Lelia

by George Sand

  - Always mocking, Lélia! You can laugh and prune here in the presence of this sublime scene! Without you, I would have prostrated before the author of all this; but you, my demon, you didn't want to. I must hear you deny everything, even the beauty of nature.

  - Hey! I do not deny it! cried she. What thing have i got have you ever heard deny? What belief found me oblivious to what she was poetic or great? But the

  power to abuse me, who will give it to me? Alas, why Did God take pleasure in putting such a disproportion between the human illusions and reality? Why should we suffer always of a desire for well-being which is revealed in the form of beautiful and that hovers in all our dreams, without ever asking Earth ? It is not only our soul that suffers from the absence of God is our whole being, it's sight, it is the flesh that suffer from the indifference or the rigor of the sky. Tell me: in what climate of the earth does man ignore it the excessive sensations of cold and hot? What is the valley that is not wet in winter? Where are the mountains whose grass is not withered and uprooted by the wind? In Page 98

  Orient, the edgy species vegetates and languishes always lying, always inert. Women wither in the shade of harems, because the sun would burn them. And then a dry and corrosive wind comes from the sea, and brings to this indolent race a kind of vertigo that gives birth to crimes or heroism unknown to our people below the sun. So these men get drunk of activity; they exhale in ferocious rumors, in pleasures bloodthirsty, in unrestrained debauchery, the concentrated force which slept in them, until exhausted with suffering and tired they fall back on their couches, stupid among all men!

  And these are the best, the most

  energetic among the peoples, the happiest in rest, the most violent in action. Look at those in the zones steamy; for those, the sun is generous, indeed; the plants are gigantic, the earth is full of fruit, perfumes and shows. There is luxury vanity in color and in form. Birds and insects sparkle with

  jewels, the flowers exhale intoxicating odors. Trees themselves contain exquisite scents in the woody tissue of their bark. The nights are clear like our days fall stars are four times as big

  here. Everything is beautiful, everything is rich. The still rude man and naive ignore some of the evils we have invented.

  Do you think he is happy? No. Troops of animals hideous and ferocious make war on it. The tiger roars around its remains; the snake, that cold, sticky monster whose man has more horror than any other enemy, creeps up to cradle of his child. Then comes the storm, this big convulsion of a robust nature which leaps like a bull in fury, which tears itself apart like a wounded lion. he man must flee or perish; the wind, the lightning, the overflowing torrents upset and swept away his cabin, his field and herds: every evening, he does not know if he will have a homeland the next day; it was too beautiful, this homeland: God does not don't want to leave it to him. Every year he will have to look for it a news. The spectacle of a happy man is not pleasing to the Lord. Oh my God ! you may also be suffering, you may be bored in your glory, since you make us so much of badness !

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  Well ! these children of the sun only in our dreams of poets we envy like the privileged of the earth, no doubt they sometimes wonder if there is a sweetheart country from heaven, that do not cross the fiery lava, which the

  destructive winds; a country that wakes up in the morning, united, calm and warm as the day before. They wonder if God, in his anger, put blood-hungry panthers and

  hideous reptiles; maybe these simple men dream about their

  earthly paradise in our temperate latitudes, perhaps in their dreams see the mist and the cold come down on their tanned foreheads and darken their fiery atmosphere. We, when we dream, we see the red hot sun, the sparkling plain, the blazing sea, and the hot sand beneath our feet. We call the southern sun on our shoulders icy and the people of the South would receive the drops on their knees of our rain on their burning breasts. So everywhere man suffers and whispers; delicate and nervous creature he made himself the king of creation in vain, he is the most unfortunate victim, he is the only animal in whom the power intellectual being in such a disproportionate relationship with the physical power. In the beings he calls animals coarse material force dominates, instinct is only the conservative spring of animal existence. In humans, the over-developed instinct burns and tortures a frail and puny organization. He has the impotence of the mollusk, with the tiger appetites; misery and necessity imprison him in a tortoiseshell; ambition, anxiety deploy their eagle wings in his brain. He would like to have the faculties united of all races, but he has only the faculty to want in vain. He surrounds himself with spoils: the bowels of the earth abandon gold and marble, flowers can be crushed, express in perfumes for its use; air birds drop to adorn the most beautiful feathers of their wings, the dive and the eider deliver their down breastplate for warm its indolent and cold limbs; wool,

  fur, tortoiseshell, silk, the entrails of that one, the teeth of this one, this other’s skin, everyone’s blood and life belong to man. Man's life is not nourished only by destruction; and yet what a painful and short duration !

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  The most hideous of painters and poets

  in the grotesque fantasies of their imagination and, it is necessary well put it, what appears to us most often in the nightmare, it's a sabbath of living corpses, skeletons animals, skinny, bloody, with errors

  monstrous, bizarre overlays, bird heads

  on horse trunks, crocodile faces on bodies camel; it's always a jumble of bones, a

  orgy of fear that smells of carnage and cries of pain, words of threat uttered by mutilated animals. Believe-Do you think dreams are a pure combination of chance? Born don't you think that apart from the laws of association and habits consecrated in man by law and by

  power, there can exist in him secret, vague remorse, instinctive, that no order of received ideas wanted to confess or state and which are revealed by the terrors of superstition or sleep hallucinations? While manners, usage and belief have destroyed certain realities of our moral life, the imprint remained in a corner of the brain and there wake up when the other intelligent faculties fall asleep.

  There are many other intimate sensations of this kind. There is memories that seem like those of another life, of children who come into the world with pains that seem to be contracted in the grave, because the man is perhaps leaving the cold of the coffin to enter the down of the cradle. Who knows ?

  have we not gone through death and chaos? These images terrible follow us in all our dreams! Why this lively sympathy for erased lives, why these regrets and this love for beings who left only one name in human history? Isn't it maybe from memory

  who doesn't know? It sometimes seems to me that I have known Shakespeare, that I cried with Torquato, that I crossed the heaven and hell with Dante. A name from the old days awakens emotions that resemble memories in me, like certain scents of exotic plants remind us of countries that produced them. So our imagination is there walk as if she knows them, as if our feet

  had once trod this unknown homeland which however, we believe, did not see us born or die. Poor men, what do we know

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  - We only know that we cannot know,

  said Sténio.

  - Well, that is what devours us, Sténio! she went on; it is this impotence that a whole universe enslaved and mutilated can barely hide under the brilliance of its vain trophies. The arts, industry, and science, all the scaffolding of the civilization, what is it, if not the continual effort of weakness human to hide its evils and cover its misery? See if, despite its profusion and its voluptuousness, luxury can create in us new senses or perfect the system

  organic of the human body; see if the development exaggerated of human reason carried the application of theory in practice, if the study took science beyond certain insuperable limits, if the monstrous excitement of feeling has succeeded in producing complete enjoyments. he is doubtful that the progress made by sixty centuries of research has brought h
uman existence to the point of being bearable and destroy the need for suicide for a large number.

  - Lélia, I did not try to prove to you that the man

  would have reached its peak of power and grandeur. At on the contrary, I told you that, in my opinion, the human race had still many generations to be buried before arriving at this point and maybe then she will stay there for a long time centuries before descending to a state of decrepitude where you believe her now.

  - How can you believe, young man, that we

  follow a progressive walk, when you see around of you all losing beliefs, all societies

  restless in their loose bonds, all faculties are exhausted through the abuse of life, all the once sacred principles fall into the area of discussion and serve as a toy for children, as the rags of royalty and the clergy served as masquerade to the people, king and priest of its full right?

  - Hey! you know that, in all times, thrones have faltered on fragile foundations! This spirit of freedom which seizes, it is said, new peoples, it is not a improvisation so prompt that we only had time to read Page 102

  how the ancient peoples organized their system of Republic. Everything in our revolutions has a character childish imitation and miserable plagiarism. The struggle between the poor and the rich didn’t start from the day she ceased between the strong and the weak? Establishing the law is not an inheritance almost as old as that of law of conquest? Is it yesterday and we are fighting over the soil who carries us?

  - Yes, she said, but after these human-to-human wars, after these upheavals of societies, the still young world and vigorous stood up and rebuilt his building for a new period of centuries. It won't happen again. We don't

  are not just, as you believe, one of these aftermath of crisis where the tired human mind falls asleep on the battlefield before retaking the arms of the deliverance. By dint of falling and getting up, by dint of staying stretched out on your side and take hold of hope and see your injuries reopen and close, by dint of restlessness in their shackles and crying out to the sky, the colossus ages and collapses; he is now tottering like a ruin crumble for ever; a few more hours of agony convulsive and the wind of eternity will pass indifferent on a chaos of nations without brake, reduced to fighting for debris of a worn-out world that will no longer suffice for their needs.

  - Do you believe that the last judgment is approaching? O my sad Lélia! your dark soul gives birth to these immense terrors, because it is too vast for lesser superstitions. But, in all times, the spirit of man has been preoccupied with these ideas of death. Ascetic souls are are always delighted in these sinister contemplations, in these images of cataclysm and universal desolation. You you are not a new prophet, Lélia; Jérémie came before you and your dantesque poetry and anger have created nothing so dismal as the Apocalypse, sung in delusional nights from a sublime madman to the rocks of Pathmos.

  - I know, but the voice of Jean, the dreamer and the poet, was heard and collected; she terrified the world, and everything unintelligible as it seemed, she rallied through fear to faith Christian a lot of mediocre intelligences that the Page 103

  sublimity of evangelical precepts could not have touched. Jesus had opened heaven to spiritualists; jean opened hell and brought out death mounted on his pale horse, despotism at

  bloody sword, war and famine galloping on a skeleton courier, to frighten the vulgar who suffered quietly the plagues of humanity and who was afraid of it as soon that he saw them personified in pagan form. But today the prophets cry out in the wilderness and no voice answers them because the world is indifferent, he is deaf, he lie down and cover your ears to die in peace. In vain a few scattered groups of helpless sectarians are trying to rekindle a spark of virtue. Last remnants of power moral of man, they will float for a moment over the abyss, and will go and join the other debris at the bottom of this sea without shores to which the world must return.

  - Oh ! why despair thus, Lélia, of these men sublime who aspire to bring virtue back to our Iron Age!

  If I doubted, like you, their success, I wouldn't to say it. I would fear committing an impious crime.

  - I admire these men, answered Lélia, and I would like to be the last of them. But what can these shepherds, who carry a star on the forehead, in front of the great monster of the Apocalypse, in front of this immense and terrible figure who draw on the foreground of all the pictures of the prophet.

  This pale and beautiful woman like vice, this tall prostitute of the nations, covered with the riches of the East and riding a hydra which vomits rivers of poison on all human ways, it's civilization, it's humanity depraved by luxury and science, it is the torrent of venom that will swallow up every word of virtue, all hope of regeneration.

  - O Lélia, exclaimed the poet struck with superstition. N'êtes-you point this unhappy and terrible ghost? How much this fear has taken hold of my dreams! How much times you appeared to me as a type of the unspeakable suffering where the spirit of research threw man! Born

  not personify yourself, with your beauty and your sadness, with your boredom and your skepticism, the excess pain produced by the abuse of thought? This moral power, if developed through the exercise that art, poetry and Page 104

  science, haven't you delivered it and so to speak prostitute at all impressions, at all errors new ? Instead of clinging, faithful and careful, to faith simple of your fathers and the instinctive carelessness that God has put in the man for his rest and for his conversation; at place to shut yourself up in a religious life and without pomp, you have surrendered to the seductions of an ambitious philosophy. You threw yourself into the torrent of civilization which rose to destroy and which, for having run too quickly, ruined the foundations, barely laid, of the future. And because you have moved the work of

  centuries, you believe you have broken the hourglass of eternity! There is much pride in this pain, O Lélia! But God

  will let pass this stream of stormy centuries which for him is not than a drop in the sea. The devouring hydra will die for lack of food and, of his corpse which will cover the world, will come out a new breed, stronger and more patient than old.

  - You see far, Sténio! You personify for me the nature of which you are the child virgin rating. You do not have still blunted your faculties: you think you are immortal because you feel young, like this uncultivated valley, which blooms beautiful and proud, without thinking that in one day the share of the plow and the hundred-armed monster called industry can wither its breast to steal its treasures; you grow up, confident and presumptuous, without foreseeing the life that

  comes forward and will swallow you up under the weight of his mistakes, disfigure yourself in the shade of its promises. Wait, wait a few years, and you will say like us: "Everything is going away! "

  - No, everything is not going away! said Sténio. So see what sun and this earth, and this beautiful sky, and these green hills, and this very ice, a fragile building of winters, which has resisted since centuries in the summer rays. Thus will prevail the frail power of man! And whatever the fall of a few generations? Do you cry for so little, Lélia?

  Do you believe it possible that only one idea dies in the universe?

  Will this imperishable legacy not be found intact in the dust of, our extinct races, like the inspirations of Page 105

  art and science discoveries come out every day living from the ashes of Pompeïa or the tombs of Memphis? Oh ! the great and striking proof of immortality intellectual! Deep mysteries were lost in the time immemorial, the world had forgotten its age and, believing itself still young, he was afraid of feeling so old already. He said like you, Lélia: "Here I am close to finishing, because I weakened me, and it was so few days ago that I was born! How much there it will take me little to die, since so little was enough to make me live ! "But human corpses are one day exhumed from the within Egypt, Egypt that had lived its age of civilization and which has just lived its age of barbarism! Egypt where the old, long lost light comes back on and which, rested and rejuvenate
d, may soon come and sit on the torch extinguished of ours! Living Egypt image of its mummies who slept in the dust of centuries and who wake up to the big day of science to reveal to the world

  new age of the old world! Say, Lélia, this is not it solemn and terrible? At the bottom of the dried out entrails of a human corpse, the curious gaze of our century discovers the papyrus, mysterious and sacred monument of the eternal power of man, still dark testimony, but

  indisputable, the imposing duration of the creation. Our hand greedy unrolls these frail, frail and

  indissoluble shrouds before which destruction took place stopped. These shrouds where the man was buried, these manuscripts which lay under emaciated ribs in place of what was perhaps a soul, it is human thought, expressed by the science of figures and transmitted by the aid of a lost art for us and found in the graves of the East, the art of to dispute the remains of the dead in the contempt of corruption which is the greatest power in the universe. O Lélia, deny therefore the youth of the world, seeing it stop ignorant and naive before the lessons of the past and start living on forgotten ruins of an unknown world!

  - To know , it is not power , answered Lélia. relearn, it is not to advance; to see is not to live. Who will return us the power to act and especially the art of enjoying and conserving?

  We have gone too far now to retreat. What was the rest for eclipsed civilizations will be death for our Page 106

  exhausted civilization; the rejuvenated nations of the Orient will get drunk on the poison that we spread on our soil. Bold drinkers, the men of barbarism may extend the orgy of luxury by a few hours, in the mists of time, but the venom that we will bequeath to them will be deadly for them and for us and everything will fall back into darkness! don't you see,

  Sténio, that the sun withdraws from us? The tired earth in does not its walk drift noticeably towards the shade and the chaos? Is your blood so fiery and young that it doesn't smell the cold that stretches like a mourning coat on this planet abandoned to Destiny, the most powerful of all the Gods? Oh the cold! this penetrating evil that sinks sharp needles in every pore! That cursed breath who withers flowers and burns them like fire; this bad at a time invading physical and moral, soul and body, which. penetrates to the depths of thought and paralyzes the mind and the blood ; the cold, this sinister demon, which shaves the universe of its wing wet and blows the plague on the dismayed nations! Cold which tarnishes everything, which unrolls its gray and nebulous veil over the rich colors of the sky, on the reflections of the water, on the bosom of flowers; on the cheeks of virgins! The cold that casts its shroud white on the meadows, on the woods, on the lakes and even on the fur, even on the plumage of animals! The cold that discolour everything in the material world as in the world intellectual, the dress of the hare and the bear on the shores d'Archangel, the pleasures of man and the character of his manners in the places he approaches! You can see that everything becomes civilized, that is to say everything cools down. The Nations torrid zone tans start to open their hand