Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/528

508 DUDEVANT and Louis XVIIL, and she proclaims herself as frankly a daughter of the people, endowed by nature with the instincts of her class. Her birth itself was romantic. Her father was playing a country dance at the house of a fellow officer, the future husband of Sophie s sister, when he was told that his wife, who had not long left the room, had borne him a daughter. " She will be fortunate," said the aunt, " she was bom among the roses to the sound of music." Passing by her infantine recollections, which go back further than even those of Dickens, we find her at the age of three crossing the Pyrennees to join her father who was on Murat s staff, occupying with her parents a suite of rooms in the royal palace, adopted as the child of the regiment, nursed by rough old sergeants, and dressed in a complete suit of uniform to please the general. For the next ten years she lived at Nohant, near Le Chatre in Berri, the country house of her grandmother. Here her character was shaped ; here she imbibed that passionate love of country scenes and country life which neither absence, politics, nor dissipation could iiproot ; here she learnt to understand the ways and thoughts of the peasants, and laid up that rich store of scenes and characters which a marvellously retentive memory enabled her to draw upon at will. The progress of her mind during these early years well deserves to be recorded. Education, in the strict sense of the word, she had none. A few months after her return from Spain her father was killed by a fall from his horse. He was a man of remarkable literary gifts as well as a good soldier, and his letters, which are included in her life, show in a less degree the vivid force of descrip tion and clear insight into character which he bequeathed to his daughter. " Character," says George Sand, " is in a great measure hereditary : if my readers wish to know me they must know my father." On his death the mother resigned, though not without a struggle, the care of Aurore to her grandmother, Mme. Dupin do Francueil, a good representative of the ancien regime. Though her husband was a patron of Rousseau, she herself had narrowly escaped the guillotine, and had only half imbibed the ideas of the Revolution. In her son s lifetime she had, for his sake, condoned the mesalliance, but it was impossible for the stately chatelaine and her low-born daughter-in-law to live in peace under the same roof. She was jealous as a lover of the child s affection, and the struggle beween the mother and grandmother was one of the bitterest of Aurore s childish troubles. Next to the grandmother, the most important person in the household at Nohant was Deschatre. He was an ex- abbe who had shown his devotion to his mistress when her life was threatened, and henceforward was installed at Nohant as factotum. He was maire of the village, he managed the estate, doctored the neighbourhood, played picquet with Madame, was tutor to Aurore s half-brother, and, in addition to his other duties, undertook the education of the girl. The tutor wa? no more eager to teach than the pupil to learn. He, too, was a disciple of Rousseau, believed in the education of nature, and allowed his Emile to wander at her own sweet will. At odd hours of lessons she picked up a smattering of Latin, music, and natural science, but most days were holidays and spent in country rambles and gamt-3 with village children. Yet even then, though she passed for an ordinary child, somewhat more wayward and less instructed than the average, her special powers had begun to show themselves. Her favourite books were Tasso, Atala, and Paul et Viryinie. A simple refrain of a childish song or the monotonous chaunt of the ploughman touched a hidden chord and thrilled her to tears. Like Blake she fell into involuntary trances, saw visions and heard voices, though, unlike Blake, she never mistook her day-dreams for realities. She invented a deity of her own, a mysterious Corambe", half pagan and half Christian and like Goethe erected to him a rustic altar of the greenost grass, the softest moss, and the brightest pebbles. From the free out-door life at Nohant she passed at thirteen to the convent of the English Augustinians at Paris, where for the first two years she never went outside the walls. Nothing better shows the plasticity of her character than the ease with which she adapted herself to this sudden change. The volume which describes her con ventual life is as graphic as Miss Bronte s Villette, but we can only dwell on one passage of it. Tired of mad pranks, in a fit of home-sickness, she found herself one evening in the convent chapel. In a strange reverie she sat through vespers. Time passed unnoticed, the prayers were over, the chapel was being closed. " I had forgotten all; I knew not what was passing in me; with my soul rather than my senses, I breathed an air of ineffable sweetness. All at once a sudden shock passed through my whole being, my eyes swam, and 1 seemed wrapped in a dnxzling white mist. I heard a voice murmur in my ear, Tolle, Icgc. I turned round thinking that it was one of the sisters talking to me I was alone. I indulged in no vain illusion ; I believed in no miracle ; I was quite sensible of the sort of hallucination into which I had fallen ; I neither sought to intensify it nor to escape from it. Only I felt that faith was laying hold of me by the. heart, as I had wished it. I was so rilled with gratitude and joy that the tears rolled down my cheeks. 1 felt as before that 1 loved God, that my mind embraced and accepted that ideal of justice, tenderness, and holiness which I had never doubted, but with which I had never held direct communion, and now at last 1 felt that this com munion was consummated, as though an invincible barrier had been broken down between the source of infinite light and the smoulder ing fire of my heart. An endless vista stretched before me, and I panted to start upon my way. There was no more doubt or lukewarmness. That I should repent on the morrow and rally myself on my over-wrought ecstasy never once entered my thoughts. I was like one who never casts a look behind, who hesitates before some Rubicon to be crossed, but having touched the further bank sees no more the shore he has just left." Such is the story of her conversion as told by herself. It reads more like a chapter from the life of Ste The rese or Madame Guyon than of the author of Lclie. Yet no one can doubt the sincerity of her narrative, or even the permanence of her religious feelings under all her many phases of faith and aberrations of conduct. A recent critic has sought in religion the clue to her character and the mainspring of her genius. But, except we take religion in the vague sense of the vision and the faculty divine, this is a one-sided view. "Half poet and half mystic" is the verdict she pronounces on herself, and we may add that her element of mysticism was always subordinate to the poetic. " Je fus toujours tourmente e des choses divines," ever stirred and stimulated, but never possessed by things divine. Again in 1820 Aurore exchanged the restraint of a con vent for freedom, being recalled to Nohant by Mme. do Francueil, who had no intention of letting her granddaughter grow up a devote. She rode across country with hei brother, she went out shooting with Deschatre, she sat by the cottage doors on the long summer evenings and heard the flax-dressers tell their tales of witches and warlocks. She read widely though unsystematically Aristotle, Leibnitz, Locke, Condillac, and fed her imagination with Rene and Childe Harold. Her confessor lent her the Genius of Christianity, and to this book she ascribes the first change in her religious views. She renounced once for all the asceticism and isolation of the De Imitatione for the more genial and sympathetic Christianity of Chateaubriand. Yet she still clung to old associations, and on her grandmother s death was about to return to her convent, but was dissuaded by her friends, who found her a husband in the person of M. Dudevant, a retired officer who had turned farmer. About her husband and her married life George Sand is

discreetly reticent. It was a marriage, if not of love, yet