eems to have entered into this plan only
for the moment; it soon escaped her remembrance altogether, and the
little girl waited and waited to be sent for, till finally the whole
vision faded into a dream.

Deschartres, the tutor of Maurice, and of Hippolyte, his illegitimate
son, became also the instructor of the little Aurore. With all her
passion for out-door life, she felt always, she tells us, an invincible
necessity of mental cultivation, and perpetually astonished those
who had charge of her by her ardor alike in work and in play. Her
grandmother soon found that the child was never ill, so long as
sufficient freedom of exercise was permitted; so she was soon allowed to
run at will, dividing her time pretty equally between the study and the
fields. Thus she grew in mind and body from seven to twelve, promising
to be tall and handsome, though not in after-years fulfilling this
promise; for of her stature she tells us that it did not exceed that of
her mother, whom she calls a _petite femme_,--and of her appearance
she simply says that in her youth "with eyes, hair, and a robust
organization," she was neither handsome nor ugly. At the age of twelve,
a social necessity compelled her to go through the form of confession
and the first communion. Her grandmother was divided between the
convictions of her own liberalism, and the desire not to place her
cherished charge in direct opposition to the imperious demands of a
Catholic community. The laxity of the period allowed the compromise to
be managed in a merely formal and superficial manner. The grandmother
tried to give the rite a certain significance, at the same time
imploring the child "not to suppose that she was about to _eat her
Creator_." The confessor asked none of those questions which our author
simply qualifies as infamous, and, with a very mild course of catechism
and slight dose of devotion, that Rubicon of maturity was passed. Not
far beyond it waited a terrible trial, perhaps as great a sorrow as the
whole life was to bring. Aurore's diligence in her studies was marred
by the secret intention, long cherished, of escaping to her mother, and
adopting with her her former profession of dress-maker. Having one day
answered reproof with a petulant assertion of her desire to rejoin her
mother at all hazards, the grandmother determined to put an end to such
projects by a severe measure. Aurore was banished from her presence
during a certain number of days. Neither