Sand, George

Autograph manuscript of her unpublished play Gabriel, also referred to as Julia.



Extensively revised and corrected throughout from 1851 to 1863, strikethrough text and interlinear additions with new pages partial and full, pasted over lines original to the 1851 writing. The manuscript is comprised of seven sections: Prologue, Five Acts and Epilogue, each bound separately with paper wrappers and sewn with cream string, 243 leaves with writing on rectos only (10 3/4 x 8 1/2 in.; 273 x 217 mm); two contemporary watercolor illustrations pasted on the verso of two leaves, depicting the stage set for Act IV, the arcade of the Coliseum in Rome, and for Act V, the interior bedroom or sitting room of an aristocrat's villa in Rome from the late Renaissance. Acts IV, V and the Epilogue are in Sand's handwriting prior to 1855 slanting forward; Prologue, Acts I, II and III, are primarily in her post-1855 handwriting, bold and straight up and down. Corrections and strikethroughs are executed in her post -1855 handwriting in bold blue ink.

By family descent — purchased from the family by present owner

Manifold, Gay. George Sand's Theatre Career. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1985; Correspondence de George Sand. Edited and annotated by Georges Lubin, Paris: Garnier, 1964-1995.

A major George Sand manuscript, a full-length play written and revised between 1851 and 1863, presumed lost until its identification in 1987. This working manuscript provides extraordinary insight into Sand's creative process in writing for the proscenium stage and live performance. The visions and revisions in the manuscript over a period of more than a dozen years testify to the importance of the play to the author. Significant for modern audiences, the manuscript demonstrates Sand creating and recreating a female character raised as a male, Gabriel, filling his/her transvestite role as a prince, and then as Julia, the heterosexual role of lover and wife, irreconcilable roles that lead to her assassination and wished-for release.

A prolific writer of a hundred novels, dozens of plays, letters that amount to twenty-six volumes of correspondence, political essays and literary criticism, George Sand is popularly known for her love affair with Alfred de Musset and her nine-year liaison with Frederic Chopin. This monumental figure stood no more than five feet tall with a petite shape fit for both the wasp-waist dresses of the times and her tight-fitting riding habit and boots for the equestrian that she was. This physical appearance, along with her profoundly deep and seductive big brown eyes, soft voice, and attentive ear, attracted men and women alike. Sand's creation of the character of Gabriel shares these features, first in her novel of that title published in 1839, and then in the present manuscript of her full-length play of the same title, sometimes referred to as Julia. Writing her autobiography in the early 1850s, at the same time she began working on this play, Sand describes the male outfit she wore as a young woman joining the ranks of literati in Paris, when she needed boots rather than a woman's dainty shoes to traverse the streets of Paris, and the freedom of pants and jackets rather than flimsy dresses for all kinds of weather. Dressed in such an outfit, she looked like an attractive adolescent boy. In the play, Gabriel's seventeenth-century costumes serve similar purposes, whether the one that looks like Hamlet, a Renaissance prince or a flowing white gown and flowers in her hair for the role of Julia. Similarly, just as Sand received an education from her tutors comparable to that of well-educated young men of the period, she gives Gabriel tutelage in Greek, Latin, science, history, philosophy, literature, politics, as well as hunting, riding and fencing. Gabriel's more proactive experiments in living as a man and living as a woman reflected not so much Sand herself, but her quest to understand such a woman's position in history and in her own time.

The play's subject is love, a dilemma, a dialectic of the heart. Gabriel's love is self-abnegating, sacrificial, redemptive. Gabriel performs pure and generous acts. Compelled by her grandfather to remain a male to prevent her dissipated cousin, Astolphe, from the inheritance, Gabriel instead falls in love and marries Astolphe. But Astolphe's love is egotistical, jealous, cynical; he is ruled by instincts and greed. Suggestive of a political sub-text is Sand's firm belief that political revolutions must have "at their summit men of virtue without limit and a profound modesty of the heart." (Correspondence 9:266). To some of Sand's contemporaries, her plays offered hope that a heroic world is possible. Gabriel/Julia's devotion and duty to others, and her calm serenity may reflect Sand's belief that with the state of the world as it was  in the 1850s and 1860s, in both personal and public spheres, these characteristics in a leader would offer hope and rehabilitation, two of Sand's oft-repeated words.

Written in 1851, revised in 1853 and 1855 and then again as late as 1863, Sand circulated this manuscript among her theatre contacts with plans for a premier production. She worked on the first version of the play Gabriel  in the summer and early fall of 1851, during a period of feverish theatre activity, both in Paris, where she had thirty of her plays produced over the course of her professional playwriting career (1839-1870), and at her country house in Nohant, where she experimented with shorter improvisational works, as well as where she gave some of her full-length plays trial runs. Sidelined by political upheavals at the end of 1851, Sand did not return to her manuscript of Gabriel until 1853. Acknowledging the play was too long and too disjointed, she reduced the number of "tableaux" from eleven to seven, being the seven scene changes in the present manuscript. Still, the play was put aside by the directors of the Odeon Theatre who ultimately judged it as too sad. Indeed, great sadness had invaded Sand's personal life at this time with the kidnapping of her adored granddaughter Jeanne by the child's father. The child's subsequent death by neglect broke Sand's heart, a trauma that changed her handwriting, as can be observed in this manuscript. The writing that appears slanted to the right pre-dates 1855, while the straight up-and-down writing follows after 1855. Sand attempted negotiations with another theatre director to no avail. The manuscript was returned to le tiroir in Nohant.  Paul Meurice, Victor Hugo's secretary and executor, collaborated with Sand on her play production of Le Drac and in 1863 expressed interest in adapting other of her works.  Sand sent Meurice two manuscripts, one being the present manuscript of Gabriel, for which he proposed substantial changes. Sand's subsequent silence speaks volumes about her reaction to the suggested revisions. Again, she returned the manuscript to slumber in the drawer at her Nohant country home, labeled and destined for her son.