I studied this phenomenon with an extreme pleasure. What struck me as most strange was to hear my own name repeated by my own voice. Then there occurred to me an odd explanation. I thought that I was double, and that there was round about me another “I” whom I could not see, but who always saw me, since he always answered me.
She then combined with this strange phenomenon another, viz., the red and blue balls (ocular spectra) that she got into her eyes after looking at the golden globe of a church glittering against the sky, and so found her way to a theory that everything had its double—a theory which, Mr. Tylor and others tell us, was excogitated in very much the same way by uncivilised man. She spent days in trying to get sight of her double. Her mother, who one day surprised her in this search, told her it was echo, ‘the voice in the air!’
This voice in the air no longer astonished me, but it still charmed me. I was satisfied at being able to name it, and to call to it, ‘Echo, are you there? Don’t you hear me? Good-day, Echo!’[[334]]
The next event of deep import for Aurore was the sudden death of her father by a fall from his horse, which occurred in the autumn of the same year. The first visit of the King of Terrors to a home has been a black landmark in many a child’s life. Aurore was at first ‘annihilated’ by excess of grief and fear, for, as she says, ‘childhood has not the strength to suffer’. The days that immediately followed the bringing in of the lifeless body were passed in a sort of stupor. Clear recollection dates only from the moment when she was to be clad in the conventional black.
The black made a strong impression on me. I cried in submitting to it; for though I had worn the black dress and veil of the Spaniards, I had certainly never put on black stockings, and the stockings frightened me terribly. I would have it that they were putting on me the legs of death, and my mother had to show me that she wore them also.[[335]]
The father’s death brought a profound change into the child’s life. The despised mother had already been recognised by the paternal grandmother, and a certain advance made towards a show of amity. Visits were paid to the grandmother’s château at Nohant, and it was, in fact, when they were staying there that the fatal accident occurred.
The common loss drew the two women together for a time, but the contrasts of temperament and of education were too powerful, and the jealousy which had first directed itself to the father now found a new object in his talented child. She has given us more than one excellent description of mother and grandmother. The latter, a blonde with white and red complexion, imposing air, always dressed in a brown silk robe and a white wig frizzled in front, was grave and quiet, ‘a veritable Saxon,’ a friend of the ancien régime, a disciple of Voltaire and Rousseau, albeit a stickler for the conventionalities of high life. The mother was a brunette, of an ardent temperament, endowed with considerable talent, yet timid and awkward before grand folk, a Spanish nature, jealous and passionate, a true democrat withal, and a worshipper of the Emperor. The problem of dividing poor little Aurore between two such women, habiting two distinct worlds, would have baffled Solomon himself. The grandmother insisted on the advantages of bringing up the child as a lady, and the mother, after a hard struggle, relinquished her claims, the girl being handed over to the grandmother and transported into the new world of Nohant.
The story of this struggle, which tore the heart of Aurore as much as that of her mother, is a tragedy of child-life. Aurore’s instincts bound her to her mother. She implored her not to give her up for money—she understood she was to be the richer for the change. She was beside herself with joy when her grandmother allowed her to visit the maternal home, and she has given us a charming account of these visits. The rooms were poor and ugly enough by the side of her grandmother’s salons; yet—
How good my mother seemed, how amiable my sister, how droll and agreeable my friend Pierret! I could not stop repeating, ‘I am here at home: down there I am at the house of my grandmother’. ‘Zounds!’ said Pierret; ‘don’t let her go and say chez nous before Madame Dupin. She would reproach us with teaching her to talk as they do aux-z-halles!’ And then Pierret would burst out into a fit of laughter, for he was ready to laugh at anything, and my mother made fun of him, and I cried out, ‘How we are enjoying ourselves at home!’
When she found that she was to live at Nohant she was beside herself with grief, and implored her mother to take her away, and to let her join her in some business enterprise. The mother seemed at first to yield to these entreaties; but the barriers of rank proved to be inexorable, and would not let the little orphan pass. The narrative of the final departure of the mother from Nohant is deeply pathetic. It was the eve of the parting: and the child resolved to write a letter to her mother in which for the last time she poured out her passionate love and her implorings to be taken with her. But the house was sentinelled with hostile maids, and how to get the letter to its destination? At last, lover-like, she bethought her of putting it behind a portrait of her grandfather in her mother’s room. To make sure of her finding it, she hung her nightcap on the picture, writing on it in pencil ‘Shake the portrait!’ The mother came, but a provoking maid stayed a long half-hour with her. Aurore dared not move. Then, having waited another half-hour for the maid to fall asleep, she crept to her mother, whom she found reading the letter and weeping. She pressed her child to her heart, but would listen to no more proposals of flight from Nohant.