1Zola believed he was founding the experimental novel; the author of Lélia experimented with ideas in the novel. Let us remember that writers find the underpinnings (the expression is Stendhal’s) of their works as much in literature as in their experience. Quasi cursores lampada tradunt: literature has its own entrenchments against reality.

2There are, in Lélia, a psychological study and a network of ideas. It is the network that concerns us here; we should like to inquire into the influences at work on George Sand when she wrote this bizarre book, at the end of 1832 and the beginning of 18332. In the best authenticated influences we shall be able to seize upon her originality of the moment and to discern her most deep-seated avowals...

3The thought of Lélia? perhaps the book consists merely of thoughts; at least there is some thought. Unable to draw up a phenomenology of doubt, Sand does not resolve her thought into a system; she describes and analyses, observes and interrogates – giving a testimony, not a message. She attempts to think, or tries out thoughts, rather than thinks.

4According to its author, Lélia is a book in which “Thought takes a fancy to attack Enthusiasm”3. Those planks to which, according to Nietzsche, one clings “in the storms of existence”, Love, Man, Nature, even God, Sand abrades or breaks in the very act of examination. Thought not going so far as to invent an existential conception of man, she reaches the stage of Sartrian nausée or better still that of Cartesian doubt prior to the cogito. After A Rebours, Huysmans had to choose between the cross and the pistol; after Lélia, Sand (if we take for granted that she was fully conscious of her work’s implications)4 had to choose between death and forgetting. She chose to forget; love “quand même” and work are the best opiates.

5But in Lélia, earthly love could be only an inane enthusiasm or a hypocritical compromise; man drags his destiny after him as a ball-and-chain; everywhere, everything is dying, time will soon have reached its fullness – history is dilapidation – God hovers over all things a great silence... And Lélia refuses to close her eyes – can one unknow what one knows? She refuses, however, to accept what she sees – can one renounce the good that one conceives? In short, she finds herself on the threshold of a philosophy of the absurd; grace to cross it is neither given nor withheld from her.

6Thus, no coherent system, but passionate meditations and a sheaf of questionings. Man always lives beyond himself. An enormous wave of love carries him towards the unknown, but abandons him, pitiful and plaintive, on some lacerating reef. Amori et dolori sacrum... These words sum up all mankind; they sum up Lélia.

I Amori…

7Love, not lovers; the former appears, in close-ups, in the sensual epicureanism of Pulchérie, the cordial enthusiasm of Sténio, the melancholic “impotence” of Lélia, and the serene detachment of Trenmore5.

8The theme of impotency is a barrier to our immediate comprehension of the book, being too particularized not to weaken general arguments. Gradually, one becomes aware of its interest, which is metaphysical – for Lélia attacks God because of this very particularity. Above all, it allows George Sand to isolate certain elements – by suppressing hypothetically all sexual enjoyment she succeeds in highlighting the moral and sociological aspects of love, and Lélia attacks men in general. Whether it be a question of marriage, of passion, or of prostitution, she attacks man or society – never woman. Except through some miracle, love could never be, here below, other than the dream of a dream; it is nothing but sexual enjoyment (sometimes refused) and servitude...

9This revolt was not a new one. But Sand does not battle on the conventional tactical positions of passion. Misfortune, in her view, is consubstantial with love, which is not possible because society has corrupted man. Here we go beyond the sweeping considerations of the Nouvelle Héloïse or the facile antitheses of Dumas’ Antony. This greater depth of view Sand owes to Sénancour and especially to Nodier6.

10Love does not occupy the focal point of Senancour’s Obermann, but is occasionally treated in several lines or pages of the hero’s recollections. The latter discusses his impotence in the most spiritual acceptation of the term. Sand does not seem to have borrowed greatly here, except perhaps, first, in the admirable justification of the fallen woman which she transposes to fit the case of the prostitue, and second, generally speaking, in the rejection of the mass notion according to which, despite all appearances, the existence of love was taken for granted: she showed its machinery, motions, and consequences, without ever inquiring into its essence. Sénan– cour, precisely, reflected upon love itself, and under that scrutiny love disintegrated.

11Sand contracted more precise debts towards Nodier7, with whose long article “De l’amour et de son influence” she was acquainted. Its author showed the evolution of feeling, from the innocent incest of primitive families, to contemporary society in which love no longer counted. This article explains the turning-point in Sand’s work. Indiana and Valentine had been novels of the heart; Lélia is a novel of the head. Love is not merely accepted in the latter, naïvely, as an atom of the soul; Sand splits it by her conceptual analysis. This appears in all the avatars of her story, from the « jeux interdits » of the adolescent sisters, through the sensual renouncements of Pulchérie and the illusions of Sténio, to the reversals suffered by Lélia. Nodier made Sand aware of the contemporary crisis in matters of love and she was only too happy to find this justification for her own amorous ill-success.

12If Sténio’s blind enthusiasm carries him to his goal which is death, Lélia’s lucidity brings with it the impotence of love; she knows too well what love should be, and what it fails to be. There is apparently, of course, the same impotency in Obermann, but the context is different. Lélia’s strong-mindedness is her weak point; Obermann’s weak-mindedness is part of his very love. This does not mean that Sand owes nothing to Sénancour. Why, in any case, limit herself to Obermann? When Lélia reproaches herself for having loved badly ( “ne sachant où dépenser ma vigueur intellectuelle, je la jetais rampante aux pieds d’une idole créée par mon culte”) she is probably remembering Senancour’s Meditations d’un solitaire inconnu: “Si vous n’idolâtrez pas la femme que vous avez choisie, vous ne serez qu’un amant vulgaire.”

13If lovers are blind worshippers, it is because their love erroneously stops at man. The powerlessness to love, in its concrete reality, symbolizes a reality more important still: all love tends ultimately towards God; but the very infirmity of the lover prevents him from getting beyond the beloved – a qui pro quo always exists. From this there result disappointments, and deception. The text of the Imitation of Christ 8 comes to mind: “Love is born of God... it cannot come to rest except in God, above all created things”; to which Sténio provides an echo: « I understand, Lélia, alas, I understand! You have love for God only. Only in Heaven can your soul find rest and life.” It was precisely this passage from the Imitation that was quoted at the end of Nodier’s article “De l’amour”. It cannot be claimed outright that Sand took it from Nodier. But it was he who gave her the idea of crowning a theory of human love with a conception of amor dei and of placing the love of the unknown in that of the known, like a mine – Sand should have been a mystic9. The impression of distress, conveyed by Léila, is brought on by spiritual dryness. Man possesses the infinite, but negatively; it is the emptiness of his own heart. Death is the only key to love. The ending of Léila, in which two meteors placed side by side represent the union of two hearts, illustrates this sentence of Nodier’s Adèle:10 “Cela n’est pas une chose de la terre que l’amour! C’est la première conquête de Thomme qui ressuscite. Laissez-moi partir.” From this angle, the psychology becomes evident; Lélia is altogether one of those beings « qui sont condamnées à l’amour de l’impossible…, qui ont la faculté déplorable de concevoir, d’embrasser en imagination des voluptés devant lesquelles toutes celles de la terre se dégradent et s’aneantissent…11 ».

14Thus, where there is lucidity, there is no love. It is only in the innocent perverseness of Pulchérie or the gracious infatuation of Sténio that love is present. But can one “delude oneself”? Love condemns man to suffer...

II… et dolori…

15Man aspires to the immutable. His condition situates him in space and time, and grief is born of time – that death of succeeding moments, a fearful evolution. A meditation on love is a meditation on time and, ultimately, as it were, a philosophy of history. Lélia affirms that the end of time is at hand. “We are not in agreement as to the age of the world”, she says to Sténio, who has faith in progress. According to Lélia, everything goes from bad to worse. Later on, Sand was to think just the contrary – before Lélia she had scarcely given the subject a thought. But Lélia is an indictment of time, the enemy that one kills only by killing oneself: “I accuse the great law of time, which ordains that everything shall wear itself out and come to an end” (II, 29). Undoubtedly the grievous intent of time, which precisely forms the central theme of Obermann, inspired George Sand12. But it is easier to assume that the simpler, more conceptual thought of Nodier was more readily accessible to her. The texts cited in the appendix to this article make it possible to establish the fact that Sand appreciated in Nodier the pessimistic conception of time: history is decadence. This is the doctrine of Lélia and the one that Nodier had set forth in his articles on love and perfectibility:

On a demandé parfois d’où venait cette révolution ? Elle venoit d’où vient l’agonie de tout ce qui a vécu, de la nécessité de mourir commune à tous les êtres créés, et dont le vain savoir des sophistes13 n’a préservé jusqu’ici ni les individus ni l’espèce. Pour peu que vous la regardiez attentivement, vous lui trouverez toutes les conditions de cette dernière crise de la vie, les angoisses de la dissolution et les besoins du changement, et des convulsions de douleur et des lueurs d’apothéose. C’est tout simplement que Dieu a écrit sur le front des espèces comme sur celui des individus : “Vous êtes nés de la poussière et vous retournerez a la poussiere.” (“De l’amour”)

16The world is in its death throes; the great social bodies are in their final convulsions. Literature becomes frenzied in echo of this death which will be followed by rebirth:

Vous ne concevez pas pourquoi la plus haute expression du génie de l’homme est devenue convulsive comme un râle, et plaintive comme un soupir qu’un soupir ne suivra jamais.... Et si vous mettez la main sur la place où palpitoit le coeur du corps social, vous sentirez cependant qu’il ne bat plus.

17This extract could serve as an epigraph to Lélia, in which Sand expresses the dying agony of individuals, religions, sciences and societies. Sénancour had treated this theme with simple profundity. Sand revamped it with systematic vigour. Nodier had expressed the idea that the contemporary world had no longer a present, that at the moment of its eclipse it was trying to recapture its past or to hurl itself towards an illusory future, that it was clinging to cheerless, futile science as though it were a lifebuoy, or was keeping its eyes shut in order to go on believing in perfectibility. Sand revived these also, and no doubt owed something to Balzac in her manner of treating them. In the course of a “bal masque”, Lélia mocks those guests whose only pleasure lies in escaping from themselves through the revival of an outmoded form. This brings to mind Raphaël’s visit to the Antiquarian in La Peau de chagrin, where Balzac pities his contemporaries for being “uprooted from the present”14.

18Depicting the world’s grief is not original in itself. But we have here a theory of suffering. The author of Lélia an rocher has thought of Christ – every being here below experiences his own calvary15. The only élite is a dolorous one; Trenmor’s greatness lies in what he endures. Suffering is presented as a thing of great worth, almost as a way of life (II, 30):

J’ai découvert, je pense, ce qui me soutient encore dans cette vie de désenchantement et de lassitude : c’est la souffrance. La souffrance excite, ranime, irrite les nerfs ; elle fait saigner le cceur, elle abrège l’agonie. C’est la convulsion violente, terrible, qui nous relève de terre et nous donne la force de nous dresser vers le ciel pour maudire et crier… souffrons ! cela vaut mieux que de dormir… . Le doute s’introduit dans fâme qui rêve, la foi descend dans l’âme qui souffre.… Reviens done, ô ma douleur ! Pourquoi m’as-tu quittée ? Si je ne puis avoir d’autre ami que toi, du moins je ne veux pas te perdre. N’es-tu pas mon héritage et mon lot ? C’est par toi seul que l’homme est grand.… C’est toi, ô douleur sublime, qui… nous mets à part, et nous places, brebis au désert, sous la main du pasteur céleste qui nous regarde, nous plaint, en attendant peut-être qu’il nous console !
Oh ! l’homme qui n’a pas souffert n’est rien ! C’est un être incomplet, une force inutile, une matière brute et sans valeur, que le ciseau de l’ouvrier brisera peut-être en essayant de le faqonner16.

19What characterizes this thought is that suffering is presented as good in itself, being, one might say, assimilated to the very essence of man. To suffer is to live, to know that one lives and that one is sure of a life hereafter. No positive religion, to Sand’s mind, affords a justification for this « mystique » of suffering. Moreover, the author affirms and does not prove. She has, however, left information which leads us to think that she was referring to Nodier’s expiatory doctrine, that to suffer is to live, because it is expiation. Lélia complains to God (II, 27) that she is punished for sins which she did not commit; she is expiating some former existence. Envisaging her death, she asks herself what form she desires to have post mortem; is this not a discreet allusion to palingenesis? A favourable rebirth is possible only through suffering: “Alas, was I guilty even before birth?” Ballanche answered in the affirmative17. Nodier also:

O mon ami ! sois sur qu’il y a dans le monde où nous habitons, des âmes punies d’une faute ancienne, punies peut-être d’une faute à venir indispensable, des âmes d’expiation qui portent pour une génération le poids des vengeances de Dieu, qui sont condamnées à l’amour de l’impossible, comme si la suprême puissance qui ne peut sans contrevenir à ses décrets leur ôter l’infini dans 1’eternité, avait voulu leur donner le néant dans le présent18.

20Nodier had thus consigned to writing the very formula, the chemical symbol of Lélia! We think inevitably of René, Obermann, Manfred, but first and foremost we think of Nodier’s work – it is there that we find the true origin of Lélia. There Sand discovered her conception of time, and the notion of palingenesis which gives a hypothetical meaning to the crosses men must bear (Lélia, II, 29):

Dieu ploiera l’univers comme un vêtement qu’on jette au vent, comme un manteau usé qu’on dépouille parce qu’on n’en veut plus. Alors Dieu seul sera. Alors, peut-être, sa gloire et sa puissance eclateront sans voiles. Mais qui les contemplera ? De nouvelles races naîtront-elles sur notre poussière pour voir ou pour deviner celui qui crée et qui détruit ?

21Thus did Nodier announce the death of humanity and the birth of a new species, comprehensive man.

22Here suffering has not merely the banal utility of learning by experience. Beyond it there lies a “mystique” of passion and a doctrine of expiation – a discreet esoterism, hinted at rather than affirmed, enunciated rather than envisioned, more hypothetical than dogmatic.

III … sacrum

23Man is destined to suffer and to love – these constitute his life and his after-life; through this double destiny, he escapes the jus civile and is subject to the jus divinum. The end of man is thus a divine one. God is present in Lelia – all the more so in that his existence and his goodness are doubted. For Sand in 1833, as for Chateaubriand, Bonald, Ballanche, or Nodier, humanity is a pyramid clinging at its apex to God (the imagery is Chateaubriand’s). But Lélia is in doubt, like a mountain-climber made uneasy by a toe-hold which he does not see. The author moreover does not take upon herself the temporary negation of her chief character; Lélia is a work that is ideally clinical and non-dogmatic. The book seems to present an esoteric concept of God. As in the work of Saint-Martin and Ballanche, the accent is placed on the gospel of love19. Yet this God unknowable is the master of both good and evil (Lélia, I, 3):

Vous me demandez si j’adore l’esprit du mal ! L’esprit du mal et l’esprit du bien, c’est un seul esprit, c’est Dieu ; c’est la volonté inconnue et mystérieuse qui est au-dessus de nos volontés. Le bien et le mal, ce sont des distinctions que nous avons créées. Dieu ne les connaît pas plus que le bonheur ou l’infortune.

24The germ of this idea, which reduces God to the life-principle, quite apart from all qualification or appreciation, had been discovered by Sand in Obermann, where Sénancour tries to show the necessity of things and to ridicule man who passes judgments on them. In his Rêveries especially, one finds a multiplicity of remarks such as the following:

Tout est bon dans la nature, parce que la nature contenant tout, emploie tout. Tout est indifférent dans la nature, parce que la nature étant seule, n’est en rapport avec rien d’extérieur. Tout est beau dans la nature. Comme elle est entière, elle est toujours une ; comme elle est une, elle est toujours symétrique ; comme elle existe essentiellement, elle remplit sa fin qui est de subsister20.

25But the creation, victim of time, a prey to evil, accuses the creator. Lélia’s cross is to love and at the same time to doubt her love. There are breaks in her continued belief in God. She echoes Nodier’s passage in “De l’amour”:

Le dernier chant du génie est un chant de désespoir. C’est cette clameur qu’on entendit un jour au milieu de la mer, et qui annonga au monde épouvanté que Dieu était mort.

26Not that Lélia is a complete atheist – she experiments with doubt, it is her life and she endures it. Doubt itself is sacred, for it is suffering. It is piety, for it is expiation. In another existence, she will no longer doubt; like Trenmor, she will have come to know God, before contemplating him in all his glory.

27Between that which consecrates and man who is consecrated to suffering, is there a perceptible link? Why not pass from doubt to negation21, from negation to forgetting? God, whom Lélia accuses and about whom she has doubts, remains present in her consciousness – through love, which reveals him by postulating him; through dreams also, which rend the veil surrounding him. Lélia tells of the horrors of her nights. She sometimes relives the history of the world. She contemplates unknown creatures. She does not admit that the world of dreams is the result of pure chance. It is, if not revelation, at least allusion; there is something in it of the sacred. It is the outcropping of Reality – both promise and menace, recompense and chastisement, suffering and sign of election. Sand hardly makes her thought explicit, perhaps because she cannot believe; she suspects, and one must not exaggerate her faith in dreams any more than her doubts. But there appears to be no uncertainty regarding her reference to more precise doctrines – dreams, even when poignant, deliver man from his condition by doing away with time. As in the works of Sénancour, Ballanche, or Nodier, dreams make man a seer. But in Lélia they are, more often than not, a revelation of the past, instants of past time reappearing in semi-consciousness. Dreams thus reveal that meeting-place of moments called eternity. The individual relives world history and contemplates, as he assumes it, human destiny.

28Thus dreams and love alike awaken man out of this life’s fatal slumber; they reveal to him, beyond temporal and spatial semblances, an absolute towards which he must reach forth through suffering, in order to attain to the true life.

29Between God and the absence of God, between good and evil, between inevitable and impossible love, between passion and impassiveness, Sand did not find her true course; a flower from Balzac, others from Sénancour, an armfull from Nodier (and a deal of fragrance from Chateaubriand or Byron) – these do not constitute a bouquet. But Lélia cannot be reduced to these exterior elements, which Sand appropriated minus their context of certitude; she may have borrowed this, that, and the other, but faith she never borrowed. The absolute is merely conjectured, God postulated, love foreshadowed. Even if Lélia, a bit ridiculously, climbs a rock in order to vaticinate, there is no trace of the theosophist in Sand herself. No revelation whatsoever, simply exigencies, postulations, apprehensions, and a prolonged cry of pain.

30Therein resides the originality of Lélia. In it the author casts into the night borrowed truths like glowing embers which held in the hand both burn it and are put out by it. Only suffering is sure. Only suffering can permit man to put his existence to the test, and to anticipate the true life. There is nothing exemplary about Lélia; she embodies an idea, not a precept. Whereas Trenmor is almost a Man of Providence, she is entirely a Woman of Destiny22.

31Lélia is neither uniquely nor essentially a confession. It is an attempt to give concrete form to philosophical thoughts; to express the inexpressible suffering of man who knows that he knows nothing with certainty and who nevertheless cannot forego knowledge. It is the novel of an existence desiring essences of which it is unaware, and which it doubts, a powerful effort towards the destruction of all idols in favour of a true God, so completely absconditus that he leaves created beings almost in emptiness. What we have here, as Sainte-Beuve put it, is a corrosive liquid which has had no detrimental effect upon the pure metal of the vase that held it – and this because the author played with ideas, as a child plays with firearms. The book is, or at least Sand must have wanted it to be, a far-off echo of the anguish in the Garden, eighteen hundred and thirty-three years before.