Part 43

I studied this phenomenon with an extreme pleasure. What struck me as most strange was to hear my own name repeated by my own voice. Then there occurred to me an odd explanation. I thought that I was double, and that there was round about me another “I” whom I could not see, but who always saw me, since he always answered me.

She then combined with this strange phenomenon another, _viz._, the red and blue balls (ocular spectra) that she got into her eyes after looking at the golden globe of a church glittering against the sky, and so found her way to a theory that everything had its double—a theory which, Mr. Tylor and others tell us, was excogitated in very much the same way by uncivilised man. She spent days in trying to get sight of her double. Her mother, who one day surprised her in this search, told her it was echo, ‘the voice in the air!’

This voice in the air no longer astonished me, but it still charmed me. I was satisfied at being able to name it, and to call to it, ‘Echo, are you there? Don’t you hear me? Good-day, Echo!’[334]

Footnote 334:

Compare above, p. 113.

The next event of deep import for Aurore was the sudden death of her father by a fall from his horse, which occurred in the autumn of the same year. The first visit of the King of Terrors to a home has been a black landmark in many a child’s life. Aurore was at first ‘annihilated’ by excess of grief and fear, for, as she says, ‘childhood has not the strength to suffer’. The days that immediately followed the bringing in of the lifeless body were passed in a sort of stupor. Clear recollection dates only from the moment when she was to be clad in the conventional black.

The black made a strong impression on me. I cried in submitting to it; for though I had worn the black dress and veil of the Spaniards, I had certainly never put on black stockings, and the stockings frightened me terribly. I would have it that they were putting on me the legs of death, and my mother had to show me that she wore them also.[335]

Footnote 335:

Compare this with other accounts of the first impression of death given above, p. 237 f.

The father’s death brought a profound change into the child’s life. The despised mother had already been recognised by the paternal grandmother, and a certain advance made towards a show of amity. Visits were paid to the grandmother’s château at Nohant, and it was, in fact, when they were staying there that the fatal accident occurred.

The common loss drew the two women together for a time, but the contrasts of temperament and of education were too powerful, and the jealousy which had first directed itself to the father now found a new object in his talented child. She has given us more than one excellent description of mother and grandmother. The latter, a blonde with white and red complexion, imposing air, always dressed in a brown silk robe and a white wig frizzled in front, was grave and quiet, ‘a veritable Saxon,’ a friend of the _ancien régime_, a disciple of Voltaire and Rousseau, albeit a stickler for the conventionalities of high life. The mother was a brunette, of an ardent temperament, endowed with considerable talent, yet timid and awkward before grand folk, a Spanish nature, jealous and passionate, a true democrat withal, and a worshipper of the Emperor. The problem of dividing poor little Aurore between two such women, habiting two distinct worlds, would have baffled Solomon himself. The grandmother insisted on the advantages of bringing up the child as a lady, and the mother, after a hard struggle, relinquished her claims, the girl being handed over to the grandmother and transported into the new world of Nohant.

The story of this struggle, which tore the heart of Aurore as much as that of her mother, is a tragedy of child-life. Aurore’s instincts bound her to her mother. She implored her not to give her up for money—she understood she was to be the richer for the change. She was beside herself with joy when her grandmother allowed her to visit the maternal home, and she has given us a charming account of these visits. The rooms were poor and ugly enough by the side of her grandmother’s salons; yet—

How good my mother seemed, how amiable my sister, how droll and agreeable my friend Pierret! I could not stop repeating, ‘I am here at home: down there I am at the house of my grandmother’. ‘Zounds!’ said Pierret; ‘don’t let her go and say _chez nous_ before Madame Dupin. She would reproach us with teaching her to talk as they do _aux-z-halles_!’ And then Pierret would burst out into a fit of laughter, for he was ready to laugh at anything, and my mother made fun of him, and I cried out, ‘How we are enjoying ourselves at home!’

When she found that she was to live at Nohant she was beside herself with grief, and implored her mother to take her away, and to let her join her in some business enterprise. The mother seemed at first to yield to these entreaties; but the barriers of rank proved to be inexorable, and would not let the little orphan pass. The narrative of the final departure of the mother from Nohant is deeply pathetic. It was the eve of the parting: and the child resolved to write a letter to her mother in which for the last time she poured out her passionate love and her implorings to be taken with her. But the house was sentinelled with hostile maids, and how to get the letter to its destination? At last, lover-like, she bethought her of putting it behind a portrait of her grandfather in her mother’s room. To make sure of her finding it, she hung her nightcap on the picture, writing on it in pencil ‘Shake the portrait!’ The mother came, but a provoking maid stayed a long half-hour with her. Aurore dared not move. Then, having waited another half-hour for the maid to fall asleep, she crept to her mother, whom she found reading the letter and weeping. She pressed her child to her heart, but would listen to no more proposals of flight from Nohant.

I cried no more—I had no more tears; and I began to suffer from a trouble more profound and lacerating than absence. I said to myself, ‘My mother does not love me as much as I love her’.

In the distraction of her grief she resolved that if it was unbearable she would walk to Paris and rejoin her mother; and, with characteristic inventiveness, thought out, by help of her fairy stories, how she would avoid the anguish of begging by disposing of some precious trinkets.

But the grief, like many another that looks crushing at first, proved not unbearable. In time the child learnt to take kindly to her new home, and even to love the stately and severe-looking grandmamma.

_The Grandmother’s Regime._

It was verily a new home, this country house at Nohant. Besides the grave grandmamma bent on drilling Aurore into the proprieties, there was another solemn figure in Deschartres, her friend and counsellor, who combined the functions of steward of the estate and tutor of the young people. His pupils were Aurore herself, a half-brother Hippolyte, whose birth added one more irregularity to the family history, and of whom the _Histoire_ has much to say. Hippolyte was a wild-tempered youth, more given to mischievous adventure and practical joking than to serious study, and proved a considerable set-off to the formal gravity of the elders of the household. A second youthful companion was supplied in Clotilde, a girl of humble parentage, who was probably introduced by the authorities as a concession to Rousseau’s teaching, and supplied a link between the young lady and the peasant world she was to love and to portray. Beyond the house was the unpretending country of Le Bas Berry, with its ‘landes’ or wastes, the ‘Valée Noire’ of Aurore’s early descriptions, which more than one of our writers have found half English in character, and which was to become to Aurore what the Midlands were to George Eliot.

The first effect of this forced separation from the mother seems to have been to throw Aurore in upon herself, and to confirm her natural tendency to reverie. She says much at this stage of her day-dreaming, which overtook her both when alone and when joining her companions in play. It visited her regularly as she sat at her mother’s feet in the evening listening to her reading, with an old screen covered with green taffeta between her and the fire.

I saw a little of the fire through this worn taffeta, and it formed on it little stars, whose radiation I increased by blinking my eyes. Then little by little I lost the meaning of the phrases which my mother read. Her voice threw me into a kind of moral stupor, in which it was impossible for me to follow an idea. Images began to shape themselves before me, and came and settled on the green screen. They were woods, meadows, rivers, towns of a grotesque and gigantic architecture, as I have often seen them in dreams; enchanted palaces with gardens like nothing that exists, with thousands of birds of azure, gold, and purple, which sprang on the flowers and let themselves be caught.... There were roses—green, black, violet, and especially blue.[336]... I closed my eyes and still saw them, but when I reopened them I could only find them again upon the screen.

Footnote 336:

A blue rose was for a long time the favourite dream of Balzac.

As at Madrid, so at Nohant: the splendour of her new home caused her alarm at first. On the wall-paper of her bedroom above each door was a large medallion with a figure: the one a joyous dancing Flora; the other a grave, severe Bacchante, standing with arm stretched out leaning on her thyrsus. The first was beloved, the second dreaded. The child’s bed was so placed that she had to turn her back on her favourite. She hid her head under the bed-clothes and tried not to see that terribly stern Bacchante, but in vain.

In the middle of the night I saw it leave its medallion, glide along the door, grow as big as a real person (as children say), and, walking to the opposite door, try to snatch the pretty nymph from her niche. She uttered piercing cries, but the Bacchante paid no heed to them. She pulled and tore the paper till the nymph detached herself and fled into the middle of the chamber. The other pursued her thither, and as the poor fugitive threw herself on my bed in order to hide herself under my curtain, the furious Bacchante came towards me and pierced us both with her thyrsus, which had become a steeled lance, whose every stroke was to me a wound of which I felt the pain.

In her play with Ursule and Hippolyte she continued to indulge in her passion for vivid imaginative realisation. When playing at crossing the windings of a river, rudely marked with chalk on the floor, five minutes would suffice to generate this kind of hallucination.

I lost all notion of reality, and believed I could see the trees, the water, the rocks—a vast country—and the sky, now bright, now laden with clouds which were about to burst and increase the danger of crossing the river. In what a vast space children think they are acting when they thus walk from table to bed, from the fireplace to the door!

On one of these occasions, Hippolyte, with the boy’s bent to realism, took the water jug, and pouring its contents on the floor, produced a closer semblance of the river. The natural consequence followed: the children, wholly absorbed in their little drama, were caught by Aurore’s mother in the very act of paddling with naked feet and legs in a dirty puddle formed by the water and the staining of the floor, and were visited with summary chastisement.

More daring pranks would sometimes be ventured on with Hippolyte. One day, as Deschartres was away shooting, the boy got one of his works on Incantation, and tried, much in the fashion of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, to get a peep at the supernatural. Mysterious lines, digits, etc., were duly traced on the floor with chalk, and other preparations carried out. Then they awaited with deepening agitation the first indication of success, the darting out of a blue flame on certain digits or figures. Long minutes passed, yet no blue flame, no devil’s horns, appeared to thrill the eager watchers. At length Hippolyte, in order to keep up the girl’s excitement, put his ear to the floor and declared that he could hear the crackling sound of a flame. But it was all in vain. After all it was but a game, ‘though a game that made our hearts beat’.

Hippolyte was given to dangerous experiments, which he dignified by high-sounding names. Thus he one day put gunpowder into a big log and threw this into the fire, with the view of blowing the saucepan into the kitchen, an occupation which he cheerfully described as studying the theory of volcanoes. He succeeded in leading on Aurore into pranks of a decidedly hoydenish character, such as must have sadly grieved the decorous grandmamma had she known of them. They one day went so far as to dig a trough across the garden-path, fill this with light wet earth, duly cover it with sticks and leaves, and then watch Deschartres, who was particularly vain of his white stockings, as with the stiff, pompous gait of the pedagogue he marched straight into the trap.

Such a child as Aurore, with her fits of reverie alternating with somewhat rude outbursts of animal spirits, was not easily drilled into those proprieties on which Madame Dupin set so high a value. This good lady took great pains to make Aurore walk properly, wear her gloves, give up the familiar ‘thou,’ and adopt the stilted mode of address of the fashionable world. But she did not appreciate these educational experiments. ‘It seemed to me that she shut me in with herself in a big box when she said to me, “Amusez-vous tranquillement”.’ While, for the sake of pleasing her guardian, she outwardly conformed to the rules of society, in her heart she remained a rebel, and was dreadfully bored, when she ceased to be amused, by her grandmother’s ‘old Countesses’. One exception to her general dislike of the grand personages she had now to meet was made in the case of her great-uncle, the Abbé of Beaumont. He seems to have been a man of ability and culture, as well as of amiable heart, and he proved a good friend of the family after the death of Colonel Dupin by improvising the distraction of a comedy at Nohant, in which Deschartres’ flute did duty as orchestra, and the little Aurore was called on to dance a ballet all by herself. The Abbé’s house, which was decorated throughout in the style of Louis XIV., filled her with admiration, and she loved to wander, candle in hand, alone through its vast salons while the older people were absorbed in their cards. This grand-uncle, by-the-bye, served in part as the prototype of the Canon in _Consuelo_.

The formal teaching was mostly handed over to Deschartres, though the grandmother gave instruction in music. Aurore can hardly be said to have been a backward child. She read well at four. Towards five she learnt to write, but not having patience to copy out the alphabet, struck out an original orthography of her own, and indited letters in this to Ursule and Hippolyte. It was, she tells us, very simple and full of hieroglyphics. She devoured a certain class of books, and found delight for five or six months in the stories of Madame d’Aulnoy and of Perrault, which she came across at Nohant. She adds that though she has never re-read them since, she could repeat them all from beginning to end. She tried, out of regard for her grandmamma, to take kindly to arithmetic, Latin, and French versification, which Deschartres taught her, but she could not master her dislike. After a little scene, in which the passionate Deschartres threw a big dictionary at the girl’s head, the Latin had to be given up altogether. The study she liked best was history, since it gave her the chance of indulging in the pleasures of imagination. She had to prepare extracts from a book for her grandmother, and as she soon found that these were not compared with the original, she began to introduce additions of her own. Without altering essential facts, she tells us, she would place the historical personage in new imaginary situations, so as to develop the character more completely. In truth, she seems to have used history very much after the fashion which Aristotle, and after him Lessing, recommend to the poets, varying the situation, but leaving the character intact.

In addition to these more solid studies, the young lady had special lessons in dancing and in calligraphy. Both the dancing-master and the writing-master came in for her ridicule. The latter, she tells us, was

a professor of large pretensions, capable of spoiling the best hand with his systems.... He had invented various instruments by which he compelled his pupils to hold up the head, to keep the elbow free, three fingers extended on the pen, and the little finger stretched on the paper in such a way as to support the weight of the hand.

It must have been a joyous moment for Aurore when she was set free from the restraints and impositions of the château for a couple of hours’ visit to some adjoining farm, where she could shout, laugh, and romp with the peasant girls. Here she would climb the trees, rush wildly down from the top to the bottom of a mountain of sheaves in the barn, and do other outrageous things; or when the dream-mood was on her she would quietly contemplate her rustic friends as they tended the lambs, hunted for eggs, or gathered fruit from the orchard, weaving their figures into one of her interminable romances.

Among the charming rural pictures that her pen has drawn for us in these recollections there is one of a swineherd, called Plaisir, for whom she conceived a strange friendship. She loved to watch his odd figure, always clothed in a blouse and hemp trousers, ‘which with his hands and naked feet had taken the colour and the hardness of the earth,’ armed with a triangular iron instrument, ‘the sceptre of swineherds,’ and looking like ‘a gnome of the glebe, a kind of devil between man and werwolf’. As the swine turned up the soil with their snouts, the birds would come to forage.

Sometimes these birds perched on the hog merely to get warm, or in order the better to observe the labour from which they were to profit. I have often seen an old ashy rook balancing himself there on one leg with a pensive and melancholy air, while the hog bored deeply in the soil, and by these labours caused it oscillations which disturbed it, rendered it impatient, and finally drove it to correct this clumsiness by strokes of its beak.

Nor was it merely as playmates that the young lady from the château deigned to associate with the peasantry. She threw herself with ardent sympathy into the hard toilsome life of the people. One day, as she chanced to see an old woman stooping, as well as her stiff limbs allowed her, to gather sticks in her grandmother’s garden, she set vigorously to work with bill-hook cutting dry wood, working late into the evening, and forgetting all about her meal, for she was ‘strong as a peasant girl’. She then set out with blood-stained face and hands, and with a weight greater than that of her own body, for the poor woman’s hut, where she enjoyed a well-earned slice from her black loaf.

This contact with the rustic mind, so oddly introduced into the fashionable scheme of education, exerted a profound effect on the child’s imagination. She listened eagerly to the superstitious stories which the hemp-dressers related when they came to crush the hemp, sitting in the moonlight within view of the crosses of a cemetery. Among these were a sacristan’s gruesome stories of interments and of the rats that lived in the belfry. The doings of those rats, she tells us, would of themselves fill a volume. He knew them all, and had given them the names of the more important among the deceased villagers. They were very clever, and could, among other exploits, arrange grains or beans given them in the form of a circle enclosing a cross. It is hardly surprising to learn that these stories robbed Aurore of her sleep.

The rustic legend of the _grande bête_ much exercised the girl’s brain. She tried to reconcile the superstition with what she had learnt about the animal kingdom. And in this way she concluded that the creature must be a member of a species almost entirely extinct. She imagined that it was leading a solitary existence, being able to survive the rest of its species by hiding during the day and wandering at night. This weird conception soon began to expand into a zoological romance.

If the girl’s imaginative impulse had been excited by her historical studies, it could not but be roused to preternatural activity by the stirring political events of the time. In 1812, when she was just eight years old, occurred Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia. The absence of all news of the army for fifteen days gave a new direction to her reverie.

I imagined that I possessed wings, that I darted through space, and that peering into the abysses of the horizon I discovered the vast snows and the endless steppes of White Russia. I hovered, took my bearings in the air, and at last spied the wandering columns of our unhappy legions. I guided them towards France—for that which tormented me the most was that they did not know where they were, and that they were moving towards Asia, plunging more and more into deserts as they turned their backs on the West.

A quaint illustration of the conflict the child’s mind was passing through under the contradictory impressions of Napoleon’s character received from her mother and from her new instructors at Nohant, is given us in the following:—

Once I dreamt I carried him (the Emperor) through space and set him on the cupola of the Tuileries. There I had a long talk with him, put him a thousand questions, and said to him, ‘If thou prove thyself by thy answers, as people say, a monster, an ambitious man, a drinker of blood, I will cast thee down and dash thee to pieces on the threshold of thy palace; but if thou justify thyself, if thou be what I have believed, the good, the great, the just Emperor, the father of the French, I will replace thee on thy throne, and with my sword of fire defend thee from thy enemies’. He thereupon opened his heart and confessed that he had committed many faults from too great a love of glory, but he swore that he loved France, and that henceforth he would only think of the happiness of the people. On this I touched him with my sword of fire, which rendered him invulnerable.

_A Self-evolved Religion._

Perhaps there is no domain of children’s thought and feeling that is more remote from our older experience, and consequently less easily understood by us, than that of religion. Their first ideas about the supernatural are indeed, as we have seen above, though supplied by us, not controlled by us.

To most children, presumably, religious instruction comes—at first at least—with a commanding, authoritative force. The story of the supernatural, of the Divine Father, of Heaven, and the rest, cannot be scrutinised by the child—save, indeed, in respect of its inner consistency—for it tells of things unobservable by sense, and so having no direct contact with childish experience. Their natural tendency is to believe, in a submissive, childish way, not troubling about the proof of the mystery.