by George Sand
No sound reaching his ear anymore, he reassured himself little and looked up. He saw Lélia, kneeling near Sténio.
The monk wanted to cry, his tongue clinging to his palace. Hey wanted to run away, his legs became colder and more as motionless as the granite of the rock. He remained the haggard eye, the open hand, face shaded by its hood.
Lélia was leaning on the funeral bed. Her long hair, unrolled by the humidity, fell along his pale cheeks; it seemed as dead as Sténio. She was the worthy fiancee of a corpse.
She had listened to the speeches of the shepherds she had stolen from their care, from their consolations; she had wanted to kiss the dust of Sténio. Guided by the sinister lighthouse lit in front of the cave, she came alone, without fear, without remorse, perhaps without pain.
However, the appearance of this beautiful forehead covered with shadows from death, she felt her soul soften; tender pity Page 294
softens the harshness of this dark and calm soul in the despair.
"Yes, Sténio," she said without worrying or noticing the monk's presence, I pity you, because you have me cursed. I pity you, because you did not understand that God,
in creating us, had not resolved the union of our destinies. You believed, I know, that I took pleasure in multiplying your tortures.
You thought I wanted to avenge the pains and disappointments from my early years. You thought that I accepted your oaths with disdain and indifference, for indemnify my vanity for all the betrayals that men had inflicted on me. You were wrong, Sténio, and I forgive you the anathema you spoke against me. Whoever judges our thoughts before we can even predict them, whoever leaf through the book of our consciences at all times and which reads unambiguously the mysterious designs that are not yet there registered, that one, Sténio, did not accept your threats and did not not realize. He won't punish you, because you were blind. Hey will not chastise your weakness, because you refused to confide in yourself in a wisdom that was not yours. You paid too much the light that has come to light your last days so that it will reproach for having long wandered in darkness. The knowledge painful and terrible that you take with you doesn't need of expiation, because your lip dried out tasting the fruit that you had picked.
I loved you, Sténio, without being able to console you; I admired, without being able to respond to it, this indefinite need for expansion and devotion, which devoured your blood and burned your brain. I regretted the relentless trials which had convinced me of my helplessness; but to deny and disregard them, Was it not impiety, a cowardly lie? If I had told you:
"The wounds I showed you, the wounds you have counted are not incurable; hope the
trust, mutual self-denial will warm my heart warm; hope that by relying on you, I will find the meaning and value of the sufferings that I accept today without understanding them ", I would have lied, Sténio, I would have deserved
your contempt and anger could not have gone down low enough to wither my hypocrisy.
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So is it for my frankness and my loyalty that you have called upon me the punishments that God reserves for bad guys ? Is it because I confessed before you, without blushing and without confusion, the infirmities of my nature that you asked lightning to strike me, as if I had abused of my power?
I had met on my way many faithless souls who had deceived me. My ear got tired of listening to helpless promises; more generous and bolder, I refused your affection which I could not reward. I have sacrificed to the security of your future the treacherous joys and passengers of a few days; I did not want to hire a although I no longer owned it. Because my heart had worn out without return all his credulities; under the ground you trod on fast and confident, I saw the lava of the
volcano which was to scatter the building of your ambitions in the distance.
To retain and fix your love, I would have had to degrade myself and degrade. My frozen senses could do nothing for your pleasures.
If I had tried to shudder under your embraces, poor Sténio!
Lélia, grimacing the pleasure, commanding in her eyes to smile and to play the ecstasy, Lélia which you deified, would have been only one hideous monster, the ridiculous sham of a courtesan.
But God, I have firm confidence, God will bring us together in eternity. Sitting together at his feet, we will attend his advice and then we will know why he separated us on the ground. Reading on his radiant brow the secret of his impenetrable wills with mortal eyes, your anger and your amazement will be as if they had never been.
Then, Sténio, you will not try any more to hate me; you will no longer accuse my injustice and my cruelty. When God, giving each of us the share we deserve, will distribute our work according to our strength, you will understand, O my beloved, that we could not follow the same road here, nor walk for the same purpose. The pains he sent us were not same. The stern master that we both served will explain to us the mystery of our sufferings. When opening before us the dazzling prospect of an eternal outpouring, it will tell us why it pleased him to prepare the meeting of our Page 296
two souls through the dark ways that our eye never suspected not.
It will show you, Sténio, in its rare nudity, my heart to whom you imputed disdain and harshness. The terror you have felt listening to my words, the humiliation that obscured your gaze when I confessed that I could not love you, the trembling confusion of your thoughts will change into serious compassion. Lélia, that you believed so strongly before-above you, which you despaired of reaching, Lélia will lower itself in front of you ; you will forget, like her, admiration and respect whose men surrounded my steps, you will know why I went alone and never asked for help.
Confused under the eye of God, in bliss
permanent, each of us will courageously accomplish the task he will have received. Our looks, by meeting, will double our confidence and our strength: the memory of our past miseries will vanish like a dream and it will will come to ask us if we really lived.
Take comfort, Sténio, your ordeal is over and mine keep on going. You no longer hear the foolish crowd buzzing at your
ears; you no longer have before you the unwelcome spectacle of joys nor lie to themselves and who get dizzy from the noise their lies. It's up to me now to invoke you in my prayers ; it is up to me to implore your power and your wisdom.
For you know the nothingness of the pleasures after which you sighed; you look with pity on the greatness and the glories which dazzled you; you no longer desire, you enjoy. The presence of God suffices for your ecstasies. The smiles you asked me to knees, the caresses that you would have paid with your blood are not-they not now for your bright clairvoyance an object taunt?
But no, I'm sure, since you know, since the divine hand, passing your finger over your eyelid, opened your eyes, your soul, which was irritated by its ignorance and its weakness, is indulgent and serene today. The tumult of our hopes, the ambitious visions of our dreams are ahead you, as before God, the incomplete expression, but sincere, of our present humility. If we suck so high, Page 297
is not it, it is that our soul remembers its origin it is that it suffers in its terrestrial envelope; it is that she feels that, to resume its growth and its power, it needs to strip the swaddling clothes where it is tied up.
Well ! Sténio, you preceded me; God prefer you to Lélia, since he calls you first. The anxieties and the exhaustion of your early lapse deserved him quicker reward than isolation and patience Lelia. I do not accuse his indifference; I am not complaining ; no doubt, he measured the pilgrimage to the vigor of the pilgrim. he brought the celestial city closer to your tottering feet. He bowed the branch in front of your failing hand. Blessed Sténio! you
now can shake off the dust from your shoe you can sit and rest. It's up to you to intercede with the master so that I can sit by your side.
Selfless now, you challenge the passions that have you devoured, you judge yourself and you applaud your deliverance. Or would your regrets be addressed? Would it be mine? But the future is
to both of us. In Trenmor? But Trenmor would have saved you, if your hello, on this earth, would have been possible. Since his soul, purified by atonement, did not find enough speech eloquent to convince you; since his arm, tested by the tortures, didn't have enough energy. to turn you away from fatal road you entered is that God didn't want it.
By letting you go, Trenmor recognized in your flight the trace mysterious of a decree that it did not belong to him to interpret. As long as he could follow you with his eyes, he yelled at you in an obstinate voice: "Come back to us, come back, Sténio, we will support you. "But when your fast run had put between you and Trenmor an impassable space, so the sage had to be silent and the sage is silent.
You threw yourself in the arms of death, you asked this inexorable and jealous mistress a refuge from liars seductions of life. May his caresses be sweet to you, oh Sténio! Sleep in peace on the cold bed where you wanted marry oblivion!
So young and so beautiful though! how did you not hope How am I still standing, I who have seen everything wear and tear Page 298
wither around me? I who can neither give nor give feel love, why am I here to contemplate you?
why am I not lying in this coffin? "
Lélia was silent and, crossing her arms over her chest, she
contemplated in silence the beauty of the one she had refused caresses and repelled transport. She liked her pallor livid, her lips blue like the damp columbine, her hair rare on the forehead, long and bushy on the shoulders. This blonde hair, unwound in the waters of the lake, had dried in the wind from the hill and even it had resumed the natural ripple of her graceful curls. Last wealth that had resisted long for the insults of fatigue and illness, last beauty that was to survive the next dissolution of the corpse, it floated, silky and alive, on this frozen forehead, as in the days when the child poet ran in the morning sun on the flowery mountain paths.
Lélia remembered the days when she had loved him the most.
It was when he was more of a poet than a lover. In these first time of their affection, the passion of Sténio had some something romantic and angelic. He only thought of to sing Lélia, to pray to God for her, to dream of her or to the contemplate in mute ecstasy. Later, his eye had animated by a more virile fire, his greedy lip had sought and asked for the kiss, his poetry had expressed more transports wild; it was then that the impotent Lélia felt scared, tired and almost disgusted with this love that she never not share. Now she found Sténio calm and
collected as she had known him, as she had loved him.
"There you are, my poet," she said to him, "as I often have you contemplated without your knowledge. Often in our dream races I saw you, weaker than Trenmor and me, give in to fatigue and fall asleep at my feet under a hot midday breeze, among the flowers of the forest. Bending over you, I was protecting your sleep, I removed from you the harmful insects. I covered with my shadow when the sun pierced the branches to throw a sharp kiss on your beautiful young girl's forehead. I
I placed myself between you and him. My soul, despot and jealous, surrounded you with his love. My quiet lip touched sometimes the warm, fragrant air that quivered around you.
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I was happy then and I loved you! i loved you as much as i then love. I breathed you like a beautiful lily, I smiled at you like a child, but like a child full of genius.
I wanted to be your mother and be able to hug you without awakening in you the senses of a man.
Other times, I have surprised the secret of your walks lonely. Sometimes, leaning over the limpid basin of a spring or leaning on the age-old moss of the rocks, you looked at the sky in the waters. Most often your eyes were half closed and you seemed dead to all outside impressions.
Like now, you seemed to meditate and watch, yourself, God and the angels reflected in the mysterious mirror of your soul. There you are, like you were then, frail adolescent, still without vigor and without desires, stranger to intoxication and suffering from physical life. Fiance of some virgin with golden wings, you had not yet thrown your ring in the stormy waves of our passions. So much so many ailments have been suffered since this morning serene where I met you like a young bird opening its trembling wings at the first breezes of the sky? Is we have lived and suffered since that hour when you me asked to explain love, happiness, glory and wisdom? Child, who believed in all these things and who sought in me these imaginary treasures, is it true that so many tears, so much terror, so many disappointments separate us from this melodious pastoral? Did your steps, which had not curved as flowers, have since walked in the mire and on
the gravel ? Did your voice, which sang so sweet harmonies, hoarsely screaming intoxication? Do your chest, open and dilated in the pure mountain air, dried up and burned in the orgy? Do your
lip, that the angels came to kiss in your sleep, soiled with infamous lips? Have you suffered so much, so blushed and so struggled, O Sténio, O beloved son of heaven?
But you're still beautiful and calm, like in the days when you rest your forehead on my knees, to sleep in the wind of maritime nights. Your hands are white and pure; your knees are not broken by so many falls. And yet, poor poet, you crawled on the thorns, you flayed on the stones Page 300
acute; you got dirty, bloody, exhausted to embrace reality hideous and fierce. You fought with this coarse-haired lioness, you got drunk on the smell of its flanks, you fell under she, seized with horror and disgust; and, to get revenge, she got you devoured the bowels. But God kept you, inviolable soul and holy; no orgy, no woman in love, no liar
friendship never possessed you: you remained a virgin in a body prostitute at all debauchery. Diamond whose fire had been stolen from the purest rays of the sun, you remained buried in the pebble that protected you, and lust did not suspect the treasure that you hid from him and that you wanted to give back to God bright and pure as you received it. You did well to die, Sténio, your great soul was suffocating in this delicate body and frail, in this sunless world. We were not worthy of you: you refused us your love, you took away your desires and your caresses. Return to God, angel misled in our ways unclean. Protect us, forgive us for not giving you anything of what you asked. We were men and
that you were better than us.
Go, Sténio, we will meet again, and then we will be worthy of each other. My soul is sister of yours, it bored, she gets tired, she is indignant at everything. Like yours, she desired without reaching, she worked without collecting. God condemn me to longer expiations; because more cautious or more fearful than you, I backed away from the trials you wanted to undergo, I avoided the dangers where you rushed. AT
slower evil must devour me, so that eternal justice is satisfied. But these days so long on earth, what value have they in eternity where you have already entered? What will they be when i will you join?
Maybe then we'll be equal, maybe we'll be
lovers and brothers. Today I hardly dare to look at myself like your fiancée, and my respect, that death has returned to you, barely half open this sanctuary of love and hope. O
Sténio, now let me implore you as you have me longed for! Let me fear you and worship you like a power above me, let me pray and moan:
it is a revenge that God allows you and that God gives you.
I love you, I love you on my knees, now that you seem deaf Page 301
to my confession, insensitive to my caresses. Take my oaths, receive my kisses; I loved you, O Sténio, I loved you more than you could not understand and share it: I felt unworthy of you, I did not want to defile the holiness of your soul.
If God had deigned to restore my fiery youth and my heart to me virgin, if my imagination had not been depraved at the pursuit of twenty fancies, if my love had not been given and withdrawn, if error, despair and weakness did not have me not withered, I would have been yours. But your youth thought they saw in
me all the virtues, all the greatnesses that I no longer had, You would have given yourself to me without reserve and I would have impoverished you,
It deposited on the purple lips of Sténio one last Wink; she detached from the crown a withered flower which she put on her heart and she took the valley trail without having done watch out for the monk who, standing in the shade, leaning against stiffness at the cave wall, darted her eyes over her sparkling.
Magnus' reason had abandoned him; he did not understand nothing to Lélia's speeches. He only saw it and he found it beautiful; his passion was awakened violently, he never remembered more than the wishes he had for so long pills that devoured him more than ever.
When it saw it embracing Sténio, a frightful jealousy, that he had never known because he hadn't had an opportunity to feel it, burst into him. He would have hit Sténio, if he had daring; but this corpse frightened him and the desire ignited in him even more intense than revenge.
It dashed on the tracks of Lélia and, as it turned the path, he grabs her by the arm.
Lélia turned around without shouting, without trembling, and looked at this hasty figure, this bloody eye, this trembling mouth, without scared and almost without surprise.
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"Woman," said the monk, "you have made me suffer enough console me, love me. "
Lélia, not recognizing in this bald and vaulted monk the priest she had seen young and proud a few years before, stopped surprised.
"My father," she said to him, "speak to God, his love is the only one who can console.
- Do you not remember it anymore, Lélia, answered the monk without listen to him, that it was I who saved your life? Without me, neither perished in the ruins of the monastery where you spent two years.
Do you remember, woman? I threw myself in the rubble almost crushing me; I carried you, I put you on my horse and I traveled all day holding you in my arms and I didn't dare only kiss your clothes. But, from that day, a fire devouring lit in my chest; in vain, I fasted and prayed, God doesn't want to heal me. You must be mine; when I will be appeased, I will be healed; I will do penance and I will be saved; otherwise I will go mad again and be damned.