1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Sandeau, Léonard Sylvain Julien

SANDEAU, LÉONARD SYLVAIN JULIEN [Jules] (1811–1883), French novelist, was born at Aubusson (Creuse) on the 19th of February 1811. He was sent to Paris to study law, but spent much of his time with unruly students. He met Madame Dudevant (George Sand) at Le Coudray in the house of a friend, and when she came to Paris in 1831 she joined Sandeau. The intimacy did not last long, but it produced Rose et Blanche (1831), a novel written in common under the pseudonym Jules Sand, from which George Sand took the idea of her famous nom de guerre.

Sandeau continued for nearly fifty years to produce novels and to collaborate in plays. His best works are Marianna (1839), in which he draws a portrait of George Sand; Le Docteur Herbeau (1841); Catherine (1845); Mademoiselle de la Seiglière (1848), a successful picture of society under Louis Philippe, dramatized in 1851; Madeleine (1848); La Chasse au roman (1849); Sacs et parchemins (1851); La Maison de Penarvan (1858); La Roche aux mouettes (1871). The famous play of Le Gendre de M. Poirier is one of several which he wrote with Émile Augier—the novelist usually contributing the story and the dramatist the theatrical working up. Meanwhile Sandeau had been made conservateur of the Mazarin library in 1853, elected to the Academy in 1858, and next year appointed librarian of St Cloud. At the suppression of this latter office, after the fall of the empire, he was pensioned. He died on the 24th of April 1883. He was never a very popular novelist, and the quiet grace of his style, and his refusal to pander to the popular taste in the morals and incidents of his novels, may have disqualified him for popularity.

See G. Planche, Portraits littéraires (1849), vol. i.; J. Clarétie, J. Sandeau (1883); F. Brunetière in the Revue des deux rondes (1887).