I cried no more—I had no more tears; and I began to suffer from a trouble more profound and lacerating than absence. I said to myself, ‘My mother does not love me as much as I love her’.
In the distraction of her grief she resolved that if it was unbearable she would walk to Paris and rejoin her mother; and, with characteristic inventiveness, thought out, by help of her fairy stories, how she would avoid the anguish of begging by disposing of some precious trinkets.
But the grief, like many another that looks crushing at first, proved not unbearable. In time the child learnt to take kindly to her new home, and even to love the stately and severe-looking grandmamma.
The Grandmother’s Regime.
It was verily a new home, this country house at Nohant. Besides the grave grandmamma bent on drilling Aurore into the proprieties, there was another solemn figure in Deschartres, her friend and counsellor, who combined the functions of steward of the estate and tutor of the young people. His pupils were Aurore herself, a half-brother Hippolyte, whose birth added one more irregularity to the family history, and of whom the Histoire has much to say. Hippolyte was a wild-tempered youth, more given to mischievous adventure and practical joking than to serious study, and proved a considerable set-off to the formal gravity of the elders of the household. A second youthful companion was supplied in Clotilde, a girl of humble parentage, who was probably introduced by the authorities as a concession to Rousseau’s teaching, and supplied a link between the young lady and the peasant world she was to love and to portray. Beyond the house was the unpretending country of Le Bas Berry, with its ‘landes’ or wastes, the ‘Valée Noire’ of Aurore’s early descriptions, which more than one of our writers have found half English in character, and which was to become to Aurore what the Midlands were to George Eliot.
The first effect of this forced separation from the mother seems to have been to throw Aurore in upon herself, and to confirm her natural tendency to reverie. She says much at this stage of her day-dreaming, which overtook her both when alone and when joining her companions in play. It visited her regularly as she sat at her mother’s feet in the evening listening to her reading, with an old screen covered with green taffeta between her and the fire.
I saw a little of the fire through this worn taffeta, and it formed on it little stars, whose radiation I increased by blinking my eyes. Then little by little I lost the meaning of the phrases which my mother read. Her voice threw me into a kind of moral stupor, in which it was impossible for me to follow an idea. Images began to shape themselves before me, and came and settled on the green screen. They were woods, meadows, rivers, towns of a grotesque and gigantic architecture, as I have often seen them in dreams; enchanted palaces with gardens like nothing that exists, with thousands of birds of azure, gold, and purple, which sprang on the flowers and let themselves be caught.... There were roses—green, black, violet, and especially blue.[[336]]... I closed my eyes and still saw them, but when I reopened them I could only find them again upon the screen.
As at Madrid, so at Nohant: the splendour of her new home caused her alarm at first. On the wall-paper of her bedroom above each door was a large medallion with a figure: the one a joyous dancing Flora; the other a grave, severe Bacchante, standing with arm stretched out leaning on her thyrsus. The first was beloved, the second dreaded. The child’s bed was so placed that she had to turn her back on her favourite. She hid her head under the bed-clothes and tried not to see that terribly stern Bacchante, but in vain.
In the middle of the night I saw it leave its medallion, glide along the door, grow as big as a real person (as children say), and, walking to the opposite door, try to snatch the pretty nymph from her niche. She uttered piercing cries, but the Bacchante paid no heed to them. She pulled and tore the paper till the nymph detached herself and fled into the middle of the chamber. The other pursued her thither, and as the poor fugitive threw herself on my bed in order to hide herself under my curtain, the furious Bacchante came towards me and pierced us both with her thyrsus, which had become a steeled lance, whose every stroke was to me a wound of which I felt the pain.
In her play with Ursule and Hippolyte she continued to indulge in her passion for vivid imaginative realisation. When playing at crossing the windings of a river, rudely marked with chalk on the floor, five minutes would suffice to generate this kind of hallucination.