She had already commenced, then, at the age of three, and these early stories are the precursors of the novels of her maturity.  They are optimistic, drawn out, and with long digressions.  Something similar is told about Walter Scott.  There is evidently a primordial instinct in those who are born story-tellers, and this urges them on to invent fine stories for amusing themselves.

A little later on we have another phenomenon, almost as curious, with regard to Aurore.  We are apt to wonder how certain descriptive writers proceed in order to give us pictures, the various features of which stand out in such intense relief that they appear absolutely real to us.  George Sand tells us that when Berquin’s stories were being read to her at Nohant, she used to sit in front of the fire, from which she was protected by an old green silk screen.  She used gradually to lose the sense of the phrases, but pictures began to form themselves in front of her on the green screen.

“I saw woods, meadows, rivers, towns of strange and gigantic architecture. . . .  One day these apparitions were so real that I was startled by them, and I asked my mother whether she could see them.”

With hallucinations like these a writer can be picturesque.  He has in front of him, although it may be between four walls, a complete landscape.  He has only to follow the lines of it and to reproduce the colours, so that in painting imaginary landscapes he can paint them from nature, from this model that appears to him, as though by enchantment.  He can, if he likes, count the leaves of the trees and listen to the sound of the growing grass.

Still later on, vague religious or philosophical conceptions began to mingle with the fiction that Aurore always had in her mind.  To her poetical life, was added a moral life.  She always had a romance going on, to which she was constantly adding another chapter, like so many links in a never-ending chain.  She now gave a hero to her romance, a hero whose name was Corambe.  He was her ideal, a man whom she had made her god.  Whilst blood was flowing freely on the altars of barbarous gods, on Corambe’s altar life and liberty were given to a whole crowd of captive creatures, to a swallow, to a robin-redbreast, and even to a sparrow.  We see already in all this her tendency to put moral intentions into her romantic stories, to arrange her adventures in such a way that they should serve as examples for making mankind better.  These were the novels, with a purpose, of her twelfth year.

Let us now study a striking contrast, by way of observing the first signs of vocation in two totally different novelists.  In the beginning of Facino Cane, Balzac tells us an incident of the time when, as an aspiring writer, he lived in his attic in the Rue Lesdiguieres.  One evening, on coming out of the theatre, he amused himself with following a working-man and his wife from the Boulevard du Pontaux-Choux to the Boulevard Beaumarchais.  He listened to them as they talked of the piece they had just seen.  They then discussed their business matters, and afterwards house and family affairs.  “While listening to this couple,” says Balzac, “I entered into their life.  I could feel their clothes on my back and, I was walking in their shabby boots.”