Overview

Just Nivières arrives at the Château d'Ionis with a legal problem and leaves with considerably more than he bargained for. The problem is this: his client, the Comtesse Félicie d'Ionis, wishes to lose her own lawsuit. Her legal position is strong; her opponents, the d'Aillane family, would be ruined by a verdict in her favor; and her conscience, which is clearer and more generous than the law generally accommodates, has led her to instruct her lawyers accordingly. Her husband, who holds legal authority over the property she brought into the marriage, disagrees. And Nivières, twenty-two years old and already uncertain whether he has any taste for the law, finds himself caught between a legal system, a husband, and a woman whose intelligence and moral seriousness he finds increasingly difficult to look away from. The additional complication is the Green Ladies. Three sisters, daughters of the house, were poisoned centuries ago by a jealous rival at the royal court. They are said to return after midnight to the room now assigned to Nivières, where bread and water and salt have been laid out for them in an ancient ritual. Nivières is skeptical. Then he wakes in the dark to the sound of clinking glass. Published in 1857 - the same year as Madame Bovary, and in deliberate contrast to Flaubert's disenchanted vision - Les Dames Vertes is one of George Sand's most charming and underappreciated works: a ghost story, a love story, a quiet comedy of manners, and a precise observation of the legal powerlessness of married women in the France of 1788. Set on the eve of the Revolution in the Loire Valley countryside of Anjou, it belongs to Sand's sustained engagement with French folklore and the supernatural - not as a source of dread, but as a mode of idealism, a way of pointing toward what the living have not yet managed to become. Sand's ghosts are never simply frightening. They have something to say.

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