Lelia

by George Sand

  fruits, I excited it, I developed it, I gave it course by all possible means. Reckless and unhappy that I was!

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  I then exhaled it through every pore, I spread it as an inexhaustible source of life over all things. The the least object of esteem, the least subject of amusement inspired me with enthusiasm and drunkenness. A poet was a god for me, the earth was my mother and the stars my sisters.

  I blessed the sky on my knees for a flower blossoming on my window, for a bird song sent when I woke up. My

  admiration was ecstasy; my well-being, delirium.

  So increasing my power day by day, exciting my sensibility and spreading it without measure above and beyond beneath me I was going to throw all my thought, all my strength in the void of this elusive universe, which sent me back all my blunt sensations: the faculty of seeing, dazzled by the sun, that of desire, tired by the appearance of the sea and the wave of horizons, and that of believing, shaken by algebra mysterious of the stars and the silence of all these things after which my soul wandered; so i arrived as soon adolescence to this fullness of faculties which cannot go beyond beyond without breaking the deadly envelope.

  When I entered working life, I had before me all the facts to learn, no new emotions to feel. This is still the story of a whole generation.

  Then a man came and I loved him. I loved him the same love with which I had loved God and the heavens, and the sun and the sea.

  Only I stopped loving these things and I carried over to him the enthusiasm that I had for the other works of the Divinity.

  Alas! this man had not lived the same ideas. he knew other pleasures, other ecstasies: he would have liked them share with me. But I, nourished by a heavenly windfall, me whose body was depleted by contemplations austere mysticism, blood tired by the stillness of the study, I did not feel the youth sinking its pricks in my flesh. I forgot to be young, and nature forgot to wake up. My dreams had been too sublime; i could no longer descend to the gross appetites of matter. A complete divorce had taken place without my knowledge between the body and the mind. I had lived in the opposite direction from natural destiny.

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  Instead of starting with enjoyment and ending with reflection, I had opened the book of life in the chapter of science; I got drunk on meditations and spiritualism, and I had pronounced the anathema of the old men on all that I had not yet experienced. When the age of living came, he was too late: I had lived.

  But if the youth of the senses, if the life of the body has only one day, which must be seized and which never returns, the youth of the soul is long and the life of the spirit is immortal. My heart survived my senses, and I devoted myself by turning pale and closing my eyes.

  You are right to say that poetry has lost the spirit of the man ; she sorry the real world, so cold, so poor, so deplorable at the cost of the sweet dreams she gives birth to. Intoxicated with his crazy promises, lulled by his sweet mockery, I have never been able to resign myself to positive life. Poetry had created me other faculties, immense, magnificent and that nothing on the earth was not to satisfy. Reality found my soul too vast to be contained there for a moment. Each day was to mark the ruin of my destiny before my pride, ruin of my sorry pride before its own triumphs. It was a struggle powerful and a miserable victory; because, by despising all that is, I conceived contempt for myself, foolish and vain creature, who could not enjoy anything by dint of wanting to enjoy all things splendidly.

  Yes, it was a big and hard fight, because by getting drunk the poetry does not tell us that it deceives us. She looks beautiful, simple, austere like the truth. She takes a thousand faces diverse, she becomes man and angel, she becomes God; we get attached to this shadow, we chase it, we kiss it, we prostrate before her, we believe to have found God and conquered the

  promised land; but unfortunately! his fleeting adornment falls in tattered under the eye of analysis and human misery no longer has a rag to cover. Oh ! then the man cries and blasphemy. He insults the sky, he asks why his reckoning, he believes himself stolen, he goes to bed and wants to die.

  And, indeed, why does God deceive him so much?

  What glory can the strong find in luring the weak? Because all Page 148

  poetry emanates from the sky and is only the instinctive feeling of a divinity present to our destinies; materialism destroys the poetry, he reduces everything to the simple proportions of reality. He ... not builds the universe with combinations, religious faith the ghost people. Divinity, behind its veils impenetrable, does she even laugh at our worship and angelic creations with which our sickly brain surrounds it?

  Alas! all this is dark and discouraging.

  "Because we should neither dream nor pray," said Pulchérie; Hey should be content to live, naively accept the belief to a good God: that would be enough for man, if he had less vanity. But man wants to examine this God and revise his works; he wants to know it, question it, make it conducive to his needs, responsible for his sufferings; he wants to deal as equals with him. It's your pride that invented poetry and who placed so many disappointing dreams between earth and sky.

  God is not the author of your miseries ...

  - Pride, confidence, resumed Lélia, these are two words different to express the same idea; these are two ways diverse to consider the same feeling. From whatever name you called it, it is the complement of our organization and as the keystone of our intellectual architecture.

  It is God who crowned his work with this vague thought,

  painful, but infinite and sublime; that's the condition of worry and uneasiness that he imposed on us elevating above other animated creatures. "You surpass the strength of the camel, the skill of the beaver, did we he says; but you will never be satisfied with your works and, above your earthly Eden you will always seek the floating promise of a better stay. Come on, you you will share the earth, but you will desire the sky; you will be powerful, but you will suffer. "

  - Well! if so, said Pulchérie, suffer in

  silence, pray on your knees, wait for the sky, but resign yourself before the evils of life. Feel the suffering imposed by the Creator is not the whole task of man: it is to accept it. Constantly shouting and cursing the yoke is not to wear it. You know that it is not enough to find the bitter chalice, it must still be drunk to the dregs. You do not have Page 149

  that a chance of greatness on earth, and you despise it: it is that of submitting, and you are not submitting never. By dint of striking imperiously at the stay of angels, are you not afraid of making it inaccessible to you?

  - You are right, my sister, you speak like Trenmor.

  In love with life, you are at the same point of submission that this man detached from life. You are out of order the same calm as he in virtue. But I, who have neither virtues or vices, I don't know how to deal with boredom to exist. Alas! it's easy for you to prescribe patience! Yes you were, like me, placed between those who still live and those who no longer live, you would, like me, be agitated by a dark anger and tormented by an insatiable desire to be something, to start life, or to end it ...

  - But didn't you tell me you liked it?

  To love is to live in pairs.

  - Oh ! for you, no doubt! for you who were looking for in love a well-known end that could achieve it.

  But I was not, I could not be in love the equal of person. The coldness of my senses placed me below more abject women, the exaltation of my thoughts raised me above the most passionate men. I liked by

  need, by necessity; but, not tasting the joys that I gave, I couldn't get attached by any real feeling, by no recognition based on the object of my sacrifices. This unrestrained desire for happiness that I pursued in him and that none human enjoyment could not satiate was torture eternal and deep. If the enthusiasm of the spirit had not destroy in me the salutary calculations of selfishness, I would not have never could love. But not knowing where to spend my vigor intellectual, I threw it rampant and tenacious at the foot of an idol created by my worship;
because he was a man like others, and when I was tired of prostrating myself, I broke the pedestal and I saw it reduced to its true size. But I had it placed so high in my pompous adoration that he had me seemed great as God.

  This was my most deplorable mistake and see what destiny miserable is mine! I was reduced to regret it, as soon as Page 150

  I would have lost it. Alas! I had nothing more to put on the square. Everything seemed small near this imaginary colossus.

  Friendship seemed cold to me, lying religion and poetry was dead with love.

  With my chimera I was as happy as he is

  allowed to be the characters of my temper. I enjoyed the

  robust growth of my faculties. The intoxication of the error me threw into truly divine ecstasies; I immersed myself in excess in this stinging and terrible destiny which was to gobble me up after breaking me. It was an inexpressible state of pain and joy, of despair and energy. My soul thunderstorm liked this fatal sloshing which wore him out without fruit and without return. Calm frightened him, rest irritated him.

  He needed obstacles, fatigue, jealousy

  devouring to concentrate, cruel ingratitudes to forgive, great works to be continued, great misfortunes to support. It was a career, it was a glory; man, I would have liked the fighting, the smell of blood, the hugs of the danger ; perhaps the ambition to rule by intelligence, to dominate other men with powerful words,

  she smiled in the days of my youth. Woman, I only had one noble destiny on earth was to love. I loved valiantly ; I suffer all the ills of blind passion and robust struggling with social life and real selfishness of the heart human; I resisted for many years all that

  had to turn it off or cool it. Now I support without bitterness the reproaches of men and I listen with a smile the charge of insensitivity with which they charge my head. I know, and God knows it too, that I have accomplished my task, that I have provided my share of fatigue and anguish to the great abyss of anger into which the tears of men without ceaseless fall be able to fill it. I know I used my strength by dedication, that I have recanted my pride, erased my existence behind another existence. Yes, my God, you know, you broke me under your scepter and I fell in the dust. I have stripped this pride once so haughty, today so bitter; I stripped it for a long time before being that you offered to my fatal cult. I worked well, oh

  my God, I devoured my evil in silence. When so will you bring me into rest?

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  - You boast, Lélia; you worked at a loss and I don't don't surprise me. You wanted to be sublime and you weren't even not tall. This is what it is to want to isolate yourself from joys vulgar and make a destiny of choice and exception!

  You felt too noble to also share the

  happiness with another creature; you wanted him to give without receiving it. Well! you stayed below of this wonderful project. You wanted to be generous, you were only lavish. If you had been really tall, you would have put the happiness of others in place of yours; you would have tasted, in the arms of your lover, a greater his pleasure, that of giving him everything. I often have it desired, me, this supreme pleasure; I often regretted not ability to quench the heat of my blood and moderate the impetuosity of my desires, to contemplate a man happy on my breast. I wish I could mix the purified pleasures of the mind with feverish pleasures of body ; but where does it seem that they exclude each other or that they choke on each other?

  - It is because we know how to distinguish them, said Lélia. I have well known the generous pleasures of the soul separated from the matter; but they weren't enough for me; because human selfishness is fierce, he is indomitable, he gets up constantly, he gnaws dully or wakes up suddenly tearing us apart.

  You are right to mock the gigantic ambition of love Platonic. In vain the spirit seeks to rise, the suffering always bring it back to the ground. Oh ! I remember ; during these burning nights that I spent near the sides of a man, I

  well studied the revolts of pride against the vanities of self-denial; I felt that we could love at the same time someone other than yourself, to the point of submitting to him and loving yourself

  even to the point of feeling hatred against the one who subjugates.

  - And then, said Pulchérie, softening the tone of sarcasm that she had before and taking Lélia's hand in a sympathetic union movement is that men are coarse. Do you see, my sister, in our life of gallantry and change, things happen to us

  similar. It happens that we are filled with riches Page 152

  from one and that we share with the other. most often we hate the one who loves us enough for us pay and we pay the one who loves us loosely enough to be at our wages. But the man is brutal and doesn't know where woman's devotion begins, or where it ends. He ... not not know that it is foolish to accept the gifts of a loving heart, under the watchful eye of a spirit: she offers with abandonment, she give with joy; then she stops surprised and despises the one who, being the strongest and the most powerful, did not blush to receive. The man is stupid, and the woman is mobile. These two beings so similar and so dissimilar are made of such so there is always hatred between them even in the love they have for each other. The first feeling that succeeds their embraces, it is disgust or sadness; it is a law from above against which you will rebel in vain.

  The union of man and woman had to be fleeting in the designs of Providence; everything is against their association and change is a necessity of their nature.

  - What was most cruel to me, resumed Lélia, is that he

  did not know the extent of my sacrifices. As if he had blushed with gratitude, he always dismissed the unwelcome idea of my resignation. He pretended to believe me abused by a feeling of modesty hypocrite. He affected to take for marks of intoxication the moans torn from the pain and impatience. He laughed hard at my tears. Sometimes its infamous egoism fed itself with pride; and when he had broken me in fierce embraces, he was falling asleep carefree and rude by my side as I devoured my sobs so as not to awaken him. O misery and enslavement of wife ! you are so much in nature that society should at least have tried to soften you! Yet i loved him with passion, this master of my choice whom I accepted as a fatal necessity, which I venerated with a secret complacency for myself, because I had chosen it. I loved him madly. The more he made me feel his dominance, the more I cherished it, the more I put pride in wearing my chain.

  But also I started again to curse my servitude at first moment of freedom that his forgetfulness or his indolence me left. I made of my love a religion, a virtue in less; but I wanted him to be grateful, he who did not obey Page 153

  only to an instinctive preference. I was wrong. He could only to despise my heroic weakness, when I cherished his cowardly rule over me ...

  Which made me love him for a long time (long enough to wear out my whole soul), it was probably feverish irritation produced on my faculties by the lack of satisfaction personal. I had near him a kind of strange greed and delusional which, having its source in the most exquisite powers of my intelligence, could only be sated by

  no carnal embrace. I felt my chest devoured of an unquenchable fire and his kisses poured no relief. I pressed him in my arms with force superhuman and I fell near him exhausted, discouraged from have no way of expressing my

  enthusiasm. The desire for me was an ardor of the soul which paralyzed the power of the senses before awakening it; it was a wild fury, which took hold of my brain and which focused exclusively on it. My blood froze, helpless and poor, during the immense development of my will.

  Then he should have died. But the selfish never wanted agree to suffocate me by pressing me against his chest; however, that was all my hope for pleasure. I hoped finally to know the languors and the delights of love in falling asleep in the arms of death.

  When he was dozing, satisfied and sated, I stayed motionless and dismayed at his side. I spent so many hours watching him sleep. It seemed so beautiful to me, this man! There was so much strength and greatness on his forehead peaceful! My heart throbbed violently nea
r him; the waves ardent with my restless blood rose to my face; then unbearable tremors passed through my limbs.

  I seemed to feel the disturbance of physical love and the growing disorders of a material desire. I was violently tempted to awaken him, to embrace him in my arms and to call his caresses which I had not yet enjoyed. But I resisted to these lying solicitations of my suffering, because I knew although it was not in him to calm her down: God alone could have to do, if he had deigned to dampen the sickly vigor of my soul.

  So I was fighting this demon of hope who was watching over me.

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  I was fleeing this voluptuous and miserable layer, this sanctuary of love which was the coffin in which all my buried illusions and all my strength. I was walking on cold marble of my apartments; I carried my head on fire in the air of the night; then I threw myself on my knees and I prayed to God to regenerate. If I had been promised to renew my blood depleted in my veins, I would have let myself be stabbed like Eson and cut into pieces like him.

  Sometimes, in sleep, prey to these rich ecstasies devouring ascetic brains, I felt carried away with him on the clouds by balmy breezes. I was swimming then in the waves of an inexpressible pleasure; and passing my indolent arms around her neck, I fell on her breast, murmuring vague words. But he woke up and it was all over with my happiness. In place of this aerial being, this angel who had cradled in the wind of its wings, I found the man, brutal and voracious man like a wild beast and I fled in horror. But he was chasing me, he pretended not to have been vainly disturbed in his sleep and he savored her fierce pleasure on the breast of a woman passed out and half-dead.

  One day I felt so tired of loving that I stopped stroke. There was no other drama in my passion. When i live how easily this fatal link was broken, I was astonished to have believed so long in its eternal duration.