The solid two-storey building flanked by outbuildings has not moved. In the park, cedars and one of the two ginkgo trees with leaves yellowed by autumn were already growing two hundred years ago. The houses and the church of the small village of Nohant (commune of Nohant-Vic, Indre), in the Berry countryside, breathe tranquility. Were it not for the heavy traffic on the Châteauroux-Montluçon road, which passes behind the house, one would not be surprised to come across George Sand, her hands full of earth, getting up from the plantations she loved to cultivate.
Sand’s whole life is there: the little office where, in the winter of 1832, she wrote Indiana, his first novel; the large kitchen where the servants were busy feeding the household; the upstairs bedroom where his companion Frédéric Chopin composed two-thirds of his work; and then the estate, at the time 230 hectares of countryside and forest, where she spent time as a child, learning the Berry dialect with the children of the village.
In the 1830s, after separating from a troublesome husband who, by the simple act of marriage, had become the master of the domain, Aurore Dupin found the administration of her house and began to write under the pseudonym passed on to posterity. The arrival of the railway in Châteauroux, in 1847, and the rule of Napoleon III – the Head of State put an end to the hopes she placed in the 1848 revolution – led her to settle permanently in the Berry.
So the writer “transforms the dwelling into a comfortable home. She had a boiler installed for taking hot baths, central heating, a modern stove with which few houses were equipped at the time., says guide Vinciane Esslinger. The house, almost a castle, now depends on the Center des Monuments Nationaux and, as such, remains open all year round.
A bit far from everything
Nohant soon becomes a worldly refuge. The cutlery of the painter Eugène Delacroix, the writer Gustave Flaubert, the singer Pauline Viardot are still set up today in the large dining room. Vinciane Esslinger seems to have spent the evening there, the day before: “We dine early, we go to bed late. In the evening, we play dominoes, we read aloud, then, with our friends, we play George Sand’s last play in the pocket theater on the ground floor. Maurice animates his puppets. »
Maurice Sand, the son, lived in Nohant until his death in 1889. A jack-of-all-trades artist, he occupied a huge room in the attic, half-workshop, half-cabinet of curiosities, lit by large bay windows . The place can be discovered during the guided tours “Nohant differently”, once a month, except in summer.
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