George Sand needed a police permit to wear trousers in Paris
In 1831 a young baroness named Aurore Dupin applied to the Paris police for permission to dress as a man, arguing that trousers were cheaper and tougher than a noblewoman's gown. That same year she took a masculine pen name. As George Sand she would outsell Victor Hugo in Britain.
She was born in Paris on 1 July 1804, a great-granddaughter of the Marshal Maurice de Saxe, and grew up largely with her grandmother at Nohant, a country house in Berry she inherited in 1821 and wrote into many of her books. At eighteen she married Casimir Dudevant and had two children. In early 1831 she walked out on the marriage and spent several years in what she called romantic rebellion; a legal separation in 1835 gave her the children.
Men's clothes, obtained with a permit under an order dating from 1800, let her move through Paris and into places closed to women of her class. She smoked in public too. The pen name came from her lover Jules Sandeau, with whom she had written a first novel; she dropped the final s and added George for her solo debut, Indiana, in 1832. Contemporaries never settled on a grammar for her. Victor Hugo said it was not his place to decide whether she was his sister or his brother, one critic crowned her king of modern novelists, and Flaubert addressed her with a masculine title and a feminine adjective.
Her affairs were many, from Alfred de Musset to the composer Frédéric Chopin, with whom she spent a miserable wet winter in 1838 and 1839 at an old monastery in Mallorca that worsened his tuberculosis. Summers at Nohant went better: there Chopin wrote his Fantaisie in F minor, the Third Sonata and the Third Ballade. The relationship frayed over a novel featuring a sickly prince who looked a lot like him, and over her daughter Solange. They parted two years before he died, and Sand stayed away from his funeral and later burned most of their letters.
She kept writing, turning to theatre when money ran short and doctoring Nohant's villagers with herbs she had studied. Some 70 novels and dozens of other volumes later, she died at Nohant on 8 June 1876. A proposal in 2003 to move her remains to the Panthéon stirred controversy.
Source: George Sand
