It is absolutely impossible to give an analysis of Lelia.  There really is no subject.  The personages are not beings of flesh and blood.  They are allegories strolling about in the garden of abstractions.  Lelia is a woman who has had her trials in life.  She has loved and been disappointed, so that she can no longer love at all.  She reduces the gentle poet Stenio to despair.  He is much younger than she is, and he has faith in life and in love.  His ingenuous soul begins to wither and to lose its freshness, thanks to the scepticism of the beautiful, disdainful, ironical and world-weary Lelia.  This strange person has a sister Pulcherie, a celebrated courtesan, whose insolent sensuality is a set-off to the other one’s mournful complaints.  We have here the opposition of Intelligence and of the Flesh, of Mind and Matter.  Then comes Magnus, the priest, who has lost his faith, and for whom Lelia is a temptation, and after him we have Trenmor, Lelia’s great friend, Trenmor, the sublime convict.  As a young man he had been handsome.  He had loved and been young.  He had known what it was to be only twenty years of age.  “The only thing was, he had known this at the age of sixteen” (!!) He had then become a gambler, and here follows an extraordinary panegyric on the fatal passion for gambling.  Trenmor ruins himself, borrows without paying back, and finally swindles “an old millionaire who was himself a defrauder and a dissipated man” out of a hundred francs.  Apparently the bad conduct of the man Trenmor robs, excuses the swindling.  He is condemned to five years of hard labour.  He undergoes his punishment, and is thereby regenerated.  “What if I were to tell you,” writes George Sand, “that such as he now is, crushed, with a tarnished reputation, ruined, I consider him superior to all of us, as regards the moral life.  As he had deserved punishment, he was willing to bear it.  He bore it, living for five years bravely and patiently among his abject companions.  He has come back to us out of that abominable sewer holding his head up, calm, purified, pale as you see him, but handsome still, like a creature sent by God.”

We all know how dear convicts are to the hearts of romantic people.  There is no need for me to remind you how they have come to us recently, encircled with halos of suffering and of purity.  We all remember Dostoiewsky’s Crime and Punishment and Tolstoi’s Resurrection.  When the virtue of expiation and the religion of human suffering came to us from Russia, we should have greeted them as old acquaintances, if certain essential works in our own literature, of which these books are the issue, had not been unknown to us.