Novelists From France

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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...."

"...exploiters are sometimes duped by their own egotism...the devoted don't always lack happiness. I proved nothing; one proves nothing with stories, not even true ones; but good people have consciences that bolster them, and it's for them above all that I wrote this book, in which so much malice has been perceived. They do me too much honor: I would much rather belong to the poorer class of suckers than the more illustrious one of the jokers. "Notice" (1852) in Horace, translated from French to English by Zack Rogow (1995)"

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

"Thank God that one ridiculing is not enough for ambitious youth, which expands and refines itself by means of a thousand errors and mistakes, owing to the powerful engine of self-love. My friend, we often spoke of those among our contemporaries in whom we saw personality developing in frightening excess; we saw them do much evil while desiring to do good. Sometimes we made fun of them, often on several occasions; more often we pitied them. But we always loved them, nevertheless!"

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

"Nous ne pouvons arracher une seule page de notre vie, mais nous pouvons jeter le livre au feu."

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

"Mais, fat impudent, tu ne veux pas qu'on te pardonne, tu veux qu'on croie ou qu'on prétende n'avoir rien à te pardonner. Tu veux qu'on baise la main qui frappe et la bouche qui ment."

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

"J'ai un but, une tâche, disons le mot, une passion. Le métier d'écrire en est une violente et presque indestructible."

"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."

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

"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"

"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."

"No part of George Sand's Memoirs is more interesting than the description of the development of her own genius. To remember the dreams and confusions of childhood, never to lose the recollections of the curiosity and simplicity of that age, is one of the gifts of the poetic character."

"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)."

"Jane Harrison, the great classical anthropologist, wrote in 1914 in a letter to her friend Gilbert Murray: "By the by, about "Women," it has bothered me often-why do women never want to write poetry about Man as a sex-why is Woman a dream and a terror to man and not the other way around?... Is it mere convention and propriety, or something deeper?"...One answer to Jane Harrison's question has to be that historically men and women have played very different parts in each others' lives. Where woman has been a luxury for man, and has served as the painter's model and the poet's muse, but also as comforter, nurse, cook, bearer of his seed, secretarial assistant, and copyist of manuscripts, man has played a quite different role for the female artist. Henry James repeats an incident which the writer Prosper Mérimée described, of how, while he was living with George Sand, "he once opened his eyes, in the raw winter dawn, to see his companion, in a dressing-gown, on her knees before the domestic hearth, a candlestick beside her and a red madras round her head, making bravely, with her own hands the fire that was to enable her to sit down betimes to urgent pen and paper. The story represents him as having felt that the spectacle chilled his ardor and tried his taste; her appearance was unfortunate, her occupation an inconsequence, and her industry a reproof-the result of all which was a lively irritation and an early rupture." The specter of this kind of male judgment, along with the misnaming and thwarting of her needs by a culture controlled by males, has created problems for the woman writer: problems of contact with herself, problems of language and style, problems of energy and survival."

"She was a woman of almost unprecedented intelligence and talent – a name that has gone down in history, a name that is destined not to be forgotten and not to disappear from European humanity... from my very first reading at the age of sixteen I was amazed by the strangeness of the contradiction between what was written and said about her and what I myself could see in fact. In actual fact, many, or at least some, of her heroines represented a type of such sublime moral purity as could not be imagined without a most thorough moral scrutiny within the poet’s own soul; without the acceptance of one’s full responsibility; without an understanding and a recognition of the most sublime beauty and mercy, patience, and justice."

"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."

"Sand is in my opinion, without doubt, the finest prose writer in any modern language—at least. As passionate as Rousseau, & far more picturesque. No writer perhaps ever possessed so fine an eye for nature or could convey the results with such picturesque precision."

"There were plenty of women writing, different kinds of women, you know...How come they did it?...How brave George Sand was!...The miracle is what women have done in this world. It’s miraculous that they did the work they did on such a high level. Where did they do it? And wearing the clothes they were wearing?"

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

"“To take something from a person and keep it for oneself: that is robbery. To take something from one person and then turn it over to another in exchange for as much money as you can get: that is business. Robbery is so much more stupid, since it is satisfied with a single, frequently dangerous profit; whereas in business it can be doubled without danger.” (Garden of Tortures)"

"“You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.” (Garden of Tortures)"

"“The worship of money is the lowest of all human emotions, but it is shared not only by the bourgeoisie, but also by the great majority of us… Little people, humble people, even those who are practically penniless. And I, with all my indignation, all my passion for destruction, I, too, am not free of it. I who am oppressed by wealth, who realise it to be the source of all misery, all my vices and hatred, all the bitterest humiliations that I have to suffer, all my impossible dreams and all the endless torment of my existence, still, all the time, as soon as I find myself in the presence of a rich person, I cannot help looking up to him, as some exceptional and splendid being, a kind of marvelous divinity, and in spite of myself, stronger than either my will of my reason, I feel rising from the very depths of my being, a sort of incense of admiration for this wealthy creature, who is all too often as stupid as he is pitiless. Isn’t it crazy? And why... why?” (Diary ot a Chambermaid)"

"“There is something more mysteriously attractive than beauty: it is corruption.” (Garden of Tortures)"

"“Schools are miniature universes. They encompass, on a child’s scale, the same kind of domination and repression as the most despotically organised societies. A similar sort of injustice and comparable baseness preside over their choice of idols to elevate and martyrs to torment.” (Sébastien Roch)"

"“There is a diabolical streak in me, a troublesome and inexplicable perversity.”"

"“The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden…Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.” (Garden of Tortures)"

"“I had, at that moment, another soul – an almost divine soul, a creative and sacrificial soul.”"

"“Honesty is negative and sterile; it is ignorant of the correct evaluation of appetite and ambition – the only powers through which you can found anything durable.”"

"“It is no exaggeration to say that the main aim of upper-class existence is to enjoy the filthiest of amusements.” (Garden of Tortures)"

"“Children, by nature, are keen, passionate and curious. What was referred to as laziness is often merely an awakening of sensitivity, a psychological inability to submit to certain absurd duties, and a natural result of the distorted, unbalanced education given to them. This laziness, which leads to an insuperable reluctance to learn, is, contrary to appearances, sometimes proof of intellectual superiority and a condemnation of the teacher.”"

"“Each footstep taken in this society bristles with privileges, and is marked with a bloodstain; each turn of the government machinery grinds the tumbling, gasping flesh of the poor; and tears are running from everywhere in the impenetrable night of suffering. Facing these endless murders and continuous tortures, what's the meaning of society, this crumbling wall, this collapsing staircase?”"

"“Dead trees enclosed the bodies of men and women, violently distorted and subjected to hideous and shameful tortures.” (Garden of Tortures)"

"“It isn’t dying that’s sad. It’s living when you’re not happy.”"

"“Desire can attain the darkest human terror and give an actual ideal of hell and its horror.”"

"“During Humankind’s long centuries societies have risen and fallen, all alike in this one fact which rules all history: the great are protected, the small are crushed.”"

"“Sheep run to the slaughterhouse, silent and hopeless, but at least sheep never vote for the butcher who kills them or the people who devour them. More beastly than any beast, more sheepish than any sheep, the voter names his own executioner and chooses his own devourer, and for this precious “right” a revolution was fought.” (Voters' strike)"

"“Every intellectual effort is bent towards committing the most diversified violations upon the human being.”"

"Le plus grand danger de la bombe est dans l'explosion de bêtise qu'elle provoque."

"“I feel something like a powerful oppression, like an immense fatigue after marching across fever-laden jungles, or by the shores of deadly lakes…And I am flooded by discouragement, so that it seems I shall never be able to escape from myself again.”"

"“When one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people’s souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.” (Diary of a Chambermaid)"

"“Murder is born in love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder.” (Garden of Tortures)"