In this company was a young artiste named Mlle. de Verrieres whose father was a certain M. Rinteau. Maurice de Saxe admired the young actress and a daughter was born of this _liaison_, who was later on recognized by her father and named Marie-Aurore de Saxe.
This was George Sand's grandmother. At the age of fifteen the young girl married Comte de Horn, a bastard son of Louis XV. This husband was obliging enough to his wife, who was only his wife in name, to die as soon as possible. She then returned to her mother "the Opera lady." An elderly nobleman, Dupin de Francueil, who had been the lover of the other Mlle. Verrieres, now fell in love with her and married her. Their son, Maurice Dupin, was the father of our novelist.
The astonishing part of this series of adventures is that Marie-Aurore should have been the eminently respectable woman that she was.
On her mother's side, though, Aurore Dupin belonged to the people.
She was the daughter of Sophie-Victoire Delaborde milliner, the grandchild of a certain bird-seller on the Quai des Oiseaux, who used to keep a public-house, and she was the great-granddaughter of Mere Cloquart.
This double heredity was personified in the two women who shared George Sand's childish affection. We must therefore study the portraits of these two women.
The grandmother was, if not a typical _grande dame_, at least a typical elegant woman of the latter half of the eighteenth century.
She was very well educated and refined, thanks to living with the two sisters, Mlles. Verrieres, who were accustomed to the best society. She was a good musician and sang delightfully.
When she married Dupin de Francueil, her husband was sixty-two, just double her age. But, as she used to say to her granddaughter, "no one was ever old in those days. It was the Revolution that brought old age into the world."Dupin was a very agreeable man. When younger he had been _too_ agreeable, but now he was just sufficiently so to make his wife very happy.
He was very lavish in his expenditure and lived like a prince, so that he left Marie-Aurore ruined and poor with about three thousand a year. She was imbued with the ideas of the philosophers and an enemy of the Queen's _coterie_. She was by no means alarmed at the Revolution and was very soon taken prisoner.
She was arrested on the 26th of November, 1793, and incarcerated in the _Couvent des Anglaises_, Rue des Fosse's-Saint-Victor, which had been converted into a detention house. On leaving prison she settled down at Nohant, an estate she had recently bought.
It was there that her granddaughter remembered her in her early days.
She describes her as tall, slender, fair and always very calm.
At Nohant she had only her maids and her books for company.
When in Paris, she delighted in the society of people of her own station and of her time, people who had the ideas and airs of former days.
She continued, in this new century, the shades of thought and the manners and Customs of the old _regime._As a set-off to this woman of race and of culture, Aurore's mother represented the ordinary type of the woman of the people.
She was small, dark, fiery and violent. She, too, the bird-seller's daughter, had been imprisoned by the Revolution, and strangely enough in the _Couvent des Anglaises_ at about the same time as Maurice de Saxe's granddaughter. It was in this way that the fusion of classes was understood under the Terror. She was employed as a _figurante_ in a small theatre. This was merely a commencement for her career. At the time when Maurice Dupin met her, she was the mistress of an old general. She already had one child of doubtful parentage. Maurice Dupin, too, had a natural son, named Hippolyte, so that they could not reproach each other.
When Maurice Dupin married Sophie-Victoire, a month before the birth of Aurore, he had some difficulty in obtaining his mother's consent.
She finally gave in, as she was of an indulgent nature. It is possible that Sophie-Victoire's conduct was irreproachable during her husband's lifetime, but, after his death, she returned to her former ways. She was nevertheless of religious habits and would not, upon any account, have missed attending Mass. She was quick-tempered, jealous and noisy and, when anything annoyed her, extremely hot-headed. At such times she would shout and storm, so that the only way to silence her was to shout still more loudly.
She never bore any malice, though, and wished no harm to those she had insulted. She was of course sentimental, but more passionate than tender, and she quickly forgot those whom she had loved most fondly.
There seemed to be gaps in her memory and also in her conscience.
She was ignorant, knowing nothing either of literature or of the usages of society. Her _salon_ was the landing of her flat and her acquaintances were the neighbours who happened to live next door to her.
It is easy to imagine what she thought of the aristocrats who visited her mother-in-law. She was amusing when she joked and made parodies on the women she styled "the old Countesses." She had a great deal of natural wit, a liveliness peculiar to the native of the faubourgs, all the impudence of the street arab, and a veritable talent of mimicry. She was a good housewife, active, industrious and most clever in turning everything to account. With a mere nothing she could improvise a dress or a hat and give it a certain style.
She was always most skilful with her fingers, a typical Parisian work-girl, a daughter of the street and a child of the people.
In our times she would be styled "a midinette."Such are the two women who shared the affection of Aurore Dupin.
Fate had brought them together, but had made them so unlike that they were bound to dislike each other. The childhood of little Aurore served as the lists for their contentions. Their rivalry was the dominating note in the sentimental education of the child.
