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._