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.

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