Word: sand
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...Unforgivable. Maurois is not a member of the ogress school. He believes that George Sand was "a woman thirsting for love and worthy to be loved, yet incapable of that humility without which no love is possible." As Aurore Dupin, she was the daughter of a dashing and aristocratic officer who was killed in a fall from his horse while Aurore was a child. Her mother was a dancer-"or, rather," said Sand, "something lower than a dancer, in one of the most disreputable of the Paris theaters." Aurore was raised at the Dupin estate at Nohant by a strict...
...Sand; out of their relationship came the Sand characteristics-the billowing cigar, the tasseled boots, the incurable, paradoxical habit of seeking perfect love only in the arms of men who were too feeble or feminine to supply...
...cushion at his feet, puffing a long pipe of Bosnian cherrywood, while he murmured that "his genius was a poor, frail thing." It was. George left Alfred half dead in a Venetian hotel and took up with his Italian doctor. "Is it in you, my Pietro," Sand wrote to her medico, "in you at long last that I shall see my dream fulfilled?" It was not in Pietro...
...Walking Graveyard. "What it all comes to," said Balzac in his brusque way, "is that she is a man: all the more so since she wants to be one." Pianist Chopin agreed. "How antipathetic this Sand woman is!" he complained after meeting her. "Is she really a woman at all?" Soon after, he wrote in his diary: "She gazed deep into my eyes while I played . . . My heart was captured! . . . She loves...
Maurois does not flinch from giving a clinical history of the relationships that caused George Sand to be described as "a walking graveyard." Nor does he deny that it was her fatal psychological weakness always to pick on men who were too weak to dominate her. And yet. his complete portrait convincingly presents a figure of memorable strength. Sand, Maurois shows, was the forerunner of today's emancipated woman. All her characteristics would have been considered admirable-in a man. Her friends were legion; most of her ex-lovers confessed that though she had nearly been the death...