Famous Women: George Sand. Bertha Thomas
rather than French, child-life; and Aurore's early years—when domestic hostilities and nursery tyrannies, from which, like most sensitive children, she suffered inordinately, were suspended—were passed in the careless, healthy fashion approved in this country. A girl of her own age, but of lower degree, was taken into the house to share her studies and pastimes. Little Ursule was to become, in later years, the faithful servant of her present companion, who had then become lady of the manor, and who never lost sight of this humble friend. Aurore had also a boy playmate in a protégé of her grandmother's, five years her senior, who patronised and persecuted her by turns, in his true fraternal fashion. This boy, Hippolyte, the son of a woman of low station, was in fact Aurore's half-brother, adopted from his birth and brought up by Madame Dupin the elder, whose indulgence, where her son was concerned, was infinite. With these, and the children of the farm-tenants and rural proprietors around, Aurore did not want for companions. But the moment soon arrived when the painful family dispute of which she was the object, was to become the cause of more distress to the child than to her elders. There were reasons which stood in the way of Madame Maurice Dupin's fixing her residence permanently under her mother-in-law's roof. But the mind of the latter was set on obtaining the guardianship of her grand-daughter, the natural heir to her property, and on thus assuring to her social and educational privileges of a superior order. The child's heart declared unreservedly for her mother, whose passionate fondness she returned with the added tenderness of a deeper nature, and all attempts to estrange the two had only drawn them closer together. But the pecuniary resources of Maurice Dupin's widow were of the smallest, and the advantages offered to her little girl by the proposed arrangement so material, that the older lady gained her point in the end. Madame Maurice settled in Paris. Aurore grew up her grandmother's ward, with Nohant for her home; a home she was to keep, knowing no other, till the end of her life.
The separation was brought about very gradually to the child. The first few winters were spent in Paris, where her grandmother had an establishment. Then she could pass whole days with her mother, who, in turn, spent summers at Nohant, and Aurore for years was buoyed up by the hope that a permanent reunion would still be brought about. But meantime domestic jealousy and strife, inflamed by the unprincipled meddling of servants, raged more fiercely than ever, and could not but be a source of more than ordinary childish misery to their innocent object. It was but slowly that she became attached to her grandmother, whose undemonstrative temper, formal habits and condescending airs were little calculated to win over her young affections, or fire her with gratitude for the anxiety displayed by this guardian to form her manners and cultivate her intellect. Nay, the result was rather to implant in her a premature dislike and distrust for conventional ideals. From the standard of culture and propriety, from the temptations of social rank and wealth held up for her preference, she instinctively turned to the simple, unrestrained affection of the despised mother, and the greater freedom and expansion enjoyed in such company. In vain did disdainful lady's-maids try to taunt her into precocious worldly wisdom, asking if she could really want to go and eat beans in a little garret. Such a condition, naturally, she began to regard as the equivalent of a noble and glorious existence!
Meantime, throughout all these alternations of content and distress, Nohant and its surroundings were perforce becoming dear to her, as only the home of our childhood can ever become. The scenery and characteristics of that region are familiar to all readers of the works of George Sand; a quiet region of narrow, winding, shady lanes, where you may wander long between the tall hedges without meeting a living creature but the wild birds that start from the honey-suckle and hawthorn, and the frogs croaking among the sedges; a region of soft-flowing rivers with curlew-haunted reed beds, and fields where quails cluck in the furrows; the fertile plain studded with clumps of ash and alder, and a rare farm-habitation standing amid orchards and hemp-fields, or a rarer hamlet of a dozen cottages grouped together. The country is flat, and, viewed from the rail or high road, unimpressive. But those fruitful fields have a placid beauty, and it needs but to penetrate the sequestered lanes and explore the thicket-bound courses of the streams, to meet with plenty of those pleasant solitudes after a poet's own heart, whose gift is to seize and perpetuate transient effects, and to open the eyes of duller minds to charms that might pass unnoticed. In this sense only can George Sand be said to have idealized for us the landscapes she loved.
The thoughtful, poetic side of her temperament showed itself early, leading her to seek long intervals of solitude, when she would bury herself in books or dreams, to satisfy the cravings of her intellect and imagination. On the other hand, her vigorous physical organization kept alive her taste for active amusements and merry companionship. So the child-squire romped on equal terms with the little rustics of Nohant, sharing their village sports and the occupations of the seasons as they came round: hay-making and gleaning in summer; in winter weaving bird-nets to spread in the snowy fields for the wholesale capture of larks; anon listening with mixed terror and delight to the picturesque legends told by the hemp-beaters, as they sat at their work out of doors on September moonlight evenings—to all the traditional ghost-stories of the "Black Valley," as she fancifully christened the country round about. Tales were these of fantastic animals and goblins, the grand'-bête and the levrette blanche, Georgeon, that imp of mischief, night apparitions of witches and charmers of wolves, singing Druidical stones and mysterious portents—a whole fairy mythology, then firmly believed in by the superstitious peasantry.
As a signal contrast to this way of life came for a time the annual visits to Paris—suspended after she was ten years old. There liberty ended, and the girl was transported into a novel and most uncongenial sphere. Her grandmother's friends and relatives were mostly old people, who clung to antiquated modes and customs; and distinguished though such circles might be, the youngest member only found out that they were intolerably dull. The wrinkled countesses with their elaborate toilettes and ceremonious manners, the abbés with their fashionable tittle-tattle and their innumerable snuff-boxes, the long dinners, the accomplishment-lessons, notably those in dancing and deportment, were repugnant to the soul of the little hoyden. She made amends to herself by observing these new scenes and characters narrowly, with the acute natural perception that was one of her leading gifts. From this artificial atmosphere of constraint, it was inevitable that she should welcome hours of escape into her mother's unpretending domestic circle; and already at ten years old she had pronounced the lot of a scullery-maid enviable, compared to that of an old marquise.
Nevertheless the fact of her having, at an age when impressions are strongest, and most lasting, mixed freely and on equal terms with the upper classes of society, was a point in her education not without its favorable action on her afterwards as a novelist. Despite her firm republican sympathies, emphatic disdain for mere rank and wealth, and her small mercy for the foibles of the fashionable world, she can enter into its spirit, paint its allurements without exaggeration, and indicate its shortcomings with none of that asperity of the outsider which always suggests some unconscious envy lurking behind the scorn.
The despised accomplishment-lessons, in themselves tending only to so much agreeable dabbling, proved useful to her indirectly by creating new interests, and as an intellectual stimulus. There seems to have been little or no method about her early education. The study of her own language was neglected, and the time spent less profitably, she considered in acquiring a smattering of Latin with Deschartres. She took to some studies with avidity, while others remained wholly distasteful to her. For mere head-work she cared little. Arithmetic she detested; versification, no less. Her imagination rebelled against the restrictions of form. Nowhere, perhaps, except in the free-fantasia style of the novel, could this great prose-poet have found the right field in which to do justice to her powers. The dry technique in music was a stumbling-block of which she was impatient. History and literature she enjoyed in whatever they offered that was romantic, heroic, or poetically suggestive. In her Nohant surroundings there was nothing to check, and much to stimulate, this dominant, imaginative faculty. Her youthful attempts at original composition she quickly discarded in disgust; but it seemed almost a law of her mind that whatever was possessing it she must instinctively weave into a romance. Thus in writing her history-epitome she must improve on the original, when too dry, by exercising her fancy in the description of places and personages. The actual political events of that period were of the most exciting character; Napoleon's Russian campaign, abdication, retreat to Elba, the Hundred Days, Waterloo, the Restoration, following each