I was just going to do it, monsieur; but I saw a woman meet him. At that moment I said to myself: 'Perhaps it's monsieur and madame, who have taken a fancy to walk a bit before daybreak; ' and I went back to bed. But this morning I heard Lelievre talking about a thief whose tracks he had seen in the park, and I said to myself: 'There's something under this.
The Countess of Rudolstadt" is the follow-up volume to "Consuelo" and widely considered to be one of George Sand's finest works. Translated from the French by Fayette Robinson
The first translation of The Countess von Rudolstadt in more than a century brings to contemporary readers one of George Sand's most ambitious and engaging novels, hailed by many scholars of French literature as her masterpiece. Consuelo, or the Countess von Rudolstadt, born the penniless daughter of a Spanish gypsy, is transformed into an opera star by the great maestro Porpora. Her peregrinations throughout Europe (especially Vienna, Berlin, and the Bohemian forest), become a quest undertaken on a number of levels: as a singer, as a woman, and as an unwilling subject of alienation and oppression. Sand's heroine moves through a mid-eighteenth-century Europe where absolute rulers mingle with Enlightenment philosophers and gender-bending members of secret societies plot moral and political revolution. As the old order breaks down, she undergoes a series of grueling initiations into radically redefined notions of marriage and social organization. In a novel by equal measures philosophical and lurid, nothing is what it seems. Written some fifty years after the French Revolution, the book taps into many of the political and religious currents that contributed to that social upheaval—and aims to channel their potential for future change. Fed by Sand's rich imagination and bold aspirations for social reform, The Countess von Rudolstadt is a sinuous novel of initiation, continuing the coming of age tale of the titular heroine of Sand's earlier Consuelo and drawing on such diverse models as Ann Radcliffe's Gothic tales and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister.
While working for his uncle, Alexis Hartz is introduced to Laura who shares his scientific interests, and in particular his fascination for crystals. To his amazement Laura has discovered a way to enter this alluring world and together they travel the vast and glittering landscape. But it cannot last forever.
Consuelo, a plain young woman with a divine operatic voice and a heart of sterling integrity, rises from her lowly zingarella (gypsy) beginnings to become a prima donna in Venice. At the same time, many romantic choices are laid before her.
Both Gothic and philosophical, Spiridion tells the story of a young novice, Angel, who finds himself cruelly ostracized by his monastic superiors and terrified by the ghostly visits of his monastery's founder, the abbot Spiridion. Though he founded the monastery on the search for truth, Spiridion watched his once intelligent and virtuous monks degenerate into a cruel, mindless community. Turning away from the Church and withdrawing into his cell, he poured his energy into a manuscript that tells the "truth" about Roman Catholic doctrine and monastic life and provides a vision of a new and eternal gospel. The manuscript was buried with him, and his spirit now searches for a monk who is intelligent enough to exhume it from his crypt, which is guarded by hellish spirits, and share its vision with the world. Translated into English for the first time in more than 160 years, Spiridion offers a fierce critique of Catholic doctrine as well as solutions for living with the Church's teachings. Although Sand had broken with the Church several years earlier, she nevertheless continued to believe in an omnipotent God, and her novel makes the distinction, as Angel's protector, Father Alexis, puts it, "between the authority of faith and the application of this authority in the hands of men." As translator Patricia J. F. Worth argues in her introduction, the novel's emphasis on freedom of inquiry, benevolence, and moral reform inspired other nineteenth-century writers, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Matthew Arnold, and Henry James, and the novel is also relevant to twenty-first-century discussions of religious authority and rigid adherence to doctrine.
Consuelo, now an operatic diva at the court of Frederick II of Prussia, and suspected by many to be his mistress, leads a chaste, uninspired, and dreary life at court. Her vocal performances, though still brilliant, have lost their divine inspiration, for she grieves in secret the mysterious loss of her occult love.
The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters" is a compilation of personal correspondence between two great nineteenth century French writers and contemporaries. The letters reveal often divergent but always profound, effervescent, and fascinating views on art, literature, drama, philosophy, culture, and gossip of the period: an unparalleled window into history, and a rare interior glimpse into the creative psyche of two literary giants. Translated from the French by A.L. McKenzie (1921), with an introduction by Stuart Sherman.
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