“We were eating ices at Tortoni’s, after the theatre, when my mother Angele [her new friend] said to her husband,—­’See, there is Casimir.’

“A slender young man, rather elegant, with a gay aspect and military bearing, came to shake hands with them.  He seated himself by Madame Angele, and asked her in a low voice who I was.

“‘It is my daughter,’ she replied.

“‘Then,’ whispered he, ’she is my wife.  You know that you have promised me the hand of your eldest daughter.  I thought it would have been Wilfrid; but as this one seems of an age more suitable to mine, I accept her, if you will give her to me.’

“Madame Angele laughed at this, but the pleasantry proved a prediction.”

Aurore had given her new protectors the titles of Mother Angele and Father James, and they in turn called her their daughter.  The period of her residence with them at Plessis appears in her souvenirs as an ideal interval of happiness and repose, a renewal of the freedom and insousiance of childhood, with the added knowledge of their value, a suspension of the terrible demands and interests of life.  Would that this ideal period could be prolonged for women!—­but the exigencies of the race, or perhaps the fears of society, do not permit it.  The two-faced spectre of marriage awaits her, for good or ill.  The aphelion of a woman’s liberty is soon reached, the dark organic forces bind her to tread the narrow orbit of her sex, and if, at the farthest bound of her individual progress, the attraction could fail, and let her slip from the eternal circle, chaos would be the result.

Uninvited, therefore, but unrepulsed, Hymen approached our heroine in the form of Casimir Dudevant, the illegitimate, but acknowledged son and heir of Colonel Dudevant, an officer of good standing and reasonable fortune.  The only feeling he seems to have inspired in the bosom of his future wife was one of mild good-will.  His only recommendation was a decent degree of suitableness in outward circumstances.  For the true wants of her nature he had neither fitness nor sympathy; but she did not know herself then,—­she was not yet George Sand.  From the stand-point of her later development, her marriage would seem to us a low one; but we must remember that she started only from the plane, and not the highest plane, of French society, in which a marriage of some sort is the first necessity of a woman’s life, and not the crowning point of her experience.  To compensate the rigor of such a requisition, a French marriage, though civilly indissoluble, has yet a hundred modifications which remove it far from the Puritan ideal which we of the Protestant faith cherish.  Hence the French novel, whose strained sentiment and deeply logical immorality have wakened strange echoes among us of the stricter rule and graver usage.