96 
VERENA PERLHEFTER - "He’s a Genius!" " She’s got no Taste. 
Belvedere 2/2003 
She seems to have been aware from the outset that she was 
seeing genius at work: "Eugene Delacroix was one of my 
first friends in the world of the artists. [...] Although his criti- 
cal spirit never ceased to cast imprecations against the pre 
sent and the future, and although it pleased him to acknow- 
ledge and research only the works and often also the ideas 
of the past, in his art he is a New Man par excellence. To me 
he is the greatest painter of the present time, and I am con- 
vinced that he will hold one of the foremost places in the his- 
tory of art, next to the masters of the past. [...] Around his 
super-human creations he has formed a world of light which 
perhaps cannot be fully explained by the word colour, but 
the effect of which seizes all who behold it, in the amaze- 
ment or in the wonder which fills them at the sight of these 
creations." 18 In her eyes, she associated Delacroix with “a 
friendship without shadows, the absolute truth.” 19 
By contrast, he appears to have held her in greater esteem as 
a person than as a writer, as an entry in his "Journal” from 
the year 1855 shows: “When we have read a novel through 
to the end, our feelings about the people are entirely confu- 
sed; the one who should amuse us with his jokes can only 
move us to tears at his virtuous qualities, at his squeezing 
out his next love, or at his speaking the language of a mira- 
cle worker, upon whom the Spirit has come. I could give a 
hundred examples of such disappointments for the reader.” 20 
He had already noted something similar earlier on: "She un- 
doubtedly has a great talent, but she knows even less than 
most other writers what she is about. Should I too be unjust 
here? I I like her, but I must say that her work will not last. 
She has no taste.’’ 21 
George Sand, who always set great störe by talking about 
"we artists", with all the freedoms that this implied, empha- 
sised over and over again what she saw as their common ap- 
proach to life, such as in a letter to Eugene Delacroix in 1838 
(in which at the same time she showed her generosity with 
regard to the laziness of others when it came to writing): 
"Dear old friend, how nice of you to write to your old sister! 
I had not hoped that you would dare to take up the struggle 
with pen and ink (both instruments of torture, with which I 
am only too familiär, and which I would not wish upon my 
worst enemy). [...] We artists and Bohemians, our tempera- 
ment is violent and nervous. You are right when you say that 
we fly through the air like feathers or rubber balls. That 
means that we touch the earth for a brief moment, only to 
fly up into the heavens again, and because there are feathers 
on the feather balls, we imagine we have wings and can fly 
like the birds, and are happier than the birds even though 
they really fly well [...]. This is our advantage over the Philis 
tines, that we have the infinite ability to savour our fantasies. 
This also means that we can make fun of their sense of rea- 
lity, of their coaches and their salons, their titles and their po- 
pularity. They believe that poetry is more comfortable in a 
coach than in the dust of the Street, and there's better hu- 
mour to be found in a palace than a garret. I do not believe 
this, unless one could conceive of a society entirely altered 
and ruled by the laws of the Golden Age. We see that we 
must choose between the dependency on money, which 
makes prosaic slaves of us, or poetry, which sets us free to 
die of starvation. They see what choice remains to us, and 
laugh at us. But we die singing or crying, while they fade a- 
way from boredom and burst with envy and stodgy eating. 
So let us remain gypsies, then, my dark-eyed beloved, let us 
remain artists and lovers, the only two possibilities which ex 
ist for us on earth. Love above all, is that not so? Love above 
all, when the star lights the way with its brightest light, art 
above all when the star sets. Is that not all well arranged? 
[...] Adieu. Write to me if you feel like it, but never feel that 
you are obligated towards me. I am one of those people 
who believe that a sense of Obligation and inclination have 
nothing whatever to do with one another, and that the com- 
mandments to which one subjects one's feelings are just as 
bad as the laws of the criminal code. Freedom above all. I 
hope you are thinking of me every day, but even if you only 
get around to sending me a token of your love in ten years 
time, you should never feel yourself to be involved when it 
comes to me. I would kill all the fatted calves which I could 
possibly possess up to then, if l’m not lying in the hospital. 
Your George.’’ 22 
The question naturally arises as to why the writer and the ar- 
tist 23 who was generally regarded as good-looking, famous 
for their passions, did not become lovers. Both were commit- 
ted at the time of their meeting: Delacroix to his cousin Jo 
sephine de Forget, and George Sand to Alfred de Müsset. 
George Sand, as her liaison with Frederic Chopin after Müs 
set demonstrates, plainly had a weakness for highly-sensitive 
ailing artists. But although Delacroix with his fragile health 
(he suffered from a tubercular inflammation of the larynx, 
which long years later drove him again and again into sana- 
toria and finally led to his death) may have appealed to her 
maternal instincts, he was really far too independent for her. 
He was basically worried that marriage and a family would 
restrict his artistic activities and sap his spiritual strength, or 
even dissipate it entirely. 34 Nevertheless, he revered women 
and even had relationships which lasted for long years, as 
with Josephine de Forget who has already been mentioned. 
With age all his physical passion left him, but he nevertheless 
feit lightened and did not mourn the pleasures of love. 25 
A Friendship without Shadows 
How very different things were with George Sand! In 1837 
she met Chopin, and one year later they became one of the