"`Ah, how is it that there is only one cup?'
"`The other has been taken away.'
"`No, nothing has been taken away. You drank out of the same cup.'
"`Even if that were so, you have no longer the right to trouble about such things.'
"`I have the right, as I am still supposed to be your lover.
You ought at least to show me respect, and, as I am leaving in three days, you might wait until I have gone to do as you like.'
"The night following this scene Musset discovered George Sand, crouching on her bed, writing a letter.
"`What are you doing?' he asked.
"`I am reading,' she replied, and she blew out the candle.
"`If you are reading, why do you put the candle out?'
"`It went out itself: light it again.'
"Alfred de Musset lit it again.
"`Ah, so you were reading, and you have no book. Infamous woman, you might as well say that you are writing to your lover.'
George Sand had recourse to her usual threat of leaving the house.
Alfred de Musset read her up: `You are thinking of a horrible plan.
You want to hurry off to your doctor, pretend that I am mad and that your life is in danger. You will not leave this room.
I will keep you from anything so base. If you do go, I will put such an epitaph on your grave that the people who read it will turn pale,' said Alfred with terrible energy.
"George Sand was trembling and crying.
"`I no longer love you,' Alfred said scoffingly to George Sand.
"`It is the right moment to take your poison or to go and drown yourself.'
"Confession to Alfred of her secret about the doctor. Reconciliation.
Alfred's departure. George Sand's affectionate and enthusiastic letters."Such are the famous episodes of the _tea-cup_ and _the letter_as Buloz heard them told at the time. {The end of footnote [20]}
Musset returned in March, 1834, leaving George Sand with Pagello in Venice. The sentimental exaggeration continued, as we see from the letters exchanged between Musset and George Sand.
When crossing the Simplon the immutable grandeur of the Alps struck Alusset with admiration, and he thought of his two "great friends."His head was evidently turned by the heights from which he looked at things. George Sand wrote to him: "I am not giving you any message from Pagello, except that he is almost as sad as Iam at your absence." "He is a fine fellow," answered Musset.
"Tell him how much I like him, and that my eyes fill with tears when I think of him." Later on he writes: "When I saw Pagello, I recognized in him the better side of my own nature, but pure and free from the irreparable stains which have ruined mine.""Always treat me like that," writes Musset again. "It makes me feel proud. My dear friend, the woman who talks of her new lover in this way to the one she has given up, but who still loves her, gives him a proof of the greatest esteem that a man can receive from a woman. . . ." That romanticism which made a drama of the situation in _L'Ecole des Femmes_, and another one out of that in the _Precieuses ridicules_, excels in taking tragically situations that belong to comedy and in turning them into the sublime.
Meanwhile George Sand had settled down in Venice with Pagello--and with all the family, all the Pagello tribe, with the brother, the sister, to say nothing of the various rivals who came and made scenes. It was the vulgar, ordinary platitude of an Italian intimacy of this kind. In spite of everything, she continued congratulating herself on her choice.
"I have my love, my stay here with me. He never suffers, for he is never weak or suspicious. . . . He is calm and good. . . .
He loves me and is at peace; he is happy without my having to suffer, without my having to make efforts for his happiness. . . . As for me, I must suffer for some one. It is just this suffering which nurtures my maternal solicitude, etc. . . ." She finally begins to weary of her dear Pagello's stupidity. It occurred to her to take him with her to Paris, and that was the climax. There are some things which cannot be transplanted from one country to another. When they had once set foot in Paris, the absurdity of their situation appeared to them.
"From the moment that Pagello landed in France," says George Sand, "he could not understand anything." The one thing that he was compelled to understand was that he was no longer wanted.
He was simply pushed out. George Sand had a remarkable gift for bringing out the characteristics of the persons with whom she had any intercourse. This Pagello, thanks to his adventure with her, has become in the eyes of the world a personage as comic as one of Moliere's characters.
Musset and George Sand still cared for each other. He beseeched her to return to him. "I am good-for-nothing," he says, "for I am simply steeped in my love for you. I do not know whether I am alive, whether I eat, drink, or breathe, but I know I am in love."George Sand was afraid to return to him, and Sainte-Beuve forbade her.
Love proved stronger than all other arguments, however, and she yielded.
As soon as she was with him once more, their torture commenced again, with all the customary complaints, reproaches and recriminations.
"I was quite sure that all these reproaches would begin again immediately after the happiness we had dreamed of and promised each other. Oh, God, to think that we have already arrived at this!"she writes.
