book she set to work on the philosophers and essayists Mably, Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bacon, Bossuet, Aristotle, Leibnitz, Pascal, Montaigne, and then turned to the poets and moralists La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare, &c.  But she was not a metaphysician; the tendencies of her mind did not impel her to seek for scientific solutions of the great mysteries.  “J’etais,” she says, “un etre de sentiment, et le sentiment seul tranchait pour moi les questions a man usage, qui toute experience faite, devinrent bientot les seules questions a ma, portee.”  This “le sentiment seul tranchait pour moi les questions” is another self-revelation, or instance of self-knowledge, which it will be useful to remember.  What more natural than that this “being of sentiment” should prefer the poets to the philosophers, and be attracted, not by the cold reasoners, but by Rousseau, “the man of passion and sentiment.”  It is impossible to describe here the various experiences and doings of Aurora.  Without enlarging on the effects produced upon her by Byron’s poetry, Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” and Chateaubriand’s “Rene”; on her suicidal mania; on the long rides which, clad in male attire, she took with Deschartres; on the death of her grandmother, whose fortune she inherited; on her life in Paris with her extravagantly-capricious mother; on her rupture with her father’s family, her aristocratic relations, because she would not give up her mother—­I say, without enlarging on all this we will at once pass on to her marriage, about which there has been so much fabling.

Aurore Dupin married Casimir Dudevant in September, 1822, and did so of her own free will.  Nor was her husband, as the story went, a bald-headed, grey-moustached old colonel, with a look that made all his dependents quake.  On the contrary, Casimir Dudevant, a natural son of Colonel Dudevant (an officer of the legion of honour and a baron of the Empire), was, according to George Sand’s own description, “a slender, and rather elegant young man, with a gay countenance and a military manner.”  Besides good looks and youth—­he was twenty-seven—­he must also have possessed some education, for, although he did not follow any profession, he had been at a military school, served in the army as sub-lieutenant, and on leaving the army had read for the bar and been admitted a barrister.  There was nothing romantic in the courtship, but at the same time it was far from commonplace.

He did not speak to me of love [writes George Sand], and owned that he was little inclined to sudden passion, to enthusiasm, and in any case no adept in expressing it in an attractive manner.  He spoke of a friendship that would stand any test, and compared the tranquil happiness of our hosts [she was then staying with some friends] to that which he believed he could swear to procure me.

She found sincerity not only in his words, but also in his whole conduct; indeed, what lady could question a suitor’s sincerity after hearing him say that he had been struck at first sight by her good-natured and sensible look, but that he had not thought her either beautiful or pretty?