The only event that brightened her sadness was the arrival of a young tutor for her children, M. Jules Boucoiran, who always, as she says, remained her devoted friend and ally.
She thus whimsically relates an incident small in itself, but one that made an impression on her owing to the existing circumstances:
“I was living in what used to be my grandmother’s boudoir, because there was only one door, and no one could come in unless I liked. My two children sleep in the room next to me. The boudoir was so small that I could hardly fit into it with all my books. I therefore slept in a hammock, and wrote at an old bureau, which I used in company with a cricket, who seeing me so often had become perfectly tame. It lived on my wafers, which I purposely chose white for fear of poisoning it. After eating its meal on my paper as I wrote, it always went and sang in its favorite drawer. One evening, not hearing it move, I searched everywhere, but the only remains I found of my poor friend were his hind legs. He never told me that he went out for a walk every day, and the maid had crushed him when shutting the window. I buried him in a datura flower, which I kept for some time as a sacred relic. I could not get rid of a strange foreboding that with the song of this little cricket my domestic happiness had fled for ever.”
Meantime the artistic leaven was working within her. On one of her flying visits to Paris she entered the Louvre and felt singularly “taken possession of” by the beautiful pictures around her.
“I returned,” she says, “again and again, arriving early in the morning and going away late in the evening. I was transported into another world, and was haunted day and night by the grand figures created by genius. The past and present were revealed to me, I became classical and romantic at the same time, without understanding the struggle between the two that agitated the artistic world. I seemed to have acquired a treasure, the existence of which I had never been aware of. My spirit expanded, and when I left the gallery I walked through the streets as in a dream.”
After this awakening of her intellectual nature she returned to Nohant, more determined than ever to escape from her wretched life, and to save her children from influences that might destroy them in the future. Her first object was to endeavor to make money enough to procure the means of existence. She tried everything, translating, drawing, needlework, and at last discovered that she could earn an humble pittance by painting flowers on wooden boxes. To this pursuit she devoted herself for some time, believing it to be the only trade for which she was fitted.