Page:Daughters of Genius.djvu/563

 GEORGE SAND. 551 playing with her village companions, exploring every nook and corner of the fields and woods, and listening half creduously to the legends and fairy tales of the neighbor- hood, her vivid imagination and her admirable health made her one of the gayest and happiest of children. After a time, too, a separation was gradually effected between her mother and herself, and this, although griev- ous in itself, rendered her life more peaceful. Madame Maurice Dupin, who was poor, in consideration of the benefits such an arrangement would confer upon the child, consented to leave her in the care of her grandmother, and herself removed permanently to Paris. Aurore slowly learned to love the old lady whose formal manners long repelled and chilled her. For years it was her dearest hope to effect a reconciliation, and she resented with more than childish indignation the scornful remarks of the servants, who used to taunt her with wishing to go to her mother and eat beans in a garret, rather than stay at the chateau and learn to be a lady. Her education was varied and peculiar. While on the one hand her grandmother and her grandmother's friends tried their best to teach her the elaborate accomplish- ments and submissive demeanor which they considered desirable in a young girl, on the other she was dabbling in Latin, history, literature, and classic mythology, play- ing practical jokes upon her tutor, and inventing new games and dances for herself and the village children. Of religious instruction she had none. In the course of time she invented for herself a Being half hero, half deity, whom she named Corambe*, a Greek god possessed of the Christian virtues, to whom she erected shrines in the woods, before which, as an acceptable sacrifice, she would lay flowers and set free the birds and butterflies that she had taken captive. When she was thirteen, all this came to an end. She