About the same time, George Sand made use of Sainte-Beuve as her confessor.  He seemed specially indicated for this function.  In the first place, he looked rather ecclesiastical, and then he had a taste for secrets, and more particularly for whispered confessions.  George Sand had absolute confidence in him.  She considered that he had an almost angelic nature.  In reality, just about that time, the angelic man was endeavouring to get into the good graces of the wife of his best friend, and was writing his Livre d’Amour, and divulging to the world a weakness of which he had taken advantage.  This certainly was the most villainous thing a man could do.  But then he, too, was in love and was struggling and praying.  George Sand declares her veneration for him, and she constituted herself his penitent.

She begins her confession by an avowal that must have been difficult for her.  She tells of her intimacy with Merimee, an intimacy which was of short duration and very unsatisfactory.  She had been fascinated by Merimee’s art.

“For about a week,” she says, “I thought he had the secret of happiness.”  At the end of the week she was “weeping with disgust, suffering and discouragement.”  She had hoped to find in him the devotion of a consoler, but she found “nothing but cold and bitter jesting."(16) This experiment had also proved a failure.

     (16) Compare Lettres a Sainte-Beuve.

Such were the conditions in which George Sand found herself at this epoch.  Her position was satisfactory; she might have been calm and independent.  Her inner life was once more desolate, and she was thoroughly discouraged.  She felt that she had lived centuries, that she had undergone torture, that her heart had aged twenty years, and that nothing was any pleasure to her now.  Added to all this, public life saddened her, for the horizon had clouded over.  The boundless hopes and the enthusiasm of 1831 were things of the past.  “The Republic, as it was dreamed of in July,” she writes, “has ended in the massacres of Warsaw and in the holocaust of the Saint-Merry cloister.  The cholera has just been raging.  Saint Simonism has fallen through before it had settled the great question of love."(17)

     (17) Histoire de ma vie.

Depression had come after over-excitement.  This is a phenomenon frequently seen immediately after political convulsions.  It might be called the perpetual failure of revolutionary promises.

It was under all these influences that George Sand wrote Lelia.  She finished it in July, and it appeared in August, 1833.