The last part of the novel is devoted to Stenio.  Hurt by Lelia’s disdain, which has thrown him into the arms of her sister Pulcherie, he gives himself up to debauch.  We find him at a veritable orgy in Pulcherie’s house.  Later on he is in a monastery at Camaldules, talking to Trenmor and Magnus.  In such books we must never be astonished. . . .  There is a long speech by Stenio, addressed to Don Juan, whom he regrets to have taken as his model.  The poor young man of course commits suicide.  He chooses drowning as the author evidently prefers that mode of suicide.  Lelia arrives in time to kneel down by the corpse of the young man who has been her victim.  Magnus then appears on the scene, exactly at the right moment, to strangle Lelia.  Pious hands prepare Lelia and Stenio for their burial.  They are united and yet separated up to their very death.

The summing up we have given is the original version of Lelia.  In 1836, George Sand touched up this work, altering much of it and spoiling, what she altered.  It is a pity that her new version, which is longer, heavier and more obscure, should have taken the place of the former one.  In its first form Lelia is a work of rare beauty, but with the beauty of a poem or an oratorio.  It is made of the stuff of which dreams are composed.  It is a series of reveries, adapted to the soul of 1830.  At every different epoch there is a certain frame of mind, and certain ideas are diffused in the air which we find alike in the works of the writers of that time, although they did not borrow them from each other. Lelia is a sort of summing up of the themes then in vogue in the personal novel and in lyrical poetry.  The theme of that suffering which is beneficent and inspiring is contained in the following words:  “Come back to me, Sorrow!  Why have you left me?  It is by grief alone that man is great.”  This is worthy of Chateaubriand.  The theme of melancholy is as follows:  “The moon appeared. . . .  What is the moon, and what is its nocturnal magic to me?  One hour more or less is nothing to me.”  This might very well be Lamartine.  We then have the malediction pronounced in face of impassible Nature:  “Yes, I detested that radiant and magnificent Nature, for it was there before me in all its stupid beauty, silent and proud, for us to gaze on, believing that it was enough to merely show itself.”  This reminds us of Vigny in his Maison du berger.  Then we have the religion of love:  “Doubt God, doubt men, doubt me if you like, but do not doubt love.”  This is Musset.

But the theme which predominates, and, as we have compared all this to music, we might say the leit-motiv of all, is that of desolation, of universal despair, of the woe of life.  It is the same lamentation which, ever since Werther, was to be heard throughout all literature.  It is the identical suffering which Rene, Obermann and Lara had been repeating to all the echoes.  The elements of it were the same: