That is the moment an impulse drives me backwards, like many others, back towards the calm, monotonous lake of analysis.

However, I should not like to see my generation forget itself for too long on these still waters and be unaware of the progress that ceaselessly calls it towards new horizons. Lucrezia Floriani, this book that is all analysis and meditation, is no more than a relative protest, therefore, against the abuse of forms fashionable at that time, those veritable surprise machines, whose qualities and flaws it seemed to me were confused with each other by a public that used little judgment.

Shall I now say a word about my own work, not about its form, which has all the flaws (admitted in advance) that my plan entailed, but about its content, that inalienable question of intellectual freedom that every reader has always claimed and always will claim the right to dispute? That is exactly what I want to do. Victor Hugo, in the preface to Orienta1es, denying that the public had a right to address its insolent why to the poet, and declaring that as regards the choice of subject the author answered only to himself, would certainly be right in the eyes of that superhuman power who sends the poet inspiration without consulting the taste, the customs or the opinions of the century. But the public does not bow to such lofty considerations; he keeps on saying to both great and small: Why are you serving us this dish? What is it made of? Where did you get it? What did you season it with? etc. etc.

Questions like that are pointless, and they are especially awkward; because the instinct that brings a writer to choose some subject or other today that might not have struck him yesterday, is elusive by nature. And if one gave a simple answer, would the public have gotten much farther?

If, for example, I told you what a very great poet told me one day, unaffectedly and even with a playful innocence: all the time there are thousands of subjects surfacing one after the other in my brain: all of them please me for a moment, but I don’t stop, knowing that one I am able to treat will grab hold of me in a very special way and make me feel the authority it has over my will by indisputable signs.

“What are they?” I asked him with great interest.

“A sort of dizzy spell,” he answered, “and my heart’s beating as if I were going to faint. When a thought, an image, any old fact, passes through my mind in a way that stirs my physical being, no matter how vaguely, it is this sort of vertigo that lets me know I have to stop there to seek my poem.”

So, what would you have to say to this poet? Would he have done better to consult you than to listen to this inner voice that summoned him to obey it?

On a less elevated level of ideas and productions, there is a mysterious attraction that I shall not have the arrogance to call inspiration, as it concerns myself, but to which I surrender without wanting to fight when it comes. People who do not create works of imagination believe that they are only made out of memories, and always ask you: “Whom did you mean to portray?” They are very much mistaken if they believe it is possible to make a real person into a character in a novel, even in such an unromantic novel as Lucrezia Floriani. One would have to add so much to what is real, in order to make this person logical and defensible in a fictional event, even if it were only for twenty pages, that by the twenty-first one would have stepped out of the resemblance and by the thirtieth, the character you might have claimed to copy would have completely disappeared. What is impossible to accomplish is the analysis of a sentiment. In order for it to make sense to the intelligence, therefore, while passing through the prism of imagination, one must create characters for the sentiment one wishes to describe and not create the sentiment for the characters.

At least that is my procedure, and I have never been able to find any other. A hundred times subjects have been proposed for me to treat. Someone would tell me an interesting story, describe the heroes, even show them to me. Yet never has it been possible for me to make use of these precious materials. I was immediately struck by something that all of you must have observed more than once. Which is that there is an obvious, unexplainable, but utterly complete divergence between the behavior of people on the fabulous occasions of life, and the character, the habits, and appearance of these very people. Hence our first reaction, at the sight of someone whose works or deeds have made an impression on us, is to say: I didn’t think he looked like that!

Where does that come from? I don’t know, nor do you, my friendly readers. But that is how it is, and when we have time we can look for the answer together. As for now, to cut short a preface that is already too long, I only have one word in answer to your usual questions. Examine whether or not the portrait of the passion, which is the subject of this book, has some truth, some depth, I won’t say something to teach; it is up to you to find the conclusions, and the writer’s only job is to make you reflect. As for the two characters who are sacrificed (both of them) to this terrible passion, make them over again better within yourself, if the author’s imagination has badly suited them to the example they ought to provide.

George Sand

Nohant, January 16, 1853

Foreword

My dear reader (an old phrase and the only good one), I am bringing you my new attempt whose form is borrowed from the Greeks at the very least, and which you may not particularly like. Gone are the days when “ … kneeling in a humble preface, the author begs the public’s pardon.” We have definitely cured ourselves of this false modesty since the time when Boileau reported it with no regard for the great men. Today, we are quite cavalier, and if one makes a preface, it is to prove to the dismayed reader that he should respectfully remove his hat to read, admire and keep quiet.

We did well to act like that with you, kind reader, since it worked. You are just as pleased, because you know very well that the author is not so headstrong as he would like to appear, that it is a manner, a style, a way of dressing himself for the role, and that, basically, he is going to give you his best and serve you according to your taste.

Now, you often have extremely bad taste, my good reader. Ever since you have stopped being French, you like everything that is contrary to the French spirit, to French logic, to the old customs of the language, and to events and characters that are clearly and simply inferred. To please you, an author has to be simultaneously as dramatic as Shakespeare, as romantic as Byron, as fantastic as Hoffmann, as frightening as Lewis and Anne Radcliffe, as heroic as Calderon and all of Spanish theatre; and if he contents himself with imitating only one of these models, you think it is pretty colorless.

The result of your reckless appetites is that the school of the novel has rushed headlong into a web of horrors, of murders, betrayals, surprises, terrors, bizarre passions, astounding events; in short, into movement dizzying to good folk who are not sure-footed enough or quick enough at seeing to keep up.

That is what we have done to please you, and if you were given a few slaps as a matter of form, it was a way of holding your attention, in order to gratify you later with the satisfactions you hope for. So never, I say, has any public been more caressed, more flattered, more spoilt than you nowadays, showered by works.

You have forgiven so many impertinences that you will let me get away with one little one; that is to tell you that you are ruining your stomach eating so much spice, that you are wearing out your emotions and exhausting your novelists. You force them to overtax their means and push them to an exhaustion of imagination after which nothing will be possible any more, unless we invent a new language and discover a new race of men. You no longer allow talent to apportion itself and it spares no efforts. One of these mornings, it will have said everything and be forced to repeat.