Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/43

Rh very narrow restrictions laid down by the social code of La Châtre was, it must be owned, hardly to be expected. It was perhaps premature to throw down the gauntlet at sixteen, but her inexperience and isolation were complete. The grandmother in her dotage was no counsellor at all. Deschartres, an oddity himself, cared for none of these things. Those best acquainted with her at La Châtre, families the heads of which had known her father well and whose younger members had fraternised with her from childhood upwards, liked her none the less for her unusual proceedings, and defended her stoutly against her detractors.

"You are losing your best friend," said her dying grandmother to her when the end came, in December 1821. Aurore was, indeed, placed in a difficult and painful situation. She had inherited all the property of the deceased who, in her will, expressed her desire that her own nearest relations by her marriage with M. Dupin, a family of the name of de Villeneuve, well-off and highly connected, should succeed her as guardians to her ward. But it was impossible to dispute the claims of Madame Maurice Dupin to the care of her own daughter if she chose to assert them, which she quickly did, bearing off the girl with her to Paris—Nohant being left under the stewardship of Deschartres—and by her unconciliatory behaviour further alienating the other side of the family from whom Aurore,