(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.

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