wanderings in the country was not lacking in her convent home.  The pupils had divided themselves into three categories:  the diables, the good girls, who were the specially pious ones, and the silly ones.  Aurore took her place at once among the diables.  The great exploit of these convent girls consisted in descending into the cellars, during recreation, and in sounding the walls, in order to “deliver the victim.”  There was supposed to be an unfortunate victim imprisoned and tortured by the good, kindhearted Sisters.  Alas! all the diables sworn to the task in the Couvent des Anglaises never succeeded in finding the victim, so that she must be there still.

Very soon, though, a sudden change-took place in Aurore’s soul.  It would have been strange had it been otherwise.  With so extraordinarily sensitive an organization, the new and totally different surroundings could not fail to make an impression.  The cloister, the cemetery, the long services, the words of the ritual, murmured in the dimly-lighted chapel, and the piety that seems to hover in the air in houses where many prayers have been offered up—­all this acted on the young girl.  One evening in August, she had gone into the church, which was dimly lighted by the sanctuary lamp.  Through the open window came the perfume of honeysuckle and the songs of the birds.  There was a charm, a mystery and a solemn calm about everything, such as she had never before experienced.  “I do not know what was taking place within me,” she said, when describing this, later on, “but I breathed an atmosphere that was indescribably delicious, and I seemed to be breathing it in my very soul.  Suddenly, I felt a shock through all my being, a dizziness came over me, and I seemed to be enveloped in a white light.  I thought I heard a voice murmuring in my ear:  ’Tolle Lege.’ I turned round, and saw that I was quite alone. . . .”

Our modern psychiatres would say that she had had an hallucination of hearing, together with olfactory trouble.  I prefer saying that she had received the visit of grace.  Tears of joy bathed her face and she remained there, sobbing for a long time.

The convent had therefore opened to Aurore another world of sentiment, that of Christian emotion.  Her soul was naturally religious, and the dryness of a philosophical education had not been sufficient for it.  The convent had now brought her the aliment for which she had instinctively longed.  Later on, when her faith, which had never been very enlightened, left her, the sentiment remained.  This religiosity, of Christian form, was essential to George Sand.