But their thoughts are full of grandeur and power, because they rest on the principle of eternal justice, disregarded by societies and preserved in their hearts. When this principle sees the light of day, no matter how it is expressed, it startles and strikes like the lightning of divine truth. (chapter 11)"

"Three years ago in Saint-Front, an ugly little town that you won't find on any map, something happened that caused quite a stir. It wasn't particularly interesting and few people heard of it, but it had serious consequences. (first lines)"

"Je n'appelle pas priere un choix et un arrangement de paroles lancees vers le ciel, mais un entretien de la pensee avec l'ideal de lumiere et de perfections infinies."

"Laurence did what all predestined artists do: she suffered through all the misery, all the agony of unrecognized, unappreciated talent. (I)"

""Up till now," I said to myself, "there's been something too personal about his ambition, which portrayed the future in the light of egotism. Now that he's in love, his soul will open to ideas that are more ample, truer, more generous. Devotion will reveal itself to him, and with devotion, the need and the courage to work." (chapter 13)"

"Ce n'est pas la première fois que je remarque combien, en France particulièrement, les mots ont plus d’empire que les idées."

"La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu'un roman ne ressemble à la vie."

"Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué."

"Dans les jours orageux de la jeunesse, on s'imagine que la solitude est le grand refuge contre les atteintes, le grand remède aux blessures du combat; c'est une grave erreur, et l'expérience de la vie nous apprend que, là ou l'on ne peut vivre en paix avec ses semblables, il n'est point d'admiration poétique ni de jouissances d'art capables de combler l'abîme qui se creuse au fond de l'âme."

"Tous, quand nous avons un peu de loisir et d'argent, nous voyageons, ou plutôt nous fuyons, car il ne s'agit pas tant de voyager que de partir, entendez-vous? Quel est celui de nous qui n'a pas quelque douleur à distraire ou quelque joug à secouer?"

"The author of these novellas has never had a system as to the priority of one sex over the other. He has always believed in the perfect natural equality between the sexes which is in no way altered by the diversity of their functions, since each sex finds its superiority in exercising the function that nature and Providence have accorded it."

"Apprendre à voir, voilà tout le secret des études naturelles."

"Les chefs-d'oeuvre ne sont jamais que des tentatives heureuses."

"one should always judge youth leniently. Certainly it would be unfair to pass dogmatic judgment upon what is spontaneous and consequently naïve."

"On est heureux par soi-même quand on sait s'y prendre, avoir des goûts simples, un certain courage, une certaine abnégation, l'amour du travail et avant tout une bonne conscience."

"What is it that you think about, Sleeping Beauty, as you ride along the country lanes on that skinny mare of yours? And not so much of a beauty either, come to think of it. Too skinny, too pale, too dull. Not a glimmer of sparkle in those big dark eyes. Still, I do wonder, when you're riding past the hedges, little dreaming you are watched, I wonder what exactly it is you go out for. What sort of things are going through your mind? You look straight ahead, far into the distance and I wonder, do your thoughts travel that far too, or do they stay close to home, wrapped up in yourself?"

"Here I am, worried and anxious; there she is, serenity incarnate. How can she appear before me like a human reproach? Like an ironic comment on my own life. How can she never suspect I might be miserable? Unlike myself, she is not protected by a mature, philosophical outlook on existence. Compared to me she is a child. No struggle has tested her strength, no disappointment has yet caused her spirit to waver. But that's it, by God! That's the very reason she is the stronger. She has lost nothing of herself. She has not been devoured by vultures and wolves! She is untouched. She lives life to the full. However feeble the flame within her it is enough to light her way. But as for me, the fire in my heart burns me alive."

"It was there he composed these most beautiful of short pages which he modestly entitled the Preludes. They are masterpieces. Several bring to mind visions of deceased monks and the sound of funeral chants; others are melancholy and fragrant; they came to him in times of sun and health, in the clamor of laughing children under he window, the faraway sound of guitars, birdsongs from the moist leaves, in the sight of the small pale roses coming in bloom on the snow. … Still others are of a mournful sadness, and while charming your ear, they break your heart. There is one that came to him through an evening of dismal rain — it casts the soul into a terrible dejection. Maurice and I had left him in good health one morning to go shopping in Palma for things we needed at out "encampment." The rain came in overflowing torrents. We made three leagues in six hours, only to return in the middle of a flood. We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful Prelude. Seeing us come in, he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, "Ah, I was sure that you were dead." When he recovered his spirits and saw the state we were in, he was ill, picturing the dangers we had been through, but he confessed to me that while waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and no longer distinguished the dream from reality, he became calm and drowsy while playing the piano, persuaded that he was dead himself. He saw himself drowned in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should intepret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might — and he was right to — against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky. … The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power."

"His creation was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without searching for it, without foreseeing it. It came to his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he would hasten to hear it again by, tossing it off on his instrument. But then would begin the most heartbreaking labor I have ever witnessed. It was a series of efforts, indecision, and impatience to recapture certain details of the theme he had heard: what had come to him all of a piece, he now over-analyzed in his desire to write it down, and his regret at not finding it again "neat," as he said, would throw him into a kind of despair. He would shut himself up in his room for days at a time, weeping, pacing, breaking his pens, repeating and changing a single measure a hundred times, writing it and effacing it with equal frequency, and beginning again the next day with a meticulous and desperate perseverance. He would spend six weeks on one page, only to end up writing it just as he had traced it in his first outpouring."

"People who live in a calm retreat have a marvelous instinct for imagining storms and disasters in other people's lives, and they secretly rejoice at having avoided them themselves. It is a consolation that must be allowed these people, since pride, too, has its needs, and virtue alone cannot always compensate for long hours of boredom and solitude. (II)"

"It would be a serious mistake to assume that provincial prejudices are difficult to overcome. Whatever people say about this, one can easily win or lose their goodwill by one's presence and behavior. Some say that time is a great healer: in the provinces, it is boredom which brings about change and its justification. Any kind of change in the routine of a small town appears awful at first; but after a while people recognize that it wasn't so terrible, and that, indeed, a thousand curious but timid souls were just waiting for an example to be set, to launch themselves into a career of innovation. (III)"

"Those who inspire in us the greatest affection are not always those for whom we have the highest regard. Tenderness does not require admiration and enthusiasm: it is based on a feeling of equality which makes us seek out in a friend a peer, a man subject to our own passions, our own weaknesses. Veneration demands a different sort of affection than that continuously openhearted intimacy we call friendship. I would have a very poor opinion of a man who could not love what he admired; I would have an even worse opinion of a man who could love only what he admired. This applies merely to friendship. Love is a different creature entirely: it lives only on enthusiasm, and all that injures its feverish delicacy blights and withers it. But the sweetest of all human emotions, the one that is nourished by calamities and mistakes as well as by greatness and heroic acts, the one that spans every stage of life, that begins to develop in us from our very first sensation of being, and that endures as long as we do, the one that parallels and actually lengthens our life, that is reborn from its ashes and that reties itself as tightly and just as firmly after being broken; that emotion, alas! is not love, as you well know, but friendship. (beginning of Chapter 1)"

"Without our even realizing it, literature performs its miracles. It revives the poetry of former days; and, putting to rest in the past all that had been for intellectuals of the past the object of just criticisms, it brings to us, like a forgotten perfume, the unrecognized riches of a taste that is no longer open to discussion, since it no longer reigns arbitrarily. Art, although it poses as egotistical ("art for art's sake"), creates progressive philosophy without realizing it. It makes its peace with the mistakes and shortcomings of the past, to preserve, as in a museum, the monuments of its conquest. (chapter 18)"

"L'art pour l'art est un vain mot. L'art pour le vrai, l'art pour le beau et le bon, voilà la religion que je cherche...."

"L'art n'est pas une étude de la réalité positive; c'est une recherche de la vérité idéale."

"Why call George Sand a wild woman in the publicity for her books? I protest the use of such an inaccurate epithet for such a cultivated and intelligent woman"

"If the author of the romantic creed was Rousseau, its popularizer and vulgarizer was George Sand."

"La vie est une longue blessure qui s'endort rarement et ne se guérit jamais."

"She had the gift of most clearly intuiting (if I may be permitted such a fancy word) a happier future awaiting humanity. All her life she believed strongly and magnanimously in the realization of those ideals precisely because she had the capacity to raise up the ideal in her own soul. The preservation of this faith to the end is usually the lot of all elevated souls, all true lovers of humanity."

"L'art est une démonstration dont la nature est la preuve."

"What time the gifted lady took Away from paper, pen, and book, She spent in amorous dalliance (They do those things so well in France)."

"Je vois sur leurs nobles fronts le sceau du Seigneur, car ils sont nés rois de la terre bien mieux que ceux qui la possèdent pour l'avoir payée."

"La beauté qui parle aux yeux, reprit-elle, n’est que le prestige d’un moment; l’œuil du corps n'est pas toujours celui de l'âme."

"The sorrows of love, the torment of remorse, even the worries of destitution hadn't seriously unsettled him; but the deep wound sustained by his vanity was more than enough to punish him. Unfortunately, it was not enough to correct him. (Chapter 32)"

"For brevity, for wit that began back in the observation of the eye which produced it; for the loving openness, almost transparency, of all the senses to the moment passing, its time and place; for a recognition of the essence of that tension (of whatever name or quality) existing between and among the human beings and sometimes the cat in a room together; for a recording of feeling as strict as a seismograph's; perhaps best of all for a real gaiety, a real laughing gaiety-for these things we will value, honor, study, and above all delight in Colette."

"One of the most frequently quoted literary passages on lesbian relationship is that in which Colette's Renée, in The Vagabond, describes "the melancholy and touching image of two weak creatures who have perhaps found shelter in each other's arms, there to sleep and weep, safe from man who is often cruel, and there to taste better than any pleasure, the bitter happiness of feeling themselves akin, frail and forgotten [emphasis added]." Colette is often considered a lesbian writer. Her popular reputation has, I think, much to do with the fact that she writes about lesbian existence as if for a male audience; her earliest "lesbian" novels, the Claudine series, were written under compulsion for her husband and published under both their names. At all events, except for her writings on her mother, Colette is a less reliable source on the lesbian continuum than, I would think, Charlotte Brontë, who understood that while women may, indeed must, be one another's allies, mentors, and comforters in the female struggle for survival, there is quite extraneous delight in each other's company and attraction to each others' minds and character, which attend a recognition of each others' strengths."

"Here lived, here died Colette, whose work is a window wide open on life."

"I am devoted to those who endured, like Colette. It is easier … to kiss the world a bitter goodbye than to go on working, writing, changing, enduring the slings & arrows of outrageous aging. Colette endured. And she wrote & wrote & wrote. Whenever I feel really depressed, I think of her & keep going."

"I've felt that her perceptions, her feelings about food, gardens, the sea are beautiful. She was a peasant-that was her saving grace. And yet so elegant in her style. But I love the peasant in her, the one who delights in smells and tastes. I never tasted a of chocolate like her chocolate. And her matchless subtlety. Do remember the episode, I think it's so funny, when they were going to bring her into the Académie Française and they said, oh yes, she's a beautiful writer, a wonderful stylist, but she doesn't write about important things, only about love? She's only writing about love. She meant a lot to me."

"If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles,"

"Kiki-The-Demure: Once when I was little She tried to give me castor oil. I scratched and bit her so, she never tried again. Ha! She must have thought she held the devil between her knees. I squirmed, blew fire through my nostrils, multiplied my twenty claws by a hundred, my teeth by one thousand, and finally — disappeared as if by magic. Toby-Dog: I wouldn't dare do that. You see, I love her. I love her enough to forgive her even the torture of the bath."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."

"I do admire Colette, her wonderful descriptions of flowers, trees and animals, animals especially."

"Don’t ever wear artistic jewellry; it wrecks a woman’s reputation."

"On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us — ah! what a dream, to live in that! — the other stifles us at the first breath."