her, she was old enough to take care of herself.

Her mother had blamed her for learning Latin and osteology. "Why should
a woman be ignorant?" she asks. "Can she not be well educated without
this spoiling her and without being pedantic? Supposing that I should
have sons in the future, and that I had profited sufficiently by my
studies to be able to teach them, would not a mother's lessons be as
good as a tutor's?"

She was already challenging public opinion, starting a campaign against
false prejudices, showing a tendency to generalize, and to make the
cause of one woman the cause of all women.

We must now bear in mind the various traits we have discovered, one
after another, in Aurore's character. We must remember to what parentage
she owed her intellectuality and her sentimentality. It will then
be more easy to understand the terms she uses when describing her
fascination for Rousseau's writings.

"The language of Jean-Jacques and the form of his deductions impressed
me as music might have done when heard in brilliant sunshine. I compared
him to Mozart, and I understood everything."

She understood him, for she recognized herself in him. She sympathized
with that predominance of feeling and imagination, that exaggeration of
sentiment, that preference for life according to Nature, that emotion
on beholding the various sights of the country, that distrust of people,
those effusions of religious sentimentality, those solitary reveries,
and that melancholy which made death seem desirable to him. All this
was to Aurore Dupin the gospel according to Rousseau. The whole of her