The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 49, November, 1861. Various
to avoid unpleasant acquaintances than eager to make advantageous ones. Such, too, was the foundation of my father's character, and in this respect never was couple better assorted. They were never happy out of their little household. And they have bequeathed me this secret sauvagerie, which has always rendered the [fashionable] world insupportable to me, and home indispensable."
In referring back to these volumes, we are led into continual loiterings by the way. The style of our heroine is so magical, that we are constantly tempted to let her tell her own story, and to give to the gems of hers which we insert in these pages the slightest possible setting of our own. But it is not our business to anticipate for any one a reading from which no student of modern literature, or, indeed, of modern mind, will excuse himself. We must give only so much as shall make it sure that others will seek more at the fountain-head; but for this purpose we must turn less to the book, and trust for our narration to a sufficiently recent perusal still vividly remembered.
Aurore could scarcely have passed out of her third year when she accompanied her mother to Madrid, where her father was already in attendance upon Murat. She remembers their quarters in the palace, magnificently furnished, and the half-broken toys of the royal children, whose destruction she was allowed to complete. To please his commander-in-chief, her father caused her to assume a miniature uniform, like those of the Prince's aide-de-camps, whose splendid discomfort she still recalls. This would seem a sort of prophecy of that assuming of male attire in later years which was to constitute a capital circumstance in her life. The return from the Peninsula was weary and painful to the mother and child, and made more so by the disgust with which the Spanish roadside bill-of-fare inspired the more civilized French stomach. They were forced to make a part of the journey in wagons with the common soldiery and camp-retainers, and Aurore in this manner took the itch, to her mother's great mortification. Arrived at Nohant, however, the care of Deschartres, joined to a self-imposed régime of green lemons, which the little girl devoured, skins, seeds, and all, soon healed the ignominious eruption. Here the whole family passed some months of happy repose, too soon interrupted by the tragical death of Maurice. He had brought back from Spain a formidable horse, which he had christened the terrible Leopardo, and which, brave cavalier as he was, he never mounted without a certain indefinable misgiving. He often said, "I ride him badly, because I am afraid of him, and he knows it." Dining with some friends in the neighborhood, one day, he was late in returning. His wife and mother passed the evening together, the first jealous and displeased at his protracted absence, the second occupied in calming the irritation and rebuking the suspicions of her companion. The wife at last yielded, and retired to rest. But the mother's heart, more anxious, watched and watched. Towards midnight, a slight confusion in the house augmented her alarm. She started at once, alone and thinly dressed, to go and meet her son. The night was dark and rainy; the terrible Leopardo had fulfilled the prophetic forebodings of his rider. The poor lady, brought up in habits of extreme inactivity, had taken but two walks in all her life. The first had been to surprise her son at Passy, when released from the Revolutionary prison. The second was to meet and escort back his lifeless body, found senseless by the roadside.
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