hich
made peace under one roof with her a matter of difficulty, Aurore hung
back from the notion of marriage, and clearly was much too young to be
urged into taking so serious a step. So to Nohant she returned from the
convent in the spring of 1820. There she continued to strike that
judicious compromise between temporal and spiritual duties and pleasures
enjoined on her by her clerical adviser. Still bent on choosing a
monastic life, when free to choose for herself, she was reconciled in
the meantime to take things as they came, and to make herself happy and
add to the happiness of her grandmother in the ordinary way. So we find
her enjoying the visit of one of her school friends, getting up little
plays to amuse the elders, practicing the harp, receiving from her
brother Hippolyte--now a noisy hussar--during his brief visit home, her
first initiation into the arts of riding--for the future her favorite
exercise--and of pistol-shooting; and last, but not least, beginning to
suspect that she had learned nothing whatever while at school, and
setting to work to educate herself, as best she could, by miscellaneous
reading.

In the spring of the following year Madame Dupin's health and mental
faculties utterly broke down. But she lived on for another ten months.
Aurore for the time was placed in a most exceptional position for a
French girl of sixteen. She was thrown absolutely on herself and her own
resources, uncontrolled and unprotected, between a helpless, half
imbecile invalid, and the eccentric, dogmatic pedagogue, Deschartres.
Highly susceptible to influences from without, her mind, during their
sudden and complete suspension, seemed as it were invited to discover
and take its own bent.

Piqued by the charge of dense ignorance flung at her by her ex-tutor,
and aware that there was truth in it, she would now sit up all night
reading, finding her appetite for the secular knowledge she used to
despise grow by what it fed upon. The phase of religious exaltation she
had recently passed through still gave the tone to her mind, and it was
with the works of famous philosophers, metaphysicians, and Christian
mystics that she began her studies. Comparing the "Imitation of Christ"
with Chateaubriand's "Spirit of Christianity," and struck here and
elsewhere with the wide discrepancies and contradictions of opinion
manifest between great minds ranging themselves under one theological
banner, she was led on to speculations that