Deschartres, the tutor of Maurice, and of Hippolyte, his illegitimate son, became also the instructor of the little Aurore.  With all her passion for out-door life, she felt always, she tells us, an invincible necessity of mental cultivation, and perpetually astonished those who had charge of her by her ardor alike in work and in play.  Her grandmother soon found that the child was never ill, so long as sufficient freedom of exercise was permitted; so she was soon allowed to run at will, dividing her time pretty equally between the study and the fields.  Thus she grew in mind and body from seven to twelve, promising to be tall and handsome, though not in after-years fulfilling this promise; for of her stature she tells us that it did not exceed that of her mother, whom she calls a petite femme,—­and of her appearance she simply says that in her youth “with eyes, hair, and a robust organization,” she was neither handsome nor ugly.  At the age of twelve, a social necessity compelled her to go through the form of confession and the first communion.  Her grandmother was divided between the convictions of her own liberalism, and the desire not to place her cherished charge in direct opposition to the imperious demands of a Catholic community.  The laxity of the period allowed the compromise to be managed in a merely formal and superficial manner.  The grandmother tried to give the rite a certain significance, at the same time imploring the child “not to suppose that she was about to eat her Creator.”  The confessor asked none of those questions which our author simply qualifies as infamous, and, with a very mild course of catechism and slight dose of devotion, that Rubicon of maturity was passed.  Not far beyond it waited a terrible trial, perhaps as great a sorrow as the whole life was to bring.  Aurore’s diligence in her studies was marred by the secret intention, long cherished, of escaping to her mother, and adopting with her her former profession of dress-maker.  Having one day answered reproof with a petulant assertion of her desire to rejoin her mother at all hazards, the grandmother determined to put an end to such projects by a severe measure.  Aurore was banished from her presence during a certain number of days.  Neither friend nor servant spoke to her.  She describes naturally enough this lonely, uncomforted condition, in which, more than ever, she meditated upon the wished-for return to her mother, and the beginning with her of a new life of industry and privation.  Summoned at last to her grandmother’s bedside, and kneeling to ask for reconciliation, she is forced to stay there, and to listen to the most cruel and literal account of her mother’s life, its early errors, and their inevitable consequences.