t, like Margot, at melodrama, but she noticed the pink of a cloud,
the mauve of a flower, and, what was more important, she called her
little daughter's attention to such things. This illiterate mother had
therefore had some influence on Aurore and on her taste for literature.

It is not enough to say that George Sand was a born writer. She was a
born novelist, and she belonged to a certain category of novelists.
She had been created by a special decree of Providence to write her
own romances, and not others. It is this which makes the history of
the far-back origins of her literary vocation so interesting. It is
extremely curious to see, from her earliest childhood, the promises of
those faculties which were to become the very essence of her talent.
When she was only three years old, her mother used to put her between
four chairs in order to keep her still. By way of enlivening her
captivity, she tells us what she did.

"I used to make up endless stories, which my mother styled my novels.
. . . I told these stories aloud, and my mother declared that they were
most tiresome on account of their length and of the development I gave
to my digressions. . . . There were very few bad people in them,
and never any serious troubles. Everything was always arranged
satisfactorily, thanks to my lively, optimistic ideas. . . ."

She had already commenced, then, at the age of three, and these early
stories are the precursors of the novels of her maturity. They are
optimistic, drawn out, and with long digressions. Something similar is
told about Walter Scott. There is evidently a primordial instinct in
those who are born story-tellers, and this urges them on to invent fine
stories for amusing themselves.

A little later on we have another phenomenon, almost as curious, with
regard to Aurore. We are apt to wonder how certain descriptive writers
proceed in order to give us pictures, the various features of which
stand out in such intense relief that they appear absolutely real to us.
George Sand tells us that when Berquin's stories were being read to
her at Nohant, she used to sit in front of the fire, from which she was
protected by an old green silk screen. She used gradually to lose the
sense of the phrases, but pictures began to form themselves in front of
her on the green screen.

"I saw woods, meadows, rivers, towns of strange and gigantic
architecture. . . . One day these apparitions were so real that I was
startled by them