It was on July 5, 1804, that Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, who under the name of George Sand became famous all the world over, saw for the first time the light of day.  The baby, which by a stratagem was placed in the arms of her grandmother, mollified the feelings of the old lady, whom the clandestine marriage had put in a great rage, so effectually that she forgave her son, received his wife, and tried to accommodate herself to the irremediable.  After the Spanish campaign, during which he acted as aide-de-camp to Murat, Maurice Dupin and his family came to Nohant, his mother’s chateau in Berry.  There little Aurora lost her father when she was only four years old.  Returning home one evening from La Chatre, a neighbouring town, he was thrown off his horse, and died almost instantly.

This was an event that seriously affected the future of the child, for only the deceased could keep in check the antagonism of two such dissimilar characters as those of Aurora’s mother and grandmother.  The mother was “dark-complexioned, pale, ardent, awkward and timid in fashionable society, but always ready to explode when the storm was growling too strongly within”; her temperament was that “of a Spaniard—­jealous, passionate, choleric, and weak, perverse and kindly at the same time.”  Abbe Beaumont (a natural son of Mdlle. de Verrieres and the Prince de Turenne, Duke de Bouillon, and consequently grand-uncle of Aurora) said of her that she had a bad head but a good heart.  She was quite uneducated, but had good natural parts, sang charmingly, and was clever with her hands.  The grandmother, on the other hand, was “light-complexioned, blonde, grave, calm, and dignified in her manners, a veritable Saxon of noble race, with an imposing demeanour full of ease and patronising goodness.”  She had been an assiduous student of the eighteenth century philosophers, and on the whole was a lady of considerable culture.  For about two years these two women managed to live together, not, however, without a feeling of discord which was not always successfully suppressed, and sometimes broke out into open dissension.  At last they came to an arrangement according to which the child was to be left in the keeping of the grandmother, who promised her daughter-in-law a yearly allowance which would enable her to take up her abode in Paris.  This arrangement had the advantage for the younger Madame Dupin that she could henceforth devote herself to the bringing-up of another daughter, born before her acquaintance with Aurora’s father.

From her mother Aurora received her first instruction in reading and writing.  The taste for literary composition seems to have been innate in her, for already at the age of five she wrote letters to her grandmother and half-brother (a natural son of her father’s).  When she was seven, Deschartres, her grandmother’s steward, who had been Maurice Dupin’s tutor, began to teach her French grammar and versification, Latin, arithmetic, botany, and