IX Letters During 18461
Passy, January 1, 1846.
One year more, dear, and I take it with pleasure; for these years, these thirteen years which will be consummated in February on the happy day, a thousand times blessed, when I received that adorable letter starred with happiness and hope, seem to me links indestructible, eternal. The fourteenth will begin in two months; and all the days of these years have added to my admiration, to my attachment, to my fidelity, like that of a dog.
I have a very Grandet mind, I assure you. A few days more, and if the King of Holland were to offer me sixty thousand francs for my Florentine furniture, he could not have it! It is still more so in matters of the heart. I shall have proved it to you fourteen years from now, when you have seen me forgetting nothing of all my happinesses, great or small.
January 4.
O dear countess, I received this morning, at half-past eight o’clock, the letter of your dear child with the portrait of Leonidas; decidedly, I shall have an “Album Gringalet.” I do not understand why on the 22nd you had not received my letter of the 3rd, sent from Rothschild’s counting-room. When this letter leaves it will be the seventh on its way to you. I have never failed to tell you day by day what happens to me; and you will see on your return that I have written the oftenest. I am going to see your dear Lirette; for I do not wish to forget that I am a substitute for both of you, mother and daughter, towards her; moreover, I want to know at what periods she wishes to receive the sum you have given me for her.
I dined, as I told you I should in my last letter, with Nestor Roqueplan, on the last day of the year, at the illustrious Delphine’s. We laughed as much as I am capable of laughing without you and far away from you. Delphine is really a queen of conversation; that evening she was particularly sublime, sparkling, ravishing. Gautier was there also; I came away after a long talk with him; he had been assured there was no hurry about “Richard Cœur-d’Éponge,” the theatre having more than enough on hand. Gautier and I may make our play together later. Such was the result of this dinner, the history of which is your due. Returning home, I met two or three bores, who tired me much. You will not believe that, for you seem ignorant that I like to have no one but you, and to see none but you in the world. But, dear countess, the sad thing is, that I cannot write a line, and I groan—
January 5, midnight.
Here is a strange thing! I received this morning your long letter, one day later than that of your daughter; this is a mystery, for both came from Marseille.
Oh! dearest, what a day I have had! atrocious, dreadful, awful! I had errands to do; I was to go to Froment-Meurice, then to M. Gavault, then to a ship-builder who is building a ship he is bent on naming for me, then to the newspaper offices, especially the “Presse.” At midday, after breakfast, I went to the post; good! I received a fine thick letter, very heavy; my heart quivered with joy. Ah! I was happy! so happy that in the carriage from Passy to Paris I opened my letter a thousand times blessed, and read, and read! At last I reached the page dictated to you by the strange and inconceivable conduct of Madame A. and Koref; and after having read your crushing reflections I was thrown into consternation. I closed the letter and put it in my pocket. At first, any one might have seen my tears; then I was overcome by a sadness of which the following were the physical effects: Two inches of snow were on the pavements of Paris; I was in thin boots; so unhappy was I that I wanted air, I was choking in the fiacre. I stopped it, and got out in the rue de Rivoli and walked, walked, my feet in the snow, across all Paris, through crowded streets, seeing no one, among the carriages, noticing none of them; I went, I went, on and on, my face convulsed, like a madman. People stared at me. I marched from the rue de Rivoli to the back of the Hôtel de Ville among all those populous streets, not conscious of the crowd or the cold, or of anything. What hour was it? what weather? what season? what city? Where was I? Had any one questioned me I could not have answered him; I was senseless with pain. Sensibility, which is the blood of the soul, was flowing out of me in torrents through my wound. And this is what I was saying to myself: “I have never, in my life, uttered one indiscreet word; and here are the reasons of my silence: 1. honour and integrity; 2. certainty of injuring the object of my hopes; 3. certainty of rendering my liquidation impossible; 4. complete uncertainty as to the result of my wishes. And I am accused of ignoble speeches,—I, whose conduct is irreproachable!” To meet with this injustice, even involuntary, from you crushed me; I felt the blows of that club upon my head at every step. Koref is an infamous spy, an Austrian spy, well known as such; he is not received anywhere; I do not bow to him any longer; I scarcely answer him when he speaks to me. Madame A... is ignorant of this, she confides herself and talks of your interests and of my affairs to the most dangerous man I know! It is truly incredible! Moreover, Koref is allied with a very bad woman, a Madame de B... who spreads slanders, and spies as spies spy, even outside of politics, and merely to keep her hand in. Who knows if those people have not already made this the subject of a report? Who knows if Koref, too well known to be trusted any longer by the Austrian police, has not used Madame A.’s absurd confidences to get into the service of a hyperborean power? Ah! truly, Madame A. may have done us, without exaggeration, an incalculable injury! I, who already have suffered a great pecuniary loss through absurd cancans sent from Berlin, to have such sufferings, thanks to that woman, in addition!
Thinking all this I walked on, seeing nothing before me but trouble and confusion—Koref! whom I have not seen for eighteen months, and to whom I have not addressed a word for three years, he to call himself my friend! It is too impudent!—I walked with my heart bleeding, my feet in the ashes of my longed-for future, and thinking ever of the pitiless reflections that Madame A.’s fatal letter had suggested to you. At four o’clock I reached Froment-Meurice; nothing was ready, neither your set, nor the bracelet, nor my seal (fulge, vivam) which I have waited for so long.
I went to Gavault’s on foot, from the Hôtel de Ville to the Madeleine. Gavault was frightened at my face when he saw me without soul, without strength, without life. From there, still on foot, I went back to Passy at eight o’clock, without feeling bodily fatigue; the bruised soul numbed the body, mental fatigue was greater than all physical exhaustion. At ten o’clock I went to bed; impossible to sleep. I have lighted my candles and my fire, and taken my coffee.—I have just read the end of your letter; and the balm of the last sheet has calmed me, without altogether making the last echoes of my suffering cease.
Till to-morrow: bodily fatigue has come to me and I can sleep. I am going to bed; it is one o’clock.
January 6.
To-day, January 6, is your birthday, dear countess. I wish to express to you none but thoughts of gentleness and peace. Going to bed at one o’clock, I fell asleep among the charming things you said to me at the close of your letter, and I had no dreams at all. The fatigue of yesterday, moral and physical, was such that I slept till ten o’clock. I have just breakfasted and I return to your letter. That which is grievous in it does not come from you; it comes from strangers, from that silly Madame A...; and you could not have thought otherwise than as you did on reading her letter. By a strange fatality I read only half your letter, and I have suffered by my own fault. I could have taken a fiacre and read the rest; but, I see now, deep and violent sensations do not reason; they rush like torrents or thunderbolts. What upset me thus was that I saw plainly they were trying to give you malignant impressions about me. I have no need of “society;” far from it, I have a most profound horror of it; celebrity weighs upon me; I thirst for a home, a home of my own, I thirst to drink long draughts of a life in common, the life of two. I have no affection in the world that conflicts in any manner whatsoever with what I have in my soul, which is indeed the very substance of that soul; “the rest is all vain dream.” To finish, once for all, with bad people and bad tales, tell yourself, dear, that society is composed of criminals who have a horror of honest men and of men without sin; it hates the happiness that eludes it.
Let me, before I close my letter, say this: my mind is made up; if I am forced to abandon my hopes, if, by force of hostile and secret persecution you should turn your back upon me, my resolutions are fixed; the haschisch that I tried yesterday will render a man imbecile at the end of a year; he can remain so, knowing nothing further of the pains or joys of life, until he dies. Haschisch, as you know, is only an extract of hemp, and hemp contains the end of man. No, if I cannot have my beautiful dreamed-of life, I want nothing. Yesterday, all the treasures of furniture which I have collected were so many bits of wood and crockery to me! Poverty, were I alone, has attractions for me. I want nothing, except in relation to the secret object of my life; that object is the supreme motive of all my prayers, my steps, my efforts, my ideas, my toils, of the fame I seek to acquire, in short of my future and of all that I am. For thirteen years this aspiration has been the principle of my blood—for ideas and sentiments work through the blood.
I thank you for the instructions you give me about Lirette. I will pay her the sum agreed upon to-morrow at her convent, and I will inquire the amount that you must still add. I am so glad to do any business for you that you ought to make me give you a commission for it. Poor dear Atala [a name by which he called her in jest], poor dear Anna, the picture of your losses and financial deceptions distresses me; alas! there is nothing to be done but to return to your own home as soon as the thermal treatment at Baden is duly accomplished. Yes, you will have to return courageously, to settle all and complete your work in order to obtain the right to rest in peace.
I leave you to go to the post, for I expect a letter with news of my Amsterdam cases, which are as long delayed in coming from Rouen to Paris as they were between Amsterdam and Rouen. If I do not finish my letter to-day I will to-morrow; and to-morrow it will jump into the letter-box, and the day after be at Roanne. What a hippogriff is the post!
Adieu, dear; I am going to work like one possessed. I start April 1 by boat for Civita-Vecchia. Easter Sunday falls on the 12th; I shall see Rome for ten days; then I will return with you through Switzerland. There’s my plan. Between now and then I shall have my liberty. Take care of yourselves, all, but you especially. I will answer next week your dear child’s letter, and also Georges’.
When I think that after Baden you will have to return home, a shudder comes over me. You know when you enter there but you don’t know when you can leave. But I will not end my letter sadly; find here within it the fresh flowers of an old affection. My heart blesses you, my soul is round you with all its thoughts. As for my mind, you know that is only the reflection and echo of yours.
Passy, February 8, 1845.1
No letters! my uneasiness has reached its height; I do not know what to think; I believe you are ill. I am tortured to the point of not being able to write a line to-day. I dine with M. F..., a sacrifice to make, and a great one, I assure you; but it is very essential not to displease him; he does my business well, and I am more and more satisfied with him. This week we attack an account very difficult to terminate; that of B... It is a matter of nine thousand francs to be paid. No letter! I am very unhappy.
February 9.
What joy! I have your letter at last. I ought to write to you on my knees for such kindness, and such persistency and perseverance in that kindness. The passage in which you tell me you had been lost in a contemplation of the future like one of mine, and in which you seem so touched by those transports of worship I often have toward you,—that true affection, so humble coming from a soul so lofty, gave me for a moment more happiness than I have ever had before in my life.
Dear countess, do not risk yourself in Rome before Georges is perfectly recovered; put off the journey for your children’s sake; Rome will not be swallowed up to-morrow, but health is lost there in a week. Wait; wait.
When you receive this letter La Comédie Humaine will be finished.
I have paid M. Potier a thousand francs, for he has had, you see, to incur expenses,—he says so himself. This is a house of forty-five thousand francs, and fifteen thousand for additions, sixty thousand in all. [The house in the rue Fortunée.] I hope to own the house and to have paid up all disquieting claims by the end of February. But all these uncertainties prevent me from working at my ease. I am like a bird on a branch. I hope you will let me come and tell you of my installation and spend a few days with you in April.
In going to Souverain’s to-day I saw in the shop of a dealer in bric-à-brac a miniature of Madame de Sévigné, done in her day it seemed to me, which can be had for very little. Do you want it? It seemed to me rather good; but it must be said that I scarcely looked at it because I was in a hurry.
February 10.
I have seen that miniature again, and it is hideous. On the other hand, I have bought a portrait of Queen Marie Leczinska after Coypel, evidently painted in his atelier. I bought it for the value of the frame; as it is one of those portraits that queens give to cities or great personages, though it is but a copy, I thought it would decorate a salon.
I am more inert than I can tell you; I work badly, without inspiration, without taste, without courage; my life, my soul, and all my forces are elsewhere. I have asked Gautier to bring me an artist named Chenavard, a friend of La Belgiojoso, whom I know but whose address is unknown to me, to enlighten me as to the value of Marie Leczinska’s portrait, because, like Louis XIV., “I don’t choose to deceive myself.”
February 11.
Much tramping, much fatigue, without result. M. F... has fallen dangerously ill, and that delays my business. You see, dear beloved countess, that I am not the master of this liquidation; the least effort would be punished; I must wait like a hunter on the watch. It is dreadful! I assure you that the harassment of my affairs, joined to that of my soul (which is tortured by absence as one is, they say, by remorse) affects my poor brain powerfully. Without vanity, I can certify to you that I am wonderful; I rise every night, I think of you, I write to you, and stay so for two hours before I am able to begin to work. Then I continue to write, but for you, and not, as I ought, for the public. Or if by a miracle it is not you of whom I am thinking, it is about one of the houses offered to me, its furnishing, its arrangement, and the thousand details of my business; for every affair of a thousand francs exacts as much care as a matter of a hundred thousand. Then I re-read your dear letters, I look at my proofs, and I reason with myself. The day dawns, and I have done nothing. I tell myself that I am a monster, that to be truly worthy of you I must forget you and girt my loins with the labourer’s cord; I say insults to myself; I grasp that ivory Daffinger; I think you there; I dream—and I waken to remorse for having dreamed instead of working.
Madame de Girardin writes to ask me to go and see her. There is to be a lady present, daughter or grand-daughter of Sheridan, who desires to see me. I shall go in my grand costume of fine manners.
February 12.
I went to bed this morning, my hours upset! and all for a tiresome Englishwoman who stared at me through an eyeglass as she might at an actor. Madame de Girardin, charming in a small company, is, it must be admitted, a less agreeable mistress of a house at great receptions. She belies her origin by her talent; but when her talent is not to the fore she becomes once more the daughter of her mother; that is to say, bourgeoise and Gay pur sang. The Duc de Guiche, who has given in his allegiance, was there; he exerted himself, and was almost witty, which I had doubted. The memory of Madame Kalergi, whom I never knew, or even saw, as you know, pursued me. Admiral de la Susse described the regrets of the Baden society that I did not accept the invitations of that beautiful lady, but confined myself to a certain family who had confiscated me to their own profit. From that moment I became of a most stupendous stupidity; so that Madame de Girardin whispered to me, “What is the matter with you this evening?” To which I answered, “Your Englishwoman has gone to my heart.” At which she laughed and I kept the secret of my melancholy—I saw once more the scenery of Baden, the Hôtel du Cerf, the promenades, etc. Ah! how you absorb me! It cannot be expressed; a word a nothing, brings me back to you.
Dear countess, we must console that poor Georges. I will find a copy of the Dejean catalogue; it is very rare, the whole edition having been burned in the fire of the rue Pot-de-Fer (when the “Contes Drolatiques” were destroyed). I have found a work the title of which you will find on the sheet which envelops this letter. Write me whether Georges knows of it. It is the finest iconography of coleopteras in existence. Only seven copies remain; the blocks are planed and that ends it. If he wants the work I will bring it to him with his insects and the Dejean. In wandering about, Saturday, I found two vases (Restoration) on which were painted, for some entomologist no doubt, the prettiest insects in the world. They are the work of an artist and must have cost a great deal. Georges will like them, I know, and I shall return him painted pots for painted pots. Perhaps these vases were a gift to Latreille; for no one, I think, would have done such conscientious work unless for some great entomological celebrity. It is a real trouvaille, a chance such as I never had before. No one knows what Paris is; with time and patience, everything can be found here, even at a bargain. Just now I am negotiating for the purchase of a chandelier which must have come from the palace of some Emperor of Germany, because it is surmounted by the double-headed eagle. It is a Flemish chandelier and came from Brussels no doubt before the Revolution; it weighs two hundred pounds and is of brass; I have bought it for the intrinsic value of the metal—four hundred and fifty francs. I intend it for my dining-room, which will be in the same style. I see you alarmed by this communication; but do not be anxious; no debts are incurred; I am obeying your sovereign orders. Lirette will be paid as you intend, and Froment-Meurice also. As to my personal affairs, the liquidation has more money than it needs. Froment-Meurice is really an impossible jeweller. Here it is February 17th, and the figure of Nature is not yet finished. He says it is still in the hands of the chaser. He himself is wholly absorbed in a toilet-set for the Duchess of Lucca.
February 18.
I have received the letter in which you tell me that Georges gets better and better, and that he had come to see you at the Villa Reale. This good letter shows me that calmness is restored to your heart and mind, because you have returned to your habit of writing every evening when your good friendship battles with sleep, often vanquished to my profit. A strange thing! there are in this long letter that I am about to carry to the post things that reply to the questions in yours! This affinity with each other brings tears to my eyes. How I love your letters! how true they are! In reading them I seem to hear you speak; they are indeed a balm to all my wounds. I beg of you do not go to Rome, I repeat it; the journey might be fatal to Georges; he is very delicate. I was like that at his age; but I never thought of myself, and others cared still less for me.
I am not working as much as I ought. You do right to tell me so; believe that I blame myself harshly. “The days are going,” as you say; but you do not know the labyrinth through which my liquidation is leading me; you are ignorant of the incessant tramps which upset all my days, and often for sums not more than a hundred francs. My tranquillity means owning property, settlement in a home, and respect. Therefore I avow that even if I incur your blame (to me so terrible) I must put my liquidation before my literary work.
I am glad that the engraving and device of your armed knight pleased you. No one helped your servitor; pray believe that; the Latin is my own property: Virens sequar and Fulge, vivam, are worthy of the E inscribed on the star.
I have the portrait of Queen Marie Leczinska. It is not by Coypel, but was done in his atelier by a pupil, either Lancret or another, as you please. One must be a connoisseur not to think it a Coypel. The portrait has been engraved, and I shall lose nothing on it, Chenavard says.
I met Koref, who had the impudence to tell me he had been talking of me to one of your friends in the most eulogistic terms. I wish you could have seen me look at him as I said, “I do not doubt it.” He left me instantly.
Passy, March, 1846.1
Dear countess, the person who will take to you this letter is a friend of mine, M. Schnetz, the painter of the beautiful picture of the “Madonna’s Vow,” which is in Saint-Roch. He is the Director of the French School of Art in Rome, and I profit by his kindness to send you news from me to meet you on your arrival in Rome.
As M. Nacquart prophesied, my courage has been rewarded; to-day I can walk [he had been thrown from a carriage], and all my preparations for my journey are made. My place is booked in the mail-cart for Lyon; for the Marseille’s post service carries so many letters that letters in my person are turned out of the mail-cart by the other kind.
I must wear my bandages for another month; but nothing prevents me from seeing Rome with you, or rather you with Rome. Oh! it was God who led you to Naples, you and yours, more than you think perhaps. Now, the wisest thing you can do is to stay in Rome, and not continue your projected journey until you have received good news from the Ukraine; for they say that those provinces are in a state of disquieting fermentation; I even hear talk of a general insurrection. Eleven hundred seigneurs and land-owners in Galicia have been murdered by their peasantry, whom they were endeavouring to draw into rebellion against their sovereign, the Emperor of Austria. The Austrians are to-day in retreat (you will see that in the “Débats”). The revolt, or the insurrection, has been simultaneous throughout the former Poland—Prussian, Austrian, and Russian; the movement is communistic. I tremble for your cousin L.... The insurgents, they tell me, are occupying Piotrkov. This is really frightful; no quarter is given on either side; priests, women, children, old men, all are in arms. Bands of ten thousand starving Poles have thrown themselves from Russian Poland into Prussia (where the famine began), and the Prussians are thrusting them back, as if infected with the plague, by a cordon of troops. Every one here foresees nothing but evil for that unfortunate nation; but the surprise is that Galicia, which seemed to be so well governed, so happy even, under the Austrian sceptre, should have revolted in this untimely manner. Chlopiçki, whom they wished to put at the head of the movement, refused. He has retired into Prussia, saying that he would blow his brains out sooner than command such a folly. All sensible people groan over it. They say that Lithuania and the provinces in the west of Russia will rise also, on account of the recruiting for the Caucasus. What disasters for the future of Europe must we not fear, with these populations at a pitch of chronic insanity! And the governments, which admit that they are already exhausted, will they be able to repress and control them?
How fortunate that you are in Rome! for even you, so wise and so intelligent, have jealous and malevolent people about you over there. Besides, no one knows what might happen if you were caught between the insurgents and the troops. The “Gazette de Cologne” has published, under Prussian censure, an article which speaks of the blindness of the governments in the matter of Poland, and dwells on the fact that nationalities cannot perish. (Don’t speak of this to any one.) I hope nothing unfortunate will happen to Countess Mniszech; but Georges must be very uneasy about his mother, for the whole of Galicia is expected to rise. They say that Hungary, hitherto so faithful, is also in arms.
You can form no idea of my happiness ever since my place was booked in the Lyon mail. I am now making all my arrangements.
I have given Lirette the money you gave me for her. I went to the convent myself, though still ill. Here’s a strange thing! She has been requested by Abbé L... to send to Petersburg an affidavit declaring that neither he, the abbé, nor you had endeavoured to dissuade her from entering a convent, and affirming that she did not possess forty roubles and consequently had never given that sum to the convent. What does all that mean? I hope they will permit her to write, and that I shall bring you a long letter from her.
Take care of yourself, and do not forget to let me know where you are in Rome, addressing your letter to “M. Lysimaque, at the French Consulate, Civita-Vecchia, for M. de Balzac;” and try to find me a niche not far from you, if it is only a kennel. I hope my preceding letter has reached you through the Rothschilds.
What do you think of M. de Custine, who offered me a letter of introduction to Prince George (Michel Angelo)? He did not remember the prince’s relationship to you! I take such part in your interests and those of your dear child that I tremble every morning as I open the newspapers. Mon Dieu! what anxiety when I think of the state in which your affairs are! You must not think of returning there till all is quiet once more.
Without adieu this time, but à bientôt.2
To Madame Laure Surville, Paris.
Rome, the Eternal City, April, 1846.
My dear Laure, I feel in advance the pleasure you will enjoy in thinking that your brother has put his hand to the pen in the city of the Cæsars, popes, and others. Give you a description of it?—I could not do it. Read Lamennais (“Affaires de Rome”) and you will know nearly as much as he or I. I have been received with distinction by our Holy Father; and you must tell my mother that in prostrating myself at the feet of the father of all faithful people, whose hierarchical slipper was kissed by me in company with a podestat d’Avignone (a hideous mayor from the Vaucluse district, who claimed to be his former subject), I thought of her, and I am bringing her back a little chaplet prepared by Leo XII. much shorter to recite than the old one. It is called La Corona, and is blessed by his present Holiness.
I have seen all Rome from A to Z. The illumination of the dome of St. Peter’s on Easter-Eve is alone worth the journey; but as the same might be said of the benediction given urbi et orbi, Saint Peter’s itself, the Vatican, the ruins, etc., etc., my journey really counts as ten journeys.
I am so content in Rome that I am thinking of passing nearly the whole of next winter here, for I want to know everything about it. As there are three hundred churches, you can imagine that I have only been to see the principal ones. Saint Peter’s surpasses all that one expects, but through reflection. I climbed to the ball above which is the cross. It would take a week to tell of Saint Peter’s. Imagine that your house could easily be put into the cornice of one of the flat double-columns of the interior third tier of the dome. Nothing could surpass the Miserere of the choir, which is so superior to the choir of the Sistina that I preferred to listen twice to that of Saint Peter’s: the first time, it was the music of angels (Guglielmi); the second time it was learned music (Fioravanti), which I thought bad, though the execution was perfect.
Truly, everybody should lay by money and go once in his life to Rome, or he will know nothing of antiquity, architecture, splendour, and the impossible realized. Rome, in spite of the short time I have stayed here, will always be one of the grandest and most beautiful memories of my life.... I sail on the 22nd for Genoa, and shall go from there as quickly as possible to Paris.
Passy, June 14, 1846.1
Dear countess, I find in the “Presse” of yesterday an article sent from Russia, which seems to me so disquieting that I send it to you. To-morrow I will send you the “Presse” and the “Débats.” You will receive them for one month.
I rise at half-past three, not earlier, though I ought to be up at two. Sleep will not come as it should at seven in the evening, on account of the heat. It is now half-past four, and I have not yet written a line!
Adieu for to-day, till to-morrow. M. F... is coming to see me to-day, and I shall have to talk business after working all night.
The Russian article in the “Presse” points to very serious matters. I believe in the spoliation of the land-owners by the government; my uneasiness about your interests is extreme. Will your children have time? What does the article mean? Tell me fully what you think about it. It seems to me to be written by some one who feigns ignorance on the subject.
June 15.
Yesterday I wrote eight pages; the heat was so intense that I put myself into a cold water bath. M. F... came to see me, and I did not go to bed till half-past seven. But I had to be waked out of my first sleep, for at half-past nine the carriers brought the “Adam and Eve” and the “Saint Peter,” and my presence was necessary. The concierge had paid sixty francs too much, and I had to explain the error. The discussions as to this lasted till half-past eleven, and I did not get to sleep again till midnight. I had nothing to pay with but a thousand-franc note, for which it was difficult at that hour to get change; and besides, I opened the packages to amuse M. F. and an artist who was with us. The Natoire is charming, signed and authentic. But Holbein’s Saint Peter was held to be sublime. The artist, who is a fine connoisseur, said that at public sale it ought to bring three thousand francs.
Now I have paid out one thousand and forty francs. I have only the cases from Rome and the one from Geneva to receive, which will not be more together than five hundred francs, and a third from Genoa, five hundred more. So that leaves me still fifteen hundred francs, and the Chemin du Nord pays a dividend in July; therefore, you see, I am not at all embarrassed.
My situation is even better than I thought. With ten thousand francs all will be brought to an end by M. F..., and my principal creditors perfectly agree to the broad manner in which I am settling my accounts with them.
I can easily suffice to pay all. My health is excellent, and my talent—oh! I have recovered it in all its bloom. My various treaties are to be concluded this week.
Write me the time when you will permit me to come and see you again, so that I may get myself in readiness.
Among the serious paintings that I have in my study, it must be owned that the Natoire [Adam and Eve] looks a little too mincing. I hope to sell that false Breughel for five hundred francs, and that will pay for Genoa, while returning me the cost of the picture.
Here is what I am now going to write: “L’Histoire des Parents pauvres,” consisting of “Le Bonhomme Pons”1 (which will make two or three folios of La Comédie Humaine) and “La Cousine Bette” which will make sixteen; also “Les Méfaits d’un Procureur-du-roi,” making six more; in all, twenty-five folios, or twenty thousand francs, newspapers and publishers combined; then, to conclude all, “Les Paysans.” All that surpasses my payments. I have besides, for this winter, “Les Petits Bourgeois,” and the regulating of La Comédie Humaine; also the reprinting of the “Contes Drolatiques” and my comedy. I shall thus have acquired, I think, the right to travel a little. I shall have no debts, and a little house of my own.
But much work is still necessary; if I do eight pages to-day that will be a good deal, for the weather seems threatening to be hotter than ever. I am now going to do a number of errands in Paris, and send you the “Presse” and the “Débats.” The Chemin du Nord will not be in full activity for three weeks yet, and that is the cause of the fall in stock which unnecessarily disturbs you. I have so much hope in it that, had I the money, I would again buy into it. The great banking-houses are not anxious, for they are buying it. If the railway has a hundred thousand travellers in July, there will be a rise of two hundred francs; for the funds are placed at ten per cent. I should like to keep five or six hundred francs in the bank so as to buy thirty-five more shares—in case they fall lower, be it understood.
No news from Rome. But I am not uneasy; I am in a phase of hope and confidence which surprises myself; for nothing is really changed in my position; yet I feel, I don’t know how or why, less sad, less discouraged than usual. It is as if currents, waves, floods of affection came at moments through my heart for you; it seems to me to be a sympathetic effect between us, and as if at that moment you were thinking of me. You are indeed the principle of the new courage and talent that I feel within me; if I strive to be free and esteemed, it is for you. The world is nothing to me; I do not care for it. I seek to pay all, to make my place clean, to have a home that is dignified and suitable. I devote myself to that result, so often preached to me by you, and the sense of the good I do for the future represses for the moment the pain of an absence which your ideas consider necessary. Moreover, the subjects I am now to write of please me, and can be done with extreme rapidity. The publishing business is at this moment in a bad state. This morning I am going to see Véron, Furne, and Charpentier; but to-day is Monday, and to-morrow is the inauguration of the Chemin de fer du Nord; so it is possible I may postpone these visits till the day after.
June 16.
It is now a week since I returned from Tours and I have only a dozen pages done, when I ought to have many more. But, as you know, one does not easily resume either hours of work or the faculty of working. Every day I go out for two hours to attend to business. I have not yet seen Émile de Girardin, or Véron, or M. Deshayes.
M. Buquet has sent me a great many insects; show the list of them to Georges, and send it back to me when he has chosen those he wants. Tell him to mark in pencil against them. Tell him also how keenly and deeply I have felt for his misfortune [the death of his father]. And this is very sincere; for there are but you three in whom I take an interest in this world. The others are not worth naming; and it is that I may no longer be shackled, but wholly a thing all yours, that I throw myself up to my chin into work. I am now finishing “Les Paysans” and “Les Petits Bourgeois,” and beginning to invent “Le Vieux Musicien” [“Cousin Pons”] and “La Cousine Bette.”
Those four works will pay my last debts, and this winter “L’Éducation du Prince” and “La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin” will give me the first money which will be really mine, and the beginning of my fortune. The times require that I should do two or three masterly works to overthrow the false gods of our bastard literature, and prove that I am younger, fresher, more fruitful than ever.
The “Vieux Musicien” is a poor relation, crushed by insults and humiliations, full of heart, forgiving all, and avenging himself by benefactions. “La Cousine Bette” is another poor relation, overwhelmed by insults and humiliations, living in the homes of three or four families, and meditating vengeance for her bruised self-love and her wounded vanity. These two histories with that of “Pierrette” constitute the “Histoire des Parents pauvres.” I shall try to put “Le Vieux Musicien” into the “Semaine,” “La Cousine Bette” into the “Constitutionnel,” at the same time that “Les Paysans” appears, and that the “Débats” prints “Les Petits Bourgeois.”
I will send my letters Thursdays and Sundays; next Sunday you will receive a packet. On that day I shall have begun “La Cousine Bette,” and “Les Paysans” will be in full blast. Bertin does not want “Les Petits Bourgeois” till next September. No, to be far from you now is to be crucified daily. If you only knew under what heat I am working you would pity me. May your letters give me courage and hope. Au revoir and à bientôt, I trust.
Passy, July 13, 1846.
Dear countess, a disagreeable thing has happened to me which will take much time; a creditor to satisfy for a very small sum; but the course he is taking is dangerous for me, and will annoy me much and necessitate a multitude of steps. You see, the end of liquidations is always difficult; it is not enough to have the money, the settlement must be negotiated. That is what crushes me and hinders my work. This new creditor will take a whole week of my time. I can’t help it. M. F... is in Brussels, pursuing a bankrupt. Besides, the creditor in question refuses an intermediary, and insists on treating with me. When this is over I will tell you what he has done to me. It is written above that I shall know all the horrors of debt.
July 14.
I have nothing new to tell you, except that I am much fatigued. I have passed the night in hunting for receipted bills and memoranda. It is an excessive bore. Buisson has returned; we are not agreed as to figures. If I do not settle this affair now it will become onerous in the future and more difficult to terminate. I am fully aware that I must attend to my liquidation before all else. I am really frightened to see very honest men asking in good faith for money that has already been paid to them and become stupefied when they have their own receipts before their eyes. M. Picard, my lawyer, says it happens every day.
You have no idea what a hunted hare’s life I have led from 1836 to 1846. The state of my papers expresses it in a lamentable fashion; it is enough to break one’s heart! It will take six months at least to put them in order. In the hurry of my various movings the business papers have been piled up without care, stuffed into boxes, twisted, pressed, crushed, torn. I need a vast library with numerous drawers in which to classify and put them away. Space is wanting here; I smother. The furniture, which is fine, is getting spoiled; a house is a necessity as urgent as the payment of my debts. I am really as much hurried as I was in 1837, and it is an inexplicable miracle, to me how I ever did those sixteen volumes of La Comédie Humaine between 1841 and 1846.
Two years of calmness and tranquillity in a home like the Beaujon house are absolutely necessary to heal my soul after sixteen years of successive catastrophes. I feel, I do assure you, very weary of this incessant struggle, as keen to-day in paying my last debts as when it concerned the total of them. And always my crushing literary labour in the midst of these worrying affairs! Were it not for the new causes of courage which have come into my heart, I should, like that shipwrecked man whose strength surmounted for one whole day the fury of the seas, succumb to waves less rough and gentler within sight of port. To be torn perpetually from calmness and works of the mind by vexations and worries that drive ordinary men mad—is that living, I ask you?
No, I have not lived in these last years, except at Dresden, Carnstadt, Baden, Rome, or in travelling. Thanks be to you, O dear and tender consoling angel, who alone have poured into my desolate life some drops of pure happiness, that marvellous oil which does at times give courage and vigour to the fainting wrestler. That alone should open to you the gates of paradise, if indeed, you have any sins with which to reproach yourself—you, wife so perfect, mother so devoted, friend so kind and compassionate. It is a great and very noble mission to console those who have found no consolation upon earth. I have, in the treasure of your letters, in the still greater treasure of my recollections, in the grateful and constant thought of the good you have done to my soul by your counsel and your example, a sovereign remedy against all misfortunes; and I bless you very often, my dear and beneficent star, in the silence of night and in the worst of my troubles. May that blessing, which looks to God as the Author of all good, reach you often. Try to hear it sometimes in the murmuring sounds that whisper in the soul though we know not whence they come. My God! without you, where should I be!
With what ever increasing gratitude do I look at the casket in which are your letters, those treasures of intelligence, and kindness, thinking how you have ever been to me a beneficent friend, gentle and kind, without failure or deception of any sort, without reproaches or regrets—like a spring ever flowing, so that, even now, in the midst of your personal anxieties, you are still concerned for me, for my literary and financial interests, for my future, in short!—
Ah! how well I comprehend the tears shed by Teano when the memory of Caliste came back too powerfully to his sickened heart! It is a noble thing, admit it, the sacred chrism of tears shed on a head, on a brow irreproachable by a poor man who adores them and says, “Would that I could love you more!”
July 15.
Yesterday the affair of that creditor took my whole day. I also went to fetch my proofs at the “Constitutionnel.” Alas! here it is July 15, and it is doubtful if by the 31st I can have finished “Les Parents pauvres.” “Les Paysans” will take August and September; especially with the journey I am to make [that to Wiesbaden]. There’s the naked truth; but if “Les Paysans” bring twenty-five thousand francs, that will be thirty-five thousand in four or five months; that’s a great deal. When I am paid for La Comédie Humaine, you see, my liquidation will be well advanced; so I shall put off all solution till the month of November. The Beaujon house will not be free till then; then I shall know what to expect from the Chemin du Nord and from myself. I have my apartment here till August 1; so I must be patient, work, and liquidate. To-day I have to go again to the Palais de Justice about the affair of that creditor; it is a day lost. I will write you another line to-night before dinner. I have all my proofs to put in order.
July 16.
Yesterday I came in late and too tired to write you the promised line; moreover, I found the picture restorer waiting for me. He is the cleverest of his trade in Paris; a former pupil of David and of Gros; he is a great connoisseur. He thinks “Le Jugement de Paris” superb, and attributes it to Giorgione. He accepts the “Chevalier de Malte” for a Sebastian del Piombo; he thinks it a very fine thing, and deplores the accident to the Bronzino, which he considers a work of the first order; the hand especially enchanted him. He will restore them all, and also the flower-picture, which has been badly cleaned. He is a very good little man, much of a connoisseur, and has promised me his help on all occasions. He is to come back Saturday and make the toilet of the “Chevalier de Malte,” supposed to have a layer of church grease upon him,—the smoke of candles and other disagreeable ecclesiastical glaze.
You see, dear countess, what Paris is. I sent for the little man in question two weeks ago and it has taken him that time to get here. And my frames! ordered a month ago and not yet begun. That is Paris! it needs time and will to get the simplest and most trifling things; imagine therefore what is needed for serious matters. “La Femme” by Mireveldt, which you gave me, my restorer considered an admirable thing, a real marvel. He consoled me for my false Breughel, and did not despise it as Chenavard did. But no matter, I don’t wish to keep it, nor the landscape by Krug-Miville, nor “Les Sorciers.” I want good things or none.
Now just imagine that a pretended creditor,—I have his receipts,—a mechanician, took an idea to complain of me at the office of the procureur-du-roi, and I was troubled by a letter requesting me to go there to answer a complaint; I! that is telling you all. I could not understand what it meant; I was too sure of myself to be uneasy; but I feared the malignancy of the newspapers, for I know of what they are capable when it concerns me. You remember that story of Brussels in 1843. However, yesterday at half-past three, the substitute-procureur gave my pretended creditor a good lecture, and showed him his own receipt. He is a bad man, the accomplice of servants I had at Les Jardies; and they no doubt plotted this fine thing among them. I owe him nothing but some unimportant costs, for which he may try to sue me. You see, of course, I can easily pay him those fifty francs (at the most), but I want to give him a lesson and not pay him on account of his complaint, for others might try the same means. I have a project of making him pay five hundred francs to get his fifty. It is vengeance; but I think it is permissible in such a case.
I am going valiantly to work, and with what ardour! I have now spent two whole nights on “Les Parents pauvres.” I think it will be really a fine work, extraordinary among those with which I am most satisfied. You shall see. You know it is dedicated to our dear Teano, and I want it to be worthy of him.
It is seven in the morning; I have been at my proofs for three hours. It is very arduous, for this history is something between “César Birotteau” and the “Interdiction.” The question is how to give interest to a poor and simple-minded man, an old man. I have just been reading the papers. “L’Époque” has passed over, skipped, forgotten to print the twenty finest lines in Esther’s letter to Lucien. I am in despair because of you. I must get them replaced if possible.
You ought to be pleased with Méry’s novel; it is enchanting! What wit the fellow has! Too much, perhaps; it is like a shopful of crystals. He breakfasts with me to-day, and we shall regale ourselves by talking of you. I want also to communicate to him the idea of my farce on the army, and propose to him to write it between us for Frédérick.
Must I bid you adieu, dear valiant soul, sister of my soul. I would I could send you back the good you do me from those heights where you shine, but that is impossible: I am a man, and you are an angel; I can only equal myself to you by the reflection of your intelligence, so powerful, yet at the same time so simple and so candid; to you, in whom all gracious details attract yet without detriment to the ensemble which charms and binds for life. If I did not fear to displease you I could go on thus forever; but if I wish to satisfy you I must work, work on, work ever. Besides, is not that being occupied with you? So I leave you for my “Parents pauvres,” and I hope you will reward me by one of those exquisite letters of which you alone possess the secret.
Passy, July 17, 1846.
Yesterday, dear countess, I had Bertin1 to breakfast, which was delicate, fine, superfine, I’ll answer for it. He was charming, and he stayed a long time, talking and looking at my pictures and bric-à-brac. My whole day was taken up, or very nearly; and I profited by what remained of it to go and see Véron, whom I did not find, and Gavault on business. I dine to-day with Madame de Girardin; I want to confer with her husband about “Les Paysans.” You will receive three newspapers: the “Presse,” “Débats,” and “Époque.” I wish also to make you read an Opposition journal.
Bertin was stupefied at my riches. He thought that tête-à-tête of old Sèvres delicious; and declared I could sell my beautiful Chinese porcelain service for three or four thousand francs. He told me he had given commissions to one of the cleverest and most influential men of our embassy to China; he wanted fine vases of old porcelain, but was told there was nothing now to be bought in China but the modern. Old china is all bought up by the mandarins, the court, and the rich; and the prices are ten times higher than ours in Paris. All their admirable productions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are now in Europe. There is nothing left in Nankin or in Canton, and nothing in the interior of the Empire, except what belongs to the emperor and private persons.
I am notified that the pictures from Rome will be here in five or six days, and the picture from Heidelberg in three or four. They were very reasonable in Rome. I had only to pay twenty-five Roman crowns in duties (about one hundred and fifty francs), but the total expense is more than three hundred. So if the other Italian pictures arrive, what will become of me? I must make preparations, for I have received no letter from the consul-general, which seems to me ominous.
I asked Bertin to send you the beginning of Charles de Bernard’s novel. Tell me if you have received all, and whether you are satisfied. I re-read yesterday, according to your sovereign orders, “L’Instruction criminelle.” You are right, as usual; it is a fine thing.
Your semi-compatriot Walewski is to marry, they say, Mademoiselle Ricci, grand-daughter of Stanislas Poniatowski, and descendant of Macchiavelli through the women. She has, I am told, a hundred thousand francs as dot, and three hundred thousand in expectation. Walewski was madly in love with her, and, in his quality of dandy he found no other way of proving it to her than to marry her. What will become of the son of the great man, le grand Colonna Walewski with such a poor little civil list?
I leave you to return to my old musician. I am very well; my head is full of ideas; I work easily, for I have the hope of going to see you at Kreuznach as soon as I have finished my three volumes: there’s the secret of my courage.
July 18.
No letters, dear countess! that is not nice of you. Here I am very uneasy, very much worried, not to say quite discouraged. It is midday; I got back at one in the morning from Madame de Girardin’s. The dinner was given for a Madame de Hahn, a famous German actress, whom a gentleman endowed with fifty thousand francs a year withdrew from the stage and married, in spite of all the petty magnates of his family and caste. Madame de Girardin had her two great men, Hugo and Lamartine, the two Germans, husband and wife, Dr. Cabarrus and his daughter (the doctor is the son of Ouvrard and Madame de Tallien, and a friend from childhood of Émile de Girardin), and your servant. The dinner was over by ten o’clock. At the end of a political disquisition by Hugo I let myself go to an improvisation in which I fought him and beat him, with some success I do assure you. Lamartine seemed charmed and thanked me effusively. He wants me more than ever to go to the Chamber; but do not be anxious, I will never cross the threshold of mine to enter there.
I won Lamartine by my appreciation of his last speech (on Syrian affairs); I was sincere, as I always am, for, truly, the speech was magnificent from end to end. Lamartine has been very great, very dazzling during this session. But what destruction from the physical point of view! That man of fifty-six looks to be fully eighty; he is destroyed, ended; he has but a few years of life in him; he is consumed by ambition, and worn-out by the bad state of his pecuniary affairs. Émile de Girardin went off to the Chamber, so I had no chance to speak of “Les Paysans;” it must be for another time. As to Véron, he takes my novel of “La Cousine Bette;” but we have not yet agreed as to price and quantity. I am expecting the editor of “La Semaine” M. Hippolyte Castille. Beside “Les Paysans” to finish, I have eighteen more folios to do for La Comédie Humaine.
July 19.
I went to bed at half-past six last evening and slept the deepest sleep, in spite of the 32 degrees of heat which we have here. I am now ready to work from two to ten in the morning, when Dubochet and Furne are to breakfast with me. We are to have a conference about the Comédie Humaine, and God knows what will come of it; new griefs and worries perhaps! So I shall count only on my work and what I earn from the newspapers for my financial solutions. If I spend the whole of the month of August in doing “Les Paysans,” Véron must have the manuscript of “La Cousine Bette” the first days of the same month. I shall correct “Cousine Bette” while I do “Les Paysans.”
I wish that all my cases were unpacked, and all my beautiful things visible; for the anxiety to know in what state they are reacts upon me too vehemently, especially in the state of irritation I am in from a continued fever of inspiration and insomnia. I hope to have finished “Le Vieux Musicien” on Monday, by rising daily at half-past one in the morning, as I did to-day, being quite re-established in my working hours. I will tell you to-morrow how many pages I have done to-day; it must be twelve to satisfy me.
July 20, 1846.
I received your letter yesterday at half-past six o’clock and I could not answer then, for I had to dine, and after dinner Cailleux (to whom I had written about the furniture, the Salomon de Caux, etc., and about the portraits of the king and Madame Adélaïde, which are at Geneva) chose the hour between eight and nine to come and see my collection. I had scarcely time to read your letter in the street, and none in which to answer it.
“Le Vieux Musicien,” that novel of fifty sheets, will be finished Tuesday. Wednesday I take up the other part of “Les Parents pauvres.” This morning I treat with Méry and an editor of “Le Messager.” In spite of the intolerable heat (30 degrees at nine in the morning!) my activity has never been more violent or my work more desperate; I am determined to pay integrally the sum total of my debts and win my independence and peace.
I am very well satisfied with “Le Vieux Musicien;” but “La Cousine Bette” is only a formless sketch; it is not yet a question of perfecting it; much has still to be invented.
Well, I must go and do the amount of “copy” I ought to do every morning. I send you my letters very regularly twice a week, but your answers are, alas! short and rare. Oh! I entreat you, on my knees, be less miserly of letters and details; scold me, tell me disagreeable things, but write me! the sight of your pretty little writing softens the bitterness of your wrath, which is never very terrible; for no matter how much you are displeased or even wounded, the angel of peace and mildness, who pardons and does not punish, is always in you.
Ballard, an editor of the “Messager,” and Méry came to breakfast with me this morning. I need the “Messager;” for thirty thousand francs are not drawn too easily out of the well of the Parisian press. It is needful to have the support in the “Débats” of Bertin, in the “Constitutionnel” of Véron, in the “Presse” of de Girardin, in the “Messager” of the Minister of the Interior, in the “Musée des Familles” of Picquée. I have also some other newspapers without any leading personal influence. Now these articles are more difficult than you think; they are all invention, labour, drama; the payment is the object. As for the publishing of books, that is dying out, they say. The Public is going to sleep; it is necessary to wake up that bored despot by things that interest and amuse him. Just now, I am very well content with my “Vieux Musicien.” When you read this letter it will be finished, for I have now reached the thirty-fourth sheet, and there are but forty-eight. Next week I shall work at “La Cousine Bette” for the “Constitutionnel;” and as soon as those two manuscripts are delivered to the compositors I shall finish “Les Paysans.” In April I shall do “Les Méfaits d’un procureur-du-roi;” and this coming winter “Les Petits Bourgeois” and “L’Éducation du Prince.” Will not this have been a well-employed year, specially when one considers a moving like mine? I am now searching in the faubourg Saint-Germain, or the rue Royale, for a house.
And now let me beg of you to drive away all useless and unwholesome reflections; do not be sad, do not even be pensive; be what you always are, the providence and joy of your home; be its mind, its heart, its blessing at all moments; a line of sadness, a word of anxiety in your letters gives me such pain. I want you happy; that is my special ambition; and my will is so strong in all which concerns you that I do not doubt its success in this. There is not a day or a moment in my life when I would not fling myself into a gulf to save you from care. That is not a form of speech, it is a sentiment of the heart, deep and true, and you have always seen it manifested in acts when occasion offered; what has been done in the past will not fail you in the future.
Write me often and gaily, and do not tell me you are “obsessed” as an excuse; I am obsessed, too, by business, work, tramping; compare the obsession of the world with yours; yet I write to you every day as one makes one’s prayer on rising; but this is because you are my whole life, you are my very soul, and the slightest, vaguest of your depressions casts its shadow upon me. Continue to relate to me your life and all its impressions; hide nothing from me; tell me all,—the good, the bad, and even the involuntary thoughts.
C... came to see me yesterday; he is bitterly dull; I am alarmed when I see that the king takes him and M. Fontaine with him five times out of ten wherever he goes. The king commits the same fault that Napoleon committed; that is, in wishing to be all himself. There comes a day when empires perish because the man they rest on perishes or neglects to supply his substitute. What is certain is that the peace and tranquillity of Europe hang upon a thread, and that thread is the life of an old man of seventy-six.
You speak of complications in your affairs; what are they? But, as you say, we must trust in Providence, for all is danger when we sound the earth beneath us. I acknowledge that nothing surprises me more than to see you so troubled about things that you cannot change, you, whom I have always seen so submissive to the divine will, you, who have always walked straight before you without looking to one side or to the other, and still less behind you, where the past like a corpse is buried. Why not let yourself be led by the hand of God through the world and through life as you have done hitherto, advancing towards the future with that serenity, that calmness, that confidence, which a faith like yours should inspire? I must admit that in this fact of seeing my star which shines with so pure a lustre thus concerned about material interests there is something, I know not what, that I do not like and which makes me suffer. You have already given too much of your time and your beautiful youth. In spite of your instincts and your repugnances, you have been mastered by necessity, the welfare of your child, and your sense of duty. Now that you have fulfilled with such scrupulous and meritorious thoroughness your obligations to your adorable daughter, who understands so well all that she owes to you, and now that you have established her according to the choice of her heart and in accordance with your own ideas and sympathies, you have nothing further to do than to let yourself rest in that quietude of repose which you have so fully earned, giving the burden of business affairs into the hands of your children, who will continue the work of your patient and laborious administration. What can you fear for them, so wise, so enlightened, so sensible, so perfectly united, so exactly suited to each other? Why foresee events that are hostile to their safety?—why fear catastrophes which, I like to believe, will never happen? By spending your strength in creating imaginary dangers you will have none to defend you against real danger—should any ever threaten you, which I do not believe will happen.
Doesn’t it seem to you rather strange and odd—-you who have so often consoled and sustained me in my troubles and strengthened my beliefs—that I should insolently take my turn in daring to give you counsel, I who have constant and incessant need of being sustained, guided, and sometimes scolded by your high wisdom?
I don’t know if you can decipher this shorthand scribbling in haste, which, according to our agreement, I do not take the trouble to read over.
Be very tranquil on the subject of nostalgia; I have forbidden my heart to have any more; it is crushed by toil. Do the same with your dark ideas; disperse them by confiding them to me and permitting me to combat them.
Adieu for to-day; to-morrow the continuation of this scribbled conversation. My tenderest regards to your dear children; you know well what is in my heart to both of them. Adieu and au revoir.
Passy, July 27, 1846.
I hope my wandering and vagabond troupe will not be alarmed by a thing which will bring us nearer to each other. For the last five days I have not felt well, and this morning I went to see my doctor, who told me an epidemic of severe cholerine was raging, due to the excessive heat we are suffering at this moment; he has prescribed a strict diet, and gum-water to drink. I intend, therefore, to rest myself by going to meet you at Kreuznach and spending three or four days with you if the mail-cart permits. This illness will be absolutely nothing, and therefore do not disturb yourself about it; but if not taken in time it might develop into a case of sporadic cholera. I have given up fruits, which I ate in abundance. I had no strength, I slept incessantly, and had to give up all work.
It is probable that I shall buy the Beaujon house. I will bring you the plan of it. In August and September they are to make the repairs, put in the heaters and do the painting. In October the upholsterer will do his work, and in November I can move in. If my affairs go well, I shall have a year to buy a bit of adjoining ground for a greenhouse and the indispensable stable and coach-house. Then, perhaps, I shall stay in this species of chartreuse for the rest of my days, “the world forgetting, by the world forgot,” as Chénier says.
Ah! dear luminous and sovereign star, this time last year we were at Bourges when posting; but you were ill and sad, even while seeing those beautiful things. To suffer amid happiness, that is my lot; for am I not happy in loving you?—yet I suffer here, when I know you to be at Kreuznach. But it must be, when fettered by work and business as I am now.
July 28.
This day year we were at Montrichard; and you saw for a few hours the beautiful valley of the Cher. Ah! how I feel, in thus turning back to the past, that there is no happiness for me without you; since yesterday, when I began to rest, I am a prey to one fixed idea,—see her, listen to her! Do not be affronted, I entreat you, but I need to see you as we need food when hungry; it is odious, it is brutal, it is all that is most revolting, perhaps, but it is true. My thought carries me to Kreuznach at every moment. I must finish my work for the “Constitutionnel,” and then go and book my place in the mail. Shall I have a letter this morning? I dare not hope it.
July 29.
I found in the post a letter from your children. Anna had put in a little line which makes me very uneasy. She writes: “Mamma is sad and ill; you ought to come and help us to cheer her.” I went at once and took my place as far as Mayence, and I shall be there punctually to meet you; you will not do me the wrong to doubt it, I am sure. Adieu for to day.
July 30.
The king has again been shot at; you will see it in the papers. It is truly odious! it will make our unhappy country impossible and hateful to foreigners. I am very much better; the doctor was a prophet; in two days all was over and restored in good order; I am still dieting, but to-morrow I can resume my usual food and my work. The heat has become more frightful than ever; as I write I am afloat; every pore, every hair, has its drop of moisture; I am soaked as if I were just out of a bath.
Last night I saw the fireworks; I had slept all day, so much had weakness and heat reduced me. The illuminations were very fine; I doubt if Peterhof ever showed anything finer (in spite of your admirations). How I wished for you here! and how many times I said to myself that, positively, you should see it with me next year. In spite of the heat and the diet, I feel so recovered that I shall go this evening to the first representation of “Le Docteur noir,” and to-morrow I shall return to my usual ways and my nocturnal work, minus coffee, be it understood; and on the 17th you will see me at Kreuznach, rely upon it.
The end of “Esther” has had a great success. The letter was like an electric shock, everybody is talking of it. The profound truth about our judiciary morals, made dramatic, has startled the men of the robe. Expect now “L’Histoire des Parents pauvres,” and you will see that I shall make a very fine work of it—but don’t feel too much confidence, for I may deceive myself about it.
So all goes well, and will go better and better. But I love you so much that there is no other misfortune possible for me than that which might come to you either in health or feelings. Tears come into my eyes as I recall certain gestures, certain motions of your dear person in the dim chamber of my brain where are pictured all your features, your adorable nature, your heart infinite in goodness, your mind, your walks with me, our walks along the roadsides, even to your gentle scoldings—in short, our whole history, in which you have always been the noblest, purest, most saintly, and most excellent of human creatures.
July 31.
Forty degrees of heat in my apartment! My weakness is extreme, on account of the strict diet the doctor ordered me. This will explain to you the brevity of my talk with you this morning.
Last night I saw “Le Docteur noir;” it is the height of stupidity, of mediocrity in its saturnalia. I got to bed at one o’clock and did not rise till nine. I have just returned from the post-office; no letters, alas! ’Twas a soldier of the “Medusa,” looking out on the horizon and seeing nothing, who came back without letters just now! Well, I must read and correct my proofs.
Passy, August 1, 1846.1
I have your letter! it is the great event of my life. In it I see two atrocities; 1st, “Do not come, you would be so bored;” 2nd, “You do not think enough of your health; you let yourself be worn-out by frantic work; do take a little more diversion; amuse yourself.” Bored with you! amuse myself without you! Is that enough insult and injustice? Am I required to refute them?
I am quite well again this morning and I wish to announce that news for a beginning, so that my dear troupe may feel no more uneasiness about its illustrious leader.
My doctor is coming to dinner to-day with Méry (one of your believers), Léon Gozlan and Laurent-Jan. That ought to fully reassure you; I am now only a man without strength, food, or appetite. But the intestines are all right again, I believe; and next week I shall finish with the “Constitutionnel.”
August 2.
Dear fraternal soul, I have just finished “Le Parasite,” for such will be, as I told you, the definitive title of what I have hitherto called “Le Bonhomme Pons,” “Le Vieux Musicien,” etc. It is—to me at least—one of those fine works of extreme simplicity which contain the whole of the human heart; it is as grand as the “Curé de Tours,” but more clear and quite as heart-breaking. I am enchanted with it; I will bring you the proofs, and you must tell me your impressions. Now, I am going to work on “La Cousine Bette,” a terrible novel, for the principal character is a composition of my mother, Madame Valmore and your aunt. It is the history of many families.
Yesterday my dear star seemed veiled for me; I had many annoyances. “Le Messager” was ready to reproduce, for one thousand francs, “Madame de la Chanterie,” the proofs of which you and I corrected together at Lyon; but the publisher, assignee of Chlendowski, was inexorable; he would not consent to the publication, even in receiving part of the price. The “Messager” is sent gratuitously to peers and deputies; it prints a thousand copies. So I failed through the greatest piece of ill-will I ever met with in my life. This will show you what the business of literature and publishing is. I am going to send you the “Courier,” in which George Sand is bringing out a novel; for I perceive that you are reading only the ministerial newspapers, and you ought also to read a little of the Opposition ones, in order to understand something of our political mess.
August 4.
At last I have your letter; and now that I have it after wishing for it so much, I fear that it tired you to write it in such heat. Be tranquil in mind, as you ought to be in heart; I only bought the Greuze and the Van Dyck because I have a purchaser at a higher price for two of my pictures,—namely, “Les Sorcières” by Paul Brill, and the sketch that Miville sold to me at Bâle. I have exchanged the little picture bought for fifty francs, which Chenavard said was not worth two sous, for a delicious little sketch of the birth of Louis XIV., called an “Adoration of the Shepherds,” in which the shepherds are bewigged in the fashion of the times. Louis XIII. and his ministers are represented. Well, well! I shall win your confidence sooner or later, in bric-à-brac at any rate. You can’t imagine to what point I am fretted and what anxiety fills my mind when I discover that I have something inferior as a matter of art in my collection. Therefore set your mind at rest; I follow your good advice exactly; I continually deny myself; I never yield to any spontaneous fancy; I buy nothing without consulting, examining, reflecting; and that is the same as telling you I buy nothing but fine things.
I write to you in 50 degrees of heat, as you will have seen by the “Débats.” My study is 15 degrees higher than that; for the laundry-man below me keeps a coal fire like that of a locomotive, and above my head is a zinc roof; in short, I live in a stove. But in spite of this heat my health gets better and better; nourishment no longer distresses me; and the intestines are coming back to a normal state. The doctor says my illness came only from heat, which is to me what it is to you. One must cling to doing one’s duty, as I do, in order to work under this physical dissolution.
Adieu; proofs are calling me, and I have not, as at Lyon, an intelligent comrade to correct them cleverly and gaily. I have still twenty-six sheets to write.
August 5.
I met Potier in the Passy omnibus; I questioned and sounded him, and gained the certainty that he has another purchaser in view for the Beaujon house, and considers me only as a pis aller; but I cannot put myself in the way of offering more than I have for the last year.
I saw Véron yesterday, who wants as many folios as I can write. He told me that the public was not content with Sue’s publication; it was thought repulsive and shameful. The pretty sinners of the great world think to rehabilitate themselves by making an outcry against “such revolting immorality,” as they call it. On the other hand, Véron made me many compliments on “L’Instruction Criminelle.” At the Palais de Justice both magistrates and lawyers think it splendidly true and irreproachably accurate. If they only remembered Popinot, they would see that Popinot and Camusot are two aspects of the Judge.1
I see with joy, by your letter, that you are rather better; also that you have had an earthquake, which must make Germany uneasy. Suppose a crater were to open expressly to prove Georges’ theories! Oh! how I wish I knew when you will be really in possession of a prolongation of your passport. I hope to leave here by the 15th or 20th, but I absolutely must finish “Les Parents pauvres” first. I have booked my place for the 15th, but I can exchange it for the 20th if necessary.
Ah! so you are not content with my title of “Le Parasite;” you think it a comedy title of the eighteenth century, like “Le Méchant,” “Le Glorieux,” “L’Indécis,” “Le Philosophe marié,” etc. Well, it shall be as your autocratic and supreme will decides, and inasmuch as you declare that the pendant to “La Cousine Bette,” can only be “Le Cousin Pons,” “Le Parasite” will disappear from La Comédie Humaine and give place to “Le Cousin Pons.”
Work, occupation, difficulties in regulating the payments of the last sixty thousand francs of debt, all that mass of fixed or floating cares, repress within my heart the desire to see you, and the need of consulting you and talking over with you my literary and pecuniary affairs. But as you will not permit me to go to you until I have finished “Les Paysans,” or at least “La Cousine Bette,” I endeavour to obey you. It is the order of the day to me; and it bestows upon me a strength for work I have never yet known. “Le Cousin Pons” and “La Cousine Bette” will give me ten thousand francs; that will pay Hetzel, and the seven thousand francs to my mother. If I can be with you next winter, counting from September, I shall do three works: “Les Petits Bourgeois,” “Le Théâtre comme il est,” and “Le Député d’Arcis,” which, according to my calculation, are worth, taken together, forty thousand francs. So you see that not only will everything be paid, but I shall even have money in hand for the rest of the winter. Dear sovereign star, be very tranquil about my conduct; how do you suppose that at my age any enthusiasm could make me compromise the result of fifteen to sixteen years’ labour? I shall not ruin myself in buying pictures any more than I will “bind myself to write novels against the sum that would free me entirely.” In spite of that lofty wisdom of yours, you are no more prudent and reasonable than I am. I am really ashamed to repeat these things so often.
No news from Rome; I think there are as many reasons to fear as to rejoice. To-morrow I write again; but à bientôt. I hope to see you.
It is Laurent-Jan and Achard who are doing Grimm’s letters; and it is Laurent-Jan who is just now publishing “Jeunesse” in the “Époque.”
August 7.
The heat is so dissolving I cannot write a line: I soak two shirts a day by merely staying in my arm-chair and reading Walter Scott. I must love you much to write even these few words; my hand and forehead are streaming. This delays me and makes me groan. I expect Potier to-day; I have decided to settle with him if possible before my departure; so that everything may be done, repairs and all, during my absence, and I can then remove there on my return.
Adieu, all my thoughts are with you, and with what can make you happy, were it even at the cost of my life and happiness. Before the end of the month I hope to see you! I shall work firmly, that there may be no delay in my journey. I hope you will be satisfied with the work I bring you. My dear critic will be too tenderly moved to be very severe.
Passy, October 18, 1846.1
Here I am, dear sovereign star, imperturbably before my desk, at the hour named, as I announced to you yesterday in the little letter hastily written in the office of “Le Messager;” and before resuming my work, my heart, that poor heart all yours, feels an imperious need to shed itself into your heart, and tell you the little details of a life become your life through that miracle of thought, constant, immutable, during so many years of exclusive affection, of which you alone, besides myself, can appreciate the immensity and the depth. From Frankfort to Forbach I lived in you only; I went over those four days like a cat which has finished her milk and licks her whiskers. All the precautions with which your kindness and that of your dear children surrounded me, the shawl, the hood, cured my cold perfectly; I feel admirably well. While they changed the luggage I wrote you a line, to prevent you from doing yourself harm, so anxious about me did I leave you.
I paid the duties on the little Dresden service. They told me at the custom-house that they had orders to send my cases to Paris, and I asked them to wait till the Wiesbaden cases came so that all might go together. Custom-houses do not respect heart-griefs, and I had to leave my reveries and memories (more and more tender beneath the charm of your smile, and your glance ever present with me) and attend to my cases. As my cold disturbed my stomach I relayed that organ with two little rolls and two large slices of Wiesbaden ham between Frankfort and Forbach. This, I hope, is a sufficient bulletin.
I was alone in the mail, and that was a blessing from heaven. At Metz, no one. At Verdun I encountered Germeau, coming from Paris with his wife, and I thanked him for his intervention at the custom-house. When you come to Forbach in your carriage you will be received with all the respect due to your social position, and your things will not be searched, I promise you that. I flew with the mail to Paris and arrived here at six o’clock in the morning; I went to bed at seven, and got up at eleven to breakfast. In the midst of my frugal repast the editor of the “Constitutionnel” fell from the clouds upon me, and found me half eating, half correcting the proofs of “La Cousine Bette,” which he owned to me was having an astounding success. Véron’s anxiety was consequently all the greater; but I calmed it by telling him of my journey and assuring him I had come back to finish everything. All this kept me till one o’clock.
I have written to Lirette, and shall send her your collective letter. But I shall soon go and see her and give her all details. Here is the dawn, just breaking; I must leave you, you, who are always there before me, blessing my work, like the soft white dove that you are. You will hear with some pleasure, I am sure, that an immense reaction in my favour has set in. I have conquered at last! Once more has my protecting star watched over me; once more an angel of peace and hope has touched me with her vigilant, guardian wing. At this moment society and the newspapers are turning favourably towards me; more than that, there is something like an acclamation, a general coronation. Those who fought me most fight no longer; those who were most hostile to me, Soulié for instance, are coming back to me. You know that he (Soulié) made me honourable amends in his new drama at the Ambigu. It is a great year for me, dear countess, especially if “Les Paysans” and “Les Petits Bourgeois” are published rapidly one after the other, and if I have the happiness of doing them well, and if your taste and that of the public should agree in thinking them fine—Come, tell me to stop, and bring myself back to “Cousine Bette;” truly, I am talking too much, and with too much pleasure; but it is to me such delicious, irresistible joy to throw myself thus wholly into your fraternal soul.
Ah! I have read your pretty letter which arrived the morning after I had left Paris, as I see by the postmark; had it reached me in time I would have dressed differently and so escaped my cold. Poor dear, you see once more in this that I comprehend you at a distance. I was already at Mayence when your letter reached Passy telling me that as I was ill I must drop the “Constitutionnel” and come and rest near you. You have so spoilt me by kindness that I had already done this without knowing whether you would approve of it.
The time that I have lost on business errands and proposals is really frightful. Furne is making gigantic announcements of La Comédie Humaine. I hasten to tell you this as I don’t know whether I shall be able to write to you again for some time. It is now the 20th. This letter can only go to Dresden, Hôtel de Saxe, and it must even wait for a line from you before I send it.
Allons! to the pen, and to work!
October 24.
Yesterday I worked like a negro; I wrote the amount of two chapters and corrected thirty columns of proof which I had on my desk. Just now, I can only count on money from the “Constitutionnel,” or on that of a treaty by which I should bind myself for another work, but that other work is quite impossible for me to do. In my present labyrinth I must work and work without cessation to end, first of all, “Les Parents pauvres.” It is not elegies that will give me money, and I need some; there is none here just now, at this moment, and I am at the mercy of certain payments to make, besides which I am expecting cases from everywhere, Geneva, Wiesbaden, etc. Nevertheless, do not think of my affairs or cloud the purity of your brow by useless anxieties. Publications will give something—but when? Voilà!
I hoped to find a letter from you at the post-office this morning telling me where to address you. I have half a mind to send this letter to Dresden by Bossange; but suppose that by chance you do not go to Dresden? Evidently I ought to wait for your next letter, which cannot be long in coming. I entreat you, do not harass yourself about all this: do not punish me for having believed in the luck of business in default of other happiness, more complete but impossible. I shall work, as I have always worked. It is only a habit to resume, not to begin, which would be more difficult. I feel young, full of energy and of talent before new difficulties. When I am settled in my little house at Beaujon [rue Fortunée], very cosy, well furnished, very quiet, safe from the intrusion of unwelcome persons, I shall write successively “Les Paysans,” “Les Petits Bourgeois,” “La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin,” “Le Député d’Arcis,” “Une Mère de famille;” and the plays will go on as well. It was especially to give myself up to this immense, but necessary production, that I wished to house myself as soon as possible at Beaujon, for it is quite impossible to stay longer at Passy.
Most Parisians think I did not go to Wiesbaden; that it was only a canard; that’s Paris! Madame de Girardin told me that she had heard from a person who knew you well, that you were excessively flattered by my homage, and sent for me to join you wherever you went, out of pride and vanity, being much gratified in having a man of genius for patito, though your social position was too high to allow him to aspire to anything else! And thereupon she laughed satirically, and told me I was wasting my time running after great ladies, who would only strand me! Isn’t that Parisian? But, as you see, the contradictory statements of the Paris cancans make them little dangerous.
To-day, all the exterior work on the Beaujon house is finished, except the gallery which is to be added, and is, in fact, a new building; that will be covered in this week. So, in this respect, at any rate, I am tranquil.
It is four o’clock; I must brush up copy; I salute you as the birds are saluting the dawn.
The combined letter of your dear children has made me very happy. I see them so contented, so charmed, without the slightest fear of mischance in the future; but then, how you have brought-up your Anna! morally and physically how you have trained her! In truth, Georges owes you much, and I think he feels it, for a brain like his comprehends everything; there is in him the union of great knowledge and great character. Pity me to be once more battling with business, the house, repairs, buildings, contractors; I go from one to the other, on foolish errands and vexations of all sorts. Yet I must write as if I were tranquil, and devote myself exclusively to that intolerable and hideous old maid who calls herself Cousine Bette, when I would much rather be with you and you only. It is really atrocious; and I never had such a time in my life. But my faith and belief in you give me a courage, a patience, a lucidity and a talent that amaze the boldest and most hardened toilers.
Alas! I must leave you; time has marched while I have been talking thus at random with you. I must carry this letter to the post.
Paris, November 20, 1846.
I was saying yesterday, dear countess, that I had scarcely more than time to write to you if I were going to see you on the 6th in Dresden. But how can I help writing? heart and soul are at Dresden, only body and courage are in Paris. To talk with you is an imperative need; I must write to you, tell you, relate to you everything—about my books, my furniture, my financial calculations, the architect, the house, the bothers, the nothings, the conversations, just as I talk to myself—are you not myself? have you not long been my conscience? If you were not, should I have talked to you with such freedom and sincerity of my follies, my faults,—in short, of all that I have done either of good or evil?
Yesterday I went to the Vaudeville, where Arnal made me die of laughing in “Le Capitaine de Voleurs,” and I put my letter into the post for yesterday’s mail. It will not go till to-day. This morning I have still thirty-two pages to do on “Cousine Bette” and sixty-four on “Cousin Pons.” Total, one hundred between now and the 29th. On Friday I shall go and book my place in the mail.
Ouf! I have just corrected eight hundred lines of “Cousine Bette” and the eight first chapters of “Cousin Pons.” Since this morning I have not risen from my chair, and it is now a quarter past three. I put wood on the fire, and think of you, there, as if near me. What happiness in the idea of soon seeing you again! My whole soul quivers at the thought. I have such need to be with you three. And to think that I have still a hundred pages to write and correct!
Decidedly, I shall send to Tours for that secretary and bureau of Louis XVI.; the bedroom will then be complete. It is an affair of a thousand francs; but for that money what sort of modern furniture does one get? bourgeois platitudes, paltry things without taste or value.
November 22.
I have your letters, yours and those of the children. Thanks be to God, they tell me you are better, and that I can meet you on the 6th at Leipzig. I have just re-read your letter, for the paper is so thin that one side of the page prevented me from reading the other in a carriage. I went to the post, from there to your house, where nothing is getting on. You tell me not to work so hard, to take care of my health, to amuse myself, to go into society. But, dear countess, did I not write you that I had pledged myself to the payment of my last debts, counting on a rise to sell my shares in the Chemin de Fer du Nord? Well the Nord fell yesterday from 627 frs. to 575—two hundred francs below the price at which I bought them. So, you see, my pen must earn what the shares should have given me, and work to pay my creditors, to whom I will keep my word. Do you think I have time to amuse myself? It will be a miracle if I pull through at all. I have almost doubled in production; I have done forty-eight folios of La Comédie Humaine instead of twenty-four; and you know that can’t be done by scribbling as I am doing now to you. Ah! bon Dieu, it is fearful! I tremble as I write of it. I am not sure that even that will get me through. I must finish “Les Paysans” and perhaps something more. It is necessary, even indispensable. If I go to you I shall hardly see you, for I could not leave my table and papers. I cannot think about my health, or take any care or thought of myself; I am a copy-machine, and nothing else. My courage is really amazing; I recognize that, and you will be convinced of it when I tell you that since my return from Wiesbaden I have done all you will read of “La Cousine Bette,”—which, parenthetically, has a prodigious success—all those twenty chapters, dear countess, were written currente calamo, done at night for the next day, without proofs. You have been, this time as ever, my inspiring genius.
November 23, 1846.
Yesterday I went to see Laurent-Jan and proposed to him to dialogue my play for the Variétés, for I have an avalanche of work up to November 30, and as I want to start December 1, I have no time to do the play. It would have paid him some thousands of francs, but he declined, on the pretext that it was too strong, too colossal for his “feeble talent.” The real cause of this touching modesty is his invincible laziness. Nature gives talent, but it is for man to put it to work and bring it to sight by force of will, perseverance, and courage. Now, that fellow has talent, but he will never do anything with it except spend it in pure waste, wearing it out, like his boots, on the boulevards, or in the boxes of the lesser theatres with actresses who laugh at him.
Here I was interrupted by Dr. Nacquart; he scolded me well when he found me at my table writing, after all he had said to me about it. Neither he nor any of his friends the doctors can conceive how a man should subject his brain to such excesses. He said to me, and repeated his words with a threatening air, that harm would come of it. He entreated me to at least put some interval of time between the “debauches of the brain,” as he called them. The efforts on “Cousine Bette,” improvised in a week, especially alarmed him. He said, “This will necessarily end in something fatal.”
The fact is, I feel myself in some degree affected; sometimes in conversation I search, and often very painfully, for nouns. My memory for names fails me. It is true that I ought to rest. If I had not had so much anxiety about my last financial affairs, the cares to be given to the arrangement of my little house would have been a happy and good diversion to my literary occupations. I have continued to be unlucky financially. When the doctor made me the above observations on my literary excesses, I said to him:—
“My friend, you forget my debts. I have obligations which I have bound myself to meet at certain fixed dates, at the end of each month, and I will not fail to do so; I must therefore earn money; that is to say, I must write until I make my chains fall off by force of courage and toil.”
You will never divine the doctor’s answer. It paints the man; but start with the principle that he is a friend, who loves me truly and has not only much affection, but also much esteem for me.
“Well, my friend,” he said, “I can’t write fine things like you, but I manage my affairs better. As a proof, I’ll tell you that I bought at auction three days ago, a house of five stories in the rue de Trévise, for which I paid two hundred and thirty-five thousand francs; as there were twenty-five thousand to pay on costs, that makes two hundred and sixty thousand francs.”
The whole spirit, the whole character of our bourgeoisie is in that; it turns its money over and over, as the aristocracy of old made theirs by privileges and personal advantages. You must not find fault with the poor doctor, he is an excellent, worthy man; he is of his caste and his epoch, that is all.
Regarding what you say to me of your affairs, I shall not cease to repeat to you, “Make haste!”
You must have read the article in the “Constitutionnel” on Siberia; it is enough to make persons more confiding than you shudder. Therefore, do not lose any time, for the future does not seem to me couleur de rose, I assure you. I see Italy and Germany very ready to rise; the present state of peace hangs by a thread, the life of Louis-Philippe, who is getting old, and God knows, when the struggle comes, what will happen to us. For a young and ambitious sovereign, not willing, like Louis Philippe, to die tranquilly in his bed, see how favourable this moment would be to recover the right bank of the Rhine! The populations are harassed by idiotic little sovereigns; England is grappling with Ireland, which wants to ruin her or separate from her; the whole of Italy is making ready to shake off the yoke of Austria; Germany wants its unity, or perhaps, only more liberty. In short, believe it firmly, we are on the eve of great political catastrophes. In France, our interest lies in gaining time,—our cavalry and our navy not being strong enough to make us triumph by sea or land. But the day when those two arms are strengthened, the fortifications mounted, our defences finished, and our public works completed, France will be very formidable.
It must be owned that by the way Louis-Philippe has administered and governed the country he has made it the first power in the world. Reflect on that! Nothing is factitious; our army is a fine army; we have money; all is strong, is real, at this moment. The port of Algiers, just finished, gives us a second Toulon opposite to Gibraltar; we advance towards controlling the Mediterranean. We now have Belgium and Spain with us. Certainly Louis-Philippe has made great way; you are right in that. If he were ambitious he could sing the Marseillaise and demolish three empires to his profit. If he puts a paw on Mehemet-Ali, as he has on the Bey of Tunis, the Mediterranean will be all for France in case of war. It is a conquest made morally, without firing a gun. We have, moreover, made giant strides in Algeria by the displacement of the centres of military action. This means conquest consolidated, and revolt rendered impossible.
I hope you will be content with me, and will think that I at last do justice to a sovereign whom you have always supported against me, not from sympathy, you say, but from conviction. Perhaps you are right in the main. Perhaps France has less need of glory than of liberty and security; and inasmuch as she has obtained these two great benefits, let us wish that she may know how to appreciate them and keep the government that has given them to her.
Here is the dawn; for two hours I have been talking to you with pleasure and no fatigue; and I say to you, joyfully, à bientôt.1
To M. Le Comte Georges Mniszech, at Wierzchownia.
Paris, February 27, 1847.
My dear Anna and my dear Georges: do not have the slightest uneasiness about your dear mamma. In the first place, she is here in the strictest incognito; next she is thoroughly re-assured about her health; and lastly, charged with the immense duty of taking the place of her beloved children so essential to her happiness (and I may say to my own, for all my human affections are centred on three cherished heads), I have put myself into forty thousand pieces, not to make her forget those who are the soul of her thought and life but, to render their absence as endurable as possible.
Our dear Atala [his family name for her] is in a charming and magnificent apartment (not too expensive); she has a garden, and goes much to the convent and a little to the theatre. I try to amuse her, and to be as much Anna to her as possible; but the name of her dear daughter is so daily and continually on her lips that last night, as she was amusing herself much at the Variétés and laughing with all her heart at the “Filleul de tout le monde,” played by Bouffé and Hyacinthe, in the midst of her gaiety she asked herself, in a heart-rending tone that brought the tears to my eyes, how she could laugh and amuse herself without her “dear little one.”...
You know that in the month of April I take her back to Germany, and from there she will go to join you at Wierzchownia. As for me, who cannot now live away from you, I hope to follow her a little later.
[Note.—Balzac left Paris early in September, and reached his much longed for Wierzchownia by October 1, 1847.
The rest of this sad story will be found in the Memoir to this edition, pp. 318-349; and in the Correspondence, vol. xxiv. of the Édition Définitive, pp. 561-662.—TR.]
Notes
1 Concerning the letters of this year, see Appendix.—TR.
1 To Madame Hanska, at Naples.
1 To Madame Hanska, at Naples.
2 Balzac started for Rome March 20, and returned to Paris May 1, 1846.
1 To Madame Hanska, at Rome.
1 In “Le Bonhomme Pons,” afterwards called “Le Cousin Pons,” will be found a description of Balzac’s own passion for collecting antiquities and bric-à-brac. This passion was partly his natural instinct, and partly his desire to fill with treasures the home for which he longed. His collection is described in “Le Cousin Pons.” See Memoir p. 323.—TR.
1 Armand Bertin; his father, Louis-François, founded the “Journal des Débats;” after the latter’s death in 1841, Armand Bertin edited the paper.—TR.
1 To Madame Hanska, at Kreuznach.
1 This refers to the examination of Lucien de Rubempré before the juge d’instruction, and the description connected with it of the Palais de Justice.—TR.
1 Balzac’s visit to Wiesbaden, Stuttgard, etc., was paid between the date of the last letter and that of the present one. It has been stated, on what proof I do not know, that during this visit Madame Hanska promised definitively to marry him as soon as permission could be obtained from her government. Before Balzac left Paris he purchased the little house in the Beaujon quarter, since known as the house in the rue Fortunée, now rue Balzac, and began to store it with his treasures of furniture, pictures, and bric-à-brac, many of which, he says in a letter to his sister, belonged to Madame Hanska.—TR.
1 This is the last letter to Madame Hanska given in Balzac’s Correspondence in the Édition Définitive of his works. Soon after writing it he went to Dresden, and brought Madame Hanska, without M. and Mme. Mniszech, to Paris, in January, 1847,—TR.