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I have taken Aurore's whooping-cough, and, at my age, it is severe. I am, however, better, but hardly able to go about. Write me a line, so I can reserve the hours that you can give me. I embrace you, as I love you, with a full heart. G. Sand The hours that I could give you, dear Master! Why, all the hours, now, by and by, and forever.
At fourteen a necessity which had been parleyed with for two years or more became imperative, and Aurore's maid was taken from her. Explanation is almost superfluous. Aurore was to become a lady and her playmate a lady's maid; but not her maid, because the maid had become, of the two, the ruling spirit. It was a question of grave debate in the mind of M. De Grapion what disposition to make of her.
The discovery of this deeply irritated her grandmother, who at length was provoked to intimate to the girl something of the real motive for insisting on this separation namely, that her mother's antecedents were such as, in the eyes of Aurore's well-wishers, rendered it desirable to establish the daughter's existence apart from that of her parent.
The first had been to surprise her son at Passy, when released from the Revolutionary prison. The second was to meet and escort back his lifeless body, found senseless by the roadside. We have done now with Aurore's ancestry, and must occupy our remaining pages with accounts of herself. Much time is given by her to the record of her early childhood, and the explanation of its various phases.
This conjecture led me to painful imaginings, till the throbbings of my heart drowned the murmur that was causing them. At length Aurore's speech was ended. I waited for the reply. Perhaps I might gather from that what she had said. The tones of the male voice would be loud enough to enable me Hush! hark! I listened I caught the sound of a voice, but not the words. The sound was enough.
Finally, she grew weary of her black hair, and wore a blond periwig, which disgusting her in turn, she finished by appearing in a different head of hair every day in the week. Aurore's new friends proved congenial to her, and the influence of their happy family-life dispersed, she says, her last dreams of the beatitudes of the convent.
But Raoul's insinuation that anybody would entrust him with a private matter brought another laugh. Honoré nodded to his uncle to read it out, and those who could not understand English, as well as those who could, listened. It was a paper Sylvestre had picked out of a waste-basket on the day of Aurore's visit to the counting-room. Agricola read: "What is that layde want in thare with Honoré?"
As the girl was still but seventeen, she was placed under the guardianship of the nearest relative on her father's side a gentleman of rank. When the will was read, Aurore's mother made a violent protest, and caused a most unpleasant scene. "I am the natural guardian of my child," she cried. "No one can take away my rights!"
Aurore had also a boy playmate in a protégé of her grandmother's, five years her senior, who patronised and persecuted her by turns, in his true fraternal fashion. This boy, Hippolyte, the son of a woman of low station, was in fact Aurore's half-brother, adopted from his birth and brought up by Madame Dupin the elder, whose indulgence, where her son was concerned, was infinite.
Aurore's mother seems to us, du reste, the perfect type of a Parisian lorette, the sort of woman so keenly attractive with the bloom of youth and the eloquence of passion, but when these have passed their day, the most detestable of mistresses, the most undesirable of companions. Men of all ranks and ages acknowledge their attraction, endure their tyranny, and curse the misery it inflicts.
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