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,
