Ajaccio, April 2.
This evening, at ten o'clock, a little boat will carry me away; then I have five days' quarantine at Alghiero, a little harbour you may see on the map of Sardinia. It is there, between Alghiero and Sassari, that the district of Argentara lies, and it is there that I am going to see mines, abandoned at the time of the discovery of America. I cannot tell you more than that.
When this letter is in your possession in that pretty room at beautiful Wierzchownia, I shall be either a fool or a man of wisdom; perhaps neither the one nor the other, simply an ambitious heart defeated in an ingenious hope.
Addio, cara; I hope that all goes well at Wierzchownia, that you have wept a little over "César Birotteau," that you have written me your feelings and impressions about that book, and that I shall thus be rewarded for it in this world. All caressing things to those you love. I have again put off writing to M. Hanski, because I shall do so at Milan after receiving certain news. But give him my regards, and keep for yourself the most attaching and coquettish, which are your due.
OffAlghiero, Sardinia, April 8.
I am here, after five days of rather lucky navigation in a coral-boat on its way to Africa. But I now know the privations of sailors; we had nothing to eat but the fish we caught, which they boiled into execrable soup. I had to sleep on deck and be devoured by fleas, which abound, they say, in Sardinia. And finally, although here, we are condemned to remain five days in quarantine on this little boat, in view of port, and those savages will give us nothing. We have just gone through a frightful tempest; they would not let us fasten a cable to a ring on the quay; but, as we are Frenchmen, onesailor jumped into the water and fastened it himself by force. The governor came down and ordered the cable loosed as soon as the sea calmed down; which, under their system of contagion, was absurd; because we had already given the cholera or we had not given it. It was a pure notion of the governor, who wants things done as he says. Africa begins here; I see a ragged population, almost naked, brown as Ethiopians.
Cagliari, April 17.
I have just crossed the whole of Sardinia and seen things such as they relate of the Hurons and about Polynesia. A desert kingdom, real savages, no husbandry; long stretches of palm-trees and cactus; goats everywhere browsing on the undergrowth and keeping it down to the level of the waist. I have been seventeen and eighteen hours on horseback—I who have not mounted a horse these four years—without seeing a single dwelling. I came through a virgin forest, lying on the neck of my horse in fear of my life; for I had to ride down water-courses arched over with branches and climbing plants which threatened to put out my eyes, break my teeth or wrench off my head. Gigantic oaks, cork-trees, laurel, and heather thirty feet high,—nothing to eat.
No sooner did I reach the end of my expedition than I had to think of returning; so, without taking any rest, I started on horseback from Alghiero to Sassari, the second capital of the island, from which a diligence, lately established, was to bring me here, where there is, in port, a steamboat for Genoa. But, as the weather is bad here I must stay for two days.
From Sassari to Cagliari I came through the whole of Sardinia, through the middle of it. It is alike everywhere. There is one district where the inhabitants make a horrible bread by pounding acorns of the live-oak to flour and mixing it with clay, and this within sight ofbeautiful Italy! Men and women go naked with a strip of linen, a tattered rag, to cover their nudity. I saw masses of human beings trooped in the sun along the walls of their hovels, for Easter-day. No habitation has a chimney; they make their fires in the middle of the huts, which are draped with soot. The women spend their days in pounding the acorns and kneading the bread; the men tend the goats and the cattle; the soil is untilled in this, the most fertile spot on earth! In the midst of this utter and incurable misery there are villages which have costumes of amazing richness.
Genoa, April 22.
Now I can tell you the object of my journey. I have been both right and wrong. Last year, at this time, in Genoa, a merchant told me that the careless neglect of Sardinia was so great that there were, in a certain locality, disused silver mines with mountains of scoriæ containing refuse lead from which the silver had been taken. At once, I told him to send me specimens of these scoriæ to Paris, and that after assaying them I would return and get a permit in Turin to work those mines with him. A year passed, and the man sent me nothing.
Here is my reasoning: The Romans and the metallurgists of the middle ages were so ignorant of docimasy that these scoriæ must, necessarily, still contain a great amount of silver. Now, a friend of Borget, a great chemist, possesses a secret by which to extract gold and silver in whatever way and in whatever proportion they are mixed with other material, at no great cost. By this means I could get all the silver from these scoriæ.
While I was waiting and expecting the specimens, my Genoese merchant obtained for himself the right to work the mine; and, while I was inventing my ingenious deduction, a Marseille firm went to Cagliari, assayed the lead and the scoriæ, and petitioned, in rivalry withthe Genoese, for a permit in Turin. An assayer from Marseille, who was taken to the spot, found that the scoriæ gave ten per cent of lead, and the lead ten per cent of silver by the ordinary methods. So my conjectures were well-founded; but I had the misfortune not to act promptly enough. On the other hand, misled by local information, I rode to the Argentara, another abandoned mine, situated in the wildest part of the island, and I brought away specimens of mineral. Perhaps chance may serve me better than the reasonings of intellect.
I am detained here by the refusal of the Austrian consul tovisermy passport for Milan, where I must go before returning to Paris, to get some money. I will send you my letter from there, which is in the Austrian dominions, and time will be saved in its going to Brody.
I thought I should only be a month on this trip, and I shall have been from forty-five to fifty days. I do not surfer less in my affairs than in my habits by such a break. It is now fifty days since I had news of you! And my poor house which is building! Grant it be finished, and that I may be able to regain time lost. I must do three works at once without unharnessing.
Adieu,cara. If you have seen Genoa you know how dull the life is here. I shall go to work on my comedy. Do not scold me too much when you answer this letter about my journey, for the vanquished should be consoled. I have thought often of you during my adventurous trip; and I imagined that M. Hanski was saying more than once, "What the devil is he doing in that galley?"
À propos, the statue from Milan has been received in Paris [Puttinati's statue], and is thought bad; so I shall not insist on sending you a copy; you have enough of me on Boulanger's canvas.
Milan, May 20, 1838.
Dear countess, you know all that this date says [his birthday]. I begin the year at the end of which I shall belong to the great and numerous regiment of resigned souls; for I swore to myself in the days of misfortune, struggle, and faith which made my youth so wretched, that I would struggle no longer against anything when I reached the age of forty. That terrible year begins to-day,—far from you, far from my own people, in a mortal sadness which nothing alleviates, for I cannot change my fate myself, and I no longer believe in fortunate accidents. My philosophy will be the child of lassitude, not of despair.
I came here to find an opportunity to get back to France, and I have remained to do a work, the inspiration for which has come to me here after I had vainly implored it for some years. I have never read a book in which happy love is pictured. Rousseau is too impregnated with rhetoric; Richardson is too much of a reasoner; the poets are too flowery; the romance-writers are too slavish to facts; and Petrarch too busy with his images, hisconcetti; he sees poesy better than he sees woman. Pope has given too many regrets to Héloïse. None have described the unreasoning jealousies, the senseless fears, or the sublimity of the gift of self. It may be that God, who created love with humanity, alone understands it, for none of his creatures have, as I think, rendered the elegies, imaginations, and poesies of that divine passion, which every one talks of and so few have known.
I want to end my youth—not my earliest youth—by a work outside of all my other work, by a book apart, which shall remain in all hands, on all tables, ardent and innocent, containing a sin that there may be a return, passionate, earthly and religious, full of consolations, full of tears and joys; and I wish this book to be without aname, like the "Imitation of Jesus Christ." I would I could write it here. But I must return to France, to Paris, re-enter my shop of vendor of phrases, and between now and then I can only sketch it.
Since I wrote you nothing new has happened. I have seen once more the Duomo of Milan, and I have made the tour of the Corso. But I have nothing to say of all that which you do not know already. I have made acquaintance with the Chimæras of the grand chandelier on the altar of the Virgin, which I had seen superficially; with Saint Bartholomew holding his skin as a mantle; with certain delightful angels sustaining the circle of the choir; and that is all. I have heard, at the Scala, the Boccabadati in "Zelmira." But I go nowhere; the Countess Bossi came bravely up to me in the street and reminded me of our dear evening at the Sismondis'. She was not recognizable. The change in her forced me to a terrible examination of myself.
It is now two months that I have had no news of you. My letters remain in Paris; no one writes to me because I have been wandering in lands where there are no mails. Nothing has better proved to me that I am an animal living by caresses and affection, neither more nor less like a dog. Skin-deep friendships do not suit me; they weary me; they make me feel more vividly what treasures are inclosed in the hearts where I lodge. I am not a Frenchman, in the frivolous acceptation of that term.
The inn became intolerable to me, and I am, by the kindness of Prince Porcia, in a little chamber of his house, overlooking gardens, where I work much at my ease, as with a friend who is all kindness for me. Alphonso-Serafino, Principe di Porcia, is a man of my own age, the lover of a Countess Bolognini, more in love this year than he was last year, unwilling to marry unless he can marry the countess, who has a husband from whom she is separateda mensâ et thero. You seethey are happy. The countess is very witty. The prince's sister is the Countess San-Severino, about whom I think I have already told you.
Milan is all excitement about the coronation of the emperor as King of Lombardy; the house of Austria has to spend itself in costs and fireworks. Though I have seen Florence only through the crevice of a half-week, I prefer Florence to Milan as a residence. If I had the happiness to be so loved by a woman that she would give me her life, it would be upon the banks of the Arno that I should go and spend my life. But after all, in spite of the romances of my friend George Sand, and my own, it is very rare to meet with a Prince Porcia who has enough fortune to live where he likes. I am poor, and I have wants. I must work like a galley-slave. I cannot say to Arabella d'Agoult (see the "Lettres d'un Voyageur"), "Come to Vienna, and three concerts will give us ten thousand francs; let us go to Saint-Petersburg, and the ivory keys of my piano will buy us a palace." I need that insulting Paris, its publishers, its printing-offices, twelve hours' stupefying work a day. I have debts, and debt is a countess who loves me too tenderly. I cannot send her away; she puts herself obstinately betwixt peace, love, idleness, and me. It is too hideous, that fate, to cast upon any one, even my enemies. There is only one woman in the world from whom I could accept anything, because I am sure of loving her all my life; but if she did not love me thus, I should kill myself in thinking of the part I had played.
You see I must, within a few months, take refuge in the life of La Fontaine. Whichever side I turn I see only difficulties, toil, and vain and useless hope. I have not even the resource of two years at Diodati on the Lake of Geneva, for I am now too hardened in work to die of it. I am like a bird in its cage, which has struck against all its bars, and now sits motionless onits perch, above which a white hand stretches the green net that protects it from breaking its head. You would never believe what gloomy meditations this happy life of Porcia's costs me; he lives upon the Corso, ten doors from the Bolognini. But I am thirty-nine to-day, with one hundred and fifty thousand francs of debt upon me; Belgium has the million I have earned, and——I have not the courage to go on, for I perceive that the sadness which consumes me would be cruel upon paper, and I owe to friendship the grace of keeping it in my heart.
To-morrow, after writing a few letters for my lovers, I shall be gayer, and I will come to you with a virtue that shall make a saint despair.
May 23.
Cara, I have home-sickness! France and its sky—gray for most of the time—wrings my heart beneath this pure blue sky of Milan. The Duomo, decked with its laces, does not lift my soul from indifference; the Alps say nothing to me. This soft, relaxing air fatigues me; I go and come without soul, without life, without power to say what the matter is; and if I stay thus for two weeks longer, I shall be dead. To explain is impossible. The bread I eat has no savour; meat does not nourish me, water can scarcely slake my thirst; this air dissolves me. I look at the handsomest woman in the world as if she were a monster, and I do not even have that common sensation that the sight of a flower gives. My work is abandoned. I shall recross the Alps, and I hope in a week to be in the midst of my own dear hell. What a horrible malady is nostalgia! It is indescribable. I am happy only at the moment when I write to you, and say to myself that this paper will go from Milan to Wierzchownia; then only does thought break through this black existence beneath the sun, this atony which relaxes every fibre of the life. That is the only operative force which maintains the union of soul and body.
May 24.
I have again seen the Countess Bossi; and I am struck with the few resources of Italian women. They have neither mind nor education; they scarcely understand what is said to them. In this country criticism does not exist, and I begin to think that the saying is right which attributes to Italian women something too material in love. The only intelligent and educated woman I have met in Italy is La Cortanza of Turin.
I have been to see the Luini frescos at Saronno; they are worthy of their reputation. The one that represents the Marriage of the Virgin is of peculiar sweetness. The faces are angelical, and, what is rare in frescos, the tones are soft and harmonious.
There is no present opportunity to return to France. I must resolve to take the wearisome and fatiguing means of the Sardinian and French mail-carts.
June 1, 1838.
My departure is fixed for to-morrow, errors excepted, and I think that never shall I have seen France again with such pleasure, though my affairs must be greatly tangled by this too long absence. If I am six days on the road that will make three months, and, in all, it has been seven months of inaction. I need eight consecutive months of work to repair this damage. I shall enter my new little house to spend many nights in working.
June 5.
I have just been to the post-office to see if any one had had the idea to write to meposte restante. There I found a letter from the kind Countess Loulou [Louise Turheim], who loves you and whom you love, and in whose letter your name is mentioned in a melancholy sentence which drew tears from my eyes; for, in the species of nostalgia under which I am, imagine what itwas to me to recall the Landstrasse and the Gemeindegasse! I sat down on a bench before a café and stayed there for nearly an hour, with my eyes fixed on the Duomo, fascinated by all that letter recalled; and the incidents of my stay in Vienna passed before me, one by one, in their truth, their marble candour. Ah! what do I not owe—not to her who causes such memories, but—to this frail paper that awakens them! You must remember that I am without news of you for three months, by my own fault. You know why. But you will never know whence this thirst for making a fortune comes to me.
I am going to write to the good chanoinesse without telling her all she has done by her letter, for such things are difficult to express, even to that kind German woman. But she spoke of you with such soul that I can tell her that what in her is friendship in me is worship that can never end. She says so prettily thatoneof my friends—not theveritableone, but theother—is in Venice; truly, she moved me to tears. What perpetual grief to be always so near you in thought and so distant in reality! Ah, dear, the Duomo was very sublime to me on the 5th of June at eleven o'clock! I lived there a whole year.
Well, adieu. I leave to-morrow, and in ten days I shall answer all your letters, treasures amassed during this dreadful journey. May God guard you and yours, and forget not the poor exile who loves you well.
Aux Jardies, Sèvres, July 26, 1838.
I receive to-day your number 44, and I answer it, together with the three letters I found awaiting me in the rue des Batailles a month ago.
In the first place, dear, you must know that the "Veuve Durand" no longer exists. The poor woman was killed by the little journals which pushed their basenesstowards me so far as to betray a secret which to any men of honour would have been sacred. So now I am established for always at Sèvres, and my hovel is called "Les Jardies;" therefore my address now is and long will be: "M. de Balzac, aux Jardies, à Sèvres."
You predicted truly in your last letter; I ought to pass a month here doing nothing but turning round and round to settle myself upon my muck-heap. I am still in the midst of plasterers, masons, diggers, painters, and other workmen. I arrived quite full of that book which does not exist, which has never been done, and which I desire to do, and I found the most foolish mercantile hindrances; the two volumes of "La Femme Supérieure," taken from the "Presse," lack a few pages before they can be sold as a book, which I must fill out by adding the beginning of "La Torpille." I found the contractor for my house at bay; I found the hounds of my debts awaiting me, with annoyances of all kinds. I have enough to do for a month in goings and comings, etc. I took a week to rest; my journey back was very fatiguing; I risked an ophthalmia on the Mont Cenis; having left the great heat of Lombardy, I came, in a few hours, into twenty degrees below freezing on the summit of the Alps, with snow and wind.
August 7.
Fifteen days' interruption, during which this letter has been constantly under my eyes, on my table, without my being able to tell you that the wind on the Mont Cenis drove a fine dust into my eyes, which pricked them with blinding particles. I know that my letters, which tell you my life, give you as much pleasure as yours give me. Only, your words sustain and refresh me; whereas mine communicate to you my vertigoes, my worries, my disappointments, my lassitudes, my terrors, my toils. Your existence is calm, gentle, and religious; it rolls slowly along, like a stream on its gravelly bed between twoverdant shores. Mine is a torrent, all noise and rocks. I am ashamed of the exchange, in which I bring you only troubles, and obtain from you the treasures of peace. You are patient; I am in revolt. You have not understood the last cry I uttered, at Milan. I had, there, a double nostalgia, and I had not, against the more dreadful of the two, the resource, horrible as it is, of my struggles here. Here, moral and physical combat, debts, and literature have something exciting, bewildering. See it yourself; I am interrupted in a sentence in the middle of the night, and I cannot resume that sentence for perhaps two weeks.
I have a world of things to tell you. In the first place, remove from your tranquil life a trouble like that of procuring my hookah. Just fancy! all that came of my ignorance! I thought you lived near Moscow, and that Moscow was the principal market for such things. That was all,—except that I wanted to receive from you an article which is, they say, achasse-chagrin. But if it causes you the slightest trouble it will be painful to me to see it.
Among the thousand and one things that I have had to do I must put in the front line a negotiation about the "Mariage de Joseph Prudhomme," with a theatre that agrees to give me twenty thousand francs on the day the play is read; and you can imagine what thirst a man has for twenty thousand francs when he is building a house, and how he must work to obtain them!
I am, therefore, in spite of the doctor's orders forbidding me to live in freshly plastered rooms, at Les Jardies. My house is situated on the slope of the mountain, or hill, of Saint-Cloud, half-way up, backing on the king's park and looking south. To the west I see the whole of Ville d'Avray; to the south I look down upon the road to Ville d'Avray, which passes along the foot of the hills where the woods of Versailles begin;and easterly I overlook Sèvres and rest my eyes upon a vast horizon where lies Paris, its smoky atmosphere blurring the edges of the famous slopes of Meudon and Bellevue; beyond which I see the plains of Montrouge and the Orléans highroad which leads to Tours. It is all strangely magnificent, with ravishing contrasts. The depths of the valley of Ville d'Avray have all the freshness, shade, and verdure of the Swiss valleys, adorned with charming buildings. The horizon on the other side shines on its distant lines like the open sea. Woods and forests everywhere. To the north is the royal residence. At the end of my property is the station of the railway from Paris to Versailles, the embankment of which runs through the valley of Ville d'Avray without injury to any part of my view.
So, for ten sous and in ten minutes I can go from Les Jardies to the Madeleine in the heart of Paris! Whereas at Chaillot, and in the rue Cassini it took an hour and forty sous at least. Therefore, thanks to that circumstance, Les Jardies will never be a folly, and its value will be some day doubled. I have about one acre of land, ending, towards the south, in a terrace of one hundred and fifty feet and surrounded by walls. At present nothing is planted in it, but this autumn I shall make this little corner of the earth an Eden of plants and shrubs and fragrance. In Paris or its environs anything can be had for money; so, I shall get magnolias twenty years old,tiyeuillesof sixteen, poplars of twelve years, birches, etc., transplanted with balls of roots, and white Chasselas grapes, brought in boxes, that I may gather them next year. Oh! how admirable civilization is! To-day my land is bare as my hand. In the month of May it will be surprising. I must buy two more acres of ground about me, to have a vegetable garden and fruit, etc. That will cost some thirty thousand francs, and I shall try to earn them this winter.
The house is a parrot's perch; there is one room on each floor, and there are three floors. On the ground-floor a dining-room and salon; on the first floor a bedroom and dressing-room; on the second floor a study, where I am writing to you at this moment in the middle of the night. The whole is flanked by a staircase that somewhat resembles a ladder. All round the building is a covered gallery to walk in, which rises to the first floor. It is supported on brick pilasters. This little pavilion, Italian in appearance, is painted brick-colour, with stone courses at the four corners, and the appendix in which is the well of the staircase is painted red also. There is room in it only for me.
Sixty feet in the rear, towards the park of Saint-Cloud, are the offices, composed, on the ground-floor, of a kitchen, scullery, pantry, stable, coach-house, and harness-room, bath-room, woodhouse, etc. Above is a large apartment which I can let if I choose, and above that again are servants' rooms and a room for a friend, [He says elsewhere that this building was the peasant's house, bought with the land.] I have a supply of water equal to the famous Ville d'Avray water, for it comes from the same source. There is no furniture here as yet; but all that I own in Paris will be brought here, little by little. I have, just now, my mother's old cook and her husband to serve me. But for at least a month longer I shall live in the midst of masons, painters and other workmen; and I am working, or am going to work to pay them. When the interior is finished I will describe it to you.[1]
I shall stay here until my fortune is made; and I am already so pleased with it that after I have obtained the capital of my tranquillity I believe that I shall end my days here in peace, bidding farewell, without flourish oftrumpets, to my hopes, my ambitions—to all! The life that you lead, that life of country solitude, has always had great charms for me. I wanted more, because I had nothing at all, and in making to one's self illusions it costs a young man no more to make them grand. To-day my want of success in everything has wearied my character—I do not say my heart, which will hope ever. That I may have a horse, fruits in abundance, the material costs of living secured, such is my place in the sunshine, obtained, not paid for, but sketched out. I pay the interest on capital, instead of paying rent. That is the change of front I have performed. I am in my own home, instead of being in the house of an oppressive landlord. My debt and my money anxieties remain the same; but my courage has redoubled under the lessening of my desires.
To-morrow,cara, I will continue my chatter and send it to you this week.
[1]See Théophile Gautier's description of that interior; "Memoir of Balzac," pp. 224, 225.—TR.
[1]See Théophile Gautier's description of that interior; "Memoir of Balzac," pp. 224, 225.—TR.
Wednesday, August 8.
There are many things in your last four letters to which I ought to reply; but they are locked up in Paris, and before I can get them too much time will have passed. I will answer in another letter, quickly following this.
But among other things that struck me in them was the extreme melancholy of your religious ideas. You write to me as if I believed in nothing, as if you wished to send me to La Grande-Chartreuse, or as if you meant to say to me, "Earth no longer interests me." You cannot think how many inductions, possibly false, I draw from that state of mind; but (and you tell me so with sincerity) you express to me what you feel; otherwise you would be false and distrustful when you should be all truth with a friend like me. Even if I displease you, I must say to you with confidence that I am not satisfied, and I would rather see you otherwise. To go thus to God is to renounce the world; and I do not comprehend why you should renounceit when you have so many ties that bind you to it, so many duties to accomplish. None but feeble souls will take that course. The reflections that I make on this subject are not of a nature to be communicated to you. They are, moreover, very selfish, and concern only me. Like those that I expressed in Milan, they would displease you, because, as you say, they trouble you; and for those my heart sinks down. I see clearly that happiness will never come to me; and who would have no bitterness in thinking that thought? I was very unhappy in my youth, but Madame de Berny balanced all by an absolute devotion, which was understood to its full extent only when the grave had seized its prey. Yes, I was spoilt by that angel; I prove my gratitude by striving to perfect that which she sketched out in me.
I meant to speak to you of new vexations; but I ought to be silent. In one of my letters, I don't know which, there is a promise that I made to us both not to speak to you again of my troubles, to write to you only at the moments when all looked rosy, and to tell my jeremiads to the passing clouds, going northward. When you see them look gray they are telling them to you. How many black confidences have I not smothered! There is many a corner that I hide from you; and it is those corners that would amaze you could you penetrate them and find—behind so many agitations, preoccupations, toils, travels, "inward dissipations," as you say—a fixed idea, daily more intense, which surely has little virtue since it cannot remove mountains, that miracle promised to faith! Often, friends have seen me turn pale at the loud cracking of a whip and rush to the window. They ask me what the matter is; and I sit down, palpitating, and saddened for days. Such fevers, such starts, shaken by inward convulsions, break me, crush me. There are days when I fancy that my fate is being decided, that something happy or unhappy will occur to me, is preparing, and Inot there! These are the follies of poets, comprehended by them alone. There are days when I take real life and all about me for a dream; so much is this present life, for me, against nature. But now all that will cease amid these fields, which always calm me.
Have I secured material existence, beneath which I would fain compress the life of the heart that I see is lost and useless, in spite of the ten good years that still remain to me?—for my passion has a will of which you can form to yourself no idea. It must have all or nothing. As to that, I am as I was on the day I left college. I am much to be pitied, and I will not be pitied. I have never done anything to disprove the absurd and silly lies of society which give me the good graces of charming women, all of which are derived from the coquetries of Madame de Castries and a few others. I have accepted the accusation of self-conceit; I am willing that absurdity on absurdity should accumulate about me to hide the true man, who has but one sentiment, one ideal!
I am at this moment-engaged in doing a part of my book on love, which will be detached; I want to paint well the soul of a young girl before the invasion of that love (which will lead her into a convent), and I have thought it true to make her abhor the Carmelites (to whom she will eventually return) at the beginning of life, when she longs for the world and its pleasures. As she has been eight years in the convent, she arrives in Paris as much a stranger to it as Montesquieu's Persian; and by the power of that idea I shall make her judge and depict the modern Paris, instead of employing the dramatic method of novels. That is a novel idea, and I am putting it into execution.
Nevertheless, it is very difficult for me to resume my life of labour, getting up at midnight and working till five in the afternoon. This is the first morning that I have passed without dozing between six and eight o'clock.Six months' interruption have made ravages; there are forces that come from habit, and when habit is broken, farewell forces. I hope to continue working for three or four months, in order to repair the breaches caused by absence, and, if my plays succeed, perhaps I shall have earned, over and above my debts, enough capital for the bread and water on my table, and my flowers and fruit. The rest may come, perhaps, hereafter.
Addio, cara; I could not tell you how my comic-opera house, that cottage they push forward on the stage and where lovers give themselves a rendezvous, has awakened the housekeeping and bourgeois instincts in me. One could be so happy here! All the advantages of Paris, and none of its disadvantages! I am here as at Saché, with the possibility of being in Paris in fifteen minutes—just time enough to reflect on what one is going to do there.
Mon Dieu!have you read in the "Lettres d'un Voyageur" the part about Moulin-Joli? the engraving of which I saw inherhouse without then knowing the terrible passage to which it gave rise, terrible to ill-mated beings. Well, Les Jardies are Moulin-Joli without the woman who engraves. If you do not know this history, read it. George Sand never related anything as well.
I send you many caressing homages and all those flowers of the soul which are so exactly the same that I fear they bore you. Many kind remembrances to those about you. I cannot send you an autograph, unfortunately; I had one of Manzoni for you, but they have just lit my fire with it! This is the second time something precious has been burned up here.
The newspapers have told you of the deplorable end of the poor Duchesse d'Abrantès. She has ended like the Empire. Some day I will explain her to you,—some good evening at Wierzchownia.
I can now reply to your bucolics on your beautiful flowers and turf by idyls on my own; but alas! there'sa difference in quantity. You have a thousand acres, and I have a thousand square feet!
All affectionate and good things. Do not neglect to tell me about your health, your beauty, your incidents in the depths of the Ukraine; you will do so if you form the least idea of the value I attach to the most minute particular.
Aux Jardies, September 17, 1838.
Since I last wrote I have done nothing but work desperately; for one must conquer during the last years, or bury one's self under a barren success.
I have just written for the "Presse" the beginning of "La Torpille," and the "Presse" would not have it. I have written the beginning of "Le Curé de Village," the religious pendant of the philosophical book you know as "Le Médecin de campagne." I have written the preface to two volumes about to be published, containing "La Femme Supérieure," "La Maison Nucingen," and "La Torpille." I have written two volumes in 8vo, entitled, "Qui Terre a, Guerre a;" and finally, I have written for the "Constitutionnel" the end of "Le Cabinet des Antiques," under the title of "Les Rivalités de Province."
You will understand from that,cara, that I have been unable to write you even two lines in the midst of this avalanche of ideas and labour.
Nothing of all that gives me a sou. I had prepared, to save me, certain dramas, and they are all begun; but I wish to go to thegrand, and I am discontented; so much so that, seeing how ill I do things while I see such fine things to do, I have abandoned my attempts. And yet, my salvation is in the theatre. A success there would give me a hundred thousand francs. Two successes would clear me, and two successes are only matters of intelligence and toil,—nothing else.
At the moment of present writing I have begun a drama in three acts, entitled, "La Gina." It is Othello the otherway. La Gina will be a female Othello. The scene is in Venice. Imustessay the stage. Proposals are not lacking to me. I am offered in one direction twenty thousand francs first payment for fifteen acts; and I have the fifteen acts in my head, but not on paper.
Well, all the manuscripts are at the printing-office; proofs are rolling; the printers will not beat me in rapidity, for it is not the mechanical invention with its thousand arms that gets on fastest, it is the brain of your poor friend!
September 18.
The time to turn the page, and I find "La Gina" too difficult. Reasons have killed it. In "Othello" Iago is the pillar which supports the conception; I have only a money motive, instead of the motive of hidden love. I found my personage inadmissible. A vaudeville writer would not have been stopped by that difficulty. So I return to a former play, imagined some time ago, called "Richard Cœur-d'Éponge." I will tell you about it if I do it.
My house does not get on. I have the walls of the enclosure still to do, and much to the interior. It is alarming. I have found a source—not of fortune! only clear water.
October 1.
I am into money matters up to my neck. It is demoralizing. I have not had two hours to myself for reflection since I wrote you the above few lines. Do not be vexed with me. I need calmer times to relate to you a life like mine. I must say mass every second, and ring it. I have had the hope of buying out my publishers, who are ruining me, and I have just spent two weeks in Paris in crushing, killing efforts. You must remember that I have no help or succour, but, on the other hand, infinite obstacles, without number. If I cannot overcome them I shall go to you for six months' rest at Wierzchownia, where I can write my plays in peace before returning here. Many personswhom I love and esteem advise this, telling me to "go somewhere." But as for me, I cannot abandon a battlefield.
The two volumes containing "La Femme Supérieure," "La Maison Nucingen," and "La Torpille" are out.
October 10.
For the last seven years or so, whenever I have read a book in which Napoleon was mentioned, if I found any new and striking thought said by him, I put it at once into a cook-book that never leaves my desk and lies on that little book you know of, which will belong to you—alas, soon, perhaps—in which I put my subjects and my first ideas. In a day of distress (one of my recent days), being without money, I looked to see how many of those thoughts there were. I found five hundred; hence, the finest book of the century; I mean the publication of the "Maximes et Pensées de Napoléon." I sold the work to a former hosier, who is the big-wig of his arrondissement, and wants the cross of the Legion of honour, which he can have by dedicating this book to Louis-Philippe. It is about to appear. Get it. You will have one of the finest things of the day; the soul, the thought of that great man, gathered through much research by your moujik, Honoré de Balzac. Nothing has made me laugh so much as this idea of getting the cross for a sort of grocer, who may perhaps recommend himself to your Grace by his title of administrator of a charitable enterprise. Napoleon will have brought me four thousand francs and the hosier may get a hundred thousand. I had such great distrust of myself that I would not work my own idea. To the hosier, both fame and profit. But you will recognize the hand of your serf in the dedication to Louis-Philippe. May the shade of Napoleon forgive me![1]
[1]This book, extremely rare to-day, appeared at the close of the year 1838, without the name of any publisher, under the following title: "Maximes et Pensées de Napoléon, recueillies par J. L. Gaudy jeune. Paris. 1838."
[1]This book, extremely rare to-day, appeared at the close of the year 1838, without the name of any publisher, under the following title: "Maximes et Pensées de Napoléon, recueillies par J. L. Gaudy jeune. Paris. 1838."
October 15.
I receive to-day your answer to my last letter. Never before did it happen to me to receive a reply to one letter while I was writing another. This phenomenon takes place now at the end of five years, during which time I have written to you once a fortnight at least. To tell you all the whys and wherefores belongs to the domain oftalk, not to that of epistolary conversation.
Cara, you are more than ever bent onconvertingme. Your letter is that of a grave and serious abbess and an omnipotent,omni-scavante, gracious and witty Countess Hanska. I kneel at your feet, dear and beautiful sister-Massillon, to tell you here that the sorrow of my life is a long prayer, that my soul is very white, not because I do not sin, but because I have no time to sin, which makes it perhaps all the blacker in your eyes. But you know that I have in the shrine of my heart a madonna who sanctifies all. What have I said or done to you that should bring me all this Christian advice? I work so hard that I have not always time to sleep or, more alarming symptom, to write to you. A man so unfortunate is either the most guilty or the most innocent of men on earth; and in either case there's nothing to be done. Would you know what that means? I am weary of the life thus allotted to me, and, were it not for my duties, I would take another. I must have received many blows, be very tired of my fate, to abandon myself to chance, as I do to-day, with a character as strongly tempered as mine.
You have reticences about my affections which grieve me all the more because I cannot reply to them (the reticences), and you ask me superfluous questions about my health. Why have you not divined, with that grand perspicacious forehead of yours and your other attributes, that the unhappy are always robust in health? They can pass through seas, conflagrations, battles, bivouacs, andfresh plaster; they are always sound and well! Yes, I am perfectly well, without aches or pains, in my young house. Have no uneasiness as to that. Beyond a great and general fatigue after my excesses of work during the last fortnight, I am well, and if white hairs did not abound I should think I were the younger by ten years.
Mon Dieu!how I suffer when, in reading your letter, I see that you have suffered from my silence, and that you have taken to heart my anxieties and the agonies of my poor life. Do you know it? do you feel it? No—never see me, as you say, joyous and tranquil! When I write to you joyously all is at its worst, and I am trying to conceal how ill that is. When things are going ill with me if I do not write to you, it is because—No, I cannot write it to you; I will talk of it to you some day, and then you will regret having written to me some words that are sweet and cruel both in relation to my delayed letters. There are things that you will never divine. Do not fear that anything can change or diminish an attachment like mine. You think me light-minded, giddy; it makes me laugh. Believe, once for all, that he in whom you have been good enough to recognize some depth of thought, has depth in his heart, and that while he displays such courage in the battle he is fighting, there is just as great constancy in his affections. But you are ignorant of the claims of each day; the dreadful difficulties on which I spend myself. If you knew what wiles were necessary—like those of the "Mariage de Figaro"—to make that hosier pay four thousand francs for the thoughts and maxims of Napoleon; if you realized that my publishers will not give me money; that I am trying to break up that agreement; that to break it I must pay them fifty thousand francs; and that after believing that my life was secured and tranquil it is now more in peril than ever, you would not treat as folly my enterprise in Sardinia! Oh! I entreatyou, do not advise or blame those who feel themselves sunk in deep waters and are struggling to the surface. Never will the rich comprehend the unfortunate. One must have been one's self without friends, without resources, without food, without money, to know to its depths what misfortune is. I have the knowledge of all that; and I no longer complain that I am the victim of a poor unfortunate man who, for food, sells a jest of mine that I may have said on the boulevard, but which, when published, forms a horrible attack upon me. I complain no longer of calumnies and insults; those poor unfortunates live upon them, and though I would rather die than live so, I have not the courage to blame them, for I know what it is to suffer.
However rare my letters are, they are theonly onesthat I write to-day (except those on business); and what quarrels and ill-will I have brought upon myself by not answering letters! You cannot know what a literary life busy as mine is must be. Whatever they tell you, or however my silence may appear to you, know this: that I work day and night; that the phenomenon of my production is doubled, trebled; that I have brought myself to correct a volume in a single night, and to write one in three days. The world is foolish. It thinks that a book is spoken. This grieves me only from you; I laugh with pity at others.
I have done eight works since the month of last November.Cara, each of those eight works would have foundered for a year the strongest of the French writers, who barely do half a volume a year. Among those eight I do not mention the book of love, of which I have told you something, which is there, on my table, beneath your letter; I have about twenty-fivefeuillesof that written. Neither do I speak of five "Contes Drolatiques" written within two months.
Mon Dieu!I have not one soul to understand me; Ihave never had but one. Poor, dear Madame de Berny came to see me daily in those days when she thought that I should perish beneath my burden. What would she say now if she saw it tenfold heavier? Yes, I work tenfold harder in 1838 than I did in 1828, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833. In those days I believed in fortune; to-day I believe in misery. There are men who want me to sell myself to the present order of things. I would rather die! I must have my freedom of speech.
When you speak to me of fatal death, such as that of your cousin, I call it happy death, for I do not believe we are placed here below for happiness. Withold was right; I pity his mother much; but he is happy, believe it.
You asked me when I shall calm that French fury which carried me to Italy, to Sardinia. Is not that asking me when I shall be imbecile? Do you expect a man who can write in five nights "Qui Terre a, Guerre a" or "César Birotteau" to measure his steps like a capitalist who takes his dog to walk on the boulevard, reads the "Constitutionnel," comes home to dinner, and plays billiards in the evening? I will allow you here five seconds to laugh at the most charming person in the world, who, to my thinking, is Madame Eve. Nothing remains now but to blamela furiawhich will take me to see certain Northern people in their steppe. Know, beautiful great lady, that if I abandoned myself to Providence, as you propose to me, Providence would already have put me in prison for debt; and I don't see that there is anything providential in a sojourn at Clichy. What would the plants that creep out of caves in search of the sun say if they heard a pretty dove asking them why they climbed that fissure to the air? You curse our civilization; I await you in Paris! But I would also like to know who are the impertinent people who write to you about me; and who think there is a sun for me elsewhere than in the North.
Théophile Gautier is a young man of whom I think I have spoken to you. He is one of the talents that I discovered; but he is without force of conception. "Fortunio" is below "Mademoiselle de Maupin," and his poems, which have pleased you, alarm me as a decadence in poesy and language. He has a ravishing style, much intellect, of which I think he will not make the most because he is in journalism. He is the son of a custom-house receiver at the Versailles barrier of Paris. He is very original, knows a great deal, and talks well on art, of which he has the sentiment. He is an exceptional man, who will, no doubt, lose his way. You have divinedthe man; he loves colour and flesh; but he comprehends Italy, without having seen it.
I am struck by the manner in which you return, three several times to the "levity of my character, and the multiplicity of my enthusiasms." There must be under all that some calumny which has snaked its way to Wierzchownia, God knows how!
Well, I must bid you farewell, without having said one tenth part of the things I had to say to you, and which I will return to later. After all, it would be only describing to you the worries of my present life, which are innumerable. I must correct for to-morrow "Le Curé de Village" for it annoys me to have further dealings with the "Presse."
Adieu, dear azure flower; keep all safely for one who lays up treasures of affections and feelings in your direction. I know not why you say that old friendships are timid; mine grows very bold with time.
All graceful things to those about you, and to M. Hanski my friendly regards.
October 16.
I am in treaty with the "Débats" to take all my prose at a franc a line. That would make M. Sedlitz, theGerman poet, howl; but he is a baron, and has estates, and was scandalized in the Landstrasse at hearing me talk about the profits of literature. If thisaffaircomes off you will see me very soon at Wierzchownia. I want to be there in winter.
Much tenderness, preaching or laughing, mundane or Catholic.À bientôt.
Aux Jardies, November 15, 1838.
To-day I meant to have closed and sent to you a letter begun a month ago; but it is lost,—lost from my desk. I have spent three hours of this night in looking for it. I am vexed, I weep for it, because, to me, all expression of the soul fallen into the gulf of oblivion seems irreparable. You would have known what has happened to me since the date of my last letter. In two words, I am about to enter a happier period, or, to use a truer word, a less unhappy period than the past, financially speaking. A few days more and I shall, perhaps, have paid off half my debt. Material success is coming; it begins. My works are to be issued in severalformatsat the same time. My publishers allow me to buy off my agreement, which bound me too closely, and I am going, in a few months, to be free. These are results. You will be ignorant, until I can tell them to you, of the marches and countermarches, and goings and comings, and conferences which have made me mount and descend all the rungs of the ladder of hope.
My pen will have brought in mounds of gold this month.[1]"Qui Terre a, Guerre a" more than ten thousandfrancs; "Le Cabinet des Antiques" five thousand francs, etc., etc.; "Massimilla Doni" a thousand francs. I have sold for twenty thousand francs the right to sell thirty-six thousand 18mo volumes, selected from my works. "La Physiologie du Mariage" in 18mo has been sold for five thousand francs. In short, it is a sudden, unhoped-for harvest, and it comes in the nick of time. I hope, between now and five months hence, to have paid off one hundred thousand francs of my debt. But I have eight volumes to finish. They have bought prefaces of afeuillein length for five hundred francs. All this will give you pleasure, will it not? Nothing will as yet give me any ease; for this money goes only to clear off the old debt; but at least I can breathe. Another thing that will give you pleasure and rejoice your Catholic soul is that my affairs took on this smiling aspect from the day when my mother hung about my neck a medal blessed by a saint, which I have religiously worn with another amulet [probably her miniature], which I believe to be more efficacious. The two talismans get on very well together, and have not displeased each other. I am not willing to disappoint my mother, but this miracle does not convert me, because I am ignorant which of the two charms is the most powerful.
I have been very miserable of late; my publishers are piling up their ducats, while I have not had a brass farthing, and this war of diplomatic conferences costs me much. I have now returned to my shell, at Sèvres, where nothing is yet finished or habitable. I have the removal of my furniture to do and many other expenses besides.
The moral is less satisfactory than the material condition. I am growing older, I feel the need of a companion, and every day I regret the adored being who sleeps in a village cemetery near Fontainebleau. My sister, who loves me much, can never receive me in herown home. A ferocious jealousy bars everything. My mother and I do not suit each other, reciprocally. I must rely on work unless I have a family of friends about me; which is what I should like to arrive at. A good and happy marriage, alas! I despair of it, though no one is more fitted than I for domestic life.
I have interior griefs that I can tell only to you, which oppress me. Ever since I have had ideas and sentiments I have thought wholly of love; and the first woman that I met was a faultless heroine, angelic in heart, a mind most keen, education most extensive, graces and manners perfect. Diabolical Nature placed its fatalbutupon all this.Butshe was twenty-two years older than I; so that if the ideal was morally surpassed, the material, which is much, erected insurmountable barriers. Therefore, the unlimited passion that has always been in my soul has never found true fulfilment. The half of all was lacking. Do you think, therefore, that I can meet with it now that time is flying at a gallop with me? My life will be a failure, and I feel it bitterly. There is no fame that lasts; I am resigned to that. There are no chances for me. My life is a desert. That which I desired is lacking,—that for which I could have made the greatest sacrifices, that which will never come to me, that on which I must no longer count! I say it mathematically, without the poesy of wailing, which I could lift to the height of Job; but the fact is there. I should not lack adventures; I could play, if I chose, the rôle of a manà bonnes fortunes, but my stomach turns against it with disgust. Nature made me for one sole love. I am an ignored Don Quixote. I have ardent friendships. Madame Carraud, in Berry, has a noble soul; but friendship does not take the place of love,—the love of every day, of every hour; which gives infinite pleasures in the sound at all moments of a voice, a step, the rustle of a gown through the house;such as I have had, though imperfectly, at times in the last ten years. Add to this that I hold in profound detestation all young girls, that I count much higher developed beauties than those that will develop, and the problem is still more difficult to solve.
Madame Carraud, whose letters give me great pleasure—if that word can be employed for other letters than yours—-has divined my situation. She awakes my sorrows by a letter I have just received from her, in which she talks marriage to me, which makes me furious for a long time. I will not listen to it. You know how fixed my opinion is. I must have much fortune for that, and I have none. I must have a person who knows me well, and I doubt if that is possible in one who is, after all, a stranger. What a sad thing is life,cara!
You will certainly see me when my great works are done. At the first inanition of the brain I shall turn to your dear Wierzchownia, and pay you a visit; for I cannot endure to be so long without seeing you. Last night at the Opera, where I heard Duprez in "Guillaume Tell," I was the whole evening in Switzerland,—the Switzerland of Pré-l'Évêque and the two shores of the lake where we walked together. There are details of our trips to Coppet and Diodati which occupy me more than my own life. Looking at the scene of the Lake of the Four Cantons, I remembered,word for word, all you said to me as we passed the Galitzin house, and what you said about such and such a portrait at Coppet. And I said to myself—in my way of telling myself the future—"Such a period will not pass without my seeing the Ukraine; as I live so much by memories, these are the treasures I ought to seek, and not silver mines." I was happier in that Opera-Switzerland than the millionnaire Greffulhe, who yawned above me.
From those letters of yours, so serious, so dun-colouredand ascetic, I fear to find you changed. No matter, we must love our friends as they are.
What I do not like in your last letter is the remark that "old friendships are timid." In that there is a distrust of yourself or of me that I do not like. You know that nothing can prevail against you, that you are apart from whatever may happen to me, like a true king who can never be reached. I am afraid that you forge ogres. If my letters are delayed, be sure there is some good reason; that I have been hurried about night and day, without truce or rest; that I have not written to a living soul, and that, if I were ill or happy, you, in spite of distance, would be the first informed of it.
You know the good your letters do me, whatever they are, religious, or sad, or gay, or domestic. I am the more reserved because I have nothing but troubles to send you, and no flower other than that of an eternal affection, as much above all petty, worldly imitations as Mont Blanc is above the lake. Do not be surprised therefore if I hold back a letter which tells you of misery and toil without other compensation than that of talking to you about them.
You complain of Polish divorces, whereas here we are doing all we can to restore the admirable section on divorce to the Civil Code such as Napoleon contrived it; which met all social disasters, without giving an opening to libertinism, change, vice, or passion. It is the only institution which can secure happy marriages. There are in Paris forty thousand households on promise only, without either civil or religious contract; and they are among the best, for each fears to lose the other. This is not said publicly, but the statistic is correct. Cauchois-Lemaire, for instance, is married in that way. The Napoleonic law allowed onlyonedivorce in a woman's life, and forbade even that after ten years of marriage. In this it was wrong. There are tyrannieswhich can be borne in youth, that are later intolerable. I knew an adorable woman who waited till she was forty-five and her daughters were married, in order to separate from her husband; having put off until that moment when she could no longer be suspected the liberation without which she would have died.
What! do you dare to tell us there is butoneman in this "stupid nineteenth century"? Napoleon is he? And Cuvier,cara! And Dupuytren,cara! And Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire,cara! And Masséna,carina! And Rossini,carissima! And our chemists, our secondary men, who are equal to the talents of the first order! And Lamennais, George Sand, Talma, Gall, Broussais (just dead), etc.! You are very unjust. Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and Cowper belong to this century. Weber also, and Meyerbeer; also severalgamins de Pariswho could make a revolution by a wave of their hand. Victor Hugo, Lamartine, and Musset are, they three, the small change of a poet, for neither of them is complete. Apropos, "Ruy Blas" is immense nonsense, and an infamy in verse. The odious and the absurd never danced a more dissolute saraband. He has cut out two horrible lines:—
... affreuse compagnone,Dont la barbe fleurie et dont le nez trognonne;
but they were said at the first two representations. At the fourth representation, when the public became aware of them, they were hissed.
I cannot tell you anything of the war in the Caucasus, except that I deplore for you the loss that grieves you [Count Withold Rzewuski].
Cara, I would like you to explain to me how I have deserved a phrase thus worded and addressed to me in your last letter: "The natural levity of your character." In what do I show levity? Is it because for the lasttwelve years I pursue, without relaxing, an immense literary work? Is it because for the last six years I have had but one affection in my heart? Is it because for twelve years I have worked night and day to pay an enormous debt which my mother saddled upon me by a senseless calculation? Is it because in spite of so many miseries I have not asphyxiated or drowned myself, or blown out my brains? Is it because I work ceaselessly, and seek to shorten by ingenious schemes, that fail, the period of my hard labour? Explain yourself. Is it because I flee society and intercourse with others to give myself up to my passion, my work, my release from debt? Can it be because I have written twelve volumes instead of ten? Can it be because they do not appear with regularity? Is it because I write to you with tenacity and constancy, sending you with incredible levity autographs? Is it because I go to live in the country, away from Paris, in order to have more time and spend less money? Come, tell me; have no hidden thought from your friend. Can it be because, in spite of so many misfortunes, I preserve some gaiety and make campaigns into China and Sardinia? For pity's sake, be fearless, and speak out. Can it be because I am delaying to write my plays that I may not risk a fiasco? Or is it because you are—through the blind confidence of a son for his mother, a sister for a brother, a husband for a wife, a lover to his mistress, a penitent to his confessor, an angel towards God, all, in short, that is most confiding and most aunit—so aware of what passes in my poor existence, my poor brain, my poor heart, my poor soul, that you arm yourself with my confidences to make ofmeanothermyselfwhom you scold and lecture and strike at your ease?
Levity of nature! Truly, you are like the worthy bourgeois who, seeing Napoleon turn to right and left, and on all sides to examine his field of battle, remarked:"That man cannot keep quiet in one place; he has no fixed ideas." Do me the pleasure to go wherever you have put the portrait of your poor moujik and look at the space between his two shoulders, thorax and forehead, and say to yourself: "There is the most constant, least volatile, most steadfast of men." That is your punishment. But, after all, scold, accuse your poor Honoré de Balzac; he is your thing; and I do wrong to argue; for if you will have it so, I will be frivolous in character, I will go and come without purpose, and say sweet things without object to the Duchesse d'O...; I will fall in love with a notary's wife, and write feuilletons to enrage the actresses, and I will make myself a superlative rip. I will sell Les Jardies; I will await your sovereign orders. There is but one thing in which I shall disobey you, and that is the thing of my heart—where, nevertheless, you have all power.
I entreat you to add also that I am a light-weight in body and thin as a skeleton. The portrait will then be complete.
Explain also, if you can, the "multiplicity of my dissipations [entraînements],"—I, of whom it is said that no one can make me do anything but what I choose to do! (Those who say so do not know that I am moujik on the estate of Paulowska, the subject of a Russian countess, and the admirer of the autocratic power of my sovereign.)
Alas! I never doubt you, I never rebel against anything—except the invasion of mystical ideas. And even that is from an admirable instinct of jealousy. Moreover, if I must say so, I hold thedevout spiritin horror. It is not piety which alarms me, but devoutness. To fly from this and that to the bosom of God, so be it; but the more I admire those sublime impulses, the more the minute practices of devoutness harden me. Quibbling is not law.
Addio,cara; I must finish "Massimilla Doni," do the opening part of "Le Curé de Village" (in that book you will adore me in the quality of Brother of the Church; it will be pure Fénelon), correct "Qui Terre a, Guerre a," and, finally, deliver within ten days the manuscript of "Un Grand homme de Province à Paris," which is the conclusion of "Illusions Perdues." So you see that my idleness is a busy one.
Find here all treasures of affection, and prayers for the happiness of you and yours in the present and in the future. If God heard or paid attention to what I ask of him, you would have no anxieties, and you would be the happiest woman upon earth.
I have busied myself about your Parisian pearls, and I shall have an opportunity to send them. God grant they may get to you in time for the New Year. Did you receive the autographs of Scribe, Hugo, and Byron? I sent them all.