Le Secrétaire intime [Suivi de :] Metella ; La Marquise ; Lavinia

Begun in Paris and finished in Venice, Le Secrétaire intime is closely tied to George Sand’s affair with Alfred de Musset in Paris and Venice during 1833 and 1834. Sand’s fourth novel was published without delay by Victor Magen, followed by three stories not mentioned on the title page: “Metella,” “La Marquise” and “Lavinia.”

The first of these echoes conversations between the young Aurore Dupin and her grandmother, Madame Dupin de Francueil. It opens the series of Venetian novels (followed by Leone Leoni and then Jacques) in which the protagonists are consumed by passionate affairs, mirroring Sand’s own life as she fell in love with Musset’s doctor, Pagello. In this text she also rails against the tyrannical and unjust jealousy she experienced with Musset and would experience again with Chopin. This is the only first edition of a text by Sand to include a preface, in which she defends Lélia, a novel she would begin rewriting the following year.

The novel opens in nineteenth-century France with Louis de Saint-Julien, an impoverished young nobleman who becomes the private secretary of the Italian princess Quintilia Cavalcanti, ruler of a small state coveted by the surrounding great powers. In the “notice” she wrote for an 1853 reissue, Sand said she had been inspired by rereading Hoffmann’s Contes fantastiques, and offered a pro domo plea on behalf of learned women, who were suspected of every crime as soon as they attained fame and knowledge — an argument that would later inspire her friend Balzac in Béatrix (1839).

In 1842, the Church deemed Le Secrétaire intime a pernicious book and placed it on the Index, along with eleven other titles by Sand: Lélia, Les Lettres d’un voyageur, Les Sept Cordes de la lyre, L’Uscoque, La Dernière Aldini, Simon, Les Maîtres mosaïstes, Mauprat, Jacques, Leone Leoni and Spiridion. Seven titles by Balzac joined them: Le Vicaire des Ardennes, La Femme supérieure, La Maison Nucingen, La Torpille, Les Cent Contes drolatiques, Le Lys dans la vallée and Louis Lambert.

A choice copy, finely bound in a contemporary binding.

Small corner restoration to the last leaf of the second volume, not affecting the text.