Lamartine's La Chute d'un ange: Heaven and Hell on Earth

Lamartines's La Chute d'un ange (1838) relates the fate of an angelic man in two primitive desacralized societies. Cédar, who like the tribesmen has lost his memory of Heaven, finds Heaven on earth in the love of Daïdha and in a brief stay in an earthly paradise; he finds Hell among wicked men whose persecutions serve as God's punishment for his having preferred human love to sacred love. The precariousness of Cédar's happiness is shown in his melodramatic adventures and struggle against demonic forces, usually personified in humans. The narrator concludes that man must submit to suffering imposed by a jealous God, but the reader is likely to sympathize with Cédar's final revolt. (MMI)