Aurore had given her new protectors the titles of Mother Angèle and Father James, and they in turn called her their daughter. The period of her residence with them at Plessis appears in her souvenirs as an ideal interval of happiness and repose, a renewal of the freedom and _insousiance_ of childhood, with the added knowledge of their value, a suspension of the terrible demands and interests of life. Would that this ideal period could be prolonged for women!--but the exigencies of the race, or perhaps the fears of society, do not permit it. The two-faced spectre of marriage awaits her, for good or ill. The _aphelion_ of a woman's liberty is soon reached, the dark organic forces bind her to tread the narrow orbit of her sex, and if, at the farthest bound of her individual progress, the attraction could fail, and let her slip from the eternal circle, chaos would be the result. Uninvited, therefore, but unrepulsed, Hymen approached our heroine in the form of Casimir Dudevant, the illegitimate, but acknowledged son and heir of Colonel Dudevant, an officer of good standing and reasonable fortune. The only feeling he seems to have inspired in the bosom of his future wife was one of mild good-will. His only recommendation was a decent degree of suitableness in outward circumstances. For the true wants of her nature he had neither fitness nor sympathy; but she did not know herself then,--she was not yet George Sand. From the stand-point of her later development, her marriage would seem to us a low one; but we must remember that she started only from the plane, and not the highest plane, of French society, in which a marriage of some sort is the first necessity of a woman's life, and not the crowning point of her experience. To compensate the rigor of such a requisition, a French marriage, though civilly indissoluble, has yet a hundred modifications which remove it far from the Puritan ideal which we of the Protestant faith cherish. Hence the French novel, whose strained sentiment and deeply logical immorality have wakened strange echoes among us of the stricter rule and graver usage. Without passion, then, or tender affection on either side, but with a tolerable harmony of views for the moment, and after long and causeless opposition on the part of Aurore's mother, this marriage took place. Aurore was but eighteen; her bridegroom was of suitable age. With dreams of a peaceful family existence, and looking forward to maternity as the great joy and office of the coming years, she brought her husband to Nohant, whose inheritance had been settled by contract upon the children of this marriage.