rought old age into the world."

Dupin was a very agreeable man. When younger he had been _too_
agreeable, but now he was just sufficiently so to make his wife very
happy. He was very lavish in his expenditure and lived like a prince,
so that he left Marie-Aurore ruined and poor with about three thousand a
year. She was imbued with the ideas of the philosophers and an enemy of
the Queen's _coterie_. She was by no means alarmed at the Revolution and
was very soon taken prisoner. She was arrested on the 26th of November,
1793, and incarcerated in the _Couvent des Anglaises_, Rue des
Fosse's-Saint-Victor, which had been converted into a detention house.
On leaving prison she settled down at Nohant, an estate she had recently
bought. It was there that her granddaughter remembered her in her early
days. She describes her as tall, slender, fair and always very calm. At
Nohant she had only her maids and her books for company. When in Paris,
she delighted in the society of people of her own station and of her
time, people who had the ideas and airs of former days. She continued,
in this new century, the shades of thought and the manners and Customs
of the old _regime._

As a set-off to this woman of race and of culture, Aurore's mother
represented the ordinary type of the woman of the people. She was small,
dark, fiery and violent. She, too, the bird-seller's daughter, had been
imprisoned by the Revolution, and strangely enough in the _Couvent des
Anglaises_ at about the same time as Maurice de Saxe's granddaughter.
It was in this way that the fusion of classes was understood under the
Terror. She was employed as a _figurante_ in a small theatre. This was
merely a commencement for her career. At the time when Maurice Dupin met
her, she was the mistress of an old general. She already had one child
of doubtful parentage. Maurice Dupin, too, had a natural son, named
Hippolyte, so that they could not reproach each other. When Maurice
Dupin married Sophie-Victoire, a month before the birth of Aurore, he
had some difficulty in obtaining his mother's consent. She finally
gave in, as she was of an indulgent nature. It is possible that
Sophie-Victoire's conduct was irreproachable during her husband's
lifetime, but, after his death, she returned to her former ways. She was
nevertheless of religious habits and would not, upon any account, have
missed attending Mass. She was quick-tempered, jealous and noisy and,
when anything annoyed her