Where the Lady and the Painter Fall in Love

Antonia by George Sand
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my introduction to George Sand, and I enjoyed it very much. I bought a small collection of 1898 Sand novels that started their life in a public library in Nebraska (last checked out in 1975--the card is still in it), and they are somewhat fragile but still hanging in there. I have six more such novels waiting for me, and that feels like riches.

This is the story of the Countess d'Estrelle--Julie--a widowed woman left in debt by her husband, who is facing all kinds of pressure by her friends in high society to live a certain way while being threatened by her creditors. Her father-in-law's second wife is in both categories, and she is a pure villain who will not lift a finger to help her with the debts her stepson left her with. Everyone is so invested in Julie's marrying some rich aristocrat, including her friends, that they bring every kind of pressure to bear against her. M. Antoine, her solicitor's rich old uncle, buys up her debt to use it against her, mostly to make her marry him, though he loves no one and doesn't seem to want anything from her except her humility. He works with her cruel mother-in-law at one point to force her to do what they both want.

This is complicated by a love story. A young painter who lives on the property beside Julie's home, adjacent to her garden, is in love with her. His mother (also a widow, also left in debt by her husband, and also from an aristocratic background) becomes friends with her and visits her in her garden, but the young man--Julien--cannot be friendly with the widow and visit the garden because he is a man and like his father is working class. Still, he sees her in the garden sometimes through the blinds in the room where he paints, and inevitably they meet and really fall in love. It's a very nice love story, in parts.

But wow, the conspiracies against them... The rich old man, the solicitor's uncle, is also Julien's uncle, and he suspects they are in love and he will do anything to keep them apart. In the end, he arranges matters so that Julien and his mother will be supported in the nice home they used to live in and Julie will have her debts paid and be allowed to keep her home (hotel in the novel), as long as they don't meet again and never try to marry. If either breaks the agreement, all lose and end in poverty. Nobody wants to be responsible for ruining the lives of the others, especially hurting Julien's old mother, so they agree to it.

If this were the end, I would kinda hate it, but it's not a horrible sad ending (spoiler--sorry). Ultimately, the rotten old uncle gives in when both Julien's mother and Countess d'Estrelle, independently, kneel for him to ask his pardon for ridiculous imagined slights. Once he has that, he's willing to let everyone have a happy life. Yay!

I haven't researched this, but since it takes place just before the French Revolution, it feels like M. Antoine is deliberately made to represent the wealthy bourgeoisie who resent the old (often debt-ridden) nobility and want to take them down a peg--I'm as good as you!--but I don't know if the author wants it read as allegory. For certain, the ridiculous belief, so deeply held it was encoded into law, that the nobility were not to marry someone from the low classes, that they were innately different, innately superior to them, is mocked here. (I think that's awesome.) Julie and Julien are the best characters in the story, both of them selfless and virtuous, and they deserve each other.

The story is not very long, which I like, but it also has very few characters, which is less fun. Most scenes include only two people, sometimes three; there are no balls or parties in the story, and except one scene with maybe five characters meeting up it feels very lonely. I wonder if it could be staged as a play... Actually, yeah, it would be pretty simple to do that. Maybe it started that way. Hmmmm.

Despite missing the sights and sounds of dinners or big social events (as we might find in Jane Austen, I mean), I enjoyed this a lot, and I'm eager to see what the other novels on my shelf turn out to be like.

Recommended for readers of 19th century novels.

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