Accidental Families: Ritual and Initiation in Horace and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt

Crashing Through Chapter 27 of Horace takes the reader to the Paris barricades. The revolt of June 1832, one of many between the two revolutions of 1830 and 1848, was by far the bloodiest. Sand, who witnessed the uprising, calls it "un drame poignant" in her Histoire de ma vie, and sees in its demise the birth of what she calls "le regne de la matiere." (1) Two decades later, in his Miserables, Hugo will distinguish this emeute from a full-fledged revolution by the very fact that it failed. In Horace, Sand simply calls the event "une revolution avortee." (2) She portrays two students fighting on the Republican side: Paul Arsene, an art student in Delacroix's atelier, and Jean Laraviniere, "president des bousingots" (p. 72). The two insurgents end up at the cloister of Saint-Merry, the infamous site of the massacre of some 800 men by government troups. Laraviniere disappears, seeming to succumb to the same fate as Balzac's Michel Chrestien (even though, ultimately, he survives), but Paul manages to escape. While Hugo will send Jean Valjean and Marius down into the Paris sewers in the aftermath of the same uprising, Sand propels Arsene up onto the rooftops. Wounded and bloody, he spies the window of a particular dwelling under the eaves: Il s'agissait de sauter d'un toit a l'autre pour entrer dans une mansarde par une fenetre inclinee [...] penchant le corps en avant, il se laissa tomber plutot qu'il ne s'elanca [...] Alors, se trainant sur ses genoux et ses coudes, car ses pieds et ses mains lui refusaient le service, il parvint jusqu'a la fenetre ... l'enfonca en posant ses deux genoux sur le vitrage ... [et] roula evanoui sur le carreau de la mansarde. (p. 252) By a poetic coincidence, the window that Paul has chosen, seemingly at random, brings him into the miserable hovel where the heroine Marthe has taken refuge with her newborn child. Thus are unexpectedly reunited in this scene two of the novel's main characters. There are several ways to understand this passage. The abundance of historically accurate and realistic elements emphasizes that Sand is dealing with a real-life event situated in a real-life space. The reprisals for this insurrection were particularly brutal, as doctors were obliged to denounce any insurgents they might be called upon to treat. In a letter written to her friend Laure Decerfz, Sand expressed her disgust with the powers in place: ... une ordonnance royale [in fact, the order emanated from the Prefecture de Police], affichee sur tous les murs, enjoint aux medecins et aux chirurgiens de declarer immediatement a la police le nom et la demeure des blesses qu'ils sont appeles a soigner a domicile! La police va fouiller le lit des mourants, arracher les cadavres aux larmes des familles, rouvrir les plaies a peine fermees. (3) When she wrote Horace a decade later, Sand accorded her heroine an uncanny premonition of this decree: [Marthe] marcha vers la porte pour appeler quelques voisins a son aide; mais, se rappelant aussitot que parmi ces gens ... un scelerat ou un poltron pouvait livrer le proscrit a la vengeance des lois, elle tira le verrou de la porte. (p. 253) In addition to accurate details such as this one, Sand also pursued an intense social agenda in Horace, and this chapter highlights in a dramatic way the double theme of poverty and hunger that runs throughout the novel. In this scene, Sand depicts the characters' extreme destitution, describing how Marthe and Paul survive on minute amounts of bread and milk. Finally, there is a fantastic element in Paul's choosing--seemingly by chance--to enter precisely the mansarde which belongs to Marthe. In fact this scene functions as a deliberate and conscious "coup de theatre." Sand has Paul come crashing into the mansarde, I will argue, just as Sand herself goes crashing through the established classification of social types. …