[1]For a brief account of this lawsuit, which, though won, left cruel effects upon his life, see his sister's narrative in the Memoir of this edition, pp. 231, 232.—TR.
[1]For a brief account of this lawsuit, which, though won, left cruel effects upon his life, see his sister's narrative in the Memoir of this edition, pp. 231, 232.—TR.
June 16,——
My letter was again interrupted. Yesterday, I dined with the Abbé de Lamennais, Berryer, and I don't know whom besides. I saw the abbé for the first time; as for Berryer, we are old acquaintances. I was shocked at the atrocious face of the Abbé de Lamennais; I tried to seize a single feature to which one could attach one's self, but there was none.
Berryer takes a trip to Saint Petersburg. I advised him strongly to return by land and pass through the Ukraine. I told him that I had hopes of going to the Ukraine towards September; but I dare not yield myself to any hope at all. On the 20th I start for Saché [a beautiful estate near Tours, belonging to a family friend, M. de Margonne].
The "Chronique de Paris" is very wellposed, politicallyspeaking. But it needs funds. Berryer told me how fruitful the idea of a Right Centre was in results.
Madame de Berny is getting worse and worse. I hope to go and see her on my return from Touraine. But she cannot bear the least emotion.
Adieu; you will pardon my silence when you know all my griefs and pains. I send you many flowers of memory and affectionate homage. Present my friendly remembrances to Monsieur Hanski, to whom I shall write next, and recall me to the recollection of those about you.
Saché, June, 1836.
I receive here your last letter in which you speak to me of Madame Rosalie and of "Séraphita." In relation to your aunt, I own that I am ignorant by what law it is that persons so well born and bred can believe such base calumnies. I, a gambler! Can your aunt neither reason, combine, nor calculate anything except whist? I, who work, even here, sixteen hours a day, how should I go to a gambling-house that takes whole nights? It is as absurd as it is crazy.
I went for the first time, at thirty-six years of age, and out of curiosity, to Frascati, where I found Bernhard. One night Bernhard presented me to the Cercle des Étrangers, where he invited me to dinner. I went for the third time the day he gave the dinner. Since then, though I have been invited several times, I have never returned there. The last time, I asked Bernhard to include me in his stake for a certain sum, which denotes the most profound ignorance of the passion. In all, during my life, I have lost thirty ducats at cards. So much for gambling. That vice will never catch me. I play for a stake far dearer and nobler.
Let your aunt judge in her way of my works, of which she knows neither the whole design nor the bearing; it is her right to do so. I submit to all judgments. That isone of the evils through which we have to pass. Resignation is one of the conditions of my existence.
Your letter was sad; I felt it was written under the influence of your aunt. To comprehend is to equal, said Raphael; and as you yourself declare that our poor age does not take the trouble to comprehend, it follows that our equals are few. That which I can pretend to for myself and my own person is the usage of a faculty given to man,—reason. Your aunt makes me a gambler and a debauchee; shehas the proofs, you say. It is now seven or eight years that I work, as I have told you, sixteen hours a day. If I am a gambler and a debauchee, the man who has written thirty volumes in seven years must disappear. Both cannot live in the same skin; or, if they do, it must have pleased God to make an extraordinary creature—which I am not.
I was beginning to recover life and strength here, where I have been for the last five days. On leaving I told them with regard to the letters that might come, "Send me none but those from Russia;" and your letter has crushed me more than all the heavy nonsense that jealousy and calumny, lawsuit and money matters have cast upon me. My sensibility is a proof of friendship; there are none but those we love who can make us suffer. I am not angry with your aunt, but I am angry that a person as distinguished as you say she is should be accessible to such base and absurd calumny. But you yourself, at Geneva, when I told you I was free as air, you believed me to be married, on the word of one of those fools whose trade it is to sell money. I laughed. Here I cannot laugh; I have the horrible privilege of being horribly calumniated. A few debates like this, and I shall retire into Touraine, isolating myself from everything, renouncing all, striving to make myself an egoist, desiring neither sentiment nor happiness, and living by thought, and for thought.
Your aunt makes me think of the poor Christian who, entering the Sistine chapel just as Michel-Angelo had drawn a nude figure, asked why the popes allowed such horrors in Saint Peter's. She judges a work of at least the same range in literature, without putting herself at a distance and awaiting its end. She judges the artist without knowing him, and by the sayings of ninnies. All that gives me little pain for myself, but much for her, if you love her. But that you should let yourself be influenced by such errors, thatdoesgrieve me and makes me very uneasy, for I live by my friendships only.
This is enough about that, or you will think me an angry author, a personage that does not exist in me. I forbade him ever to appear. Now let us come to what you say to me of "Séraphita." It is strange that no one sees that "Séraphita" isall faith. Faith affirms, and the whole is said. The angel has descended from the angelic sphere to come into the midst of the quibbles of reasoning; he opposes reasoning with reasoning. It is not for him to formulate doubt. As to his answer, no sacred author has ever more energetically proven God. The proof drawn from the infinitude of numbers has surprised learned men. They have lowered their heads. It was beating them on their own ground with their own weapons.
As for the orthodoxy of the book. Swedenborg is diametrically opposed to the Court of Rome; but who shall dare pronounce between Saint Peter and Saint John? The mystical religion of Saint John is logical; it will ever be that of superior beings. That of Rome will be that of the crowd.
As you say, one must try to penetrate the meaning of "Séraphita" in order to criticise the work; but I never counted on a success after "Louis Lambert" was so despised. These are books that I make for myself and a few others. When I have to write a book for all theworld I know very well what ideas to appeal to, and what I must express. "Séraphita" has nothing of earth; if she loved, if she doubted, if she suffered, if she were influenceable by anything terrestrial, she would not be the angel. No one in Paris has comprehended the vision of old David, when he speaks of the efforts of all the elementary substances to recover their creaturewiththe spirit she has conquered; whereas they can have nought but her mortal remains. Séraphita is, as it were, a flower of the globe; all that has nourished her yearns after her. The "Path to God" is a far more lofty religion than that of Bossuet; it is the religion of Saint Teresa, of Fénelon, of Swedenborg, of Jacob Boehm, and of M. Saint-Martin.
But I am repeating myself. Your belief leads to it as much as mine. I thought I was making a beautiful and grand work, but I may have deceived myself. It is what it is; and it is now delivered over to the disputes of this world.
At the moment when I write you have doubtless read the "Lys dans la Vallée," another Séraphita, who, this one, is orthodox. But I will not say anything more about them. Literature and its accompaniments bore me. When a book is done, I like to forget it; I do forget it; and I never return to it except to purge its faults a year or two later. You will read the book in its flesh, not its skeleton, and I hope it may give you pleasure.
I have undertaken to do here the two volumes for Madame Bêchet, as I must have written you before I left Paris. Touraine has given me back some health, but at the moment I was working most, with your letter came a letter from a friend, who sent me a puff of vexations. Such things dishearten one for living. Happily, the book I am now writing, "Illusions Perdues," is sufficiently in that tone. All that I can put into it of bitter sadness will do marvellously well. It is one of the "novels" that will be understood. It is breast-high of all men.
I am at this moment in the little bedroom at Saché, where I have worked so much! I see again the noble trees I have so often looked at when searching out ideas. I am not more advanced in 1836 than I was in 1829; I owe, and I work, always. I still have in me the same young life, the heart, still childlike, though you ask me to say how many sentiments a man's existence can consume. It seems as though, like gamblers, I have an "angélique" which multiplies. My pretended successes are still another of the agreeable fables fastened on me. I don't know which critic it was who said that I had known very intimately all my models. But I will never reply to these exaggerations. Berryer is of my opinion, and I shall never forgive myself for having quitted my silent attitude to descend into this arena of mud, as I did in the Introduction to "Le Lys dans la Vallée."
I have, within the last few days, been contemplating the extent of my work and what still remains to do. It is enormous. And, therefore, looking at that immense fresco, I have a great mind to sell out the "Chronique," renounce all species of political ambition, and make some arrangements which would allow me to retire to a "cottage" in Touraine and there accomplish peaceably, without anxieties, a work which will help me to pass my life, if not happily, at least tranquilly. That my life should behappy, many other circumstances are needed.
What! Anna has been ill? Do not nurse her too much; excess of care, a great physician told me, is one of the evils that threaten the children of the rich. It is a way of bringing the influence of evils to bear upon them. But you know much already on this head. What I say is not one of those commonplaces addressed to mothers; it is the cry of a deep conviction. My sister adored a little girl whom she lost because she gave ear to everything for her. Her little Valentine is, to-day, on the contrary, left to herself and she is magnificent.
My brother still gives us much anxiety. My mother is consumed with grief. But my brother-in-law is succeeding better. The lateral canal of the Loire has been voted by both Chambers. Nothing is needed now but to find the capital to build it. Also he has lately obtained the building of a bridge in Paris, which is an excellent affair. So the skies are brightening, at least for him. But he has needed, like myself, much perseverance and courage.
In re-reading your letter, I think you make me out rather greater than I am, and you demand more of me than I can give. The desire to do well has brought me to certain means to produce that result, but the exercise of intellectual faculties does not bring with it real grandeur; one remains, humanly speaking, what one is: a poor being veryimpressible, whom God had made for happiness, and whom circumstances have condemned to the most wearying toil in the world.
At this moment I must leave you to complete my work; in five or six days, when I am delivered of these two volumes, which will terminate the hardest of the obligations I have ever contracted, I will write you at length, with a heart more joyful; for just now things are causing me more pain than pleasure. My soul and spirit are too strained by work. I am as nervous as a fashionable woman, but I shall, perhaps, recover a little gaiety when I feel myself the lighter by two volumes. Touraine is very beautiful just now. The weather is extremely warm, which has brought the vineyards into bloom. Ah! my God, when shall I have a little place, a little château, a little park, a fine library! and shall I ever inhabit it without troubles, lodging within it the love of my life?
The farther I go, the more these golden wishes take the tint of dreams; and yet to renounce them would be death to me. For ten years past I live by hope only.
Well, adieu; a thousand kindly things to M. Hanski. I place on Anna's forehead a kiss, full of good wishes,and I beg you to find here those pretty flowers of the soul, those caressing thoughts, which you awaken and which belong to you, sad or not; for mine is one of those unalterable friendships which resemble the sky; clouds may pass beneath it, the atmosphere may be more or less ardent, but above them the heavens are ever blue. When you are sad, all you need do is to go up a little higher.
I have thought of you much during these last days, not receiving any letters; and now I regret having begun this letter with harshness towards a person you love and who loves you, though from her portrait I should judge her very cold.
Adieu again; I confide all I think to this little paper, which, unfortunately, will be very discreet. You will talk to me about the "Lys," and say a little more than you have said this time?
Paris, August 22, 1836.
This date,cara, is not without significance. All will be explained to you by three events which will leave their mark within my soul and on the history of my misfortunes.
Madame de Berny is dead. I can say no more on that point. My sorrow is not of a day; it will react upon my whole life. For a year I had not seen her, nor did I see her in her last moments. This was why: at the moment when I ought to have been at Nemours I was obliged to wind up the affairs of the "Chronique" in Paris—in the midst of its greatest success. We could not support competition with daily papers at forty francs a year, while we cost sixty-four and appeared semi-weekly. To keep on, we needed fifty thousand francs, and no one could or would advance a farthing in the present circumstances of the press. I went to see all the shareholders and guaranteed to them the integral payment of what they had put in; so that at the moment when I received the heaviest blow my heart has ever known—for never, since thedeath of my grandmother, have I sounded so deeply the selfish gulf of eternal separation—at that moment I was meeting a loss of forty thousand francs. It was too much. Immediately after, Madame Bêchet, married, as I told you, to a certain Jacquillart, was constrained by him to sue me for my volumes; I was thus under the weight of a new suit which is all clear loss to me, for by the deed itself I am condemned to pay fifty francs for every day's delay, and I am now two months behind, since the time I received the summons.
The last letter of the angel who has now escaped the miseries of life, and who in her last days was not spared them,—for in two years her two finest children, her best loved son, twenty-three years old, he who was allherself, and her most beautiful daughter of nineteen, are both dead; her youngest daughter of seventeen, mad; and her remaining son the cause of her greatest grief,—well, her last letter came in the midst of those worries of mine; andshe, who was always so lovingly severe to me, acknowledged that the "Lys" was one of the finest books in the French language; she decked herself at last with the crown which, fifteen years earlier, I had promised her, and, always coquettish, she imperiously forbade me to come and see her, because she would not have me near her unless she were beautiful and well. The letter deceived me. I waited until I had, by dint of efforts, conferences, and much ability, made Werdet buy the "Études de Mœurs" from Madame Bêchet for thirty thousand francs before I started for Nemours, and then, suddenly, the fatal news came, and almost killed me.
I do not speak to you here in detail of these forty and some days. I have given you the chief features, the outline. Some day I will tell you more. I will tell you how in this intelligent Paris we succumbed; how in order to settle the affair of the "Études de Mœurs" and the last lawsuit by which I can ever be threatened, the devotionof my tailor and the savings of a poor workingman were needed,—two men who had more faith in me than all the pompous admiration of men in high places.
When all was over,—struck down in the clearest illusions of my heart, ruined in money, undergoing a second Beresina such as befell me in 1828, and wearied out,—Werdet gave me twenty days' freedom, and we arranged for my payments till August 20. Rothschild gave me a letter of credit for Italy, and I seized a pretext of going to Milan to do a service to a man with whom I had a box at the opera, M. Visconti [Count Guidoboni-Visconti]. In twenty days I went there by the Mont Cenis, returning over the Simplon, having for companion a friend of Madame Carraud and Jules Sandeau [Madame Caroline Marbouty, to whom he dedicated "La Grenadière"]. You will divine that I lodged in your hotel Piazza Castello, and that in Geneva I stayed at the Arc with the Biolleys, and went to see Pré-l'Évêque and the Maison Mirabaud.
Alas! It is not forbidden to those who suffer to go and breathe a perfumed air. You alone and your memories could refresh a heart in mourning. I went over the road to Coppet and to Diodati.Cara, the Porte de Rive is enlarged, just as, suddenly, the affection I bear you is enlarged by all that I have lost. One no longer waits to enter Geneva; we can now come and go at any hour of the night. I stayed only one day in Geneva, and saw no one but de Candolle, who came near dying, but is better.
Here I am, returned, bearing a wound the scar of which will be ever visible, but which you alone have soothed unconsciously.
You must have had much uneasiness in consequence of my silence. Forgive me, dear. It was impossible for me to write, or think. I could only let myself be drawn along in a carriage, led by an inoffensive hand, guided like a dying man. My mind itself was crushed; for thefailure of the "Chronique" came upon me at Saché, at M. de Margonne's, where I was, by a wise impulse, plunged in work to rid myself of that odious Bêchet (it was that which kept me from going to Nemours!); in eight days I had invented, composed, "Les Illusions Perdues," and I had written aThirdof it! Think what such work was. All my faculties were strained; I wrote fifteen hours a day; I got up with the sun and wrote till the dinner-hour without taking anything but coffee.
One day, after dinner, which I naturally made substantial, the letters arrived, and I read that which announced to me the crisis of the "Chronique." I went out with M. and Mme. de Margonne into the park, and fell, struck down by a rush of blood to the head, at the foot of a tree. I could not write a word, I saw all my prospects ruined. I said to myself that nothing remained for me but to go and hide myself at Wierzchownia, and amass enough work and money to come back some day and pay all I owed. In short, I was stunned. Courage came back to me. I flew to Paris; I struggled; then the rest came unexpectedly, blow on blow. I was at Saché after the "Lys" appeared and my suit was won. Touraine had cured my fatigue then and restored my brain. I was enabled there to make a last effort.
The journey I have just made only did me good at Geneva. In seeing that lake, finding myself again in places where I won a friendship that is so sweet to me, I was wrapped in a delightful atmosphere which shed a balm upon the bleeding wounds. You will find all in that sentence.
I wished to go to Neufchâtel; but the twenty days were too short. That is what prevented me from going to you,—the little time and the little money; for I am still in debt. All illness costs.
Here I am returned, in face of my obligations. To be able to make the journey, I obtained the price of the"Mémoires d'une jeune Mariée;" so that I have four volumes 8vo to do, on which I shall not receive another sou. I have, besides, enormous engagements; and no resources to sustain them. I must have recourse to credit; that means paying enormous interest. What a position! Oh!cara, what a life! Apathy saved me. If I had felt it all fully, I should have flung myself into some torrent on the Simplon.
Yes, all the papers have been hostile to the "Lys;" they have all cried shame, they have spit upon it. Nettement tells me that the "Gazette de France" attacked it "because I do not go to mass." The "Quotidienne" from a private vengeance of the editor; in short all, for some reason or other. Instead of selling two thousand, as I hoped, for Werdet, we are only as far as thirteen hundred. Thus all material interests are endangered. There are some ignorant persons who cannot understand the beauty of Madame de Mortsauf's death; they do not see the struggle of matter with mind, which is the foundation of Christianity. They see only imprecations of the disappointed flesh, of the wounded physical nature; they will not do justice to the sublime placidity of the soul when the countess confesses and dies a saint.
When I am thus hurt I spring toward you,—toward you alone now; toward you who comprehend me, and who judge with enough critical mind to give value to your praises. With what happiness we feel ourselves appreciated, judged, by some one who loves us. A word, an observation from the celestial creature of whom Madame de Mortsauf is a pale representation made more impression upon me than the whole public, for she was true; she wanted only my good and my perfection. I make you her heir, you who have all her noble qualities; you who could have written that letter of Madame de Mortsauf, which is but the imperfect breath of her constant inspirations, you who could, at least, complete it.
I must plunge into stupefying work; I can live only in that way, for where are my hopes? They are very distant. Happiness and material tranquillity are very far from me. I shall go conscientiously before me, striving to be sufficient for each day.
Only,cara, do not aggravate my griefs by dishonouring doubts; believe that, to a man so heavily burdened otherwise, calumny is a light thing, and that now I must let it all be said against me without distressing myself. In your last letters, you know, you have believed things that are irreconcilable with what you know of me. I cannot explain to myself your tendency to believe absurd calumnies. I still remember your credulity in Geneva when you thought me married.
I hope to go and see you next spring, wherever you are. Perhaps some fortunate circumstances may happen. My brother-in-law's affairs are doing pretty well. He has the building of a bridge in Paris, and of a short railway, besides which the law on the lateral canal of the Lower Loire is promulgated. It is only necessary to find the money for it. At any rate it is an acquired right, and nothing can now destroy it. In that direction I may be able to arrange some good matter of business. The only thing which at this moment is serious is my double condition,—that of a man wounded to the heart, who has not yet recovered his vitality, and of a man garroted by material interests in jeopardy.
In the midst of these storms, I have received M. Hanski's inkstand, which has the misfortune of being far too magnificent for a man condemned to poverty. It is of a style that demands a mansion, horses, majordomos. Express to him, I beg of you, my admiring thanks for this beautiful thing, which I can only use in one way, namely: by placing it among my precious things, to remind me of our good days in Vienna, Geneva, and Neufchâtel when, seeking for ideas, my eyes may light upon it.
I do not think I commit sacrilege in sealing this letter to you with the seal I used to Madame de Berny. I have mislaid the key of the drawer where I keep my little articles. I made a vow always to wear this ring on my finger.
I received a letter from you at Saché, of later date than a letter I have since received in Paris. Perhaps this will make some confusion in what I wrote to you about "Séraphita" in reply to what you said in the letter received at Saché. Consider that I said nothing, if anything that I did say pained you. I received your number 15 yesterday.
No one knows what has become of Mitgislas ... He has left Paris without paying his debts, having sold everything, and allowing all sorts of suspicions to hover over him. But I do not concern myself with such things; I neither listen nor repeat.
You are right; I have no more serviceable friends than my enemies. The violence and absurdity of the attacks made upon me have revolted all honest men. Did I tell you that M. de Belleyme came to see me after the trial? The Court blamed the lawyer on the other side, Chaix d'Estanges.
It seems to me that you have divined my situation in what you say of sorrow, and also in what you say of those who, like Robert Bruce, return ever to the light in spite of their defeats.
Adieu! it has done me good to write this long letter. But time does not belong to me wholly. The most horrible wound of my life is to be never able to give myself up to my affections, joyous or sad. It is always work, under pain of perishing, and I have no right to perish. My death would injure too many. I owe money to devoted friends who give me of their blood. Therefore I am much misjudged.
Adieu; to you the most beautiful and richest flowersof my soul and memory. I did not know all that the Pré-l'Évêque was to me, and the hill from which we see the lake and the bridge; I had to see it all again, alone and unhappy, to know the value of those memories.
Chaillot, October 1, 1836.
Friendship ought to be an infallible consolation in the great misfortunes of life. Why should it aggravate them? I ask myself sadly that question on reading to-night your last letter. In the first place, your sadness reacts strongly upon me; then it betrays such wounding sentiments. There were phrases in it that pierced my heart. Doubtless you did not know what profound sorrow was in my soul, nor what sombre courage accompanies this, my second great disaster, undergone in middle life. When I was wrecked the first time, in 1828, I was only twenty-nine years old and I had an angel at my side. To-day I am at an age when a man no longer inspires the lovable sentiment of a protection which has nothing wounding, because it is of the essence of youth to receive it, and it seems natural that youth be aided. But to a man who is nearer to forty than to thirty, protection must needs be wanting; it would be an insult. A weak man, without resources at that age, is judged in all lands.
Fallen from all my hopes, having abdicated wholly, forced to take refuge here in Jules Sandeau's former garret at Chaillot on September 30, the day when, for the second time in my life, I failed to honour my signature, and when to the lamentations of integrity, which weeps within me, was added the sense of solitude,—for here, this time, I am alone,—I thought, soothingly, that at least I lived complete in certain chosen hearts. I thought of you. Your letter, so sad, so discouraged, came. With what avidity I took it, with what tears I locked it up before taking the little sleep I allow myself! But I cling to your last words as to the last branch of a treewhen the current is bearing us away. Letters are endowed with a fatal power. They possess a force which is either beneficent or fatal, according to the sensations in the midst of which they come to us. I would that, between two friends very sure of themselves, signs were agreed upon by which from the aspect of a letter each might know if it was one of expansive gaiety or plaintive moaning. We could then choose the moment for reading it.
I had but nineteen days before me; I could not go to the Ukraine and return. Talma's letter was given to me in Gérard's salon. What trifles you lay hold of! Perhaps you will not even remember what you have written to me on this subject when you receive this letter. Am I to send you that of Mademoiselle Mars? Will you not think that she has beenpaid? If you ever go to Italy and pass through Turin, I wish you may see Madame la Marquise de Saint-Thomas. You would know then what the autographs of Silvio Pellico and Notacost.
You told me that your sister Caroline was the most dangerous of women; and in your letter she is an angel, and you tell me she is about to do what I call signal folly; for I have not forgotten what you wrote to me about the colonel. She will be very unhappy.
I am cast down, but not without courage; what Boulanger has painted, and what I am pleased with, is the persistenceà laColigny,à laPeter the Great, which is the basis of my character,—the intrepid faith in the future.
Must I renounce the Italian Opera, the only pleasure that I have in Paris, because I have no other seat than in a box where there is also a charming and gracious woman [Countess Guidoboni-Visconti]? I was in a box among men who were an injury to me, and brought me into disrepute. I had to go elsewhere, and, in all conscience, I was not willing for Olympe's box. But let us drop the subject.
The feeling of abandonment and of the solitude in which I am stings me. There is nothing selfish in me; but I need to tell my thoughts, my efforts, my feelings to a being who is not myself; otherwise I have no strength. I should wish for no crown if there were no feet at which to lay that which men may put upon my head. What a long and sad farewell I have said to my lost years, engulfed beyond return! they gave me neither complete happiness nor complete misery; they kept me living, frozen on one side, scorched on the other! To be no longer held to life by aught but the sentiment of duty!
I entered the garret where I am with the conviction that I should die exhausted with my work. I thought that I should bear it better than I do. It is now a month that I have risen at midnight and gone to bed at six; I have compelled myself to the least amount of food that will keep me alive, so as not to drive the fatigue of digestion to the brain. Well, not only do I feel weaknesses that I cannot describe, but so much life communicated to the brain has brought strange troubles. Sometimes I lose the sense of vertically, which is in the cerebellum. Even in bed my head seems to fall to right or left, and when I rise I am impelled by an enormous weight that is in my head. I understand how Pascal's absolute continence and his immense labour led him to see an abyss around him, so that he could not do without two chairs, one on each side of him.
I have not abandoned the rue Cassini without pain. To-day, I do not know if I shall save some parts of my furniture to which I am attached, or have my library. I have made, in advance, every sacrifice of lesser pleasures and memories that I may keep the little joy of knowing that these things are still mine. They would be trifles indeed to quench the thirst of creditors, but they would slake mine during my march across the desert, through the sands. Two years of toil would pay my debtin full; but it is impossible that I should not succumb under two years of such a life. Besides which, piracy is killing us. The farther we go, the less my books sell. Have the newspapers influenced the sale of the "Lys"? I do not know; but what I do know is that out of two thousand copies Werdet sold only twelve hundred, while Belgium has sold three thousand! I have the certainty, from that fact, that my works do not find purchasers in France. Consequently, the success of sales that might save me is still distant.
I am here with Auguste, whom I have kept. Can I still keep him? As yet I know not.
To let you know how far my courage goes, I must tell you that "Le Secret des Ruggieri" was written in a single night. Think of that when you read it. "La Vieille Fille" was written in three nights. "La Perle brisée," which ends at last the "Enfant Maudit," was written in a single night. It is my Brienne, my Champaubert, my Montmirail, my campaign of France! But it was the same with "La Messe de l'Athée" and "Facino Cane." I wrote the first fiftyfeuilletsof the "Illusions Perdues" in three days at Saché.
What kills me is the corrections. The first part of "L'Enfant Maudit" cost me more than many volumes. I wanted to bring that part up to the level of "La Perle brisée" and make them a sort of little poem of melancholy in which there would be nothing to gainsay. That took me a dozen nights. And now, at the moment of writing to you, I have before me the accumulated proofs of four different works which ought to appear in October. I must be equal to all that. I have promised Werdet to bring out his third Part of the "Études Philosophiques" this month, and also the thirddizain, and to give him for November 15 "Illusions Perdues." That makes five volumes 12mo, and three volumes 8vo. One must surpass one's self, inasmuch as purchasers are indifferent;and surpass one's self in the midst of protested notes, griefs, cruel embarrassments, and solitude!
This is the last plaint that I shall cast into your heart. In my confidences there has been something selfish which I must put an end to. When you are sad I will not aggravate your sadness, for your sadness aggravates mine. I know that the Christian martyrs smiled. If Guatimozin had been a Christian he would have gently consoled his minister, and not have said to him, "And I—am I on a bed of roses?" A fine saying for a savage, but Christ has made us more courteous, if not better.
I see with pain that you read the mystics. Believe me, such reading is fatal to souls constituted like yours. It is poison; it is an intoxicating narcotic. Such books have an evil influence. There is madness in virtue as there is madness in dissipation. I would not deter you if you were neither wife, nor mother, nor friend, nor relation, because then you could go into a convent if it pleased you, though your death would there come quickly. But, in your situation, such reading is bad. The rights of friendship are too weak for my voice to be listened to. I address you, on this subject, a humble prayer. Do not read anything of that kind. I have been there; I have experience of it.
I have taken all precautions that your wishes shall be fulfilled relating to the sternest of your requests, but under circumstances which your intelligence will no doubt lead you to foresee. I am not Byron; but I know this: Borget is not Thomas Moore; he has the blind fidelity of a dog, as your faithful moujik has also.
Send me word exactly the way by which I must despatch Boulanger's picture—about which no one will say to you what you heard about that very wretched thing of Grosclaude's;—it is not enough to say to Rothschild, "For Russia." To what house am I to address it? Grosclaude is an artist, but nothing eminent. He sees form, but he goes no farther; he has no style, he is common,without elevation. HisBuveursare good painting, but the nature is low. If he were in Paris he would re-form himself. But in Geneva he will stay what he is. Your portrait by him is an infamous daub. Daffinger, in Vienna, caught your likeness much better; but I do not like miniature very much, unless it is that of Madame de Mirbel. I saw some others in the last Exhibition, and I perceived then that Daffinger was much beneath her. We must still, if we want to have good portraits, spring back to the principles of Rubens, Velasquez, Van Dyck, and Titian.
I am astonished that you have not yet received Werdet's "Lys;" the true "Lys" in which there is a portrait. They say that I have painted Madame Visconti! Such are the judgments to which we are exposed! You know that I had the proofs in Vienna, and that portrait was written at Saché, and corrected at La Boulonnière before I ever saw Madame Visconti. I have received fiveformal complaintsfrom persons about me, who say that I have unveiled their private lives. I have very curious letters on this subject. It appears that there are as many Monsieurs de Mortsauf as there are angels at Clochegourde; angels rain down upon me, butthey are not white.
A thousand, little cavillings of this kind make me take to solitude with less regret. Yesterday, September 29, my sister, for her birthday, gave herself the little pleasure of coming to see me, for we see each other very little. Her husband's affairs move slowly, and her life also; she is running to waste in the shade; her fine powers exhaust themselves in a hidden struggle without credit. What a diamond in the mud! The finest diamond that I know in France. For her fête we exchanged our tears! And, poor little thing! she held her watch in her hand; she had but twenty minutes. Her husband is jealous of me. For coming to see a brother for a pleasure trip!
Adieu, the day is dawning, my candles pale. For three hours I have been writing to you, line after line, hoping that in each you would hear the cry of a true friendship, far above all petty and transitory irritations, infinite as heaven, and incapable of thinking it can ever change, because all other sensations are below it. Of what good would intellect be if not to place a noble thing on a rock above us, where nothing material can touch it?
But this would lead me too far. The proofs are waiting, and I must plunge into the Augean stable of my style, and sweep out its faults. My life offers nothing now but the monotony of work, which the work itself varies. I am like the old Austrian colonel who talked about his gray horse and his black horse to Marie Antoinette; sometimes I am on one, sometimes on the other; six hours on the "Ruggieri," six hours on "L'Enfant Maudit," six hours on "La Vieille Fille." From time to time I rise, I contemplate that ocean of houses which my window overlooks, from the École Militaire to the Barrière du Trône, from the Pantheon to the Étoile; and then, having inhaled the air, I go back to my work. My apartment on the second floor is not yet vacant; I play at garret; I like it, like the duchesses who eat brown bread by chance. There is not in all Paris a prettier garret. It is white and coquettish as a grisette of sixteen. I shall make a bedroom of it to supplement mine in case of illness; for below I sleep in the passage, in a bed two feet wide which leaves only room to pass. The doctors say it is not unhealthy; but I am afraid it is. I need much air; I consume it enormously. My apartment costs me seven hundred francs. I shall be no longer in the National Guard; but I am still pursued by the police and theétat-majorfor eight days in prison. Not going out of the house, they cannot catch me. My apartment is taken under another name than mine [that of his doctor], and I am living ostensibly in a furnished hotel.
Well, I wish I could send you some of my courage. Find it here with my tender respects.
Chaillot, October 22, 1836.
I had great need of the letter I have just received from you, to efface the grief your last had caused me; for, I may now tell you, it pained me by the uncertainty it revealed, and perhaps that pain may have acted on my answer, though I am tolerably stoic. But when an affection as devoted, as pure of all storms, as that of Madame de Berny has perished, and around us little else remains, if then, amid dreadful misfortunes, the branch on which our beliefs are hanging breaks also, the skies are very sombre, and the fall to earth is heavy.
That letter came, full of doubts and reproaches wrapped in your pretty phrases, while I was in my garret, which I shall not quit until I owe nothing; and was it not a cruelly facetious thing to be told that one is dissipated in one's fortieth year, and when the doctors cannot explain to themselves how it is that I bear such work? They see my monkish life; they will not believe in it. They are like you.
A dreadful misfortune has come to crown my misery. Werdet, who never had a sou, is about to fail, and drags me into the gulf; for, to sustain him, I had the weakness to sign bills of exchange, the value of which I never received, and notes to the amount of thirteen thousand francs which I must honour. I have already taken precautions to weather this storm.
To-morrow I shall have moved all from the rue Cassini, which I have left never to return. My apartment here is taken in the name of a third person. I did this to evade the National Guard; also my furniture is secured from attachment, for I have to face the immediate payment of fifty thousand francs without the resource of my own credit, or that of a publisher.
Under these circumstances, which have made this month of October a true Beresina for me, I longed to go and ask you for an asylum and bread for two years, during which time I could earn, by working, the hundred thousand francs I need. But my life would have been too stained by that flight, although my most sensitive and upright friends advised it. I have been greater than my misfortune. In fifteen days' time I have sold fifty columns to the "Chronique de Paris" for a thousand francs; one hundred and twenty columns to the "Presse" for eight thousand; twenty columns to a "Revue Musicale" for one thousand; an article to the "Dictionnaire de la Conversation" for a thousand. That makes eleven thousand francs in fifteen days. I have worked thirty nights without going to bed. I have written "La Perle brisée" (for the "Chronique") "La Vieille Fille" (for the "Presse"). I have done the "Secret des Ruggieri" for Werdet. I have sold for two thousand francs my lastdizain(that makes thirteen thousand). And now I am doing "La Torpille" for the "Chronique," and "La Femme Supérieure," and "Les Souffrances d'un Inventeur" for the "Presse." At the same time I am in process of selling the reprinting [in book form] of "La Torpille," "La Femme Supérieure," "Le Grand homme de Province à Paris," and "Les Héritiers Boirouge," both begun; that will give me in all thirty-one thousand francs. Then, having no longer that rotten plank Werdet to rest on, I shall contract with a rich and solid firm for the last fourteen volumes of the "Études de Mœurs," which ought to amount to fifty-six thousand francs for author's rights, on which I want thirty thousand at once. If that succeeds I shall have sixty-one thousand francs, which will save me. Not only shall I then owe nothing, but I shall have some money for myself. But I must work day and night for six months, and after that at least ten hours a day for two years.
Rossini said to me yesterday:—
"When I did that myself, I was dead at the end of fifteen days, and then I took fifteen to rest."
I said to him, "I have only a coffin in prospect for my rest; but work is a fine shroud."
You can comprehend how, in the midst of these multiplied errands, these torrents of proofs, of manuscripts to write, of this savage struggle, it is dreadful to receive stones from heaven instead of rays of light. Not only have I neither pleasure nor time, but I have not been able since my return to take a bath or go to the Opera, two things (bath and Opera) which are more essential to me than bread. Everything is going to ruin within me to the profit of my brain. It makes one shudder.
For having three times in my life—I, feeble—interested myself in unfortunate men, and taken themen croupeupon my horse or in my boat,—the printer, Jules Sandeau, and Werdet,—three times have they broken the tiller, sunk the boat, and flung me into the water naked. It is over. I will never interest myself again in feeble men. I have too many obligations, which command me to employ the cold logic of a banker's strong-box. I shut myself up, in my work and my garret. I grow more solitary than ever.
See how the whole of society combines to isolate superiorities, how it drives them to the heights! Affections which ought to be exclusively kind and tender to us, never judge us, never make a mountain out of nothing, and a nothing of a mountain, these very affections torture us by fantastic exactions; they stab us with pin-pricks about silly things; they want faith for themselves and have none for us; they will not put into their sentiments that grandeur which separates them from others. They do not abstract their sentiments, as we do, from earthly soiling. The protections that we give to the weak are fresh means by which we fling ourselves more rapidly intothe inextricable difficulties of material life. Indifferent people adopt calumnies which enemies forge and envious men repeat. No one succours us. The masses do not understand us; superior persons have no time to read us and defend us. Fame illumines the grave only; posterity gives us no income, and I am tempted to cry out, like that English country gentleman from his place in parliament: "I hear much talk of posterity; I would like to know what that power has so far done for England."
So you see,cara, that short of miracles, poor writers are condemned to misfortunes under all forms; therefore, I entreat you, do not keep from me any of your griefs, or your ideas, or anything regarding yourself, but be indulgent and kind to me. Think always that what I do has a reason and an object, that my actions arenecessary. There is, for two souls that are a little above others, something mortifying in repeating to you for the tenth time not to believe in calumny. When you said to me, three letters ago, that I gambled, it was just as true as my marriage was at Geneva.
Cara, the life that I lead cannot endure that the sweet things of friendship should be converted into constant explanations; the life of the soul is not that.
You ask me again who is Charles de Bernard. I have already told you; did you not get my letter? He is a gentleman of Besançon who, on my passage through that town when I went to Neufchâtel, received me like an honour, and in whom I found talent. As soon as I owned the "Chronique de Paris" I sent for him; I advised him, directed him with paternal affection, telling him that he was a man to gallop straight if given a horse; and it was true. I conceived of making a newspaper only by the help of superior men. I had already picked out Planche, Bernard, Théophile Gautier. I should have unearthed others. But that is all over now.
A Polish colonel, who returns to Saint-Petersburg byway of Warsaw, a Monsieur Frankowski, will take to you thecassoletteattached to my watch-chain. The chain, you know, was so delicate that the little links were continually breaking. As I told you before, it will be safer fastened to a ring; you will not then destroy it when playing with it. Lecointe has tried to do it well. You gave me, in Vienna, the right to recall myself to your memory by such little dainty things. Let Paris send you, now and then, a few flowers of her industry. Ah!cara, if I had not among so many waking nights the thought that one of them is spent in sending to you a little thing the gold of which, as Walter Scott's man says in the "Chronicles of the Canongate," is earned grain by grain, to testify to you my gratitude, my toil would be too heavy.
M. Frankowski would have taken charge of my manuscripts and sent them to you with Polish fidelity, but he feared the difficulties of the custom-house. You have here a veritable library. You would be proud if you knew the price the magistrates attached to this enormous collection of manuscripts and proofs, which I was forced to show them in my lawsuit with the "Revue de Paris." The rage for these things was quite absurd. M. de Montholon wanted to buy for a hundred francs one of those "orders to print" which you saw me write in Geneva. But any printer who abstracted from Madame Hanska a single one of her proofs would be quitted by me.
Well,addio. Take care of yourself. Alas! if I only had money! In a few days I must have a month's rest, and then I could have gone and spent a week in your Wierzchownia. But nothing is possible to poverty—to that poverty which the world envies me!
Chaillot, October 28, 1836.
I have received your letter number 19, addressed to the widow Durand, which ends with a dreadful "Be happy!" I would have preferred another wish, though less Christian.I write in haste to tell you that I have received all your letters; there is no reason why, though I am at Chaillot, I should not get my letters from the rue Cassini.
La Marchesais a very agreeable old woman who had, they say, all Turin at her feet thirty years ago. You are not, in spite of your analytical mind, either generous or attentive; you write me a quantity of phrases, to which I cannot answer; you even overwhelm me with them, while I have to read them with my arms crossed, my lips silent, and my heart sick. But on this point you will find a word in my last letter.
I write now only to say one thing. I have put many anxieties into your heart, if you have for me all the affection that I have for you. So, then, you must now be told that the end of so much misery is approaching. Did I tell you that one day, when a mind astray led me to the river so frequented by suicides (those are things that I have hidden from you), I met the former head-clerk of my lawyer, who was my comrade in legal days. He was the head of the lawyer's office where Scribe and I were placed. This poor young fellow has, so he says himself, a saintly respect for genius (that word always makes me laugh), and he believed me to be at the summit of fortune and honours. I, who would die like the Spartan with the fox at my vitals rather than betray my penury, I had the weakness, at that moment when I was bidding farewell to many things, to pour out a heart too full. It was at a spot that I shall never forget; rue de Rivoli, before the iron gate of the Tuileries. This poor man who is—remark this—a business man in Paris, said, with moist eyelids:—
"Monsieur de Balzac, all that a sacred zeal can do, expect from me. I ought only to speak to you by results. I shall try to save you."
And yesterday, this brave and devoted young man wrote me that he had succeeded in making a loan whichwould liquidate my debts, lift off the burden of anxiety, and leave me time to pay all. And something finer still. When the lender heard the name of the borrower, he, who wanted ten per cent and securities, would take only five per cent and a mortgage on my works. May those two names be blest!If this thing is arranged, for I own to you I have little faith in luck, I shall escape a long suicide—that of death by toil.
Besides this loan, a company is to be formed for the management of my works. I am following up this affair, about which I think I have already spoken to you, very warmly. It will be donecol tempo. I have about forty thousand francs to pay immediately; but I shall have earned nearly sixty thousand in a short time. Instead of working eighteen hours, I shall then work nine, and I shall have won, after fourteen years' labour, the right to come and go as I please. It is too fine; I don't believe in it.
The five hundred francs sent as you sent them, now instead of a few months later, have been, between ourselves, a benefit. Boulanger needed the money; and I am now bestirring myself to get him a thousand francs for the right to engrave the portrait. That outrageous miser Custine paid him only three thousand francs for his picture of "Le Triomphe de Pétrarque," while my portrait will thus have brought him fifteen hundred francs. But can we get an engraver to pay one thousand for the right of engraving? That is what I am trying to do.
Now, here is a grave question; I want you to have the original. Boulanger wants to exhibit it. Though I shall pose for the copy, a copy never has the indefinable beauty of a canvas on which the painter has sought out, scrutinized, and seized the soul of his model. We must therefore wait; for, to the artist, my portrait is a battle to win before the eyes of his comrades. They are beginning to talk of this canvas—which is magnificent.The copy will be ready in a month. You could receive it in January. But if you permit me to send you the original, it cannot leave till after the Exhibition. I have conferred with Boulanger; though I pose for the copy, and though he wants to make as good a thing, he always says to me, "A copy, even done by the artist himself, is never worth the original."
Let me tell you that my mother, who will be on the Salon catalogue as having ordered the portrait, will be quite indifferent about having the copy or the original. (This is between ourselves.) You have time to answer me about this. The newspapers are beginning to speak of the portrait. The painters say of it, obligingly, what people said to me of "Séraphita." I did not think that Boulanger was capable of making such a picture. In style of art it is masterly. It has cost me two volumes which I might have made during the last sittings—which I had to give standing.
Whatever happens, let me confide to you a very bad feeling that I have: it is that I don't like my friends to judge me; I want them to believe that what I determine on doing is necessary. A sentiment discussed has no more existence than a power controlled. Why couple pettiness with greatness?
As I have added a second sheet to the single one which I intended to cover with ink and friendship, I will tell you that Werdet is horrible to me. Another deception about which I must keep silence, another wound I must receive, more calumnies to listen to calmly. There is no publisher possible for me so long as he is a publisher of the publishingrace. I made every sacrifice for that man, and now he kills me, he refuses to join in taking measures for our common interests. I must be willing to lose thirty thousand more francs and be accused of having wrecked a man for whom I have used all my resources, put my silver in pawn, lent my signature, etc.,and written fifteen 12mo volumes and six 8vo volumes in the course of two years! He's a sparrow's head on the body of a child!
I must now come to the selfishness of a man who works, not for himself, but for his creditors. This is the third trial of my life. After this, my experience ought to be complete. I am expecting Werdet on Sunday. If he has good sense matters may still be arranged. But he's a perfect child. After the third month I judged the man to whom I had intrusted the material interests of my works. But these are secrets one keeps to one's self. I hoped he would follow my advice; but no! he is like a child with a sparrow's head, and, over and above it all, as obstinate as a donkey. Moreover, he has the fatal defect of saying "yes" and doing the contrary, or else he forgets what he promises.
I am much distressed; all this will help to publish calumnies which Werdet is already assisting, for he finds it convenient to say that he fails because of me.
Well, adieu. Remember that I never read over my letters; I have barely time to write them between two proofs. If anything shocks you, pardon it. A thousand tender regards. Do not forget to remember me to all. Write me regularly. If you knew what one of your letters is to me in my life of toil, you would write out of charity.
Tours, November 23, 1836.
After the great struggle that I have just maintained, and of which you have been sole confidant, I felt the need of returning to thecara patria, to rest like a child on the bosom of its mother.
If you find a gap in my letters, you must attribute it to what has just been taking place, of which you shall now be told in a few words.All my debts are paid; I mean those that harassed me. The prospect that promisedgood by a loan failed; everything about me became more serious, more inflamed. During this month writs, protests, sheriffs, crowded upon me; I truly think that a stout volume in-folio could be made of that literature of misfortune.
Then, when flames surrounded me on every side, when all had failed me on the side of succour, when no friend could or perhaps would save me, before renouncing France and going to find a country in Russia, in the Ukraine, I attempted a last effort; and that effort was crowned with a success which will redouble the bitterness of my enemies. God grant that you will divine all the agony that lies on this simple page, for then you will indeed feel pity for your poor moujik.
Nothing still shone on the horizon in this great shipwreck of all my ambitions but theuna fides, the principle of which isadoremus in æternum.
I went to find a speculator named Victor Bohain, to whom I had done some very disinterested services. He immediately called in the man who had drawn Chateaubriand out of trouble, and a capitalist who has of late done a publishing business. Here is the agreement that came out of our four heads:—
1. They gave me fifty thousand francs to pay my urgent debts.
2. They secure me, for the first year, fifteen hundred francs a month. The second year, I may have three thousand monthly; and the fourth, four thousand, up to the fifteenth year, if I supply them with a certain number of volumes. We are in partnership for fifteen years. We are not author and publishers, but associates, partners. I bring to them the management of all my books made or to be made for fifteen years. My three associates agree to advance all costs and give me half the profits above the cost of the volume. My eighteen, twenty-four, or forty-eight thousand francs a year andthe fifty thousand francs paid down are charged upon my profits.
Such is the basis of the treaty which delivers me forever from newspapers, publishers, and lawsuits; these gentlemen being substituted for me in all my rights as to management, sale, etc. They share the profits of my pen with me, like all other profits of sale. It is like a farm on shares, where my intellect is the soil, with this difference,—that I, the owner, have no costs or risks, and that I finger my profits without anxiety.
This agreement is a great deal more advantageous than that of M. de Chateaubriand, beside whom speculation places me; for I sell nothing of my future; whereas for one hundred thousand francs, and twelve thousand francs a year, rising to twenty-five thousand when he published anything, M. de Chateaubriand gave up everything.
I would not send you word of all this until the papers were signed. They were signed on Saturday, 19th, and I started for Tours the 20th; and now, after one day's rest, I send you this little scrap of a letter, scribbled in haste.
I have no doubt that between now and spring we shall employ the means I discovered of preventing piracy; and if I make a journey on that account, God and you alone know with what rapidity I shall go to Wierzchownia to tell you all that time, business, cares, and the narrow limits of a letter, have prevented me from putting, as yet, into my correspondence, smothered by so many causes!
I am very uneasy about you and yours. It is now an immense time since I have received any word from you. It has been a torture the more to add to all my other pains and distresses. You have moments of cruelty which make me doubt your friendship; then, when I fancy you may be ill, that your little Anna is a cause of anxiety, or that—that—etc, then my head decamps!
I was all the more obliged to come here because the National Guard, for whom I have ten more days of prison to do, worries me horribly. The grocers and gendarmes are at my heels. I have not been able to go to my dear Italian Opera for fear they should arrest me. At this moment I must finish "Illusions Perdues" in order to be done with Werdet, and the thirddizain; also two works for the "Presse" and two for the "Figaro." After which, my pen is free, and my new treaty will go into execution. Now, as Werdet is much disposed to torment me, I must give him his devil of a volume as soon as may be.
I shall have a hard year, because, to reach a tolerable condition, I must complete what my pen already owes; and besides that, show a value of ten volumes to my associates. Until I do that, I shall be miserable.
After having killed my janissaries (creditors), I must, like Mahmoud, introduce a vast reform into my States. So here I am in my garret, having paid all, evacuated the rue Cassini, and keeping no one but Auguste and a boy for all service. I have resolved never to dine from home and to continue my monk's life for three years.
I left Paris so hurriedly that I have not brought with me the sacred seal, nor the autograph I wanted to send you; this will prove to you the perturbations of my triumph.
Three days hence I shall go, I think, to Rochecotte, to see the Duchesse de Dino, and the Prince de Talleyrand, whom I have never seen; and you know how I desire to see the witty turkey who plucked the eagle and made it tumble into the ditch of the house of Austria. As for Madame de Dino, I have already met her at Madame Appony's.
I finished this very morning "L'Enfant Maudit." You will not recognize that poor nugget; it is chased, mounted, and set with pearls. Read it again in the"Études Philosophiques" with "Le Secret des Ruggieri" and "Le Martyr Calviniste," and ask yourself what sort of iron head it was that could fight and write and suffer all at once. I wrote "La Vieille Fille" in the midst of these worries, struggles, and preoccupations.
Have you sometimes prayed God for me, with all the force of your beautiful, ingenuous soul, that I might obtain some sort of tranquillity?—for I still owe the sums I owed before. But I have no longer to find them. This mode of payment leaves me my time free and relieves me of worry. I spare you the details of the agreement, which has been the object of long examination by my lawyers, and business agents, very devoted men, who think it good and honourable.
You could never believe how I miss the bulletin of your calm and solitary life, what interest I take in that life, and what peace the contemplation of it sheds upon my agitated life. Either it is very bad of you to cut me off, or you are ill; on each side anxiety, thinking that you suffer or that your friendship diminishes.
Well, adieu. I meant to write you only one word: there is truce between misfortune and me. But when once I begin to talk to you, the pen is never heavy in my fingers. I wish you all mercies in your life, for this letter and its wishes will reach you, I suppose, about Christmas day. Many amiable things to M. Hanski, and a kiss to your dear Anna on the forehead.
I return to my corrections, for I must finish "Illusions Perdues" for December 10, in default of which I shall fall back into lawsuits.
La Grenadière has escaped me; it is sold; but the cruel event that has weighed me down this year has changed my desire for that poor cottage. I could not live in it if I had it. I am looking for a vineyard where I could build without the cost being much.
Paris, December 1, 1836.
I have just returned from Touraine, where I wrote you the letter of a man of business. You will know, at the moment when this letter is racing along the roads, that you have no more anxieties to share in relation to the financial affairs of the monk of Chaillot. I kneel humbly at your feet and beg you to grant me plenary indulgence for all the tears I have heretofore shed upon them.
You made me smile when you reproached me in your good letter (number 20) for not reading your prose attentively. If I read the Holy Scriptures as I read your letters I should have to go and stand by Saint-Jérôme; and if I read my own books in that way, there would be no faults in them. You say that I do not answer certain things. As to that, I can only be silent.
Now, before all, business. Poor Boulanger is an artist both proud and poor, a noble and kind nature. As soon as I got any money I carried him the five hundred francs, pretending that I had received them; for from me, perhaps, he would not have taken them. Now that the matter concerns me only, there is no hurry, and to say it once for all, you need only send me a bill of exchange on Rothschild to my order. Now that you have sent me the proper address, all is well. You will receive the picture after our Exhibition, which begins in February. I have not the courage to allow the copy only to be exhibited. Poor Boulanger would die of grief. He sees a whole future in it. Since I wrote to you about it many stern judges have seen it, and they all put this work above many others. There was question of a poor engraver for the picture. Planche went to see Boulanger and advised him to despise the thousand francs offered, and wait the effect the picture would produce in the Salon,—assuring him he would then have the best engravers and a better price at his command. There'sa little of Titian and Rubens mingled in it. The copy will be substituted for the original for my mother, who will see no difference, and who, between ourselves, cares little for it. You will therefore have the canvas on which Boulanger has put all his strength and for which I posed thirty times.
What a misfortune that I cannot send you a beautiful frame that I brought from Touraine and which is now being regilt! I got it for twenty francs, and there is in it more than two hundred francs of days' work paid fifty years ago to the carver who made it.
Since I wrote you I have been very ill. All these distresses, discussions, toils, and fatigues produced, at Saché, a nervous, sanguineous attack. I was at death's door for one whole day. But much sleep and the woods of Saché put me right in three days.
In your letter I find a reproach which, between ourselves, is serious; that relating to an evening at the Opera. You must know me very little if you do not think that after the sorrow that fell upon me my mourning is eternal, at every moment; that it follows me in all my joys, at my work, everywhere. Oh! for pity's sake, since you alone can touch that wound in my heart, never touch it roughly. My affections of that kind are immutable; they are held in a part of my heart and soul where nothing else enters. There is room there for two sentiments only; it was needful for the first to terminate, as it has, before the other could take all its strength; and now that other is infinite. Of what good would be the power with which I am invested if not to make within myself a sanctuary, pure and ever ardent, where nothing of outside agitation can penetrate? The image placed on high upon that rock, pure, inaccessible, can never be taken down; and if she herself descended from it, she could never prevent her place from being marked there forever.
Under this point of view, whether I go to hear "Guillaume Tell" or remain to weep in my chimney-corner, all is immutable in that centre where few words ever come. But, dear, remember also that I am not worldly; I am so little that that the few steps I take in society assume a gravity that alarms me. Once more, use your analytical mind and ask yourself, writing down on paper the dates of my works, what time I should have to write them if I allowed myself a pleasure, a festivity, a distraction. Since the winter began, which is now two months, I have been but twice to the Opera, and each time with Madame Delannoy and her daughter, Madame Visconti being absent.
Now that I have gained the relief of having no more financial anxieties, I have exchanged those cares for incessant labour. The ten days a month that material struggle cost me will now be employed in work; for, to gather the fruits of this new arrangement, I must not leave for eighteen months this garret that you think so salubrious. It is not. The dormer-window is too high up; I cannot look out of it. As soon as I can, I shall go down to work on the second floor, where the air is better, more abundant.
Any other than myself would be frightened at mypen obligations. I must give within the next three months: "La Haute Banque" and "La Femme Supérieure" to the "Presse;" "César Birotteau" and "Les Artistes" to the "Figaro;" publish the "Illusions Perdues" and the thirddizain, and prepare for April the "Mémoires d'une jeune Mariée" without counting what I have to do on the third and fourth Parts of the "Études Philosophiques." Believe me, the man who achieves such work has no time for puerile amusements. It is now three years that I have not taken apenfulof ink without seeing your name; for accident made me keep one of your visiting cards, and I placed it on my inkstand. You will not believethat since that time I have never becomeblaséon the infantile pleasure of seeing your name married to all my thoughts. I put it there to be able to write correctly your name and address, and yet you reproach me with not reading your letters properly! You understand that I respect too much the pure friendship that you allow me to feel for you to talk to you about things that I despise; in the first place, it would give me a conceited air; and you know whether I have ever been accused of conceit.
Seriously, I live much at Wierzchownia. I am interested in all you tell me; your visits to neighbours, your affairs, your pleasures, your park which extends to right and left; all that occupies my mind. Read this as I write it, with a childlike heart; for these affairs of yours are my affairs, as, perhaps, you and M. Hanski make mine yours, in the evenings, deploring my troubles—now over. If you are sad, I am saddened; when your letter is gay I am gay. Solitude produces this quick exchange of affections. The soul has the faculty of living on the spot that pleases it. Certainly, it needed the desire to be with you, at least in painting, to make me bear the loss of thirty days which Boulanger required. You alone are in the secret of my affairs, as you are in the secret of what Madame de Berny was to me. You alone know my mourning and a loss which can never be repaired; for here the sky is inclement, it "is too high," as you say in Poland, and you are too far off. But keep me, very whole and without diminution, that affection which makes me less sad in sad hours, and gayer in the bright ones. Remember that I have no life but one of toil, that I am not in the midst of the talk that is made about me, that the emotions of fame do not reach me, that I live by a little hope and sun, in a hidden nest!