The Marquise by George Sand

As an aside, I was currently attempting to read Bukowski- then I decided I wanted to read something worthwhile...

"[...] this man in whom the body seemed wasted and shattered by the soul, and a single one of whose glances contained all the life I failed to find in real life, exercised over me a really magnetic power."

He was who she wanted to be.

"I must tell you that instead of struggling against this passion I yielded to it with eagerness, with delight. It was so pure! Why should I have blushed for it? It gave me new life; it initiated me into all the feelings I had wished to experience; it almost made me a woman."

"Long wings of lace fell from our arms, and our ribbons, purses, and jewels were variegated with the most brilliant colors. Balancing ourselves in our little high-heeled shoes, we seemed to fear to touch the earth and walked with the disdainful circumspection of a little bird on the edge of a brook."

"But from the moment that I loved I began to enjoy my beauty for its own sake."

"When, by the light of the smoky lamp, I looked at Lelio, I thought I had been mistaken and had followed another man. He was at least thirty-five, sallow, withered, and worn out. He was badly dressed, he looked vulgar, spoke in a hoarse, broken voice, shook hands with the meanest wretches, drank brandy, and swore horribly. It was not until I had heard his name repeated several times that I felt sure that this was the divinity of the theater, interpreter of the great Corneille. I could recognize none of those charms which had so fascinated me, not even his glance, so bright, so ardent, and so sad. His eyes were dull, dead, almost stupid; his strongly accentuated pronunciation seemed ignoble when he called to the waiter, or talked of gambling and taverns."

How beautifully she emphasizes his divinity and plunges the reader into a sense of vulgarity and disappointment. It would have been better if she had never known who he really was in reality.

"I thought myself thoroughly cured of my love, and I tried to rejoice at it, but in vain. I was filled with a mortal regret, the weariness of life again entered my heart, the world had not a pleasure which could charm me."

"Lelio was sublime, and I had never been more in love with him. My recent adventure seemed but a dream. I could not believe that Lelio was other than he seemed upon the stage. In spite of myself, I yielded to the terrible agitations into which he had the power of throwing me."

How powerful our impressions are! Especially when they have the least trace of reality!

"My Lelio was a fictitious being who had no existence outside the theater. The illusions of the stage, the glare of the footlights, were a part of the being whom I loved. Without them he was nothing to me, and faded like a story before the brightness of day. I had no desire to see him off the boards; and should have been in despair had I met him. It would have been like" contemplating the ashes of a great man.

"Oh, my madness was arrant, but it was sweet! Leave me my illusions, madam; what are they to you?"

He has his own illusions of her.

"I no longer understood how it had been possible for me to consent to exchange my heroic and romantic tenderness for the revulsion of feeling which awaited me, and the sense of shame which would henceforth poison all my recollections."

"Above all, I mourned for Lelio, whom in seeing I should forever lose, in whose love I had found five years of happiness, and for whom in a few hours I should feel nothing but indifference."

She knew for sure she would be disappointed.

"Alas! did he deceive himself! Was he playing a part?"

Was he encouraging her in her illusions? Was he trying to make her illusions a reality? If he did then what did his individuality matter?

'“Listen, Lelio,” said I. “Here we separate forever, but let us carry from this place a whole future of blissful thoughts and adored memories."'

"I asked him if he would not find happiness in thinking of me, if the ecstasy of our meeting would not lend its charm to all the days of his life, if his past and future sorrows would not be softened each time he recalled it."

"After a few steps, when I was about to lose him forever, I turned back and looked at him once more. Despair had crushed him."

This is almost Biblical. Don't look back! Imagine, instead of having her impression of him on her mind for her entire life, she had the picture of his true self: a disappointment. Wow, what a critical detail. Maybe, she would have been different if she hadn't looked back. Maybe she would have gone away with the false hope that the embodiment of the ideal might be possible. Instead, she walked away with a sense of the crudeness of reality. Not pretty.

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First of all, let me praise George Sand for her response to the "classic" dandy. Since nearly all of the books written in the true Romantic Period were written by men, they constantly emphasize the classic "poet". The guy who falls in love with the most beautiful actress and raves over her beauty. He usually either ends up with her and gets disappointed later, or gets disappointed right away and then kills himself, or something of the sort. Yes, yes. We all know that men are impulsive and treasure beauty (at first, anyway) over anything else. And here comes George Sand. She turns the table and switches the roles. This time, yes it is possible, a woman fell in love with an actor. Why not? I mean that is more likely to happen. Not only were men more free; they could either go to the theater or to the local brothel, but they could have their fill of femninity. Not so for the women. This is why the imagination was such a comfort for them, because they could invision their lives and passions in their minds. That is where it was most safe. I'm sure plenty of women fell in love with the actors, and nursed a passionate love in the privacy of their own minds. I mean, it is extremely convenient.

Anyway, I absolutely loved Sand's emphasis on the importance of the Marquise's illusions. They were far better than real life. On stage, Lelio appeared, "The word charm should have been invented for him; it belonged to all his words, to all his glances, to all his motions." He became her ideal, and that is what she worshipped. She herself admitted, "It was a passion purely intellectual, purely ideal. It was not he I loved, but those heroes of ancient times whose sincerity, whose fidelity, whose tenderness he knew how to portray; with him and by him I was carried back to an epoch of forgotten virtues." She loved what she saw, she loved the impression the concepts he tried to portray made on her mind, her imagination. I think that is the most important thing about illusions: the person itself ceases to exist, what feelings and concepts the person excites in the other is what really exist. Well, those impressions exist for the person who experiences them only. And that is the beauty of this concept, because it only matters how we see things in this world. And no, I don't mean to give a painfully boring lecture about how one can change the world and so on. I am a pessimist after all. No, but I mean just the fact that we each view the world in literally different shades of red, of blue, of yellow... says something about our conception of our own world. She consciously knew that Lelio was a product of her imagination, and wished it to remain that way. She begged him, after the strangely realistic meeting, to remain in her fantasies like she saw him in the present. To not continue life and drone it with the day-to-day existence. She wanted him to live in that moment.

Because she knew how painful reality was- how he could be something (as she so grotesqueley found out) completely different. Coincidentally, I have come to find out the same thing: that our impressions are so safe. Lelio could be anything one wants him to be, as long as one doesn't know who he truly is in real life. I prefer not talking to a person I would like to get to know, for who knows, maybe they aren't who I want them to be. Of course, there is a danger in that too, because one is left with a world full of manufactured impressions that don't resemble real life. I think that may be classified as "crazy".

And so, I was wondering throughout the story- what if Lelio did become her ideal? What if he truly did embody everything she imagined in reality. I mean, realistically he was everything she wanted him to be. If that was possible, would she still have been happy? Or is it that the imagination provides an impossible advantage: having the unlimited capacity of molding and changing one's ideal. If she had wanted him to be this hero, this charmer, now- he could. If she had wanted him to be someone else- he could. Do our ideals stay fixed? Or do they change according to our mental development? So, personally, I think even if that would be possible, she would have wanted him to be something else. Once she achieved her ideal, the realism of it all would repulse her.

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Kindle Edition