me and amiable
son Maurice. Though fondly attached to her, he was yet to be the cause
of her heaviest sorrows, by his more than hazardous marriage, and by his
premature and tragical fate.

His strongest natural leanings seem to have been towards art in general,
music and the drama in particular, and of his facile, buoyant, artist
temperament there is ample evidence; but the political conditions of
France under the Directory in 1798 left him no choice but to enter the
army, where he served under Dupont, winning his commission on the field
of Marengo in 1800. It was during this Italian campaign that the young
officer met with the woman who, four years later, became his wife, and
the mother of his illustrious child.

Mademoiselle Sophie Victorie Delaborde, was, emphatically speaking, a
daughter of the people. Her father had been a poor bird-seller at Paris,
where she herself had worked as a milliner. Left unprotected at a very
early age, thoroughly uneducated and undisciplined, gifted with
considerable beauty, and thrown on the world at a time when the very
foundations of society seemed to be collapsing, she had been exposed to
extreme dangers, and without any of the ordinary safeguards against
them. That she proved herself not undeserving of the serious attachment
with which she inspired Maurice Dupin, her least favorable judges were
afterwards forced to admit; though, at the time this infatuation of the
lieutenant of six-and-twenty for one four years his senior, and of the
humblest extraction, and whose life hitherto had not been blameless, was
naturally regarded as utterly disastrous by his elders.

The devoted pair were married secretly at Paris in 1804; and on the 5th
of July in the same year--the last of the French Republic and the first
of the Empire--their daughter entered the world, receiving the name of
Amantine-Lucile-Aurore.

The discovery of the _mesalliance_ she had been dreading for some time,
and which her son had not dared to confess to her, was a heavy blow to
old Madame Dupin. However, she schooled herself to forgive what was
irrevocable, and to acknowledge this most unwelcome daughter-in-law, the
infant Aurore helping unconsciously to effect the reconciliation. But
for more than three years M. Dupin's mother and his wife scarcely ever
met. Madame Dupin _mere_ was living in a retired part of the country, in
the very centre of France, on the little property of Nohant, which she
had bought with what th