the sublime convict. As a young man he had been handsome. He
had loved and been young. He had known what it was to be only twenty
years of age. "The only thing was, he had known this at the age
of sixteen" (!!) He had then become a gambler, and here follows an
extraordinary panegyric on the fatal passion for gambling. Trenmor
ruins himself, borrows without paying back, and finally swindles "an old
millionaire who was himself a defrauder and a dissipated man" out of
a hundred francs. Apparently the bad conduct of the man Trenmor robs,
excuses the swindling. He is condemned to five years of hard labour. He
undergoes his punishment, and is thereby regenerated. "What if I were to
tell you," writes George Sand, "that such as he now is, crushed, with a
tarnished reputation, ruined, I consider him superior to all of us, as
regards the moral life. As he had deserved punishment, he was willing to
bear it. He bore it, living for five years bravely and patiently among
his abject companions. He has come back to us out of that abominable
sewer holding his head up, calm, purified, pale as you see him, but
handsome still, like a creature sent by God."

We all know how dear convicts are to the hearts of romantic people.
There is no need for me to remind you how they have come to us recently,
encircled with halos of suffering and of purity. We all remember
Dostoiewsky's _Crime and Punishment_ and Tolstoi's _Resurrection_. When
the virtue of expiation and the religion of human suffering came to
us from Russia, we should have greeted them as old acquaintances, if
certain essential works in our own literature, of which these books are
the issue, had not been unknown to us.

The last part of the novel is devoted to Stenio. Hurt by Lelia's
disdain, which has thrown him into the arms of her sister Pulcherie,
he gives himself up to debauch. We find him at a veritable orgy in
Pulcherie's house. Later on he is in a monastery at Camaldules, talking
to Trenmor and Magnus. In such books we must never be astonished. . . .
There is a long speech by Stenio, addressed to Don Juan, whom he
regrets to have taken as his model. The poor young man of course commits
suicide. He chooses drowning as the author evidently prefers that mode
of suicide. Lelia arrives in time to kneel down by the corpse of the
young man who has been her victim. Magnus then appears on the scene,
exactly at the right moment, to strangle Lelia. Pious hands prepare
Lelia and Stenio f