page_title: George Sand
section_title: Relationship with Chopin
hierarchical_section_title: George Sand / Personal life / Notable relationships / Relationship with Chopin
caption_attribution_description: Writer George Sand depicted as Mary Magdalenelabel QS:Len,"Writer George Sand depicted as Mary Magdalene" label QS:Lfr,"George Sand en Madeleine"
context_page_description: Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, best known by her pen name George Sand, was a French novelist, memoirist, and Socialist. One of the more popular writers in Europe in her lifetime, being more renowned than both Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s, Sand is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era.
context_section_description: Sand spent the winter of 1838–1839 with Chopin in Majorca at the (formerly abandoned) Carthusian monastery of Valldemossa. The trip to Majorca was described in her Un hiver à Majorque (A Winter in Majorca), first published in 1841. Chopin was already ill with incipient tuberculosis at the beginning of their relationship, and spending a cold and wet winter in Majorca where they could not get proper lodgings exacerbated his symptoms. They separated two years before his death for a variety of reasons. In her novel Lucrezia Floriani, Sand used Chopin as a model for a sickly Eastern European prince named Karol. He is cared for by a middle-aged actress past her prime, Lucrezia, who suffers a great deal through her affection for Karol. Though Sand claimed not to have made a cartoon out of Chopin, the book's publication and widespread readership may have exacerbated their later antipathy towards each other. The tipping point in their relationship involved her daughter Solange.
  Chopin continued to be cordial to Solange after she and her husband Auguste Clésinger had a falling out with Sand over money. Sand took Chopin's support of Solange to be extremely disloyal, and confirmation that Chopin had always "loved" Solange. Sand's son Maurice also disliked Chopin. Maurice wanted to establish himself as the "man of the estate" and did not wish to have Chopin as a rival. Chopin was never asked back to Nohant; in 1848, he returned to Paris from a tour of the United Kingdom, to die at the Place Vendôme in the following year. Chopin was penniless at that time; his friends had to pay for his stay there, as well as his funeral at the Madeleine. The funeral was attended by over 3,000 people, including Eugène Delacroix, Franz Liszt, Victor Hugo and other notables. George Sand was notably absent.
caption: Sand as Mary Magdalene in a sketch by Louis Boulanger
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