What Flowers Say. George Sand

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      Published in 2014 by the Feminist Press

      at the City University of New York

      The Graduate Center

      365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

      New York, NY 10016

       feministpress.org

      Text copyright © 1994 by Holly Erskine Hirko

      Cover and interior illustrations copyright © 2014 by Molly Crabapple

      All rights reserved.

This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

      No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      First printing November 2014

      Cover design by Molly Crabapple

      Text design by Drew Stevens

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Sand, George, 1804-1876.

       [Contes d’une grand-mére. English]

       What flowers say and other stories / George Sand ; translated by Holly Erskine Hirko ; illustrated by Molly Crabapple.

      pages cm

       Previously published in 1994 under the title: The Castle of pictures and other stories.

       ISBN 978-1-55861-878-7 (ebook)

      1. Fairy tales—France. 2. Children’s stories, French—Translations into English. [1. Fairy tales. 2. Short stories.] I. Hirko, Holly Erskine, translator. II. Crabapple, Molly, illustrator. III. Title.

       PZ8.S2495Wh 2014

       [Fic]—dc23

      2014031227

      Contents

TO THE READER

What Flowers Say

The Bug-Eyed Fairy

The Talking Oak

       The Castle of Pictordu

       The Talking Statue

       The Veiled Lady

       The Young Lady of Pictordu

       Little Bacchus

       The Lost Face

       Looking for the Face

       The Face Rediscovered

       The Collapse

       Return to Pictordu

       The Statue’s Speech

To the Reader

      George Sand was a woman, born Aurore Dupin in Paris, France, in 1804. She took on a masculine name because, as an aspiring writer, she knew that her work would be more seriously considered if people thought the author was a man. She kept the name throughout her life, and became one of France’s most beloved and prolific writers, publishing more than eighty novels and plays.

      The same freedom that Sand exercised in her writing, she applied to the rest of her life. In nineteenth-century France, women were expected to wear long dresses with tight corsets, but instead Sand wore men’s clothing, which allowed her to move more freely and to gain access to places otherwise restricted to women. She smoked cigars and dated whomever she wanted to date. Sand’s behavior may have been seen as unladylike, but she lived a liberated life at a time when liberation for women was in short supply.

      Sand wrote What Flowers Say for her granddaughters only a few years before her death. She wanted to leave behind stories that would convey her strong belief in fantasy, to urge them to consider the unseen. Maybe it was Sand’s endless imagination that enabled her to create a revolutionary life. Believe and live free. That lesson is the gift she gave to her granddaughters with this collection, and that we are passing on to you, the reader, nearly one hundred and fifty years later.