The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 49, November, 1861

We have done now with Aurore's ancestry, and must occupy our remaining pages with accounts of herself. Much time is given by her to the record of her early childhood, and the explanation of its various phases. She loves children; it is perhaps for this reason that she dwells longest on this period of her life, describing its minutest incidents with all the poetry that is in her. One would think that her childhood seemed to her that actual flower of her life which it is to few in their own consciousness. Despite the loss of her father, and the vexed relations between her mother and grandmother which followed his death, her infancy was joyous and companionable, passed mostly with the country surroundings and out-door influences which act so magically on the young. It soon became evident that she was to be confided chiefly to her grandmother's care; and this, which was at first a fear, soon came to be a sorrow. Still her mother was often with her, and her time was divided between the plays of her village-friends and the dreams of romantic incident which early formed the main feature of her inner life. Already at a very early age her mother used to say to those who laughed at the little romancer,—"Let her alone; it is only when she is making her novels between four chairs that I can work in peace." This habit of mind grew with her growth. Her very dolls played grandiose parts in her child-drama. The paper on the wall became animated to her at night, and in her dreams she witnessed strange adventures between its Satyrs and Bacchantes. Soon she imagined for herself a sort of angel-companion, whose name was Corambé. His presence grew to be more real to her than reality itself, and in her quiet moments she wove out the mythology of his existence, as Bhavadgheetas and Mahabraatus have been dreamed. In process of time, she built, or rather entwisted, for him a little shrine in the woods. All pretty things the child could gather were brought together there, to give him pleasure. But one day the foot of a little playmate profaned this sanctuary, and Aurore sought it no more, while still Corambé was with her everywhere.

Although she seems to have always suffered from her mother's inequalities of temper, yet for many years she clung to her, and to the thought of her, with jealous affection. The great difference of age which separated her from her grandmother inspired fear, and the grand manners and careful breeding of the elder lady increased this effect. When left with her, the child fell into a state of melancholy, with passionate reactions against the chilling, penetrating influence, which yet, having reason on its side, was destined to subdue her. "Her chamber, dark and perfumed, gave me the headache, and fits of spasmodic yawning. When she said to me, 'Amuse yourself quietly,' it seemed to me as if she shut me up in a great box with her." What sympathetic remembrances must this phrase evoke in all who remember the gêne of similar constraints! George draws from this inferences of the wisdom of Nature in confiding the duties of maternity to young creatures, whose pulses have not yet lost the impatient leap of early pleasure and energy, and to whom repose and reflection have not yet become the primal necessities of life. This want of the nearness and sympathy of age she was to experience more, as, by the consent of both parties, her education was to be conducted under the superintendence of her grandmother, from whom the mother derived her pension, and whose estate the child was to inherit. The separation from her mother, gradually effected, was the great sorrow of her childhood. She revolted from it sometimes openly, sometimes in secret; and the project of escaping and joining her mother in Paris, where, with her half-sister Caroline, they would support themselves by needle-work, was soon formed and long cherished. For the expenses of this intended journey, the child carefully gathered and kept her little treasures, a coral comb, a ring with a tiny brilliant, etc., etc. In contemplating these, she consoled many a heartache; as who is there of us who has not often effectually beguiled ennui and privation by dreams of joys that never were to have any other reality? The mother seems to have entered into this plan only for the moment; it soon escaped her remembrance altogether, and the little girl waited and waited to be sent for, till finally the whole vision faded into a dream.

Deschartres, the tutor of Maurice, and of Hippolyte, his illegitimate son, became also the instructor of the little Aurore. With all her passion for out-door life, she felt always, she tells us, an invincible necessity of mental cultivation, and perpetually astonished those who had charge of her by her ardor alike in work and in play. Her grandmother soon found that the child was never ill, so long as sufficient freedom of exercise was permitted; so she was soon allowed to run at will, dividing her time pretty equally between the study and the fields. Thus she grew in mind and body from seven to twelve, promising to be tall and handsome, though not in after-years fulfilling this promise; for of her stature she tells us that it did not exceed that of her mother, whom she calls a petite femme,—and of her appearance she simply says that in her youth "with eyes, hair, and a robust organization," she was neither handsome nor ugly. At the age of twelve, a social necessity compelled her to go through the form of confession and the first communion. Her grandmother was divided between the convictions of her own liberalism, and the desire not to place her cherished charge in direct opposition to the imperious demands of a Catholic community. The laxity of the period allowed the compromise to be managed in a merely formal and superficial manner. The grandmother tried to give the rite a certain significance, at the same time imploring the child "not to suppose that she was about to eat her Creator." The confessor asked none of those questions which our author simply qualifies as infamous, and, with a very mild course of catechism and slight dose of devotion, that Rubicon of maturity was passed. Not far beyond it waited a terrible trial, perhaps as great a sorrow as the whole life was to bring. Aurore's diligence in her studies was marred by the secret intention, long cherished, of escaping to her mother, and adopting with her her former profession of dress-maker. Having one day answered reproof with a petulant assertion of her desire to rejoin her mother at all hazards, the grandmother determined to put an end to such projects by a severe measure. Aurore was banished from her presence during a certain number of days. Neither friend nor servant spoke to her. She describes naturally enough this lonely, uncomforted condition, in which, more than ever, she meditated upon the wished-for return to her mother, and the beginning with her of a new life of industry and privation. Summoned at last to her grandmother's bedside, and kneeling to ask for reconciliation, she is forced to stay there, and to listen to the most cruel and literal account of her mother's life, its early errors, and their inevitable consequences.

"All that she narrated was true in point of fact, and attested by circumstances whose detail admitted of no doubt. But this terrible history might have been unveiled to me without injury to my respect and love for my mother, and, thus told, it would have been much more probable and more true. It would have sufficed to tell all the causes of her misfortunes,—loneliness and poverty from the age of fourteen years, the corruption of the rich, who are there to lie in wait for hunger and to blight the flower of innocence, the pitiless rigorism of opinion, which allows no return and accepts no expiation. They should also have told me how my mother had redeemed the past, how faithfully she had loved my father, how, since his death, she had lived humble, sad, and retired. Finally, my poor grandmother let fall the fatal word. My mother was a lost woman, and I a blind child rushing towards a precipice."

The horror of this disclosure did not work the miracle anticipated. Aurore submitted indeed outwardly, but a spell of hardness and hopelessness was drawn around her young heart, which neither tears nor tenderness could break. The blow struck at the very roots of life and hope in her. Self-respect was wounded in its core. If the mother who bore her was vile, then she was vile also. All object in life seemed gone. She tried to live from day to day without interest, without hope. From her dark thoughts she found refuge only in extravagant gayety, which brought physical weariness, but no repose of mind. She, who had been on the whole a docile, manageable child, became so riotous, unreasonable, and insupportable, that the only alternative of utter waste of character seemed to be the discipline and seclusion of the convent. She was accordingly taken to Paris, and received as a pensionnaire in the Convent des Anglaises, which had been, in the Revolution, her grandmother's prison. To Aurore it was rather a place of refuge than a place of detention. The chords of life had been cruelly jarred in her bosom, and the discords in her character thence resulting agonized her more than they displeased others. As for the extraordinary communication which had led to this disorder of mind, we do not hesitate, under the circumstances, to pronounce it an act of gratuitous cruelty. Of all pangs that can assail a human heart, none transcends that of learning the worthlessness of those we love; and to lay this burden, which has crushed and crazed the strongest natures, upon the tender heart of a child, was little less than murderous. Nor can the motive assigned justify an act so cruel; since modern morality increasingly teaches that the means must justify themselves, as well as the end. In spite of these odious revelations, the child felt that her love for her mother was undiminished, and a pitying comprehension of the natural differences between the two nearest to her on earth slowly arose in her mind, allowing her to do justice to the intentions of both.

Aurore wandered at first about the convent with only a vague feeling of loneliness. The young girls, French and English, who composed its classes, surveyed her in the beginning with distrust. Soon the youngest and wildest set, called Diables, accorded her affiliation, and in their company she managed to increase tolerably the anxieties and troubles of the under-mistresses.

She was early initiated into the great secret, the traditionary legend of the convent. This pointed at the existence, in some subterranean dungeon, of a wretched prisoner, or perhaps of several, cut off from liberty and light; and to deliver the victim became the object of a hundred wild expeditions, by day and by night, through the uninhabited rooms and extensive vaults of the ancient edifice. The little ladies hoarded with care their candle-ends,—they tumbled up and down ruinous staircases, listened for groans and complaints, tried to undermine walls and partitions, fortunately with little success. The victim was never found, but her story was bequeathed from class to class, and her deliverance was always the object and excuse of the Diables.

After much time wasted in these pursuits, attended by a mediocre progress in the ordinary course of study and what the French call leçons d'agrément, and we accomplishments, a critical moment came for Aurore. She was weary of frolic and mischief,—she had tormented the nuns to her heart's content. She knew not what new comedy to invent. She thought of putting ink in the holy water,—it had been done already; of hanging the parrot of the under-mistress,—but they had given her so many frights, there would be nothing new in that. She saw, one evening, the door of the little chapel open;—its quiet, its exquisite cleanliness and simplicity attracted her. She had followed thither to mock at the awkward motions of a little hunch-backed sister at her devotions,—but once within she forgot this object. A veiled nun was kneeling in her stall at prayer,—a single lamp feebly illuminated the white walls,—a star looked in at her through the dim window. The nun slowly rose and departed. Aurore was left alone. A calm, such as she had never known, took possession of her,—a sudden light seemed to envelop her,—she heard the mystical sentence vouchsafed to Saint Augustin: "Toile, lege!" Turning to see who whispered it, she found herself alone.

"I cherished no vain illusion. I did not believe in a miraculous voice. I understood perfectly the sort of hallucination into which I had fallen. I was neither elated nor frightened at it. Only, I felt that Faith was taking possession of me, as I had wished, through the heart. I was so grateful, in such delight, that a torrent of tears inundated my face. 'Yes, yes, the veil is torn!' I said, 'I see the light of heaven! I will go! But, before all, let me render thanks. To whom? how? What is thy name?' said I to the unknown God who called me to him. 'How shall I pray to thee? What language worthy of thee and capable of expressing its love can my soul speak to thee? I know not; but thou readest my heart,—thou seest that I love thee!'"

From this moment, Aurore gave herself up to the passion of devotion, which, in natures like hers, is often the first to unclose. There are all sorts of religious experiences,—some poor and shallow, some rich and deep, with every variety of shade between. But wherever Love is capable of being heroic, Religion will also find room to work its larger miracles. Aurore's devotion was not likely to be a frigid recognition of doctrine, nor to consist in the minute care of an infinitesimal soul, whose salvation could be of small avail to any save its possessor. Her religion could only be a sympathetic and contagious flame, running from soul to soul, as beacon-fires catch at night and illuminate a whole tract of country. From this time she became patient, thorough, and laborious in all the duties of her age and place. A closer sympathy now drew her to the nuns, with several of whom she formed happy and intimate relations. The convent life became for the time her ideal of existence, and she formed the plan, so common among young girls educated in this manner, of taking the veil herself, when such a step should become possible. This hidden purpose she carried with her, when, at the age of sixteen, she quitted the convent with bitter regret, fearing the strange world, fearing a conventional marriage, and looking back to the pleasant restraints of tutelage, whose thorn hedges are always in blossom when we view them from the dusty ways and traffic of real, responsible life.

Aurore exchanged her convent for a life of equal retirement; for her grandmother, fearing lest the pietistic influences to which she had been subjected should awake too dominant a chord in the passionate nature of her pupil, brought her to Nohant at once, where, for a few days, she realized the delight of a greater freedom from rule and surveillance. It was pleasant for once, she says, to sleep into la grasse matinée, to wear a bright gingham instead of her dress of purple serge, and to comb her hair without being reminded that it was indecent for a young girl to uncover her temples. The projects of marriage which had alarmed her were abandoned for the present, and she was left to enjoy, unmolested, the pleasure of finding again the friends and playmates of her youth. It soon appeared, however, that the convent education had left many a lacune, and the grandmother felt that the result of the three years' claustration in nowise corresponded to its expense. Aurore set herself to work to fill up, in secret, the many blanks left by her preceptresses,—wishing, as she says, to conceal, as far as she could, their want of faith or of thoroughness. She sat at her books half the night, being gifted, according to her own account, with a marvellous power of sacrificing sleep to any other necessity. At this time she learned to ride on horseback, her first exploit being to tame a colt of four years, the after-companion of many a wild scramble, who grew old and died in her service. Her grandmother becoming soon after disabled by a paralytic stroke, the alternation of this new exercise enabled Aurore to bear the fatigues of the sick-room without serious inconvenience. Of this period of her life our heroine speaks as follows:—

"Had my destiny caused me to pass immediately from my grandmother's control to that of a husband, or of a convent, it is possible that, subjected always to influences already accepted, I should never have been myself. But it was decided by Fate that at the age of seventeen years I should experience a suspension of external authority, and that I should belong wholly to myself for nearly a year, to become, for good or evil, what I was to be for nearly all the rest of my life."

Passing much of her time at the bedside of the invalid, now incapable of giving any further direction to the young life so dear to her, Aurore plunged into many studies which opened to her new worlds of thought and observation. She read Châteaubriand with delight. The "Genie du Christianisme" proved to her rather an intellectual than a religious stimulant, and under its impulse she proceeded, as she says, to encounter without ceremony the French and other authors most quoted at that time, to wit: Locke, Bacon, Montesquieu, Leibnitz, Pascal, La Bruyère, Pope, Milton, Dante, and others not below these in difficulty. She studied them in a crude and hurried manner; but that wonderful alembic of youth, with its fiery heat of ardor, enabled her to compose these far and hastily gathered ingredients into a certain homogeneity of knowledge. "The brain was young," she says, "the memory always fugitive; but the sentiment was quick, and the will ever tense." From these pursuits, interrupted by the cares of nursing, she broke loose only to mount her favorite Colette, and accompany Deschartres in his hunting expeditions. She attempted also to acquire some knowledge of Natural History, Mineralogy, and so on; but science was always less congenial to her than literature, and of Leibnitz, the "Théodicée" is the only work of which she speaks with any familiarity. For convenience in riding and hunting, she adopted, on occasion, the dress of a boy, a blouse, cap, and trousers, to the great scandal of the neighborhood, already indisposed towards her by reason of her eccentric reputation; since, as one can imagine, a small French province is the last place in the world where a young girl can display the lone-star banner of individuality with impunity.

Aurore had promised her aged relative that she would not read Voltaire before the age of thirty; but her literary wanderings soon brought her across the path of Rousseau.

The French make the reading of the "Nouvelle Héloïse" one of the epochs in the life of woman. According to its motto, "The mother will not allow the daughter to read it," this critical act is by common consent adjourned till after marriage, when, we suppose, it appears something in the light of a Bill of Rights, a coming to the knowledge of what women can do, if they will. But as all Julie's divagations occur before marriage, and as her subsequent life becomes a model of Puritanic duty and piety, one does not understand the applicability of her example to French life, in which this progress is reversed. In this, as in all works of true genius, people of the most opposite ways of thinking take what is congenial to themselves,—the ardent and passionate fling themselves on the swollen stream of Saint Preux's stormy love, the older and colder justify Julie's repentance, and the slow but certain rehabilitation of her character. With all its magnificences, and even with the added zest of a forbidden book, the "Nouvelle Héloïse" would be very slow reading for our youth of today. Its perpetual balloon voyage of sentiment was suited to other times, or finds sympathy to-day with other races. With all this, there is a great depth of truth and eloquence in its pages,—and its moral, which at first sight would seem to be, that the blossom of vice necessarily contains the germ of virtue, proves to be this wiser one, that you can tell the tree only by its fruits, which slowly ripen with length of life. As a novel, it is out of fashion,—for novels have fashion; as a development of the individuality of passion, it has perhaps no equal. Be sure that Aurore saw in it its fullest significance. It was strange reading for the disciple of the convent, but she had laid her bold hand upon the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil. She was not to be saved like a woman, through ignorance, but like a man, through the wisdom which has its heavenly and its earthly side. "Émile," the "Contrat Social," and the rest of the series succeeded each other in her studies; but she does not speak of the "Confessions," a book most cruel to those who love the merits of the author, and to whom the nauseating vulgarity of his personal character is a disgust scarcely to be recovered from. Taken at his best, however, Rousseau was the Saint John of the Revolutionary Gospel, though the bloody complement of its Apocalypse was left for other hands than his to trace. To Aurore, stumbling almost unaided through fragmentary studies of science and philosophy, his glowing, broad, synthetic statement was indeed a revelation. It made an epoch in her life. She compared him to Mozart. "In politics," she says, "I became the ardent disciple of this master, and I followed him long without restriction. As to religion, he seemed to me the most Christian of all the writers of his time. I pardoned his abjuration of Catholicism the more easily because its sacraments and title had been given to him in an irreligious manner, well calculated to disgust him with them." But with Aurore, too, the day of Catholicism was over,—its rites were become "heavy and unhealthy" to her. Her faith in things divine was unshaken; but the confessional was empty, the mass dull, the ceremonial ridiculous to her. She was glad to pray alone, and in her own words. Hers was a nature beyond forms. By a rapid intuition, she saw and appropriated what is intrinsic in all religions,—faith in God and love to man. However wild and volcanic may have been her creed in other matters, she has never lost sight of these two cardinal points, which have been the consolation of her life and its redemption. The year comprising these studies and this new freedom ended sadly with the death of her grandmother.

And now, her real protectress being removed, the discords of life broke in upon her, and asserted themselves. Scarcely was the beloved form cold, when Aurore's mother arrived, to wake the echoes of the chateau with wild abuse of its late mistress. By testamentary disposition, Madame Dupin had made Aurore her heir, and had named two of her own relatives as guardians; but the mother now insisted on her own rights, and, after much acrimonious dispute and comment, carried Aurore from her beloved solitudes to her own quarters in Paris,—a journey of sorrow, and the beginning of sorrows. In her childhood Aurore had often longed for this mother's breast as her natural refuge, and the true home of her childish affections. But it "was one of those characters of self-will and passion which deteriorate in later life, and in which no new moral beauties spring up to replace the impulsive graces of youth. Regarding Aurore now as the work of another's hands, she made her the victim of ceaseless and causeless petulance. Her gross abuse of her mother-in-law gave Aurore many tears to shed in private, while her persecution of poor Deschartres drove her daughter to the expedient of shielding him—with a lie. The poor tutor had administered the affairs of Nohant for some time. He was now called to account for every farthing with the most malignant accuracy, and a sum of money, lost by ill-management, not being satisfactorily accounted for, his new tormentor threatened him with prison and trial. As he muttered to his late pupil that he would not survive this disgrace, she stepped forward and shielded him after the fashion of Consuelo.

"I have received this money," said she.

"You? Impossible! What have you done with it?"

"No matter, I have received it."

Deschartres was saved, and Aurore had only availed herself of the first of a Frenchwoman's privileges. Nor will we reckon with her too harshly for this lie, so benevolent in intention, so merciful in effect. A lie sometimes seems the only refuge of the oppressed; but there is always something better than a lie, if we could only find it out. Here is her account of the scene itself:—

"To have gone through a series of lies and of false explanations would not, perhaps, have been possible for me. But from the moment that it was only necessary to persist in a 'yes' to save Deschartres, I thought that I ought not to hesitate. My mother insisted:—

"'If M. Deschartres has paid you eighteen thousand francs, we can easily find it out. You would not give your word of honor?'

"I felt a shudder, and I saw Deschartres ready to speak out.

"'I would give it!' I cried out

"'Give it, then,' said my aunt.

"'No, Mademoiselle,' said my mother's lawyer, 'don't give it.'

"'She shall give it!' cried my mother, to whom I could scarcely pardon this infliction of torture.

"'I give it,' I replied;' and God is with me against you in this matter.'

"'She has lied! she lies!' cried my mother. 'A bigot, a _philosophailleuse.' She is lying and defrauding herself.'

"'Oh, as to that,' said the lawyer, laughing, 'she has the right to do it, since she robs only herself.'

"'I will take her with her Deschartres before the justice of the peace,' said my mother. 'I will make her take oath by Christ, by the Gospel!'

"'No, Madame,' said the lawyer, 'you will go no further in this matter; and as for you, Mademoiselle, I beg your pardon for the annoyance I have given you. Charged with your interests, I felt obliged to do so.'"

Eternal shame to those who make use of any authority to force the secrets of a generous heart, cutting off from it every alternative but that of a loathed deceit, or still more hateful, and scarcely less guilty, betrayal!

Aurore now found herself in the hands of a woman of the people, ennobled for a time by beauty and a true affection, but sinking, her good inspiration gone, into the bitterest ill-temper and most vulgar uncharity. Detesting her superiors in rank and position, she soon managed to cut off Aurore from all intercourse with her father's family, and thus to frustrate every prospect of her marriage in the sphere for which she had been so carefully educated. She was even forbidden to visit her old friends at the convent, and was eventually placed by her mother with a family nearly unknown to both, whose pity had been excited by her friendless condition and unhappy countenance. Aurore's mother seems to us, du reste, the perfect type of a Parisian lorette, the sort of woman so keenly attractive with the bloom of youth and the eloquence of passion,—but when these have passed their day, the most detestable of mistresses, the most undesirable of companions. Men of all ranks and ages acknowledge their attraction, endure their tyranny, and curse the misery it inflicts. Marriage and competency had protected this one from the deteriorations which almost inevitably await those of her class, but they could not save her from the natural process of an undisciplined mind, an ungoverned temper, and a caprice verging on insanity. This self-torment of caprice could be assuaged only by constant change of circumstance and surroundings; her only resource was to metamorphose things about her as often and as rapidly as possible. She changed her lodgings, her furniture, her clothes, retrimmed her bonnets continually, always finding them worse than before. Finally, she grew weary of her black hair, and wore a blond periwig, which disgusting her in turn, she finished by appearing in a different head of hair every day in the week.

Aurore's new friends proved congenial to her, and the influence of their happy family-life dispersed, she says, her last dreams of the beatitudes of the convent. It was in their company that she first met the man destined to become her husband. Most of us would like to know the impression he made upon her at first sight. We will give it in her own words.

"We were eating ices at Tortoni's, after the theatre, when my mother Angèle [her new friend] said to her husband,—'See, there is Casimir.'

"A slender young man, rather elegant, with a gay aspect and military bearing, came to shake hands with them. He seated himself by Madame Angèle, and asked her in a low voice who I was.

"'It is my daughter,' she replied.

"'Then,' whispered he, 'she is my wife. You know that you have promised me the hand of your eldest daughter. I thought it would have been Wilfrid; but as this one seems of an age more suitable to mine, I accept her, if you will give her to me.'

"Madame Angèle laughed at this, but the pleasantry proved a prediction."

Aurore had given her new protectors the titles of Mother Angèle and Father James, and they in turn called her their daughter. The period of her residence with them at Plessis appears in her souvenirs as an ideal interval of happiness and repose, a renewal of the freedom and insousiance of childhood, with the added knowledge of their value, a suspension of the terrible demands and interests of life. Would that this ideal period could be prolonged for women!—but the exigencies of the race, or perhaps the fears of society, do not permit it. The two-faced spectre of marriage awaits her, for good or ill. The aphelion of a woman's liberty is soon reached, the dark organic forces bind her to tread the narrow orbit of her sex, and if, at the farthest bound of her individual progress, the attraction could fail, and let her slip from the eternal circle, chaos would be the result.