Baron Haussmann's Recollections of George Sand.

Te Aroha News, Volume VIII, Issue 488, 12 July 1890, Page 3

Baron Haussmann's Recollections of George Sand.

The Paris correspondent of the ‘ Daily Rows ’ sends some gleanings from tho first volume of Baron Haussmann’s Memoirs. When Sub-Prefect of Norac, tho Baron made the acquaintance of George Sand and her mother -in law, Baroness Dudevant, whom he shows in a new and pleasant light. The Baroness was of an old and noble Anjou family, and lived with a lady companion alone at a country place at Guillory, on tho edge of the Landes. She was widow of a colonel of Napoleon, a sad scamp, and out of good nature, having no child of her own, let him fake into the house the son of a peasant woman, who said ho was the Colonel’s. This boy was finally treated by the Baronness as her eon, and she settled tho reversion of her fortunes on him. When he proposed for George Sand he was a coarse and drunken brute and a bane to his mother by adoption, as he was later to his wife. On the death of the former he came to live at Guillery. Soon after this tho Sub-Prefect Ilaussmann received a letter from the head of the Civil Tribunal of Paris ordering him to aid George Sand to recover her daughter, Solange, who in the teeth of a judgment had been carried off by M. Dudevant. Solange—who was a rude little girl—was duly recovered, and she and her already famous mother were kept for a few days at the Prefecture. The latter dressed badly, smoked constantly, was thirty yeai-3 old, short and stout, and looked like a Spanish woman. Her face was a long oval, with a nose slightly curved, and she had deep-set black”eyo and a dark complexion, and her manner was moreover indolent. She had not a spice of coquetry, and wa» dull in conversation. Her perseverance in her revolt against society appeared to the Baron to ariso entirely from obstinacy. She gave the Sub-Prefect, in bidding him good-bye, a pieco of agate, which she used as a flint to strike fire, and cold him if he came to Nohant she would have for him a nargbiffi, the smoko of which would pass through cold rose wator.