As long as Maurice Dupin lived, Aurore was always with her parents in their little Parisian dwelling. Maurice Dupin was a brilliant officer, and very brave and jovial. In 1808, Aurore went to him in Madrid, where he was Murat's _aide-de-camp_. She lived in the palace of the Prince of Peace, that vast palace which Murat filled with the splendour of his costumes and the groans caused by his suffering.
Like Victor Hugo, who went to the same place at about the same time and under similar conditions, Aurore may have brought back with her _de ses courses lointaines__Comme un vaguefaisceau de lueurs incertaines._This does not seem probable, though. The return was painful, as they came back worried and ill, and were glad to take refuge at Nohant.
They were just beginning to organize their life when Maurice Dupin died suddenly, from an accident when riding, leaving his mother and his wife together.
From this time forth, Aurore was more often with her grandmother at Nohant than with her mother in Paris. Her grandmother undertook the care of her education. Her half-brother, Hippolyte Chatiron, and she received lessons from M. Deschartres, who had educated Maurice Dupin.
He was steward and tutor combined, a very authoritative man, arrogant and a great pedant. He was affectionate, though, and extremely devoted. He was both detestable and touching at the same time, and had a warm heart hidden under a rough exterior.
Nohant was in the heart of Berry, and this meant the country and Nature.
For Aurore Dupin Nature proved to be an incomparable educator.
There was only one marked trait in the child's character up to this date, and that was a great tendency to reverie. For long hours she would remain alone, motionless, gazing into space.
People were anxious about her when they saw her looking so _stupid_, but her mother invariably said: "Do not be alarmed. She is always ruminating about something." Country life, while providing her with fresh air and plenty of exercise, so that her health was magnificent, gave fresh food and another turn to her reveries. Ten years earlier Alphonse de Lamartine had been sent to the country at Milly, and allowed to frequent the little peasant children of the place.
Aurore Dupin's existence was now very much the same as that of Lamartine. Nohant is situated in the centre of the Black Valley.
The ground is dark and rich; there are narrow, shady paths.
It is not a hilly country, and there are wide, peaceful horizons.
At all hours of the day and at all seasons of the year, Aurore wandered along the Berry roads with her little playfellows, the farmers' children. There was Marie who tended the flock, Solange who collected leaves, and Liset and Plaisir who minded the pigs.
She always knew in what meadow or in what place she would find them.
She played with them amongst the hay, climbed the trees and dabbled in the water. She minded the flock with them, and in winter, when the herdsmen talked together, assembled round their fire, she listened to their wonderful stories. These credulous country children had "seen with their own eyes" Georgeon, the evil spirit of the Black Valley. They had also seen will-o'-the-wisps, ghosts, the "white greyhound" and the "Big Beast"! In the evenings, she sat up listening to the stories told by the hemp-weaver. Her fresh young soul was thus impregnated at an early age with the poetry of the country. And it was all the poetry of the country, that which comes from things, such as the freshness of the air and the perfume of the flowers, but also that which is to be found in the simplicity of sentiments and in that candour and surprise face to face with those sights of Nature which have remained the same and have been just as incomprehensible ever since the beginning of the world.
The antagonism of the two mothers increased, though. We will not go into detail with regard to the various episodes, but will only consider the consequences.
The first consequence was that the intelligence of the child became more keen through this duality. Placed as she was, in these two different worlds, between two persons with minds so unlike, and, obliged as she was to go from one to the other, she learnt to understand and appreciate them both, contrasts though they were.
She had soon reckoned each of them up, and she saw their weaknesses, their faults, their merits and their advantages.
A second consequence was to increase her sensitiveness. Each time that she left her mother, the separation was heartrending.
When she was absent from her, she suffered on account of this absence, and still more because she fancied that she would be forgotten.
She loved her mother, just as she was, and the idea that any one was hostile or despised her caused the child much silent suffering.
It was as though she had an ever-open wound.
Another consequence, and by no means the least important one, was to determine in a certain sense the immense power of sympathy within her.
For a long time she only felt a sort of awe, when with her reserved and ceremonious grandmother. She felt nearer to her mother, as there was no need to be on ceremony with her. She took a dislike to all those who represented authority, rules and the tyranny of custom.
She considered her mother and herself as oppressed individuals.
A love for the people sprang up in the heart of the daughter of Sophie-Victoire. She belonged to them through her mother, and she was drawn to them now through the humiliations she underwent.
In this little enemy of reverences and of society people, we see the dawn of that instinct which, later on, was to cause her to revolt openly. George Sand was quite right in saying, later on, that it was of no use seeking any intellectual reason as the explanation of her social preferences. Everything in her was due to sentiment.
Her socialism was entirely the outcome of her suffering and torments as a child.
Things had to come to a crisis, and the crisis was atrocious.
