The First Years.

Much has been written about George Sand, but singularly little about her childhood. Yet she herself, when she set to work, between forty and fifty, to write the Histoire de ma Vie, thought it worth while to fill the best part of two volumes of that work with early reminiscences; and herein surely she judged wisely. Good descriptions of childish experience are rare enough. George Sand gives us a singularly full story of childhood; and, allowing for the fact of its author being a novelist, one may say that this story reads on the whole like a record of memory. That a narrative at once so charming and so pathetic should have been neglected, by English writers at least, can only be set down to the circumstance that it is not clearly marked off from the tediously full account of ancestors which precedes it.^[332]

The early reminiscences of a great man or woman have a special interest. Schopenhauer has ingeniously traced out the essential similarity of the man of genius and the child. Whatever the value of this analogy, it is certain that the gifted child seems not less but more of a child because of his gifts. This is emphatically true of the little lady with whom we are now concerned, and of whom, since we are interested in her on her own account and not merely as the precursor of the great novelist, we shall speak by her rightful name, Aurore Dupin.

The reader need not be told that the child who was to become the representative among modern women of the daring irregularities of genius was an uncommon child. She would certainly have been set down as strange and as deficient in childish traits by a commonplace observer. Yet close inspection shows that the untamed and untamable ‘oddities’ were, after all, only certain common childish impulses and tendencies exalted, or, if the reader prefers, exaggerated. Herein lies the chief value of the story. To this it may be added that this exaggeration of childish sensibility was set in a milieu admirably fitted to stir and strain it to the utmost. It was a motley turbulent world into which little Aurore was unceremoniously pitched, and makes the chronicle of her experience a thrilling romance. And all this experience, it may be said finally, is set down with the untroubled regard and the patient hand of one of the old chroniclers. The forty years had left the memory tenacious and clear to a remarkable degree—in this respect the story will bear comparison with the childish recallings of Goethe and the other famous self-historians; at the same time these years had brought the woman’s power of quiet retrospect and the artist’s habit of calm complacent envisagement. Herein lies a further element of value. The writer feels her identity with the subject of her memoir: she lives over again the passion-storms and ennuis, the reveries and hoydenish freaks of little Aurore; yet she can detach herself from her heroine too, and discuss her and her surroundings with perfect artistic aloofness.

Aurore—or, to give her her full appellation, Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin—was born in 1804. Her father, a distinguished officer of the Empire, was grandson of Maurice de Saxe, natural son of Augustus II., King of Poland. Her mother was a daughter of a Parisian bird-seller, and a true child of the people. The student of heredity may, perhaps, find in this commingling of noble and humble blood a key to much of the wild and bizarre in the child as well as in the later woman. However this may be, it is certain that the disparate alliance gave the sombre and almost tragic hue to the child’s destiny. Through the precious years that should be given over to happy play and dreams, she was to hear the harsh and dismal contention of classes, and hear it, too, in the shape of a bawling strife for the possession of herself.

The first home was a humble lodging in Paris. The father was away. The mother, disdained by the father’s family, had to be hard at work, and the baby had its irregular career foreshadowed by being often handed over to a male nurse, one Pierret, an ugly and quarrelsome though really good-natured creature, whom an accident suddenly made a devoted friend of the small family, faithfully dividing his time between the estaminet and the Dupin mÉnage.

Beyond a recollection of an accident, a fall against the corner of the chimney-piece, which shock, she tells us, ‘opened my mind to the sense of life,’ the first three years yield no reminiscences. From that date onwards, however, her memory moves without a hitch, and gives us a series of delightful vignette-like pictures of child-life.

Her mother had a fresh, sweet voice, and the first song she sang to Aurore was the nursery rhyme:—

The legend of little Father Christmas, a good old man with a white beard, who came down the chimney exactly at midnight and placed a simple present, a red apple or an orange, in her little shoe, excited the infantile imagination to unusual activity.

The love of sound, so strong in children, found an outlet in playing with some brass wirework on the doors of an alcove near her bed.

Her vivid recollection enables her to describe with a sure touch the oddly mixed and capriciously changeful feeling of children towards their dolls and other simulacra of living creatures. She somehow had presented to her a superb Punch, brilliant with gold and scarlet, of whom she was greatly afraid at first, on account of her doll. Before going to bed she securely shut up this last in a cupboard, and laid the brilliant monster on his back on the stove; but her anxieties were not yet over.

Her childish way of looking at dolls is thus described in another place:—

She only broke those, she adds, that could not stand the test of being undressed, or that proclaimed their unfleshly substance by falling and breaking their noses. The fluctuations of childish feeling in this matter, and the triumph of faith over doubt in the case of a real favourite, are prettily illustrated in a later story of how she parted from her doll when she was going from home on a long journey.

The gift of vivid imagination is probably quite as much a torment as a joy to a child, as the story of Punch suggests. Aurore’s finely strung nervous organisation exposed her to a preternatural intensity of fear, and made any clumsy attempt to ‘frighten’ by suggestion of ‘black hole,’ or other childish horror, more than ordinarily cruel. One day she had been with her mother and Pierret on a visit to her aunt. On returning towards the evening she was lazy and wanted the amiable Pierret to carry her. So to spur her on her mother threatened in fun to leave her alone if she did not come on. The child knew it was not meant, and daringly stopped while the others made a feint of moving on. It happened that a little old woman was just then lighting a lamp hard by, and, having overheard the talk, turned to the child and said in a broken voice, ‘Beware of me; it is I who take up the wicked little girls, and I shut them in my lamp all the night’.

At bottom Aurore’s nature was a happy one, and if it encountered in the real world the terrors of childhood, it found in the ideal world of fiction its supreme delights. Before she learned to read (about four) she had managed to stock her small brain with an odd jumble of supernatural imagery, the outcome of fairy stories recited to her, and of picture-books setting forth incidents from classical mythology and the lives of the saints; and she soon began to make artistic use of this motley material. Her mother, she tells us, used to shut her within four straw chairs in order to keep her from playing with the fire. She would then amuse herself by pulling out the straws with her hands (she always felt the need of occupying her hands) and composing in a loud voice interminable stories. They were of course modelled on the familiar fairy-tale pattern. The principal characters were a good fairy, a good prince, and a beautiful princess. There were but few wicked beings, and never great misfortunes. ‘All arranged itself under the influence of a thought, smiling and optimistic as childhood.’ These stories, carried on day after day, were the subject of amusing comment. ‘Well, Aurore,’ the aunt used to ask, ‘hasn’t your prince got out of the forest yet?’

To Aurore’s ardent imagination, play, as the story of the doll suggests, was more than the half-hearted make-believe it often is with duller children. She was able to immerse her whole consciousness in the scene, the occupation imagined, so as to lose all account of her actual surroundings. One evening, at dusk, she and her cousin were playing at chasing one another from tree to tree, for which the bed-curtains did duty. The room had disappeared for these little day-dreamers; they were really in a gloomy country at the oncoming of night and when they were called to dinner they heard nothing. Aurore’s mother had finally to carry her to the table, and she could ever after recall the astonishment she felt on seeing the light, the table, and other real objects about her.

Even at this tender age the child came into contact with the large mysterious outer world. At her aunt’s home at Chaillot there was a garden, the one garden she knew, a small square plot, seeming a vast region to Aurore, shut in by walls. At the bottom of this garden, on a green terrace, she and her cousin used to play at fighting battles.

She first saw the Emperor in 1807, from the good Pierret’s shoulders, where, being a conspicuous object, she attracted Napoleon’s quick eye. ‘I was, as it were, magnetised for a moment by that clear look, so hard for an instant, and suddenly so benevolent and so sweet.’

The political storm that was then raging on the sea of Europe made itself felt even in the far-off and seemingly sheltered creek of Aurore’s small life. Her father was aide-de-camp to Murat at Madrid, and in 1808 the mother resolved to betake herself to him with her child. It was a singular experience for a girl just completing her fourth year, and the narrative of it is romantic enough. Her imagination was strangely affected by the sight of the great mountains, which seemed to shut them in and to forbid their moving forwards or backwards. Yet she felt no fear at the postillion’s malicious fictions about brigands which quite horrified her mother. In Madrid they found themselves quartered in a large and magnificent palace. The unaccustomed space and splendour at first troubled the child. She was tormented by the huge pictures from which big heads seemed to come out and follow her, and she was further alarmed by a low mirror which gave her the first sight of her whole figure and made her feel how big she was.

Murat was not over well pleased at the arrival of his aide-de-camp’s wife and child, so an attempt was made to propitiate him by decking the little maid in a gay and coquettish uniform. The child, who was no coquette, seems to have cared but little for this performance, though she soon began to find amusement in her new sumptuous dwelling.

It was at Madrid that she first made acquaintance with one of Nature’s most fascinating mysteries, the echo.

She then combined with this strange phenomenon another, viz., the red and blue balls (ocular spectra) that she got into her eyes after looking at the golden globe of a church glittering against the sky, and so found her way to a theory that everything had its double—a theory which, Mr. Tylor and others tell us, was excogitated in very much the same way by uncivilised man. She spent days in trying to get sight of her double. Her mother, who one day surprised her in this search, told her it was echo, ‘the voice in the air!’

The next event of deep import for Aurore was the sudden death of her father by a fall from his horse, which occurred in the autumn of the same year. The first visit of the King of Terrors to a home has been a black landmark in many a child’s life. Aurore was at first ‘annihilated’ by excess of grief and fear, for, as she says, ‘childhood has not the strength to suffer’. The days that immediately followed the bringing in of the lifeless body were passed in a sort of stupor. Clear recollection dates only from the moment when she was to be clad in the conventional black.

The father’s death brought a profound change into the child’s life. The despised mother had already been recognised by the paternal grandmother, and a certain advance made towards a show of amity. Visits were paid to the grandmother’s chÂteau at Nohant, and it was, in fact, when they were staying there that the fatal accident occurred.

The common loss drew the two women together for a time, but the contrasts of temperament and of education were too powerful, and the jealousy which had first directed itself to the father now found a new object in his talented child. She has given us more than one excellent description of mother and grandmother. The latter, a blonde with white and red complexion, imposing air, always dressed in a brown silk robe and a white wig frizzled in front, was grave and quiet, ‘a veritable Saxon,’ a friend of the ancien rÉgime, a disciple of Voltaire and Rousseau, albeit a stickler for the conventionalities of high life. The mother was a brunette, of an ardent temperament, endowed with considerable talent, yet timid and awkward before grand folk, a Spanish nature, jealous and passionate, a true democrat withal, and a worshipper of the Emperor. The problem of dividing poor little Aurore between two such women, habiting two distinct worlds, would have baffled Solomon himself. The grandmother insisted on the advantages of bringing up the child as a lady, and the mother, after a hard struggle, relinquished her claims, the girl being handed over to the grandmother and transported into the new world of Nohant.

The story of this struggle, which tore the heart of Aurore as much as that of her mother, is a tragedy of child-life. Aurore’s instincts bound her to her mother. She implored her not to give her up for money—she understood she was to be the richer for the change. She was beside herself with joy when her grandmother allowed her to visit the maternal home, and she has given us a charming account of these visits. The rooms were poor and ugly enough by the side of her grandmother’s salons; yet—

When she found that she was to live at Nohant she was beside herself with grief, and implored her mother to take her away, and to let her join her in some business enterprise. The mother seemed at first to yield to these entreaties; but the barriers of rank proved to be inexorable, and would not let the little orphan pass. The narrative of the final departure of the mother from Nohant is deeply pathetic. It was the eve of the parting: and the child resolved to write a letter to her mother in which for the last time she poured out her passionate love and her implorings to be taken with her. But the house was sentinelled with hostile maids, and how to get the letter to its destination? At last, lover-like, she bethought her of putting it behind a portrait of her grandfather in her mother’s room. To make sure of her finding it, she hung her nightcap on the picture, writing on it in pencil ‘Shake the portrait!’ The mother came, but a provoking maid stayed a long half-hour with her. Aurore dared not move. Then, having waited another half-hour for the maid to fall asleep, she crept to her mother, whom she found reading the letter and weeping. She pressed her child to her heart, but would listen to no more proposals of flight from Nohant.

In the distraction of her grief she resolved that if it was unbearable she would walk to Paris and rejoin her mother; and, with characteristic inventiveness, thought out, by help of her fairy stories, how she would avoid the anguish of begging by disposing of some precious trinkets.

But the grief, like many another that looks crushing at first, proved not unbearable. In time the child learnt to take kindly to her new home, and even to love the stately and severe-looking grandmamma.

The Grandmother’s Regime.

It was verily a new home, this country house at Nohant. Besides the grave grandmamma bent on drilling Aurore into the proprieties, there was another solemn figure in Deschartres, her friend and counsellor, who combined the functions of steward of the estate and tutor of the young people. His pupils were Aurore herself, a half-brother Hippolyte, whose birth added one more irregularity to the family history, and of whom the Histoire has much to say. Hippolyte was a wild-tempered youth, more given to mischievous adventure and practical joking than to serious study, and proved a considerable set-off to the formal gravity of the elders of the household. A second youthful companion was supplied in Clotilde, a girl of humble parentage, who was probably introduced by the authorities as a concession to Rousseau’s teaching, and supplied a link between the young lady and the peasant world she was to love and to portray. Beyond the house was the unpretending country of Le Bas Berry, with its ‘landes’ or wastes, the ‘ValÉe Noire’ of Aurore’s early descriptions, which more than one of our writers have found half English in character, and which was to become to Aurore what the Midlands were to George Eliot.

The first effect of this forced separation from the mother seems to have been to throw Aurore in upon herself, and to confirm her natural tendency to reverie. She says much at this stage of her day-dreaming, which overtook her both when alone and when joining her companions in play. It visited her regularly as she sat at her mother’s feet in the evening listening to her reading, with an old screen covered with green taffeta between her and the fire.

As at Madrid, so at Nohant: the splendour of her new home caused her alarm at first. On the wall-paper of her bedroom above each door was a large medallion with a figure: the one a joyous dancing Flora; the other a grave, severe Bacchante, standing with arm stretched out leaning on her thyrsus. The first was beloved, the second dreaded. The child’s bed was so placed that she had to turn her back on her favourite. She hid her head under the bed-clothes and tried not to see that terribly stern Bacchante, but in vain.

In her play with Ursule and Hippolyte she continued to indulge in her passion for vivid imaginative realisation. When playing at crossing the windings of a river, rudely marked with chalk on the floor, five minutes would suffice to generate this kind of hallucination.

On one of these occasions, Hippolyte, with the boy’s bent to realism, took the water jug, and pouring its contents on the floor, produced a closer semblance of the river. The natural consequence followed: the children, wholly absorbed in their little drama, were caught by Aurore’s mother in the very act of paddling with naked feet and legs in a dirty puddle formed by the water and the staining of the floor, and were visited with summary chastisement.

More daring pranks would sometimes be ventured on with Hippolyte. One day, as Deschartres was away shooting, the boy got one of his works on Incantation, and tried, much in the fashion of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, to get a peep at the supernatural. Mysterious lines, digits, etc., were duly traced on the floor with chalk, and other preparations carried out. Then they awaited with deepening agitation the first indication of success, the darting out of a blue flame on certain digits or figures. Long minutes passed, yet no blue flame, no devil’s horns, appeared to thrill the eager watchers. At length Hippolyte, in order to keep up the girl’s excitement, put his ear to the floor and declared that he could hear the crackling sound of a flame. But it was all in vain. After all it was but a game, ‘though a game that made our hearts beat’.

Hippolyte was given to dangerous experiments, which he dignified by high-sounding names. Thus he one day put gunpowder into a big log and threw this into the fire, with the view of blowing the saucepan into the kitchen, an occupation which he cheerfully described as studying the theory of volcanoes. He succeeded in leading on Aurore into pranks of a decidedly hoydenish character, such as must have sadly grieved the decorous grandmamma had she known of them. They one day went so far as to dig a trough across the garden-path, fill this with light wet earth, duly cover it with sticks and leaves, and then watch Deschartres, who was particularly vain of his white stockings, as with the stiff, pompous gait of the pedagogue he marched straight into the trap.

Such a child as Aurore, with her fits of reverie alternating with somewhat rude outbursts of animal spirits, was not easily drilled into those proprieties on which Madame Dupin set so high a value. This good lady took great pains to make Aurore walk properly, wear her gloves, give up the familiar ‘thou,’ and adopt the stilted mode of address of the fashionable world. But she did not appreciate these educational experiments. ‘It seemed to me that she shut me in with herself in a big box when she said to me, “Amusez-vous tranquillement”.’ While, for the sake of pleasing her guardian, she outwardly conformed to the rules of society, in her heart she remained a rebel, and was dreadfully bored, when she ceased to be amused, by her grandmother’s ‘old Countesses’. One exception to her general dislike of the grand personages she had now to meet was made in the case of her great-uncle, the AbbÉ of Beaumont. He seems to have been a man of ability and culture, as well as of amiable heart, and he proved a good friend of the family after the death of Colonel Dupin by improvising the distraction of a comedy at Nohant, in which Deschartres’ flute did duty as orchestra, and the little Aurore was called on to dance a ballet all by herself. The AbbÉ’s house, which was decorated throughout in the style of Louis XIV., filled her with admiration, and she loved to wander, candle in hand, alone through its vast salons while the older people were absorbed in their cards. This grand-uncle, by-the-bye, served in part as the prototype of the Canon in Consuelo.

The formal teaching was mostly handed over to Deschartres, though the grandmother gave instruction in music. Aurore can hardly be said to have been a backward child. She read well at four. Towards five she learnt to write, but not having patience to copy out the alphabet, struck out an original orthography of her own, and indited letters in this to Ursule and Hippolyte. It was, she tells us, very simple and full of hieroglyphics. She devoured a certain class of books, and found delight for five or six months in the stories of Madame d’Aulnoy and of Perrault, which she came across at Nohant. She adds that though she has never re-read them since, she could repeat them all from beginning to end. She tried, out of regard for her grandmamma, to take kindly to arithmetic, Latin, and French versification, which Deschartres taught her, but she could not master her dislike. After a little scene, in which the passionate Deschartres threw a big dictionary at the girl’s head, the Latin had to be given up altogether. The study she liked best was history, since it gave her the chance of indulging in the pleasures of imagination. She had to prepare extracts from a book for her grandmother, and as she soon found that these were not compared with the original, she began to introduce additions of her own. Without altering essential facts, she tells us, she would place the historical personage in new imaginary situations, so as to develop the character more completely. In truth, she seems to have used history very much after the fashion which Aristotle, and after him Lessing, recommend to the poets, varying the situation, but leaving the character intact.

In addition to these more solid studies, the young lady had special lessons in dancing and in calligraphy. Both the dancing-master and the writing-master came in for her ridicule. The latter, she tells us, was

It must have been a joyous moment for Aurore when she was set free from the restraints and impositions of the chÂteau for a couple of hours’ visit to some adjoining farm, where she could shout, laugh, and romp with the peasant girls. Here she would climb the trees, rush wildly down from the top to the bottom of a mountain of sheaves in the barn, and do other outrageous things; or when the dream-mood was on her she would quietly contemplate her rustic friends as they tended the lambs, hunted for eggs, or gathered fruit from the orchard, weaving their figures into one of her interminable romances.

Among the charming rural pictures that her pen has drawn for us in these recollections there is one of a swineherd, called Plaisir, for whom she conceived a strange friendship. She loved to watch his odd figure, always clothed in a blouse and hemp trousers, ‘which with his hands and naked feet had taken the colour and the hardness of the earth,’ armed with a triangular iron instrument, ‘the sceptre of swineherds,’ and looking like ‘a gnome of the glebe, a kind of devil between man and werwolf’. As the swine turned up the soil with their snouts, the birds would come to forage.

Nor was it merely as playmates that the young lady from the chÂteau deigned to associate with the peasantry. She threw herself with ardent sympathy into the hard toilsome life of the people. One day, as she chanced to see an old woman stooping, as well as her stiff limbs allowed her, to gather sticks in her grandmother’s garden, she set vigorously to work with bill-hook cutting dry wood, working late into the evening, and forgetting all about her meal, for she was ‘strong as a peasant girl’. She then set out with blood-stained face and hands, and with a weight greater than that of her own body, for the poor woman’s hut, where she enjoyed a well-earned slice from her black loaf.

This contact with the rustic mind, so oddly introduced into the fashionable scheme of education, exerted a profound effect on the child’s imagination. She listened eagerly to the superstitious stories which the hemp-dressers related when they came to crush the hemp, sitting in the moonlight within view of the crosses of a cemetery. Among these were a sacristan’s gruesome stories of interments and of the rats that lived in the belfry. The doings of those rats, she tells us, would of themselves fill a volume. He knew them all, and had given them the names of the more important among the deceased villagers. They were very clever, and could, among other exploits, arrange grains or beans given them in the form of a circle enclosing a cross. It is hardly surprising to learn that these stories robbed Aurore of her sleep.

The rustic legend of the grande bÊte much exercised the girl’s brain. She tried to reconcile the superstition with what she had learnt about the animal kingdom. And in this way she concluded that the creature must be a member of a species almost entirely extinct. She imagined that it was leading a solitary existence, being able to survive the rest of its species by hiding during the day and wandering at night. This weird conception soon began to expand into a zoological romance.

If the girl’s imaginative impulse had been excited by her historical studies, it could not but be roused to preternatural activity by the stirring political events of the time. In 1812, when she was just eight years old, occurred Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia. The absence of all news of the army for fifteen days gave a new direction to her reverie.

A quaint illustration of the conflict the child’s mind was passing through under the contradictory impressions of Napoleon’s character received from her mother and from her new instructors at Nohant, is given us in the following:—

A Self-evolved Religion.

Perhaps there is no domain of children’s thought and feeling that is more remote from our older experience, and consequently less easily understood by us, than that of religion. Their first ideas about the supernatural are indeed, as we have seen above, though supplied by us, not controlled by us.

To most children, presumably, religious instruction comes—at first at least—with a commanding, authoritative force. The story of the supernatural, of the Divine Father, of Heaven, and the rest, cannot be scrutinised by the child—save, indeed, in respect of its inner consistency—for it tells of things unobservable by sense, and so having no direct contact with childish experience. Their natural tendency is to believe, in a submissive, childish way, not troubling about the proof of the mystery.

But even in this submissive acceptance there lies the germ of a subsequent transformation. If the child is to believe, he must believe in his own fashion; he must give body and reality to the ideas of Divine majesty and goodness, and of spiritual approach and worship. Hence the way in which children are apt to startle the reverent and amuse the profane by divulging their crude material fancies about things spiritual.

Such materialisation of spiritual conceptions is apt to bring trouble to the young mind. It is all so confusing—this exalted Personage, who nevertheless is quite unlike earthly dignitaries, this all-encompassing and never-failing Presence, which all the time refuses to reveal itself to eye or ear. How much real suffering this may entail in the case of children at once serious and imaginative we shall never know. The description of the boy Waldo, in that strangely fascinating book, The Story of an African Farm, kneeling bare-headed in the blazing sun and offering his dinner on an altar to God, may look exaggerated to some; but it is essentially true to some of the deepest instincts of childhood. The child that believes at all, believes intensely, and his belief grows all-commanding and prolific of action.

While, however, it is the common tendency of children passively to adopt their elders’ religious beliefs, merely inventing their own modes of giving effect to them, there is a certain amount of originality exercised in the formation of the beliefs themselves. Stories of independent creations of a religious cult by children are no doubt rare; and this for the very good reason that it needs the greatest force of self-assertion to resist the pressure of the traditional faith on the childish mind. The early recollections of George Sand furnish what is probably the most remarkable instance of childish daring in fashioning a new religion, with its creed and ritual all complete.

Poor little Aurore’s religious difficulties and experiments at solution can only be understood in the light of her confusing surroundings. From her mother—ardent, imaginative, and of a ‘simple and confiding faith’—she had caught some of the glow of a fervent piety. Then she suddenly passed into the chilling air of Nohant, where the grandmother equalled her master Voltaire in cynical contempt of the revered mysteries. The effect of this sudden change of temperature on the warm young heart was, as might have been anticipated, extremely painful. Madame Dupin at once recognised the girl’s temperament, and saw with dismay the leaning to ‘superstition,’ a trait which she disliked none the less for recognising in it a bequest from the despised grisette mother. So she applied herself with all the energy of her strong character to counteract the child’s religious tendencies. Now this might have proved neither a difficult nor lengthy process if she had consistently set her face against all religious observances. But though a disciple of Voltaire, she was also a lady with a conspicuous social position, and had to make her account with the polite world and the ‘biensÉances’. So Aurore was not only allowed but encouraged to attend Mass and to prepare for the ‘First Communion’ like other young ladies of her station. Madame Dupin well knew the risk she was running with so inflammable a material, but she counted on her own sufficiency as a prompt extinguisher of any inconveniently attaching spark of devotion. In this way the young girl underwent the uncommon if not unique experience of a regular religious instruction, and, concurrently with this and from the very hand that had imposed it, a severe training in rational scepticism and contempt for the faith of the vulgar.

Even if Aurore had not been in her inmost heart something of a dÉvote, this parallel discipline in outward conformity and inward ridicule would have been hurtful enough. As it was, it brought into her young life all the pain of contradiction, all the bitterness of enforced rebellion.

The attendance on Mass could hardly have seemed dangerous to Madame Dupin. The old curÉ of Nohant was not troubled with an excess of reverence. When ordering a procession, in deference to the mandate of his archbishop, he would seize the occasion for expressing his contempt for such mummeries. In his congregation there was a queer old lady, who used to utter her disapproval of the ceremony with a frankness that would have seemed brutal even in a theatre, by exclaiming, ‘Quelle diable de Messe!’ And the object of this criticism, on turning to the congregation to wind up with the familiar Dominus vobiscum, would reply in an under-tone, yet loudly enough for Aurore’s ear, ‘Allez au diable!’ That the child attached little solemnity to the ritual is evident from her account to the grandmother of her first visit to the Mass: ‘I saw the curÉ who took his breakfast standing up before a big table, and turned round on us now and then to call us names’.

The preparation for the ‘First Communion’ was a more serious matter. The girl had now to study the life of Christ, and her heart was touched by the story. ‘The Gospel (she writes) and the divine drama of the life and death of Jesus drew from me in secret torrents of tears.’ Her grandmother, by making now and again ‘a short, dry appeal to her reason,’ succeeded in getting her to reject the notion of miracles and of the divinity of Jesus. But though she was thus unable to reach ‘full faith,’ she resolved en revanche to deny nothing internally. Accordingly she learnt her catechism ‘like a parrot, without seeking to understand it, and without thinking of making fun of its mysteries’. For the rest, she felt a special repugnance towards the confessional. She was able to recall a few small childish faults, such as telling a lie to her mother in order to screen the maid Rose, but feared the list would not satisfy the confessor. Happily, however, he proved to be more lenient than she had anticipated, and dismissed his young penitent with a nominal penance.

The day that makes an epoch in the Catholic girl’s life at length arrived, and Aurore was decked out like the rest of the candidates. The grandmother, having given a finishing touch to her instructions by bidding Aurore, while going through the act of decorum with the utmost decency, ‘not to outrage Divine wisdom and human reason to such an extent as to believe that she was going to eat her Creator,’ accompanied her to the church. It was a hard ordeal. The incongruous appearance of the deistic grandmamma in the place sufficed in itself to throw the girl’s thoughts into disorder. She felt the hollowness of the whole thing, and asked herself whether she and her grandmother were not committing an act of hypocrisy. More than once her repugnance reached such a pitch that she thought of getting up and saying to her grandmother, ‘Enough of this: let us go away’. But relief came in another shape. Going over the scene of the ‘Last Supper’ in her thoughts, she all at once recognised that the words of Jesus, ‘This is my body and my blood,’ were nothing but a metaphor. He was too holy and too great to have wished to deceive his disciples. This discovery of the symbolism of the rite calmed her by removing all feeling of its grotesqueness. She left the Communion table quite at peace. Her contentment gave a new expression to her face, which did not escape the anxious eyes of Madame Dupin: ‘Softened and terrified, divided between the fear of having made me devout and that of having caused me to lie to myself, she pressed me gently to her heart and dropped some tears on my veil’.

It was out of this conflicting and agitating experience, the full sense of the beauty of the Christian faith and the equally full comprehension of the sceptic’s destructive logic, that there was born in Aurore’s imagination the idea of a new private religion with which nobody else should meddle. She gives us the origin of this strange conception clearly enough:—

Since all religion is a fiction (I thought), let us make a story which may be a religion, or a religion which may be a story. I don’t believe in my stories, but they give me just as much happiness as though I did.^[337] Besides, should I chance to believe in them from time to time, nobody will know it, nobody will dispel my illusion by proving to me that I am dreaming.