Things had to come to a crisis, and the crisis was atrocious.  George Sand gives an account of the tragic scene in her Histoire de ma vie.  Her grandmother had already had one attack of paralysis.  She was anxious about Aurore’s future, and wished to keep her from the influence of her mother.  She therefore decided to employ violent means to this end.  She sent for the child to her bedside, and, almost beside herself, in a choking voice, she revealed to her all that she ought to have concealed.  She told her of Sophie-Victoire’s past, she uttered the fatal word and spoke of the child’s mother as a lost woman.  With Aurore’s extreme sensitiveness, it was horrible to receive such confidences at the age of thirteen.  Thirty years later, George Sand describes the anguish of the terrible minute.  “It was a nightmare,” she says.  “I felt choked, and it was as though every word would kill me.  The perspiration came out on my face.  I wanted to interrupt her, to get up and rush away.  I did not want to hear the frightful accusation.  I could not move, though; I seemed to be nailed on my knees, and my head seemed to be bowed down by that voice that I heard above me, a voice which seemed to wither me like a storm wind.”

It seems extraordinary that a woman, who was in reality so kind-hearted and so wise, should have allowed herself to be carried away like this.  Passion has these sudden and unexpected outbursts, and we see here a most significant proof of the atmosphere of passion in which the child had lived, and which gradually insinuated itself within her.

Under these circumstances, Aurore’s departure for the convent was a deliverance.  Until just recently, there has always been a convent in vogue in France in which it has been considered necessary for girls in good society to be educated.  In 1817, the Couvent des Anglaises was in vogue, the very convent which had served as a prison for the mother and grandmother of Aurore.  The three years she spent there in that “big feminine family, where every one was as kind as God,” she considered the most peaceful and happy time of her life.  The pages she devotes to them in her Histoire de ma vie have all the freshness of an oasis.  She describes most lovingly this little world, apart, exclusive and self-sufficing, in which life was so intense.

The house consisted of a number of constructions, and was situated in the neighbourhood given up to convents.  There were courtyards and gardens enough to make it seem like a small village.  There was also a labyrinth of passages above and underground, just as in one of Anne Radcliffe’s novels.  There were old walls overgrown with vine and jasmine.  The cock could be heard at midnight, just as in the heart of the country, and there was a bell with a silvery tone like a woman’s voice.  From her little cell, Aurore looked over the tops of the great chestnut trees on to Paris, so that the air so necessary for the lungs of a child accustomed to