Biography of George Sand | Page 9

She had first been a child of
Nature. Her convent life had taken her away from Nature and
accustomed her to falling back on her own thoughts. Nature now took
her back once more, and her beloved Nohant feted her return.
"The trees were in flower," she says, "the nightingales were singing,
and, in the distance, I could hear the classic, solemn sound of the
labourers. My old friends, the big dogs, who had growled at me the
evening before, recognized me again and were profuse in their
caresses. . . ."

She wanted to see everything again. The things themselves had not
changed, but her way of looking at them now was different. During her
long, solitary walks every morning, she enjoyed seeing the various
landscapes, sometimes melancholy-looking and sometimes delightful.
She enjoyed, too, the picturesqueness of the various things she met, the
flocks of cattle, the birds taking their flight, and even the sound of the
horses' feet splashing in the water. She enjoyed everything, in a kind of
voluptuous reverie which was no longer instinctive, but conscious and
a trifle morbid.
Added to all this, her reading at this epoch was without any order or
method. She read everything voraciously, mixing all the philosophers
up together. She read Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bossuet, Pascal,
Montaigne, but she kept Rousseau apart from the others. She devoured
the books of the moralists and poets, La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante,
Virgil, Shakespeare. All this reading was too much for her and excited
her brain. She had reserved Chateaubriand's Rene, and, on reading that,
she was overcome by the sadness which emanates from these
distressing pages. She was disgusted with life, and attempted to commit
suicide. She tried to drown herself, and only owed her life to the
healthy-mindedness of the good mare Colette, as the horse evidently
had not the same reasons as its young mistress for wishing to put an
end to its days.
All this time Aurore was entirely free to please herself. Deschartres,
who had always treated her as a boy, encouraged her independence. It
was at his instigation that she dressed in masculine attire to go out
shooting. People began to talk about her "eccentricities" at Landerneau,
and the gossip continued as far as La Chatre. Added to this, Aurore
began to study osteology with a young man who lived in the
neighbourhood, and it was said that this young man, Stephane Ajasson
de Grandsaigne, gave her lessons in her own room. This was the
climax.
We have a curious testimony as regards the state of the young girl's
mind at this epoch. A review, entitled Le Voile de pourpre, published
recently, in its first number, a letter from Aurore to her mother, dated

November 18, 1821. Her mother had evidently written to her on
hearing the gossip about her, and had probably enlarged upon it.
"You reproach me, mother, with neither having timidity, modesty, nor
charm," she writes, "or at least you suppose that I have these qualities,
but that I refrain from showing them, and you are quite certain that I
have no outward decency nor decorum. You ought to know me before
judging me in this way. You would then be able to form an opinion
about my conduct. Grandmother is here, and, ill though she is, she
watches over me carefully and lovingly, and she would not fail to
correct me if she considered that I had the manners of a dragoon or of a
hussar."
She considered that she had no need of any one to guide or protect her,
and no need of leading-strings.
"I am seventeen," she says, "and I know my way about."
If this Monsieur de Grandsaigne had ventured to take any liberty with
her, she was old enough to take care of herself.
Her mother had blamed her for learning Latin and osteology. "Why
should a woman be ignorant?" she asks. "Can she not be well educated
without this spoiling her and without being pedantic? Supposing that I
should have sons in the future, and that I had profited sufficiently by
my studies to be able to teach them, would not a mother's lessons be as
good as a tutor's?"
She was already challenging public opinion, starting a campaign
against false prejudices, showing a tendency to generalize, and to make
the cause of one woman the cause of all women.
We must now bear in mind the various traits we have discovered, one
after another, in Aurore's character. We must remember to what
parentage she owed her intellectuality and her sentimentality. It will
then be more easy to understand the terms she uses when describing her
fascination for Rousseau's writings.

"The language of Jean-Jacques and the form of his deductions
impressed me as music might have done when heard in