ot get into her head; and
poetry was not her language. History, on the other hand, was a source
of great enjoyment to her; but she read it like a romance, and did not
trouble herself about dates and other unpleasant details. She was also
fond of music; at least she was so as long as her grandmother taught
her, for the mechanical drilling she got from the organist of La Chatre
turned her fondness into indifference. That subject of education,
however, which is generally regarded as the foundation of all
education--I mean religion--was never even mentioned to her. The Holy
Scriptures were, indeed, given into the child's hands, but she was left
to believe or reject whatever she liked. Her grandmother, who was a
deist, hated not only the pious, but piety itself, and, above all, Roman
Catholicism. Christ was in her opinion an estimable man, the gospel
an excellent philosophy, but she regretted that truth was enveloped in
ridiculous fables. The little of religion which the girl imbibed she
owed to her mother, by whose side she was made to kneel and say her
prayers. "My mother," writes George Sand in her "Histoire de ma Vie,"
from which these details are taken, "carried poetry into her religious
feeling, and I stood in need of poetry." Aurora's craving for religion
and poetry was not to remain unallayed. One night there appeared to her
in a dream a phantom, Corambe by name. The dream-created being took hold
of her waking imagination, and became the divinity of her religion
and the title and central figure of her childish, unwritten romance.
Corambe, who was of no sex, or rather of either sex just as occasion
might require--for it underwent numberless metamorphoses--had "all the
attributes of physical and moral beauty, the gift of eloquence, and
the all-powerful charm of the arts, especially the magic of musical
improvisation," being in fact an abstract of all the sacred and secular
histories with which she had got acquainted.

The jarrings between her mother and grandmother continued; for of
course their intercourse did not entirely cease. The former visited her
relations at Nohant, and the latter and her grandchildren occasionally
passed some weeks in Paris. Aurora, who loved both, her mother even
passionately, was much harassed by their jealousy, which vented itself
in complaints, taunts, and reproaches. Once she determined to go to
Paris and live with her mother, and was only deterred from doing so by
the most cruel means im