told about Walter Scott. There is evidently a primordial instinct in
those who are born story-tellers, and this urges them on to invent fine
stories for amusing themselves.

A little later on we have another phenomenon, almost as curious, with
regard to Aurore. We are apt to wonder how certain descriptive writers
proceed in order to give us pictures, the various features of which
stand out in such intense relief that they appear absolutely real to us.
George Sand tells us that when Berquin's stories were being read to
her at Nohant, she used to sit in front of the fire, from which she was
protected by an old green silk screen. She used gradually to lose the
sense of the phrases, but pictures began to form themselves in front of
her on the green screen.

"I saw woods, meadows, rivers, towns of strange and gigantic
architecture. . . . One day these apparitions were so real that I was
startled by them, and I asked my mother whether she could see them."


With hallucinations like these a writer can be picturesque. He has
in front of him, although it may be between four walls, a complete
landscape. He has only to follow the lines of it and to reproduce the
colours, so that in painting imaginary landscapes he can paint them from
nature, from this model that appears to him, as though by enchantment.
He can, if he likes, count the leaves of the trees and listen to the
sound of the growing grass.

Still later on, vague religious or philosophical conceptions began
to mingle with the fiction that Aurore always had in her mind. To her
poetical life, was added a moral life. She always had a romance going