All this is excellent. Unfortunately the novel as a whole is spoiled by its religious purpose.
The authors of this period could not write of love pure and simple; they felt obliged to mix religion up with it. Lamartine makes his lovers go through whole courses of philosophy and theology together. They hold different opinions, and she is intellectually his superior. He still retains the beliefs of his childhood. In the house of her famous husband she has associated with intellectually emancipated men of science, whose opinions, marked with the stamp of the eighteenth century, she has imbibed. He and she really belong to different generations--she to the generation of the empire, he to that of the monarchy. Faust, when he is catechised by his Gretchen, is obliged to parry her attempt to convert him by explaining his unbelief to her in palliating euphemisms; the opposite happens here; Raphael makes long, fruitless attempts to convert his Julie to faith in God and Christianity. The first time the innocent youth recommends her to seek aid from God, he is astonished when, instead of answering him, she looks sad and indifferent and turns away her face. He timidly asks her reason for so doing. She answers: "That word distresses me." "What! the word which signifies life, love, and everything that is good--how can it distress the most perfect of God's creatures?" &c., &c. Then she is obliged to explain to him that what he calls _God_ is what she calls _law_--an infinite greatness, an absolute, inevitable necessity, something that it is impossible to move with prayers.
To this conviction of hers is due Julie's easy and yet dignified moral attitude. She says: "I was educated by a philosopher, and in my husband's house I have lived in the society of free-thinking men, who have severed themselves entirely from the dogmas and observances of a church which they have helped to undermine; hence I have no superstitions and none of the weak-minded scruples which impel most women to bow their heads under a second yoke, superadded to that which our consciences impose upon us."
It is Raphael who plays the girl's part when, time after time, he supplicates a woman of a spirit like this to return to the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church. "I besought her to seek in a religion of love and tenderness, in the sacred gloom of our churches, in the mysterious faith in that Christ who is the God of tears, in genuflections and prayer, the relief and the comfort which I myself had found in them in my youth." Raphael's attempt at conversion was not entirely successful; he himself was satisfied with the result, but a more strictly orthodox Christian would hardly have been so.