lessly in love with her; and a mysterious personage--a
sort of Solomon-Socrates-Senancour--who bears the Ossianesque name of
Trenmor, with a later and less provincially poetical _alias_ of
"Valmarina."[180] The history of the _preuves_ of Trenmor's
novel-nobility are soon laid before the reader. They are not, in their
earlier stages, engaging to the old-fashioned believer in "good form."

Trenmor is the sort of exaggeration of Childe Harold which a lively but
rather vulgar mind might conceive. "He was born great; but they
developed the animal in him." The greatness postponed its appearance,
but the animality did credit to the development. "He used to love to
beat his dogs; before long he beat his prostitutes." This harmless
diversion accentuated itself in details, for which, till the acme, the
reader must be referred to the original. The climacteric moment came. He
had a mistress called "La Mantovana," whom he rather preferred to the
others, because she was beautiful and impudent. "In a night of noise and
wine" he struck her, and she drew a dagger. This made him love her for a
moment; but unfortunately she made an improper observation; thereupon he
tore off her pearl necklace and trod it under his feet. She wept. This
annoyed Trenmor very much. "She had wished revenge for a personal
insult, and she cried for a toy!" Accordingly he had a "crispation of
nerves," which obliged him to take a large cut-glass decanter and hit
her on the head with it. According to the natural perversity on such
occasions of such persons, she died. The brutal justice of mankind--so
hateful to Godwin and George Sand and Victor Hugo--sent Trenmor, not,
indeed, to the gallows, as it should have done, but to the galleys. Yet
the incident made Lelia, who (she must have had a sweet set of friends)
somehow knew him, very fond of Trenmor, though she certainly told him
that he might as well repent of what he had done, which seems
inconsistent.

They let him out after five years (why, Heaven or the other
place knows!) and he became a reformed character--the
Solomon-Socrates-Senancour above mentioned _plus_ a sort of lay
"director" to Lelia, with a carbonaro attitude of political
revolutionary and free-thinking _illumine_. Now _corruptio pessimi_ is
seldom _optima_.

The main interest, however, shifts (with apparitions of
Trenmor-Valmarina) to the loves (if they may be called so) of the
pitiable Stenio and the intolerable heroine. She is unable to love