The Grandmother’s Regime
It was verily a new home, this country house at Nohant. Besides the grave grandmamma bent on drilling Aurore into the proprieties, there was another solemn figure in Deschartres, her friend and counsellor, who combined the functions of steward of the estate and tutor of the young people. His pupils were Aurore herself, a half-brother Hippolyte, whose birth added one more irregularity to the family history, and of whom the Histoire has much to say. Hippolyte was a wild-tempered youth, more given to mischievous adventure and practical joking than to serious study, and proved a considerable set-off to the formal gravity of the elders of the household. A second youthful companion was supplied in Clotilde, a girl of humble parentage, who was probably introduced by the authorities as a concession to Rousseau’s teaching, and supplied a link between the young lady and the peasant world she was to love and to portray. Beyond the house was the unpretending country of Le Bas Berry, with its ‘landes’ or wastes, the ‘Valée Noire’ of Aurore’s early descriptions, which more than one of our writers have found half English in character, and which was to become to Aurore what the Midlands were to George Eliot.
The first effect of this forced separation from the mother seems to have been to throw Aurore in upon herself, and to confirm her natural tendency to reverie. She says much at this stage of her day-dreaming, which overtook her both when alone and when joining her companions in play. It visited her regularly as she sat at her mother’s feet in the evening listening to her reading, with an old screen covered with green taffeta between her and the fire.
I saw a little of the fire through this worn taffeta, and it formed on it little stars, whose radiation I increased by blinking my eyes. Then little by little I lost the meaning of the phrases which my mother read. Her voice threw me into a kind of moral stupor, in which it was impossible for me to follow an idea. Images began to shape themselves before me, and came and settled on the green screen. They were woods, meadows, rivers, towns of a grotesque and gigantic architecture, as I have often seen them in dreams; enchanted palaces with gardens like nothing that exists, with thousands of birds of azure, gold, and purple, which sprang on the flowers and let themselves be caught.... There were roses—green, black, violet, and especially blue.336... I closed my eyes and still saw them, but when I reopened them I could only find them again upon the screen.
As at Madrid, so at Nohant: the splendour of her new home caused her alarm at first. On the wall-paper of her bedroom above each door was a large medallion with a figure: the one a joyous dancing Flora; the other a grave, severe Bacchante, standing with arm stretched out leaning on her thyrsus. The first was beloved, the second dreaded. The child’s bed was so placed that she had to turn her back on her favourite. She hid her head under the bed-clothes and tried not to see that terribly stern Bacchante, but in vain.
In the middle of the night I saw it leave its medallion, glide along the door, grow as big as a real person (as children say), and, walking to the opposite door, try to snatch the pretty nymph from her niche. She uttered piercing cries, but the Bacchante paid no heed to them. She pulled and tore the paper till the nymph detached herself and fled into the middle of the chamber. The other pursued her thither, and as the poor fugitive threw herself on my bed in order to hide herself under my curtain, the furious Bacchante came towards me and pierced us both with her thyrsus, which had become a steeled lance, whose every stroke was to me a wound of which I felt the pain.
In her play with Ursule and Hippolyte she continued to indulge in her passion for vivid imaginative realisation. When playing at crossing the windings of a river, rudely marked with chalk on the floor, five minutes would suffice to generate this kind of hallucination.
I lost all notion of reality, and believed I could see the trees, the water, the rocks—a vast country—and the sky, now bright, now laden with clouds which were about to burst and increase the danger of crossing the river. In what a vast space children think they are acting when they thus walk from table to bed, from the fireplace to the door!
On one of these occasions, Hippolyte, with the boy’s bent to realism, took the water jug, and pouring its contents on the floor, produced a closer semblance of the river. The natural consequence followed: the children, wholly absorbed in their little drama, were caught by Aurore’s mother in the very act of paddling with naked feet and legs in a dirty puddle formed by the water and the staining of the floor, and were visited with summary chastisement.
More daring pranks would sometimes be ventured on with Hippolyte. One day, as Deschartres was away shooting, the boy got one of his works on Incantation, and tried, much in the fashion of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, to get a peep at the supernatural. Mysterious lines, digits, etc., were duly traced on the floor with chalk, and other preparations carried out. Then they awaited with deepening agitation the first indication of success, the darting out of a blue flame on certain digits or figures. Long minutes passed, yet no blue flame, no devil’s horns, appeared to thrill the eager watchers. At length Hippolyte, in order to keep up the girl’s excitement, put his ear to the floor and declared that he could hear the crackling sound of a flame. But it was all in vain. After all it was but a game, ‘though a game that made our hearts beat’.
Hippolyte was given to dangerous experiments, which he dignified by high-sounding names. Thus he one day put gunpowder into a big log and threw this into the fire, with the view of blowing the saucepan into the kitchen, an occupation which he cheerfully described as studying the theory of volcanoes. He succeeded in leading on Aurore into pranks of a decidedly hoydenish character, such as must have sadly grieved the decorous grandmamma had she known of them. They one day went so far as to dig a trough across the garden-path, fill this with light wet earth, duly cover it with sticks and leaves, and then watch Deschartres, who was particularly vain of his white stockings, as with the stiff, pompous gait of the pedagogue he marched straight into the trap.
Such a child as Aurore, with her fits of reverie alternating with somewhat rude outbursts of animal spirits, was not easily drilled into those proprieties on which Madame Dupin set so high a value. This good lady took great pains to make Aurore walk properly, wear her gloves, give up the familiar ‘thou,’ and adopt the stilted mode of address of the fashionable world. But she did not appreciate these educational experiments. ‘It seemed to me that she shut me in with herself in a big box when she said to me, “Amusez-vous tranquillement”.’ While, for the sake of pleasing her guardian, she outwardly conformed to the rules of society, in her heart she remained a rebel, and was dreadfully bored, when she ceased to be amused, by her grandmother’s ‘old Countesses’. One exception to her general dislike of the grand personages she had now to meet was made in the case of her great-uncle, the Abbé of Beaumont. He seems to have been a man of ability and culture, as well as of amiable heart, and he proved a good friend of the family after the death of Colonel Dupin by improvising the distraction of a comedy at Nohant, in which Deschartres’ flute did duty as orchestra, and the little Aurore was called on to dance a ballet all by herself. The Abbé’s house, which was decorated throughout in the style of Louis XIV., filled her with admiration, and she loved to wander, candle in hand, alone through its vast salons while the older people were absorbed in their cards. This grand-uncle, by-the-bye, served in part as the prototype of the Canon in Consuelo.
The formal teaching was mostly handed over to Deschartres, though the grandmother gave instruction in music. Aurore can hardly be said to have been a backward child. She read well at four. Towards five she learnt to write, but not having patience to copy out the alphabet, struck out an original orthography of her own, and indited letters in this to Ursule and Hippolyte. It was, she tells us, very simple and full of hieroglyphics. She devoured a certain class of books, and found delight for five or six months in the stories of Madame d’Aulnoy and of Perrault, which she came across at Nohant. She adds that though she has never re-read them since, she could repeat them all from beginning to end. She tried, out of regard for her grandmamma, to take kindly to arithmetic, Latin, and French versification, which Deschartres taught her, but she could not master her dislike. After a little scene, in which the passionate Deschartres threw a big dictionary at the girl’s head, the Latin had to be given up altogether. The study she liked best was history, since it gave her the chance of indulging in the pleasures of imagination. She had to prepare extracts from a book for her grandmother, and as she soon found that these were not compared with the original, she began to introduce additions of her own. Without altering essential facts, she tells us, she would place the historical personage in new imaginary situations, so as to develop the character more completely. In truth, she seems to have used history very much after the fashion which Aristotle, and after him Lessing, recommend to the poets, varying the situation, but leaving the character intact.
In addition to these more solid studies, the young lady had special lessons in dancing and in calligraphy. Both the dancing-master and the writing-master came in for her ridicule. The latter, she tells us, was
a professor of large pretensions, capable of spoiling the best hand with his systems.... He had invented various instruments by which he compelled his pupils to hold up the head, to keep the elbow free, three fingers extended on the pen, and the little finger stretched on the paper in such a way as to support the weight of the hand.
It must have been a joyous moment for Aurore when she was set free from the restraints and impositions of the château for a couple of hours’ visit to some adjoining farm, where she could shout, laugh, and romp with the peasant girls. Here she would climb the trees, rush wildly down from the top to the bottom of a mountain of sheaves in the barn, and do other outrageous things; or when the dream-mood was on her she would quietly contemplate her rustic friends as they tended the lambs, hunted for eggs, or gathered fruit from the orchard, weaving their figures into one of her interminable romances.
Among the charming rural pictures that her pen has drawn for us in these recollections there is one of a swineherd, called Plaisir, for whom she conceived a strange friendship. She loved to watch his odd figure, always clothed in a blouse and hemp trousers, ‘which with his hands and naked feet had taken the colour and the hardness of the earth,’ armed with a triangular iron instrument, ‘the sceptre of swineherds,’ and looking like ‘a gnome of the glebe, a kind of devil between man and werwolf’. As the swine turned up the soil with their snouts, the birds would come to forage.
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.