The aunts were a bundle of contradictions and surprises. In their short gathered print skirts, aprons and kerchiefs, they looked like peasant women, and they worked like peasant women too, at hay-making, poultry-keeping and fruit-farming. But so distinguished was their bearing that in their humble attire they had the air of great ladies in disguise, while their discussion during hay-making of Sismondi’s _Italian Republics_ showed them to be veritable _femmes savantes_. Though living in the heart of the country, these original spinsters took a deep interest in all the literary and political movements of the town. Though, with their step-sister, Mme. Seron, they were firmly convinced that a constitutional monarchy was the only ideal form of government, they did not altogether share Mme. Seron’s admiration for Louis Philippe. They criticised his policy and approved of the opposition led by M. Odillon Barot. In almost every respect Juliette’s life at Chivres was a complete contrast to her life at Chauny or Blérancourt. Instead of, as at Chauny, sitting up late over her books and then going to bed in her grandmother’s stuffy chamber, with the windows tightly closed and the atmosphere infested by the midnight oil burnt to enable Mme. Seron to read her romances, Juliette at Chivres, after a day spent in healthy open-air exercise, lay down with the lamb and rose with the lark, having slept by herself in a large airy room with the windows wide open. Whereas at Chauny no interest was taken in house arrangement, while picturesque old family heirlooms were regarded as lumber and relegated to the attic, and any artistic feeling found its only expression in personal adornment, at Chivres it was just the opposite: Juliette’s fine clothes were all folded away, and she was dressed like her aunts in peasant costume; but her natural love of the beautiful was gratified by the daintiness and artistry of all the household arrangements, by the handsome old chests and commodes, the embroidered draperies, the nosegays of fresh wild flowers, and the beautifully bound books ranged trimly on their shelves. The intellectual atmosphere of Chivres was likewise entirely different from that of Chauny and Blérancourt. Dr. Lambert’s heroes, Louis Blanc and Proudhon, were anathema to such worshippers of the established order as the aunts. In the light of her aunts’ wide interest in all manifestations of nature, her grandmother’s concentration on the merely human aspect of life suddenly appeared to Juliette as intensely narrow. It was at Chivres that Juliette first acquired that passionate love of nature which she was later to express so eloquently in her books. It was at Chivres that Juliette learnt to take an interest in birds and beasts and flowers, and also in inanimate things, to find— “... tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones and good in everything.”