Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/85

Rh a lesson in French, and it is a pity that the whole of the French Academy could not have been present too, as it is quite certain that they might have derived great profit from it.

Not all the distractions of fame and work, of passionate pleasure or passionate sorrow, ever relaxed her active solicitude for the present and future welfare of her two young children. "They give me the only real joys of my life," she repeats again and again.

Lélia, begun immediately after Valentine, was published in the spring of 1833, and created an immense sensation. Hailed by her admirers as a sign of an accession of power, of power exerted in quite a new direction, it brought down on the writer's head a storm of hostile criticism, as a declared enemy of religion and domestic morality—enhancing her celebrity not a little.

Lélia, a lyrical novel—an outburst of poetical philosophy in prose, stands alone among the numerous productions of George Sand. Here she takes every sort of poetical license, in a work without the restrictions of poetic form which are the true conditions of so much latitude. "Manfred" and "Alastor" are fables not further removed from real life than is Lélia. The personages are like allegorical figures, emblematic of spiritual qualities on a grand scale, the scenes like the paradisiacal gardens that visited the fancy of Aurore Dupin when a child. There is no action. The interest is not in the characters and what they do, but in what they say. The declamatory style, then so popular, is one the