I would call your attention, though, to that picture of Helene, with the magic lyre in her hand, risking her life, by climbing to the spire of the steeple and uttering her inspiring speech from there.  Is not this something like Solness, the builder, from the top of his tower?  Like Tolstoi, Ibsen had evidently read George Sand and had not forgotten her.

Spiridion introduces us into a strange convent, in which we see the portraits come out of their frames and roam about the cloisters.  The founder of the convent, Hebronius, lives again in the person of Father Alexis, who is no other than Leroux.

In Consuelo we have the same imagination.  We have already considered the first part of this novel, that which takes place at Venice, in the schools of music and in the theatres of song.  Who would have thought that the charming diva, the pupil of Porpora, was to have such strange adventures?  She arrives in Bohemia, at the Chateau of Rudolstadt.  She has been warned that extraordinary things take place there.  Comte Albert de Rudolstadt is subject to nervous fits and to great lethargy.  He disappears from the chateau and then reappears, without any one seeing him go in or out.  He believes that he has been Jean Ziska, and this is probably true.  He has been present at events which took place three hundred years previously, and he describes them.  Consuelo discovers Albert’s retreat.  It is a cavern hollowed out of a mountain in the vicinity, which communicates, by means of a well, with his rooms.  The Chateau of Rudolstadt is built on the same architectural plan as Anne Radcliffe’s chateau.  After staying for some time in this bewildering place, Consuelo sets forth once more.  She now meets Haydn, goes through the Bohmer Wald with him, arrives in Venice, is introduced to Maria Theresa, and is engaged at the Imperial Theatre.  She is now recalled to the Chateau of Rudolstadt.  Albert is on his deathbed, and he marries her in extremis, after telling her that he is going to leave her for a time, but that he shall return to her on earth by a new birth.  He, too, had evidently read Pierre Leroux, and it was perhaps that which had caused his illness.

Consuelo is a novel of adventures after the style of Gil Blas, the Vie de Marianne, and Wilkelm Meister.  It is a historical novel, for which we have Joseph Haydn, Maria Theresa, Baron Trenk, and the whole history of the Hussites.  It is a fantastical story with digressions on music and on popular songs, but running through it all, with the persistency of a fixed idea, are divagations on the subject of earthly metempsychosis.  Such, then, is this incongruous story, odd and exaggerated, but with gleams of light and of great beauty, the reading of which is apt to leave one weary and disturbed.