Sometimes these birds perched on the hog merely to get warm, or in order the better to observe the labour from which they were to profit. I have often seen an old ashy rook balancing himself there on one leg with a pensive and melancholy air, while the hog bored deeply in the soil, and by these labours caused it oscillations which disturbed it, rendered it impatient, and finally drove it to correct this clumsiness by strokes of its beak.
Nor was it merely as playmates that the young lady from the château deigned to associate with the peasantry. She threw herself with ardent sympathy into the hard toilsome life of the people. One day, as she chanced to see an old woman stooping, as well as her stiff limbs allowed her, to gather sticks in her grandmother’s garden, she set vigorously to work with bill-hook cutting dry wood, working late into the evening, and forgetting all about her meal, for she was ‘strong as a peasant girl’. She then set out with blood-stained face and hands, and with a weight greater than that of her own body, for the poor woman’s hut, where she enjoyed a well-earned slice from her black loaf.
This contact with the rustic mind, so oddly introduced into the fashionable scheme of education, exerted a profound effect on the child’s imagination. She listened eagerly to the superstitious stories which the hemp-dressers related when they came to crush the hemp, sitting in the moonlight within view of the crosses of a cemetery. Among these were a sacristan’s gruesome stories of interments and of the rats that lived in the belfry. The doings of those rats, she tells us, would of themselves fill a volume. He knew them all, and had given them the names of the more important among the deceased villagers. They were very clever, and could, among other exploits, arrange grains or beans given them in the form of a circle enclosing a cross. It is hardly surprising to learn that these stories robbed Aurore of her sleep.
The rustic legend of the grande bête much exercised the girl’s brain. She tried to reconcile the superstition with what she had learnt about the animal kingdom. And in this way she concluded that the creature must be a member of a species almost entirely extinct. She imagined that it was leading a solitary existence, being able to survive the rest of its species by hiding during the day and wandering at night. This weird conception soon began to expand into a zoological romance.
If the girl’s imaginative impulse had been excited by her historical studies, it could not but be roused to preternatural activity by the stirring political events of the time. In 1812, when she was just eight years old, occurred Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia. The absence of all news of the army for fifteen days gave a new direction to her reverie.
I imagined that I possessed wings, that I darted through space, and that peering into the abysses of the horizon I discovered the vast snows and the endless steppes of White Russia. I hovered, took my bearings in the air, and at last spied the wandering columns of our unhappy legions. I guided them towards France—for that which tormented me the most was that they did not know where they were, and that they were moving towards Asia, plunging more and more into deserts as they turned their backs on the West.
A quaint illustration of the conflict the child’s mind was passing through under the contradictory impressions of Napoleon’s character received from her mother and from her new instructors at Nohant, is given us in the following:—
Once I dreamt I carried him (the Emperor) through space and set him on the cupola of the Tuileries. There I had a long talk with him, put him a thousand questions, and said to him, ‘If thou prove thyself by thy answers, as people say, a monster, an ambitious man, a drinker of blood, I will cast thee down and dash thee to pieces on the threshold of thy palace; but if thou justify thyself, if thou be what I have believed, the good, the great, the just Emperor, the father of the French, I will replace thee on thy throne, and with my sword of fire defend thee from thy enemies’. He thereupon opened his heart and confessed that he had committed many faults from too great a love of glory, but he swore that he loved France, and that henceforth he would only think of the happiness of the people. On this I touched him with my sword of fire, which rendered him invulnerable.
A Self-evolved Religion.
Perhaps there is no domain of children’s thought and feeling that is more remote from our older experience, and consequently less easily understood by us, than that of religion. Their first ideas about the supernatural are indeed, as we have seen above, though supplied by us, not controlled by us.