249 - SAND, George (known as Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant) [Paris, 1804 – Nohant, 1876], French novelist.

SAND, George (known as Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant) [Paris, 1804 – Nohant, 1876], French novelist. Autograph manuscript titled “The Pope’s Enemy—To the Armenian Monks of the Island of San Lazzaro.” [Venice, ca. 1834] 2 pages, oblong in-8°. This text forms the core of Letter III of *Lettres d’un voyageur*, originally published in the journal *Les Deux Mondes*, Volume III, on September 15, 1834. While visiting a Mekhitarist monastery in the spring of 1834, she met Father Hiéronyme, and the conversation turned to the rebellious and progressive priest Félicité Robert de Lammenais, whose book had just been condemned by the Pope. In her manuscript, she fiercely defends Lammenais and speaks out against Roman dogma. “Be at peace, my brothers, and let the Pope settle his own quarrels. The thunderbolts of Rome no longer kill anyone, and the fire of anger burns in vain in the hearts of men of God. Anathema is now nothing more than a sound with which the wind plays, like the foam of roaring waves. The heresiarch is no longer forced to take refuge in the mountains or to wear out the soles of his feet fleeing the vengeance of the Church. Faith has inevitably become what Jesus intended it to be: a hope offered to free souls, and not a yoke imposed by the powerful and the wealthy of the earth. Remain at peace, my brothers, and if you believe that God takes the Pope’s quarrels to heart, leave it to God to punish the Pope’s enemy. - As for those of you who wish to reconcile them, you do not realize the harm you would do to the Church by stifling this rebellious voice! You do not realize that the Pope is very proud and very pleased to have an enemy: what would he not give to have two, what would he not do to ensure that a few thousand men cling to the doctrine of a few new Luthers! But the world is now indifferent to theological debates; it reads the heresiarch’s pamphlets because they are [eloquent]; it does not read the Pope’s decrees because they are merely Catholic and nothing more. Read them, my brothers, since the pope sends them to you; but pray for the pope’s enemy. [...] - Remain at peace, then, my brothers, for God has placed His rainbow in the clouds, and from the world beyond your island, a messenger has come to you. You mistook him for a dove, so gentle was his voice and so innocent his appearance. But the pope declares to you that white is black and that the dove was a raven. Speak as he does, O sons of prudent Noah! But if the Pope’s enemy, battered by some storm, should one day come again to rest in the shelter of your fig trees, slip quietly behind the foliage, O good fathers! and bend toward him the branch from which hangs the sweet fruit with its torn robe. The swallows of the Adriatic will not go and tell Rome. If he enters your chapel, let him bow his vast, proud brow before your Madonna. A Turk painted her, and yet she is truly beautiful and truly Christian. She will hear the play by the Pope’s enemy, and if she converts, be very careful not to say that the miracle took place in your chapel, Brother Hieronymus, you who commissioned the Madonna from the Muslim painter and who would like to silence the heresiarch— it is you who would be punished; and who, under penalty of excommunication, would be forced to declare yourself the enemy of the Pope.”