inherited prejudices which divided the families of her parents. As a
young girl wildly romping with the peasant children at Nohant she
discovered a joy in untrammeled rural life which was only to
increase with years. At the proper age for beginning to fashion a
conventional young lady, the hoyden was put in a convent, where she
underwent some exalting religious experiences; and in 1822 she was
assigned to her place in the "established social order" by her
marriage at seventeen to M. Dudevant. After a few years of rather
humdrum domestic life in the country, she became aware that this
gentleman, her husband, was behaving as we used to be taught that
all French husbands ultimately behave; he was, in fact, turning from
her to her maids. The young couple had never been strongly united--
the impetuous dreamy girl and her coarse hunting mate; and they had
grown wide apart. She should, of course, have adjusted herself
quietly to the altered situation and have kept up appearances. But
this young wife had gradually become an "intellectual"; she had been
reading philosophy and poetry; she was saturated with the writings
of Rousseau, of Chateaubriand, of Byron. None of the spiritual
masters of her generation counselled acquiescence in servitude or
silence in misery. Every eloquent tongue of the time-spirit urged
self-expression and revolt. And she, obedient to the deepest
impulses of her blood and her time, revolted.

At the period when Madame Dudevant withdrew her neck from the
conjugal yoke and plunged into her literary career in Paris, the
doctrine that men are created for freedom, equality and fraternity
was already somewhat hackneyed. She, with an impetus from her own
private fortunes, was to give the doctrine a recrudescence of
interest by resolutely applying it to the status of women. We cannot
follow her in detail from the point where she abandons the domestic