tigation that she dressed in masculine attire to go out
shooting. People began to talk about her "eccentricities" at Landerneau,
and the gossip continued as far as La Chatre. Added to this,
Aurore began to study osteology with a young man who lived in the
neighbourhood, and it was said that this young man, Stephane Ajasson de
Grandsaigne, gave her lessons in her own room. This was the climax.

We have a curious testimony as regards the state of the young girl's
mind at this epoch. A review, entitled _Le Voile de pourpre_, published
recently, in its first number, a letter from Aurore to her mother, dated
November 18, 1821. Her mother had evidently written to her on hearing
the gossip about her, and had probably enlarged upon it.

"You reproach me, mother, with neither having timidity, modesty,
nor charm," she writes, "or at least you suppose that I have these
qualities, but that I refrain from showing them, and you are quite
certain that I have no outward decency nor decorum. You ought to know me
before judging me in this way. You would then be able to form an opinion
about my conduct. Grandmother is here, and, ill though she is, she
watches over me carefully and lovingly, and she would not fail to
correct me if she considered that I had the manners of a dragoon or of a
hussar."

She considered that she had no need of any one to guide or protect her,
and no need of leading-strings.

"I am seventeen," she says, "and I know my way about."

If this Monsieur de Grandsaigne had ventured to take any liberty with
her, she was old enough to take care of herself.

Her mother had blamed her for learning Latin and osteology. "Why should
a woman be ignorant?" she asks. "Can she not be well educated without
this spoiling her and without being pedantic? Supposing that I should
have sons in the future, and that I had profited sufficiently by my
studies to be able to teach them, would not a mother's lessons be as
good as a tutor's?"

She was already challenging public opinion, starting a campaign against
false prejudices, showing a tendency to generalize, and to make the
cause of one woman the cause of all women.

We must now bear in mind the various traits we have discovered, one
after another, in Aurore's character. We must remember to what parentage
she owed her intellectuality and her sentimentality. It will then
be more easy to understand the terms she uses when describing her
fascination for Rousseau's writings.

"The l