by George Sand
If you knew how you make me unhappy, you
would have compassion on me; you would tell me whether to live or pass away ; you would immediately give me the happiness that intoxicates or the reason that consoles. "
7
"Who is this pale man I see now
appear as a sinister vision in all places where Page 18
you are ? What does he want with you? where does he know you from? or you did he see? How is it that the first day he appeared here, he crossed the crowd to look at you, and immediately you exchanged a sad smile with him?
This man worries and scares me. When he approaches me,
I'm cold ; if his clothes touch mine, I feel like an electric concussion. He is, you say, a great poet who does not give himself up to the world, but who is above Byron. His broad forehead indeed reveals genius; but i don't not find this celestial purity, this ray of enthusiasm which characterizes the poet. This man is bleak and desolate like the Giaour, like Lara, like you, Lélia, when you suffer. I don't like to see him constantly by your side, absorbing your attention, monopolizing, so to speak, everything that you reserve benevolence for society and of interest for human things.
I know I have no right to be jealous. Also, what I sometimes suffer, I will not tell you. But i grieve (I am allowed) to see you surrounded by this dismal affecting. You already so sad, so discouraged, that he you should maintain only hope and sweet promises, you here is the contact of a withered and desolate existence. Because this man is parched by the breath of passions, none youthful freshness no longer colors its petrified features, its mouth no longer knows how to smile, his complexion never comes alive; he speaks, he walks, he acts out of habit, out of memory. But the principle of life has long since died out in his chest.
I am sure of that, madam, I have observed this a lot man, I have pierced the mystery with which it envelops itself. If he tells you that he loves you, he lies! He can no longer love.
But can't the one who feels nothing inspire anything? It is a terrible question that I've debated for a long time, since that I live, since I love you. I cannot decide to believe that so much love and poetry emanates from you without your soul harbors it. This man throws so much cold by all pores! He prints to everyone who approaches him such repulsion that his example comforts and encourages me. Yes
you had a dead heart like him, I would not love you, I would hate you as I hate him.
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And yet, oh! in what inextricable maze of my reason to debate ! you don't share the horror it inspires in me. You on the contrary, seem attracted to him by an invincible sympathy. There are moments when, seeing him pass with you at the middle of our holidays, you two so pale, so serious, so distracted in dancing circles, laughing women and
flowers that fly, it seems to me that, alone among all of us, you can understand yourself. It seems to me that painful resemblance is established between your sensations and even between the features of your face. Is it the seal of misfortune that imprints on your dark foreheads this family resemblance or this stranger, Lélia, would it really be your brother? Everything in your existence is so mysterious that I am ready for all assumptions.
Yes, there are days when I persuade myself that you are his sister. Well ! I want to say it, so that you understand that my jealousy is neither narrow nor childish, I suffer no less with this idea. I'm no less hurt by confidence than you show him and the intimacy that reigns between him and you, you so cold, so wary, so reserved sometimes, and who are not never for him. If he is your brother, Lélia, what rights does he have more than me on you? Do you think I love you less purely than him? Do you think i might love you with more tenderness, concern and respect, if you were my sister? Oh ! why are you not! you would have me no distrust, you would not fail to recognize the chaste and deep feeling that you inspire me! Do love do we not his sister with passion, when you have a passionate soul and a
sister like you, Lélia! The blood ties, which have so many weight on vulgar natures, what are they at the cost of those that the sky forges us in the treasure of its mysterious sympathies?
No, if he's your brother, he doesn't love you better than me, and you don't owe him more trust than me.
How happy he is, damn him, if you like to tell him your sufferings and if he has the power to soften them! Alas! you do not not only give me the right to share them! I am so very little! My love therefore has very little price!
So I am a very weak and still useless child, Page 20
since you're afraid to give me a little bit of your burden! Oh ! I am unhappy, Lélia! because you are, you, and you never shed a tear in my breast. There is days when you strive to be gay with me, like if you were afraid of being dependent on me by delivering yourself to your mood. Ah! it is a very insulting delicacy, Lélia, and which often hurt me a lot! With him you are never happy. See if I have reason to be jealous! "
8
"I showed your letter to the man named here Trenmor and whose only real name I know. He took so much of interest in your suffering and he's a man whose heart is so compassionate (that heart you think dead!) that he gave me authorized to tell you its secret. You will see that no one not treat you like a child, because this secret is the greatest that a man can entrust to another man.
And first know the cause of my interest in Trenmor. Is that this man is the most unhappy that I have met again; is that, for him, he did not stay
at the bottom of the chalice a drop of lees which should not have been used up; is that he has on you an immense, an indisputable superiority, that of misfortune.
Do you know what misfortune is, young man?
You barely enter life, you support them
first agitations, your passions are raised, accelerate movements of your blood, disturb the peace of your sleep, awaken in you new sensations, worries
convulsive, nervous torment, and you call it suffer ! You believe you have received the great, the terrible, the solemn baptism of doom! You are suffering, it is true, but what a noble and precious suffering to love! Of how much poetry is not the source! Which is Page 21
warm, that it is productive, the suffering that one can to say and of which one can be complained!
But the one that must be contained under pain of infamy and curse, the one that must be hidden deep inside like a bitter treasure, the one that doesn't burn you, but that freezes you, who has no tears, no prayers, no daydreams, the one who always watches, cold, pale, paralytic, bottom of my heart ! the one Trenmor has used up, this is the one he can boast before God on the day of justice; because in front of men we must hide it.
Hear the story of Trenmor. It is more broadly, more richly organized that none of you. For him life commune was too small; to souls like hers
the universe does not offer enough food. Like you however he was young, candid, in love; like you he had twenty years. Only, as he lived faster, he had them at sixteen.
Love exhausted, it was devoured by a passion well
otherwise energetic, much more fruitful in terrible dramas, well read intense, much more intoxicating, much more heroic in acts which contribute to its aim. The game ! because it must be said, alas! if the goal is apparently vile, the ardor is powerful, daring is sublime, the sacrifices are blind and without terminals. Women never inspire such. Gold is a power far greater than theirs. In strength, in courage, in dedication, perseverance, at the price of the player, the lover is only a weak child whose efforts are worthy of pity.
How many men have you seen sacrificing to their mistress this priceless good, this priceless necessity, this condition of existence without which there is no bearable existence, honor! I hardly know whose devotion goes
beyond the sacrifice of life. Everyday the player sacrifice his honor and support life. The player is bitter, he is stoic, it triumphs coldly, it succumbs coldly; he passes in a few hours from the lowest ranks of society to first, in a few hours it will descend to the point where it was gone ; and that, without changing attitude or face. In a few hours, witho
ut leaving the place where his demon connects it, it goes through all the vicissitudes of life, it passes by all the chances of fortune which represent the Page 22
different social conditions. By turns king and beggar, he climbed in one leap the immense ladder, always calm, always in control, always supported by its robust ambition, always excited by the acrid thirst that devours him. that will it be later? Prince or slave? How will he from this lair? Naked? or bent under the weight of gold?
What does it matter? He will come back tomorrow to make a fortune, lose or triple it. What is impossible for him is the
rest; he is like the bird of storms, who cannot live without the agitated waves and the raging winds. We accuse him of loving gold! he loves it so little that he throws it with both hands. These donations from
hell can neither benefit nor satisfy it. Barely rich, he I look forward to being ruined in order to still taste this nervous and terrible emotion without which life is insipid. What is that so that gold in his eyes? Less, by itself, than grains of sand to yours. But gold is an emblem of goods and evils that he comes to seek and to defy. Gold is her toy, it's his enemy, it's his God, it's his dream, it's his demon is his mistress, his poetry; it's the shadow that he pursues, that he attacks, that he embraces, then that he leaves to escape, to have the pleasure of recommencing the fight and once again take hand to hand with destiny. Come on!
that’s beautiful! it's absurd ; it must be condemned, because the energy used in this way is of no benefit to society, because that the man who directs his forces towards such a goal steals from his alike all the good he could have done to them with less selfishness. But, by condemning him, don't despise him, little ones organizations, which are capable of neither good nor bad; born measure that with dread the colossus of will which thus fights on fiery sea for the sole pleasure of exercising its vigor and to throw her outside of him. His selfishness pushes him in the middle fatigues and dangers, like yours chains you to patient and hardworking professions. How much do you count, in the world, of men who work for the homeland without think of themselves? He frankly isolates himself, he begins to apart, he has his future, his present, his rest, his honor. He condemns himself to suffering, to fatigue.
Deplore his error, but do not compare yourself to him, in the secret of your pride, to glorify you at its expense. That
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his fatal example only serves to console you for your harmless nullity.
I will stop here for today; your age is that of intolerance and you would be too violently dizzy if I told you said in one day the whole secret of Trenmor. I want to leave this part of my story make its impression; tomorrow i will say the rest. "
9
"You are right to spare me: what I learn amazes and upsets me. But you can imagine
the rest interest if you think i was so moved secrets of Trenmor. It is your judgment on all of this that trouble. So you are way above society for
deal so lightly with the crimes committed against it?
This question is perhaps insulting; maybe society is-she so contemptible that I myself am better than she; Goal forgive the perplexities of a child who knows nothing yet from real life.
Everything you say has the effect of a sun on me too fiery on eyes accustomed to the dark. And yet I feel that you spare me a lot of light, out of friendship or out of compassion… O God! so what do i have left learn? what illusions rocked my youth? Tea player is not contemptible, you say? Now, if it is eyes of superior beings, it cannot be mine? I do not have no right to judge him and say, "I am taller than this man, who harms himself and benefits no one. "? Well well! is; I am young; I don't know what will become of me, I have not gone through the trials of life; but Trenmor too has been twenty years old and has noble passions! You, Lélia, you more
great by your soul and your genius that everything that exists on the earth, you can condemn Trenmor and hate him; and you don't want to do it! Your indulgent compassion or your Page 24
reckless admiration (I don't know how to say) follows him to amidst his guilty triumphs, applauds his successes and respects its setbacks…
But if this man is tall, if he has such luxury in him of energy, what does he not use to suppress such fatal addictions? Why is he using his force badly?
So pirates and bandits are great too? Whoever distinguished by daring crimes or exceptional vices is therefore a man in front of whom the moved crowd must open with respect? So you have to be a hero or a monster for you please? ... Maybe. When I think of the full and hectic life that you must have had, when I see how many illusions died for you, how much weariness and exhaustion there there is in your ideas, I tell myself that an obscure and dull destiny like mine can only be an unnecessary burden for you and it takes unusual and violent impressions to awaken the sympathies of your jaded soul.
Well ! tell me a word that encourages me, Lélia! Tell me what you want me to be, and i will be. You think that the love of a woman cannot give the same energy as love of gold…
Is it my dishonor, is it my shame that you tell me ask?… Well! Lélia, well!… But it's you
to insult that to offer you such sacrifices, you me would despise afterwards, say? Yet you don't despise Trenmor and he sacrificed his honor, you say, to what? to the passion for gaming! Continue, continue this story; she
interests me horribly, because it is a revelation of your soul, after all; of that deep, moving, elusive soul, that I always seek and that I never penetrate. "
10
"No doubt you are much better than us, young man: may your pride be reassured. But in ten years, in Page 25
five years even, will you be worth Trenmor, will you be worth Lélia?
This is a question.
As you are, I love you, O young poet! that this no word scares you or intoxicates you. I don't pretend you give here the solution to the problem you are waiting for. I you love for your candor, for your ignorance of all things I know, for this great moral youth which you are so impatient to strip yourself, reckless that you are! I love you with another affection than Trenmor; despite his broad passions, despite his superior organization, I finds less charm in the interview of this man than in yours and I'll explain to you later why I sacrifices me to the point of leaving you for him.
Before continuing my story, however, I will answer a of your questions.
"Why, you say, this man so powerful of will did he not use his strength to suppress himself? " Why ?…
happy Sténio! But how do you see nature
of man? What do you augur of its power?
What do you expect from yourself, alas?
Sténio, you are very reckless to come and throw yourself into our whirlwind! See what you force me to say to you! ...
Men who suppress their passions in the interest of their fellow men, these, you see, are so rare that I have none
not yet encountered a single one. I saw heroes of ambition, love, selfishness, vanity especially! Philanthropy?…
Many boasted to me, but they lied by the
throat, hypocrites! My sad look plunged to the bottom of their soul and found nothing but vanity. Vanity is, after love, the most beautiful passion of man and know, poor as a child, that it is still very rare. Greed, the rude pride of social distinctions, debauchery, all vile addictions, laziness itself, which is for some a sterile but stubborn passion, these are the ambitions that move most men. Vanity, at least, is something
great thing in its effects. It forces us to be good, by the desire that we have to appear it, it pushes us up heroism, how sweet it is to see oneself carried in triumph, so much the Page 26
popularity has powerful and dexterous seductions! And vanity is something that never admits. Other passions can not give the change. Vanity Can Hide
behind another word, which the dupes accept. The philanthropy! Oh my God ! what childish falsehood! Where is-he, the man who prefers the happiness of other men to his own glory.
Christianity itself, which has produced what has been most heroic o
n earth, Christianity, what does it have for base? The hope of rewards, a throne high in the sky.
And those who made this great code, the most beautiful, the largest, the most poetic monument of the human spirit, knew so well the heart of man and his vanities and pettiness, which they have accordingly arranged their system of divine promises.
Read the apostles' writings, you will see that there will be distinctions in the sky, different hierarchies of
blessed, chosen places, organized militia regularly with its leaders and degrees. To the right comment on these words of Christ: "The first will be the last, and the last will be the first! - I tell you say, in truth, whoever is the smallest on earth will be the most great in the kingdom of heaven! "
Now why didn't Trenmor use his
moral force to tame in the interest of his fellow men?
Is that he misunderstood life, is that his selfishness hurt him advised, is that instead of going up on a sumptuous theater, he went up on a theater in the open wind; is that instead of strive to declare specious morals on the scene world and playing heroic roles he had fun, to give strength to your muscles, take turns
force and to risk on an archal thread. And again this comparison is worth nothing! the acrobat has his vanity as the tragedian, like the philanthropist orator. The player has none not ; he is neither admired, applauded, nor envied. His triumphs are so short and so haphazard that it is not worth it speak. On the contrary, society condemns it, the vulgar mistake, especially on days when he lost. All his quackery consists in making good capacity, to fall decently in front a group of interested parties who don't even watch it, as long as they Page 27