lties unfolded, increasing disparity between them
brought increasing estrangement. Such a strong artist-nature may require
for its expansion an amount of freedom not easily compatible with
domestic happiness. But of real domestic happiness she never had a fair
chance, and for a time the will to make the best of her lot as it was
cast appears not to have been wanting.

The Dudevants, after their return home in 1826, began to mix more freely
in such society as La Chatre and the environs afforded, and at certain
seasons there was no lack of provincial gayeties. Aurore Dudevant all
her life long was quite indifferent to what she has summarily dismissed
as "the silly vanities of finery"--"_Souffrir pour etre belle_" was what
from her girlhood she declined to do. Regard for the brightness of her
eyes, her complexion, the whiteness of her hands, the shape of her foot,
never made her sacrifice her midnight study, her walks in the sunshine,
or her good country sabots for the rough lanes of Berry. "To live under
glass, in order not to get tanned, or chapped, or faded before the time,
is what I have always found impossible," she for her part has
acknowledged. And she cared very moderately for general society. She
writes to her mother in spring, 1826: "It is not the thing of all others
that reposes, or even that amuses me best; still there are obligations
in this life, which one must take as they come." She was not yet
two-and-twenty, and carnival-tide with its social "obligations" in the
form of balls and receptions was not unwelcome. They snatched her away
from her increasing depression. She writes of these diversions to her
mother in a lively strain, describing how one ball was kept up till nine
o'clock the next day, how every Sunday morning the _cure_ preaches
against dancing, but in the evening the dance goes on in despite of
him--how this cross _cure_ is not their own parish _cure_ of St.
Chartier,--a very old friend and a "character" who, when Madame Dudevant
was five-and-thirty, used to say of her, "Aurore is a child I have
always been fond of." "As for him, if only he were sixty years younger,"
she adds, "I would undertake to make him dance himself if I set about
it." Then follows an amusing sketch of a rustic bridal, the double
marriage of two members of the Nohant establishment:

The wedding-feast came off in our coach-houses--there was dinner in
one, dancing in the other. The splendor was such as you may