GIRLHOOD AND MARRIED LIFE.
Aurore Dupin was now fifteen, and so far, though somewhat peculiarly
situated, she and her life had presented no very extraordinary features,
nor promise of the same. Her energies had flowed into a variety of
channels, and manifestly clever and accustomed to take the lead though
she might be, no one, least of all herself, seems to have thought of
regarding her as a wonder. The Lady Superior of the _Couvent des
Anglaises_, who called her "Still Waters," had perhaps an inkling of
something more than met the eye, existent in this pupil. But a dozen
years were yet to elapse before the moment came when she was to start
life afresh for herself, on a footing of independence and literary
enterprise, and by her first published attempts raise her name at once
above the names of the mass of her fellow-creatures.
Old Madame Dupin, warned by failing health that her end was not far off,
would gladly have first assured a husband's protection for her ward,
whom she had now succeeded in really dissociating from her natural
guardian. The girl's bringing-up, and an almost complete separation for
the last five years, had made a gap--in habits of mind and feeling--such
as could hardly be quite bridged over, between her mother and herself.
But though beginning to be sadly aware of this and of the increasing
violence and asperities of poor Madame Maurice Dupin's temper, which
made peace under one roof with her a matter of difficulty, Aurore hung
back from the notion of marriage, and clearly was much too young to be
urged into taking so serious a step. So to Nohant she returned from the
convent in the spring of 1820. There she continued to strike that
judicious compromise between temporal and spiritual duties and pleasures
enjoined on her by her clerical adviser. Still bent on choosing a
monastic life, when free to choose for herself, she was reconciled in
the meantime to take things as they came, and to make herself happy and
add to the happiness of her grandmother in the ordinary way. So we find
her enjoying the visit of one of her school friends, getting up little
plays to amuse the elders, practicing the harp, receiving from her
brother Hippolyte--now a noisy hussar--during his brief visit home, her
first initiation into the arts of riding--for the future her favorite
exercise--and of pistol-shooting; and last, but not least, beginning to
suspect that she had learned nothing whatever while at school, and
setting to work to educate herself, as best she could, by miscellaneous
reading.
In the spring of the following year Madame Dupin's health and mental
faculties utterly broke down. But she lived on for another ten months.
Aurore for the time was placed in a most exceptional position for a
French girl of sixteen. She was thrown absolutely on herself and her own
resources, uncontrolled and unprotected, between a helpless, half
imbecile invalid, and the eccentric, dogmatic pedagogue, Deschartres.
Highly susceptible to influences from without, her mind, during their
sudden and complete suspension, seemed as it were invited to discover
and take its own bent.
Piqued by the charge of dense ignorance flung at her by her ex-tutor,
and aware that there was truth in it, she would now sit up all night
reading, finding her appetite for the secular knowledge she used to
despise grow by what it fed upon. The phase of religious exaltation she
had recently passed through still gave the tone to her mind, and it was
with the works of famous philosophers, metaphysicians, and Christian
mystics that she began her studies. Comparing the "Imitation of Christ"
with Chateaubriand's "Spirit of Christianity," and struck here and
elsewhere with the wide discrepancies and contradictions of opinion
manifest between great minds ranging themselves under one theological
banner, she was led on to speculations that alarmed her conscience, and
she appealed to her spiritual director, the Abbe Premord, for advice,
fearing lest her faith might be endangered if she read more. He
encouraged her to persevere, telling her in no wise to deny herself
these intellectual enjoyments. But her rigid Catholicism was doomed from
that hour. Hers was that order of mind which can never give ostensible
adhesion to a creed whilst morally unconvinced; never accept that refuge
of the weak from the torment of doubt, in abdicating the functions of
reason and conscience, shifting the onus of responsibility on to others,
and agreeing to believe, as it were, by proxy. She had plunged
fearlessly and headlong into Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, Condillac, Mably,
Leibnitz, Bossuet, Pascal, Montaigne, Montesquieu; beginning to call
many things in question, and, through the darkness and confusion into
which she was sometimes thrown, trying honestly and sincerely to feel
her way to some more glorious faith and light.
In the convent she had been familiarized with Romanism under its most
attractive aspects. The moral refinement, the mystery, the seclusion,
and picturesque beauties of that abode had a poetic charm that had
carried her irresistibly away. But, confronted with the system in its
practical working, she was staggered by many of its features. In the
country churches around her she saw the peasantry encouraged in their
grossest superstitions, and the ritual, carelessly hurried through,
degenerate often into mere mockery. The practice of confession,
moreover--her ultimate condemnation of which, as an institution whose
results for good are scanty, its dangers excessive, will be endorsed by
most persons in this country--and the Church's denial of the right of
salvation to all outside its pale, revolted her; and she caught at the
teaching of those who claimed liberty of conscience. "Reading Leibnitz,"
she observes, "I became a Protestant without knowing it." That purer and
more liberal Christianity she dreamed of had, she discovered, been the
ideal of many great men. The step brought her face to face with fresh
and grave problems of which, she truly observes, the solutions were
beyond her years, and beyond that era. There came to her rare moments of
celestial calm and concord, but she owed them to other and indirect
sources of inspiration. The study of philosophy, indeed, was not much
more congenial to her at sixteen than arithmetic had been at six. In
what merely exercised memory and attention she took comparatively but
languid interest. Instruction, to bring her its full profit, must be
conveyed through the medium of moral emotion, but the mysterious power
of feeling to stimulate intellect was with her immense. She turned now
to the poets--Shakespeare, Byron, Dante, Milton, Virgil, Pope. A poet
herself, she discovered that these had more power than controversialists
to strengthen her religious convictions, as well as to enlarge her mind.
Above all, the writings of the poet-moralist, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
helped her towards resolving the question that occupied her, of her true
vocation in life, now that her determination to take the veil was not a
little shaken.
The midnight student was by turns Amazon and sick-nurse as well. From
the fatigue of long watches over her books or by the invalid's bedside,
she found a better and more invigorating refreshment than sleep in
solitary morning rides across country. Her fearlessness on horseback was
madness in the eyes of the neighbors. Riding, then and there, was almost
unheard of for ladies, a girl in a riding-habit regarded as simply a
Cossack in petticoats, and Mademoiselle Dupin's delight in
horse-exercise sufficed to stamp her as eccentric and strong-minded in
the opinion of the country gentry and the towns-folk of La Chatre. They
had heard of her studies, too, and disapproved of them as unlady-like in
character. Philosophy was bad enough, but anatomy, which she had been
encouraged to take up by Deschartres, himself a proficient in medical
science, was worse--sacrilegious, for a person understood to be
professedly of a devotional turn of mind. She went game-shooting with
the old tutor; he had a mania for the sport, which she humored though
she did not share. But when quails were the object, she owns to have
enjoyed her part in the chase, which was to crouch in the furrows among
the green corn, imitating the cry of the birds to entice them within
gunshot of the sportsman. Lastly, finding in the feminine
costume-fashions of that period a dire impediment to out-door enterprise
of the sort, in a region of no roads, or bad roads, of rivers
perpetually in flood, turning the lanes into water-courses for
three-fourths of the year, of miry fields and marshy heaths, she
procured for herself a suit of boy's clothes, donning blouse and gaiters
now and then without compunction for these rough country walks and
rambles.
Here, indeed, was more than enough to raise a hue-and-cry at La Chatre,
a small provincial town, probably neither better nor worse than the rest
of its class, a class never yet noted for charity or liberality of
judgment. The strangest stories began to be circulated concerning her,
stories for the most part so false and absurd as to inspire her with a
sweeping contempt for public opinion. By a very common phenomenon, she
was to incur throughout her life far more censure through freaks,
audacious as breaches of custom, but intrinsically harmless, nor likely
to set the fashion to others, than is often reserved for errors of a
graver nature. The conditions of ordinary middle-class society are
designed, like ready-made clothes, to fit the vast majority of human
beings, who live under them without serious inconvenience. For the
future George Sand to confine her activities within the very narrow
restrictions laid down by the social code of La Chatre was, it must be
owned, hardly to be expected. It was perhaps premature to throw down the
gauntlet at sixteen, but her inexperience and isolation were complete.
The grandmother in her dotage was no counsellor at all. Deschartres, an
oddity himself, cared for none of these things. Those best acquainted
with her at La Chatre, families the heads of which had known her father
well and whose younger members had fraternized with her from childhood
upwards, liked her none the less for her unusual proceedings, and
defended her stoutly against her detractors.
"You are losing your best friend," said her dying grandmother to her
when the end came, in December, 1821. Aurore was, indeed, placed in a
difficult and painful situation. She had inherited all the property of
the deceased, who, in her will, expressed her desire that her own
nearest relations by her marriage with M. Dupin, a family of the name of
de Villeneuve, well-off and highly connected, should succeed her as
guardians to her ward. But it was impossible to dispute the claims of
Madame Maurice Dupin to the care of her own daughter if she chose to
assert them, which she quickly did, bearing off the girl with her to
Paris--Nohant being left under the stewardship of Deschartres--and by
her unconciliatory behavior further alienating the other side of the
family from whom Aurore, through no fault of her own, was virtually
estranged at the moment when she stood most in need of a friend. Twenty
years later they came forward to claim kinship and friendship again: it
was then with George Sand, the illustrious writer, become one of the
immortals.
Thus her lot was cast for her in her mother's home and plebeian circle
of acquaintance. So much the worse, it was supposed, for her prospects,
social and matrimonial. This did not distress her, but none the less was
the time that followed an unhappy one. The mother whom she had idolized,
and of whom she always remained excessively fond, appears to have been
something of a termagant in her later years. The heavy troubles of her
life had aggravated one of those irascible and uncontrollable tempers
that can only be soothed by superior violence. Aurore, saddened, gentle,
and submissive, only exasperated her. Her fitful affection and fitful
rages combined to make her daughter's life miserable, and to incline the
girl unconsciously to look over-favorably on any recognized mode of
escape that should present itself.
A long visit to the country-house of some friends near Melun, was hailed
as a real relief by both. Here there were young people, and plenty of
cheerful society. Aurore became like one of the family, and her mother
was persuaded to allow her to prolong her stay indefinitely. Among the
new acquaintance she formed whilst on this visit was one that decided
her future.
M. Casimir Dudevant was a young man on terms of intimacy with her hosts,
the Duplessis family. From the first he was struck by Mlle. Dupin, who
on his further acquaintance was not otherwise than pleased with him.
The sequel, before long, came in an offer of marriage on his part, which
she accepted with the approval of her friends.
He was seven-and-twenty, had served in the army, and studied for the
law; but had expectations which promised an independence. His father,
Colonel Dudevant, a landed proprietor in Gascony, whose marriage had
proved childless, had acknowledged Casimir, though illegitimate, and
made him his heir. It was reckoned not a brilliant _parti_ for the
_chatelaine_ of Nohant, but a perfectly eligible one. It was not a
_mariage de convenance_; the young people had chosen freely. Still less
was it a love match. Romantic sentiment--counted out of place in such
arrangements by the society they belonged to--seems not to have been
dreamed of on either side. But they had arranged it for themselves,
which to Aurore would naturally seem, as indeed it was, an improvement
on the usual mode of procedure, according to which the burden of choice
would have rested with her guardians. It was a _mariage de raison_
founded, as she and he believed, on mutual friendliness; in reality on a
total and fatal ignorance of each other's characters, and probably, on
Aurore's side, of her own as well. She was only just eighteen, and had a
wretched home.
The match was sanctioned by their parents, respectively. In September,
1822, Aurore Dupin became Madame Dudevant, and shortly afterwards she
and her husband established themselves at Nohant, there to settle down
to quiet country life.
If tranquillity did not bring all the happiness that was expected, it
was at least unbroken by such positive trials as those to come, and
whatever was lacking to Madame Dudevant's felicity she forgot for a
while in her joy over the birth of her son Maurice, in the summer of
1823--a son for whom more than ordinary treasures of maternal affection
were in store, and who, when his childhood was past, was to become and
remain until the time of her death a sure consolation and compensation
to her for the troubles of her life.
The first two years after her marriage were spent almost without
interruption in the still monotony of Nohant. "We live here as quietly
as possible," she writes to her mother in June, 1825, "seeing very few
people, and occupying ourselves with rural cares." That absolute
dependence on each other's society that might have had its charm for a
really well-assorted couple was, however, not calculated to prolong any
illusions that might exist as to the perfect harmony of their
dispositions. Already in the summer of 1824 the Dudevants had sought a
change from seclusion in a long visit to their friends the Duplessis,
after which they rented a villa in the environs of Paris for a short
while. The spring found them back at Nohant, and the summer of 1825 was
marked by a tour to the Pyrenees, undertaken in concert with some old
school-fellows of Aurore's, two sisters, who with their father were
starting for Cauterets. The pleasure of girlish friendships renewed gave
double charm to the trip, and her delight in the mountain scenery knew
no bounds.
"I am in such a state of enthusiasm about the Pyrenees," she writes to
her mother, "that I shall dream and talk of nothing but mountains and
torrents, caves and precipices, all the rest of my life." She joined
eagerly in every excursion on foot and horseback, but even moderate
feats of mountaineering, such as are now expected of the quietest
English lady-tourists by their husbands and brothers, were then deemed
startlingly eccentric, and got her into fresh trouble on this head.
Her letters and the fragments of her journal kept during this time, and
in which she tried to commit to paper her impressions, whilst fresh and
vivid, of the Pyrenees, show the same peculiar descriptive power that
distinguished her novels--that art of seizing grand general effects
together with picturesque detail, and depicting them in a simple and
straightforward manner, in which she was an adept. It must be added that
the diffuseness which characterizes her fiction, also pervades her
correspondence. Neither can be adequately represented by extracts. Her
composition is like a gossamer web, that must be shown in its entirety,
as to split it up is to destroy it.
The ensuing winter and spring were passed agreeably in visits with her
husband to his family at Nerac, Gascony, and to friends in the
neighborhood. In the summer of 1826 their wanderings ended. Once more
they settled down at Nohant, where Madame Dudevant, except for a few
brief absences on visits to friends, or to health resorts in the
vicinity, remained stationary for the next four years, during which her
after-destiny was unalterably shaping itself.
It is perfectly idle to speculate on what might have happened had her
lot in marriage turned out a fortunate one, or had she married for love,
or had the moral character of the partner of her life preserved any
solid claim on her respect, since the contrary was unhappily the case.
Their situation, no doubt, was anomalous. In the young girl of barely
eighteen, country-bred and intellectually immature, whom M. Dudevant had
chosen to marry, who could have discerned one of the greatest poetical
geniuses and most powerful minds of the century? Some commiseration
might _a priori_ be felt for the petty squire's son who had taken the
hand of the pretty country-heiress, promising himself, no doubt, a
comfortable jog-trot existence in the ordinary groove, to discover in
after years that he was mated with the most remarkable woman that had
made herself heard of in the literary world since Sappho! But he
remained fatally blind to the nature of the development that was taking
place under his eyes, preserving to the last the serenest contempt for
his wife's intelligence. Her large mind and enthusiastic temperament
sought in vain for moral sympathy from a narrow common spirit, and in
proportion as her faculties unfolded, increasing disparity between them
brought increasing estrangement. Such a strong artist-nature may require
for its expansion an amount of freedom not easily compatible with
domestic happiness. But of real domestic happiness she never had a fair
chance, and for a time the will to make the best of her lot as it was
cast appears not to have been wanting.
The Dudevants, after their return home in 1826, began to mix more freely
in such society as La Chatre and the environs afforded, and at certain
seasons there was no lack of provincial gayeties. Aurore Dudevant all
her life long was quite indifferent to what she has summarily dismissed
as "the silly vanities of finery"--"_Souffrir pour etre belle_" was what
from her girlhood she declined to do. Regard for the brightness of her
eyes, her complexion, the whiteness of her hands, the shape of her foot,
never made her sacrifice her midnight study, her walks in the sunshine,
or her good country sabots for the rough lanes of Berry. "To live under
glass, in order not to get tanned, or chapped, or faded before the time,
is what I have always found impossible," she for her part has
acknowledged. And she cared very moderately for general society. She
writes to her mother in spring, 1826: "It is not the thing of all others
that reposes, or even that amuses me best; still there are obligations
in this life, which one must take as they come." She was not yet
two-and-twenty, and carnival-tide with its social "obligations" in the
form of balls and receptions was not unwelcome. They snatched her away
from her increasing depression. She writes of these diversions to her
mother in a lively strain, describing how one ball was kept up till nine
o'clock the next day, how every Sunday morning the _cure_ preaches
against dancing, but in the evening the dance goes on in despite of
him--how this cross _cure_ is not their own parish _cure_ of St.
Chartier,--a very old friend and a "character" who, when Madame Dudevant
was five-and-thirty, used to say of her, "Aurore is a child I have
always been fond of." "As for him, if only he were sixty years younger,"
she adds, "I would undertake to make him dance himself if I set about
it." Then follows an amusing sketch of a rustic bridal, the double
marriage of two members of the Nohant establishment:
The wedding-feast came off in our coach-houses--there was dinner in
one, dancing in the other. The splendor was such as you may
imagine; three tallow candle-ends by way of illumination, lots of
home-made wine for refreshment; the orchestra consisting of a
bagpipe and a hurdy-gurdy, the noisiest and, therefore, the best
appreciated in the country side. We invited some friends over from
La Chatre, and made fools of ourselves in a hundred thousand ways;
as, for instance, dressing up as peasants in the evening and
disguising ourselves so well as not to recognize each other. Madame
Duplessis was charming in a red petticoat; Ursule, in a blue blouse
and a big hat was a most comical fellow; Casimir, got up as a
beggar, had some halfpence given him in all good faith; Stephane,
whom I think you know, as a spruce peasant, made believe to have
been drinking, stumbled against our _sous-prefet_ and accosted
him--he is a nice fellow, and was just going to depart when all of
a sudden he recognized us. Well, it was a most farcical evening,
and would have amused you I will engage. Perhaps you, too, would
have been tempted to put on the country-cap, and I will answer for
it that there would not have been a pair of black eyes to compete
with yours.
In other letters written in a vein of charming good humor, her facility
and spirit are shown in her treatment of trivial incidents, or sketches
of local characters, as this, for example, of an ancient female servant
in her employ:
The strangest old woman in the world--active, industrious, clean
and faithful, but an unimaginable grumbler. She grumbles by day,
and I think by night, when asleep. She grumbles whilst making the
butter, she grumbles when feeding the poultry, she grumbles even at
her meals. She grumbles at other people, and when she is alone she
grumbles at herself. I never meet her without asking her how her
grumbling is getting on, and she grumbles away more than ever.
And elsewhere she has her fling at the little squabbles and absurdities
of provincial society, the "sets" and petty distinctions, giving a
humorous relation of the collapse of her well-meaning efforts, in
conjunction with friends at the _sous-prefecture_, to do away with some
of these caste prejudices, of the horror and indignation created in the
oligarchy of La Chatre by the apparition of an inoffensive music-master
and his wife at the _sous-prefet's_ reception, horror so great that on
the next occasion, the _salon_ of the official was unfurnished with
guests, except for the said music-master and the Dudevants themselves.
She wrote a poetical skit to commemorate the incident, which created
great amusement among her friends.
In the autumn, 1828, her daughter Solange was born. The care of her two
children, to whom she was devoted, occupied her seriously. Maurice's
education was beginning, a fresh inducement to her to study that she
might be better able to superintend his instruction. His least
indisposition put her into a fever of anxiety. Her own health during all
these years had repeatedly given cause for alarm. Symptoms of
chest-disease showed themselves, but afterwards disappeared, her
constitutional vigor triumphing in the end over complaints which seem to
a great extent to have been of a nervous order. Meantime her domestic
horizon was becoming overcast at many points.
Her brother, Hippolyte Chatiron, now married, came with his family to
settle in the neighborhood, and spent some time at Nohant. He had fallen
into the fatal habit of drinking, in which he was joined by M. Dudevant
to the degradation of his habits and, it would be charitable to suppose,
to the confusion of his intelligence. This grave ill came to make an
open break in the household calm, hitherto undisturbed on the surface.
Low company and its brutalizing influences were tending to bring about a
state of things to which the most patient of wives might find it hard to
submit. A role of complete self-effacement was not one it was in her
power long to sustain, and the utter moral solitude into which she was
thrown consolidated those forces inclining her to the extreme of
self-assertion. For together with trials without came the growing sense
of superiority, the _ennui_ and unrest springing from mental faculties
with insufficient outlet, and moreover, denied the very shadow of
appreciation at home, where she saw the claim to her deference and
allegiance co-exist with a repudiation she resented of all idea of the
reciprocity of such engagements.
She had voluntarily handed over the management of her property--the
revenue of which was hardly proportionate to the necessary expenses and
required careful economy--to her husband, an arrangement which left her,
even for pocket money, dependent on him. She now set herself to devise
some means of adding to her resources by private industry. The more
ambitious project of securing by her own exertions a separate
maintenance for herself and her children would at this time have seemed
chimerical, but it haunted her as a dream long before it took definite
shape.
It was not in literature that she first fancied she saw her way to
earning an independent income. She had begun to make amateur essays in
novel-writing, but was as dissatisfied with them as with the
compositions of her childhood, and with a religious novelette she had
produced whilst in the convent, and speedily committed to the flames.
Again, alluding to her attempts, in 1825, at descriptions of the
Pyrenees, she says: "I was not capable then of satisfying myself by what
I wrote, for I finished nothing, and did not even acquire a taste for
writing."
But she had dabbled in painting, and remained fond of it. "The finest of
the arts," she calls it, writing to her mother in 1830, "and the most
pleasant, as a life-occupation, whether taken up for a profession, or
for amusement merely. If I had real talent, I should consider such a lot
the finest in the world." But neither did the decoration of fans and
snuff-boxes nor the production of little water-color likenesses of her
children and friends, beyond which her art did not go, promise anything
brilliant in the way of remuneration.
In her circle of friends at La Chatre--old family friends who had known
her all her life--were those who had recognized and admired her superior
ability. Here, too, she met more than one young spirit with literary
aspirations, and one, at least, M. Jules Sandeau, who was afterwards to
achieve distinguished literary success. The desire to go and do
likewise came and took hold of her, together with the conviction of her
capability to make her mark. However discontented with her essays in
novel-writing hitherto, she began to be conscious she was on the right
track. The Revolution of July, 1830, had just been successfully
accomplished, and new hopes and ambitions for the world in general, and
their own country in particular, lent a stimulus to the intellectual
activity of the youth of France--a movement too strong not to make
itself felt, even in Berry.
The state of things at Nohant for the last two years had, as we have
seen, been tending rather to stifle than to keep alive any hesitation or
compunction Madame Dudevant might have felt at breaking openly from her
present condition. In a letter, dated October, 1830, to her son's
private tutor, M. Boucoiran, who had then been a year under their roof
in that capacity, she remarks, significantly:
You often wonder at my mobility of temper, my flexible character.
What would become of me without this power of self-distraction? You
know all in my life, and you ought to understand that but for that
happy turn of mind which makes me quickly forget a sorrow, I should
be disagreeable and perpetually withdrawn into myself, useless to
others, insensible to their affection.
The distance between herself and her husband had, indeed, been widening
until now the sole real link between them was their joint love for the
children. No pretence of mutual affection existed any longer. Madame
Dudevant's feeling seems to have been of indifference merely; M.
Dudevant's of dislike, mingled, probably, with a little fear. It appears
that he committed to paper his sentiments on the subject, and that this
document, ostensibly intended by him not to be opened till after his
death, was found and perused by his wife. It was the provocation thus
occasioned her, and the certainty thus acquired of her husband's
aversion to her society, that brought matters to a climax; so, at least,
she asserted in the heat of the moment. But nothing, we imagine, could
long have deferred her next step, strange and venturesome though it was.
Violent in acting on a determination when taken, after the manner, as
she observes, of those whose determinations are slow in forming, she
declared her intentions to her husband, and obtained his consent to her
plan.
According to this singular arrangement she was to be permitted to spend
every alternate three months in Paris, where she proposed to try her
fortune with her pen. She looked forward to having her little girl to be
there with her as soon as she was comfortably settled, supposing the
experiment to succeed. For half the year she would continue to reside,
as hitherto, at Nohant, so as not to be long separated from her son, who
was old enough to miss her, and to part from whom, on any terms, cost
her dear. But he was to be sent to school in two years, and for the
meantime she had secured for him the care and services of M. Boucoiran,
whom she thoroughly trusted.
Her husband was to allow her L120 a year out of her fortune, and on
condition that the allowance should not be exceeded, he left her at
liberty to get on as she chose, abstaining from further interference.
It seems obvious that this compromise, whilst postponing, could only
render more inevitable a future separation on less amicable terms,
though neither appear to have realized it at the time. Madame Dudevant
can have had no motive to blind her in the matter beyond her desire, in
detaching herself from her present position, not to disconnect her life
from that of her children. The freedom she demanded it was probably too
late to deny. Those about her, her husband and M. Chatiron, who, with
his family, was temporarily domesticated at Nohant, and who so far
supported her as to offer her the loan of rooms held by him in Paris,
for the first part of her stay, thought her resolution but a caprice.
And viewed by the light of her subsequent success it is hard now to
realize the boldness of an undertaking whose consequences, had it
failed, must have been humiliating and disastrous. She had no practical
knowledge of the world, had received no artistic training, and enjoyed
none of the advantages of intellectual society. But she had
extraordinary courage, spirit, and energy, springing no doubt from a
latent sense of extraordinary powers, almost matured, though as yet but
half-manifest. So much she knew of herself, and states modestly: "I had
discovered that I could write quickly, easily, and for long at a time
without fatigue; that my ideas, torpid in my brain, woke up and linked
themselves together deductively in the flow of the pen; that in my life
of seclusion, I had observed a good deal, and understood pretty well the
characters I had chanced to come across, and that, consequently, I knew
human nature well enough to describe it." A most moderate estimate, in
which, however, she had yet to convince people that she was not
self-deceived.