“Had my destiny caused me to pass immediately from my grandmother’s control to that of a husband, or of a convent, it is possible that, subjected always to influences already accepted, I should never have been myself.  But it was decided by Fate that at the age of seventeen years I should experience a suspension of external authority, and that I should belong wholly to myself for nearly a year, to become, for good or evil, what I was to be for nearly all the rest of my life.”

Passing much of her time at the bedside of the invalid, now incapable of giving any further direction to the young life so dear to her, Aurore plunged into many studies which opened to her new worlds of thought and observation.  She read Chateaubriand with delight.  The “Genie du Christianisme” proved to her rather an intellectual than a religious stimulant, and under its impulse she proceeded, as she says, to encounter without ceremony the French and other authors most quoted at that time, to wit:  Locke, Bacon, Montesquieu, Leibnitz, Pascal, La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante, and others not below these in difficulty.  She studied them in a crude and hurried manner; but that wonderful alembic of youth, with its fiery heat of ardor, enabled her to compose these far and hastily gathered ingredients into a certain homogeneity of knowledge.  “The brain was young,” she says, “the memory always fugitive; but the sentiment was quick, and the will ever tense.”  From these pursuits, interrupted by the cares of nursing, she broke loose only to mount her favorite Colette, and accompany Deschartres in his hunting expeditions.  She attempted also to acquire some knowledge of Natural History, Mineralogy, and so on; but science was always less congenial to her than literature, and of Leibnitz, the “Theodicee” is the only work of which she speaks with any familiarity.  For convenience in riding and hunting, she adopted, on occasion, the dress of a boy, a blouse, cap, and trousers, to the great scandal of the neighborhood, already indisposed towards her by reason of her eccentric reputation; since, as one can imagine, a small French province is the last place in the world where a young girl can display the lone-star banner of individuality with impunity.

Aurore had promised her aged relative that she would not read Voltaire before the age of thirty; but her literary wanderings soon brought her across the path of Rousseau.

The French make the reading of the “Nouvelle Heloise” one of the epochs in the life of woman.  According to its motto, “The mother will not allow the daughter to read it,” this critical act is by common consent adjourned till after marriage, when, we suppose, it appears something in the light of a Bill of Rights, a coming to the knowledge of what women can do, if they will.  But as all Julie’s divagations occur before marriage, and as her subsequent life becomes a model of Puritanic duty and piety, one does not understand the applicability