Between the extreme reserve of the last two volumes and the wild
assertions of so many we would gladly keep the _juste milieu_, if
we could; but we wish only truth, and it is not at the hands of the
scandalmongers of any society--is it?--that we seek that commodity. The
decree of the court which at a later day gave her the guardianship
of her children, and the friendship of many illustrious and of some
irreproachable men, must be accepted in favor of her of whom we
write,--and the known fanaticism of slander, and the love of the
marvellous, which craves, in stories of good or evil, such monstrous
forms for its gratification, cause us, on the other side, to deduct
a large average from the narrations current against her. But we
anticipate.

Aurore, at first, was neither happy nor unhappy in her marriage. Her
surroundings were friendly and pleasant, and the birth of a son, a third
Maurice, soon brought to her experience the keenest joy of womanhood.
Before this child numbered two years, however, she began to feel a
certain blank in her household existence, an emptiness, a discouragement
as to all things, whose cause she could not understand. In this _ennui_,
she tells us, her husband sympathized, and by common consent they strove
to remedy it by frequent changes of abode. They visited Paris, Plessis,
returned to Nohant, made a journey in the Pyrenees, a visit to Guillery,
the château of Colonel Dudevant. Still the dark guest pursued them.
Aurore does not pretend that there was any special cause for her
suffering. It was but the void which her passionate nature found in a
conventional and limited existence, and for which as yet she knew no
remedy. The fervor of Catholic devotion had, as we have seen, long
forsaken her; her studies did not satisfy her; her children--she had by
this time a daughter--were yet in infancy; her husband was not unkind,
but indifferent, and the object of indifference. She occupied herself