Famous Marriages George Sand & Casimir Dudevant Part 2

About the marriage between the famous French writer George Sand and Casimir Dudevant, history and account of the wedding.

ANATOMY OF SOME CELEBRATED MARRIAGES

George Sand and Casimir Dudevant

Twenty years later, Aurore, by then the famous George Sand, wrote to Hippolyte:

Try, if you can, to prevent your son-in-law from brutalizing your daughter on the wedding night. . . . Men do not sufficiently understand that their pleasure is our martyrdom. . . . Nothing is more frightening than the terror, the suffering, and the revulsion of a poor child ignorant of the facts of life who find herself violated by a brute.

Happily Ever After. . . . ennui--I use this word, though it is empty of meaning, to express the secret sorrow that consumed me.

--Letter from Aurore to Casimir Dudevant, Nov. 9, 1825

The marriage from the beginning was a rocky one, made more so by Casimir's adherence to the masculine role dictated by society and by Aurore's increasing dissatisfaction with her life. Discovering her own interests daily, interests unshared by Casimir, Aurore vacillated in the first months between a desire to make her marriage work and the feeling that she was capable of much more than the role of Casimir's wife permitted her.

Aurore Dupin was in the process of becoming George Sand, but the ambivalence of the young Aurore continued in a letter to a friend, written four and a half months after her wedding.

... you must also understand that it is absolutely impossible ever to meet someone whose temperament and tastes are exactly the same as yours.... So, I believe in marrying one of the two must renounce all thought of self, sacrificing not only will but opinion, seeing through the eyes of the other, loving what the other loves, etc.... But what a source of inexhaustible joy when one obeys the one one loves! Every privation becomes a new pleasure. One sacrifices to both God and married love; one does one's duty and simultaneously assures one's own happiness.

But with the friction steadily increasing between Aurore and Casimir, the vacillation didn't last long. In 1825 Aurore wrote to Casimir that she thought that her talents, passion, and aesthetic and intellectual interests were "wasted, for you did not share them. I pressed you in my arms. I was loved by you, yet something I could not express was missing in my happiness."

After bearing a son and a daughter by Casimir, and after struggling heroically with her own conscience, Aurore left her husband in 1831 and took up residence in Paris. Drifting into affairs which in time became more and more notorious and less and less discreet, Aurore Dupin began the long discovery of herself and her unique genius. Under the pseudonym of George Sand she would create both scandal and literary history.

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