Lucile

Lucile is a long narrative poem published in 1860 under the pen name "Owen Meredith" by the English poet and diplomat Robert Bulwer-Lytton, first Earl of Lytton. Written in anapaestic meter and divided into two parts, the story opens at a spa town in the French Pyrenees. The heroine, Lucile, beautiful and accomplished, was in her youth engaged to the English nobleman Alfred Vargrave, but misunderstanding and mischance drove them apart. Ten years later, Alfred is about to marry his cousin Matilda Darcey when Lucile writes to ask him to return their old letters in person, and the old love rekindles. Meanwhile the Duke of Luvois, a French legitimist nobleman, ardently courts Lucile; rejected, he plants suspicion in Alfred's mind with a base insinuation and destroys the match entirely. Alfred marries his cousin; the Duke devotes himself to family honor and military glory; the two men repeatedly come to the brink of conflict, and each time the lonely Lucile steps in to reconcile them. Years later, Alfred's son and the Duke's niece fall in love but are forbidden to meet because of the old quarrel between their fathers. The young man goes off to the Crimean War and, wounded, is tended by a merciful nun called Sister Seraphine—who is none other than Lucile, long believed lost. Learning the young people's secret, she moves her two old enemies with the story of her own suffering and her piety, brings about a reconciliation between the families and the union of the young couple, and then continues her work of love and mercy. The poem's opening landscape descriptions and the scene of the mountain storm are especially famous. It was a sensation on publication, printed in more than two thousand editions by nearly a hundred publishers over the following century, and was long shadowed by controversy over its borrowing from George Sand's Lavinia. This entry corresponds to an edition included in a collection of English classics.