The maiden name of George Sand was Amantine Aurore Dupin, and she is descended from Augustus the Second, king of Poland. Her ancestors were of king's blood, and the more immediate of them were distinguished for their valor and high birth. She was born in the year 1804. She was brought up by her grandmother, at the chateau Nahant, situated in one of the most beautiful valleys of France. The old countess of Horn, her grandmother, was a woman of brilliant qualities, but not a very safe guide for a young child. Her ideas were anti-religious, and she was a follower of Rousseau rather than of Christ. When Aurore was fifteen years old, she knew well how to handle a gun, to dance, to ride on horseback, and to use a sword. She was a young Amazon, charming, witty, and yet coarse. She was fond of field sports, yet knew not how to make the sign of the cross. When she was twenty years old she was sent to a convent in Paris, to receive a religious education. She loved her grandmother to adoration, and the separation cost her a great deal of suffering. She often alludes in her volumes to this grandparent, in terms of warm love and veneration. In her "_Letters of a Traveller_" she gives us some details of her life with her grandmother at the chateau de Nahant. She says: "Oh, who of us does not recall with delight the first, books he devoured! The cover of a ponderous old volume that you found upon the shelf of a forgotten closet--does it not bring back to you gracious pictures of your young years? Have you not thought to see the wide meadow rise before you, bathed in the rosy light of the evening when you saw it for the first time? Oh! that the night should fall so quickly upon those divine pages, that the cruel twilight should make the words float upon the dim page! "It is all over; the lambs bleat, the sheep are shut up in their fold, the cricket chirps in the cottage and field It is time to go home. "The path is stony, the bridge narrow and slippery, and the way is difficult. "You are covered with sweat, but you have a long walk, you will arrive too late, supper will have commenced. "It is in vain that the old domestic whom you love will retard the ringing of the bell as long as possible; you will have the humiliation of entering the last one, and the grandmother, inexorable upon etiquette, will reprove you in a voice sweet but sad--a reproach very light, very tender, which you will feel more deeply than a severe chastisement. But when, at night, she demands that you account for your absence, and you acknowledge, blushing, that in reading in the meadow you forgot yourself, and when you are asked to give the book, you draw with a trembling hand from your pocket--what? _Estelle et Nemorin_. "Oh then the grandmother smiles!