bbish
about underground tribunals, and judges in red cloaks, and skeletons,
and museums of torture-implements, and all the Weishauptian trumpery of
mixed occultism and revolutionary sentiment. The author has even the
insufferable audacity to fling at us _another_ resuscitation--that of
the Countess Wanda, Albert's mother, who appears to have transmitted to
him her abominable habit of catalepsy. So ends, unsatisfactorily
enough--unless anybody is satisfied by the fact that two solid children
result from the still mystifying married life of the pair--the story
which had begun so well in the first volume of _Consuelo_, and which in
the major part of _Consuelo_ itself, though not throughout, maintains
the satisfaction fairly.

[Sidenote: The "making good" of _Lucrezia Floriani_.]

If any reader, in two ways gentle, has been good enough to take some
interest in the analysis of these books, but is also so soft-hearted as
to feel slightly _froisse_ by it, as showing a disqualifying inability
to sympathise with the author, I hope I may put myself right by what I
am going to say of another. _Lucrezia Floriani_ is to me the most
remarkable book that George Sand ever wrote; and the nearest to a great
one, if it be not actually that. I have read it, with no diminution of
interest and no abatement of esteem, at very different times of my life,
and I think that it is on the whole not only the most perfect revelation
of what at any rate the author would have liked to be her own
temperament, but--a much greater thing--a presentment in possible and
human form of a real temperament, and almost of a real character.
Further, it is much the most achieved example of that peculiar style of
which more will be said in a general way presently, and it contains
comparatively few blots. One always smiles, of course, at the picture of
Lucrezia swinging in a hammock in the centre of a large room, the four
corners of which are occupied by four bedsteads containing four
children, in the production of whom not exactly _four_ fathers, as they
ought for perfect symmetry, but as a compromise _three_, have assisted.
One always shudders at her notion of restoring a patient, suffering
under a nervous ailment, by surrounding his couch with the cherubic
countenances and the balmy breaths of these infants.[185] Prince Karol,
the hero (such as there is), is a poor creature, though not such a cad
as Stenio; but then, according to Madame Dudevant, men as a rule _w