former existences which we do not
remember, but it may be that at times we have fragmentary reminiscences
of them."

George Sand must have been very deeply impressed by this idea. It
inspired her with _Sept cordes de la lyre_, _Spiridion_, _Consuelo_
and the _Comtesse de Rudolstadt_, the whole cycle of her philosophical
novels.

The _Sept cordes de la lyre_ is a dramatic poem after the manner of
_Faust_. Maitre Albertus is the old doctor conversing with Mephistocles.
He has a ward, named Helene, and a lyre. A spirit lives in this lyre.
It is all in vain that the painter, the _maestro_, the poet, the critic
endeavour to make the cords vibrate. The lyre remains dumb. Helene, even
without putting her hands on it, can draw from it magnificent harmony;
Helene is mad. All this may seem very incomprehensible to you, and I
must confess that it is so to me. Albertus himself declares: "This has a
poetical sense of a very high order perhaps, but it seems vague to me."
Personally, I am of the same opinion as Albertus. With a little effort,
I might, like any one else, be able to give you an interpretation of
this logogriph, which might appear to have something in it. I prefer
telling you frankly that I do not understand it. The author, perhaps,
did not understand it much better so that it may have been metaphysics.

I would call your attention, though, to that picture of Helene, with the
magic lyre in her hand, risking her life, by climbing to the spire of
the steeple and uttering her inspiring speech from there. Is not this
something like Solness, the builder, from the top of his tower? Like
Tolstoi, Ibsen had evidently read George Sand and had not forgotten her.

_Spiridion_ introduces us into a strange convent, in which we see the
portraits come out of their frames and roam about the cloisters. The
founder of the convent, Hebronius, lives again in the person of Father
Alexis, who is no other than Leroux.

In _Consuelo_ we have the same imagination. We have already considered
the first part of this novel, that which takes place at Venice, in the
schools of music and in the theatres of song. Who would have thought
that the charming diva, the pupil of Porpora, was to have such strange
adventures? She arrives in Bohemia, at the Chateau of Rudolstadt. She
has been warned that extraordinary things take place there. Comte Albert
de Rudolstadt is subject to nervous fits and to great lethargy. He
disappears from the chateau and then