“My mother was not one of those bold intrigantes whose secret passion is to struggle against the prejudices of their time, and who think to make themselves greater by clinging, at the risk of a thousand affronts, to the false greatness of the world.  She was far too proud to expose herself even to coldness.  Her attitude was so reserved that she passed for a timid person; but if one attempted to encourage her by airs of protection, she became more than reserved, she showed herself cold and taciturn.  With people who inspired her with respect, she was amiable and charming; but her real disposition was gay, petulant, active, and, above all, opposed to constraint.  Great dinners, long soirees, commonplace visits, balls themselves, were odious to her.  She was the woman of the fireside or of the rapid and frolicking walk; but in her interior, as in her goings abroad, intimacy, confidence, relations of entire sincerity, absolute freedom in her habits and the employment of her time, were indispensable to her.  She, therefore, always lived in a retired manner, more anxious to avoid unpleasant acquaintances than eager to make advantageous ones.  Such, too, was the foundation of my father’s character, and in this respect never was couple better assorted.  They were never happy out of their little household.  And they have bequeathed me this secret sauvagerie, which has always rendered the [fashionable] world insupportable to me, and home indispensable.”

In referring back to these volumes, we are led into continual loiterings by the way.  The style of our heroine is so magical, that we are constantly tempted to let her tell her own story, and to give to the gems of hers which we insert in these pages the slightest possible setting of our own.  But it is not our business to anticipate for any one a reading from which no student of modern literature, or, indeed, of modern mind, will excuse himself.  We must give only so much as shall make it sure that others will seek more at the fountain-head; but for this purpose we must turn less to the book, and trust for our narration to a sufficiently recent perusal still vividly remembered.

Aurore could scarcely have passed out of her third year when she accompanied her mother to Madrid, where her father was already in attendance upon Murat.  She remembers their quarters in the palace, magnificently furnished, and the half-broken toys of the royal children, whose destruction she was allowed to complete.  To please his commander-in-chief, her father caused her to assume a miniature uniform, like those of the Prince’s aide-de-camps, whose splendid discomfort she still recalls.  This would seem a sort of prophecy of that assuming of male attire in later years which was to constitute a capital circumstance in her life.  The return from the Peninsula was weary and painful to the mother and child, and made more so by the disgust with which the Spanish roadside bill-of-fare inspired the more civilized French stomach.