Aurore, as the years went on, had grown sincerely fond of Madame Dupin; but her mother still held the foremost place in her heart, and she had never ceased to cherish the belief that if they two could live together she would be perfectly happy. The discovery of this deeply irritated her grandmother, who at length was provoked to intimate to the girl something of the real motive for insisting on this separation--namely, that her mother's antecedents were such as, in the eyes of Aurore's well-wishers, rendered it desirable to establish the daughter's existence apart from that of her parent. Sooner or later such a revelation must have been made; but made as it was, thus precipitately, in a moment of jealous anger, the chief result was of necessity to cause a painful and dangerous shock to the sensitive young mind. It brought about an unnatural discord in her moral nature, forbidden all at once to respect what she had loved most, and must continue to love, in spite of all. On the injurious effects of the over-agitation to which she was subjected in her childhood she has laid much stress in her remarkable work, "The Story of My Life." Much of this book, written when she was between forty and fifty, reads like a romance; and had a certain amount of retrospective imagination entered into the treatment of these reminiscences it would not be surprising. The tendency to impart poetical color and significance to whatever was capable of taking it was her mastering impulse, and may sometimes have led her to lose the distinction between fancy and reality, especially as by her own confession her memory was never her strong point. But she had an excellent memory for impressions, and no reader whose own recollections of childhood have not grown faint, but will feel the profound truth of the spirit of the narrative, which is of a kind that occasional exaggerations in the letter cannot depreciate in value as a psychological history. For an account of her early life it must always remain the most important source. Aurore was now thirteen, and though she had read a good deal of miscellaneous literature her instruction had been mostly of a desultory sort; she was behindhand in the accomplishments deemed desirable for young ladies; and her country manners, on the score of etiquette, left something to be desired. To school, therefore, it was decided that she must go; and her grandmother selected that held by the nuns of the "English convent" at Paris, as the most fashionable institution of the kind.