ard a voice murmuring in my ear: _'Tolle Lege.'_ I turned round, and
saw that I was quite alone. . . ."

Our modern _psychiatres_ would say that she had had an hallucination of
hearing, together with olfactory trouble. I prefer saying that she
had received the visit of grace. Tears of joy bathed her face and she
remained there, sobbing for a long time.

The convent had therefore opened to Aurore another world of sentiment,
that of Christian emotion. Her soul was naturally religious, and the
dryness of a philosophical education had not been sufficient for it. The
convent had now brought her the aliment for which she had instinctively
longed. Later on, when her faith, which had never been very enlightened,
left her, the sentiment remained. This religiosity, of Christian form,
was essential to George Sand.

The convent also rendered her another eminent service. In the _Histoire
de ma vie_, George Sand retraces from memory the portraits of several of
the Sisters. She tells us of Madame Marie-Xavier, and of her despair
at having taken the vows; of Sister Anne-Joseph, who was as kind as an
angel and as silly as a goose; of the gentle Marie-Alicia, whose
serene soul looked out of her blue eyes, a mirror of purity, and of the
mystical Sister Helene, who had left home in spite of her family, in
spite of the supplications and the sobs of her mother and sisters, and
who had passed over the body of a child on her way to God. It is like
this always. The costumes are the same, the hands are clasped in the
same manner, the white bands and the faces look equally pale, but
underneath this apparent uniformity what contrasts! It is the inner life
which marks the differences so vigorously, and shows up the originality
of each one. Aurore gradually discovered the diversity of all these
souls and the beauty of each one. She thought of becoming a nun, but
her confessor did not advise this, and he was certainly wise. Her
grandmother, who had a philosopher's opinion of priests, blamed their
fanaticism, and took her little granddaughter away from the convent.
Perhaps she felt the need of affection for the few months she had still
to live. At any rate, she certainly had this affection. One of the first
results of the larger perspicacity which Aurore had acquired at the
convent was to make her understand her grandmother at last. She was able
now to grasp the complex nature of her relative and to see the delicacy
hidden under an appearance of gre