a little Greek.  But she had no liking for any of these studies.  The dry classifications of plants and words were distasteful to her; arithmetic she could not get into her head; and poetry was not her language.  History, on the other hand, was a source of great enjoyment to her; but she read it like a romance, and did not trouble herself about dates and other unpleasant details.  She was also fond of music; at least she was so as long as her grandmother taught her, for the mechanical drilling she got from the organist of La Chatre turned her fondness into indifference.  That subject of education, however, which is generally regarded as the foundation of all education—­I mean religion—­was never even mentioned to her.  The Holy Scriptures were, indeed, given into the child’s hands, but she was left to believe or reject whatever she liked.  Her grandmother, who was a deist, hated not only the pious, but piety itself, and, above all, Roman Catholicism.  Christ was in her opinion an estimable man, the gospel an excellent philosophy, but she regretted that truth was enveloped in ridiculous fables.  The little of religion which the girl imbibed she owed to her mother, by whose side she was made to kneel and say her prayers.  “My mother,” writes George Sand in her “Histoire de ma Vie,” from which these details are taken, “carried poetry into her religious feeling, and I stood in need of poetry.”  Aurora’s craving for religion and poetry was not to remain unallayed.  One night there appeared to her in a dream a phantom, Corambe by name.  The dream-created being took hold of her waking imagination, and became the divinity of her religion and the title and central figure of her childish, unwritten romance.  Corambe, who was of no sex, or rather of either sex just as occasion might require—­for it underwent numberless metamorphoses—­had “all the attributes of physical and moral beauty, the gift of eloquence, and the all-powerful charm of the arts, especially the magic of musical improvisation,” being in fact an abstract of all the sacred and secular histories with which she had got acquainted.

The jarrings between her mother and grandmother continued; for of course their intercourse did not entirely cease.  The former visited her relations at Nohant, and the latter and her grandchildren occasionally passed some weeks in Paris.  Aurora, who loved both, her mother even passionately, was much harassed by their jealousy, which vented itself in complaints, taunts, and reproaches.  Once she determined to go to Paris and live with her mother, and was only deterred from doing so by the most cruel means imaginable—­namely, by her grandmother telling her of the dissolute life which her mother had led before marrying her father.