rought to her experience the keenest joy of womanhood.
Before this child numbered two years, however, she began to feel a
certain blank in her household existence, an emptiness, a discouragement
as to all things, whose cause she could not understand. In this _ennui_,
she tells us, her husband sympathized, and by common consent they strove
to remedy it by frequent changes of abode. They visited Paris, Plessis,
returned to Nohant, made a journey in the Pyrenees, a visit to Guillery,
the chateau of Colonel Dudevant. Still the dark guest pursued them.
Aurore does not pretend that there was any special cause for her
suffering. It was but the void which her passionate nature found in a
conventional and limited existence, and for which as yet she knew no
remedy. The fervor of Catholic devotion had, as we have seen, long
forsaken her; her studies did not satisfy her; her children--she had by
this time a daughter--were yet in infancy; her husband was not unkind,
but indifferent, and the object of indifference. She occupied herself
with the business of her estate, and with the wants of the neighboring
poor; but she was unsuccessful in administering her expenses, and her
narrow revenue did not allow her to give large satisfaction to her
charitable impulses. After some years of seclusion and effort, she began
to dream of liberty, of wealth,--in a word, of trying her fortunes in
Paris. She felt a power within her for which she had found no adequate
task. She speaks vaguely, too, of a _Being_ platonically loved, and
loving in like manner, absent for most of the year, and seen only for
a few days at long intervals, whose correspondence had added a new
influence to her life. This attenuated relation was, however, broken
before she made her essay of a new life. Her half-brother, Hippolyte,
brought to Nohant a habit of joviality which soon degenerated into
chronic intemperance; and though she does not accuse her husband of
participation in this vice, or, indeed, of any wrong towards her, she
yet makes us understand that an occasional escape from Nohant became to
her almost a matter of necessity. She, therefore, made arrangements,
with her husband's free consent, to pass alternately three months in
Paris and three months at home, for an indefinite period; and leaving
Maurice in good hands, and the little Solange, her daughter, for a
short time only, she came to Paris in the winter with the intention of
writing.

Her hopes and pretensions