I owe my first socialistic and democratic instincts to the singularity of my position, to my birth a cheval so to speak on two classes—­to my love for my mother thwarted and broken by prejudices which made me suffer before I could comprehend them.  I owe them also to my education, which was by turns philosophical and religious, and to all the contrasts which my own life has presented to me from my earliest years.

At the age of thirteen Aurora was sent to the convent of English Augustines in Paris, the only surviving one of the three or four institutions of the kind that were founded during the time of Cromwell.  There she remained for the next three years.  Her knowledge when she entered this educational as well as religious establishment was not of the sort that enables its possessor to pass examinations; consequently she was placed in the lowest class, although in discussion she could have held her own even against her teachers.  Much learning could not be acquired in the convent, but the intercourse with other children, many of them belonging, like the nuns, to English-speaking nations, was not without effect on the development of her character.  There were three classes of pupils, the diables, betes, and devotes (the devils, blockheads, and devout).  Aurora soon joined the first, and became one of their ringleaders.  But all of a sudden a change came over her.  From one extreme she fell into the other.  From being the wildest of the wild she became the most devout of the devout:  “There was nothing strong in me but passion, and when that of religion began to break out, it devoured everything in my heart; and nothing in my brain opposed it.”  The acuteness of this attack of religious mania gradually diminished; still she harboured for some time the project of taking the veil, and perhaps would have done so if she had been left to herself.

After her return-to Nohant her half-brother Hippolyte, who had recently entered the army, gave her riding lessons, and already at the end of a week she and her mare Colette might be seen leaping ditches and hedges, crossing deep waters, and climbing steep inclines.  “And I, the eau dormante of the convent, had become rather more daring than a hussar and more robust than a peasant.”  The languor which had weighed upon her so long had all of once given way to boisterous activity.  When she was seventeen she also began seriously to think of self-improvement; and as her grandmother was now paralytic and mentally much weakened, Aurora had almost no other guidance than that of chance and her own instinct.  Thomas a Kempis’ “Imitation of Christ,” which had been her guide since her religious awakening, was now superseded, not, however, without some struggles, by Chateaubriand’s “Le Genie du Christianisme.”  The book was lent her by her confessor with a view to the strengthening of her faith, but it produced quite the reverse effect, detaching her from it for ever.  After reading and enjoying Chateaubriand’s