Without passion, then, or tender affection on either side, but with a tolerable harmony of views for the moment, and after long and causeless opposition on the part of Aurore’s mother, this marriage took place.  Aurore was but eighteen; her bridegroom was of suitable age.  With dreams of a peaceful family existence, and looking forward to maternity as the great joy and office of the coming years, she brought her husband to Nohant, whose inheritance had been settled by contract upon the children of this marriage.

But these dreams were not to be realized.  Aurore was not born to be the companion of a dull, narrow man, nor the Lady Bountiful of a little village in the heart of France.  Would she not have had it so?  She tells us that she would; and as honesty is one of her strong points, we may believe her.  She knew not the stormy ocean of life, nor the precious freight she carried, when she committed the vessel of her fortunes to so careless a hand as that of M. Dudevant.  She throws no special blame or odium upon him, nor does he probably deserve any.

The recital of the events spoken of above brings us well into the eighth volume of the “Histoire de ma Vie”; and as there are but ten in all, the treatment of the things that follow is pursued with much less detail, and with many a gap, which the malevolent among our author’s contemporaries would assure us that they know well how to fill up.  Between the extreme reserve of the last two volumes and the wild assertions of so many we would gladly keep the juste milieu, if we could; but we wish only truth, and it is not at the hands of the scandalmongers of any society—­is it?—­that we seek that commodity.  The decree of the court which at a later day gave her the guardianship of her children, and the friendship of many illustrious and of some irreproachable men, must be accepted in favor of her of whom we write,—­and the known fanaticism of slander, and the love of the marvellous, which craves, in stories of good or evil, such monstrous forms for its gratification, cause us, on the other side, to deduct a large average from the narrations current against her.  But we anticipate.

Aurore, at first, was neither happy nor unhappy in her marriage.  Her surroundings were friendly and pleasant, and the birth of a son, a third Maurice, soon brought to her experience the keenest joy of womanhood.  Before this child numbered two years, however, she began to feel a certain blank in her household existence, an emptiness, a discouragement as to all things, whose cause she could not understand.  In this ennui, she tells us, her husband sympathized, and by common consent they strove to remedy it by frequent changes of abode.  They visited Paris, Plessis, returned to Nohant, made a journey in the Pyrenees, a visit to Guillery, the chateau of Colonel Dudevant.  Still the dark guest pursued them.  Aurore does not pretend that there was any special cause for her suffering.  It was but the void which her passionate