aginable--namely, by her grandmother telling
her of the dissolute life which her mother had led before marrying her
father.

I owe my first socialistic and democratic instincts to the
singularity of my position, to my birth a cheval so to speak
on two classes--to my love for my mother thwarted and broken
by prejudices which made me suffer before I could comprehend
them. I owe them also to my education, which was by turns
philosophical and religious, and to all the contrasts which
my own life has presented to me from my earliest years.

At the age of thirteen Aurora was sent to the convent of English
Augustines in Paris, the only surviving one of the three or four
institutions of the kind that were founded during the time of Cromwell.
There she remained for the next three years. Her knowledge when she
entered this educational as well as religious establishment was not of
the sort that enables its possessor to pass examinations; consequently
she was placed in the lowest class, although in discussion she could
have held her own even against her teachers. Much learning could not be
acquired in the convent, but the intercourse with other children, many
of them belonging, like the nuns, to English-speaking nations, was not
without effect on the development of her character. There were three
classes of pupils, the diables, betes, and devotes (the devils,
blockheads, and devout). Aurora soon joined the first, and became one of
their ringleaders. But all of a sudden a change came over her. From one
extreme she fell into the other. From being the wildest of the wild she
became the most devout of the devout: "There was nothing strong in me
but passion, and when that of religion began to break out, it devoured
everything in my heart; and nothing in my brain opposed it." The
acuteness of this attack of religious mania gradually diminished; still
she harboured for some time the project of taking the veil, and perhaps
would have done so if she had been left to herself.

After her return-to Nohant her half-brother Hippolyte, who had recently
entered the army, gave her riding lessons, and already at the end of a
week she and her mare Colette might be seen leaping ditches and hedges,
crossing deep waters, and climbing steep inclines. "And I, the eau
dormante of the convent, had become rather more daring than a hussar and
more robust than a peasant." The languor which had weighed upon her
so long had all of once gi