Lelia

by George Sand

  news that was not withered and carried away; thistles filled the air with their scattered down; the birds were bending their wings wet and took refuge in the brush; all seemed sad, tired, broken; I was alone

  peacefully sitting in the middle of my books, busy with time in time to nonchalantly follow the terrible struggle of large yews against the storm and the ravages of hail on the Page 173

  young buds of wild elderberries. "This," I cried, is the image of my destiny, the calm at the bottom of my cell, the storm and the destruction outside. My God, if I don't attached to you, the wind of fate will carry me away these leaves; it will break me like these young trees. Oh !

  take me back, my God! take back my love, my submission and my oaths. Let only my soul

  thus gets lost and floats between hope and mistrust; ramenez-me to big and solid thoughts by an eternal rupture, absolute, between me and things, by an indissoluble alliance with loneliness. "

  I knelt before Christ and, in a movement

  of hope and training, I wrote on the white wall a oath that I read aloud in the silence of the night:

  "Here, a being still full of youth and life is devoted to prayer and meditation by a solemn oath and terrible.

  He swears by heaven, by death and by conscience, not to never leave the abbey of *** and live there all the rest of days that will be counted to him on earth. "

  After this violent and singular resolution, I felt a very calm and I fell asleep despite the increasing storm hour by hour. Towards daybreak I was awakened by a crash

  appalling. One of the upper galleries, which still raised, the day before, its frail pillars and elegant sculptures around the covered playground, had just given in to the force of the hurricane and collapsed.

  Another gust of wind cracked other parts of the building, which also collapsed in less than a quarter of an hour.

  The destruction seemed to be spreading under the influence of a supernatural will; she was approaching me, the roof that was sheltering me was starting to shake, the mossy tiles were shattered, and the frame of the frame seemed wobble and push the walls away with each new breath of the storm.

  No doubt fear took hold of me, because I allowed myself rule by superstitious and childish ideas. I thought that God overturned my hermitage to drive me out, that he rejected a reckless wish and forced me to return among Page 174

  men. So I rushed towards the door, less to flee the danger only to obey a supreme will. Can I stopped when I crossed it, struck by a good idea more consistent with sickly excitement and disposition romantic of my mind; I imagined that God, for shorten my exile and reward my courageous resolve, sent me death, but a death worthy of heroes and saints. Had I not sworn to die in this abbey?

  Did I have the right to flee it, because death was approaching?

  And what nobler end than to bury myself, with my suffering and my hope, under these ruins charged with me save from myself and surrender to God purified by the penance and prayer? "I greet you, sublime host," I exclaimed; since heaven is sending you, welcome, i'm waiting for you behind the threshold of this cell which will have been my tomb from this

  life. "

  I bowed down on the floor and, plunged into ecstasy, I awaited my fate.

  The last debris of the abbey should not remain standing in this dark morning. Before sunrise, the roof was carried away. A section of the wall collapsed. I lost the feeling of my situation.

  A priest, whom the storm had misled in these plains deserted, came to pass at this moment at the foot of the walls crumbling from the convent. He walked away with fear at first, then he thought he heard a human voice among the furious voices of storm. He ventured between the new ruins which covered the old ones and found me passed out under debris who were going to bury me. The pity, the zeal that faith gives to those who lack humanity made him find the

  cruel strength to save me; he carried me on his horse to across plains, woods and valleys. This priest was called Magnus. Through him I was torn from death and returned to the pain.

  Since I entered society, my existence

  is more miserable than before. At first it seemed to me that God spoke to my heart by the thousand voices of nature, and that he was still time to share life with a being like Page 175

  me. I forgot, alas! that I was a cursed exception and that this being did not exist. Informed about the results inaccessible to me from natural and complete love, I hoped save myself by only suffering half its power, by realizing the chimeras of Platonism; but knowing that I would hardly find a soul formed for the same destiny that I surrounded myself with subtleties and tricks including

  no human gaze has ever been able to penetrate the mystery.

  I isolated myself in my selfish and secret enjoyment; I refused to involve the object of my strange love in delicacies and the pleasures of my thought. He ignored what affection I loved him. He thought he was my friend and nothing more. It is comforted with sorrow for being only that, believing me incapable of passion for no man. But I, stingy with my happiness, I promise myself to savor it with delight, not to have May God be my confidant, to deliver myself up to all the violence of inner passion, while I keep it

  carefully the flame, covered under the innocent outside of a peaceful and holy friendship.

  Indeed, I had at first some happiness to see happy and calm the one that in a word I could have intoxicated and led astray.

  When he was peacefully sitting by my side, holding my hand between hers and talking to me about heaven and angels, I walked on his pure forehead and on his calm chest a long and penetrating look. I thought to myself that by letting my eye come out a spark, printing on my fingers entwined with his more intense pressure, I could instantly ignite her brain and make his heart beat. It was sweet to me to feel this feminine temptation and resist it. I loved the suffering voluptuous that resulted for me from this secret struggle. She rejuvenated me; she assimilated me to beings affected by whole passions and desires achievable.

  Sometimes, close to letting my secret escape, I felt the heat get on my face and I rested my head on her shoulder to rest from these hidden agitations but violent. So, troubled himself to see me like this, he escaped from my arms in terror.

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  «O Lélia! he said to me, who are you then? Are you from fire or ice? Should you repel or make yourself violence ? You who always speak of moral force and triumphant reason, how is it that with you the force succumbs and reason goes astray? But unfortunately ! you already petrify me with that bitter, cold smile that condemns or taunts all my words, which suppresses all my feelings, which rejects all my desires. Why were you just now you bent over me with a burning look, with lips ajar, with exciting and cruel indolence? Is so that you despise me to the point of playing with me like with a child? Do you allow yourself this abandonment because you forget that I am a man? Are you so little woman that you do not understand the disorder and the suffering that you can chat? "

  When I saw him close to reaching the truth, I enclosed in a system of indifference and lightness which awakened all his doubts. I chained the momentum sometimes involuntary and fiery of his senses with icy irony.

  Then, I took up the veil of friendship to console him for my disdain. I maliciously intoxicated him with soft caresses and chaste. I played with him like a vulture with its prey.

  Sometimes I made him suffer and I enjoyed his pain; sometimes i made him happy with slight concessions. In all things and at all times he was under my rule and I told him subjected the superiority of my address, without him knowing what really attribute the composure and the math that made me stronger and more skillful than him.

  He doubted and hoped for a long time, because he longed.

  When he was convinced of my invulnerability, he cooled down: he loved me as I pretended to want to be loved, but as indeed I did not want to be. So the pain and the

  anger arose in me. Jealousy buried her nails iron in my brain. I was jealous of my friend more than before I had been my lover. I would have
blushed long ago to suffer too much from an infidelity of the senses. Now i felt authorized to cry an infidelity of heart.

  But I couldn't express my pains without betraying my secret. I had learned to defeat myself; after succeeding a hundred times Page 177

  to impose myself on myself, it was very easy for me to abuse the others on my account. So I resigned myself to love without being paid back and I found in the stinging sufferings of this compressed and crumpled love of moments of enthusiasm purer and sweeter resignation than when I was the object of an ardent but brutal love and unfriendly to my nature.

  But it is in vain that man wants to fight against the laws celestial; by refusing its proud forehead to the yoke which subjects his fellows, he enters a dangerous freedom. In moving away from the roads marked out by the will of God, he gets lost, it gets lost.

  With me this disregard for natural duties, this aspiration burning towards an impossible existence brought a kind of intellectual depravity. Not feeling related to any man by this express and voluntary consecration of love material, I let my imagination worried and fiery travel the universe, and take everything that was on its passage. Finding happiness became my only thought, and, if I must admit how far I had gone below

  myself, the only rule of my conduct, the only purpose of my will. After having let, without noticing it, float my desires towards the shadows that passed around me, it happened to me

  to run in a dream after them, to seize them on the fly, of their to imperatively ask, if not happiness, at least the emotion of a few days. And like that libertinism invisible from my thought could not shock the austerity of my manners, I indulged in it without remorse. I was unfaithful in imagination, not only to the man I loved; But every day saw me unfaithful to the one I had loved the standby. Soon a single love of this kind would not be enough to fill my soul always greedy and never satiated, I kissed several ghosts at the same time. I liked, in the same day and in the same hour the enthusiastic musician who vibrated all my nerve fibers under his bow and the dreamy philosopher who associated me with his meditations. I liked to both the comedian who shed my tears and the poet who had dictated to the actor the words that came to my heart.

  I even liked the painter and the sculptor, whose Page 178

  works and whose features I had not seen. I fell in love the sound of a voice, of hair, of clothing; and then of a portrait only, of a portrait of a man dead since several centuries. The more I surrender to these whimsical admiration, the more frequent and transient they became empty. No outward sign has ever betrayed them, God knows well ! But I admit it with shame, with terror, I used my soul to these frivolous jobs of higher faculties. I have remember a great expenditure of moral energy and I never no longer remember the names of those who, without knowing it, wasted in detail the treasure of my affections.

  Then, to lavish myself like this, my heart died, I was not more capable than enthusiastic; and, that feeling fading on the slightest day projected onto the object of my illusion, I had to

  change the idol as many times as a new idol presented.

  And that's how I exist now: I still belong at the last whim that crosses my sick brain. But these whims, first so frequent and impetuous, have become rare and lukewarm; because the enthusiasm has also cooled and it’s after long days of drowsiness and disgust I sometimes find short hours of youth and activity.

  Boredom desolates my life, Pulchérie, boredom kills me. Everything runs out for me, everything goes away. I saw pretty much life in all of its phases, society in all its aspects, nature in all its splendors.

  What will I see now? When I managed to fill the abyss of a day, I wonder in dread with what I will fill that of the next day. It sometimes seems to me that still exist worthy beings and capable things of interest. But, before having examined them, I renounce them by discouragement and fatigue. I feel that I don't have any left enough sensitivity to appreciate men, not enough of intelligence to understand things. I fall back on myself with calm and somber despair and no one knows what that I suffer. The bullies that society is made up of ask me what I miss, whose wealth has been

  reach all pleasures, whose beauty and luxury have was able to achieve all ambitions. Among all these men, Page 179

  is not one whose intelligence is broad enough to understand that it is a great misfortune not to have been able attach to nothing and not be able to desire anything on the Earth. "

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  Fourth part

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  1

  Pulchérie remained for a long time in the pensive attitude where it was from the beginning of the story of Lélia. All two were silent. Finally the courtesan took her hand sister, and said to him:

  "I think only one thing can save you: it's return to loneliness and to God. You see I listened to you seriously.

  - It is no longer time, Pulchérie, to take sides only you advise me. My faith is tottering, my heart is exhausted. To burn divine love, more youth is needed and purity than any other noble passion. I no longer have strength to elevate my soul to a perpetual feeling of worship and recognition. Most often, I only think of God to accuse him of what I suffer and blame him for his harshness.

  If I sometimes bless him, it's when I pass by a cemetery and think of the brevity of life.

  "You lived too fast," said Pulchérie. It is necessary, Lélia, that you change the exercise of your faculties, that you return to loneliness or seek pleasure:

  choose.

  - I'm from the Monteverdor mountains. I tried to rediscover my old ecstasies and the charm of my reveries pious. But, there as everywhere, I found only boredom.

  - You should be chained to a social state which would save you from yourself and save yourself from your own

  reflections. You would have to be subject to a will foreign and forced labor was a diversion from work incessant and gnawing at your imagination. Get religious.

  - You have to have a virgin soul: I only have chaste body. I would be an adulterous wife of Christ; and then you Page 183

  forget that I am not a devotee. I don't believe, like the women of this region, with the regenerative virtue of rosaries and the absolutive power of the scapulars. Their piety is something that rests them, that refreshes them and that asleep. I have too great an idea of God and of the worship that one must to serve him mechanically, to pray him with words arranged in advance and memorized. My religion too passionate would be heresy and if I were to be exalted I would have nothing left.

  - Well ! said Pulchérie, since you cannot

  become a nun, make yourself a courtesan.

  - With what ? said Lélia with a bewildered air; I have no meaning.

  "It will come to you," said Pulchérie, smiling. The body is a power less rebellious than the spirit. Intended to take advantage of material goods, it is also by material means that can rule it. Go, my poor dreamer, reconcile with this humble portion of your being. Don't despise more for a long time your beauty, which all men adore and who can still flourish as in the days of the past. Don't blush ask the matter the joys that the intelligence refused you.

  You said it. You know where your pain comes from: it's having wanted to separate two powers that God had closely linked…

  - But, my sister, resumed Lélia, did not you make

  even ?

  - Not at all. I gave preference to one, without excluding the other. Do you believe that the heart remains foreign to aspirations The senses ? Is not the lover we kiss a brother, a child of God, who shares with his sister the benefits of God ? For you, Lélia, who have so much poetry in your service, I'm amazed you can't find a hundred ways to pick up the material and embellish the real impressions. I believe that disdain alone stops you and that if you renounce this unfair and mad disposition, you would live the same life as me. Who knows ? With more energy maybe you would inspire more ardent passions. Come, let's run together under these dark alleys where, from time to time, I see sparkle faintly gold costumes and flutter white feathers Page 184
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  barrettes. How many young and beautiful men, full of love and power, wander under these trees seeking the pleasure! Come, Lélia, let's excite them to pursue us: let's move on quickly near them; touch them with our clothes and then let us escape, like these moths that you see in the ray of lights to seek, to reach, to separate and to be join, to fall dead and mad with love in the flame that devours them. Come, I tell you, I will guide your steps trembling, I know all these men. I will call the most kind and most elegant around you. You will be haughty and cruel at your ease, Lélia. But you will hear their words, you will feel their breath on your shoulders. You maybe shudder when the evening wind brings your nostrils dilated the scent of their hair and maybe this evening will you feel a slight curiosity to know life while whole.

  - Alas! Pulchérie, haven't I known her horribly?

  Do you no longer remember what I told you?

  - You loved this man with your soul: you never couldn't think of tasting real pleasure near him. That is simple. A faculty, arrived at its greatest development, stifles and paralyzes others. But here what would be different. "

  The courtesan led Lélia, and continued speaking to her lowering his voice.

  "But first," continued Pulchérie, "you must think of yourself disguise. You probably wouldn't want to deliver the big name of Lélia, although, to tell you the truth, the continence where you live causes in the minds of more men serious accusations as my gallantries. But maybe don't you find yourself below your destiny to be suspected of mysterious and terrible passions, while you would despise the vulgar renown of a bacchante. So so come and take a domino similar to mine and you will be able, thanks to certain resemblances, which exist between us and, above all, between our voices, descend safely from the Page 185