In the spring of the following year Madame Dupin's health and mental faculties utterly broke down. But she lived on for another ten months. Aurore for the time was placed in a most exceptional position for a French girl of sixteen. She was thrown absolutely on herself and her own resources, uncontrolled and unprotected, between a helpless, half imbecile invalid, and the eccentric, dogmatic pedagogue, Deschartres. Highly susceptible to influences from without, her mind, during their sudden and complete suspension, seemed as it were invited to discover and take its own bent. Piqued by the charge of dense ignorance flung at her by her ex-tutor, and aware that there was truth in it, she would now sit up all night reading, finding her appetite for the secular knowledge she used to despise grow by what it fed upon. The phase of religious exaltation she had recently passed through still gave the tone to her mind, and it was with the works of famous philosophers, metaphysicians, and Christian mystics that she began her studies. Comparing the "Imitation of Christ" with Chateaubriand's "Spirit of Christianity," and struck here and elsewhere with the wide discrepancies and contradictions of opinion manifest between great minds ranging themselves under one theological banner, she was led on to speculations that alarmed her conscience, and she appealed to her spiritual director, the Abbe Premord, for advice, fearing lest her faith might be endangered if she read more. He encouraged her to persevere, telling her in no wise to deny herself these intellectual enjoyments. But her rigid Catholicism was doomed from that hour. Hers was that order of mind which can never give ostensible adhesion to a creed whilst morally unconvinced; never accept that refuge of the weak from the torment of doubt, in abdicating the functions of reason and conscience, shifting the onus of responsibility on to others, and agreeing to believe, as it were, by proxy. She had plunged fearlessly and headlong into Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, Condillac, Mably, Leibnitz, Bossuet, Pascal, Montaigne, Montesquieu; beginning to call many things in question, and, through the darkness and confusion into which she was sometimes thrown, trying honestly and sincerely to feel her way to some more glorious faith and light.