The young girl entered the convent, weary at heart, wounded in her dearest affections: she found it a place of rest. She tells, in the story of her life, of the sisters and pupils, the routine of instruction, the petty quarrels, the pastimes, and the discipline; of the quest of imaginary captives whose release was undertaken; of the wanderings in vaults and passages. Though Aurore was of a dreamy nature, yet her disposition manifested extremes; for at times she abandoned herself to boisterous enjoyment. So in the convent she became resigned to her lot, yet, yielding to her spirit of independence, she joined in the pranks of the mischievous scholars. Of the two classes into which the girls were divided,--_sages_ and _diables_,--Aurore made choice of the latter. This life continued for nearly two years, the girl rarely leaving the convent even for a single day, being deprived of her summer vacations by her grandmother, who wished to bring her to a realization of the pleasure and freedom of the Nohant home, which she would be the better capable of by reason of her prolonged absence. The routine of somewhat indifferent and desultory study and the enjoyment of the _diables_' pranks were soon to give way to a new impulse. Hitherto, Aurore had felt no attachment to the religious exercises of the convent; but one day she was seated in an obscure corner of the convent chapel, when a spiritual enthusiasm awoke in her mind. She writes of this circumstance: "In an instant, it broke forth, like some passion quickened in a soul that knows not its own force.... All her needs were of the heart, and that was exhausted." The fervent religious emotion which she experienced at once transformed her. With her whole-natured devotion, she yields to the impulse; faith finds her soul unresisting, and she bends to the divine grace that appeals to her. Yet the transformation swayed her soul with its consequences; she shed the scalding tears of the pious, she experienced the exhaustion of feverish exaltation and protracted meditation, but she found a personal faith; and, through all the emotions and changes of the turbulent years that followed, the pure faith that she imbibed in the silent convent cloisters was never wholly obscured. This change wrought wonders in the young girl's conduct; she was no longer a hoyden, but kept herself strictly within the rules of the convent, and devoted herself with regularity to its prescribed studies, yet with no more real interest than before.