Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/27

Rh thing of the popular infatuation for the Emperor, and her fancy would create him over again, as he might have been had his energies been properly directed. Her day-dreams were often so vivid as to affect her senses with all the force of realities.

Such a visionary life might have been most dangerous and mentally enervating had her organisation been less robust, and the tendency to reverie not been matched by lively external perception and plentiful physical activity. As it was, if at one moment she was in a cloudland of her own, or poring over the stories of the Iliad, the classic mythologies, or Tasso's Gerusalemme, the next would see her scouring the fields with Ursule and Hippolyte, plaving practical jokes on the tutor, and extemporising wild out-of-door games and dances with her village companions.

Of serious religious education she received none at all. Here, again, the authorities were divided. Her mother was pious in a primitive way, though holding aloof from priestly influences. The grandmother, a disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of Voltaire, had renounced the Catholic creed and was what was then called a Deist. But beyond discouraging a belief in miraculous agencies she preserved a neutrality with her ward on the subject, and Aurore was left free to drift as her nature should decide. Instinctively she felt more drawn towards her mother's unreasoning, emotional faith than towards a system of philosophic,