ind the house cluster a score of cottages of the scattered
hamlet of Nohant; in the centre rises the smallest of churches, with a
tiny cemetery hedged around and adjoining the wall of the manor garden.

At this country home the tired travellers gladly alighted; but they had
barely a few weeks in which to recover from the fatigues of their
Spanish campaign, when a terrible calamity overwhelmed the household.
Maurice Dupin, riding home one night from La Chatre, was thrown from his
horse and killed on the spot.

The story of Aurore Dupin's individual life opens at once with the death
of her father--a loss she was still too young to comprehend, but for
which she was soon to suffer through the strange, the anomalous
position, in which it was to place her. Maurice Dupin's patrician mother
and her plebeian daughter-in-law, bereft thus violently of him who had
been the only possible link between them, found themselves hopelessly,
actively, and increasingly at variance. Their tempers clashed, their
natures were antipathetic, their views contradictory, their positions
irreconcilable. Aurore was not only thrust into an atmosphere of strife,
but condemned to the apple of discord. She was to grow up between two
hostile camps, each claiming her obedience and affection.

The beginning was smooth, and the sadness which alone kept the peace was
not allowed to weigh on the child. She ran wild in the garden, the
country air and country life strengthening a naturally strong
constitution; and her intelligence, though also allowed much freedom in
its development, was not neglected. A preceptor was on the spot in the
person of the fourth inmate of Nohant, an old pedagogue, Deschartres by
name, formerly her father's tutor, who had remained in Madame Dupin's
service as "intendant." The serio-comic figure of this personage, so
graphically drawn by George Sand herself in the memoirs of her early
life, will never be forgotten by any reader of those reminiscences.
Pedant, she says, was written in every line of his countenance and every
movement that he made. He was possessed of some varied learning, much
narrow prejudice, and a violent, crotchety temper, but had proved during
the troubles of the Revolution his sincere and disinterested devotion to
the family he served, and Aurore and "the great man," as she afterwards
nicknamed her old tutor, were always good friends.

Before she was four years old she could read quite well; but she remarks
that