I lost all notion of reality, and believed I could see the trees, the water, the rocks—a vast country—and the sky, now bright, now laden with clouds which were about to burst and increase the danger of crossing the river. In what a vast space children think they are acting when they thus walk from table to bed, from the fireplace to the door!
On one of these occasions, Hippolyte, with the boy’s bent to realism, took the water jug, and pouring its contents on the floor, produced a closer semblance of the river. The natural consequence followed: the children, wholly absorbed in their little drama, were caught by Aurore’s mother in the very act of paddling with naked feet and legs in a dirty puddle formed by the water and the staining of the floor, and were visited with summary chastisement.
More daring pranks would sometimes be ventured on with Hippolyte. One day, as Deschartres was away shooting, the boy got one of his works on Incantation, and tried, much in the fashion of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, to get a peep at the supernatural. Mysterious lines, digits, etc., were duly traced on the floor with chalk, and other preparations carried out. Then they awaited with deepening agitation the first indication of success, the darting out of a blue flame on certain digits or figures. Long minutes passed, yet no blue flame, no devil’s horns, appeared to thrill the eager watchers. At length Hippolyte, in order to keep up the girl’s excitement, put his ear to the floor and declared that he could hear the crackling sound of a flame. But it was all in vain. After all it was but a game, ‘though a game that made our hearts beat’.
Hippolyte was given to dangerous experiments, which he dignified by high-sounding names. Thus he one day put gunpowder into a big log and threw this into the fire, with the view of blowing the saucepan into the kitchen, an occupation which he cheerfully described as studying the theory of volcanoes. He succeeded in leading on Aurore into pranks of a decidedly hoydenish character, such as must have sadly grieved the decorous grandmamma had she known of them. They one day went so far as to dig a trough across the garden-path, fill this with light wet earth, duly cover it with sticks and leaves, and then watch Deschartres, who was particularly vain of his white stockings, as with the stiff, pompous gait of the pedagogue he marched straight into the trap.
Such a child as Aurore, with her fits of reverie alternating with somewhat rude outbursts of animal spirits, was not easily drilled into those proprieties on which Madame Dupin set so high a value. This good lady took great pains to make Aurore walk properly, wear her gloves, give up the familiar ‘thou,’ and adopt the stilted mode of address of the fashionable world. But she did not appreciate these educational experiments. ‘It seemed to me that she shut me in with herself in a big box when she said to me, “Amusez-vous tranquillement”.’ While, for the sake of pleasing her guardian, she outwardly conformed to the rules of society, in her heart she remained a rebel, and was dreadfully bored, when she ceased to be amused, by her grandmother’s ‘old Countesses’. One exception to her general dislike of the grand personages she had now to meet was made in the case of her great-uncle, the Abbé of Beaumont. He seems to have been a man of ability and culture, as well as of amiable heart, and he proved a good friend of the family after the death of Colonel Dupin by improvising the distraction of a comedy at Nohant, in which Deschartres’ flute did duty as orchestra, and the little Aurore was called on to dance a ballet all by herself. The Abbé’s house, which was decorated throughout in the style of Louis XIV., filled her with admiration, and she loved to wander, candle in hand, alone through its vast salons while the older people were absorbed in their cards. This grand-uncle, by-the-bye, served in part as the prototype of the Canon in Consuelo.
The formal teaching was mostly handed over to Deschartres, though the grandmother gave instruction in music. Aurore can hardly be said to have been a backward child. She read well at four. Towards five she learnt to write, but not having patience to copy out the alphabet, struck out an original orthography of her own, and indited letters in this to Ursule and Hippolyte. It was, she tells us, very simple and full of hieroglyphics. She devoured a certain class of books, and found delight for five or six months in the stories of Madame d’Aulnoy and of Perrault, which she came across at Nohant. She adds that though she has never re-read them since, she could repeat them all from beginning to end. She tried, out of regard for her grandmamma, to take kindly to arithmetic, Latin, and French versification, which Deschartres taught her, but she could not master her dislike. After a little scene, in which the passionate Deschartres threw a big dictionary at the girl’s head, the Latin had to be given up altogether. The study she liked best was history, since it gave her the chance of indulging in the pleasures of imagination. She had to prepare extracts from a book for her grandmother, and as she soon found that these were not compared with the original, she began to introduce additions of her own. Without altering essential facts, she tells us, she would place the historical personage in new imaginary situations, so as to develop the character more completely. In truth, she seems to have used history very much after the fashion which Aristotle, and after him Lessing, recommend to the poets, varying the situation, but leaving the character intact.
In addition to these more solid studies, the young lady had special lessons in dancing and in calligraphy. Both the dancing-master and the writing-master came in for her ridicule. The latter, she tells us, was
a professor of large pretensions, capable of spoiling the best hand with his systems.... He had invented various instruments by which he compelled his pupils to hold up the head, to keep the elbow free, three fingers extended on the pen, and the little finger stretched on the paper in such a way as to support the weight of the hand.
It must have been a joyous moment for Aurore when she was set free from the restraints and impositions of the château for a couple of hours’ visit to some adjoining farm, where she could shout, laugh, and romp with the peasant girls. Here she would climb the trees, rush wildly down from the top to the bottom of a mountain of sheaves in the barn, and do other outrageous things; or when the dream-mood was on her she would quietly contemplate her rustic friends as they tended the lambs, hunted for eggs, or gathered fruit from the orchard, weaving their figures into one of her interminable romances.
Among the charming rural pictures that her pen has drawn for us in these recollections there is one of a swineherd, called Plaisir, for whom she conceived a strange friendship. She loved to watch his odd figure, always clothed in a blouse and hemp trousers, ‘which with his hands and naked feet had taken the colour and the hardness of the earth,’ armed with a triangular iron instrument, ‘the sceptre of swineherds,’ and looking like ‘a gnome of the glebe, a kind of devil between man and werwolf’. As the swine turned up the soil with their snouts, the birds would come to forage.