The young girl well understood that this was really the parting of the ways.  If she turned toward her uncle, she would be forever classed among the aristocracy.  If she chose her mother, who, though married, was essentially a grisette, then she must live with grisettes, and find her friends among the friends who visited her mother.  She could not belong to both worlds.  She must decide once for all whether she would be a woman of rank or a woman entirely separated from the circle that had been her father’s.

One must respect the girl for making the choice she did.  Understanding the situation absolutely, she chose her mother; and perhaps one would not have had her do otherwise.  Yet in the long run it was bound to be a mistake.  Aurore was clever, refined, well read, and had had the training of a fashionable convent school.  The mother was ignorant and coarse, as was inevitable, with one who before her marriage had been half shop-girl and half courtesan.  The two could not live long together, and hence it was not unnatural that Aurore Dupin should marry, to enter upon a new career.

Her fortune was a fairly large one for the times, and yet not large enough to attract men who were quite her equals.  Presently, however, it brought to her a sort of country squire, named Casimir Dudevant.  He was the illegitimate son of the Baron Dudevant.  He had been in the army, and had studied law; but he possessed no intellectual tastes.  He was outwardly eligible; but he was of a coarse type—­a man who, with passing years, would be likely to take to drink and vicious amusements, and in serious life cared only for his cattle, his horses, and his hunting.  He had, however, a sort of jollity about him which appealed to this girl of eighteen; and so a marriage was arranged.  Aurore Dupin became his wife in 1822, and he secured the control of her fortune.

The first few years after her marriage were not unhappy.  She had a son, Maurice Dudevant, and a daughter, Solange, and she loved them both.  But it was impossible that she should continue vegetating mentally upon a farm with a husband who was a fool, a drunkard, and a miser.  He deteriorated; his wife grew more and more clever.  Dudevant resented this.  It made him uncomfortable.  Other persons spoke of her talk as brilliant.  He bluntly told her that it was silly, and that she must stop it.  When she did not stop it, he boxed her ears.  This caused a breach between the pair which was never healed.  Dudevant drank more and more heavily, and jeered at his wife because she was “always looking for noon at fourteen o’clock.”  He had always flirted with the country girls; but now he openly consorted with his wife’s chambermaid.

Mme. Dudevant, on her side, would have nothing more to do with this rustic rake.  She formed what she called a platonic friendship—­and it was really so—­with a certain M. de Seze, who was advocate-general at Bordeaux.  With him this clever woman could talk without being called silly, and he took sincere pleasure in her company.  He might, in fact, have gone much further, had not both of them been in an impossible situation.