by George Sand
repelled God, you frankly hated this iniquitous power who had given you pain and loneliness. You you did not come, to the edge of this wave, to sing hymns melancholy, as Sténio does on the days when I afflict him; you haven't been prostrating yourself in the temples like says Magnus, when the demon of despair is in him; you have not, like Trenmor, crushed your sensitivity under the meditation; like him, you did not kill your passions composure to live proud and quiet on their debris. And you don't have either, like Lélia… ”
She forgot to articulate her thoughts and, her elbow resting on the mausoleum, the motionless eye on the waves, she did not hear Sténio which begged it to reveal itself to him.
" Yes ! she said after a long silence, she is dead! and if a human soul has deserved to go to heaven it is his; she did more than she was forced to: she drank the cup of bitterness to the dregs, then pushing back the benefit that went descend from above after the event, refusing the faculty to forget and despise her evil, she broke the cup and kept the poison in her womb like a bitter treasure. She is dead !
dead of sorrow! And we all live! You, young man, who still have brand new faculties for the pain, you live or you talk about suicide and that is more cowardly than to suffer this soiled life than the contempt for God leave us! "
Sténio, seeing it sadder, began to sing for the distract. As he sang, tears streamed from his tired eyelids; but he tamed his pain and sought in his despondent soul inspirations to console Lélia.
4
"You often told me, Lélia, that I was young and pure like an angel from heaven, you sometimes told me that you loved me. This morning again, you smiled at me saying: "I haven't Page 89
more happiness than in you. "But, tonight, you forgot everything and you ruthlessly overturn the foundations of my happiness.
Is ! break me, throw me to the ground like this flower that you just breathe and now you give up on the
gravel from the stream. If to see me carried away like her and tossed, withered, at the whim of the wave, you find something fun, some ironic and cruel satisfaction, tears me, trample me under your foot; but don't forget that one day, the hour when you want to pick me up and breathe me again, you me will find flowers and ready to be reborn under your caresses.
Well ! poor woman, you will love me as you can.
I knew that you could no longer love as I love; Besides, it's just that you are the most adored and the most sovereign of both of us. I don't deserve the love you merits, I did not suffer, I did not fight like you; I am only a child without glory and without wounds in front of the life that begins and the struggle that opens. You, furrowed
lightning, you knocked down a hundred times and still standing, you who do not understand God and yet believe, you who insult him and who love him, you withered like an old man and young like a child, Lélia, my poor soul! love me like you will be able; I will always be on my knees to thank you and I will give all my heart, all my life, in exchange for the little that you still have to give me.
Just let yourself be loved; accepts without disdain sufferings that I bring in holocaust at your feet; leave me consume my life and burn my heart on the altar that I have you trained. Don't pity me, I'm even happier than you, it is for you that I suffer! Oh ! why can't i die for you, how Viola died of her love! That there is voluptuousness in these tortures that you put in my bosom, that there are happiness to be only your toy and your victim, to atone, young, pure and resigned, the old iniquities, the murmurs, the impieties gathered on your head! Ah! if we could wash them stains of another soul with the pains of his soul and blood of her veins, if we could redeem it as a new one Christ and give up his share of eternity, to spare him the nothing!
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This is how I love you, Lélia. You don't know, because you don't want to know. I'm not asking you to appreciate myself, even less to complain; come to me only when you were suffering and do me all the harm that you will, in order to distract yourself from the one who eats you.
- Well ! said Lélia, I am suffering mortally at the hour that East ; anger is fermenting in my bosom. Do you want blaspheme for me? Maybe that will relieve me. Want-throw stones at you in the sky, outrage God, curse
eternity, invoking nothingness, worshiping evil, calling destruction on the works of Providence and contempt on his worship? Come on, are you able to kill Abel for me avenge of God my tyrant? Would you scream like a bewildered dog who sees the moon sowing ghosts on the walls?
Do you want to bite the earth and eat sand like Nebuchadnezzar? Would you like Job to spit your anger and mine in vehement imprecations?
Will you, pure and pious young man, immerse yourself in atheism to the neck and crawling in the mire where I breathe out?
I suffer, and I have no strength to cry out. Come on roar for me ! Well ! you cry! ... You can cry,
you? Happy those who cry! My eyes are drier that the sand deserts where the dew never falls and my my heart is drier than my eyes. You're crying ? Well !
listen to a song that I translated from a poet to distract you foreign. "
5
Farewell
"What did I do to be struck by this
curse? Why did you withdraw from me. You do not do not refuse the sun to inert plants, the dew to imperceptible field grasses; you give to
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stamens of a flower the power of loving and madrepor stupid feelings of happiness. And I, who am also a creature of your hands, me, whom you had endowed with a apparent wealth of organization, you took everything away from me, you treated me worse than your blasted angels; because they still have the power to hate and blaspheme and I don't don't even have it! You treated me worse than the mire of the
stream and that gravel from the path; because we trample them feet and they don't feel it. I feel what I am and I don't then not bite the foot that oppresses me or lift the damnation hanging over me like a mountain.
Why did you treat me so, unknown power which I feel the iron hand spread over me? Why did you gives birth to you woman, if you wanted me a little later turn to stone and leave me useless outside of life common? To rise above all or
to belittle me below that you have done to me, oh my God ! If it is a destiny of choice, then do may it be sweet to me and may I wear it without suffering; if it’s a life of retribution, so why do you have it to me inflicted? Alas! was I guilty before I was born?
What is this soul that you gave me?
Is this what is called a poet's soul? More mobile than the light and more wandering than the wind, always greedy, always worried, always gasping, always looking for out of it the food of its duration and exhausting them all before to have only tasted them! O life, O torment! suck everything up and understand nothing, understand everything and have nothing! arrive to the skepticism of the heart, like Faust to the skepticism of the mind ! Destiny more unhappy than the destiny of Faust; for he keeps in his bosom the treasure of young passions and fiery, who brooded in silence under the dust of books and slept while the intelligence kept watch; and when Faust, tired of looking for perfection and not finding it, stop, close to curse and deny God, God to punish him sends him the angel of dark and fatal passions. This angel attaches to it, it warms it, it rejuvenates it, it burns it, it misleads him, he devours him and old Faust enters life, young and vivacious, cursed guilty, but all-powerful! He had come to
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no longer love God, but there he is who loves Marguerite. My God, give me Faust's curse!
Because you are not enough for me, God! You know it well.
You don't want to be everything to me! you don't reveal yourself not enough for me to take you and for me to get there attaches exclusively. You attract me, you flatter me with a fragrant breath of your celestial breezes, you smile at me between two golden clouds, you appear to me in my dreams, you call me, you keep me excited to take off
towards you, but you forgot to give me wings. AT
what good is it to have given me a soul to desire you? You constantly escape me,
you wrap this beautiful sky and this beautiful nature of heavy and dark vapors; you pass on the flowers a south wind that devours them or you do blow a kiss on me that freezes me and saddens me up the bone marrow. You give us foggy days and nights without stars, you upset our poor universe with storms that irritate us, that intoxicate us, that that make us bold and skeptical despite us! And if in these sad hours we succumb under doubt, you awaken in we sting them with remorse and you place a reproach in all the voices of the earth and the sky!
Why, why did you do this to us! What a profit do you draw from our suffering? What glory our abjection and do our nothingness add to your glory? Are these torments necessary for man to make him desire the sky?
Hope is it a weak and pale flower which grows only among the rocks, under the breath of thunderstorms? Precious flower, sweet perfume, come and live in this arid and devastated heart!… Ah!
you've been trying for a long time to try to rejuvenate him;
your roots can no longer attach to its brass walls, its icy atmosphere dries you up, its storms tear you apart and throw to the broken ground, withered!… O hope! can't you no longer bloom again for me ...
- These songs are painful, this poetry is cruel, said Sténio, by tearing off the harp from his hands; you like in these somber reveries, you tear me mercilessly. No, this is not the translation of a foreign poet; the text of this poem is at the bottom of your soul, Lélia, I know it! O
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cruel and incurable! listen to this bird, it sings better than you, he sings of the sun, spring and love. This little being is therefore better organized than you who could only sing the pain and doubt. "
6
In the desert
"I brought you to this deserted valley that the foot herds never crowd, that the hunter's sandal never stained point. I led you there, Lélia, through the precipices. You fearlessly faced all the dangers of this trip ; you measured the crevasses with a quiet look crisscrossing the deep flanks of the glacier, you have them crossed on a board thrown by our guides and which trembled on bottomless abysses. You crossed the cataracts, light and agile like the white stork that lands on stone stone and fall asleep with his neck bent, his body balanced, on a of her frail legs, in the midst of the flow which smokes and whirls, above the chasms which vomit the foam to the brim.
You have not trembled once, Lélia; and me, how I shuddered! how many times my blood has frozen and my heart stopped beating seeing you pass by like this
above the abyss, carefree, distracted, looking at the sky and disdainful of where you put your narrow feet! You are very brave and very strong, Lélia! When you say that your soul is nervous, you lie; no man has
more confidence and daring than you.
- What is daring? answered Lélia, and who has none not ? Who loves life at the time we are?
This recklessness is called courage, when it produces any property; but, when it confines itself to exposing a worthless destiny, isn't it just inertia?
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Inertia, Sténio! it is the evil of our hearts, it is the great plague of this age of the world. There are only virtues we are brave because we are not
more able to be afraid. Alas! yes, everything is worn out, even the weaknesses, even human vices. We no longer have the strength that makes you love life with stubborn love and coward. When there was still energy on earth, we waged war with cunning, with prudence, with calculation. Life was a perpetual fight, a fight where the bravest retreated constantly facing danger, because the bravest was the one who lived the longest in the midst of perils and hatred.
Since civilization has made life easy and calm for all, all find it monotonous and tasteless; we expose it for a word, for a look, it is so cheap! It is the indifference of the life which made the duel in our manners. It is a spectacle made to note the apathy of the century than that of two calm and polite men, drawing lots which will kill the other without hatred, without anger and without profit. Alas! Sténio, we don't are nothing, we are neither good nor bad,
we are not even cowards, we are inert.
- Lélia, you are right and, when I cast my eyes on the company, I'm sad like you. But I brought you here to make you forget it at least for a few days.
Look where we are, isn't it sublime? and
can you think of anything other than God? Sit on this virgin moss of human steps and see at your feet the desert unfold its great depths. Have you ever seen anything wilder and yet more lively?
See that vigor in this free and wandering vegetation, that movement in these forests that the wind bends and makes undulate, in these great troops of eagles which hover without stops around the misty and passing peaks, in circles moving, like big black rings on the tablecloth white and moiré from the glacier? Do you hear the noise that go up and down from all sides? The torrents that cry and sob like unhappy souls, deer who
a plaintive and passionate voice roars, the singing breeze and laughs in the heather, the vultures cry like women frightened; and these other strange, mysterious, undiscovered noises , rumbling in the mountains, these ice
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colossal creaking in the heart of the blocks, the snow that collapse and carry the sand, these big tree roots who struggle incessantly with the bowels of the earth and who work to lift the rock and split the shale, these voices unknown, those vague sighs that the ground, still plagued by childbirth sufferings, exhaled here by its sides ajar; don't you find all this more splendid, more harmonious than the church and the theater?
- It is true that all this is beautiful and it is here that it is necessary come and see what the earth still has of youth and
force. Poor earth! she too is leaving!
- What do you say then, Lélia? Do you think the earth and Heaven be guilty of our moral decrepitude?
Insolent dreamer, do you accuse them too?
- Yes, I accuse them, she replied, or rather I accuse the great law of time, which wants everything to run out and end.
Don't you see that the flood of centuries sweeps us all away together, men and worlds, to engulf us in
eternity like those dry leaves that flee towards the precipice, carried by the water of the torrent? Alas! we don't not even leave this frail skin! We don't
not even float like those wilting weeds that float there sad and dangling, like a woman's hair drowned. The dissolution will have passed over the corpses of the empires, the dumb debris of humanity will be no more than the grains of sand from the sea. God will bend the universe like a worn clothing that is thrown in the wind, like a coat that is skinned, because we don't want it anymore. So God alone will be . So maybe his glory and power will burst forth without sails. But who will contemplate them? New races will be born them on our dust, to see or to guess whoever create and destroy!
- The world will go away, I know it, said Sténio, but it will be necessary to destroy it for so many centuries that the number is incalculable in the brains of men. No no we are not
still in its agony. This thought is hatched in the irritated soul some skeptics like you; but I feel good
that the world is young; my heart and my reason tell me Page 96
that he did not even reach half of his life, by the force of his age ; the world is still progressing; he has so many
things to learn!
- No doubt, she replied wryly, he hasn't yet found the secret of raising the dead and making the living alive immortals; but he will make these great discoveries, and then the world will not end, man will be stronger than God and will survive without the help of anything other than its intelligence.
- Lélia, you always mock, but listen to me: don't don't you think men are better today
that yesterday and therefore…
- I don't think so, but what does it matter? We are not no agreement on the age of the world, that's all.
- We would know exactly, we would not be more advances. We don't know the secrets of her organization we don't know how long a world constituted like this can and must live. But
I feel like my heart that we are walking towards light and life; hope shines in our sky, see how beautiful the sun is!
as he smiles, ruddy and generous, in the mountains which embrace his caresses and blush with love like shy virgins! It is not with the logic of
reasoning that one can prove the existence of God. We believe in him because a celestial instinct reveals it. Likewise, can measure eternity with the exact science compass, but one feels in his soul what the moral world has of sap and freshness, just as one feels in one's being physical what the air contains invigorating principles and tonics. What! you breathe this aromatic breeze of mountains without penetrating your pores and firming your fibers? You drink this clear, frozen water that tastes mint and wild thyme, without feeling the salutary flavor? You do not feel rejuvenated and soaked in
this lively and subtle air, among these flowers so beautiful and which seem so proud of owing nothing to human care? Turn around and see these thick rhododendrum bushes; like these tufts of lilac flowers are fresh and pure! as they stand Page 97
turn towards the sky to look at the azure, to collect dew! These flowers are beautiful like you, Lélia, uncultivated and wild like you; don't you understand the passion that has for these flowers? "
Lélia smiles and dreams for a long time, her eyes fixed on the valley deserted.
"No doubt we would have to live here," she said finally, "to keep the little that we have at heart; but we don't would not live three days without wilting this vegetation and without defile this air. The man is always gutting his nurse, exhausting the soil that produced it. He always wants to fix the nature and redo the work of God. You wouldn't be three days here, I tell you, without wanting to carry the rocks of the mountain at the bottom of the valley and without wanting to cultivate the reed of wet depths on the arid peaks of the mountains. You would call it a garden; if you had come there is fifty years you would have put a statue and a cradle cut.