“Conceive,” one of her biographers says, “the sadness of this wild bird shut up in the cage of the English Augustines in the ‘Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor.’ She wept tears of bitter regret for the cool depths of woods, the sunny mornings, and dim quiet evenings of her home.”
Comfort was soon found however in her work, and in the schoolgirl friendships that she formed, some of which lasted her lifetime.
In 1820, when sixteen, she returned to Nohant. Her grandmother died in the following year; and then, although often suffering from her mother’s irritable and capricious temper, she seems to have enjoyed perfect liberty: riding, walking, and reading; devouring everything that came into her hands, from Thomas à Kempis to Jean Jacques Rousseau. On one occasion, kneeling before the altar in the chapel, she was seized with a paroxysm of devotion and talked of becoming a nun. To this succeeded complete emancipation in her religious opinions, and a refusal even to conform to the observances of her Church. A quarrel with her confessor accomplished the separation from orthodoxy. She became a deist, and remained so for the rest of her life, making art her religion, and passing through all the phases of pessimism and Saint-Simonianism that prevailed in her day.
In 1822, to escape the solicitations of her mother, she consented to marry Monsieur Dudevant, son of one of the barons of the Empire.
She describes in her autobiography how one evening, when sitting outside Tortoni’s eating ices after the theatre, she heard a friend (Madame Duplessis) say to her husband: “See, there is Casimir!” Whereupon a slight, elegant young man of military bearing came up to salute them. Her fate was sealed from that day. They were married in September 1822, she being only eighteen. After paying a few visits they returned to live at Nohant. The letters begin consecutively after the birth of her first child, and are written at odd times, and from different places—sometimes in the middle of the night, while all the household were asleep, the lightning flashing and the thunder rolling; sometimes in a garret overlooking a narrow little street of the town of Châtre, at six o’clock in the morning, the nightingales singing outside and the scent of a lilac-tree pervading the air; sometimes at her grandmother’s old bureau in the hall at Nohant, with all her family round her.
The portion of the “Correspondence” which will take readers most by surprise is that describing the first years of her married life. There is no desire here “to lose her identity in the great conscience of humanity!” her heart seems perfectly satisfied bending over her cradle, and her mind entirely occupied with the “concrete duties” of manufacturing soothing syrups and amusing her children.
“My son is splendidly fat and fresh,” she writes to her mother. “He has a bright complexion and determined expression, which I must say is borne out by his character. He has six teeth which he uses with great vigor, and he stands beautifully on his feet, though too young to run alone.”
Casimir is mentioned now and then, and always with a certain amount of affection. She is evidently attached to him through the children, and relates how fond he is of her and them.
“Our dear papa,” she says, “is very much
taken up with his harvest. He has adopted a