She thus whimsically relates an incident small in itself, but one that made an impression on her owing to the existing circumstances:
“I was living in what used to be my grandmother’s boudoir, because there was only one door, and no one could come in unless I liked. My two children sleep in the room next to me. The boudoir was so small that I could hardly fit into it with all my books. I therefore slept in a hammock, and wrote at an old bureau, which I used in company with a cricket, who seeing me so often had become perfectly tame. It lived on my wafers, which I purposely chose white for fear of poisoning it. After eating its meal on my paper as I wrote, it always went and sang in its favorite drawer. One evening, not hearing it move, I searched everywhere, but the only remains I found of my poor friend were his hind legs. He never told me that he went out for a walk every day, and the maid had crushed him when shutting the window. I buried him in a datura flower, which I kept for some time as a sacred relic. I could not get rid of a strange foreboding that with the song of this little cricket my domestic happiness had fled for ever.”
Meantime the artistic leaven was working within her. On one of her flying visits to Paris she entered the Louvre and felt singularly “taken possession of” by the beautiful pictures around her.
“I returned,” she says, “again and again, arriving early in the morning and going away late in the evening. I was transported into another world, and was haunted day and night by the grand figures created by genius. The past and present were revealed to me, I became classical and romantic at the same time, without understanding the struggle between the two that agitated the artistic world. I seemed to have acquired a treasure, the existence of which I had never been aware of. My spirit expanded, and when I left the gallery I walked through the streets as in a dream.”
After this awakening of her intellectual nature she returned to Nohant, more determined than ever to escape from her wretched life, and to save her children from influences that might destroy them in the future. Her first object was to endeavor to make money enough to procure the means of existence. She tried everything, translating, drawing, needlework, and at last discovered that she could earn an humble pittance by painting flowers on wooden boxes. To this pursuit she devoted herself for some time, believing it to be the only trade for which she was fitted.
Meantime her domestic affairs came to a crisis sooner than she expected. The cause is thus related to Jules Boucoiran:
“You know my home life, and how intolerable it is! You yourself have often been astonished to see me raise my head the day after I had been crushed to the earth. But there is a term to everything. Events latterly have hastened the resolution which otherwise I should not have been strong enough to take. No one suspects anything; there has been no open quarrel. When seeking for something in my husband’s desk I found a packet addressed to myself. On it were written these words: ‘To be opened after my death.’ I opened it however at once. What did I find? imprecations, anathemas, insulting accusations, and the word ‘perversity.’”
This discovery, she tells him, decided her to come to an arrangement with her husband at once, by which she was to live the greater part of the year in Paris with her children, spending a month or two of the summer at Nohant. There were, no doubt, faults on both sides. She herself confesses in her autobiography “that she was no saint, and was often unjust, impetuous in her resolves, too hasty in her judgments.” Wherever there are strong feelings and desires there must be discord at times.
“Happy he who plants cabbages,” says she. “He has one foot on the earth, and the other is only raised off it the height of the spade. Unfortunately for me, I fear if I did plant cabbages I should ask for a logical justification for my activity, and some reason for the necessity of planting cabbages.”
Hers is not a nature that must be judged coldly. What right have we to say that she was to clip the wings of her genius, pass her years in the service of conventionality, and never seek the full development of her artistic nature? When she left the home of her childhood with pilgrim’s staff and scrip to start along the thorny path that led to the shrine of art, she was not actuated by any weak and wayward desire of change, but by the vehement and passionate desire to give forth to the world what was locked within her breast.