was enveloped in a white glimmer, and heard a voice murmur the words written
under a convent picture of St. Augustine, Tolle, lege, and turned around thinking
Mother Alicia spoke, but she was alone. She knew it was an hallucination, but
saw that faith had laid hold of her, as she wished, by the heart, and she sobbed
and prayed to the unknown God till a nun heard her groaning. At first her ardor
impelled her not only to brave the jeers of her madcap club of harum-scarums
and tomboys, but she planned to become a nun, until this feverish longing for a
recluse life passed, but left her changed.[21]
When she passed from the simple and Catholic faith of her grisette mother to the
atmosphere of her cynical grandmother at Nohant, who was a disciple of
Voltaire, she found herself in great straits between the profound sentiments
inspired by the first communion and the concurrent contempt for this faith,
instilled by her grandmother for all those mummeries through which, however,
for conventional reasons she was obliged to pass. Her heart was deeply stirred,
and yet her head holding all religion to be fiction or metaphor, it occurred to her
to invent a story which might be a religion or a religion which might be a story
into any degree of belief in which she could lapse at will. The name and the form
of her new deity was revealed to her in a dream. He was Corambé, pure as Jesus,
beautiful as Gabriel, as graceful as the nymphs and Orpheus, less austere than
the Christian God, and as much woman as man, because she could best
understand this sex from her love for her mother. He appeared in many aspects
of physical and moral beauty; was eloquent, master of all arts, and above all of
the magic of musical improvisation; loved as a friend and sister, and at the same
time revered as a god; not awful and remote from impeccability, but with the
fault of excess of indulgence. She estimated that she composed about a thousand
sacred books or songs developing phases of his mundane existence. In each of
these he became incarnate man on touching the earth, always in a new group of
people who were good, yet suffering martyrdoms from the wicked known only
by the effects of their malice. In this "gentle hallucination" she could lose herself
in the midst of friends, and turn to her hero deity for comfort. There must be not
only sacred books, but a temple and ritual, and in a garden thicket, which no eye
could penetrate, in a moss-carpeted chamber she built an altar against a tree-
trunk, ornamented with a wreath hung over it. Instead of sacrificing, which
seemed barbaric, she proceeded to restore life and liberty to butterflies, lizards,
green frogs, and birds, which she put in a box, laid on the altar, and "after having
invoked the good genius of liberty and protection," opened it. In these mimic
rites and delicious reveries she found the germs of a religion that fitted her heart.
From the instant, however, that a boy playmate discovered and entered this