IV Letters During 1836
Chaillot, January 18, 1836.
In spite of my entreaty, your letter, which I received to-day, after nearly one month’s interregnum, is neither dated nor numbered; so that it is impossible to answer each other understandingly at such a distance.
Your letter contains two reproaches which have keenly affected me; and I think I have already told you that a few chance expressions would suffice to make me go to Wierzchownia, which would be a misfortune in my present perilous situation; but I would rather lose everything than lose a true friendship.
In the first place, as for letters, count up those that you have written me, and my replies; the balance will be much in my favour. When you speak of the rarity of my letters you make me think that some must be lost, and I feel uneasy. In short, you distrust me at a distance, just as you distrusted me near by, without any reason. I read quite despairingly the paragraph of your letter in which you do the honours of my heart to my mind, and sacrifice my whole personality to my brain.
I laughed much at your reckoning of my work by quantity, not quality. I laughed, because I thought of your analytical forehead; I laughed, because I thought that at the moment when I was reading those falsely accusing pages, you, perhaps, were holding in your hand “Séraphita” and making me in the depths of your heart some honourable amends.
Ah! cara, if you were in the secret of those work-sessions, which begin at midnight and end at midday, if you knew that the new edition of the “Médecin de campagne” and the second of the “Livre Mystique” have cost me six hundred hours, that I must deliver February 1 the manuscripts of two new octavo volumes, and that I have business and lawsuits besides, you would see, with pain, that you have accused a friend falsely, that “Marie Touchet” is going on, and that—that—etc.
To-day, I have so much on my hands that I am compelled to extreme rapidity. I am irreconcilably parted from the two Revues. I have in my own hands “La Chronique de Paris,” a newspaper that comes out twice a week, and expresses my royalist sympathies. I have begun the year by “La Messe de l’Athée,” a work conceived, written, and printed in a single night. I must deliver in February a work entitled “L’Interdiction,” which is equivalent to seventy pages of the “Revue de Paris.” This is over and above what I have to do for Madame Bêchet and Werdet. In two months I shall have ended the agreement with Madame Bêchet, and be free of her.
In the enumeration which you make of my works you count as nothing the enormous corrections which the reprints cost me. Is it not sad to have to count up with you,—to make for friendship calculations such as I have to make with my publishers? You took amiss what I said to you in asking you not to cause me false sorrows, because I was bending beneath the weight of real ones. To tell you those, I should have to write you volumes. They are such that the success of “Séraphita” did not bring into my soul the slightest joy. Did there not come a moment when Sisyphus neither wept nor smiled, but became of the nature of the rocks he was ever lifting?
My life is becoming too much that of a steam-engine. Toil to-day, toil to-morrow; always toil, and small results. 1836 is begun. I shall soon be thirty-seven years old. I have six months before me, during which I have accumulated fifty thousand francs to pay. Those paid, I shall have paid off what I owe to strangers. There remains my mother. But I shall have spent nine years of life at the edge of a table, with an inkstand before me. I have had but three diversions, permit me to say three happinesses: my three journeys,—three recreations snatched, stolen, perilously torn from the midst of my battles, leaving the enemy to make headway; three halts, during which I breathed!
And you find fault with the poor soldier who has resumed his life of abnegation, his life militant, the poor writer who has not taken a penful of ink these two years without looking at your visiting card placed below his inkstand.
No, surely, I would not have you hide from me a single one of the sad or gay thoughts that come to you; but while I sympathize keenly with all that is of you, believe that I suffer horribly from the worries that you make for yourself about me, by supposing facts or sentiments that are false or foreign to my nature. Then it is that I measure the distance that parts us, and drop my head. The wound is given, here, at the moment when at Wierzchownia you ought, on receiving a letter from me, to regret having been too quick to blame a heart which is wholly devoted to you. Here are explanations enough.
I am very desirous that you should have the second edition of the “Livre Mystique” in which I have made some changes, but all is not done yet in the matter of corrections. Madame de Berny sent me her observations too late, and I could not rewrite the second chapter, entitled “Séraphita.” She alone had the courage to tell me that the angel talked too much like a grisette; that what seemed pretty so long as the end was not known is paltry. I see now that I must synthesize woman, as I have all the rest of the book. Unhappily, I need six months to remake this part, and during that time noble souls will all blame me for that fault which will be so obvious to their eyes.
I send Hammer a copy of the second edition, in memory of his kind deeds and his friendly reception.
Did I tell you that the Princess Schonberg has put her child here in the house where I am, on account of its vicinity to the Orthopædic hospital? Yesterday I met her in the garden and we talked Vienna; she did not tell me a word about you, but much about Loulou. She said that Lady... had again run away with a Greek, that Prince Alfred had prevented her from getting beyond Stuttgard. The husband arrived, fought a duel with the Greek, and took back his wife. What a singular wife!
Forgive me this gossip. I was so happy in the solitude of this house, rue des Batailles! The landlord said to me one morning that a Prince Schudenberg had come. I replied, “No, there are only Counts of Schuttenberg.” The next day on the staircase I saw a German valet, who looked at me, smiling, and three days later Prince Schonberg told me, at Madame Appony’s, that he had put his heir under the care of our good air and garden.
If the play of “Marie Touchet” succeeds I can buy the house I have in view. With what delight I shall enjoy a home of my own! But the damned seller will not accept my terms of payment; he wants twenty-five thousand francs down, and I don’t know when I shall have them. If I earn them in six months the house may then have been sold. Well, one must submit.
I have still twenty days’ more work on the “Médecin de campagne;” only one volume is printed; I must finish the second. I hope that this time the text will be definitive, and that it will be pure, without spot or blemish.
You see, nothing can be more monotonous than my life in the midst of this whirling Paris. I refuse all invitations; laboriously I do my work; I amass—to win a few days’ freedom. One more journey that I want to make! Some nights more of toil and perhaps I can go and see you about the middle of this year. It cannot be until after I clear my debt. I would not show you even once that anxious face that so struck you the day you were singing and I was looking out across the Waltergarten.
No, you never spoke to me of that Roger. You commit little sins, which, like spoilt children, you do not own till a long time afterwards.
At this moment I am a prey to the horrible spasmodic cough I had at Geneva, and which, since then, returns every year at the same time. Dr. Nacquart declares that I ought to pay attention to it, and that I got something, which he does not define, in crossing the Jura. The good doctor is going to study my lungs. This year I suffer with it more than usual. If I am at Wierzchownia this time next year you will have an old man to nurse.
I am in despair at the delay the “Revue de Paris” makes in bringing out the “Lys dans la Vallée.” No work ever cost more labour. The “Lys,” “Séraphita,” the “Médecin de campagne” are the three gulfs into which I have flung the most nights, money, and thoughts. The finest part, the end, is that which has not yet appeared.
We are reprinting at this moment the fourth volume of the “Scènes de la Vie privée,” in which I have made great changes in relation to the general meaning in “Même Histoire;” so that Hélène’s flight with the murderer is rendered more probable. It took me a long time to make these last knots.
To sum up your questions: my health is not good just now; business matters are multiplying; work also; I am under suspicion by you, whereas I am exterminating myself to earn money here. No pleasures, many annoyances. Nothing has varied since my last letter, neither my heart nor my occupations. I am awaiting some news. I have imagined a thousand evils; I fancied that Anna, or you, or M. Hanski were ill. I now learn that you really are suffering with your heart. Remember all that I have written to you about it. Avoid emotions, do not make violent exertions, and no harm will come of it. As for the cure, when you come to Paris it will be completed; we have physicians very learned on that point. It needs digitalis in doses adapted to the temperament.
January 22.
Since the night I last wrote to you, this letter has lain here without my having one moment in which to finish or close it. This wheel, this machine of a life must be seen to be understood. Werdet saw the mother of the woman who is near him burned on New Year’s day. He tried to put out the flames and burned his hands. The poor old woman died in ten minutes; and Werdet has had to keep his bed twenty days to cure his burns. I had to do his business for him, for Werdet is I. I had to obtain five thousand francs for myself and eight thousand for him. We have ten months’ distress before us, both he and I. The last four days have been spent in marches and countermarches. What hours lost! I am never at home except to sleep a few hours. I have a dreadful month of February before me, full of work that will not return me a farthing.
Well, I must bid you adieu, to you and all those about you; work is waiting; the case of proofs is full, and I am in arrears with several folios of copy still to do. I have more work than generals on a campaign, but such work is obscure. You can imagine that a soldier on a campaign cannot write, and yet you expect a writer forced along on four lines of combat to be liberal of his letters. I assure you that the problem of my time is more than ever insoluble. When I am with you, ask me why, and I will tell you. As for writing it, it would take volumes, and I must now rely on the confidence that should exist between friends to take my devotion, my testimonies of heart and soul under their simplest expression; certain that that expression will suffice, in spite of distance, to make us comprehend each other. Is that true? Say yes—“if you love me.”
Adieu; accept the wishes that I make for your happiness such as you wish it. If I were God! Ah!
You are not ignorant of how rare lofty sentiments are; I do not speak here of talents; no, I mean sentiments enlightened by pure intelligence.
Did I tell you that the little silver pencil-case for which I cared so much, and on which I had the Ave engraved, that gracious and religious Faber, I lost from my pocket while asleep in a public conveyance? I will not have another; I cared for that one so much! It fell from my pocket; it needed a chain; I thought of that too late. The lizard chain of my watch is taken off. It was so easily broken; it caught in everything. I return it to you in idea; Lecointe has put a cassolette upon it. I shall keep it for you preciously, and you will some day wear it.
Excuse me for talking of such trifles, but I wanted to explain the absence of the Ave—a prayer I often make.
Dear, I would that when looking at your flowers you heard the gentle words my heart is saying at this moment to you; I would that in breathing their perfume you might feel the spirit that consoles; I would that the silence were eloquent; that all Nature in what she has that is most endearing were my interpreter. But these, perhaps, are not all the things we should require; we should live too happy in their contact. We need to flee to loftier regions, to the bare and stormy summits, where all will make us humble by its grandeur and by the demonstration of vast struggles. You could find in what I do not tell you of myself something analogous. But I have not the sad courage to uncover all my wounds.
Well, adieu. Like the fisherman in Walter Scott’s “Antiquary,” I must saw my plank without risking the blunder of an inch; I must write. Oh! cara, write! when one’s soul is mourning, and when the sister-soul is mourning also, and something is lost to us of our faith in losing the soul that inspired it!—Let us bury that secret in our hearts.
There is an autograph for you in the envelope of this letter. It is that of Silvio Pellico.
A thousand greetings to M. Hanski and to those about you. May heaven dictate to them the honey words, the tender silences, the grace of heart, the religious efforts of the mind, which are so needed in those terrible transition days which we call bad days, sad days.
Accept a very affectionate pressure of the hand.
Paris, January 30, 1836.
Cara, I have this moment received yours of December 24 (old style), in which you speak to me of Princess G..., “that little stupid.” I should have laughed at your suspicions, if you had not revealed your displeasure in those three furious pages, the fury of which I adore. I have never but once set foot in the house of that “little stupid,” for, without having read your adorable advice relative to society, I have followed it to the letter. All that you say convinces me that our thoughts are identical. Let me repeat, for the last time, that in the situation in which I am placed I am the subject of gossip and calumnies without foundation, and that those who wish to pull me down will never know the secrets of my heart. I can deliver up my works to them, I can let them say all they like about my person, and about my business affairs; but all that you do not hear directly from me about the matters that trouble you, believe it to be false. I hasten to write you these few words so as not to delay this letter, so important to friendship.
I saw Madame Kisseleff at the Opera, and she talked to me of you and of your brother; she begged me to remember her to you with many amiable expressions. She has never said any harm of you; on the contrary, she praised me much for my attachment to you, without saying anything to lessen it. But she did say of your brother what you told me yourself in Vienna. I share the grief you express to me on the fatal event; but I am not entirely of your opinion. Among specialists, judgments go more to the root of things. If Count Henry is all that you say of him, you should consider the nervous disposition of poets, of men who live in thought. Yes, the whole world will condemn him, and especially for the last phases of the affair. But believe that there are some souls who, without absolving him—for a man cannot be absolved for a failure of moral character—will pity him as they pity “Louis Lambert,” of whom you speak. Without comparing your brother to a seer, there are in the nature of men of mobile and changeable impressions, lacunæ, lassitudes, solutions of continuity under the pressure of misfortunes, of which we should take account. As judge, I should cut him off, as you do, from communion with the faithful; but I should open to him my poet’s heart and comfort him, as you are doing. Yes, cara, the union of talent, genius, poesy, love, and a great, indomitable character, a rectangular will, is a miracle of nature—possibly an effect of temperament. I will not go farther on this dolorous subject.
The “Chronique de Paris” takes all my time. I sleep only five hours. But if your affairs and M. Hanski’s are doing well, mine are beginning to prosper. Subscriptions are received in miraculous abundance, and the shares I possess have risen to a value of ninety thousand francs capital in one month.1 It is impossible for me to go into society; I am even uncivil. I hardly see my most intimate friends. If you were a witness of my life you would pity it. But my thirst for work is in direct ratio to my thirst for independence. I have renewed negotiations for the Beaujon house. My lawsuit will be called before the court to-morrow. It is now five o’clock in the morning. I am preparing the means of defence for my lawyer. I thank you much for your good long letter. There’s a letter—a pretty letter—in in which affection scolds, and caresses as it scolds, but tells me all that you are doing!
I have broken the last frail relations of politeness with Madame de Castries. She makes her society now of MM. Jules Janin and Sainte-Beuve, who have so outrageously wounded me. It seemed to me bad taste, and now I am happily out of it.
“Marie Touchet” is getting on. You ought to have “Séraphita” by this time. The second edition of the “Livre Mystique” appears on February 1. I am sorry you should read the bad edition before this one, though this has faults and must still undergo some changes. Werdet is quite pleased; yesterday he sold a hundred and fifty copies to foreign countries; he hopes to sell as many more from that advertisement. I have ten days more of corrections on the “Médecin de campagne,” third edition, 8vo. Ask for it; it is fine, in type, printing, and paper; except for a few imperceptible blemishes, the text is settled, fixed, as that of “Louis Lambert” is fixed. “Louis Lambert” is much changed; it is now complete. The last thoughts accord with “Séraphita;” all is co-ordinated. Moreover, the gap between college and Blois is filled up; you will see that.
The “Messe de l’Athée” has had the greatest success in the “Chronique de Paris.” To-morrow the first chapter of the “Interdiction” will appear. And you think I court society! I think it is you who are the “little stupid.”
A thousand pretty flowers of affection; take them, gather them, wear them on that intelligent brow, which refuses only one comprehension, that of understanding the extent of the affections you inspire. You saw them in Vienna, you doubt them in Paris. Oh! that is not right; above all, when it concerns one who is devoted to you at all points, like your poor moujik.
Do not fail to remember me to every one about you; and M. Hanski will find here affectionate compliments, and all friendly things.
Paris, March 8, 1836.
Nothing can describe my anxiety. It is now more than a month since I have heard from you. A silence of a month can only have been caused by some grave event. Is M. Hanski ill? Is it Anna? Is it you? What has happened? Are you so busy at Kiew that you have not found a single little moment to give to so old and devoted a friendship? Has a letter been lost? Has some foolish story reached you, like that of a journey to Saint-Petersburg?—for, in my presence, a person who did not know me, but who said he did, declared I was there.1 Others assert that I am in Naples.
The truth being, that I work more now than I ever did in my life; and that never before have I had such a desire for independence. Rossini encouraged me by telling me he had never breathed at his ease until the day when he was certain of having bread. I am not there yet.
My suit with the “Revue” gives me many worries. I must sustain the “Chronique,” master my financial crisis, work for Werdet, and work for Madame Bêchet. It is enough to die of! And, speaking literally, I am killing myself. Physical strength is beginning to fail me. If I had the money I should be on my way, for there is no other resource for me than a journey of three months, at the least.
You have not said anything to me of “Séraphita.” Another month, and the true “Lys dans la Vallée” will be finished and out. In the opinion of all critics, and mine, it will be my most perfect work in style, regarding “Séraphita” and “Louis Lambert” as exceptions.
It appears that they are making from Dantan’s bad caricature a horrible lithograph of me for foreign countries, and “Le Voleur” has published one also. This obliges me to have myself painted, and abandon my habit of modesty. After examining the present condition of French art, and in default of your dear Grosclaude, who left me in the lurch, I have elected Louis Boulanger to portray me. As you wished for a copy of that which Grosclaude desired to do, I ask you candidly if you would like a second original of the portrait which Boulanger is to make? I ask this the more easily as the price is very much less. I think he does not ask more than fifteen hundred francs, which will be full length, the size of nature. If you would like the bust only, say so.
I am at this moment in a state of moral and physical exhaustion of which I can give you no idea. I have even extreme sufferings. Every evening an inflammation of the eyes warns me that I have gone beyond my strength, and yet I was never so much in need of it.
Never have I gone through such extremes of hope and of despair. Sometimes the affair of the “Cent Contes Drolatiques” (which would wholly liquidate me) seems to be settled, sometimes it will not be settled at all. Sometimes my money matters have an air of arranging themselves, and then all fails. Around me my friends are in trouble. Madame de Berny has not yet been willing since the death of her son to see me. She sees no one but her eldest son. My heavy cold has returned. Body and soul are wrung. The newspapers are full of redoubled hate and malevolence. That is nothing to me, but there are many men who would not be as philosophical.
And now, to crown this poesy of ill, this sorrowful situation, you leave me one whole month without letters, to run the gamut of suppositions and believe daily that some grievous news will reach me. For several days past, life, thus made, seems odious. Nine years of toil without immediate result, without means of living obtained—this kills me, in addition to all the other causes of distress I have enumerated.
I have not been out three times this winter. I dined with Madame Kisseleff, and once with Madame Appony, and I went to a fancy ball given by an Englishman, and, six times in all, to the Italian Opera. But nothing distracts my mind or amuses me. Since the pleasure that I had in travelling so rapidly to Vienna I have tasted the delights of Nature seen on a grand scale; I have conceived the mightiest of arts—that which puts into the soul the sentiment of Nature. To grasp vast landscapes, to see the earth under its many colours, its thousand aspects, and to have an object at the end of this kaleidoscopic vision—I know nothing that equals that passage through space. There are moments when I stand with my head buried on the chimney-piece, engaged in recalling the vast incidents of that last journey.
I am going to order a carriage, and await my first bag of two thousand ducats, and my first month of liberty.
I entreat you, whatever happens, never leave me a month again without news, and, if you are ill, dictate one line to M. Hanski. You don’t know what troubles it puts into my poor solitary life.
Jules Sandeau has been one of my blunders. You cannot imagine such indolence, such nonchalance. He is without energy, without will. The noblest sentiments in words, nothing in action, or in reality. No devotion of thought or of body. When I had spent on him what a great seigneur would spend on a caprice, I said to him:
“Jules, here is a drama, write it. And after that another, and a vaudeville for the Gymnase.”
He answered that it was impossible for him to put himself in the train of any one, no matter who. As that implied that I speculated on his gratitude, I did not insist. He would not even put his name to a work done in common.
“Well, then, get a living by writing books?”
He has not, in three years, written half a volume. Criticism? He thinks that too difficult. He is a stable horse. He is the despair of friendship, as he was the despair of love. That’s over; as soon as I get the La Grenadière, I shall leave the rue Cassini.
The two young men, de Belloy and de Gramont, have not the firm will that enables a man to rise above adversity and men, and to make for himself the events of his life. They will not subordinate themselves to reach a result. In France, associations of men are impossible, partly because of individual pretensions, partly because of wit, talent, name, and fortune, four causes of insubordination. Since I have taken Diogenes’ lantern to look through this vaunted Paris for men of talent I have heard many a cry of poverty; but when you offer to those who utter the cry money for work well done, they “can’t do it,” and I have not obtained the work.
Capefigue is my editor [on the “Chronique de Paris”] and takes my directions. A good little political condottiere! Mon Dieu, how heartily you would laugh if I were in the chimney-corner at Wierzchownia explaining to you what I see here daily.
Well, here are piles of proof to send off, and much work to finish. My spirit, one moment let loose to roam across your lands, must resume its yoke of misery. I am in the rue Cassini; I have no autograph to send you; I came near asking at the Court of Peers for one of Fieschi, but I thought it might not be agreeable to you.
The other day I went to Frascati, out of curiosity, to see a gambling-house. There I found a person of your acquaintance—one who was the devoted, in Geneva, of Madame Marie. He told me he had come there for the first time. He was playing craps [a game of dice] with incredible facility, practice, and cleverness; and all the women who were present knew him. I laughed in my sleeve. Day before yesterday he invited me to a magnificent dinner at the Rocher de Cancale, where were Madame Kisseleff and Madame Hamelin, an elderly celebrity. Among the guests was an illustrious friend of the present King of Sardinia, who has just returned to power. I set a trap for the friend of the dear Countess Marie. On leaving at eleven o’clock I said to him:—
“It is too late for the theatres, will you go and play?”
We went to the “Salon des Étrangers.” He was as well known in that place as Barabbas, and, to my great astonishment, I found there all the most virtuous and rangés men of the great world. And what did I see a quarter of an hour later? The friend of the King of Sardinia, who had told us he had a rendezvous to avoid coming out with us! And this dear Italian said to me, pointing to our late Amphytrion:—
“You know the Italian proverb: ‘gambler like a Pole.’”
The friend of the Countess Marie is henceforth to me a book in which I can read at any time. Little Komar was there also. That young man, old in the flower of his age, makes me ache to see him. I perceive that in order to understand society I must go to such places three times a year, to know the men with whom one has to do. These are the only two times in my life that I have set foot in such dens. I shall return to the Salon once more to see Hope play; he stakes a hundred thousand francs with supernatural indolence, confronting chance, as one power stands facing another power.
Addio! I am awaiting a letter from you. Last night I dreamed that I saw a letter and a parcel sent by you; in the parcel were apples. I never had so real a dream. When Auguste came to wake me at five in the morning, I said, “Where are the apples?” He saw I had been dreaming. I wish I could explain these dreams.
Paris, March 24, 1836.
At length I have received your last letter, numbered 5, a whole month after its predecessor! Being in the rue Cassini, I cannot verify whether I have received No. 4.
To what you ask of me, the friend says: No. But there is, in me, another personage, too proud to answer otherwise than by a yes when the matter concerned is something that amuses you. There are two things in my nature: childlike trust, and a total lack of egoism.
You are amusing yourself at Kiew, while I am interdicted even the Italian Opera. Never was my solitude so complete, nor my work so cruelly continuous. My health is so affected that I cannot pretend to recover that air of youth to which I had the weakness to cling. All is said. If, at my age, a man has never tasted pure, unshackled happiness, Nature will later prevent its being possible for him to wet his lips in the cup. White hairs cannot approach it. Life will have been for me a most sorrowful jest. My ambitions are falling one by one. Power is a small matter. Nature created in me a being of love and tenderness, and chance has constrained me to write my desires instead of satisfying them.
If between now and three years hence nothing is changed in my existence, I shall retire, peacefully, to Touraine, living on the banks of the Loire, hidden from all, and working only to fill the empty hours. I shall even abandon my great work. My forces are being exhausted in this struggle; it is lasting too long; it is wearing me out.
And yet, the affair of the “Cent Contes Drolatiques” seems as if it might be settled, and that would render my financial condition endurable; but it drags along in a despairing way. It will save me when I am dead. I have earned in the mass this year a sum much greater than what I owe; but the debts have fixed dates for becoming due, and the receipts are capricious.
Around me I have no one, or else only powerless friendships; for the nature of certain souls is to attach themselves only to those who suffer.
Frightened by this struggle, and not being willing even to see it, Jules Sandeau has fled from here, leaving me his rent, and a few debts on my hands. He is a man at sea, drifting, as they say of a vessel wrecked in mid-ocean, and battered by the gale. Like Medea, I have myself only against all. Nothing is changed in my situation. I might write you for six months, and say but one thing: I toil. I have no longer any distractions, any amusements—the desert, and the sun!
I smiled in thinking that Madame Eve Hanska, to whom “Séraphita” is dedicated, plays lansquenet, and that this solitary personage is immersed in all mundane things.
Wednesday, 23.
My lawsuit with the “Revue de Paris” will be tried the day after to-morrow, Friday. The verdict will enable me to fix the day for putting out “Le Lys dans la Vallée” for sale. You can only know what that book is by reading it in full in Werdet’s edition, which makes two handsome volumes, 8vo. The first is printed; I have just, before writing to you, signed the order to print the last feuille of that volume. I had several sentences to re-write in a letter from Madame de Mortsauf to Félix, which made Madame Hamelin weep—so she told me. Nothing of all that was in your infamous “Revue;” nor was there anything of all my labour, which turned my bad manuscript into a work of style. You read the manuscript in Vienna.
Yesterday they brought me all the writings of “Séraphita” bound. The manuscript is in gray cloth, with the inside of black satin, and the back of Russia leather, to ward off worms. I have also all the writings of the “Lys.” But how can I send you these things? I can’t understand how it is that you have not received my letters, for I answer all yours regularly; and I wrote you one, lately, full of anxiety, which this one, just received, has calmed. But I imagine that having always addressed them to Berditchef they are still at Wierzchownia, unless they have sent them to you in a mass to Kiew.
I have been twice to the Exhibition at the Museum. We are not strong. If you had money to spend on objects of art I should have asked you to make a few fine purchases, for there are two or three things that are really beautiful,—a Venus by Pradier, and one or two pictures. Your friend Grosclaude has nothing in it, and I hear nothing more about him.
I am wholly taken up with the last work for Madame Bêchet, who, did I tell you? is marrying, and quits publishing for happiness. Nothing will be fully decided about my poor finances until after the publication of the last volume for Madame Bêchet. That is, for me, one of the culminating points of my fortune; for I can then begin the publication of the thirteen succeeding volumes, and receive about twelve thousand francs for the copies which belong to me.
I know nothing of you except from you, for of the country you are now in I know nothing but that which you tell me; I imagine you welcomed, fêted, as you would be wherever you went. But such pleasure, is it really pleasure? You were tired of it in Vienna, but you renew it at Kiew!
You would know how I love you if you had seen me searching through your letter all at once, taking in, at a glance, each page, to see if Anna, if you, if M. Hanski, if all, were well. Then, seeing that no one but a niece was ill, and that she had recovered, I gave a great sigh of relief. You would then have known how restricted are my affections; how few beings interest me. This solitude is sad, because, believe me, one wearies of the labours that fill it, and the heart never loses its claims; it needs expansions. I often make sad elegies when, weary of writing, I lie back in my chair, and rest my head upon it, and ask myself why a soul like mine is here, alone, without other joy than a few memories, as few as they are great. And when I see that what remains to me of life is the least fortunate half, the least active, the least loved, the least lovable, I am not exempt from a sadness that sheds tears.
I will write you as soon as I have finally arranged a thing which may settle my troubles; for I have resolved to sell some of my shares in the “Chronique de Paris” in order to liquidate myself more rapidly. To-day, I am in the greatest uncertainty and overwhelmed with claims.
Well, adieu. In a few days I may write to you of gayer things. But I doubt it. My health is extremely bad. Coffee no longer procures me mental force. I must be rich enough to travel.
Thursday, 21.
I open my letter to add several things.
The first is about your cramps. Have two irons made that you can grasp at the moment the cramps seize you; have them made strongly magnetic. Here is the shape: O. As soon as you hold them in your hand the cramps will cease. If that does not stop them, write to me. But be sure the irons are strongly magnetized, and keep them near you, at your bed’s head.
Fear nothing about corrections. In our language there are incontestable things. Ask for the third edition of the “Médecin de campagne,” just out; read it. You will see if it is not improved. There are still a hundred incorrectnesses. It will only be perfect in the fourth edition. Re-read “Louis Lambert” in the “Livre Mystique,”—that is, if such work pleases you; if not, it becomes wearisome.
No, no, style is style. Massillon is Massillon, and Racine is Racine. According to the critics, the “Lys” is my culminating point. You will judge of it.
In re-reading your letter I find some bitter little epigrams against life; but, surely, there are enormous sufferings which you do not know, and never can know. The openings of life are never delightful except in the matter of sentiment. I will prove to you that there is something more delightful: I mean the perfect quietude of a life beloved, of a constancy intellectual enough to destroy monotony.
Adieu, re-adieu—if, indeed, that word is a friend’s word. It should be au revoir, for in writing to you I have, like all solitaries, the gift of second sight, and I see you perfectly. Kiss Anna on the forehead from me for the joys she gives you; have the irons made at once, so that you may no longer curse life; which is a serious insult to those who love you; amuse yourself without dissipation; for dissipation fritters away the soul, and is to the detriment of all affections.
Here is a return to the lansquenet, and for that I beg your pardon; you have a soul rich enough to throw a little of it into cards if it pleases you. As for me, who live under the despotic rule of a Chartreux, I find I have not soul enough to suffice for my work and my affections. But I have not the luck to be a woman.
Paris, March 27, 1836.
I receive to-day your good packet, my dear number 7, in which you tell me of two afflicting deaths, but in which you also give me much pleasure by the exact detail of what happens to you. I am going, therefore, to write you at length on all that you inquire about; but on condition that you write to me punctually every week.
Your passage about fidelity, understood, after the Wronski manner, as intuitive truth, made my heart bound with joy. We love to find our own ideas expressed by a friend and to know that the moral sensations of both are of equal purity. Is not this the sentiment that a fine passage of Beethoven makes us feel, by representing to us, in its purest expression, a whole sentiment, a whole nature? For myself, I am convinced that in carrying very high our sentiments we multiply a thousand-fold our pleasures; a little lower, and all would be suffering; but in the heaven above us all is infinite. This is what your “Séraphita” shows. How is it you have not received February 24 (old style) a book published here in December? It is no longer even spoken of in France. What grief that I cannot obtain a permit for a single parcel to Wierzchownia. I’ll go myself to Saint Petersburg and ask one of the Emperor! What! you, to whom the statue belongs, you have not seen it! It is not in the temple for which it was made! Everybody here has wondered over the dedication, and you have not read it printed, when the author is your devoted moujik. The world is upside down!
You are always talking to me of that detestable “Lys” which is not my “Lys.” Wait, in order to know “Le Lys dans la Vallée,” for Werdet’s edition.
Your poor moujik will never be impertinent or defiant. But, writing in great haste, from heart to heart, and never reading over a letter, there may have been, apropos of Roger, a little too hearty a laugh—which was not right. No, cara, Nature gave me a trustfulness unbounded, a soul that is proof against everything. I have always had in me a something, I don’t know what, which leads me to do quite otherwise than other people, and it may be that in me fidelity is pride. Having no other point of support but myself, I have been forced to magnify it, to reinforce the myself. All my life is there; a life without vulgar pleasures. None of those who are near me would live it “at the price of Napoleon’s and Byron’s fame united,” de Belloy said to me. But de Belloy saw only the hermit on his rock with his cruse and his loaf not bestowing a glance on the siren tempters. He did not see the ecstasy in the heavens, he did not know the revery, the evenings, the chimney-corner, the poems of Hope! I am a gambler, poor to the eyes of all; but I play my whole fortune once a year, when I gather in that which others squander!
My lawsuit has been postponed for a fortnight. Chaix d’Estange, who pleads against me, had to plead a case in the provinces. There’s the “Lys” delayed!
You ask for details about the “Chronique de Paris.” I have not given you any because it was a paper both political and literary—Bedouck!—I forget nothing that I ought to do. Did I not tell you in Geneva that within three years I should begin to build the scaffolding for my political preponderance? Did I not repeat it in Vienna? Well, the “Chronique” is the old “Globe” (same idea) but placed to the Right instead of being to the Left; it is the new doctrine of the Royalist party. We make the Opposition, and we preach autocratic power; that means that on arriving at the management of affairs we shall not be found in contradiction with what we have said. I am the supreme director of this journal, which appears twice a week, in a monstrous quarto form. It gives the amount of four feuilles of the “Revue de Paris,” which makes eight a week; and we cost only sixty francs a year, whereas the “Revue” costs eighty, and gives only four feuilles a week. The higher criticism of politics, literature, art, sciences, administration, and a portion devoted to individual work, novels, etc., that is the scheme of the paper.
We have obtained Gustave Planche, an immense and grand critic. We are going to have Sainte-Beuve, and, perhaps, Victor Hugo. Capefigue is charged with domestic politics, and does it pretty well. I have an interest which is equivalent to thirty-two thousand francs capital, and if the “Chronique” goes beyond two thousand subscribers it may bring me in twenty thousand francs income, not counting my work, very dearly paid, and my salary as director. We have enough funds to go on for two years. We are between the “Gazette de France,” the “Quotidienne,” and the Right Centre. These two newspapers are so placed that they can make no concessions to the present régime, whereas we can, ourselves, compromise. We are going to ask to be allowed to enter Russia, because we are in favour of an alliance with Russia against an English alliance, and for autocracy in the matter of government. Our doctrines as to criticism of art and literature are in favour of the highest moral expression. Is there not something grandiose in this enterprise? So, for the three months that I have now directed it, it has gained daily in respect and authority; only, the costs do crush us. Each feuille pays ten centimes tax to the treasury, and we have to go into bonds for seventy-five thousand francs in specie.
Extraordinary thing! It is this very operation that will financially save me. I hope to-morrow to sell sixteen of my shares (without cutting into the thirty-two). Besides which, the affair of the “Cent Contes Drolatiques,” published in numbers and illustrated, appears on the point of being concluded. Louis Boulanger will do the drawings, and Perret the wood-cuts. Six thousand copies are to be struck off, which will give me thirty thousand francs of author’s rights. So, in a few days from now, I shall have before me forty-five thousand francs, without counting the twenty-four thousand awaiting me on the day when Madame Bêchet gets her last Part. In all, seventy thousand francs. Now, as I only owe fifty thousand (not counting the debt to my mother), I shall see the end of my miseries.
But let me paint to you one of the thousand dramas of my life as artist and soldier. On my return from Vienna (you know what disasters that absence caused me), my silver-plate was pawned. I have never yet been able to redeem it. I have to pay three thousand francs to do so, and I have never had three thousand francs. I owe on the 31st about eight thousand four hundred. In order to live honourably until now, and meet all my obligations, I have used up my resources; all are exhausted. I am, as it were, at Marengo. Desaix must come and Kellermann must charge; then all is said. But, the men who are to give me sixteen thousand francs for my sixteen shares in the “Chronique” are coming to dine with me. You know that people lend and show confidence to none but the rich. All about me breathes opulence, ease, the wealth of a lucky artist. If at the dinner my silver is hired, all will fail; the man who is arranging the affair is a painter,—an observing race, satirical, deep, like Henri Monnier, in its coup d’œil; he will see the weak spot in the cuirass, he will guess the Mont-de-Piété—which he knows better than any one. Adieu, my affair. All my future lies in redeeming that silver, which is worth five thousand francs and is pledged for three thousand. I must have it to-morrow, or perish. Isn’t it curious? This is the 27th; on the 31st of March I must pay six thousand francs, and I haven’t a farthing. But on the 5th of April the signing of the “Drolatiques” affair may give me fifteen thousand francs!
I cannot ask a single person in Paris to lend me money, for I am thought rich and my prestige would fall, would vanish away. The affair of the “Chronique” is due to the credit I enjoy. I was able to speak en maître. Put oil on this flame by representing to yourself the perpetual fire, the ardour of a soul that is consuming itself, and tell me if that is not a drama. One ought to be a great financier, a cold, wise, prudent man; one must be!—I say no more, for yesterday one of my friends said truly: “When your statue is made it ought to be in bronze, to rightly picture the man.”
My health is at this moment so greatly affected that Dr. Nacquart issues an edict which has to be obeyed. Coffee is suppressed. Every evening they put upon my stomach a linseed poultice. I am kept on chicken broth, and eat nothing but white meat. I drink gum water, and they give me inward sedatives. I have to follow this regimen for ten days and then go to Touraine for a month, to recover life and health. All the mucous membranes are violently inflamed; I cannot digest without horrible suffering.
If my money matters could be well done, and done quickly, instead of going to Touraine I would go and see you for a few days. Would it be possible? I desire it so keenly. A journey would restore me. In any case, do not be vexed with me; it is better to do my business and pay my debts, to recover my sacred liberty, to be able to come and go as I like, to owe neither sou nor line, and postpone the joy of seeing you. Better to put one’s fortune in a place inaccessible to storm, than to discount it like a spendthrift.
I may tell you now that the dawn of my liberation begins to show, and that all foretells the end of my troubles. The journey to Vienna was the signal folly of my life. It cost five thousand francs and upset all my affairs. We can laugh about it, and I do not tell it to you now to give myself the smallest little merit, but only to prove to you that if I do not go to see you it is from a wise calculation of friendship; it is a proof of attachment; it will enable me to show you a friend whom you have never yet known, the man a child, without cares, without troubles that gnaw the heart, taking from him his grace, distorting his nature, everything, even to his glance.
If you only knew how, after this solitary life, I long to grasp Nature by a rapid rush across Europe, how my soul thirsts for the immense, the infinite; for Nature seen in the mass, not in detail, judged on its grand lines, sometimes damp with rain, sometimes rich with sun, as we bound across space, seeing lands instead of villages! If you knew this you would not tell me to come, for that redoubles my torture, it fans the furnace on which I sleep.1
Grant heaven that I sell the sixteen shares of the “Chronique” and that the matter of the “Drolatiques” may be decided. And then, then! Above all, if Werdet can buy back from Madame Bêchet the “Études de Mœurs,” then I could travel, I could go and spend a week at Wierzchownia. You would find the heart of the intellectual moujik ever young, but the moujik himself is deteriorating physically. “No one fights with impunity against the will of Nature,” Dr. Nacquart said to me yesterday, ordering me his prescriptions and wanting things I refused: such as not working, and taking much amusement—which the Wronski theory forbids. As for me, I love the noble absolute. I don’t forget how indulgent you were in your advice at Vienna; but I have intolerant superstitions.
I have long thought what I wrote to you about your brother; this is not a consolation ad hoc, it is a sentiment of my own; there are none but those that have an iron will who can be indulgent to such weaknesses, for they have often been so near, they have so often measured the depths of the gulf! But these thoughts are not social; they can only be uttered in the ear of a friend; they would do us harm. One must be Walter Scott to risk Connachar in the “Fair Maid of Perth.” And yet, I mean to go farther; I shall give in “Les Héritiers Boirouge” [never published] a body to my thoughts. I shall there introduce a personage of that kind, but to my mind, more grandiose. I was able to give interest to Vautrin; I shall be able to raise fallen men and give them an aureole by introducing common souls into those souls, whose weakness is the abuse of strength, and who fall because they go beyond it.
The loss of your sister’s child is a dreadful misfortune, about which only mothers understand each other, for they alone are in the secret of what they lose; but at your sister’s age, such losses are reparable. Children, considered in their vital future are one of the great social monstrosities. There are few fathers who give themselves the trouble to reflect on their duties. My father had made great studies on this subject; he communicated them to me (I mean their results) at an early age, and I gained fixed ideas which dictated to me the “Physiologie du Mariage,”—a book more profound than satirical or flippant; which will be completed by my great work on “Education” taken in its broad meaning, which I carry up to before generation, for the child is in the father. I am a great proof, and so is my sister, of the principles of my father. He was fifty-nine years old when I was born, and sixty-three when my sister was born. Now, through the power of our vitality we have both failed to succumb; we have centenarian constitutions. Without that power of force and life transmitted by my father I should be dead under my debts and obligations.
I see the children of rich families all enervated by the situation of their fathers and mothers. The mother is worn-out by society, the father by his vices; their children are weakly. But these great and fruitful ideas do not come within the epistolary domain. The question is immense; it has innumerable ramifications. It often absorbs me. It is not suitable to discuss here, but I refer it to Sterne, whose opinions I share entirely. “Tristram Shandy” is, in this respect, a masterpiece.
I cannot tell you anything of Paris; I live in a monk’s round, directing my newspaper, writing, contending, more occupied in divining secrets of State than those surrounding me. I want power in France, and I shall have it; but one must be well prepared for the battle, and trained in all questions. When a man of a certain compass does not absorb himself in the real and material joys of love, he must either give himself up to ambition, or vow his life to obscurity. All medium stations are ignoble and vulgar. My youth is near to extinction without ever being fully satisfied by the only destiny that I had; for Madame de Berny was not young, and, believe me, youth and beauty are something. My dream of those days was always incomplete. If I continue my present life without change for only six years more, I can truly say that my life is a failure. My life was Diodati. Two years, three years would suffice. The month of May, 1836, is approaching and I shall be thirty-seven years old; as yet I am nothing; I have done nothing complete or great; I have only heaped up stones. In that young Coliseum now constructing there is no sun, or at least its rays come from afar, so far that the soul has need of imagination to give being to the monument. But neither fame nor fortune gives back the grace of youth. Something superhuman is needed to meet with love when one is past forty. What a measure of belief in one’s self—I do not say in others—to hope to escape the common law! And yet I am all faith. When troubles have gone I shall be twenty years old once more. And then I wish to be so good.
Well, adieu. I desire that this letter full of hope may be confirmed to you by the next, for as soon as the two affairs are concluded, I will write you a line.
Answer me quickly about the portrait. Louis Boulanger is to paint it. He has just left me, with the intention of making a great work of it.
Paris, April 23, 1836.
Cara. I receive to-day your number 8 with twenty days’ interval. How many things have happened in twenty days! Yes, I have delayed writing, but intentionally. I wanted to send you only good news, and my affairs have been getting worse and worse. I have none but dreadful combats to relate to you, struggles, sufferings, useless measures taken, nights without sleep. To listen to my life a demon would weep.
Reading the last paragraphs of your letter I said to myself, “Well, I will write to her, even if to sadden her.” Sorrow has a strong life, too strong perhaps.
My lawsuit is not yet tried. I must wait six days more for a verdict, unless the trial is still further postponed. The matter of the “Contes Drolatiques” is not decided. The shares of the “Chronique” are difficult to dispose of. So, my embarrassments redouble. For two months, since I have had so much business, I have done little work; here are two months lost; that is to say, the goose with the golden eggs is ill. Not only am I discouraged, but the imagination needs rest. A journey of two months would restore me. But a journey of two months means ten thousand francs, and I cannot have that sum when, on the contrary, I am behindhand with just that money. My liberation retreats; my dear independence comes not.
“Le Livre Mystique” is little liked here; the sale of the second edition does not go off. But in foreign countries it is very different; there the feeling is passionate. I have just received a very graceful letter from a Princess Angelina Radziwill, who envies you your dedication, and says it is all of life for a woman to have inspired that book. I was very pleased for you. Mon Dieu! if you could have seen how in my quivering there was nothing personal. How happy I was to feel myself full of pride for you! What a moment of complete pleasure, and all unmixed! I shall thank the princess for you and not for myself—as we give treasures to a doctor who saves a beloved person. Besides, this is the first testimony to my success which has reached me from abroad.
Cara, write me quickly if you have any very trustworthy person in Saint Petersburg, because I have the means, or shall have, to send you those manuscripts through the French embassy. They can instantly reach Saint Petersburg; but from there to you, you must find the intermediary.
My letter was interrupted by the arrival of a commissary of police and two agents, who arrested me, and took me to the prison of the National Guard, where I am at this moment, and where I continue my letter peacefully. I am here for five days. I shall celebrate the birthday of the King of the French. But I lose the fine fireworks I intended to go and see!1
My publisher [Werdet] has come, and given me an explanation of the non-arrival of the “Livre Mystique” to your hands. It is forbidden by the censor. So now I don’t know what we shall do. Is it not singular that the person to whom it is dedicated should be the only one who has not read it? You must find out what is proper to do about it. I await your orders.
Here are all my ideas put to flight. This prison is horrid; all the prisoners are together. It is cold, and we have no fire. The prisoners are of the lowest class, they are playing cards and shouting. Impossible to have a moment’s tranquillity. They are mostly poor workmen, who cannot give two days of their time to guard duty without losing the subsistence of their families; and here and there are a few artists and writers, for whom this prison is even better than the guard-house. They say the beds are dreadful.
I have just got a table, a sofa, and a chair, and I am in a corner of a great, bare hall. Here I shall finish the “Lys dans la Vallée.” All my affairs are suspended; and this happens on a day when my paper appears, and almost on the eve of the 30th, when I have three thousand francs to pay.
This is one of the thousand accidents of our Parisian life; and every day the like happens in all business. A man on whom you count to do you a service is in the country, and your plan fails. A sum that should have been paid to you is not paid. You must make ten tramps to find some one (and often at the last moment) for the success of some important matter. You can never imagine how much agony accompanies these hours, these days, lost. Many a time I have lain down wearied,—incapable of undertaking to write a single word, of thinking my most dear ideas!
I cannot too often repeat it—it is a battle equal to those of war; the same fatigues under other forms. No real benevolence, no succour. All is protestation without efficacy. I have vanquished for six years, even seven; well, discouragement lays hold upon me when only one quarter of my debt remains to be paid, the last quarter. I don’t know what to do. My life stops short before those last four thousand ducats.
Monday, 25th.
I have again interrupted my letter for forty-eight hours. Just as I was writing the word ducats Eugène Sue arrived. He is imprisoned for forty-eight hours. We have spent them together, and I would not continue this letter before him. He talked to me of his occupations, of his fortune. He is rich, and sheltered from everything. He no longer thinks of literature; he lives for himself alone; he has developed a complete selfishness; he does nothing for others, all for himself; he wants, at the end of his day, to be able to say that all that he has done, and all that has been done was for him. Woman is merely an instrument; he does not wish to marry. He is incapable of feeling any sentiment. I listened to all this tranquilly, thinking of my interrupted letter. It pained me for him. Oh! these forty-eight hours were all I needed to prove to me that men without ambition love no one. He went away, without thanking me for having sacrificed for him the concession I had obtained of being alone in the dormitory; for his admission came near compromising the little comforts a few friends had extracted for me from the inflexible staff of grocers, anxious to club all classes together in this fetid galley. I am going to bed.
Saturday, 30.
Great news! The bill for the lateral canal in the Lower Loire, which will go from Nantes to Orléans, has passed the Chamber of Deputies, and will be presented, May 3, to the Chamber of Peers, where the Marquis de la Place, the friend of all pupils of the École Polytechnique, has promised my brother-in-law to have it passed. So, there are my sister and her husband attaining, after ten years’ struggle, to their ends. You know I told you at Geneva about that fine enterprise. Now, the only point is to find the twenty-six millions. But that is nothing after what has been done. The stock will be rated so high that money will not be lacking.
At this moment I have a hope on my own account. That is to buy the grant of the grantee, M. de Villevêque, and try to make something on it by selling to a banker. My brother-in-law has just left my prison to try and arrange this affair. If I have this luck, I might in two months make a couple of hundred thousand francs, which would heal all my wounds. It is especially in political warfare that money is the nerve.
Sue drew caricatures with pen and ink on a bit of paper to which he put his name; so I send it to you as autograph. It will remind you of my seven days in prison.
Here, I am dying of consuming activity, while, from what you say, you are living in stagnation, without aliment, without your emotions of travel, which makes you desire either travel or complete solitude. What you tell me of Anna delights me; I had some fears for that frail health, but the fears came from my affection, for I know that these organizations, apparently weak, are sometimes of astonishing power.
I have just written to Hammer; he asked me for a second copy of “Le Livre Mystique.” I shall send him two; and as our dear Hammer is as patient as a goat that is strangling herself, and thinks that books can go as fast as the post, I shall request him to send you one by the first opportunity. That’s a first attempt, I’ll try ten more, and out of ten there may be a lucky chance.
I have the set of pearls for you. But how can I send them?
When I leave the prison I shall go and see Madame Kisseleff. That will be number two of my chances.
Apropos, if you find a safe opportunity remember my tea, for there is none good in Paris. I tasted yours (Russian, I mean) a few days ago, and I am shameless enough to remind you of this. “Norma” has had little success here.
The gracefulness you have put into your last letter received here, to console me for the grief of knowing that the “Lys” was published in its first proof [in Russia] I cannot accept as author. The French language admits nothing that comforts the heart of M. Honoré de Balzac. You will say so with me when you hold the book and read it. However it be, the Apollo and the Diana are more beautiful than blocks of marble. The young man, the Oaristes, is more graceful than a skeleton, and we prefer the peach to the peach-stone, though that may contain a million of peaches.
I have much distress, even enormous distress in the direction of Madame de Berny; not from her directly, but from her family. It is not of a nature to be written. Some evening at Wierzchownia, when the wounds are scars, I will tell it to you in murmurs that the spiders cannot hear, for my voice shall go from my lips to your heart. They are dreadful things, that scoop into life to the bone, deflowering all, and making one doubt of all, except of you for whom I reserve these sighs.
Oh! what repressions there are in my heart! Since I left Vienna all my sufferings, of all kinds, of all natures, have redoubled. Sighs sent through space, sufferings endured in secret, sufferings unperceived! My God! I who have never done ill, how many times have I said to myself, “One year of Diodati, and the lake!” How often have I thought, “Why not be dead on such a day, at such an hour?” Who is in the secret of so many inward storms, of so much passion lost in secret? Why are the fine years going, pursuing hope, which escapes, leaving nought behind but an indefatigable ardour of re-hoping? During this burning year, when at every moment all seems ending, and no end comes, desires lay hold upon me to flee this crater which makes me fear a withered end—to flee it to the ends of the earth.
I am the Wandering Jew of Thought, always afoot, always marching, without rest, without enjoyments of the heart, with nothing but that which leaves a memory both rich and poor, with nothing that I can wrest from the future. I beg from the future, I stretch my hands to it. It casts me—not an obole, but—a smile that says, “To-morrow.”
Paris, May 1, 1836.
This is the day on which last year I said to myself, “I am going there!” Last evening, I left my window for sadness overcame me. Sleep drove away the grief.
I have worked much to-day. I shall close this letter this evening; I will see if I have forgotten to tell you any facts of the last twenty days, when I have been like a shuttlecock between two battledores. I am going to set to work at the difficult passages in the “Lys.” I must finish the chapter entitled, “First Loves.” I think that I have undertaken literary effects that are extremely difficult to render. What work! What ideas are buried in this book! It is the poetic pendant of the “Médecin de campagne.” I like all you write to me of the little events of your existence at Kiew: the name of Vandernesse, the little lady, etc. But I would like your letters still better if you would write me ten lines a day; no, not ten lines, but a word, a sentence. You have all your time, and I have only hours stolen from sleep to offer you. You are the luxury of the heart, the only luxury that does not ruin, but brings with it nature’s own simplicity, riches, poverty,—in short, all!
Alas! not being at home to-day I cannot enclose to you any autograph, and I have some interesting ones: Talma, Mademoiselle Mars, all sorts of people; I shall have one of Napoleon, one of Murat, etc. You will see that when a matter concerns the documentary treasures of Wierzchownia we have great constancy in our ideas.
To-day I have worked much; I shall spend the night on the completion of the “Lys;” for I have still thirty feuilles of my writing to do, which is one quarter of the book. After that I must finish the “Héritiers Boirouge” for Madame Bêchet, who is married and become Madame Jacquillart; and next, give “La Torpille” in June to the “Chronique,” without which we go to the bad. You see it is impossible that I should budge from here before September; there is nothing to be said; those things must be done. After that I shall have no money, I shall only have fulfilled my engagements. So I don’t know which way to turn; what with notes falling due, no receipts, and no friend to advance me funds, what will become of me? Either some lucky chance or perish. Hitherto luck has served me.
Just now I am particularly overwhelmed because I counted on the conclusion of the affair of the “Cent Contes Drolatiques” which gave me thirty thousand francs and would have quieted everything. But the longer it goes, the less it ends. I am more than disheartened, I am crazy about it.
There, then, are my affairs. Much work to finish, no money to receive, much money to pay. Am I to be stopped in the midst of my career? What can I attempt?
My brother-in-law came back this morning. M. Lainé de Villevêque asks to reflect upon this sale, he asks three days; and that is the least a man should take to decide so important a matter. I have offered him twenty thousand ducats for his position as grantee, but in ready money. I hope that Rossini will get Aguado to lend it to me, and that I can then resell the position to Rothschild for the double or treble, out of which those scamps will still make five or six millions. There’s a pretty smile; the first that fortune has bestowed upon me.
You see that in my next letter I shall have very interesting things to tell you: the canal affair; my lawsuit and the “Lys,” and finally “Les Drolatiques,” which will be either a complete failure or a piece of business done; in such matters I must have a “yes” or a “no.”
Adieu, cara; do not make yourself unhappy about all this. I have broad shoulders, the courage of a lion, strength of character, and if, at times, melancholy lays hold upon me, I look at the future, I believe in something good—though the years do pass with cruel rapidity; and what years! Ah, the beautiful years! Shall I ever again see the Lake of Geneva, or Neufchâtel?
Well, adieu; till ten days hence. You will know all that should be said for me and of me to those about you.
From Monsieur Hanski to H. De Balzac.
Wierzchownia, May 15, 1836.
Monsieur,—Having at last, after various attempts, succeeded in procuring an inkstand in malachite, I hasten, monsieur, to send it to you through the house of Rothschild. Have the kindness to inquire for it and to keep it as the souvenir of a true friendship, which cannot change, in spite of the vast distance that separates us; which thought alone can cross, for the present.
If God wills it as I desire, perhaps some day we shall come to find you. Meanwhile, if your literary occupations and the distractions of the world leave you a moment at liberty, think sometimes of your friends in the North, who, in spite of their frigid climate, know how to feel and appreciate your sentiments and your talents.
Your works, monsieur, make us pass many agreeable moments in our solitude. They give us even the illusion of seeing you playing with Anna, who, day by day, grows prettier. She is already a great lady, who begins to play the piano, and promises to have a distinguished talent for it. She has also a taste, a decided passion for reading; I can no longer find her books analogous to her age; we have exhausted the book-shops of Saint Petersburg.
You could hardly believe, monsieur, the pleasure I have had in reading “L’Interdiction.” I was filled with the same sentiment I described to you when reading for the first time at Neufchâtel “Le Médecin de campagne.” Give us as many as possible of such works; society expects that service of you. The picture of the judge, and that of the nobleman restoring the property which, according to his own conviction, he illegally possessed, are of incomparable beauty and rare perfection. They cannot but strongly influence the morals of this age. Men of heart, of talent, of genius, it is your mission to blast vices, to give the greatest brilliancy to virtue, and to repair the evil of which the philosophy of the last century cast the germ.
But I perceive that I am out of my natural vocation, and becoming diffuse. That is a defect communicated to me by the Châtelaine of Wierzchownia and sovereign of Paulowska, who is quite enchanted to find herself once more in her empire of flowers and verdure, who salutes you, and is preparing to write you a long letter of I don’t know how many pages.
It can only be in two years hence that we shall propose to ourselves to make a journey for the education of little Anna, and I have a presentiment, monsieur, that we shall find you sitting in the Chamber, and be present at some of your eloquent speeches. While awaiting the realization of that dream, accept the assurance of a true and sincere friendship.
Venceslas Hanski.
P. S. I send you the design of the inkstand before you receive it; that you may know if you receive the right thing.
To Madame Hanska.
Paris, May 16-June 16, 1836.
One year ago to-day, I was at the Hôtel de la Poire, in Vienna, at one o’clock, having made the journey in five days, and not having slept for three nights! At two o’clock, after an hour’s sleep, I gave myself the fête of going to the Walterische Haus. To-day, my only pleasure will be, in the midst of my perpetual battle, a halt of two hours to write you a line, cara contessina. But instead of sending you a bouquet of rosy hopes, I have only sad things to tell you. All that I announced to you of good has failed. Nothing of that which would have freed me succeeds.
However, to-day Madame Bêchet may perhaps cede her rights in the “Études de Mœurs” to Werdet; and this is more important than you know to my tranquillity; for if I have but one publisher I can regulate my work, I can manage to obtain a month’s rest, and you know what I can make of a month’s rest. The “Contes Drolatiques” affair still drags on.
During the last few days a great change has taken place in me. Ambition has disappeared. I no longer want to enter public life by the Chamber or by journalism. So my efforts will now tend to rid me of the “Chronique de Paris.” This determination comes to me from the aspect of the Chamber of Deputies. The folly of the orators, the silliness of the debates, the little chance there is of triumphing against such miserable mediocrity, have made me renounce the idea of mixing myself in it otherwise than as a minister. Therefore, two years hence, I shall try to open, with cannon-shot, the doors of the Academy; for academicians can become peers, and I will endeavour to make a large enough fortune to reach the Upper Chamber and enter power through power itself.
“Le Lys dans la Vallée” is sapping me. Neither the lawsuit nor the book is finished. I have ten more feuilles, one hundred and sixty pages, to do wholly—to write and correct. I hope to finish in ten days, though it is almost a quarter of the book; but it is the easiest quarter. All is now settled, posé. I have only to conclude. The striking character is decidedly M. de Mortsauf. It was very difficult to draw that figure; but it is done now. I have raised the statue of the Emigration. I have collected in one and the same creation all the features of the émigré returned to his estates, and perhaps all the features of the husband; for married men do, more or less, resemble M. de Mortsauf. The book will appear, I hope, by June 1. But how can I send you your copy? I could send it by the embassy, but I must know the address of some one who is devoted to you in Saint Petersburg.
June 16.
You could never understand what my life has been between these two dates. This letter has lain a month on my table without my being able to add a word. I have received two letters from you and one from M. Hanski without being able to answer them, and to-day I must lock my door and take a morning to write to you. I have so many things to tell you! So many events have happened to me I do not know where to begin. Besides, it is impossible to tell you all; it would fill volumes.
First, my lawsuit is won and my book is out. I have worked night and day to finish the book in time to have it appear the very day the verdict was given. You must know that the same sort of attack that was made against my credit during my journey to Vienna, when they declared me in prison for debt, my enemies have again made against my character and my integrity. All the most ignoble and basest calumny, all the mud that could be found has been heaped upon me. I had to write a defence, for the public, in a single night. You can read it in the “Lys,” to which it forms an introduction [he suppressed it, later]. I won twice over, once before the public, and once before the judges, who were indignant. On what will they now attack me?1
Ah! you will never know how burning my life has been during this month. I was alone to meet it, harassed by the newspaper people demanding money; harassed by my own payments to meet; harassed by my book, for which I had day and night to correct proof. No, I wonder I lived through it. Life is too heavy; I have no pleasure in living.
You have grieved me much by sending back to me the foolish things your aunt has said,—that I am married to a lady whose name and person I do not know,—while I am laden here with the foolish things of Paris! Those from Constantinople are too much! Keep, I beg of you your credulity for good things. I really do not know what Madame Rosalie [Rzewuska] means, or what Hammer writes me; he says you are going to Constantinople, and that he has sent your “Livre Mystique” to your aunt, who will deliver it to you in person. I am lost in all this muddle of news.
Though I have won my suit and the “Lys” is out, my affairs do not prosper; it is one of the victories that kill. Another such, and I am dead. The production of books does not suffice to extinguish my debts; I must have recourse to the stage, and there I shall encounter such keen hatreds that they may bar my entrance, or deceive the public on the value of the works I produce there.
I received Monsieur Hanski’s letter during those days. I have a better edition of the “Médecin de campagne” to send him. But I still do not know how to send it, therefore I keep it for him.
I am so encumbered with delayed business, cares, tentatives, that I write you with a sort of inebriated head that does not allow of logic; so I hasten to close this letter and send it off. You will receive another, acknowledging the reception of the inkstand, which from the drawing seems to me of crushing magnificence for a poor devil.
Boulanger has made a very fine thing of my portrait. It will have, I think, the honours of the King’s corner in the coming Exhibition. Don’t trouble yourself about the money for the copy, which will be an original, for I am to sit for yours as I did for this one. I will pay him the five hundred francs, fifty ducats, and when I go to Wierzchownia you can, if I am not rich, return them; if I am rich I shall have no need of them. But all artists think that Boulanger has done a fine thing, which, apart from its merit as a portrait, is great as a painting. I have had to give sittings of seven and eight hours—already ten of them—through the storms of this month.
At the moment when I am writing to you and when I need some repose to revive my brain, which drops like a jaded horse (for it is impossible not to see that there are organs the strength of which is limited), the manager of our newspaper sends me missive after missive to pay him thirteen thousand more francs, the last of the forty-five thousand which I owe on my purchase. These are pin-pricks into one’s spinal marrow. So I must leave my letter a second time and rush about the city to realize on certain shares; and I must at the same time finish the “Ecce Homo” begun in the “Chronique” two days ago.
Again my letter is interrupted. Oh! this time it is too much! Do you know by what? By a legal notice from Madame Bêchet, who summons me to furnish her within twenty-four hours my two volumes in 8vo, with a penalty of fifty francs for every day’s delay! I must be a great criminal and God wills that I shall expiate my crimes! Never was such torture! This woman has had ten volumes 8vo out of me in two years, and yet she complains at not getting twelve!
You will be some time without news of me, for I shall probably flee into the valley of the Indre and there write in twenty days the two volumes of that woman and get rid of her. For such an enterprise one must have no distraction, no thought other than that of the work we write. Yes, if I die for it, I must be done with these obligations. But if you only knew what an absence of twenty days is to me in my affairs. It is conflagration. I beg of you, do not be worried. If I do not write to you, it is that I am either fighting for serious interests, or working for something urgent, ardent, that brooks no delay. Here I am, rebeginning a horrible struggle—that of money interests and books to write! Put an end to the last of my contracts by satisfying Madame Bêchet, and write a fine book! And I have twenty days! And it shall be done! The “Héritiers Boirouge” and “Illusions Perdues” will be written in twenty days!
I leave you, as you see, more harassed, more persecuted, more occupied than ever. I have the sad presentiment that nothing can end well out of all this. Human nature has its limits, the strong as well as the weak, and I shall soon have attained my limit.
Well, adieu; you, one of the three persons who might know me, have you many doubts, have you left any dark corners without penetrating them, because I have not had the happiness to be long near you?
June 16,——
My letter was again interrupted. Yesterday, I dined with the Abbé de Lamennais, Berryer, and I don’t know whom besides. I saw the abbé for the first time; as for Berryer, we are old acquaintances. I was shocked at the atrocious face of the Abbé de Lamennais; I tried to seize a single feature to which one could attach one’s self, but there was none.
Berryer takes a trip to Saint Petersburg. I advised him strongly to return by land and pass through the Ukraine. I told him that I had hopes of going to the Ukraine towards September; but I dare not yield myself to any hope at all. On the 20th I start for Saché [a beautiful estate near Tours, belonging to a family friend, M. de Margonne].
The “Chronique de Paris” is very well posed, politically speaking. But it needs funds. Berryer told me how fruitful the idea of a Right Centre was in results.
Madame de Berny is getting worse and worse. I hope to go and see her on my return from Touraine. But she cannot bear the least emotion.
Adieu; you will pardon my silence when you know all my griefs and pains. I send you many flowers of memory and affectionate homage. Present my friendly remembrances to Monsieur Hanski, to whom I shall write next, and recall me to the recollection of those about you.
Saché, June, 1836.
I receive here your last letter in which you speak to me of Madame Rosalie and of “Séraphita.” In relation to your aunt, I own that I am ignorant by what law it is that persons so well born and bred can believe such base calumnies. I, a gambler! Can your aunt neither reason, combine, nor calculate anything except whist? I, who work, even here, sixteen hours a day, how should I go to a gambling-house that takes whole nights? It is as absurd as it is crazy.
I went for the first time, at thirty-six years of age, and out of curiosity, to Frascati, where I found Bernhard. One night Bernhard presented me to the Cercle des Étrangers, where he invited me to dinner. I went for the third time the day he gave the dinner. Since then, though I have been invited several times, I have never returned there. The last time, I asked Bernhard to include me in his stake for a certain sum, which denotes the most profound ignorance of the passion. In all, during my life, I have lost thirty ducats at cards. So much for gambling. That vice will never catch me. I play for a stake far dearer and nobler.
Let your aunt judge in her way of my works, of which she knows neither the whole design nor the bearing; it is her right to do so. I submit to all judgments. That is one of the evils through which we have to pass. Resignation is one of the conditions of my existence.
Your letter was sad; I felt it was written under the influence of your aunt. To comprehend is to equal, said Raphael; and as you yourself declare that our poor age does not take the trouble to comprehend, it follows that our equals are few. That which I can pretend to for myself and my own person is the usage of a faculty given to man,—reason. Your aunt makes me a gambler and a debauchee; she has the proofs, you say. It is now seven or eight years that I work, as I have told you, sixteen hours a day. If I am a gambler and a debauchee, the man who has written thirty volumes in seven years must disappear. Both cannot live in the same skin; or, if they do, it must have pleased God to make an extraordinary creature—which I am not.
I was beginning to recover life and strength here, where I have been for the last five days. On leaving I told them with regard to the letters that might come, “Send me none but those from Russia;” and your letter has crushed me more than all the heavy nonsense that jealousy and calumny, lawsuit and money matters have cast upon me. My sensibility is a proof of friendship; there are none but those we love who can make us suffer. I am not angry with your aunt, but I am angry that a person as distinguished as you say she is should be accessible to such base and absurd calumny. But you yourself, at Geneva, when I told you I was free as air, you believed me to be married, on the word of one of those fools whose trade it is to sell money. I laughed. Here I cannot laugh; I have the horrible privilege of being horribly calumniated. A few debates like this, and I shall retire into Touraine, isolating myself from everything, renouncing all, striving to make myself an egoist, desiring neither sentiment nor happiness, and living by thought, and for thought.
Your aunt makes me think of the poor Christian who, entering the Sistine chapel just as Michel-Angelo had drawn a nude figure, asked why the popes allowed such horrors in Saint Peter’s. She judges a work of at least the same range in literature, without putting herself at a distance and awaiting its end. She judges the artist without knowing him, and by the sayings of ninnies. All that gives me little pain for myself, but much for her, if you love her. But that you should let yourself be influenced by such errors, that does grieve me and makes me very uneasy, for I live by my friendships only.
This is enough about that, or you will think me an angry author, a personage that does not exist in me. I forbade him ever to appear. Now let us come to what you say to me of “Séraphita.” It is strange that no one sees that “Séraphita” is all faith. Faith affirms, and the whole is said. The angel has descended from the angelic sphere to come into the midst of the quibbles of reasoning; he opposes reasoning with reasoning. It is not for him to formulate doubt. As to his answer, no sacred author has ever more energetically proven God. The proof drawn from the infinitude of numbers has surprised learned men. They have lowered their heads. It was beating them on their own ground with their own weapons.
As for the orthodoxy of the book. Swedenborg is diametrically opposed to the Court of Rome; but who shall dare pronounce between Saint Peter and Saint John? The mystical religion of Saint John is logical; it will ever be that of superior beings. That of Rome will be that of the crowd.
As you say, one must try to penetrate the meaning of “Séraphita” in order to criticise the work; but I never counted on a success after “Louis Lambert” was so despised. These are books that I make for myself and a few others. When I have to write a book for all the world I know very well what ideas to appeal to, and what I must express. “Séraphita” has nothing of earth; if she loved, if she doubted, if she suffered, if she were influenceable by anything terrestrial, she would not be the angel. No one in Paris has comprehended the vision of old David, when he speaks of the efforts of all the elementary substances to recover their creature with the spirit she has conquered; whereas they can have nought but her mortal remains. Séraphita is, as it were, a flower of the globe; all that has nourished her yearns after her. The “Path to God” is a far more lofty religion than that of Bossuet; it is the religion of Saint Teresa, of Fénelon, of Swedenborg, of Jacob Boehm, and of M. Saint-Martin.
But I am repeating myself. Your belief leads to it as much as mine. I thought I was making a beautiful and grand work, but I may have deceived myself. It is what it is; and it is now delivered over to the disputes of this world.
At the moment when I write you have doubtless read the “Lys dans la Vallée,” another Séraphita, who, this one, is orthodox. But I will not say anything more about them. Literature and its accompaniments bore me. When a book is done, I like to forget it; I do forget it; and I never return to it except to purge its faults a year or two later. You will read the book in its flesh, not its skeleton, and I hope it may give you pleasure.
I have undertaken to do here the two volumes for Madame Bêchet, as I must have written you before I left Paris. Touraine has given me back some health, but at the moment I was working most, with your letter came a letter from a friend, who sent me a puff of vexations. Such things dishearten one for living. Happily, the book I am now writing, “Illusions Perdues,” is sufficiently in that tone. All that I can put into it of bitter sadness will do marvellously well. It is one of the “novels” that will be understood. It is breast-high of all men.
I am at this moment in the little bedroom at Saché, where I have worked so much! I see again the noble trees I have so often looked at when searching out ideas. I am not more advanced in 1836 than I was in 1829; I owe, and I work, always. I still have in me the same young life, the heart, still childlike, though you ask me to say how many sentiments a man’s existence can consume. It seems as though, like gamblers, I have an “angélique” which multiplies. My pretended successes are still another of the agreeable fables fastened on me. I don’t know which critic it was who said that I had known very intimately all my models. But I will never reply to these exaggerations. Berryer is of my opinion, and I shall never forgive myself for having quitted my silent attitude to descend into this arena of mud, as I did in the Introduction to “Le Lys dans la Vallée.”
I have, within the last few days, been contemplating the extent of my work and what still remains to do. It is enormous. And, therefore, looking at that immense fresco, I have a great mind to sell out the “Chronique,” renounce all species of political ambition, and make some arrangements which would allow me to retire to a “cottage” in Touraine and there accomplish peaceably, without anxieties, a work which will help me to pass my life, if not happily, at least tranquilly. That my life should be happy, many other circumstances are needed.
What! Anna has been ill? Do not nurse her too much; excess of care, a great physician told me, is one of the evils that threaten the children of the rich. It is a way of bringing the influence of evils to bear upon them. But you know much already on this head. What I say is not one of those commonplaces addressed to mothers; it is the cry of a deep conviction. My sister adored a little girl whom she lost because she gave ear to everything for her. Her little Valentine is, to-day, on the contrary, left to herself and she is magnificent.
My brother still gives us much anxiety. My mother is consumed with grief. But my brother-in-law is succeeding better. The lateral canal of the Loire has been voted by both Chambers. Nothing is needed now but to find the capital to build it. Also he has lately obtained the building of a bridge in Paris, which is an excellent affair. So the skies are brightening, at least for him. But he has needed, like myself, much perseverance and courage.
In re-reading your letter, I think you make me out rather greater than I am, and you demand more of me than I can give. The desire to do well has brought me to certain means to produce that result, but the exercise of intellectual faculties does not bring with it real grandeur; one remains, humanly speaking, what one is: a poor being very impressible, whom God had made for happiness, and whom circumstances have condemned to the most wearying toil in the world.
At this moment I must leave you to complete my work; in five or six days, when I am delivered of these two volumes, which will terminate the hardest of the obligations I have ever contracted, I will write you at length, with a heart more joyful; for just now things are causing me more pain than pleasure. My soul and spirit are too strained by work. I am as nervous as a fashionable woman, but I shall, perhaps, recover a little gaiety when I feel myself the lighter by two volumes. Touraine is very beautiful just now. The weather is extremely warm, which has brought the vineyards into bloom. Ah! my God, when shall I have a little place, a little château, a little park, a fine library! and shall I ever inhabit it without troubles, lodging within it the love of my life?
The farther I go, the more these golden wishes take the tint of dreams; and yet to renounce them would be death to me. For ten years past I live by hope only.
Well, adieu; a thousand kindly things to M. Hanski. I place on Anna’s forehead a kiss, full of good wishes, and I beg you to find here those pretty flowers of the soul, those caressing thoughts, which you awaken and which belong to you, sad or not; for mine is one of those unalterable friendships which resemble the sky; clouds may pass beneath it, the atmosphere may be more or less ardent, but above them the heavens are ever blue. When you are sad, all you need do is to go up a little higher.
I have thought of you much during these last days, not receiving any letters; and now I regret having begun this letter with harshness towards a person you love and who loves you, though from her portrait I should judge her very cold.
Adieu again; I confide all I think to this little paper, which, unfortunately, will be very discreet. You will talk to me about the “Lys,” and say a little more than you have said this time?
Paris, August 22, 1836.
This date, cara, is not without significance. All will be explained to you by three events which will leave their mark within my soul and on the history of my misfortunes.
Madame de Berny is dead. I can say no more on that point. My sorrow is not of a day; it will react upon my whole life. For a year I had not seen her, nor did I see her in her last moments. This was why: at the moment when I ought to have been at Nemours I was obliged to wind up the affairs of the “Chronique” in Paris—in the midst of its greatest success. We could not support competition with daily papers at forty francs a year, while we cost sixty-four and appeared semi-weekly. To keep on, we needed fifty thousand francs, and no one could or would advance a farthing in the present circumstances of the press. I went to see all the shareholders and guaranteed to them the integral payment of what they had put in; so that at the moment when I received the heaviest blow my heart has ever known—for never, since the death of my grandmother, have I sounded so deeply the selfish gulf of eternal separation—at that moment I was meeting a loss of forty thousand francs. It was too much. Immediately after, Madame Bêchet, married, as I told you, to a certain Jacquillart, was constrained by him to sue me for my volumes; I was thus under the weight of a new suit which is all clear loss to me, for by the deed itself I am condemned to pay fifty francs for every day’s delay, and I am now two months behind, since the time I received the summons.
The last letter of the angel who has now escaped the miseries of life, and who in her last days was not spared them,—for in two years her two finest children, her best loved son, twenty-three years old, he who was all herself, and her most beautiful daughter of nineteen, are both dead; her youngest daughter of seventeen, mad; and her remaining son the cause of her greatest grief,—well, her last letter came in the midst of those worries of mine; and she, who was always so lovingly severe to me, acknowledged that the “Lys” was one of the finest books in the French language; she decked herself at last with the crown which, fifteen years earlier, I had promised her, and, always coquettish, she imperiously forbade me to come and see her, because she would not have me near her unless she were beautiful and well. The letter deceived me. I waited until I had, by dint of efforts, conferences, and much ability, made Werdet buy the “Études de Mœurs” from Madame Bêchet for thirty thousand francs before I started for Nemours, and then, suddenly, the fatal news came, and almost killed me.
I do not speak to you here in detail of these forty and some days. I have given you the chief features, the outline. Some day I will tell you more. I will tell you how in this intelligent Paris we succumbed; how in order to settle the affair of the “Études de Mœurs” and the last lawsuit by which I can ever be threatened, the devotion of my tailor and the savings of a poor workingman were needed,—two men who had more faith in me than all the pompous admiration of men in high places.
When all was over,—struck down in the clearest illusions of my heart, ruined in money, undergoing a second Beresina such as befell me in 1828, and wearied out,—Werdet gave me twenty days’ freedom, and we arranged for my payments till August 20. Rothschild gave me a letter of credit for Italy, and I seized a pretext of going to Milan to do a service to a man with whom I had a box at the opera, M. Visconti [Count Guidoboni-Visconti]. In twenty days I went there by the Mont Cenis, returning over the Simplon, having for companion a friend of Madame Carraud and Jules Sandeau [Madame Caroline Marbouty, to whom he dedicated “La Grenadière”]. You will divine that I lodged in your hotel Piazza Castello, and that in Geneva I stayed at the Arc with the Biolleys, and went to see Pré-l’Évêque and the Maison Mirabaud.
Alas! It is not forbidden to those who suffer to go and breathe a perfumed air. You alone and your memories could refresh a heart in mourning. I went over the road to Coppet and to Diodati. Cara, the Porte de Rive is enlarged, just as, suddenly, the affection I bear you is enlarged by all that I have lost. One no longer waits to enter Geneva; we can now come and go at any hour of the night. I stayed only one day in Geneva, and saw no one but de Candolle, who came near dying, but is better.
Here I am, returned, bearing a wound the scar of which will be ever visible, but which you alone have soothed unconsciously.
You must have had much uneasiness in consequence of my silence. Forgive me, dear. It was impossible for me to write, or think. I could only let myself be drawn along in a carriage, led by an inoffensive hand, guided like a dying man. My mind itself was crushed; for the failure of the “Chronique” came upon me at Saché, at M. de Margonne’s, where I was, by a wise impulse, plunged in work to rid myself of that odious Bêchet (it was that which kept me from going to Nemours!); in eight days I had invented, composed, “Les Illusions Perdues,” and I had written a Third of it! Think what such work was. All my faculties were strained; I wrote fifteen hours a day; I got up with the sun and wrote till the dinner-hour without taking anything but coffee.
One day, after dinner, which I naturally made substantial, the letters arrived, and I read that which announced to me the crisis of the “Chronique.” I went out with M. and Mme. de Margonne into the park, and fell, struck down by a rush of blood to the head, at the foot of a tree. I could not write a word, I saw all my prospects ruined. I said to myself that nothing remained for me but to go and hide myself at Wierzchownia, and amass enough work and money to come back some day and pay all I owed. In short, I was stunned. Courage came back to me. I flew to Paris; I struggled; then the rest came unexpectedly, blow on blow. I was at Saché after the “Lys” appeared and my suit was won. Touraine had cured my fatigue then and restored my brain. I was enabled there to make a last effort.
The journey I have just made only did me good at Geneva. In seeing that lake, finding myself again in places where I won a friendship that is so sweet to me, I was wrapped in a delightful atmosphere which shed a balm upon the bleeding wounds. You will find all in that sentence.
I wished to go to Neufchâtel; but the twenty days were too short. That is what prevented me from going to you,—the little time and the little money; for I am still in debt. All illness costs.
Here I am returned, in face of my obligations. To be able to make the journey, I obtained the price of the “Mémoires d’une jeune Mariée;” so that I have four volumes 8vo to do, on which I shall not receive another sou. I have, besides, enormous engagements; and no resources to sustain them. I must have recourse to credit; that means paying enormous interest. What a position! Oh! cara, what a life! Apathy saved me. If I had felt it all fully, I should have flung myself into some torrent on the Simplon.
Yes, all the papers have been hostile to the “Lys;” they have all cried shame, they have spit upon it. Nettement tells me that the “Gazette de France” attacked it “because I do not go to mass.” The “Quotidienne” from a private vengeance of the editor; in short all, for some reason or other. Instead of selling two thousand, as I hoped, for Werdet, we are only as far as thirteen hundred. Thus all material interests are endangered. There are some ignorant persons who cannot understand the beauty of Madame de Mortsauf’s death; they do not see the struggle of matter with mind, which is the foundation of Christianity. They see only imprecations of the disappointed flesh, of the wounded physical nature; they will not do justice to the sublime placidity of the soul when the countess confesses and dies a saint.
When I am thus hurt I spring toward you,—toward you alone now; toward you who comprehend me, and who judge with enough critical mind to give value to your praises. With what happiness we feel ourselves appreciated, judged, by some one who loves us. A word, an observation from the celestial creature of whom Madame de Mortsauf is a pale representation made more impression upon me than the whole public, for she was true; she wanted only my good and my perfection. I make you her heir, you who have all her noble qualities; you who could have written that letter of Madame de Mortsauf, which is but the imperfect breath of her constant inspirations, you who could, at least, complete it.
I must plunge into stupefying work; I can live only in that way, for where are my hopes? They are very distant. Happiness and material tranquillity are very far from me. I shall go conscientiously before me, striving to be sufficient for each day.
Only, cara, do not aggravate my griefs by dishonouring doubts; believe that, to a man so heavily burdened otherwise, calumny is a light thing, and that now I must let it all be said against me without distressing myself. In your last letters, you know, you have believed things that are irreconcilable with what you know of me. I cannot explain to myself your tendency to believe absurd calumnies. I still remember your credulity in Geneva when you thought me married.
I hope to go and see you next spring, wherever you are. Perhaps some fortunate circumstances may happen. My brother-in-law’s affairs are doing pretty well. He has the building of a bridge in Paris, and of a short railway, besides which the law on the lateral canal of the Lower Loire is promulgated. It is only necessary to find the money for it. At any rate it is an acquired right, and nothing can now destroy it. In that direction I may be able to arrange some good matter of business. The only thing which at this moment is serious is my double condition,—that of a man wounded to the heart, who has not yet recovered his vitality, and of a man garroted by material interests in jeopardy.
In the midst of these storms, I have received M. Hanski’s inkstand, which has the misfortune of being far too magnificent for a man condemned to poverty. It is of a style that demands a mansion, horses, majordomos. Express to him, I beg of you, my admiring thanks for this beautiful thing, which I can only use in one way, namely: by placing it among my precious things, to remind me of our good days in Vienna, Geneva, and Neufchâtel when, seeking for ideas, my eyes may light upon it.
I do not think I commit sacrilege in sealing this letter to you with the seal I used to Madame de Berny. I have mislaid the key of the drawer where I keep my little articles. I made a vow always to wear this ring on my finger.
I received a letter from you at Saché, of later date than a letter I have since received in Paris. Perhaps this will make some confusion in what I wrote to you about “Séraphita” in reply to what you said in the letter received at Saché. Consider that I said nothing, if anything that I did say pained you. I received your number 15 yesterday.
No one knows what has become of Mitgislas... He has left Paris without paying his debts, having sold everything, and allowing all sorts of suspicions to hover over him. But I do not concern myself with such things; I neither listen nor repeat.
You are right; I have no more serviceable friends than my enemies. The violence and absurdity of the attacks made upon me have revolted all honest men. Did I tell you that M. de Belleyme came to see me after the trial? The Court blamed the lawyer on the other side, Chaix d’Estanges.
It seems to me that you have divined my situation in what you say of sorrow, and also in what you say of those who, like Robert Bruce, return ever to the light in spite of their defeats.
Adieu! it has done me good to write this long letter. But time does not belong to me wholly. The most horrible wound of my life is to be never able to give myself up to my affections, joyous or sad. It is always work, under pain of perishing, and I have no right to perish. My death would injure too many. I owe money to devoted friends who give me of their blood. Therefore I am much misjudged.
Adieu; to you the most beautiful and richest flowers of my soul and memory. I did not know all that the Pré-l’Évêque was to me, and the hill from which we see the lake and the bridge; I had to see it all again, alone and unhappy, to know the value of those memories.
Chaillot, October 1, 1836.
Friendship ought to be an infallible consolation in the great misfortunes of life. Why should it aggravate them? I ask myself sadly that question on reading to-night your last letter. In the first place, your sadness reacts strongly upon me; then it betrays such wounding sentiments. There were phrases in it that pierced my heart. Doubtless you did not know what profound sorrow was in my soul, nor what sombre courage accompanies this, my second great disaster, undergone in middle life. When I was wrecked the first time, in 1828, I was only twenty-nine years old and I had an angel at my side. To-day I am at an age when a man no longer inspires the lovable sentiment of a protection which has nothing wounding, because it is of the essence of youth to receive it, and it seems natural that youth be aided. But to a man who is nearer to forty than to thirty, protection must needs be wanting; it would be an insult. A weak man, without resources at that age, is judged in all lands.
Fallen from all my hopes, having abdicated wholly, forced to take refuge here in Jules Sandeau’s former garret at Chaillot on September 30, the day when, for the second time in my life, I failed to honour my signature, and when to the lamentations of integrity, which weeps within me, was added the sense of solitude,—for here, this time, I am alone,—I thought, soothingly, that at least I lived complete in certain chosen hearts. I thought of you. Your letter, so sad, so discouraged, came. With what avidity I took it, with what tears I locked it up before taking the little sleep I allow myself! But I cling to your last words as to the last branch of a tree when the current is bearing us away. Letters are endowed with a fatal power. They possess a force which is either beneficent or fatal, according to the sensations in the midst of which they come to us. I would that, between two friends very sure of themselves, signs were agreed upon by which from the aspect of a letter each might know if it was one of expansive gaiety or plaintive moaning. We could then choose the moment for reading it.
I had but nineteen days before me; I could not go to the Ukraine and return. Talma’s letter was given to me in Gérard’s salon. What trifles you lay hold of! Perhaps you will not even remember what you have written to me on this subject when you receive this letter. Am I to send you that of Mademoiselle Mars? Will you not think that she has been paid? If you ever go to Italy and pass through Turin, I wish you may see Madame la Marquise de Saint-Thomas. You would know then what the autographs of Silvio Pellico and Nota cost.
You told me that your sister Caroline was the most dangerous of women; and in your letter she is an angel, and you tell me she is about to do what I call signal folly; for I have not forgotten what you wrote to me about the colonel. She will be very unhappy.
I am cast down, but not without courage; what Boulanger has painted, and what I am pleased with, is the persistence à la Coligny, à la Peter the Great, which is the basis of my character,—the intrepid faith in the future.
Must I renounce the Italian Opera, the only pleasure that I have in Paris, because I have no other seat than in a box where there is also a charming and gracious woman [Countess Guidoboni-Visconti]? I was in a box among men who were an injury to me, and brought me into disrepute. I had to go elsewhere, and, in all conscience, I was not willing for Olympe’s box. But let us drop the subject.
The feeling of abandonment and of the solitude in which I am stings me. There is nothing selfish in me; but I need to tell my thoughts, my efforts, my feelings to a being who is not myself; otherwise I have no strength. I should wish for no crown if there were no feet at which to lay that which men may put upon my head. What a long and sad farewell I have said to my lost years, engulfed beyond return! they gave me neither complete happiness nor complete misery; they kept me living, frozen on one side, scorched on the other! To be no longer held to life by aught but the sentiment of duty!
I entered the garret where I am with the conviction that I should die exhausted with my work. I thought that I should bear it better than I do. It is now a month that I have risen at midnight and gone to bed at six; I have compelled myself to the least amount of food that will keep me alive, so as not to drive the fatigue of digestion to the brain. Well, not only do I feel weaknesses that I cannot describe, but so much life communicated to the brain has brought strange troubles. Sometimes I lose the sense of vertically, which is in the cerebellum. Even in bed my head seems to fall to right or left, and when I rise I am impelled by an enormous weight that is in my head. I understand how Pascal’s absolute continence and his immense labour led him to see an abyss around him, so that he could not do without two chairs, one on each side of him.
I have not abandoned the rue Cassini without pain. To-day, I do not know if I shall save some parts of my furniture to which I am attached, or have my library. I have made, in advance, every sacrifice of lesser pleasures and memories that I may keep the little joy of knowing that these things are still mine. They would be trifles indeed to quench the thirst of creditors, but they would slake mine during my march across the desert, through the sands. Two years of toil would pay my debt in full; but it is impossible that I should not succumb under two years of such a life. Besides which, piracy is killing us. The farther we go, the less my books sell. Have the newspapers influenced the sale of the “Lys”? I do not know; but what I do know is that out of two thousand copies Werdet sold only twelve hundred, while Belgium has sold three thousand! I have the certainty, from that fact, that my works do not find purchasers in France. Consequently, the success of sales that might save me is still distant.
I am here with Auguste, whom I have kept. Can I still keep him? As yet I know not.
To let you know how far my courage goes, I must tell you that “Le Secret des Ruggieri” was written in a single night. Think of that when you read it. “La Vieille Fille” was written in three nights. “La Perle brisée,” which ends at last the “Enfant Maudit,” was written in a single night. It is my Brienne, my Champaubert, my Montmirail, my campaign of France! But it was the same with “La Messe de l’Athée” and “Facino Cane.” I wrote the first fifty feuillets of the “Illusions Perdues” in three days at Saché.
What kills me is the corrections. The first part of “L’Enfant Maudit” cost me more than many volumes. I wanted to bring that part up to the level of “La Perle brisée” and make them a sort of little poem of melancholy in which there would be nothing to gainsay. That took me a dozen nights. And now, at the moment of writing to you, I have before me the accumulated proofs of four different works which ought to appear in October. I must be equal to all that. I have promised Werdet to bring out his third Part of the “Études Philosophiques” this month, and also the third dizain, and to give him for November 15 “Illusions Perdues.” That makes five volumes 12mo, and three volumes 8vo. One must surpass one’s self, inasmuch as purchasers are indifferent; and surpass one’s self in the midst of protested notes, griefs, cruel embarrassments, and solitude!
This is the last plaint that I shall cast into your heart. In my confidences there has been something selfish which I must put an end to. When you are sad I will not aggravate your sadness, for your sadness aggravates mine. I know that the Christian martyrs smiled. If Guatimozin had been a Christian he would have gently consoled his minister, and not have said to him, “And I—am I on a bed of roses?” A fine saying for a savage, but Christ has made us more courteous, if not better.
I see with pain that you read the mystics. Believe me, such reading is fatal to souls constituted like yours. It is poison; it is an intoxicating narcotic. Such books have an evil influence. There is madness in virtue as there is madness in dissipation. I would not deter you if you were neither wife, nor mother, nor friend, nor relation, because then you could go into a convent if it pleased you, though your death would there come quickly. But, in your situation, such reading is bad. The rights of friendship are too weak for my voice to be listened to. I address you, on this subject, a humble prayer. Do not read anything of that kind. I have been there; I have experience of it.
I have taken all precautions that your wishes shall be fulfilled relating to the sternest of your requests, but under circumstances which your intelligence will no doubt lead you to foresee. I am not Byron; but I know this: Borget is not Thomas Moore; he has the blind fidelity of a dog, as your faithful moujik has also.
Send me word exactly the way by which I must despatch Boulanger’s picture—about which no one will say to you what you heard about that very wretched thing of Grosclaude’s;—it is not enough to say to Rothschild, “For Russia.” To what house am I to address it? Grosclaude is an artist, but nothing eminent. He sees form, but he goes no farther; he has no style, he is common, without elevation. His Buveurs are good painting, but the nature is low. If he were in Paris he would re-form himself. But in Geneva he will stay what he is. Your portrait by him is an infamous daub. Daffinger, in Vienna, caught your likeness much better; but I do not like miniature very much, unless it is that of Madame de Mirbel. I saw some others in the last Exhibition, and I perceived then that Daffinger was much beneath her. We must still, if we want to have good portraits, spring back to the principles of Rubens, Velasquez, Van Dyck, and Titian.
I am astonished that you have not yet received Werdet’s “Lys;” the true “Lys” in which there is a portrait. They say that I have painted Madame Visconti! Such are the judgments to which we are exposed! You know that I had the proofs in Vienna, and that portrait was written at Saché, and corrected at La Boulonnière before I ever saw Madame Visconti. I have received five formal complaints from persons about me, who say that I have unveiled their private lives. I have very curious letters on this subject. It appears that there are as many Monsieurs de Mortsauf as there are angels at Clochegourde; angels rain down upon me, but they are not white.
A thousand, little cavillings of this kind make me take to solitude with less regret. Yesterday, September 29, my sister, for her birthday, gave herself the little pleasure of coming to see me, for we see each other very little. Her husband’s affairs move slowly, and her life also; she is running to waste in the shade; her fine powers exhaust themselves in a hidden struggle without credit. What a diamond in the mud! The finest diamond that I know in France. For her fête we exchanged our tears! And, poor little thing! she held her watch in her hand; she had but twenty minutes. Her husband is jealous of me. For coming to see a brother for a pleasure trip!
Adieu, the day is dawning, my candles pale. For three hours I have been writing to you, line after line, hoping that in each you would hear the cry of a true friendship, far above all petty and transitory irritations, infinite as heaven, and incapable of thinking it can ever change, because all other sensations are below it. Of what good would intellect be if not to place a noble thing on a rock above us, where nothing material can touch it?
But this would lead me too far. The proofs are waiting, and I must plunge into the Augean stable of my style, and sweep out its faults. My life offers nothing now but the monotony of work, which the work itself varies. I am like the old Austrian colonel who talked about his gray horse and his black horse to Marie Antoinette; sometimes I am on one, sometimes on the other; six hours on the “Ruggieri,” six hours on “L’Enfant Maudit,” six hours on “La Vieille Fille.” From time to time I rise, I contemplate that ocean of houses which my window overlooks, from the École Militaire to the Barrière du Trône, from the Pantheon to the Étoile; and then, having inhaled the air, I go back to my work. My apartment on the second floor is not yet vacant; I play at garret; I like it, like the duchesses who eat brown bread by chance. There is not in all Paris a prettier garret. It is white and coquettish as a grisette of sixteen. I shall make a bedroom of it to supplement mine in case of illness; for below I sleep in the passage, in a bed two feet wide which leaves only room to pass. The doctors say it is not unhealthy; but I am afraid it is. I need much air; I consume it enormously. My apartment costs me seven hundred francs. I shall be no longer in the National Guard; but I am still pursued by the police and the état-major for eight days in prison. Not going out of the house, they cannot catch me. My apartment is taken under another name than mine [that of his doctor], and I am living ostensibly in a furnished hotel.
Well, I wish I could send you some of my courage. Find it here with my tender respects.
Chaillot, October 22, 1836.
I had great need of the letter I have just received from you, to efface the grief your last had caused me; for, I may now tell you, it pained me by the uncertainty it revealed, and perhaps that pain may have acted on my answer, though I am tolerably stoic. But when an affection as devoted, as pure of all storms, as that of Madame de Berny has perished, and around us little else remains, if then, amid dreadful misfortunes, the branch on which our beliefs are hanging breaks also, the skies are very sombre, and the fall to earth is heavy.
That letter came, full of doubts and reproaches wrapped in your pretty phrases, while I was in my garret, which I shall not quit until I owe nothing; and was it not a cruelly facetious thing to be told that one is dissipated in one’s fortieth year, and when the doctors cannot explain to themselves how it is that I bear such work? They see my monkish life; they will not believe in it. They are like you.
A dreadful misfortune has come to crown my misery. Werdet, who never had a sou, is about to fail, and drags me into the gulf; for, to sustain him, I had the weakness to sign bills of exchange, the value of which I never received, and notes to the amount of thirteen thousand francs which I must honour. I have already taken precautions to weather this storm.
To-morrow I shall have moved all from the rue Cassini, which I have left never to return. My apartment here is taken in the name of a third person. I did this to evade the National Guard; also my furniture is secured from attachment, for I have to face the immediate payment of fifty thousand francs without the resource of my own credit, or that of a publisher.
Under these circumstances, which have made this month of October a true Beresina for me, I longed to go and ask you for an asylum and bread for two years, during which time I could earn, by working, the hundred thousand francs I need. But my life would have been too stained by that flight, although my most sensitive and upright friends advised it. I have been greater than my misfortune. In fifteen days’ time I have sold fifty columns to the “Chronique de Paris” for a thousand francs; one hundred and twenty columns to the “Presse” for eight thousand; twenty columns to a “Revue Musicale” for one thousand; an article to the “Dictionnaire de la Conversation” for a thousand. That makes eleven thousand francs in fifteen days. I have worked thirty nights without going to bed. I have written “La Perle brisée” (for the “Chronique”) “La Vieille Fille” (for the “Presse”). I have done the “Secret des Ruggieri” for Werdet. I have sold for two thousand francs my last dizain (that makes thirteen thousand). And now I am doing “La Torpille” for the “Chronique,” and “La Femme Supérieure,” and “Les Souffrances d’un Inventeur” for the “Presse.” At the same time I am in process of selling the reprinting [in book form] of “La Torpille,” “La Femme Supérieure,” “Le Grand homme de Province à Paris,” and “Les Héritiers Boirouge,” both begun; that will give me in all thirty-one thousand francs. Then, having no longer that rotten plank Werdet to rest on, I shall contract with a rich and solid firm for the last fourteen volumes of the “Études de Mœurs,” which ought to amount to fifty-six thousand francs for author’s rights, on which I want thirty thousand at once. If that succeeds I shall have sixty-one thousand francs, which will save me. Not only shall I then owe nothing, but I shall have some money for myself. But I must work day and night for six months, and after that at least ten hours a day for two years.
Rossini said to me yesterday:—
“When I did that myself, I was dead at the end of fifteen days, and then I took fifteen to rest.”
I said to him, “I have only a coffin in prospect for my rest; but work is a fine shroud.”
You can comprehend how, in the midst of these multiplied errands, these torrents of proofs, of manuscripts to write, of this savage struggle, it is dreadful to receive stones from heaven instead of rays of light. Not only have I neither pleasure nor time, but I have not been able since my return to take a bath or go to the Opera, two things (bath and Opera) which are more essential to me than bread. Everything is going to ruin within me to the profit of my brain. It makes one shudder.
For having three times in my life—I, feeble—interested myself in unfortunate men, and taken them en croupe upon my horse or in my boat,—the printer, Jules Sandeau, and Werdet,—three times have they broken the tiller, sunk the boat, and flung me into the water naked. It is over. I will never interest myself again in feeble men. I have too many obligations, which command me to employ the cold logic of a banker’s strong-box. I shut myself up, in my work and my garret. I grow more solitary than ever.
See how the whole of society combines to isolate superiorities, how it drives them to the heights! Affections which ought to be exclusively kind and tender to us, never judge us, never make a mountain out of nothing, and a nothing of a mountain, these very affections torture us by fantastic exactions; they stab us with pin-pricks about silly things; they want faith for themselves and have none for us; they will not put into their sentiments that grandeur which separates them from others. They do not abstract their sentiments, as we do, from earthly soiling. The protections that we give to the weak are fresh means by which we fling ourselves more rapidly into the inextricable difficulties of material life. Indifferent people adopt calumnies which enemies forge and envious men repeat. No one succours us. The masses do not understand us; superior persons have no time to read us and defend us. Fame illumines the grave only; posterity gives us no income, and I am tempted to cry out, like that English country gentleman from his place in parliament: “I hear much talk of posterity; I would like to know what that power has so far done for England.”
So you see, cara, that short of miracles, poor writers are condemned to misfortunes under all forms; therefore, I entreat you, do not keep from me any of your griefs, or your ideas, or anything regarding yourself, but be indulgent and kind to me. Think always that what I do has a reason and an object, that my actions are necessary. There is, for two souls that are a little above others, something mortifying in repeating to you for the tenth time not to believe in calumny. When you said to me, three letters ago, that I gambled, it was just as true as my marriage was at Geneva.
Cara, the life that I lead cannot endure that the sweet things of friendship should be converted into constant explanations; the life of the soul is not that.
You ask me again who is Charles de Bernard. I have already told you; did you not get my letter? He is a gentleman of Besançon who, on my passage through that town when I went to Neufchâtel, received me like an honour, and in whom I found talent. As soon as I owned the “Chronique de Paris” I sent for him; I advised him, directed him with paternal affection, telling him that he was a man to gallop straight if given a horse; and it was true. I conceived of making a newspaper only by the help of superior men. I had already picked out Planche, Bernard, Théophile Gautier. I should have unearthed others. But that is all over now.
A Polish colonel, who returns to Saint-Petersburg by way of Warsaw, a Monsieur Frankowski, will take to you the cassolette attached to my watch-chain. The chain, you know, was so delicate that the little links were continually breaking. As I told you before, it will be safer fastened to a ring; you will not then destroy it when playing with it. Lecointe has tried to do it well. You gave me, in Vienna, the right to recall myself to your memory by such little dainty things. Let Paris send you, now and then, a few flowers of her industry. Ah! cara, if I had not among so many waking nights the thought that one of them is spent in sending to you a little thing the gold of which, as Walter Scott’s man says in the “Chronicles of the Canongate,” is earned grain by grain, to testify to you my gratitude, my toil would be too heavy.
M. Frankowski would have taken charge of my manuscripts and sent them to you with Polish fidelity, but he feared the difficulties of the custom-house. You have here a veritable library. You would be proud if you knew the price the magistrates attached to this enormous collection of manuscripts and proofs, which I was forced to show them in my lawsuit with the “Revue de Paris.” The rage for these things was quite absurd. M. de Montholon wanted to buy for a hundred francs one of those “orders to print” which you saw me write in Geneva. But any printer who abstracted from Madame Hanska a single one of her proofs would be quitted by me.
Well, addio. Take care of yourself. Alas! if I only had money! In a few days I must have a month’s rest, and then I could have gone and spent a week in your Wierzchownia. But nothing is possible to poverty—to that poverty which the world envies me!
Chaillot, October 28, 1836.
I have received your letter number 19, addressed to the widow Durand, which ends with a dreadful “Be happy!” I would have preferred another wish, though less Christian. I write in haste to tell you that I have received all your letters; there is no reason why, though I am at Chaillot, I should not get my letters from the rue Cassini.
La Marchesa is a very agreeable old woman who had, they say, all Turin at her feet thirty years ago. You are not, in spite of your analytical mind, either generous or attentive; you write me a quantity of phrases, to which I cannot answer; you even overwhelm me with them, while I have to read them with my arms crossed, my lips silent, and my heart sick. But on this point you will find a word in my last letter.
I write now only to say one thing. I have put many anxieties into your heart, if you have for me all the affection that I have for you. So, then, you must now be told that the end of so much misery is approaching. Did I tell you that one day, when a mind astray led me to the river so frequented by suicides (those are things that I have hidden from you), I met the former head-clerk of my lawyer, who was my comrade in legal days. He was the head of the lawyer’s office where Scribe and I were placed. This poor young fellow has, so he says himself, a saintly respect for genius (that word always makes me laugh), and he believed me to be at the summit of fortune and honours. I, who would die like the Spartan with the fox at my vitals rather than betray my penury, I had the weakness, at that moment when I was bidding farewell to many things, to pour out a heart too full. It was at a spot that I shall never forget; rue de Rivoli, before the iron gate of the Tuileries. This poor man who is—remark this—a business man in Paris, said, with moist eyelids:—
“Monsieur de Balzac, all that a sacred zeal can do, expect from me. I ought only to speak to you by results. I shall try to save you.”
And yesterday, this brave and devoted young man wrote me that he had succeeded in making a loan which would liquidate my debts, lift off the burden of anxiety, and leave me time to pay all. And something finer still. When the lender heard the name of the borrower, he, who wanted ten per cent and securities, would take only five per cent and a mortgage on my works. May those two names be blest! If this thing is arranged, for I own to you I have little faith in luck, I shall escape a long suicide—that of death by toil.
Besides this loan, a company is to be formed for the management of my works. I am following up this affair, about which I think I have already spoken to you, very warmly. It will be done col tempo. I have about forty thousand francs to pay immediately; but I shall have earned nearly sixty thousand in a short time. Instead of working eighteen hours, I shall then work nine, and I shall have won, after fourteen years’ labour, the right to come and go as I please. It is too fine; I don’t believe in it.
The five hundred francs sent as you sent them, now instead of a few months later, have been, between ourselves, a benefit. Boulanger needed the money; and I am now bestirring myself to get him a thousand francs for the right to engrave the portrait. That outrageous miser Custine paid him only three thousand francs for his picture of “Le Triomphe de Pétrarque,” while my portrait will thus have brought him fifteen hundred francs. But can we get an engraver to pay one thousand for the right of engraving? That is what I am trying to do.
Now, here is a grave question; I want you to have the original. Boulanger wants to exhibit it. Though I shall pose for the copy, a copy never has the indefinable beauty of a canvas on which the painter has sought out, scrutinized, and seized the soul of his model. We must therefore wait; for, to the artist, my portrait is a battle to win before the eyes of his comrades. They are beginning to talk of this canvas—which is magnificent. The copy will be ready in a month. You could receive it in January. But if you permit me to send you the original, it cannot leave till after the Exhibition. I have conferred with Boulanger; though I pose for the copy, and though he wants to make as good a thing, he always says to me, “A copy, even done by the artist himself, is never worth the original.”
Let me tell you that my mother, who will be on the Salon catalogue as having ordered the portrait, will be quite indifferent about having the copy or the original. (This is between ourselves.) You have time to answer me about this. The newspapers are beginning to speak of the portrait. The painters say of it, obligingly, what people said to me of “Séraphita.” I did not think that Boulanger was capable of making such a picture. In style of art it is masterly. It has cost me two volumes which I might have made during the last sittings—which I had to give standing.
Whatever happens, let me confide to you a very bad feeling that I have: it is that I don’t like my friends to judge me; I want them to believe that what I determine on doing is necessary. A sentiment discussed has no more existence than a power controlled. Why couple pettiness with greatness?
As I have added a second sheet to the single one which I intended to cover with ink and friendship, I will tell you that Werdet is horrible to me. Another deception about which I must keep silence, another wound I must receive, more calumnies to listen to calmly. There is no publisher possible for me so long as he is a publisher of the publishing race. I made every sacrifice for that man, and now he kills me, he refuses to join in taking measures for our common interests. I must be willing to lose thirty thousand more francs and be accused of having wrecked a man for whom I have used all my resources, put my silver in pawn, lent my signature, etc., and written fifteen 12mo volumes and six 8vo volumes in the course of two years! He’s a sparrow’s head on the body of a child!
I must now come to the selfishness of a man who works, not for himself, but for his creditors. This is the third trial of my life. After this, my experience ought to be complete. I am expecting Werdet on Sunday. If he has good sense matters may still be arranged. But he’s a perfect child. After the third month I judged the man to whom I had intrusted the material interests of my works. But these are secrets one keeps to one’s self. I hoped he would follow my advice; but no! he is like a child with a sparrow’s head, and, over and above it all, as obstinate as a donkey. Moreover, he has the fatal defect of saying “yes” and doing the contrary, or else he forgets what he promises.
I am much distressed; all this will help to publish calumnies which Werdet is already assisting, for he finds it convenient to say that he fails because of me.
Well, adieu. Remember that I never read over my letters; I have barely time to write them between two proofs. If anything shocks you, pardon it. A thousand tender regards. Do not forget to remember me to all. Write me regularly. If you knew what one of your letters is to me in my life of toil, you would write out of charity.
Tours, November 23, 1836.
After the great struggle that I have just maintained, and of which you have been sole confidant, I felt the need of returning to the cara patria, to rest like a child on the bosom of its mother.
If you find a gap in my letters, you must attribute it to what has just been taking place, of which you shall now be told in a few words. All my debts are paid; I mean those that harassed me. The prospect that promised good by a loan failed; everything about me became more serious, more inflamed. During this month writs, protests, sheriffs, crowded upon me; I truly think that a stout volume in-folio could be made of that literature of misfortune.
Then, when flames surrounded me on every side, when all had failed me on the side of succour, when no friend could or perhaps would save me, before renouncing France and going to find a country in Russia, in the Ukraine, I attempted a last effort; and that effort was crowned with a success which will redouble the bitterness of my enemies. God grant that you will divine all the agony that lies on this simple page, for then you will indeed feel pity for your poor moujik.
Nothing still shone on the horizon in this great shipwreck of all my ambitions but the una fides, the principle of which is adoremus in æternum.
I went to find a speculator named Victor Bohain, to whom I had done some very disinterested services. He immediately called in the man who had drawn Chateaubriand out of trouble, and a capitalist who has of late done a publishing business. Here is the agreement that came out of our four heads:—
1. They gave me fifty thousand francs to pay my urgent debts.
2. They secure me, for the first year, fifteen hundred francs a month. The second year, I may have three thousand monthly; and the fourth, four thousand, up to the fifteenth year, if I supply them with a certain number of volumes. We are in partnership for fifteen years. We are not author and publishers, but associates, partners. I bring to them the management of all my books made or to be made for fifteen years. My three associates agree to advance all costs and give me half the profits above the cost of the volume. My eighteen, twenty-four, or forty-eight thousand francs a year and the fifty thousand francs paid down are charged upon my profits.
Such is the basis of the treaty which delivers me forever from newspapers, publishers, and lawsuits; these gentlemen being substituted for me in all my rights as to management, sale, etc. They share the profits of my pen with me, like all other profits of sale. It is like a farm on shares, where my intellect is the soil, with this difference,—that I, the owner, have no costs or risks, and that I finger my profits without anxiety.
This agreement is a great deal more advantageous than that of M. de Chateaubriand, beside whom speculation places me; for I sell nothing of my future; whereas for one hundred thousand francs, and twelve thousand francs a year, rising to twenty-five thousand when he published anything, M. de Chateaubriand gave up everything.
I would not send you word of all this until the papers were signed. They were signed on Saturday, 19th, and I started for Tours the 20th; and now, after one day’s rest, I send you this little scrap of a letter, scribbled in haste.
I have no doubt that between now and spring we shall employ the means I discovered of preventing piracy; and if I make a journey on that account, God and you alone know with what rapidity I shall go to Wierzchownia to tell you all that time, business, cares, and the narrow limits of a letter, have prevented me from putting, as yet, into my correspondence, smothered by so many causes!
I am very uneasy about you and yours. It is now an immense time since I have received any word from you. It has been a torture the more to add to all my other pains and distresses. You have moments of cruelty which make me doubt your friendship; then, when I fancy you may be ill, that your little Anna is a cause of anxiety, or that—that—etc, then my head decamps!
I was all the more obliged to come here because the National Guard, for whom I have ten more days of prison to do, worries me horribly. The grocers and gendarmes are at my heels. I have not been able to go to my dear Italian Opera for fear they should arrest me. At this moment I must finish “Illusions Perdues” in order to be done with Werdet, and the third dizain; also two works for the “Presse” and two for the “Figaro.” After which, my pen is free, and my new treaty will go into execution. Now, as Werdet is much disposed to torment me, I must give him his devil of a volume as soon as may be.
I shall have a hard year, because, to reach a tolerable condition, I must complete what my pen already owes; and besides that, show a value of ten volumes to my associates. Until I do that, I shall be miserable.
After having killed my janissaries (creditors), I must, like Mahmoud, introduce a vast reform into my States. So here I am in my garret, having paid all, evacuated the rue Cassini, and keeping no one but Auguste and a boy for all service. I have resolved never to dine from home and to continue my monk’s life for three years.
I left Paris so hurriedly that I have not brought with me the sacred seal, nor the autograph I wanted to send you; this will prove to you the perturbations of my triumph.
Three days hence I shall go, I think, to Rochecotte, to see the Duchesse de Dino, and the Prince de Talleyrand, whom I have never seen; and you know how I desire to see the witty turkey who plucked the eagle and made it tumble into the ditch of the house of Austria. As for Madame de Dino, I have already met her at Madame Appony’s.
I finished this very morning “L’Enfant Maudit.” You will not recognize that poor nugget; it is chased, mounted, and set with pearls. Read it again in the “Études Philosophiques” with “Le Secret des Ruggieri” and “Le Martyr Calviniste,” and ask yourself what sort of iron head it was that could fight and write and suffer all at once. I wrote “La Vieille Fille” in the midst of these worries, struggles, and preoccupations.
Have you sometimes prayed God for me, with all the force of your beautiful, ingenuous soul, that I might obtain some sort of tranquillity?—for I still owe the sums I owed before. But I have no longer to find them. This mode of payment leaves me my time free and relieves me of worry. I spare you the details of the agreement, which has been the object of long examination by my lawyers, and business agents, very devoted men, who think it good and honourable.
You could never believe how I miss the bulletin of your calm and solitary life, what interest I take in that life, and what peace the contemplation of it sheds upon my agitated life. Either it is very bad of you to cut me off, or you are ill; on each side anxiety, thinking that you suffer or that your friendship diminishes.
Well, adieu. I meant to write you only one word: there is truce between misfortune and me. But when once I begin to talk to you, the pen is never heavy in my fingers. I wish you all mercies in your life, for this letter and its wishes will reach you, I suppose, about Christmas day. Many amiable things to M. Hanski, and a kiss to your dear Anna on the forehead.
I return to my corrections, for I must finish “Illusions Perdues” for December 10, in default of which I shall fall back into lawsuits.
La Grenadière has escaped me; it is sold; but the cruel event that has weighed me down this year has changed my desire for that poor cottage. I could not live in it if I had it. I am looking for a vineyard where I could build without the cost being much.
Paris, December 1, 1836.
I have just returned from Touraine, where I wrote you the letter of a man of business. You will know, at the moment when this letter is racing along the roads, that you have no more anxieties to share in relation to the financial affairs of the monk of Chaillot. I kneel humbly at your feet and beg you to grant me plenary indulgence for all the tears I have heretofore shed upon them.
You made me smile when you reproached me in your good letter (number 20) for not reading your prose attentively. If I read the Holy Scriptures as I read your letters I should have to go and stand by Saint-Jérôme; and if I read my own books in that way, there would be no faults in them. You say that I do not answer certain things. As to that, I can only be silent.
Now, before all, business. Poor Boulanger is an artist both proud and poor, a noble and kind nature. As soon as I got any money I carried him the five hundred francs, pretending that I had received them; for from me, perhaps, he would not have taken them. Now that the matter concerns me only, there is no hurry, and to say it once for all, you need only send me a bill of exchange on Rothschild to my order. Now that you have sent me the proper address, all is well. You will receive the picture after our Exhibition, which begins in February. I have not the courage to allow the copy only to be exhibited. Poor Boulanger would die of grief. He sees a whole future in it. Since I wrote to you about it many stern judges have seen it, and they all put this work above many others. There was question of a poor engraver for the picture. Planche went to see Boulanger and advised him to despise the thousand francs offered, and wait the effect the picture would produce in the Salon,—assuring him he would then have the best engravers and a better price at his command. There’s a little of Titian and Rubens mingled in it. The copy will be substituted for the original for my mother, who will see no difference, and who, between ourselves, cares little for it. You will therefore have the canvas on which Boulanger has put all his strength and for which I posed thirty times.
What a misfortune that I cannot send you a beautiful frame that I brought from Touraine and which is now being regilt! I got it for twenty francs, and there is in it more than two hundred francs of days’ work paid fifty years ago to the carver who made it.
Since I wrote you I have been very ill. All these distresses, discussions, toils, and fatigues produced, at Saché, a nervous, sanguineous attack. I was at death’s door for one whole day. But much sleep and the woods of Saché put me right in three days.
In your letter I find a reproach which, between ourselves, is serious; that relating to an evening at the Opera. You must know me very little if you do not think that after the sorrow that fell upon me my mourning is eternal, at every moment; that it follows me in all my joys, at my work, everywhere. Oh! for pity’s sake, since you alone can touch that wound in my heart, never touch it roughly. My affections of that kind are immutable; they are held in a part of my heart and soul where nothing else enters. There is room there for two sentiments only; it was needful for the first to terminate, as it has, before the other could take all its strength; and now that other is infinite. Of what good would be the power with which I am invested if not to make within myself a sanctuary, pure and ever ardent, where nothing of outside agitation can penetrate? The image placed on high upon that rock, pure, inaccessible, can never be taken down; and if she herself descended from it, she could never prevent her place from being marked there forever.
Under this point of view, whether I go to hear “Guillaume Tell” or remain to weep in my chimney-corner, all is immutable in that centre where few words ever come. But, dear, remember also that I am not worldly; I am so little that that the few steps I take in society assume a gravity that alarms me. Once more, use your analytical mind and ask yourself, writing down on paper the dates of my works, what time I should have to write them if I allowed myself a pleasure, a festivity, a distraction. Since the winter began, which is now two months, I have been but twice to the Opera, and each time with Madame Delannoy and her daughter, Madame Visconti being absent.
Now that I have gained the relief of having no more financial anxieties, I have exchanged those cares for incessant labour. The ten days a month that material struggle cost me will now be employed in work; for, to gather the fruits of this new arrangement, I must not leave for eighteen months this garret that you think so salubrious. It is not. The dormer-window is too high up; I cannot look out of it. As soon as I can, I shall go down to work on the second floor, where the air is better, more abundant.
Any other than myself would be frightened at my pen obligations. I must give within the next three months: “La Haute Banque” and “La Femme Supérieure” to the “Presse;” “César Birotteau” and “Les Artistes” to the “Figaro;” publish the “Illusions Perdues” and the third dizain, and prepare for April the “Mémoires d’une jeune Mariée” without counting what I have to do on the third and fourth Parts of the “Études Philosophiques.” Believe me, the man who achieves such work has no time for puerile amusements. It is now three years that I have not taken a penful of ink without seeing your name; for accident made me keep one of your visiting cards, and I placed it on my inkstand. You will not believe that since that time I have never become blasé on the infantile pleasure of seeing your name married to all my thoughts. I put it there to be able to write correctly your name and address, and yet you reproach me with not reading your letters properly! You understand that I respect too much the pure friendship that you allow me to feel for you to talk to you about things that I despise; in the first place, it would give me a conceited air; and you know whether I have ever been accused of conceit.
Seriously, I live much at Wierzchownia. I am interested in all you tell me; your visits to neighbours, your affairs, your pleasures, your park which extends to right and left; all that occupies my mind. Read this as I write it, with a childlike heart; for these affairs of yours are my affairs, as, perhaps, you and M. Hanski make mine yours, in the evenings, deploring my troubles—now over. If you are sad, I am saddened; when your letter is gay I am gay. Solitude produces this quick exchange of affections. The soul has the faculty of living on the spot that pleases it. Certainly, it needed the desire to be with you, at least in painting, to make me bear the loss of thirty days which Boulanger required. You alone are in the secret of my affairs, as you are in the secret of what Madame de Berny was to me. You alone know my mourning and a loss which can never be repaired; for here the sky is inclement, it “is too high,” as you say in Poland, and you are too far off. But keep me, very whole and without diminution, that affection which makes me less sad in sad hours, and gayer in the bright ones. Remember that I have no life but one of toil, that I am not in the midst of the talk that is made about me, that the emotions of fame do not reach me, that I live by a little hope and sun, in a hidden nest!
The autograph of Mademoiselle Mars is addressed to me. It relates to her part in “La Grande Mademoiselle.” There’s the mysterious simplified. As soon as I have the “George Sand” I will send it to you; but I should like you also to have the “Aurore Dudevant,” so that you should possess her under both forms.
Continue, I beg you, to tell me all you think of me, without paying heed to my laments. You are right; better any suffering than dissimulation. But, seriously speaking, I see that you listen too much to your first impulse; you are, forgive me, violent and excitable, and in your first anger you are capable of breaking things without knowing whether they can be mended. I have put the word seriously to give weight to my jesting. Do not therefore allow yourself to be carried away by the tattle of calumny; if any one were to come and tell me—as they did you—that you had married Alexandre Dumas, do you not think I should have laughed heartily—all the while regretting that a life so beautiful and noble should become a subject for tattle? Yes, seriously, I should always regret to see calumny brush the noble forehead of a woman, even if it left nothing behind it. In that I am just as positive as M. Hanski in my opinions. We men, we can defend ourselves; we have a stronger flight, which can put us above the rubbish of the press and the slanders of society. But you! you, who live calm and solitary within the precincts of a home, without our forum and our sword, truly it pains me when I know that a woman who is indifferent to me is made the object of calumny, or even ridicule. From you to me, you know whether in my judgments I am actuated by the narrow sentiments with which artists and writers usually speak of their comrades. I live apart from all such matters. Well, D... is a smirched man, a mountebank, and worse than that, a man of no talent. They have again offered me the cross, and I have again refused it.
I flattered myself that the post would carry to you more quickly than usual the letter in which I announced to you the end of the money troubles that caused you so much pain. Have I sufficiently proved my friendship in telling you sorrows that I concealed from the rest of the world? Now, I shall have only my work to talk to you about.
When I see you I will tell you in detail about these days of penury, these fights of which you know only the main features, for I sent you merely bulletins. If there is some confusion in my letters it is that their dates are irregular; I quit them and return to them as my hurried occupations will allow. My way of working is still so difficult!
I entreat you, read each letter as if we were at the day on which it was written; and remember that nothing can prevail against her to whom it is addressed. It grieves me that, apropos of this joy set into the brass of my work, you should speak of hopes being lost! We will explain all that later, for, if I accomplish my tasks by the months of May or June, I shall take my flight to your great plain, and you will see your white serf otherwise than in painting. Then you shall see him famous, for by that time I shall have published: “César Birotteau,” “La Torpille,” the third dizain, “Illusions Perdues,” “La Haute Banque,” “La Femme Supérieure,” “Les Mémoires d’une jeune Mariée,”—all great and fine paintings added to my gallery.
What an outcry has been made against “La Vieille Fille”! When you laugh on reading it, you will ask yourself what the manners and morals of these French journalists are—the most infamous that I know of!
I cannot tell you much that is new about my life; for my life is eighteen hours’ daily work in a garret, where there is a bed (I never leave it), and six hours’ sleep. My health will require great care, because it is beginning to be much impaired by the toil and the great anxieties to which I have been a prey. What I say is based on serious facts. I must submit to physicians, humbly, or I shall quickly be destroyed.
Without vanity of author, yes, re-read the “Lys;” the work gains by being read a second time. But I am not deceived about the blemishes that are still in it. But they shall disappear; although the angel who is no more declared it without a fault.
You must never forget, dear, that I have all to paint, and that each subject needs different colours. We can’t relate Mademoiselle Cormon, the Chevalier de Valois, Suzanne, and du Bousquier in the style of Madame de Mortsauf, especially before a herd of envious beings who will say that I am aging unless I differentiate myself.
You send me wishes for my happiness; pray for me only that God will support me in my strength for work and in my resignation. Solitude with one hope—that is my life; it was that of the Fathers in the wilderness. Work is the staff with which I walk, indifferent to all, except the thought that is placed in the sanctuary. Una fides. Outside of that, there are nought but distractions in which the heart has no share. I mean the lifted heart, which is full of grief, but in which lives a sacred hope. You do not wholly know that vast domain; if you did you would not scold me.
In “Illusions Perdues” there is a young girl named Eve, who, to my eyes, is the most delightful creation that I have ever made.
Adieu; here’s a half-day stolen from proofs, business, work. But in writing to you I see you, just as if I were studying the Almanach de Gotha at your house in Geneva; and when I think of that halt made in my sorrows, I fancy that all about me is gold and that I have nothing to do.
I will tell you another time of the visit I paid to Madame de Dino and M. de Talleyrand at Rochecotte in Touraine. M. de Talleyrand is amazing. He had two or three gushes of ideas that were prodigious. He invited me strongly to go and see him at Valençay, and if he lives I shall not fail to do so. I still have Wellington and Pozzo di Borgo to see, so that my collection of antiques may be complete.
Anna’s dog is always on my desk. Tell her that her horse commends himself to her memory. A thousand compliments to the inhabitants of your kingdom. Are your affairs doing well? is M. Hanski more at liberty? are his enterprises successful? You cut me off too many details of your proprietary mechanism. When you think of it, trace me a few itineraries of how to go to you. I have my reasons for wishing to know the various routes that lead there.
Well, again adieu, and tender wishes for all that concerns you. I am in terror when I think of you on the roads where there are wolves and Jewish coachmen.
This week I give Boulanger his last sitting. As soon as I have finished “Illusions Perdues” I will write to you. Till then I am caught in a vice, day and night.
Notes
1 For a brief account of this enterprise, see Memoir, pp. 164, 165.—TR.
1 This story, with details quite absurd on the face of them, Werdet quotes from M. Philarète Chasles; which shows how even his friends and gentlemen united with his enemies in creating myths about him.—TR.
1 Here is one of his rare revelations of the soul of his work, of that which produced it, which conceived, for instance, the “Majesty of cold,” the scene on the Falberg, the breaking of the ice-bonds in “Séraphita.” The reader must have perceived how little, amid his overwhelming talk about his work, he revealed the mind behind the work. That was partly because he never thought of it as a personal thing. He did not weaken his work by a study of his own mind: that is Genius.—TR.
1 Under Louis-Philippe all citizens were compelled to leave their homes and do guard-duty, or, as Werdet says, paddle in the mud with knapsacks on their backs and muskets on their shoulders, for one or two nights every month. Many were the devices of worthy citizens to escape this nuisance. Balzac retreated to Chaillot and fenced himself in with a series of pass-words that made access to him nearly impossible. He was, however, so Werdet says, summoned twelve times before the authorities, and escaped only by bribing the agents. But the thirteenth time he was “empoigné” and locked up in what was satirically called the “Hôtel des Haricots.” Werdet’s account of this is very amusing (pp. 247-272 of his book), but absolutely false, for he gives an account of how the famous cane originated in the prison, whereas we know that Balzac described it to Madame Hanska March 30, 1835, more than a year earlier.—TR.
1 For a brief account of this lawsuit, which, though won, left cruel effects upon his life, see his sister’s narrative in the Memoir of this edition, pp. 231, 232.—TR.