George Sand once wrote, “I wasn’t a liar, I was a romantic. Reality didn’t satisfy me, I was seeking something stranger and more brilliant in the realm of dreams. I haven’t changed: this was the cause of all my misfortunes and perhaps the source of all my strengths, as well.”
It sounds way too touchy-feely, way too elitist, way too, “I am such an artiste!” I can practically feel the eye rolls through the screen, really.
But this is only because you are not aware that George Sand was, in fact, motherfucking badass. 
Sand, was, in actuality, a woman, Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, to be exact, and she fled her semi-comfortable existence as a wife and mother to two small children in the French countryside to write a novel and live with her lover in Paris. And, obviously, be a motherfucking badass.
She slept with painters, sculptors, poets, and even Chopin, all while publishing articles and popular and celebrated French novels under her pseudonym, the very British and very male George Sand. She also wore cummerbunds, white collared shirts, and top hats, cutting her thick brown hair into a bob, and becoming so similar to a male that she was often mistaken for a Parisian university gentleman.
With decidedly contradictory actions to suit her strong words, a propensity to make herself the victim of most romantic situations, and a strong desire for males and against females*, Sand is more than a little perfect to everything I could possibly want in a literary heroine.
She’s the ultimate tomboy, the ultimate muse, and the ultimate Hemingway-heroine-that-never-was-actually-a-Hemingway-heroine-but-Hem-seriously-would-have-loved-her-and-trust-me-I-know. In short, the French Lady Brett Ashley. Since my fascination with that particular literary figure has probably been one of the most enduring relationships of my adolescence, it only makes sense that George Sand’s life (and biography) would somehow meander its way into my general interests and obsessions. (Although it’s a little predictable, I guess, given my propensity for biographies of the court figures of Louis XIV and Louis XVI, and the closeness of French literary figures’ biographies to that shelf.)
But there is something to be said for the French Romantic movement, a salon room full of Delacroix, Hugo, Heine, and Liszt, all full of conversation, music, art, and ideas. The whole scheme of ideas, for instance, is basically the same as the society that I currently find myself inclined towards.
A plan for more art, more expression, the pursuit of individual happiness and passionate love? A detached way of seeing the world, as if it truly does revolve around you and you are somehow the only person at odds and disappointed by general society? Well, it may sound rather lofty printed out in a row, but isn’t that what most of what we’re reading and painting and creating and talking about right now? Aren’t we all suddenly all about narcissistic self-promotion, self-publication, self-realization, all while trying to pretend like at the core it, we just don’t give a damn?
We spend our time documenting our lives and our love affairs and even our grand depressions and setbacks not with exquisitely handwritten letters or calling cards or shared agenda notebooks like Sand and her most reliable boyfriends did, but with Facebook messages, GChat correspondences, texts, and e-mails.
And not one of us is really all that innocent of doing this—I mean, you’re reading this blog aren’t you? (By the way, a heartfelt gratitude from yours truly for supporting my very own self-promotion and self-publication—seriously, my inherent narcissism thanks you.)
And I constantly feel the need to express semi-love letters via e-mail. No, really, I’ve confessed seriously intense and passionate feelings this way, multiple times, and then later on looked back on the correspondences, already anticipating the short story I’m going to create out of the response. My only problem currently in sending physical letters to a gentleman currently living abroad is that I already can’t remember half the things I have said when I receive his return letter, a problem I’m still not sure how everyone dealt with back then (reiterating their own stories, I guess? It’d make sense with the rampant narcissism and self-interest and whatnot).
I document my text messages in a notebook, for fear of somehow losing them digitally. I keep an ex-boyfriend box full of poems and letters and printed out e-mails/messages. I posted multiple videos of my experiences abroad, in order to preserve somehow that entire experience in a bunch of fuzzy forty-five second clips. I even participate in a podcast (second episode available now on iTunes!). See? There it goes again.
What it all comes down to, is that if this isn’t the new French Romantic revolution, then I don’t know what is.
But I do know one thing—I call dibs on the role of George Sand.
Babygirl had a sweet collection of hats.
– A
*(“With few exceptions, I cannot stand the company of women very long, not because I feel they are inferior to me in intelligence…but woman is, in general, a nervous, anxious being who communicates to me her eternal confusion about everything, in spite of myself. I begin by listening reluctantly, then I let myself take a natural interest, and, finally, I discover that all the infantile disturbances narrated to me do not amount to a row of beans.” It is too often that I myself am the woman being described and yet also the woman who thoroughly dislikes this type of woman, a Catch 22, that Sand was more than familiar with—as mentioned earlier, she was more than a little contradictory.)
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