All this time Aurore was entirely free to please herself. Deschartres, who had always treated her as a boy, encouraged her independence.
It was at his instigation that she dressed in masculine attire to go out shooting. People began to talk about her "eccentricities"at Landerneau, and the gossip continued as far as La Chatre.
Added to this, Aurore began to study osteology with a young man who lived in the neighbourhood, and it was said that this young man, Stephane Ajasson de Grandsaigne, gave her lessons in her own room.
This was the climax.
We have a curious testimony as regards the state of the young girl's mind at this epoch. A review, entitled _Le Voile de pourpre_, published recently, in its first number, a letter from Aurore to her mother, dated November 18, 1821. Her mother had evidently written to her on hearing the gossip about her, and had probably enlarged upon it.
"You reproach me, mother, with neither having timidity, modesty, nor charm," she writes, "or at least you suppose that I have these qualities, but that I refrain from showing them, and you are quite certain that I have no outward decency nor decorum.
You ought to know me before judging me in this way.
You would then be able to form an opinion about my conduct.
Grandmother is here, and, ill though she is, she watches over me carefully and lovingly, and she would not fail to correct me if she considered that I had the manners of a dragoon or of a hussar."She considered that she had no need of any one to guide or protect her, and no need of leading-strings.
"I am seventeen," she says, "and I know my way about."If this Monsieur de Grandsaigne had ventured to take any liberty with her, she was old enough to take care of herself.
Her mother had blamed her for learning Latin and osteology.
"Why should a woman be ignorant?" she asks. "Can she not be well educated without this spoiling her and without being pedantic?
Supposing that I should have sons in the future, and that I had profited sufficiently by my studies to be able to teach them, would not a mother's lessons be as good as a tutor's?"She was already challenging public opinion, starting a campaign against false prejudices, showing a tendency to generalize, and to make the cause of one woman the cause of all women.
We must now bear in mind the various traits we have discovered, one after another, in Aurore's character. We must remember to what parentage she owed her intellectuality and her sentimentality.
It will then be more easy to understand the terms she uses when describing her fascination for Rousseau's writings.
"The language of Jean-Jacques and the form of his deductions impressed me as music might have done when heard in brilliant sunshine.
I compared him to Mozart, and I understood everything."She understood him, for she recognized herself in him.
She sympathized with that predominance of feeling and imagination, that exaggeration of sentiment, that preference for life according to Nature, that emotion on beholding the various sights of the country, that distrust of people, those effusions of religious sentimentality, those solitary reveries, and that melancholy which made death seem desirable to him. All this was to Aurore Dupin the gospel according to Rousseau. The whole of her psychology is to be found here.
She was an exceptional being undoubtedly; but in order to be a genial exception one must have within oneself, and then personify with great intensity all the inspirations which, at a certain moment, are dispersed in the atmosphere. Ever since the great agitation which had shaken the moral world by Rousseau's preaching, there had been various vague currents and a whole crowd of confused aspirations floating about. It was this enormous wave that entered a feminine soul.
Unconsciously Aurore Dupin welcomed the new ideal, and it was this ideal which was to operate within her. The question was, what would she do with it, in presence of life with all its everyday and social realities. This question is the object of our study.
In the solution of it lies the interest, the drama and the lesson of George Sand's destiny.
