It is easy to foresee with what a fiery flame this passion will blaze at first, to foretell what a full and mighty chord, what a joyful paean will resound, as though both had won complete and lasting victory and salvation. There is a new and strange mixture in her feeling--an enthusiasm which is almost fanatical, because it must be equal to the task of stifling his constantly recurring jealousy of the past; a faith which is almost convulsive, because it is not based upon sound, natural confidence, but upon a determination to believe in spite of everything, even in spite of having already been deceived; and a fidelity which suffers tortures from being constantly called upon to demonstrate its existence, because it is the offspring of faithlessness towards the past. This redoublement of passion constitutes the third marked feature in Eléonore's character. "One regarded her," says Adolphe, "with the same interest and admiration with which one gazes on a magnificent thunderstorm." It is in reality an entirely new female type which is here presented to us, a type which many years later Balzac appropriates, styles "la femme de trente ans," and varies with such genius that he may be said to be its second creator, and which George Sand too developed and embellished in a whole series of her novels. Under the treatment of these two authors this type proved to be a whole, hitherto unknown, world, in which every feeling, passion, and thought was infinitely stronger than in the world of the girlish heart. In time the type passed from the novel into the drama, and long usurped the French stage. In it the early literature of the century found its queen, as in René it found its king.[1] The strong, Promethean generation to which Goethe belonged had produced its type in Faust, the fully developed man, with the powerful, cultivated intellect, who, having studied in all the schools and toiled through all the sciences, becomes conscious in his manhood's prime of a void in his heart, a thirst for youth, freshness, and simplicity. Casting himself into the whirl of life, he falls in love with a child. It is her simplicity and innocence that win and intoxicate him, and arouse the desire of possession.