Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/100

90 weary of talking. Jacques, she observes, belonged to this large family of disillusioned thinkers; they had their raison d'être, historical and social. He comes on the scene in the novel, already worn by deceptions; he thought to revive through his love, and he does not revive. Marriage was for him only the drop of bitterness that made the cup overflow. He killed himself to bequeath to others the happiness for which he cared not, and in which he believed not."

Jacques, taken as a plaidoyer against domestic institutions, singularly misses its aim. As critics have remarked, some of the most eloquent pages are those that treat of married bliss. Our sympathies are entirely with the wronged husband against his silly little wife. It is a kindred work to Lélia and its faults are the same; but whilst dealing ostensibly with real life and possible human beings it cannot, like Lélia, be placed apart, and retain interest as a literary curiosity.

André is a very different piece of work and a little masterpiece of its kind. The author, in her preface, tells us how, whilst mechanically listening to the incessant chatter of the Venetian sempstresses in the next room to her own, she was struck by the resemblance between the mode of life and thought their talk betrayed, and that of the same class of girls at La Châtre; and how in the midst of Venice, to the sound of the rippling water stirred by the gondolier's oar,