an enough to raise a hue-and-cry at La Chatre,
a small provincial town, probably neither better nor worse than the rest
of its class, a class never yet noted for charity or liberality of
judgment. The strangest stories began to be circulated concerning her,
stories for the most part so false and absurd as to inspire her with a
sweeping contempt for public opinion. By a very common phenomenon, she
was to incur throughout her life far more censure through freaks,
audacious as breaches of custom, but intrinsically harmless, nor likely
to set the fashion to others, than is often reserved for errors of a
graver nature. The conditions of ordinary middle-class society are
designed, like ready-made clothes, to fit the vast majority of human
beings, who live under them without serious inconvenience. For the
future George Sand to confine her activities within the very narrow
restrictions laid down by the social code of La Chatre was, it must be
owned, hardly to be expected. It was perhaps premature to throw down the
gauntlet at sixteen, but her inexperience and isolation were complete.
The grandmother in her dotage was no counsellor at all. Deschartres, an
oddity himself, cared for none of these things. Those best acquainted
with her at La Chatre, families the heads of which had known her father
well and whose younger members had fraternized with her from childhood
upwards, liked her none the less for her unusual proceedings, and
defended her stoutly against her detractors.

"You are losing your best friend," said her dying grandmother to her
when the end came, in December, 1821. Aurore was, indeed, placed in a
difficult and painful situation. She had inherited all the property of
the deceased, who, in her will, expressed her desire that her own
nearest relations by her marriage with M. Dupin, a family of the name of
de Villeneuve, well-off and highly connected, should succeed her as
guardians to her ward. But it was impossible to dispute the claims of
Madame Maurice Dupin to the care of her own daughter if she chose to
assert them, which she quickly did, bearing off the girl with her to
Paris--Nohant being left under the stewardship of Deschartres--and by
her unconciliatory behavior further alienating the other side of the
family from whom Aurore, through no fault of her own, was virtually
estranged at the moment when she stood most in need of a friend. Twenty
years later they came forward to claim kinship and friendship again: i