ven way to boisterous activity. When she was
seventeen she also began seriously to think of self-improvement; and as
her grandmother was now paralytic and mentally much weakened, Aurora
had almost no other guidance than that of chance and her own instinct.
Thomas a Kempis' "Imitation of Christ," which had been her guide since
her religious awakening, was now superseded, not, however, without some
struggles, by Chateaubriand's "Le Genie du Christianisme." The book was
lent her by her confessor with a view to the strengthening of her faith,
but it produced quite the reverse effect, detaching her from it for
ever. After reading and enjoying Chateaubriand's book she set to work
on the philosophers and essayists Mably, Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu,
Bacon, Bossuet, Aristotle, Leibnitz, Pascal, Montaigne, and then turned
to the poets and moralists La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil,
Shakespeare, &c. But she was not a metaphysician; the tendencies of her
mind did not impel her to seek for scientific solutions of the great
mysteries. "J'etais," she says, "un etre de sentiment, et le sentiment
seul tranchait pour moi les questions a man usage, qui toute experience
faite, devinrent bientot les seules questions a ma, portee." This
"le sentiment seul tranchait pour moi les questions" is another
self-revelation, or instance of self-knowledge, which it will be useful
to remember. What more natural than that this "being of sentiment"
should prefer the poets to the philosophers, and be attracted, not by
the cold reasoners, but by Rousseau, "the man of passion and sentiment."
It is impossible to describe here the various experiences and doings of
Aurora. Without enlarging on the effects produced upon her by Byron's
poetry, Shakespeare's "Hamlet," and Chateaubriand's "Rene"; on her
suicidal mania; on the long rides which, clad in male attire, she took
with Deschartres; on the death of her grandmother, whose fortune she
inherited; on her life in Paris with her extravagantly-capricious
mother; on her rupture with her father's family, her aristocratic
relations, because she would not give up her mother--I say, without
enlarging on all this we will at once pass on to her marriage, about
which there has been so much fabling.

Aurore Dupin married Casimir Dudevant in September, 1822, and did so
of her own free will. Nor was her husband, as the story went, a
bald-headed, grey-moustached old colonel, with a look that made all his
dependents