formed what she called a platonic friendship--and it
was really so--with a certain M. de Seze, who was advocate-general at
Bordeaux. With him this clever woman could talk without being called
silly, and he took sincere pleasure in her company. He might, in fact,
have gone much further, had not both of them been in an impossible
situation.

Aurore Dudevant really believed that she was swayed by a pure and
mystic passion. De Seze, on the other hand, believed this mystic
passion to be genuine love. Coming to visit her at Nohant, he was
revolted by the clownish husband with whom she lived. It gave him an
esthetic shock to see that she had borne children to this boor.
Therefore he shrank back from her, and in time their relation faded
into nothingness.

It happened, soon after, that she found a packet in her husband's desk,
marked "Not to be opened until after my death." She wrote of this in
her correspondence:

I had not the patience to wait till widowhood. No one can be sure of
surviving anybody. I assumed that my husband had died, and I was very
glad to learn what he thought of me while he was alive. Since the
package was addressed to me, it was not dishonorable for me to open it.

And so she opened it. It proved to be his will, but containing, as a
preamble, his curses on her, expressions of contempt, and all the
vulgar outpouring of an evil temper and angry passion. She went to her
husband as he was opening a bottle, and flung the document upon the
table. He cowered at her glance, at her firmness, and at her cold
hatred. He grumbled and argued and entreated; but all that his wife
would say in answer was:

"I must have an allowance. I am going to Paris, and my children are to
remain here."

At last he yielded, and she went at once to Paris, taking her daughter
with her, and having the promise of fifteen hundred francs a year out
of the half-million that was hers by right.

In Paris she developed into a thorough-paced Bohemian. She tried to
make a living in sundry hopeless ways, and at last she took to
literature. She was living in a garret, with little to eat, and
sometimes without a fire in winter. She had some friends who helped her
as well as they could, but though she was attached to the Figaro, her
earnings for the first month amounted to only fifteen francs.

Nevertheless, she would not despair. The editors and publishers might
turn the cold shoulder to her, but she would not give up her ambitions.
She