Added to all this, her reading at this epoch was without any order or method.  She read everything voraciously, mixing all the philosophers up together.  She read Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bossuet, Pascal, Montaigne, but she kept Rousseau apart from the others.  She devoured the books of the moralists and poets, La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare.  All this reading was too much for her and excited her brain.  She had reserved Chateaubriand’s Rene, and, on reading that, she was overcome by the sadness which emanates from these distressing pages.  She was disgusted with life, and attempted to commit suicide.  She tried to drown herself, and only owed her life to the healthy-mindedness of the good mare Colette, as the horse evidently had not the same reasons as its young mistress for wishing to put an end to its days.

All this time Aurore was entirely free to please herself.  Deschartres, who had always treated her as a boy, encouraged her independence.  It was at his instigation that she dressed in masculine attire to go out shooting.  People began to talk about her “eccentricities” at Landerneau, and the gossip continued as far as La Chatre.  Added to this, Aurore began to study osteology with a young man who lived in the neighbourhood, and it was said that this young man, Stephane Ajasson de Grandsaigne, gave her lessons in her own room.  This was the climax.

We have a curious testimony as regards the state of the young girl’s mind at this epoch.  A review, entitled Le Voile de pourpre, published recently, in its first number, a letter from Aurore to her mother, dated November 18, 1821.  Her mother had evidently written to her on hearing the gossip about her, and had probably enlarged upon it.

“You reproach me, mother, with neither having timidity, modesty, nor charm,” she writes, “or at least you suppose that I have these qualities, but that I refrain from showing them, and you are quite certain that I have no outward decency nor decorum.  You ought to know me before judging me in this way.  You would then be able to form an opinion about my conduct.  Grandmother is here, and, ill though she is, she watches over me carefully and lovingly, and she would not fail to correct me if she considered that I had the manners of a dragoon or of a hussar.”

She considered that she had no need of any one to guide or protect her, and no need of leading-strings.

“I am seventeen,” she says, “and I know my way about.”

If this Monsieur de Grandsaigne had ventured to take any liberty with her, she was old enough to take care of herself.

Her mother had blamed her for learning Latin and osteology.  “Why should a woman be ignorant?” she asks.  “Can she not be well educated without this spoiling her and without being pedantic?  Supposing that I should have sons in the future, and that I had profited sufficiently by my studies to be able to teach them, would not a mother’s lessons be as good as a tutor’s?”