552 GEOEGE SAND. was sent to the English convent of Augustine nuns in Paris. The pupils in this convent were divided into two bands — the diables or mischievous girls, and the sages or good girls. Aurore was promptly enrolled among the diables, and so distinguished herself by pranks of many kinds, and especially by her earnestness in an enterprise called mysteriously " the Deliverance of the Victim " (the search, partly serious and partly frolicsome, for an erring nun supposed to be imprisoned somewhere within the building), that she soon earned the appellation of Madcap from her admiring friends. But, in the second year of her stay, this heroic undertaking suddenly lost its charm. She was converted, became a devoted Catholic, and desired fervently to become a nun. By her companions she was now renamed, Saint Aurore. The sisters were too wise to encourage her excessive devotion, and her confessor, disapproving sudden asceti- cism, ordered her as a penance to continue the games and amusements from which she wished to withdraw. Her taste for them quickly returned, and she became again a leader among her companions, although scrupulously avoiding anything like mischief or insubordination. Her desire for the cloister was not finally dispelled until a year or two later, when a fever of reading came upon her, and she devoured in turn the pages of Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, Condillac, Bossuet, Pascal Montaigne, Montesquieu, Leibnitz, and others. " Reading Leibnitz," she afterward remarked, " I became a Protestant without knowing it." A little later she found in Jean Jacques Rousseau a writer whose poetic treatment of religious subjects impressed her still more strongly. She passed through many phases of religious feeling in her life, but she was enabled to say in later years : "As to my religion, the ground of it has never varied.
