The despised accomplishment-lessons, in themselves tending only to so much agreeable dabbling, proved useful to her indirectly by creating new interests, and as an intellectual stimulus. There seems to have been little or no method about her early education. The study of her own language was neglected, and the time spent less profitably, she considered in acquiring a smattering of Latin with Deschartres. She took to some studies with avidity, while others remained wholly distasteful to her. For mere head-work she cared little. Arithmetic she detested; versification, no less. Her imagination rebelled against the restrictions of form. Nowhere, perhaps, except in the free-fantasia style of the novel, could this great prose-poet have found the right field in which to do justice to her powers. The dry _technique_ in music was a stumbling-block of which she was impatient. History and literature she enjoyed in whatever they offered that was romantic, heroic, or poetically suggestive. In her Nohant surroundings there was nothing to check, and much to stimulate, this dominant, imaginative faculty. Her youthful attempts at original composition she quickly discarded in disgust; but it seemed almost a law of her mind that whatever was possessing it she must instinctively weave into a romance. Thus in writing her history-epitome she must improve on the original, when too dry, by exercising her fancy in the description of places and personages. The actual political events of that period were of the most exciting character; Napoleon's Russian campaign, abdication, retreat to Elba, the Hundred Days, Waterloo, the Restoration, following each other in swift succession. Old Madame Dupin was an anti-Bonapartist, but Aurore had caught from her mother something of the popular infatuation for the emperor, and her fancy would create him over again, as he might have been had his energies been properly directed. Her day-dreams were often so vivid as to effect her senses with all the force of realities. Such a visionary life might have been most dangerous and mentally enervating had her organization been less robust, and the tendency to reverie not been matched by lively external perception and plentiful physical activity. As it was, if at one moment she was in a cloud-land of her own, or poring over the stories of the Iliad, the classic mythologies, or Tasso's _Gerusalemme_, the next would see her scouring the fields with Ursule and Hippolyte, playing practical jokes on the tutor, and extemporizing wild out-of-door games and dances with her village companions.