anybody, and knows it; she can talk--ye Demons, how she can talk!--but
she can never behave like a woman of this world. She alternately hugs
Stenio, so that she nearly squeezes his breath out, and, when he draws
natural conclusions from this process, pushes him away. But worse and
more preposterous things happen. Lelia has a sister, Pulcherie, who is
very like her (they are of course both impossibly beautiful) in body,
and so far resembles her in mind and soul as to be unable to behave
decently or sensibly. But her want of decency and sense takes the more
commonplace line of becoming an actual courtesan of the "Imperia" kind
in Italy. By a series of muddles for which Lelia is--as her plain-spoken
sister points out after the catastrophe--herself really responsible,
Stenio is induced, during the excitement of an _al fresco_ fete at night
in the grounds of a sort of fairy palace, to take the "coming" sister
for the recalcitrant one, and avail himself of her complaisance, _usque
ad finem_. Lelia reproaches him (which she has not the least right to
do), and he devotes himself entirely to Pulcherie (La Zinzolina is her
professional name) and her group of noble paramours. He gets, however,
generally drunk and behaves with a brutal rudeness, which would, in the
Italy of tradition, have finished things up very soon by a stiletto
thrust, and in honest England by a kicking into the street. There are
mysterious plots, cardinals, and anything else you like or don't like.
Lelia becomes an abbess, Stenio a suicide, the above-mentioned priest,
Magnus, being much concerned in this. She admits her unfortunate lover
to burial, and is degraded and imprisoned for it--or for having saved
Trenmor-Valmarina from the law. Everybody else now dies, and the
nightmare comes to an end.

[Sidenote: The moral of the group and its tragi-comedy.]

The beauties of style which softened the savage breast of Thackeray
himself in the notice above mentioned, and which, such as they are,
appear even in George Sand's earliest work, will receive attention when
that work comes to be discussed as a whole. Meanwhile, at the risk of
any charge of Philistinism, I confess that this part of it seems to me,
after fifty years and more of "corrected impression," almost worthless
_au fond_. It is, being in prose, and therefore destitute of the
easements or at least masquerades which poetry provides for nonsense,
the most conspicuous and considerable example--despite the