The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Prose - 16. George Sand to Daniel Stern

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George Sand to Daniel Stern

(that is, Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin to Marie d’Agoult)

I started on foot at three in the morning, fully intending to be back by eight o'clock; but I lose myself in the lanes; I forget myself on the banks of the river; I run after butterflies; and I get home at midday in a state of torrefaction impossible to describe.

You have no idea of all the dreams I dream during my walks in the sun. I fancy myself in the golden days of Greece.

In this happy country where I live, [one] may often go for six miles without meeting a human creature. The flocks are by themselves in pastures well enclosed by fine hedges; so the illusion can last for some time. One of my chief amusements, when I have [gone out] some distance, where I don't know the paths, is to fancy I am wandering over some other country with which I discover some resemblance. I recollect having strolled in the Alps, and I fancied myself for hours in America. Now I picture to myself an Arcadia in Berry. Not a meadow, not a cluster of trees which, under so fine a sun, does not appear to me quite Arcadian.

To throw yourself into the lap of mother nature: to take her really for mother and sister; stoically and religiously to cut off from your life what is mere gratified vanity; obstinately to resist the proud and the wicked; to make yourself humble with the unfortunate, to weep with the misery of the poor; nor desire another consolation than the putting down of the rich; to acknowledge no other God than H[e] who ordains justice and equality upon men; to venerate what is good, to judge severely what is [merely powerful], to live on very little, to give away nearly all, in order to re-establish primitive equality and bring back to life again the Divine institution: that is the religion I shall proclaim in a little corner of my own, and that I aspire to preach to my twelve apostles under the lime-trees in my garden.

—George Sand[i]

private letter of 1836

[translator unknown]