Julie, to give the lady known by the name of Elvire her real name, is a créole, aged twenty-eight. She is an orphan, and has married a man of seventy, a famous scientist, that she may have a protector; but her actual relation to him has never been anything but that of a daughter to a father. She has an affection of the heart which may at any time prove fatal. By the Lake of Bourget in Savoy (the lake of which Lamartine has sung so beautifully), where she is spending the autumn for the sake of her health, she meets Raphael, the young hero of the book, a man differing in nothing but name from its author, who in its pages gives us not only real facts, but even calls his friends and acquaintances by their real names. He describes himself as he was then--twenty-four years old, young and poor, solitary and shy, tender-hearted and given to enthusiasms, already a little _blasé_ from much dissipation, tired of all the commonplace and dissolute amours in which he had hitherto indulged.
It cannot be said that Lamartine gave an altogether too unfavourable description of himself. The delicacy and refinement of Raphael's feelings was such that his comrades used laughingly to declare that he was home-sick for heaven. In a somewhat clumsy manner Lamartine attempts to give us an idea of this refinement: "If he had wielded the brush, he would have painted the Madonna of Foligno; if the chisel, he would have sculptured Canova's Psyche. If he had been a poet, he would have written the lamentations of Job, Tasso's Herminia stanzas, Shakespeare's moonlight scene in _Romeo and Juliet_, and Lord Byron's description of Haydee." Fortunately it was not required of him to do any of these things, as they had been done by others. We know that in his efforts at a later period in one of the three directions, namely, as a poet, he did not attain to the level of the masters named.
In _Raphael_ we have a masterly description of a young man's ardent love, a love which, though it has taken possession of him heart and soul, is of an almost altogether spiritual nature, partly because its object inspires such a degree of reverence and compassion that the senses are not allowed to come into play, partly because the young man, after leading a loose life with women for whom he has felt no respect, shudders at the very idea of his relation to this woman, whom he reveres, becoming one of the same nature with his past amours.