The Dream Lover

Read The Dream Lover Online

Authors: Elizabeth Berg

The Dream Lover
is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Elizabeth Berg

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and the H
OUSE
colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint excerpts from
Lelia: The Life of George Sand
by André Maurois, translated from the French by Gerald Hopkins, copyright © 1953 by André Maurois and copyright renewed 1981 by Gerald Maurois. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Berg, Elizabeth.

The dream lover: a novel/Elizabeth Berg.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-8129-9315-8

eBook ISBN 978-0-679-64470-5

1. Sand, George, 1804–1876—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3552.E6996D73 2014

813′.54—dc23 2014043629

eBook ISBN 9780679644705

www.atrandom.com

eBook design adapted from printed book design by Barbara M. Bachman

Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

Cover image: De Agostini/A. Dagli Orti

v4.1

a

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2: July 1804

Chapter 3: January 1831

Chapter 4: January 1805

Chapter 5: May 1808

Chapter 6: January 1831

Chapter 7: July 1808

Chapter 8: February 1831

Chapter 9: September 1808

Chapter 10: February 1831

Chapter 11: September 1808

Chapter 12: April 1831

Chapter 13: October 1808

Chapter 14: July 1831

Chapter 15: September 1831

Chapter 16: July 1810

Chapter 17: January 1832

Chapter 18: April 1832

Chapter 19: Winter 1813

Chapter 20: August 1832

Chapter 21: November 1832

Chapter 22: October 1817

Chapter 23: January 1833

Chapter 24: November 1817

Chapter 25: January 1818

Chapter 26: February 1833

Chapter 27: March 1820

Chapter 28: May 1820

Chapter 29: February 1833

Chapter 30: September 1821

Chapter 31: March 1833

Chapter 32: January 1822

Chapter 33: March 1833

Chapter 34: March 1822

Chapter 35: June 1833

Chapter 36: June 1833

Chapter 37: April 1822

Chapter 38: June 1833

Chapter 39: September 1822

Chapter 40: July 1833

Chapter 41: Spring 1824

Chapter 42: August 1833

Chapter 43: December 1833

Chapter 44: Spring 1825

Chapter 45: June 1825

Chapter 46: December 1833

Chapter 47: September 1825

Chapter 48: Fall 1826

Chapter 49: December 1830

Chapter 50: January 1831

Chapter 51: September 1834

Chapter 52: October 1834

Chapter 53: December 1834

Chapter 54: May 1836

Chapter 55: October 1836

Chapter 56: January 1837

Chapter 57: August 1837

Chapter 58: June 1838

Chapter 59: November 1838

Chapter 60: May 1839

Chapter 61: September 1839

Chapter 62: July 1844

Chapter 63: February 1847

Chapter 64: June 1847

Chapter 65: July 1847

Chapter 66: May 1848

Chapter 67: October 1849

Chapter 68: February 1866

Chapter 69: April 1873

The finest female genius of any country or age.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

She is beyond doubt or comparison the strongest woman and the most astonishingly gifted.

—Franz Liszt

When my submission has been claimed, no longer in the name of love and friendship but by reason of some right or power, I have drawn upon the strength that is buried in my nature, I have straightened my shoulders and thrown off the yoke. I alone know the latent force hidden within me. I alone know how much I grieve and suffer and love.

—George Sand

April 1873

COUNTRY ESTATE AT NOHANT

CENTRAL
FRANCE

I
n the dining room, the men are eating roses. The small bouquet I placed at the table's center will soon be naked stems. A wreath of cigar smoke hangs in the air above my guests' heads, moving ever upward toward the Venetian glass chandelier, where the pink and turquoise colors will give in further to the dimming of their clarity.

The men—Gustave Flaubert, Ivan Turgenev, Alexandre Dumas fils, and my darling son, Maurice—are pushed back in their velvet chairs, sated; and the conversation has gone languorous. But not for long! Soon we will be dancing, singing, playing at charades, and making a great deal of noise, though Gustave will no doubt sulk and complain that we have too quickly turned our attentions away from literature, his raison d'être. The rest of us—Ivan especially—greatly enjoy the kind of raucousness that takes us back to the easy pleasures of childhood. I love doing my work and the reverie it requires, but too much contemplation turns to melancholy, and gaiety must then come to the rescue.

Before we begin our evening's amusements, our puppet show and readings and bagatelles, I have sought the out-of-doors and a temporary reprieve from my role as hostess. I stand now in a mantilla of shade, beneath a tree here so long its mere presence dwarfs the idle happenings or musings of those who seek out its shelter.

The light is amber, the air still; the daylilies have folded in on themselves. Soon the hooded blue of dusk will fall, followed by the darkness of night and the sky writing of the stars, indecipherable to us mortals, despite our attempts to force narrative upon them.

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