House of George Sand

The House of French writer George Sand (1804–1876) is a writer's house museum in the village of Nohant, in the Indre Department of France. It was purchased by the French state in 1952, and preserved because it was where George Sand wrote many of her books and hosted many of the most important artists and writers of her time, including Frédéric Chopin, Balzac, Turgenev, and Delacroix. The writer and her family are buried in a small cemetery between the garden and the village church. The gardens are classified by the French Ministry of Culture as among the Notable Gardens of France. The house is open to the public, and is managed by the Centre des monuments nationaux.

The village of 'Nohan' is mentioned in French chronicles as early as 1228. A fortified manor house stood on the site, and was reconstructed between 1450 and 1452. Two of the original towers are part of the farm of the present chateau. In 1767 the land and house was purchased by Pierre Pearron, who reconstructed the manor in its present form. It was sold in 1793, during the French Revolution, to Madame Dupin de Francueil, the illegitimate daughter of the French military hero Marechal Maurice de Saxe, and granddaughter of August II the Strong, the King of Poland, grandmother of George Sand, who laid out the gardens and built the main stairway.

In 1808 Aurore Dupin (the future George Sand), then just four years old, came to live with her grandmother after the accidental death of her father, Maurice Dupin, an officer in the French army.

Aurore Dupin's grandmother was not happy with what she considered the excessive exuberance and free ways of the child, and sent her to a convent. When Aurore was 16 her grandmother was paralyzed by a stroke, and she returned to Nohant to take care of her. When her grandmother died in 1821, Aurore received the house as an inheritance. The following year, she married Casimir Dudevant, who was nine years her senior. They had two children, Maurice (born 1823) and Solange (born 1828).

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