Aimee was an accomplished person of an exquisite distinction.  She loved everything that in any way is elegant and ornate in society:  names, manners, talents, titles.  Madcap as I assuredly was, I looked upon all this as vanity, and went in quest of intimacy and simplicity combined with poesy.  Thanks to God, I found them in Zoe, who was really a person of merit, and, moreover, a woman with a heart as eager for affection as my own.

M. and Madame Dudevant spent the greater part of autumn and the whole winter at Guillery, the chateau of Colonel Dudevant.  Had the latter not died at this time, he might perhaps have saved the young people from those troubles towards which they were drifting, at least so his daughter-in-law afterwards thought.  In the summer of 1826 the ill-matched couple returned to Nohant, where they continued to live, a few short absences excepted, till 1831.  Hitherto their mutual relation had left much to be desired, henceforth it became worse and worse every day.  It would, however, be a mistake to account for this state of matters solely by the dissimilarity of their temperaments—­the poetic tendency on the one side, the prosaic on the other—­for although it precluded an ideal matrimonial union, it by no means rendered an endurable and even pleasant companionship impossible.  The real cause of the gathering clouds and imminent storm is to be sought elsewhere.  Madame Dudevant was endowed with great vitality; she was, as it were, charged with an enormous amount of energy, which, unless it found an outlet, oppressed her and made her miserable.  Now, in her then position, all channels were closed up.  The management of household affairs, which, if her statement may be trusted, she neither considered beneath her dignity nor disliked, might have served as a, safety-valve; but her administration came to an untimely end.  When, after the first year of their married life, her husband examined the accounts, he discovered that she had spent 14,000 francs instead of 10,000, and found himself constrained to declare that their purse was too light for her liberality.  Not having anything else to do, and her uselessness vexing her, she took to doctoring the poor and concocting medicines.  Hers, however, was not the spirit that allows itself to be fettered by the triple vow of obedience, silence, and poverty.  No wonder, therefore, that her life, which she compared to that of a nun, was not to her taste.  She did not complain so much of her husband, who did not interfere with her reading and brewing of juleps, and was in no way a tyrant, as of being the slave of a given situation from which he could not set her free.  The total lack of ready money was felt by her to constitute in our altogether factitious society an intolerable situation, frightful misery or absolute powerlessness.  What she missed was some means of which she might dispose, without compunction and uncontrolled, for an artistic treat, a beautiful book, a week’s