fragmentary studies
of science and philosophy, his glowing, broad, synthetic statement was
indeed a revelation. It made an epoch in her life. She compared him to
Mozart. "In politics," she says, "I became the ardent disciple of this
master, and I followed him long without restriction. As to religion,
he seemed to me the most Christian of all the writers of his time. I
pardoned his abjuration of Catholicism the more easily because its
sacraments and title had been given to him in an irreligious manner,
well calculated to disgust him with them." But with Aurore, too, the day
of Catholicism was over,--its rites were become "heavy and unhealthy" to
her. Her faith in things divine was unshaken; but the confessional was
empty, the mass dull, the ceremonial ridiculous to her. She was glad to
pray alone, and in her own words. Hers was a nature beyond forms. By
a rapid intuition, she saw and appropriated what is intrinsic in all
religions,--faith in God and love to man. However wild and volcanic may
have been her creed in other matters, she has never lost sight of these
two cardinal points, which have been the consolation of her life and its
redemption. The year comprising these studies and this new freedom ended
sadly with the death of her grandmother.

And now, her real protectress being removed, the discords of life broke
in upon her, and asserted themselves. Scarcely was the beloved form
cold, when Aurore's mother arrived, to wake the echoes of the chateau
with wild abuse of its late mistress. By testamentary disposition,
Madame Dupin had made Aurore her heir, and had named two of her own
relatives as guardians; but the mother now insisted on her own rights,
and, after much acrimonious dispute and comment, carried Aurore from her
beloved solitudes to her own quarters in Paris,--a journey of sorrow,
and the beginning of sorrows. In her childhood Aurore had often longed
for this mother's breast as her natural refuge, and the true home of her
childish affections. But it "was one of those characters of self-will
and passion which deteriorate in later life, and in which no new moral
beauties spring up to replace the impulsive graces of youth. Regarding
Aurore now as the work of another's hands, she made her the victim of
ceaseless and causeless petulance. Her gross abuse of her mother-in-law
gave Aurore many tears to shed in private, while her persecution of poor
Deschartres drove her daughter to the expedient of shielding him--wi