Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/18

8 the road, shaded by trees, beside a pleasure ground of no vast extent, but with its large flower-garden and little wood allowed to spread at nature's bidding, quite in the English style. Behind the house cluster a score of cottages of the scattered hamlet of Nohant; in the centre rises the smallest of churches, with a tiny cemetery hedged around and adjoining the wall of the manor garden.

At this country home the tired travellers gladly alighted; but they had barely a few weeks in which to recover from the fatigues of their Spanish campaign, when a terrible calamity overwhelmed the household. Maurice Dupin, riding home one night from La Châtre, was thrown from his horse and killed on the spot.

The story of Aurore Dupin's individual life opens at once with the death of her father—a loss she was still too young to comprehend, but for which she was soon to suffer through the strange, the anomalous position, in which it was to place her. Maurice Dupin's patrician mother and her plebeian daughter-in-law, bereft thus violently of him who had been the only possible link between them, found themselves hopelessly, actively, and increasingly at variance. Their tempers clashed, their natures were antipathetic, their views contradictory, their positions irreconcileable. Aurore was not only thrust into an atmosphere of strife, but condemned to be the apple of discord. She