As it is common knowledge that, though never a compulsive transvestist, George Sand wore men’s clothes as frequently as women’s from her girlhood in Nohant until she approached middle age, her treatment of this incident is rather surprising. But this, and her careful avoidance of so much as the mention of female homosexuality, carry a suggestion of the caution observed by all potentially suspected variants. The circumstances of Aurore Dudevant’s childhood and puberty were enough, in all conscience, to produce any or all of the aberrations in a psychoanalyst’s manual. Her heterosexual affairs were so numerous, open, and dramatic that few students have looked for other emotional incidents in her life. By her own statement, however, she never achieved complete satisfaction with any of the men she loved,[3] and there are a number of suggestive incidents which crop up in one after another of her biographies. During her last year in a convent school in Paris—at about seventeen, that is—she suffered what in modern parlance would be called a violent “crush” on an Irish schoolmate. In the 1830s she was “for a long time ... fascinated by the great romantic actress of the day, Dorval.... Dumas and Vigny loved her (Dorval), and she had been Musset’s last mistress. George had seen much of her in those years, so much that Vigny had become jealous of their intimacy.”[4] (André Maurois quotes a letter in which Vigny refers to Sand viciously as “that Lesbian.”)[5] Many years later, after Dorval’s death, Sand took over the responsibility for her children. During Sand’s sojourn in Switzerland in the middle 1830s she met Mme. d’Agoult—known to literature as Daniel Stern—and was so strongly attracted that she entertained her new friend at Nohant for several months after their return to France. Subsequently the two lived but a few doors apart in Paris and for some time held a joint salon. Still later she experienced a friendship of similar intensity with Pauline Garcia, Malibran’s sister and a noted singer. Even after Garcia had married Viardot, Sand continued to see so much of her that Mme. Viardot was generally referred to as “Mme. Sand’s friend” first, “the great singer” second.