at reserve. She knew now all that
she owed to her grandmother, but unfortunately it was one of those
discoveries which are made too late.

The eighteen months which Aurore now passed at Nohant, until the death
of her grandmother, are very important as regards her psychological
biography. She was seventeen years old, and a girl who was eager to live
and very emotional. She had first been a child of Nature. Her convent
life had taken her away from Nature and accustomed her to falling back
on her own thoughts. Nature now took her back once more, and her beloved
Nohant feted her return.

"The trees were in flower," she says, "the nightingales were singing,
and, in the distance, I could hear the classic, solemn sound of the
labourers. My old friends, the big dogs, who had growled at me the
evening before, recognized me again and were profuse in their caresses.
. . ."

She wanted to see everything again. The things themselves had not
changed, but her way of looking at them now was different. During her
long, solitary walks every morning, she enjoyed seeing the various
landscapes, sometimes melancholy-looking and sometimes delightful. She
enjoyed, too, the picturesqueness of the various things she met, the
flocks of cattle, the birds taking their flight, and even the sound of
the horses' feet splashing in the water. She enjoyed everything, in
a kind of voluptuous reverie which was no longer instinctive, but
conscious and a trifle morbid.

Added to all this, her reading at this epoch was without any order or
method. She read everything voraciously, mixing all the philosophers
up together. She read Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bossuet, Pascal,
Montaigne, but she kept Rousseau apart from the others. She devoured
the books of the moralists and poets, La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante,
Virgil, Shakespeare. All this reading was too much for her and excited
her brain. She had reserved Chateaubriand's _Rene_, and, on reading
that, she was overcome by the sadness which emanates from these
distressing pages. She was disgusted with life, and attempted to commit
suicide. She tried to drown herself, and only owed her life to the
healthy-mindedness of the good mare Colette, as the horse evidently had
not the same reasons as its young mistress for wishing to put an end to
its days.

All this time Aurore was entirely free to please herself. Deschartres,
who had always treated her as a boy, encouraged her independence. It
was at his ins