That will bore you, and ungrateful towards your friends as you have always been and will always be, you will forget the marvels of richness and imagination they have made for you and the pleasures they have provided.

Since that’s how it is, run for your life! Tomorrow a movement backwards will begin, reaction will set in. My colleagues are dog-tired, I bet, and are going to join forces to demand another sort of work, and salaries less painfully paid for. I feel the storm coming in the air that grows leaden and heavy, and, cautiously, I begin by turning my back on the frenzied stir of rapid change you liked to have mark your literature. I sit by the roadside and watch them all go by: brigands, traitors, gravediggers, stranglers, extortionists, poisoners, cavaliers armed to the teeth, dishevelled women, the whole enraged and bloody troupe of modern drama. I see them, wearing their daggers, their crowns, their beggars’ rags, their scarlet cloaks, flinging curses at you and looking for some job in the world other than racing like a horse.

But how shall I start, poor devil that I am, who never attempted or managed to make any innovation in form; so that I won’t be swept away in this whirlwind, and yet so I won’t find myself too far behind when the new style, still unknown but imminent, lifts its head.

First I’m going to rest and make a quiet little life work, after that we’ll see what we see! If the new style is a good one, we shall follow it. But today’s is too fantastic, too rich; I am too old to apply myself to it and my means do not allow me to. I shall keep on wearing my grandfather’s clothes; they are comfortable, simple and solid.

So, reader, in order to do it the French way like our good ancestors, let me warn you that I am going to cut the main ingredient out of the story I shall have the honor of offering you — the strongest spice around in current use: that is to say, the unforeseen, the surprise. Instead of leading you from one astonishment to the next, instead of making you fall every chapter from fever into sickly heat, I shall lead you step by step down a straight little road, making you look in front, behind, right and left at the bushes in the ditch, the clouds on the horizon, everything that comes into view in the peaceful plains we shall have to travel. If, by chance, there is a ravine, I shall tell you, “Watch out, there’s a ravine here”; if there’s a torrent, I shall help you get over it, I won’t push you into it headfirst for the pleasure of telling others: “That reader certainly got taken in,” or the pleasure of hearing you exclaim: “Ouf! I’ve come a cropper here, I didn’t expect that in the least; our author played a good trick on me.”

In short, I won’t look down on you; I think it would be impossible to do better than that … And yet, it is highly likely that you will accuse me of being the most insolent and the most presumptuous novelist of all, that you will get angry halfway along, and that you will refuse to follow me.

However you like! Go where you feel like going. I am not annoyed with those who enthrall you by doing the opposite of what I want to do. I don’t hate the fashion. Any fashion is good as long as it lasts and suits; it is not possible to judge it until its reign has ended. Divine right is on its side; it is the daugher of the genius of the times: but the world is so large that there is room for all, and the freedoms we enjoy extend even to allowing us to write a bad novel.

GEORGE SAND: CHRONOLOGY

1804

July 1 Birth at 15 Rue de la Meslay, Paris. Daughter of Maurice Dupin and Sophie Delaborde. Christened Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin.

Family moves to Rue de la Grange-Batelière, Paris.

1808

Aurore travels to Spain with her mother. They join her father at Palace de Goday in Madrid, where he is serving in Napoleon’s army under General Murat.

1809

The family goes to Nohant in France, the home of Maurice Dupin’s mother, born Marie-Aurore de Saxe, Comtesse de Horn, the daughter of the illegitimate son of King Frederic-Augustus II of Poland. Death of Maurice Dupin in a fall from a horse.

1810

Sophie Dupin gives custody of Aurore to Madame Dupin in return for a pension.

1810-1814

Winters in Paris at Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins with her grandmother and visits from Sophie. Summers at Nohant.

1817-1820

Educated at the English Convent des Augustines in Paris.

1820

Returns to Nohant. Studies with her father’s tutor Deschartres.

1821

Death of Madame Dupin. Aurore inherits some money, a house in Paris and the house at Nohant.

Moves in with her mother at 80 Rue St.-Lazare, Paris.

1822

Meets Casimir Dudevant on a visit to the Duplessis family.

September 10 Marries Dudevant, son of Baron Dudevant. They move to Nohant.

1823

June 30 Maurice is born at Hotel de Florence, 56 Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins, Paris.

1824

Spring and summer at the Duplessis’ at Plessis-Picard near Melun; autumn at a Parisian suburb, Ormesson; winter in an apartment at Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré.

1825

Spring at Nohant. Aurore is ill in the summer. Dudevants travel to his family home in Gascony. She meets Aurélian de Sèze, and recovers her health.

November 5 Writes long confession to Casimir about de Sèze. She gives him up. Winter in Gascony.

1826

Moves to Nohant. Casimir travels, Aurore manages the estate and writes to de Sèze.

1827

Illness again. The water cure at Clermont-Ferraud, where she writes Voyage En Auvergne, autobiographical sketch.

1827-1829

Winter at Le Châtre. Summer at Nohant.

1828

September 13 Birth of Solange.

1830

Visit to Bordeaux to Aurelian de Sèze. Their correspondence ceases.