Produced by Delphine Lettau, Chuck Greif and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
[Illustration: _FAMOUS WOMEN_]
GEORGE SAND.
BY
BERTHA THOMAS.
BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1883.
_Copyright, 1883_,
BY ROBERTS BROTHERS.
UNIVERSITY PRESS:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.
PREFATORY NOTE.
The authentic materials available for an account of the life of George
Sand, although lately increased by the publication of a large part of
her correspondence, are still incomplete. Her memoirs by her own hand,
dealing fully with her early life alone, remain unsupplemented by any
entire and detailed biography, for which, indeed, the time seems hardly
yet come. Hence one among many obvious difficulties in the way of this
attempt to prepare for English readers a brief sketch that shall at
least indicate all the more salient features of a life of singularly
varied aspect.
Much, though of interest in itself, must here be omitted, as beyond the
scope of the present study. There are points again into which, as
touching persons still living or quite recently deceased, it would be
premature to enter. But none seem of such importance as to forbid the
endeavor, by a careful review of those facts in the life of George Sand
which most justly represent her character as a whole, and were the
determining influences on her career and on her work, to arrive at truth
and completeness of general outline, the utmost it is possible to hope
to accomplish in this little volume.
BERTHA THOMAS.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
EARLY YEARS
CHAPTER II.
GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE
CHAPTER III.
DEBUT IN LITERATURE
CHAPTER IV.
LELIA--ITALIAN JOURNEY
CHAPTER V.
MENTAL DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER VI.
SOLITUDE, SOCIETY AND SOCIALISM
CHAPTER VII.
CONSUELO--HOME LIFE AT NOHANT 149
CHAPTER VIII.
NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN 170
CHAPTER IX.
PASTORAL TALES
CHAPTER X.
PLAYS AND LATER NOVELS
CHAPTER XI.
ARTIST AND MORALIST
CHAPTER XII.
LATER YEARS
GEORGE SAND.
CHAPTER I.
EARLY YEARS.
In naming George Sand we name something more exceptional than even a
great genius. Her rise to eminence in the literature of her century, is,
if not without a parallel, yet absolutely without a precedent, in the
annals of women of modern times.
The origin of much that is distinctive in the story of her life may be
traced in the curious story of her lineage.
George Sand was of mixed national descent, and in her veins ran the
blood of heroes and of kings. The noble and the artist, the
_bourgeoisie_ and the people, all had their representatives among their
immediate ancestors. Her grandmother, the guardian of her girlhood, was
the child of Maurice, Marshal Saxe, that favorite figure in history and
romance, himself son of the famous Augustus II., Elector of Saxony, and
King of Poland, and the Swedish Countess Aurora von Koenigsmark. The
Marshal's daughter Aurore, though like her father of illegitimate
birth--her mother, who was connected with the stage, passed by her
professional name of Mlle. Verrieres--obtained after the Marshal's death
the acknowledgment and protection of his relatives in high places,
notably of his niece, the Dauphin of France, grand-daughter of Augustus
of Poland, and mother of the three kings--Louis XVI., Louis XVIII., and
Charles X.
Carefully educated at St. Cyr, Mlle. de Saxe was married, when little
more than a child, to the Count de Horn, who was also of partly royal
but irregular origin. He very shortly afterward fell in a duel. His
widow, at thirty, became the wife of M. Dupin de Franceuil, an old
gentleman of good provincial family and some fortune. Maurice, their
only child, was the father of George Sand.
Madame Dupin (the suffix de Franceuil was afterwards dropped by her
husband) appears to have inherited none of the adventurous and erratic
tendencies of her progenitors. Aristocratic in her sympathies,
philosophic in her intellect, and strictly decorous in her conduct,
throughout the whole of her long and checkered life she was regarded
with respect. Left a widow again, ten years after her second marriage,
she concentrated her hopes and affections on her handsome and amiable
son Maurice. Though fondly attached to her, he was yet to be the cause
of her heaviest sorrows, by his more than hazardous marriage, and by his
premature and tragical fate.
His strongest natural leanings seem to have been towards art in general,
music and the drama in particular, and of his facile, buoyant, artist
temperament there is ample evidence; but the political conditions of
France under the Directory in 1798 left him no choice but to enter the
army, where he served under Dupont, winning his commission on the field
of Marengo in 1800. It was during this Italian campaign that the young
officer met with the woman who, four years later, became his wife, and
the mother of his illustrious child.
Mademoiselle Sophie Victorie Delaborde, was, emphatically speaking, a
daughter of the people. Her father had been a poor bird-seller at Paris,
where she herself had worked as a milliner. Left unprotected at a very
early age, thoroughly uneducated and undisciplined, gifted with
considerable beauty, and thrown on the world at a time when the very
foundations of society seemed to be collapsing, she had been exposed to
extreme dangers, and without any of the ordinary safeguards against
them. That she proved herself not undeserving of the serious attachment
with which she inspired Maurice Dupin, her least favorable judges were
afterwards forced to admit; though, at the time this infatuation of the
lieutenant of six-and-twenty for one four years his senior, and of the
humblest extraction, and whose life hitherto had not been blameless, was
naturally regarded as utterly disastrous by his elders.
The devoted pair were married secretly at Paris in 1804; and on the 5th
of July in the same year--the last of the French Republic and the first
of the Empire--their daughter entered the world, receiving the name of
Amantine-Lucile-Aurore.
The discovery of the _mesalliance_ she had been dreading for some time,
and which her son had not dared to confess to her, was a heavy blow to
old Madame Dupin. However, she schooled herself to forgive what was
irrevocable, and to acknowledge this most unwelcome daughter-in-law, the
infant Aurore helping unconsciously to effect the reconciliation. But
for more than three years M. Dupin's mother and his wife scarcely ever
met. Madame Dupin _mere_ was living in a retired part of the country, in
the very centre of France, on the little property of Nohant, which she
had bought with what the Revolution had left her out of her late
husband's fortune. Maurice, now Captain Dupin and _aide-de-camp_ to
Murat, resided, when not on service, in Paris, where he had settled with
his wife and child. The union, strange though it may seem, continued to
be a happy one. Besides a strong attachment there existed a real
conformity of disposition between the two. The mother of George Sand was
also, in her way, a remarkable woman. She has been described by her
daughter as "a great artist lost for want of development"; showing a
wonderful dexterity in whatever she put her hand to, no matter if
practiced in it or not. "She tried everything, and always
succeeded"--sewing, drawing, tuning the piano--"she would have made
shoes, locks, furniture, had it been necessary." But her tastes were
simple and domestic. Though married out of her rank, she was entirely
without any vain ambition to push herself into fashionable society, the
constraint of which, moreover, she could not bear. "She was a woman for
the fire-side, or for quick, merry walks and drives. But in the house or
out of doors, what she wanted was intimacy and confidence, complete
sincerity in her relations with those around her, absolute liberty in
her habits and the disposal of her time. She always led a retired life,
more anxious to keep aloof from tiresome acquaintance than to seek such
as might be advantageous. That was just the foundation of my father's
character; and in this respect never was there a better-assorted couple.
They could never be happy except in their own little _menage_.
Everywhere out of it they had to stifle their melancholy yawns, and they
have transmitted to me that secret shyness which has always made the gay
world intolerable, and home a necessity to me."
In a modest _bourgeois_ habitation in the Rue Meslay, afterwards
transferred to the Rue Grange-Bateliere, Aurore Dupin's infancy passed
tranquilly away, under the wing of her warmly affectionate mother who,
though utterly illiterate, showed intuitive tact and skill in fostering
the child's intelligence. "Mine," says her daughter, "made no
resistance; but was never beforehand with anything, and might have been
very much behindhand if left to itself."
Aurore was not four years old when adventures began for her in earnest.
In the spring of 1808, her father was at Madrid, in attendance upon
Murat; and Madame Maurice Dupin, becoming impatient of prolonged
separation from her husband, started off with her little girl to join
him. The hazards and hardships of the expedition, long mountain drives
and wild scenery, strange fare and strange sights, could not fail
vividly to impress the child, whose imagination from her cradle was
extraordinarily active. Her mother ere this had discovered that Aurore,
then little more than a baby, and pent up within four chairs to keep her
out of harm's way, would make herself perfectly happy, plucking at the
basket-work and babbling endless fairy tales to herself, confused and
diluted versions of the first fictions narrated to her. A picturesque
line in a nursery song was enough to bring before her a world of
charming wonders; the figures, birds, and flowers on a Sevres china
candelabrum would call up enchanting landscapes; and the sound of a
flageolet played from some distant attic start a train of melodious
fancies and throw her into musical raptures. Her daily experiences,
after reaching Madrid with her mother, continued to be novel and
exciting in the extreme. The palace of the Prince de la Paix, where
Murat and his suite had their quarters, was to her the realization of
the wonder-land of Perrault and d'Aulnoy; Murat, the veritable Prince
Fanfarinet. She was presented to him in a fancy court-dress, devised for
the occasion by her mother, an exact imitation of her father's uniform
in miniature, with spurs, sword, and boots, all complete. The Prince
was amused by the jest, and took a fancy to the child, calling her his
little _aide-de-camp_. After a residence of several weeks in this abode,
whose splendor was alloyed by not a little discomfort and squalor, the
return-journey had to be accomplished in the height of summer, amid
every sort of risk; past reeking battle-fields, camps, sacked and
half-burnt villages and beleaguered cities. Captain Dupin succeeded,
however, in escorting his family safely back into France again, the
party halting to recruit awhile under his mother's roof.
Nohant, a spot that has become as famous through its associations as
Abbotsford, lies about three miles from the little town of La Chatre, in
the department of the Indre, part of the old province of Berry. The
manor is a plain gray house with steep mansard roofs, of the time of
Louis XVI. It stands just apart from the road, shaded by trees, beside a
pleasure ground of no vast extent, but with its large flower-garden and
little wood allowed to spread at nature's bidding, quite in the English
style. Behind the house cluster a score of cottages of the scattered
hamlet of Nohant; in the centre rises the smallest of churches, with a
tiny cemetery hedged around and adjoining the wall of the manor garden.
At this country home the tired travellers gladly alighted; but they had
barely a few weeks in which to recover from the fatigues of their
Spanish campaign, when a terrible calamity overwhelmed the household.
Maurice Dupin, riding home one night from La Chatre, was thrown from his
horse and killed on the spot.
The story of Aurore Dupin's individual life opens at once with the death
of her father--a loss she was still too young to comprehend, but for
which she was soon to suffer through the strange, the anomalous
position, in which it was to place her. Maurice Dupin's patrician mother
and her plebeian daughter-in-law, bereft thus violently of him who had
been the only possible link between them, found themselves hopelessly,
actively, and increasingly at variance. Their tempers clashed, their
natures were antipathetic, their views contradictory, their positions
irreconcilable. Aurore was not only thrust into an atmosphere of strife,
but condemned to the apple of discord. She was to grow up between two
hostile camps, each claiming her obedience and affection.
The beginning was smooth, and the sadness which alone kept the peace was
not allowed to weigh on the child. She ran wild in the garden, the
country air and country life strengthening a naturally strong
constitution; and her intelligence, though also allowed much freedom in
its development, was not neglected. A preceptor was on the spot in the
person of the fourth inmate of Nohant, an old pedagogue, Deschartres by
name, formerly her father's tutor, who had remained in Madame Dupin's
service as "intendant." The serio-comic figure of this personage, so
graphically drawn by George Sand herself in the memoirs of her early
life, will never be forgotten by any reader of those reminiscences.
Pedant, she says, was written in every line of his countenance and every
movement that he made. He was possessed of some varied learning, much
narrow prejudice, and a violent, crotchety temper, but had proved during
the troubles of the Revolution his sincere and disinterested devotion to
the family he served, and Aurore and "the great man," as she afterwards
nicknamed her old tutor, were always good friends.
Before she was four years old she could read quite well; but she remarks
that it was only after learning to write that what she read began to
take a definite meaning for her. The fairy-tales perused but half
intelligently before were re-read with a new delight. She learnt grammar
with Deschartres, and from her grandmother took her first lessons in
music, an art of which she became passionately fond; and it always
remained for her a favourite source of enjoyment, though she never
acquired much proficiency as a musical performer. The educational
doctrines of Rousseau had then brought into fashion a _regime_ of
open-air exercise and freedom for the young, such as we commonly
associate with English, 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 _protege_ 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'-bete_ 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 _abbes_ 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 other
in swift succession. Old Madame Dupin was an anti-Bonapartist, but
Aurore had caught from her mother something of the popular infatuation
for the emperor, and her fancy would create him over again, as he might
have been had his energies been properly directed. Her day-dreams were
often so vivid as to effect her senses with all the force of realities.
Such a visionary life might have been most dangerous and mentally
enervating had her organization been less robust, and the tendency to
reverie not been matched by lively external perception and plentiful
physical activity. As it was, if at one moment she was in a cloud-land
of her own, or poring over the stories of the Iliad, the classic
mythologies, or Tasso's _Gerusalemme_, the next would see her scouring
the fields with Ursule and Hippolyte, playing practical jokes on the
tutor, and extemporizing wild out-of-door games and dances with her
village companions.
Of serious religious education she received none at all. Here, again,
the authorities were divided. Her mother was pious in a primitive way,
though holding aloof from priestly influences. The grandmother, a
disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of Voltaire, had renounced the
Catholic creed, and was what was then called a Deist. But beyond
discouraging a belief in miraculous agencies she preserved a neutrality
with her ward on the subject, and Aurore was left free to drift as her
nature should decide. Instinctively she felt more drawn toward her
mother's unreasoning, emotional faith than toward a system of
philosophic, critical inquiry. But on both sides what was offered her to
worship was too indefinite to satisfy her strong religious instincts.
Once more she filled in the blank with her imagination, which was
forthwith called upon to picture a being who should represent all
perfections, human and divine; something that her heart could love, as
well as her intelligence approve.
This ideal figure, for whom she devised the name _Corambe_, was to
combine all the spiritual qualities of the Christian ideal with the
earthly grace and beauty of the mythological deities of Greece. For very
many years she cherished this fantasy, finding there the scope she
sought for her aspirations after superhuman excellence. It is hardly too
much to say that the Christianity which had been expressly left out in
her teaching she invented for herself. She erected a woodland altar in
the recesses of a thicket to this imaginary object of her adoration, and
it is a characteristic trait that the sacrifices she chose to offer
there were the release of birds and butterflies that had been taken
prisoners--as a symbolical oblation most welcome to a divinity whose
essential attributes were infinite mercy and love. It will be remembered
that a somewhat similar anecdote is related of the youthful Goethe.
Aurore, as the years went on, had grown sincerely fond of Madame Dupin;
but her mother still held the foremost place in her heart, and she had
never ceased to cherish the belief that if they two could live together
she would be perfectly happy. The discovery of this deeply irritated her
grandmother, who at length was provoked to intimate to the girl
something of the real motive for insisting on this separation--namely,
that her mother's antecedents were such as, in the eyes of Aurore's
well-wishers, rendered it desirable to establish the daughter's
existence apart from that of her parent. Sooner or later such a
revelation must have been made; but made as it was, thus precipitately,
in a moment of jealous anger, the chief result was of necessity to cause
a painful and dangerous shock to the sensitive young mind. It brought
about an unnatural discord in her moral nature, forbidden all at once to
respect what she had loved most, and must continue to love, in spite of
all. On the injurious effects of the over-agitation to which she was
subjected in her childhood she has laid much stress in her remarkable
work, "The Story of My Life." Much of this book, written when she was
between forty and fifty, reads like a romance; and had a certain amount
of retrospective imagination entered into the treatment of these
reminiscences it would not be surprising. The tendency to impart
poetical color and significance to whatever was capable of taking it was
her mastering impulse, and may sometimes have led her to lose the
distinction between fancy and reality, especially as by her own
confession her memory was never her strong point. But she had an
excellent memory for impressions, and no reader whose own recollections
of childhood have not grown faint, but will feel the profound truth of
the spirit of the narrative, which is of a kind that occasional
exaggerations in the letter cannot depreciate in value as a
psychological history. For an account of her early life it must always
remain the most important source.
Aurore was now thirteen, and though she had read a good deal of
miscellaneous literature her instruction had been mostly of a desultory
sort; she was behindhand in the accomplishments deemed desirable for
young ladies; and her country manners, on the score of etiquette, left
something to be desired. To school, therefore, it was decided that she
must go; and her grandmother selected that held by the nuns of the
"English convent" at Paris, as the most fashionable institution of the
kind.
This _Convent des Anglaises_ was a British community, first established
in the French capital in Cromwell's time. It has now been removed, and
its site, the Rue St. Victor, has undergone complete transformation. In
1817, however, it was in high repute among conventual educational
establishments. To this retreat Aurore was consigned and there spent
more than two years, an untroubled time she has spoken of as in many
respects the happiest of her life. There is certainly nothing more
delightful in her memoirs than the vivid picture there drawn of the
convent-school interior, drawn without flattery or malice, and with
sympathy and animation.
The nunnery was an extensive building of rambling construction--with
parts disused and dilapidated--quite a little settlement, counting some
150 inmates, nuns, pupils and teachers; with cells and dormitories, long
corridors, chapels, kitchens, distillery, spiral staircases and
mysterious nooks and corners; a large garden planted with chestnut
trees, a kitchen garden, and a little cemetery without gravestones,
over-grown with evergreens and flowers. The sisters were all English,
Irish, or Scotch, but the majority of the pupils and the secular
mistresses were French. Of the nuns the ex-scholar speaks with respect
and affection, but their religious exercises left them but the smaller
share of their time and attention to devote to the pupils. The girls
almost without exception were of high social rank, the _bourgeois_
element as yet having scarcely penetrated this exclusive seminary.
Aurore formed warm friendships with many of her school-fellows, and
seems to have been decidedly popular with the authorities as well, in
spite of the high spirits which amid congenial company found vent in
harmless mischief and a sort of organized playful insubordination. The
school had two parties: the _sages_ or good girls, and the _diables_,
their opposites. Among the latter Aurore conscientiously enrolled
herself and became a leader in their escapades, acquiring the sobriquet
of "Madcap." These outbreaks led to nothing more heinous than playing
off tricks on a tyrannical mistress, or making raids on the forbidden
ground of the kitchen garden. But the charm that held together the
confraternity of _diables_ was a grand, long-cherished design, to which
their best energy and ingenuity were devoted--a secret, heroic-sounding
enterprise, set forth as "the deliverance of the victim." A tradition
existed among them that a captive was kept languishing miserably in some
remote cell, and they had set themselves the task of discovering and
liberating this hapless wretch.
It is needless to say that prisoner and dungeon existed in their
girlishly romantic brains alone, but easy to see how such a legend might
possess itself of their imaginations, and to what bewitching exploits it
might invite firm believers. The supervision was not so very strict but
that a _diable_ of spirit might sometimes play truant from the
class-room unnoticed. The truants would then start on an exciting
journey of discovery through the tortuous passages, exploring the
darkest recesses of the more deserted portions of the convent; now
penetrating into the vaults, now adventuring on the roofs, regardless
of peril to life or limb. This sublimely ridiculous undertaking,
half-sport, half-earnest, so fascinated Aurore as to become the most
important occupation of her mind!
The teaching provided for the young ladies appears to have been of the
customary superficial order--of everything a little; a little music, a
little drawing, a little Italian. With English she had the opportunity
of becoming really conversant, as it was the language commonly spoken in
the convent, where also she could not fail to acquire some insight into
the English character. This she has treated more fairly than England for
long was to treat her. Few of her gifted literary countrymen have done
such justice to the sterling good qualities of our nation. Even when, in
delineating the Briton, she caricatures those peculiarities with which
he is accredited abroad, her blunders seem due to incomplete knowledge
rather than to any inability to comprehend the spirit of a people with
whom, indeed, she had many points of sympathy. She could penetrate that
coldness and constraint of manner so repelling to French natures, and
has said of us, with unconventional truth, that our character is in
reality more vehement than theirs; but with less mastery over our
emotions themselves, we have more mastery over the expression of our
emotions. Among her chosen school-comrades were several English girls,
but on leaving the convent their paths separated, and in her after life
she had but rare opportunities for renewing these early friendships.
Some eighteen months had elapsed in this fashion when Aurore began to
tire of _diablerie_. The victim remained undiscoverable. The store of
practical jokes was exhausted. Her restless spirit, pent up within those
convent walls, was thirsting for a new experience,--something to fill
her heart and life.
It came in the dawn of a religious enthusiasm--different from her
mystical dream of _Corambe_, which however poetical was out of harmony
with the spirit and ritual of a Catholic convent. But monastic life had
its poetical aspects also; and through these it was that its
significance first successfully appealed to her. An evening in the
chapel, a Titian picture representing Christ on the Mount of Olives, a
passage chanced upon in the "Lives of the Saints," brought impressions
that awoke in her a new fervor, and inaugurated a period of ardent
Catholicism. All vagueness was gone from her devotional aspirations,
which now acquired a direct personal import. The change brought a
revolution in her general behavior. She was understood to have been
"converted." "Madcap" was now nicknamed "Sainte Aurore" by her profane
school-fellows, and she formed the serious desire and intention of
becoming a nun.
The sisters, a practical-minded community, behaved with great good sense
and discretion. Without distressing the youthful proselyte by casting
doubts on her "vocation," they reminded her that the consideration was a
distant one, as for years to come her first duty would be to her
relatives, who would never sanction her present determination. Her
confessor, the Abbe Premord, a Jesuit and man of the world, was likewise
kindly discouraging; and perceiving that her zeal was leading her to
morbid self-accusation and asceticism of mood, he shrewdly enjoined upon
her as a penance to take part in the sports and pastimes with the rest
as heretofore, much to her dismay. But she soon found her liking for
these return, and with it her health of mind. Unshaken still in her
private belief that she would take the veil in due time, she was content
to wait, and in the interval to be a useful and agreeable member of
society. No more insubordination, no more mischievous freaks, yet
"Sainte Aurore" remained the life and soul of all recreations recognized
by authority, which even included little theatrical performances now and
then.
She had become more regular in her studies since her mind had taken a
serious turn, but her heart was less in them than ever. Considering
this, and the deficiencies in the system of instruction itself, it is
hardly surprising that when, in the spring of 1820, her grandmother
fearing that the monastic idea was taking hold of Aurore in good earnest
decided to remove her from the _Couvent des Anglaises_, she knew little
more than when first she had entered it.