man to come under his care. Madame Dupin, however, responded to the appeal, and, treating it as a passing affair, was very pleasant and good-humored about it. She was, however, destined to find the great unhappiness

he was twenty years of age, the Directory, | of this biography seems more strange to having decided on an energetic prosecution English readers than that a man should select of the war with Austria and her allies, called his mother as a confidante to share his deout a levy of 200,000 men; and Maurice light at persuading the mistress of another thus found an opportunity of serving without his mother being able to object. He joined the army on the Rhine; and in the next year passed into Switzerland, and crossed the St. Bernard under Napoleon. He was present at the battle of Marengo, and saw a great of her life in the sequel of this amour. When portion of the famous Italian campaign, acting Maurice returned to Paris, the lady went as aide-de-camp to General Dupont. When there too, and even followed him when he peace was declared, he returned to Paris, went to see his mother at Nohant. She took and remained there until 1804, when he was up her abode in a neighboring town; and summoned to Boulogne to join the expedi- Maurice's visits to her naturally excited much tionary force intended for the invasion of scandal, and caused his mother serious anEngland. During his long absences from noyance. Deschartres, who continued to rehome he wrote frequently to his mother; and side at Nohant, tried to effect a coup-dehis letters, being preserved with maternal main, and induced the maire of the place to fondness, have come into the possession of pay her a visit and threaten to expel her Madame Dudevant, who has thought proper from the town. But the issue was very unto give them to the world. They are printed fortunate; for as she refused to go, Maurice in full, and make up nearly four volumes of had no choice but openly to defend her, the work. "Character," says Madame Dude- proclaim himself her protector, and thus apvant, "is in a great measure hereditary; if, pear in direct opposition to his mother. therefore, my readers wish to know what my Henceforth there was a quarrel between the character is, they should first study my mother and son, which was never really father's character; and they cannot do this healed. Maurice lived with his mistress at properly unless they peruse several hundred of his letters." If biographers generally adopt this theory of their art, and consider themselves bound or entitled to collect together all the writings and traditions of the ancestors of the person whose life they are narrating, a hundred volumes would soon be considered a very moderate size for this kind of book. Fortunately, the maternal ancestors of Madame Dudevant did not know how to write, and we are therefore saved the psychological study of reading their letters; and her paternal line is so soon lost in a chaos of illegitimacy, that family records connected with its history were not very likely to have been preserved. Otherwise, there is no saying how far this great triumph of book-tainly achieved, and we do find that the hismaking might not have extended.

When Maurice was in Italy, he fell in with a lady who made a great impression on his heart. She was at that time living under the protection of a general; but the young aidede camp ventured to fall in love with her, and she very disinterestedly returned his passion. He wrote frankly to his mother, and gave her a full account of the progress of the intrigue. Perhaps nothing in the whole

Paris; and at length, after having had one or two children, who died in infancy, he came to the determination to marry a woman from whom he could not bear to part. One month after their union, on the 5th of July 1804, Aurore Dupin, since so well known by the name of George Sand, came into the world and therefore, more fortunate than most ofi her family, Madame Dudevant can just boast of being legitimate. Nothing can be more frank or candid than the manner in which she lays the whole story before the world: and we must confess, that if the elucidation of a female novelist's character is a sufficient excuse for publishing the shame of deceased persons, the point at which she aims is cer

tory of the stock, from which George Sand sprang, may easily be supposed to have had something to do with the startling license of many of her romances.

The family party was curiously constituted; for Aurore's mother had had a daughter by an earlier lover, and her father had had a son by another mistress. Aurore formed the uniting link-Caroline was her sister, Hi olyte was her brother. Thus

social position as compared with what she could have had if she had lived with her mother.

from her cradle she was surrounded with associations adverse to any high-strained notion of the sanctity and necessity of marriage. Her grandmother was almost her But her education was very irregular. only relation whose character was unim-She was taught Latin by the old instructor peached; and her grandmother had striven of her father, Deschartres, and received some moet earnestly to prevent her father from instruction in history and music. Her marrying her mother. When she became grandmother's notion of training a girl old enough to reflect on her position, she was to make her read enough to take a part must have been influenced by finding her- in the conversation of educated society, to self in daily contact with the illegitimate son make her go through a very few of the outof her father. Probably from an early age ward observances of religion, to let her unthis arrangement presented itself to her not derstand thoroughly how little sensible peoas a sacrifice of purity and an infraction of ple believe in their value, and in other matdecorum, but as a triumph of nature and ters to bid her follow the bent of her own natural affections over the conventional prej- inclination. But Aurore was a child of udices of society. We cannot discover that lively feelings, and a strong turn for all that at any period of her life she thought that was romantic and fanciful. She went there was any shame attaching to illegiti- through the course prescribed her; but her macy, or to the connections to which it owes heart was elsewhere. She made romances it origin; and it is not difficult to see that, out of her histories; she invented fantasies as all the recollections of her early life, the on the piano; she composed at a wonderfully memory of her mother, and the history of early age a long fiction, of which a semi-diher ancestry, were on the side of natural vine being called Corambé was the hero ; passion as against the artificial restraints of and she was so delighted with her creation, legalized unions, she would be very much that Corambé almost became a real object predisposed to make the heroes and hero- of devotion to herself. Above all, she found ines of her romances take their stand under in her separation from her mother abundant the same banners. food for feeling. She worked herself up Her father was killed by a fall from his into a belief that her mother was inexpressihorse when she was quite a little girl, and bly dear to her, and she to her mother. She she was at first educated under the joint appointed herself her mother's avenger and management of her mother and her grand-patron against the cruel neglect of her mother. But these ladies soon quarrelled, grandmother. When in Paris, she was peras it was only natural they should do. The mitted to pay her mother occasional visits; grandmother was a lady of the style of the and she then gave vent to the outpourings eighteenth century-philosophical, Voltairian, shrewd, fond of gaiety, fond of her grandchild, fond of ruling all about her. The mother was the daughter of a bird-seller; she was utterly uneducated, was devout in her own way, and was as much like a spoilt child as a grown-up woman can be. As women in every way so dissimilar were also divided by the recollection that the younger had triumphed over the elder, it is not to be supposed that there was much love lost between them. At last the end came; Aurore was left to the charge of her grandmother, and her mother went off to Paris. The elder Madame Dupin was possessed of a competence, and divided her time between her country-seat at Nohant in Berry and Paris; and Aurore had thus considerable advantages in education and in

On

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of her enthusiasm. Her mother was a weak but affectionate woman, and her very childishness made her more attractive to her little daughter. She was, too, of a religious turn of mind, and her religion assumed a form so common in France, but so rare in England. She was supporting herself in the way in which a pretty woman without a farthing was too apt to support herself; but she used to remain on her knees absorbed in the emotion of passionate prayer, and seldom failed to attend Sunday mass; combining, however, with this private piety a great distrust and horror of priests and of the respectably good. Thus, by the circumstances of her childhood, George Sand was forced in the direction in which she afterwards made herself conspicuous; and was taught to seek a refuge from the dulness of ordinary life, and

the straitness of ordinary propriety, in the her companions persuaded themselves that half-prohibited society of a woman of un- there were unhappy victims concealed in tutored affection, of tainted character, and of a vague, sentimental piety.

secret chambers whom it was their duty to release. They scratched the plaster off the She was also subjected during her child- walls in order to find the springs and hinges hood to another influence, the fruits of which of hidden doors; and they even scrambled may be traced throughout her writings. on to the roof, and ran about the leads, with Her country life at Nohant fostered and a vague wish to drop down somewhere and elicited her naturally strong taste for the effect an heroic deliverance of a prisoner. beauties of nature, the delights of rural Perhaps it is not fanciful to trace in the perhappiness, and the society of the agricultural ilous frolics of the little girl the signs of poor. She describes in one of the prettiest that union of boldness and imagination passages of her memoirs, many parts of which she afterwards displayed as a writer. which are written with much grace and force, At length her mistresses became alive to the keen pleasure she took, when quite a the fact, that she was the prime cause of all little child, in building a tiny grotto under the "devilry" of the younger class; and the superintendence of her mother; and she was removed to the older one. Thencehow she collected for its decoration the ten-forward her conduct became much more derest grass, the softest moss, and the most steady. The narrative of the years she brightly-colored stones. She had also a spent among the elder girls is very readable, great fondness for animals, especially for birds,—a liking she conceives herself to have derived from her maternal grandfather; and she tells us that birds will obey her and will confide in her to a degree which astonishes ordinary observers. She had also abundance of playmates, for she mixed freely with the children of the neighboring poor; and she describes her delight in going in winter-time with twenty or thirty young villagers to catch larks in the snow. She also frequented the homes of the peasants when, in the long winter evenings, they told their marvellous stories, and kept alive the romantic traditions which have existed from time immemorial in the centre of France.

When she was about twelve years of age, she was sent to the Couvent des Anglaises, in the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor. The account of the time she passed there is the most interesting part of her memoirs. The young ladies received by the nuns as pupils were divided into a senior and a junior class; and the junior class was said to be composed of three divisions, known familiarly as les diables, les bêtes, and les sages, according as the girls were frisky, stupid, or pious. Aurore Dupin, though forward in learning, belonged by her years to the junior class; and being placed in it, she soon took rank as a leading "devil." She tells us that she was grave, silent, and demure; but could always make others laugh, and was fertile in inventing every kind of mischief. The convent was a large rambling building, and she and

and is interspersed with many excellent remarks on conventual education; but we can only find room to refer to what she says on two subjects-her school-friendships, and her first impressions of religion.

No one can read the narrative of George Sand's school-days, or the sketches which she draws of her companions, without being struck by the union which they indicate of sensibility and sense. There is a great deal of romance; but there is also a great deal of calm judgment and sober appreciation of character. The school-friendships of young ladies have become proverbial for the exaggeration and want of reserve which they 80 often betray. The girl first has her doll, and plays at being a mother; and then finds a school-friend, and plays at being a lover. In the conventual system the possibility of this parody of love-making is keenly appreciated, and regulations of the most sugges tive nature are enforced in a spirit of prurient purity. It is possible that such a system may be harmless for the ordinary run of young women; but it is obvious that girls of a passionate nature must experience, when the crisis of passion comes, a great heightening of emotion from the power of detecting and the habit of magnifying each tiny step in the path of intimacy which they have. acquired in their school-days. There was nothing, however, in the discipline enforced at the Couvent des Anglaises to prevent the formation of very romantic friendships; and these friendships were organized on an estab

lished plan, the mystery, and the very tram- | sufficiently real. Untroubled by doubts, she mels of which, probably added a zest to the accepted the mysteries of Catholicism with delights of this feminine pastime. Not only ecstasy, and fed on the thought that she had were the young ladies bound to arrange eaten the flesh and drunk the blood of her their friends in an order of preference pub- God. Months passed away, and she still licly announced, but they were bound to remained absorbed in the reveries of religi adhere to the order when once made; so that ous fancy-outwardly performing all her George Sand was obliged on one occasion to duties well, but holding herself aloof from explain to her third friend, whom she was her companions. The first shock came not really fond of, that she much regretted be- from any diminution of her faith, but from ing obliged to love best her first and second an appeal being made to a wholly different friends, for whom she did not particularly side of her character. She thought that a care. Her list included four in all; and companion, whom she dearly loved and combining their initials in a word, she scrib- highly respected, was unjustly treated by the bled the word wherever she could find room Superior; and this suggested the doubt to write it. There was therefore no lack of whether all was so perfect in the religious warmth in her sensibility; but she never world as it seemed. She also used to unite speaks of her friends or her friendship with with a devout friend in religious exercises, any foolish raptures; and she shows that and assist her in decking with flowers the she understood them and valued them on altar where they used to pray. But she Bober grounds. The description of Fannelly, began to observe the excessive importance the best loved of her four friends, given at which her companion attached to these the end of the fourteenth volume of the decorations; and recoiling from this occupaantobiography, is as charming as any thing tion as petty and as materialising religion, which George Sand ever wrote. No one she said to herself that mental union with can mistake the pure and lively affection God was every thing, and the form nothing. with which she cherishes the memory of the While she was in this frame of mind, her "bright-haired girl, so gay, and so heedless, bodily strength gave way. She found to her that you would suppose she never thought of sorrow that she had no longer her old fervor any thing, whereas she was always thinking her old power of enduring austerities— how she could please you." And yet no one her old habitual state of rapture. She torcan fail to observe that the traits of Fan-mented herself with scruples; she accused nelly's character are sketched in by a pencil, herself of constant sin; she despaired of her which is not that of a heated fancy, but of a salvation. Fortunately she was not under calm and delicate analysis. The name of the care of mystics. The nuns of the EngGeorge Sand is so associated with the ex- lish convent were by no means anxious to pression of feeling and passion, that, unless foster the spirit of ecstatical piety; and her we take every opportunity to mark the confessor, a Jesuit, gave her sound practical strong under-current of sense and the just- advice. It has been the great work of the ness of observation, which also form a part Jesuits that, in the bosom of Catholicism, of her character, we shall fail to do her they have asserted for this life its due, perjustice, and shall miss a very important haps even more than its due, importance; cause of the influence she has exerted. and refused to remit every hope and interest of man to the world beyond the grave. When George Sand told her scruples to her confessor, he at first cheered her and listened patiently; but, after a time, ordered her to change her way of life altogether to rejoin the society of her old friends, to take plenty of exercise, and enjoy all the amusements of the convent. She obeyed, and became again the centre of life and gaiety. The consequences were most beneficial; she recovered her health and spirits, and took a much more composed view of her religious state. The

The history of her religious struggles at the convent also exhibits the same combination of qualities. At fifteen she experienced, shortly before receiving her first communion, an access of devotional ardor, the protracted effects of which make it indisputable that, in the religious rhapsodies of her novels, she is not talking vain words, but is portraying what she has herself felt, or what she feels herself capable of feeling. Looking back, she calls her state of devotional excitement a "sacred malady;" but at the time it was

crisis of enthusiasm was over. She still who can think and feel, that great men do not all think alike. Profitless as such vague study must otherwise be, it may convey to a mind that needs it a notion of the greatness and diversity of human thought. At last she came to Rousseau; and here was a philosopher exactly suited to her. She was, as she tells us, "a creature of sentiment; " and Rousseau was the apostle of sentimental

purposed becoming a nun, and retained this intention some time after she left the convent; but she was happy, tranquil, and moderate in her zeal. She was certainly aided, in this instance, by the good sense of others more than her own; but in a mental cure, good sense must always be shown as well by the patient as by the physician. The heartiness of her obedience to her director's in- philosophy. She had been brought up in junction, and the rapidity of its success, both testify to the original strength of her mind and the even balance of her natural charac

ter.

the democratic traditions which, after the Restoration, ranged themselves around the memory of Buonaparte. Rousseau was the herald of the great doctrines of equality and She left the convent to reside with her fraternity. She was at once attached to and grandmother at Nohant. The old lady was dissatisfied with Catholicism, and Rousseau shortly afterwards seized with a paralytic preached to her the gospel of natural love attack, and lay for a year between life and and liberty. Rousseau was easy to underdeath. This year decided the future career stand; his passion overpowered her, his of George Sand. She was left almost en language fascinated her. She soon also tirely her own mistress, without any guide began to read the "literature of despair;" or control, and without any duty except she pored over Réné and Byron. The mel that of rendering the few attentions required ancholy so delicious to youth fastened on by her grandmother's state of health. She her. She had at once the satisfaction of took violent exercise, and her spirits rose and her bodily strength grew greater. She began to read, and the first book which her confessor advised her to study was the Génie du Christianisme. It was exactly the book to awaken thought in her mind; it showed her that Catholicism had taken a new direction -that its adherents were not satisfied with the religion of which she had looked on a conventual life as the ideal, and which she had found embodied in the familiar De Imitatione Christi. The author of that work saw all wisdom in shunning the world, all love in divine love, all duty in isolation from the sphere of duties. Chateaubriand held up a very different picture. Christianity was with him the most humane, the most genial, the most sociable of religions-the truest friend of learning and knowledge. She put away the old teacher for the new. She determined to devote herself to her family duties, and to seek for wisdom in the study On her grandmother's death, she became of all the famous books to which she could proprietress of Nohant, and shortly afterget access. She gives a list of the philosophers whom she attacked, including Locke, Leibnitz, and Aristotle; and as she was seventeen, and about as uninformed as most French girls of that age, it is not to be wondered at that she got no great profit out of the works of those eminent writers, except the knowledge, so instructive to the young

thinking the world out of joint, and of hating her own existence; she mourned over the condition of the poor and oppressed, and she had serious thoughts of drowning herself. In time, the first flush of these feelings passed away; she got over the childish stage of big thoughts; but the influences of that year never ceased to act on her. The singular tenacity of her character had been made cling to a few leading ideas, which she never afterwarns abandoned. Rousseau and Chateaubriand have been the stars of her destiny. She is, indeed, the Rousseau of modern France; like him in her passion, in her sympathies, in her detestation of established 80ciety; but unlike him, because a poetical, vague, and essentially mundane Christianity has worked itself deeply into all her feelings, through the interpretation which Chateaubriand taught her to put upon the lessons of the old mystical Catholicism.

wards was married to M. Dudevant, a lieutenant in the army. Gossip has been so busy with her name, that few readers require to be told that her married life was not a happy one. She does not, however, permit herself to speak ill of the man whose name she bears; and she narrates the incidents of their courtship with an animation and ten