There follow scenes like those in _Valérie_--projects of suicide which are never carried into execution; nights spent by the lovers in tender converse, with a thick oaken door between them; rapt, sentimental ecstasies. This is a love which finds expression only in lingering looks, languishing that reaches the verge of insanity, sighs that are almost screams, long silences and endless outpourings--never a caress or an embrace. Unpleasant, almost offensive, in any case unnatural, is the manner in which, in this love-story too, our attention is perpetually drawn to the fact that the lovers keep their vow, that their love remains platonic. On the one solitary occasion when there seems to be real danger, there arrives at the critical moment--who? None other than that estimable old man, Monsieur Bonald, with whose theories on the subject of woman and of marriage we are acquainted. He is coming to stay with Julie, arrives at twelve o'clock at night, and is thus saved the grief of seeing his pupils rebel against order. Even in his novel, Lamartine does not miss the opportunity of proclaiming that he was at variance with Bonald, especially as regarded his doctrine of theocratic government. It became the fashion to disagree with Bonald. Chateaubriand himself remarks in his _Memoirs_ (iv. 23): "Monsieur de Bonald was a clever man. His sagacity was mistaken for genius." Whenever Julie pities Raphael, he answers her with pious outbursts in which he compares her and himself to Abélard and Héloïse. "Have I ever let you feel that I desire ought else than to share this suffering with you? Does it not make both of us voluntary and pure victims? Is not this the eternal burnt-offering of love, which has perhaps not been offered before the eyes of the angels since the days of Héloïse until now?" When, after studying _Raphael_, we re-read Lamartine's poems to Elvire, we have a new key to the understanding of the idealism and vagueness of this poetic love, which, obliged to renounce sensual pleasures, pretends that the corporeal world does not exist for it. A distinction must, however, be drawn between the later poems and some written much earlier and in a perfectly different tone, a tone which recalls the eighteenth century. Take as examples the poems _À Elvire_ (which is in reality addressed to _Graziella_) and _Sapho_.