Alfred de Musset (1810 - 1857)
Related: French literature - Gamiani, ou Une Nuit d'Excès (1833)
Related: Jean Renoir's La règle du jeu was inspired by Musset's play, Les Caprices de Marianne. [Jul 2006]
Contemporaries: Honoré Daumier - Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly - Nikolai Gogol - Edgar Allan Poe - Théophile Gautier - Richard Wagner - J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Biography
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset, (December 11, 1810 - May 2, 1857) was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist.
De Musset was an important figure in the Romantic literary movement. He trained in both law and medicine, but his success was in literature.
The tale of his celebrated love affair with George Sand, which lasted from 1833 to 1835, is told from his point of view in his autobiographical novel, and from her point of view in her Elle et lui.
On his passing, Alfred de Musset was interred in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_de_Musset [Feb 2005]
George Sand (1804 - 1876)
George Sand (1838) - Eugène Delacroix
Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, later Baroness Dudevant (July 1, 1804 – June 8, 1876) was a French novelist and early feminist (prior to the invention of the word) who wrote under the pen name of George Sand.
Born in Paris to a father of aristocratic lineage and a "common" mother, Sand was raised for much of her childhood by her grandmother at the family estate, Nohant, in the French region of Berry, a setting later used in many of her novels. In 1822, she married Baron Casimir Dudevant, and they had two children, Maurice (b. 1823) and Solange (b. 1828). In 1835, taking the children with her, she left her husband.
Her first novel, "Rose Et Blanche" (1831) was written in collaboration with Jules Sandeau, from whom she allegedly took her pen-name, Sand.
After parting from her husband Sand made less and less a secret of preferring men's clothes to women's, although she continued to dress as a woman for social occasions. This male "disguise" enabled Sand to circulate more freely about Paris, and gave her increased access to venues that might have been denied to a woman of her social standing. This was an exceptional practice for the 19th century, where social codes—especially in the upper class—were of the highest importance. As a consequence Sand lost a good deal of the privileges attached to being a Baroness. Ironically, it was also a part of the mores of this period that women of higher classes could live physically separated from their husbands without losing face, if they didn't show any blatant irregularity to the outer world.
She was linked romantically with Alfred de Musset (summer 1833 - March 1834), Franz Liszt and Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) whom she had met in Paris in 1831. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sand [May 2005]
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