Octave Uzanne

“ Portraits are often unfaithful, but her features were probably always rather too virile, and her eyes too large, recalling the epithet given by the ancients to Minerva. She seems, in short, to have been entirely without those qualities which give so much charm to feminine beauty—softness, weakness, morbidezza, as the Italians say. She is the personification of the blue-stocking of genius, the androgynous and Romantic ideal, the woman strong in her fine moral harmony—tender, disinterested, and courageous. Her supreme kindliness breathes from all her portraits. ”

“ In the few pages at our disposal we must not dream of enumerating a series of portraits that might almost be described as innumerable, portraits which, like those of Victor Hugo, would furnish forth a volume of the most dissimilar images. ”

“ Photograph by Nadar
Madame Sand, her hair simply dressed in waving bandeaux, clad in an African gandourah—a sort of blouse with wide velvet facings—made no further variations in her costume; so we see her in Lafosse's lithograph of 1866; so we find her in her numerous photographs by Nadar, with placid face and kindly eyes, her whole person expressing the truth of Joubert's charming axiom of resignation: "The evening of life brings its lamp with it."
Was George Sand ever beautiful? This is a question we cannot decide. ”