of her lover, Laurent, can
justify. Further, Therese is self-deceived in supposing her passion to
have died out with her esteem. She breaks with the culprit and engages
her word to a worthier man. But enough remains over of the past to
prevent her from keeping the promise she ought never to have made. When
she sacrifices her unselfish friend to return to the lover who has made
her miserable, she is sincere, but not heroic. She is too weak to shake
off the influence of the fatal infatuation and shut out Laurent from her
life, nor yet can she accept her heart's choice for better or worse,
even when experience has left her little to learn with regard to
Laurent. Clearly both friend and lover, out of a novel, would feel
wronged. Therese's excuse lies in the extremely trying character of her
companion, whose vagaries may be supposed to have driven her beside
herself at times, just as her airs of superiority and mute reproach may
have driven him not a little mad. Those who wish to know in what spirit
Madame Sand met the attacks upon her provoked by this book, will find
her reply in a very few words at the conclusion of her preface to _Jean
de la Roche_, published the same year.

Most readers of _Elle et Lui_ have been so preoccupied with the
question of the rights and wrongs of the originals in their behavior to
each other, so inclined to judge of the book according to its supposed
accuracy or inaccuracy as a matter of history, that its force, as a
study of the attraction that so often leads two exceptional but
hopeless, irreconcilable spirits to seek in each other a refuge from the
isolation in which their superiority places them, has been somewhat
overlooked. Laurent, whether a true portrait or not, is only too true to
nature; excessive in his admirable powers and in his despicable
weakness. Therese is an equally faithful picture of a woman not quite up
to the level of her own principles, which are so high that any lapse
from them on her part brings down more disasters on herself and on
others than the misdemeanors of avowedly unscrupulous persons.

Within a few months of _Elle et Lui_ had appeared _L'Homme de Neige_,[D]
a work of totally different but equally characteristic cast. The
author's imagination had still all its old zest and activity, and
readers for whom fancy has any charm will find this Scandinavian romance
thoroughly enjoyable. The subject of the marionette theater, here
introduced with such brilliant and in