Aurore Dudevant really believed that she was swayed by a pure and mystic passion.  De Seze, on the other hand, believed this mystic passion to be genuine love.  Coming to visit her at Nohant, he was revolted by the clownish husband with whom she lived.  It gave him an esthetic shock to see that she had borne children to this boor.  Therefore he shrank back from her, and in time their relation faded into nothingness.

It happened, soon after, that she found a packet in her husband’s desk, marked “Not to be opened until after my death.”  She wrote of this in her correspondence: 

I had not the patience to wait till widowhood.  No one can be sure of surviving anybody.  I assumed that my husband had died, and I was very glad to learn what he thought of me while he was alive.  Since the package was addressed to me, it was not dishonorable for me to open it.

And so she opened it.  It proved to be his will, but containing, as a preamble, his curses on her, expressions of contempt, and all the vulgar outpouring of an evil temper and angry passion.  She went to her husband as he was opening a bottle, and flung the document upon the table.  He cowered at her glance, at her firmness, and at her cold hatred.  He grumbled and argued and entreated; but all that his wife would say in answer was: 

“I must have an allowance.  I am going to Paris, and my children are to remain here.”

At last he yielded, and she went at once to Paris, taking her daughter with her, and having the promise of fifteen hundred francs a year out of the half-million that was hers by right.

In Paris she developed into a thorough-paced Bohemian.  She tried to make a living in sundry hopeless ways, and at last she took to literature.  She was living in a garret, with little to eat, and sometimes without a fire in winter.  She had some friends who helped her as well as they could, but though she was attached to the Figaro, her earnings for the first month amounted to only fifteen francs.

Nevertheless, she would not despair.  The editors and publishers might turn the cold shoulder to her, but she would not give up her ambitions.  She went down into the Latin Quarter, and there shook off the proprieties of life.  She assumed the garb of a man, and with her quick perception she came to know the left bank of the Seine just as she had known the country-side at Nohant or the little world at her convent school.  She never expected again to see any woman of her own rank in life.  Her mother’s influence became strong in her.  She wrote: 

The proprieties are the guiding principle of people without soul and virtue.  The good opinion of the world is a prostitute who gives herself to the highest bidder.

She still pursued her trade of journalism, calling herself a “newspaper mechanic,” sitting all day in the office of the Figaro and writing whatever was demanded, while at night she would prowl in the streets haunting the cafes, continuing to dress like a man, drinking sour wine, and smoking cheap cigars.