They were forced to make a part of the journey in wagons with the common soldiery and camp-retainers, and Aurore in this manner took the itch, to her mother’s great mortification.  Arrived at Nohant, however, the care of Deschartres, joined to a self-imposed regime of green lemons, which the little girl devoured, skins, seeds, and all, soon healed the ignominious eruption.  Here the whole family passed some months of happy repose, too soon interrupted by the tragical death of Maurice.  He had brought back from Spain a formidable horse, which he had christened the terrible Leopardo, and which, brave cavalier as he was, he never mounted without a certain indefinable misgiving.  He often said, “I ride him badly, because I am afraid of him, and he knows it.”  Dining with some friends in the neighborhood, one day, he was late in returning.  His wife and mother passed the evening together, the first jealous and displeased at his protracted absence, the second occupied in calming the irritation and rebuking the suspicions of her companion.  The wife at last yielded, and retired to rest.  But the mother’s heart, more anxious, watched and watched.  Towards midnight, a slight confusion in the house augmented her alarm.  She started at once, alone and thinly dressed, to go and meet her son.  The night was dark and rainy; the terrible Leopardo had fulfilled the prophetic forebodings of his rider.  The poor lady, brought up in habits of extreme inactivity, had taken but two walks in all her life.  The first had been to surprise her son at Passy, when released from the Revolutionary prison.  The second was to meet and escort back his lifeless body, found senseless by the roadside.

We have done now with Aurore’s ancestry, and must occupy our remaining pages with accounts of herself.  Much time is given by her to the record of her early childhood, and the explanation of its various phases.  She loves children; it is perhaps for this reason that she dwells longest on this period of her life, describing its minutest incidents with all the poetry that is in her.  One would think that her childhood seemed to her that actual flower of her life which it is to few in their own consciousness.  Despite the loss of her father, and the vexed relations between her mother and grandmother which followed his death, her infancy was joyous and companionable, passed mostly with the country surroundings and out-door influences which act so magically on the young.  It soon became evident that she was to be confided chiefly to her grandmother’s care; and this, which was at first a fear, soon came to be a sorrow.  Still her mother was often with her, and her time was divided between the plays of her village-friends and the dreams of romantic incident which early formed the main feature of her inner life.  Already at a very early age her mother used to say to those who laughed at the little romancer,—­“Let her alone; it is only when she is making her novels between four