There are many statues of George Sand. This is is the most famous one: it can be found in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris. It was designed by François-Léon Sicard and installed in 1904 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of her birth. I like this statue. Below is a different

In December of 1833, George Sand and Alfred de Musset escaped from Paris, abandoning her daughter Solange to the servants, and traveled to Italy. Was it a honeymoon or their version of the Grand Tour? They'd never been. From the 17th century onwards, the Grand Tour was an

These portraits by Charles Landelle show de Musset in 1854, three years before his death. The one above actually seems to be from 1854; the one below seems to be a later version, from 1878. De Musset spent much of his time writing, drinking and cruising brothels. Possibly, he beat

Alfred de Musset appears to have died in 1857 from drinking too much absinthe. This anise-favored drink is powerful, with an alcohol content north of 45%, and it was all the rage in 19th century Paris and, before long, everywhere else. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, van Gogh, Oscar Wilde and Picasso

The painting shown above by Eugène Delacroix from 1838 doesn't exist as such. It's a reconstruction. It was originally intended as a double portrait of Chopin and Sand, but it was unfinished and, after Delacroix's death, it was cut in half and the two

Some favorites of mine. Below is Friedrich Nerly's Piazzetta di San Marco bei Mondschein (aka A moonlight view of the Piazza San Marco towards San Giorgio Maggiore) from 1849. He died in Venice and is buried in San Michele Cemetery; his paintings are on display in his home

The French literary historian, Sainte-Beuve, who knew Sand, argued that he couldn’t imagine anything worse than an affair with a woman writer – because your private life would always end up in print. This is why Oscar Wilde, commenting at the end of the 19th century, could write, “Like Goethe,

George Sand grew up in Nohant - she also did most of her writing there and she is buried there. Over the years, but especially in the early 1840's, the guest list included Liszt, Balzac, Flaubert, Chopin of course, and Delacroix painted the gardens (and the hosts) on

The vampire invaded Western Europe across the flat Hungarian plains as the Ottoman Turks retreated from the Slavic lands. At first the vampire was a Christian -- a heretic or criminal or suicide -- whose restless soul would leave its grave at night, usually as a bat, to drink human

These photos of Sand were taken by Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) in 1864 (when she was 60 years old). She outlived them all, except Liszt, and died at 71 in 1876. Below is a portrait of Sand by Achille Lemot from 1870 - presumably based off that photo - and below

Based on his encounter with the tragic courtesan Marie Duplessis, Alexandre Dumas fils writes La Dame aux camélias with such emotion that one almost believes he was in love with her. Yet it is also another of those novels where the heroine goes down to defeat and George Sand ponders

The only known photograph of Chopin, taken in 1849, is this one below, by Louis-Auguste Bisson. He died later that year, aged 39. The photo above may be Chopin; it's from earlier, in 1846. There are differing views on what disease finally killed Chopin. Was it the tuberculosis

The Fiasco with George Sand in 1833-34 was not the end of Mérimée's relationship with her. In 1841, he stumbled across the now-famous 6 Flemish tapestries known today as The Lady and the Unicorn (La Dame à la licorne) at Boussac castle in Limousin (shown below). The tapestries

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, by Polish nobleman Jan Potocki, is one of literature's least known masterpieces. It has been compared with The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights, but I would go with From Dusk till Dawn 1-3. Or Don Quixote. Or Borges as filmed

* 1804 George Sand is born * 1810 Alfred de Musset is born * 1812 Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is published in installments through 1818 * 1813 Byron’s vampire poem Giaor is published * 1819 Byron’s Don Juan is published in installments through 1824 * 1833 Sand one-night-stand with Prosper Mérimée; she

Some families are snake-bitten – they feud constantly. That was certainly the case with George Sand, her son Maurice and daughter Solange, and her soon-to-be-ex-lover Chopin, and it sucked in visiting friends like Delacroix. The most notable crisis was in May of 1847 when Solange married Auguste Clésinger, a sculptor and