Returning home one evening from La Chatre,
a neighbouring town, he was thrown off his horse, and died almost
instantly.

This was an event that seriously affected the future of the child,
for only the deceased could keep in check the antagonism of two such
dissimilar characters as those of Aurora's mother and grandmother.
The mother was "dark-complexioned, pale, ardent, awkward and timid in
fashionable society, but always ready to explode when the storm
was growling too strongly within"; her temperament was that "of a
Spaniard--jealous, passionate, choleric, and weak, perverse and kindly
at the same time." Abbe Beaumont (a natural son of Mdlle. de Verrieres
and the Prince de Turenne, Duke de Bouillon, and consequently
grand-uncle of Aurora) said of her that she had a bad head but a good
heart. She was quite uneducated, but had good natural parts, sang
charmingly, and was clever with her hands. The grandmother, on the other
hand, was "light-complexioned, blonde, grave, calm, and dignified in
her manners, a veritable Saxon of noble race, with an imposing demeanour
full of ease and patronising goodness." She had been an assiduous
student of the eighteenth century philosophers, and on the whole was
a lady of considerable culture. For about two years these two women
managed to live together, not, however, without a feeling of discord
which was not always successfully suppressed, and sometimes broke out
into open dissension. At last they came to an arrangement according to
which the child was to be left in the keeping of the grandmother, who
promised her daughter-in-law a yearly allowance which would enable her
to take up her abode in Paris. This arrangement had the advantage for
the younger Madame Dupin that she could henceforth devote herself to
the bringing-up of another daughter, born before her acquaintance with
Aurora's father.

From her mother Aurora received her first instruction in reading and
writing. The taste for literary composition seems to have been innate in
her, for already at the age of five she wrote letters to her grandmother
and half-brother (a natural son of her father's). When she was seven,
Deschartres, her grandmother's steward, who had been Maurice Dupin's
tutor, began to teach her French grammar and versification, Latin,
arithmetic, botany, and a little Greek. But she had no liking for any
of these studies. The dry classifications of plants and words were
distasteful to her; arithmetic she could n