The form and the name of her new divinity came to her in a dream. He was to be called ‘Corambé’. His attributes must be given in her own words:—

The religious idea took an historical form, and Aurore proceeded to develop the several phases of Corambé’s mundane existence in a series of sacred books or songs. She supposed that she must have composed not less than a thousand of such songs without ever being tempted to write down a line of them. In each of these the deity Corambé, who had become human on touching the earth, was brought into a fresh group of persons. These were all good people; for although there existed wicked ones, one did not see them, but only knew of them by the effects of their malice and madness. Corambé always appears, like Jesus—and one may add, like Buddha—as the beneficent one, spending himself, and suffering persecutions and martyrdom, in the cause of humanity.

This occupation of the imagination developed ‘a kind of gentle hallucination’. Aurore soon learned to betake herself to her hero-divinity for comfort and delight. Even when her peasant companions chattered around her she was able to lose herself in her world of religious romance.

The idea of sacred books was followed by that of a temple and a ritual. For this purpose she chose a little wood in her grandmother’s garden, a perfect thicket of young trees and undergrowth, into which nobody ever penetrated, and which, during the season of leaves, was proof against any spying eye. Here, in a tiny, natural chamber of green, carpeted with a magnificent moss, she proceeded to erect an altar against a tree stem, decking it with shells and other ornaments and crowning it with a wreath of flowers suspended from a branch above. The little priestess, having made her temple, sat down on the moss to consider the question of sacrifices.

Her offering included butterflies, lizards, little green frogs, and birds. These she would put into a box, lay it on the altar, and then open it, ‘after having invoked the good genius of liberty and protection’.

In these mimic rites, hardly removed from genuine childish play, the doubt-agitated girl found repose: ‘I had then delicious reveries, and while seeking the marvellous, which had for me so great an attraction, I began to find the vague idea and the pure feeling of a religion according to my heart’.

But the sweet sanctuary did not long remain inviolate. One day her boy playmate came to look for her, and tracked her to her secret grove. He was awe-struck at the sight, and exclaimed: ‘Ah, miss, the pretty little altar of the Fête-Dieu!’ He was for embellishing it still further, but she felt the charm was destroyed.

This story of Aurore’s religious experiment cannot fail to remind the reader of biography of the child Goethe’s well-known essays in the same direction. The boy’s mind, it will be remembered, had been greatly exercised with the religious problem, first of all under the impression of horror caused by the earthquake at Lisbon, and later from having to listen to accounts of the new sects—Separatists, Moravians, and the rest—who sought a closer communion with the deity than was possible through the somewhat cold ritual of the established religion. Stirred by their example, he tried also to realise a closer approach to the Divine Being. He conceived him, he tells us, as standing in immediate connexion with Nature. So he invented a form of worship in which natural products were to represent the world, and a flame burning over these to symbolise the aspirations of man’s heart. A handsome pyramid-shaped music-stand was chosen for altar, and on the shelves of this the successive stages in the evolution of Nature were to be indicated. The rite was to be carried out at sunrise, the altar-flame to be secured by means of fumigating pastils and a burning-glass. The first performance was a success, but in trying to repeat it the boy-priest omitted to put the pastils into a cup, so the lacquered stand, with its beautiful gold flowers, was disastrously burnt—a contretemps which took away all spirit for new offerings.

In comparing these two instances of childish worship, one is struck perhaps more by their contrast than by their similarity. Each of the two incidents illustrates, no doubt, a true childish aspiration towards the great Unseen, and also an impulse to invent a form of worship which should harmonise with and express the little worshipper’s individual thoughts. But here the resemblance ceases. The boy-priest felt, apparently, nothing of the human side of religion: he was the true precursor of Goethe, the large-eyed man of science and the poet of pantheism, and found his delight in symbolising the orderliness of Nature’s work as a whole, and its Divine purpose and control. Aurore Dupin, on the other hand, approached religion on the human and emotional side, the side which seems more appropriate to her sex. She thought of her deity as intently occupied with humanity and its humble kinsfolk in the sentient world; and she endowed him above all other qualities with generosity and pitifulness, even to excess. Goethe seems to represent the speculative, Aurore the humanitarian, element in the religious impulse of the child.

To follow Aurore into her later religious experiences in the ‘Couvent des Anglaises’ would be clearly to go beyond the limits of these studies of childhood. I hope I may have quoted enough from the first chapters of the autobiography to illustrate not only their deep human and literary interest, but their special value to the psychological student.