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