Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/20

10 intelligently before were re-read with a new delight. She learnt grammar with Deschartres, and from her grand-mother took her first lessons in music, an art of which she became passionately fond; and it always remained for her a favourite source of enjoyment, though she never acquired much proficiency as a musical performer. The educational doctrines of Rousseau had then brought into fashion a régime of open-air exercise and freedom for the young, such as we commonly associate with English, rather than French, child-life; and Aurore's early years—when domestic hostilities and nursery tyrannies, from which, like most sensitive children, she suffered inordinately, were suspended—were passed in the careless, healthy fashion approved in this country. A girl of her own age, but of lower degree, was taken into the house to share her studies and pastimes. Little Ursule was to become, in later years, the faithful servant of her present companion, who had then become lady of the manor, and who never lost sight of this humble friend. 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 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. With these, and the children of the