Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 49, November, 1861 | Page 9

soon allowed to run at will, dividing her time
pretty equally between the study and the fields. Thus she grew in mind
and body from seven to twelve, promising to be tall and handsome,
though not in after-years fulfilling this promise; for of her stature she
tells us that it did not exceed that of her mother, whom she calls a
_petite femme_,--and of her appearance she simply says that in her
youth "with eyes, hair, and a robust organization," she was neither
handsome nor ugly. At the age of twelve, a social necessity compelled
her to go through the form of confession and the first communion. Her
grandmother was divided between the convictions of her own
liberalism, and the desire not to place her cherished charge in direct
opposition to the imperious demands of a Catholic community. The
laxity of the period allowed the compromise to be managed in a merely
formal and superficial manner. The grandmother tried to give the rite a
certain significance, at the same time imploring the child "not to
suppose that she was about to eat her Creator." The confessor asked

none of those questions which our author simply qualifies as infamous,
and, with a very mild course of catechism and slight dose of devotion,
that Rubicon of maturity was passed. Not far beyond it waited a terrible
trial, perhaps as great a sorrow as the whole life was to bring. Aurore's
diligence in her studies was marred by the secret intention, long
cherished, of escaping to her mother, and adopting with her her former
profession of dress-maker. Having one day answered reproof with a
petulant assertion of her desire to rejoin her mother at all hazards, the
grandmother determined to put an end to such projects by a severe
measure. Aurore was banished from her presence during a certain
number of days. Neither friend nor servant spoke to her. She describes
naturally enough this lonely, uncomforted condition, in which, more
than ever, she meditated upon the wished-for return to her mother, and
the beginning with her of a new life of industry and privation.
Summoned at last to her grandmother's bedside, and kneeling to ask for
reconciliation, she is forced to stay there, and to listen to the most cruel
and literal account of her mother's life, its early errors, and their
inevitable consequences.
"All that she narrated was true in point of fact, and attested by
circumstances whose detail admitted of no doubt. But this terrible
history might have been unveiled to me without injury to my respect
and love for my mother, and, thus told, it would have been much more
probable and more true. It would have sufficed to tell all the causes of
her misfortunes,--loneliness and poverty from the age of fourteen years,
the corruption of the rich, who are there to lie in wait for hunger and to
blight the flower of innocence, the pitiless rigorism of opinion, which
allows no return and accepts no expiation. They should also have told
me how my mother had redeemed the past, how faithfully she had
loved my father, how, since his death, she had lived humble, sad, and
retired. Finally, my poor grandmother let fall the fatal word. My mother
was a lost woman, and I a blind child rushing towards a precipice."
The horror of this disclosure did not work the miracle anticipated.
Aurore submitted indeed outwardly, but a spell of hardness and
hopelessness was drawn around her young heart, which neither tears
nor tenderness could break. The blow struck at the very roots of life
and hope in her. Self-respect was wounded in its core. If the mother
who bore her was vile, then she was vile also. All object in life seemed

gone. She tried to live from day to day without interest, without hope.
From her dark thoughts she found refuge only in extravagant gayety,
which brought physical weariness, but no repose of mind. She, who had
been on the whole a docile, manageable child, became so riotous,
unreasonable, and insupportable, that the only alternative of utter waste
of character seemed to be the discipline and seclusion of the convent.
She was accordingly taken to Paris, and received as a pensionnaire in
the Convent des Anglaises, which had been, in the Revolution, her
grandmother's prison. To Aurore it was rather a place of refuge than a
place of detention. The chords of life had been cruelly jarred in her
bosom, and the discords in her character thence resulting agonized her
more than they displeased others. As for the extraordinary
communication which had led to this disorder of mind, we do not
hesitate, under the circumstances, to pronounce it an act of gratuitous
cruelty. Of all pangs that can assail a human heart, none transcends that
of learning the