Free Nom de Plume by Carmela Ciuraru

armlets worn
    By weaker women in captivity?
    Ah, vain denial! that revolted cry
    Is sobbed in by a woman’s voice forlorn!—
    Thy woman’s hair, my sister, all unshorn
    Floats back disheveled strength in agony,
    Disproving thy man’s name: and while before
    The world thou burnest in a poet-fire,
    We see thy woman-heart beat evermore
    Through the large flame. Beat purer, heart, and higher,
    Till God unsex thee on the heavenly shore
    Where unincarnate spirits purely aspire!
    Sand was a cigar-chomping rebel who had brazen affairs as she wished, and with whomever she desired. She could practically roll a cigarette with her eyes closed, and she loved to smoke a hookah. She reveled in her own mischief. In one of her novels, Sand boldly suggested that monogamous marriage was an abnormal, unnatural state that deprived men and women of experiencing true sexual pleasure. Her significant lovers included Alfred de Musset, Franz Liszt, and Frédéric Chopin, who reported to his family, “Something about her repels me.” Her decade-long relationship with Chopin ended badly in 1847, when Sand suspected that he had fallen in love with her daughter.
    Even after it became an open secret in literary circles (and a source of malicious gossip) that Aurore Dupin was the notorious George Sand, she continued her transgressive style of dress and behavior, simply because she enjoyed it. She loved the idea of being in disguise. With her trousers, vest, military coat, hat, and tie, “I was the perfect little first-year student,” she recalled in her autobiography. “My clothing made me fearless.” And walking in her solid, sturdy boots was far preferable to the fussy discomfort of women’s shoes: “With those little iron heels, I felt secure on the sidewalks. I flew from one end of Paris to the other.” In her male attire, she was a voyeur, seeing without being seen. “No one knew me, no one looked at me, no one gave me a second thought; I was an atom lost in the immense crowd.”
    At theaters, she sat in the pit, where only men were permitted, and she always pulled off the ruse with ease—“the absence of coquettishness in costume and facial expression warded off any suspicion,” she explained. “I was too poorly dressed and looked too simple—my usual vacant, verging on dumb, look—to attract or compel attention. . . . There is a way of stealing about, everywhere, without turning a head, and of speaking in a low and muted pitch which does not resound like a flute in the ears of those who may hear you. Furthermore, to avoid being noticed as a man, you must already have not been noticed as a woman.”
    In her autobiography, Sand recalled that one of her friends, who was privy to her sartorial secret, began calling her “monsieur” in public. But just as he would get used to addressing her this way, she would appear the following day dressed as a woman, and he couldn’t keep up with the relentless change of costume. Confused by her various corrections, he took to addressing her only as “monsieur” from then on.
    There was a less amusing aspect to dabbling in androgyny: having to deal with the fallout from her marriage. Casimir meticulously kept a log of his (soon to be former) wife’s crimes and misdemeanors—among them, “She writes novels.” Even worse, “Mme D. affecting the manners of a young man, smoking, swearing, dressed as a man and having lost all the feminine graces, has no understanding of money.” Once tolerant and blithe about their marital arrangement, which allowed her to veer off on an independent path, Casimir came to detest the liberty she’d achieved and was disgusted by her “bohemian” lifestyle. She had to enter a nasty and protracted legal battle to end the marriage, and in the end had to divide her fortune with him.
    No matter how messy her personal life became at any given time,