Letters to Madame Hanska

V Letters During 1837

Paris, January 1, 1837.

To-day I have had a great happiness; some one came to see me whom I have not seen for eternities, and who has given me such pleasure that I have been sitting, all day long, dreamily talking to her;1 I never wearied of it. She has made a long journey, but a fortunate one. She is not changed. Do you not think there are beings in whom resides a larger portion of our life than in ourselves? You will know this being some day. I will not have you like her better than I do, but you cannot prevent yourself from being friendly, were it only on account of my fanaticism for her. She is a being so good, so constant, so grand, of so lofty a mind, so true, so naïve, so pure! These are the beings who serve as foils to all that we see about us. I cannot prevent myself from telling you of my joy as if you knew her, but I perceive that I am talking Greek to you. Forgive me that folly. There are, as Chérubin says, certain moments when we talk to the air, and it is better to talk to the heart of a friend.

Then this good day came in the midst of my hardest work, for “Illusions Perdues” must be finished under penalty of lawsuits and summons; at a moment, too, when I am very weary of the toils of this hard year, so hard!

I received some days ago your number 21. I have many things to say to you. But time! when one has to pay fifty francs a day for every day’s delay. I see the moment when I shall escape this vile abyss; but my wings are weary hovering over it.

You say so little of “La Vieille Fille” that I think the book must have displeased you. Say so boldly; you have a voice in the chapter; and I’ll tell you my reasons.

It will be difficult to judge of “Illusions Perdues.” I can only give the beginning of the book, and three years must pass (as for “L’Enfant Maudit”) before I can continue it.

I have meditated bringing you my portrait in person. If you hear the clack of a whip, the French clack, resounding in your courtyard, do not be much surprised. I need a month’s complete separation from ideas, fatigues, in short, from all there is in France, and I long for Wierzchownia as for an oasis in the desert. None but myself know the good that Switzerland did me. Nothing but the question of money can hinder me.

I was mistaken in my estimation of my debts. They gave me fifty thousand francs; but I needed fourteen thousand more, and seven thousand for an endorsement imprudently given to Werdet. But I feel that the stage and two fine works will save me. To make the two plays, I need to hide in some desert place that no one knows of; and this is what I should like: to be one or two months buried in your snows. The more snow there were, the happier I should be. But these are crazy projects when I see the thickness of the cable that moors me here.

January 15, 1837.

I have received another letter from you, in which you manifest anxiety about the letters you have written me. Do not fear, I have received them all.

The interruption of this letter is easily explained. I have been ill the whole time. Finally I had what I seemed to have been in search of, an inflammation of the bowels, which is scarcely quieted to-day. I still suffer, but that is a small matter. I have had constant suffering, and I greatly feared an inflammation for my poor brain after so painful a year, painful in so many ways, hard in toil, and cruel in emotions, full of distresses. There was nothing surprising in such an illness. However, though I can, as yet, digest only milk, all is well and I resume my work.

“Illusions Perdues” appears this week. On the 17th I have a meeting to close up all claims from Madame Bêchet and Werdet. So there is one cause of torment the less. I am now going to work on “La Haute Banque” and “César Birotteau,” and after that it will be but a small matter to free my pen. All will then be done; and I shall enter upon the execution of my new conventions, which only oblige me to six volumes a year,—to me an oasis from the moment that I have no longer the worry of the financial struggle. As for the fifteen thousand francs I still owe, I can quickly make head against them with a few plays. Besides, I have always hopes of the London affair. But I won’t count any more except on that which is.

Your last letter did me a good for which I thank you; I was in the calm state produced by forced confinement to my bed, and the details of your life delighted me. I think you very happy to be alone. Would you believe that, in spite of my illness, I was more harassed than ever about business? But all will now be pacificated. I shall only have to work, dear monitor. You speak golden words, but they have no other merit than to tell me more elegantly just what I tell myself. Moreover, you make me out little defects which I have not, to give yourself the pleasure of scolding me. No one is less extravagant than I; no one is willing to live with more economy. But reflect that I work too much to busy myself with certain details, and, in short, that I had rather spend five to six thousand francs a year than marry to have order in my household; for a man who undertakes what I have undertaken either marries to have a quiet existence, or accepts the wretchedness of La Fontaine and Rousseau. For pity’s sake, don’t talk to me of my want of order; it is the consequence of the independence in which I live, and which I desire to keep.

To rid myself on this theme of all solicitation on the part of those, men and women, who worry me about it, I have given out my programme, and declared that, although I have passed the fatal age of thirty-six, I wish a wife in keeping with my years, of the highest nobility, educated, witty, rich, as able to live in a garret as to play the part of ambassadress, without having to endure the impertinences of Vienna—like a person you have known—and willing to live without complaint as the wife of a poor book-workman; also I must be specially adored, espoused for my defects even more than for my few good qualities; and this wife must be grand enough, through intelligence, to understand that in the dual life there must be that sacred liberty by which all proofs of affection are voluntary and not the effect of duty (inasmuch as I abhor duty in matters of the heart); and, finally, that when this phœnix, this only woman who can render the author of the “Physiologie du Mariage” unhappy, is found,—I’ll think about it. So now I live in perfect tranquillity; yet not without my griefs. When the brain and the imagination are both wearied, my life is more difficult than it was in the past. There’s a blank that saddens me. The adored friend is here no longer. Every day I have occasion to deplore the eternal absence. Would you believe that for six months I have not been able to go to Nemours to bring away the things that ought to be in my sole possession? Every week I say to myself, “It shall be this week!” That sorrowful fact paints my life as it is. Ah! how I long for the liberty of going and coming. No, I am in the galleys!

Yes, I am sorry you have not written me your opinion of “La Vieille Fille.” I resumed my work this morning; I am obeying the last words that Madame de Berny wrote me: “I can die; I am sure that you have upon your brow the crown I wished to see there. The ‘Lys’ is a sublime work, without spot or flaw. Only, the death of Madame de Mortsauf did not need those horrible regrets; they injure that beautiful letter which she wrote.”

Therefore, to-day I have piously effaced about a hundred lines, which, according to many persons, disfigure that creation. I have not regretted a single word, and each time that my pen was drawn through one of them never was heart of man more deeply stirred. I thought I saw that grand and sublime woman, that angel of friendship, before me, smiling as she smiled to me when I used a strength so rare,—the strength to cut one’s own limb off and feel neither pain nor regret in correcting, in conquering one’s self.

Oh! cara, continue to me those wise, pure counsels, so disinterested! If you knew with what religion I believe in what true friendship says.

This counsel came to me several days after the enormous labour those figures, enormous themselves, necessitated. I waited six months till my own critical judgment could be exercised on my work. I re-read the letter, weeping; then I took up my work and I saw that the angel was right. Yes, the regrets should be only suspected; it is the Abbé Dominis, and not Henriette, who should say the words that say all: “Her tears accompanied the fall of the white roses which crowned the head of that married Jephtha’s daughter, now fallen one by one.” Religion alone can express, chastely, poetically, with the melancholy of the Orient, this situation. Besides, what would be the good of Madame de Mortsauf’s testament if she expressed herself so savagely at death? It was true in nature, but false in a figure so idealized. There are several defects still in the work. They are in Félix. The animosity of people in society has pointed them out to me; but they are very difficult to obviate. I strive to; the character of Félix is sacrificed in this work; much adroitness is needed to re-establish it. I shall succeed, however.

Cara, I have still at least seven years’ labour, if I wish to achieve the work undertaken. I need some courage to embrace such a life, especially when it is deprived of the pleasures which a man desires most. Age advances! I have in my soul a little of the rage that I have just taken out from that of Madame de Mortsauf.

Adieu; I shall now re-read your last two letters and see if I have in this—so rambling in consequence of interruptions—forgotten to answer any of your points; and I will see, too, if I have any fact to tell you about my life.

We have suddenly lost Gérard. You will never have known his wonderful salon. What homage was rendered to the genius, to the goodness of heart, to the mind of that man at his funeral. All the most illustrious persons were present; the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés could not hold them. The first gentleman [the Duc de Maillé] and the first painter of King Charles X. have quickly followed their master. There is something touching in that.

I shall write to you on the day when I finish the terrible twelve volumes I have written between our first meeting at Neufchâtel and this year. Why can I not go and see you, that I might close this work, as I began it, in the light of your noble forehead!

Adieu; Colonel Frankowski is still here. That grieves me, because you will not have your pretty cassolette for New Year’s day. It is on my mantelpiece for the last three months. Well, addio; grant heaven that I may go to Germany on the same business that may take me to England. I shall know as to this in February. I should not consider a matter of two hundred leagues. If I go to Stuttgard I shall go to Wierzchownia.

You know all I have to say to your little world of the Ukraine. Good health above all; that is the prayer of those who have just been ill.

Paris, February 10, 1837.

I have received your last sad letter, in which you tell me of the illness and convalescence of M. Hanski from the prostration of the grippe. I have, as to my own health, barring all danger however, the same thing to tell you. Nearly the whole of my month of January was taken up by an attack of very intense cholerine, which deprived me of all energy and all my faculties. Then, after getting over that semi-ridiculous illness, I was seized by the grippe, which kept me ten days in bed.

So you have been practising the profession of nurse, cara, and M. Hanski has been ill to the point of keeping his bed for a long time,—he who went into the deserts of the Ukraine to lead a patriarchal life. If I joke, it is because I imagine that by the time my letter reaches you his convalescence will be over and all will be well with him, and with you—for I am not ignorant of the nursing you have just done; I know how fatiguing it is. In such cares about a patient’s bed, the limbs swell and cause dull pains which affect the heart; I have nursed my mother.

Before my grippe I had, luckily, finished the last Part of the “Études de Mœurs,” or God knows what difficulties I should have fallen into! So that brings the first twelve volumes of the “Études,” begun at the time of my visit to Geneva in 1834, to an end in January, 1837. I am much grieved not to be able to make you a little visit after this accomplishment of one of my hardest tasks. You accompanied “Eugénie Grandet” with a smile; I would have liked to see the same smile on “Illusions Perdues”—on the beginning and on the end of the way.

You are very right, you who know the empire that my work exercises on my life, to let drop into a bottomless abyss all the follies that are said about me, whether they come from a princess or a fish-woman. Did not some one come and ask me if it was true I had married one of the Ellslers, a dancer,—I, who cannot endure any of the people who set foot upon the stage? But here, in Paris, in the same town with me, not two steps away from me, they tell the most unheard-of things about me. Some describe me as a monster of dissoluteness and debauchery, others as a dangerous and vindictive animal whom every one should attack. I could not tell you all they say of me. I am a spendthrift; sometimes a lax man, sometimes an intractable one.

But let us leave such nonsense; it is enough that it weighs on me; it would be too much to let it weigh upon our dear correspondence.

So now I am delivered from the most odious contract and the most odious people in the world. The last Part was published a few days ago. It contains “La Grande Bretèche” rearranged; that is to say, better framed than it was originally, and accompanied by two other adventures. Also “La Vieille Fille,” one of my best things (in my opinion), though it has roused a cloud of feuilletons against me. But Du Bousquier is as fine an image of the men who managed affairs under the Republic and became liberals under the Restoration as the Chevalier de Valois is of the old remains of the Louis XV. period. Mademoiselle Cormon is a very original creation, in my opinion. That is one of the figures which are almost unapproachable for the novelist, on account of the few salient points they offer to take hold of. But difficulties like these are little appreciated, and I resign myself in such cases to having worked for my own ideas.

“Illusions Perdues” is the introduction to a much more extensive work. These barbarous editors, impelled by money considerations, insist on their three hundred and sixty pages, no matter what they are. “Illusions Perdues” required three volumes; there are still two to do, which will be called “Un Grand Homme de Province à Paris;” this will, later, be joined to “Illusions Perdues,” when the first twelve volumes are reprinted; just as the “Cabinet des Antiques” will conclude “La Vieille Fille.”

I am now going to take up the last thirteen volumes of the “Études de Mœurs,” which I hope will be finished in 1840.

You will notice a considerable lapse of time between my last letter and this one; it was taken up by the sufferings (without danger) which my two little consecutive illnesses caused me. I thought one would save me from the other, but it was no such thing. I am still very miserable; the cough is a horrid difficulty; it shakes me and kills me.

I dine to-morrow with Madame Kisseleff, who has promised to make me know Madame Z..., of whom you have told me so much that I asked for this dinner, before my grippe, at a beautiful ball given by Madame Appony to which I went. It is the only one, for I go nowhere—except to Madame Appony’s great soirées, and to those seldom. I do not even go to the Opera, and I do not dine out, except at certain dinners which cannot be refused without losing supporters some day; like those of the Sardinian ambassador, for instance. But except for such things I have not been ten times in six months outside of my own home.

February 12.

My letter has been interrupted for two days; I have had business to attend to, for I have still enormous difficulties about the remainder of the debts I have not been able to pay off.

Madame Z... was not at the dinner. She was taken with grippe the night before. This grippe stops everything. There are more than five hundred thousand persons gripped. I have it still. We had the adorer of Madame P..., Bernhard, Madame Hamelin, the Pole who is seeking treasures by somnambulism, and a young relation of Madame Kisseleff who squints badly, also Saint-Marsan. The dinner was quite gay.

I had met Madame Kisseleff the previous evening at the Princess Schonberg’s. A discussion arose about beautiful hands, and Madame Kisseleff said to me that she and I knew the most beautiful hands in the world; she meant yours, and I had the fatuity to colour up to my ears, very innocently, for I find in you so many beautiful qualities, and something so magnificent in head and figure, that I could not say at that moment what your hands were like, and I coloured at my own ignorance. I only know that they are small and plump.

I am writing at this moment, with fury, a thing for the stage, for there is my salvation. I must live by the stage and my prose concurrently. It is called “La Première Demoiselle.” I have chosen it for my début because it is wholly bourgeoise. Picture to yourself a house in the rue Saint-Denis (like La Maison du Chat qui pelote), in which I shall put a dramatic and tragic interest of extreme violence. No one has yet thought of bringing the adultery of the husband on the stage, and my play is based on that grave matter of our modern civilization. His mistress is in the house. No one has ever thought of making a female Tartuffe; and the mistress will be Tartuffe in petticoats; but the empire of la première demoiselle over the master will be much easier to conceive than that of Tartuffe over Orgon, for the means of supremacy are much more natural and comprehensible.

In juxtaposition with these two passionate figures, there are an oppressed mother and two daughters equally victims to the perfidious tyranny of la première demoiselle [forewoman]. The elder daughter thinks it wise to cajole the forewoman, who has her supporter in the house, for the bookkeeper loves her sincerely. The tyranny is so odious to the mother and daughters that the younger daughter, from a principle of heroism, desires to deliver her family by immolating herself. She determines to poison the tyrant; nothing stops her. The attempt fails, but the father, who sees to what extremities his children will go, sees also that the forewoman cannot live under his roof, and that, in consequence of this attempt, all family bonds are broken. He sends her away; but, in the fifth act, he finds it so impossible to live without this woman that he takes a portion of his fortune, leaves the rest to his wife, and elopes with la première demoiselle to America.

Those are the main features of the play. I do not speak of the details, though they are, I think, as original as the characters, which have not been, to my knowledge, in any other play. There is a scene of the family judgment on the young girl; there is the scene of the separation, etc.

I hope to finish it by March 1 and to see it played early in May. On its success my journey will largely depend; for the day when I owe nothing I shall have that liberty of going and coming for which I have sighed so long.

I await with keen impatience for another letter to tell me how you are, you and M. Hanski. As soon as I have ended my work and my deplorable affairs you shall know it; I will tell you if I am satisfied with my play and with my last compositions, which are now to be done, and will take my nights and days for two months, for I must immediately do for the “Figaro” “César Birotteau” and for the “Presse” “La Haute Banque,”—two books that are quite important.

Addio, cara. Be always confident in your ideas; walk with courage in your own way. It seems to me that all trials have their object and their reward; otherwise, human life would have no meaning. As for me, the last pleasure I told you of—the coming of that friend so unexpectedly—proved to me that the sufferings through which I have passed were the price of that great pleasure. In all lives there must be such things.

Adieu; I send you this time a precious autograph, Lamartine; you will see that the verses are so chosen that they will not be ridiculous in a collection.

Florence, April 10, 1837.

In one month I have travelled very rapidly through part of France, one side of Switzerland, to Milan, Venice, Genoa, and after being detained by inadvertence in quarantine, here I am for the last two days in Florence, where, before seeing anything whatever, I rushed to Bartolini to see your bust. This was chiefly the object of this last stage of my journey, for I must be in Paris ten days hence. The desire to see Venice, and my quarantine made me spend more time than I could allow on that trip, and also made me regret not having gone to you. But the season [the condition of the roads] did not permit it, nor my finances.

The moment the publication of the last part of the “Études de Mœurs” was over, my strength suddenly collapsed. I had to distract my mind; and I foresee it will be so every fourth or fifth month. My health is detestable, disquieting; but I tell this only to you. My mind feels the effect of it. I am afraid of not being able to finish my work. Everywhere the want of happiness pursues me, and takes from me the enjoyment of the finest things. Venice and Switzerland are the two creations, one human, the other divine, which seem to me, until now, to be without any comparison, and to stand outside of all ordinary data. Italy itself seems to me a land like any other.

I have travelled so fast that nowhere had I time to write to you. My thoughts belonged to you wholly, but I felt a horror of an inkstand and my pen. The loss I have met with is immense. The void it leaves might be filled by a present friendship, but afar, in spite of your letters, grief assails me at all hours, especially when at work. That other soul which counselled me, which saw all, which was always the point of departure of so many things, is lacking to me. I begin to despair of any happy future. Between that soul, absent for evermore, and the hopes to which I cling in some sweet hours, there is, believe me, an abyss above which I bend incessantly, and often the vertigo of misfortune mounts to my head. Every day bears away with it some shred of that gaiety which enabled me to surmount so many difficulties. This journey is a sad trial. I am alone, without strength.

You will probably receive my statue in Carrara marble (half-nature, that is, about three feet high, and marvellously like me) before the portrait of that rascal Boulanger, who, after the Exhibition, still wants three months to make the copy. I am vexed. He has five good paying portraits and an order for Versailles of one hundred and twenty feet of painting, which absorb him, and, as a friend, he makes me wait. So it may be that I shall bring the portrait to you myself; for, as I see it is impossible for me to work more than four months together, I shall start for the Ukraine in August, through Tyrol and Hungary, returning by Dresden.

I have a thousand things to tell you. But first, in return for my statue, I beg M. Hanski to send me a little line authorizing Bartolini to make me a copy of your bust. If M. Hanski will grant me this permission, I shall ask Bartolini to make it half size, so as to put it on my table in the study where I write. That dimension is the one in which my statue is made, and all artists, Bartolini himself, think it more favorable for physiognomy; it has more expression. It is better for the imagination to enlarge a head than for the eyes to see it in its exact proportions.

My statue has been a work of affection, and it bears the stamp of it. It was done in Milan by an artist named Puttinati; he would take nothing for it. I had great trouble to pay even the costs and the marble. But I shall take him to Paris with me; I will show him Paris and order a group of Séraphita rising to heaven between Wilfrid and Minna. The pedestal shall be made of all the species and terrestrial things of which she is the product. I shall put aside two thousand francs a year during the three years of its execution, and that will suffice to pay for it.

Venice, which I saw for only five days, two of which were rainy, enraptured me. I do not know if you ever noticed on the Grand Canal, just after the Palazzo Fini, a little house with two gothic windows; the whole facade being pure gothic.1 Every day I made them stop before it, and often I was moved to tears. I conceived the happiness that two persons might obtain,—living there together, apart from all the world. Switzerland is costly, but in Venice one needs so little money to live! The price of the house would not be more than two years’ rent of the Villa Diodati, which you admired so much on account of Lord Byron. It would just suffice for a little household, such as that of a poor poet, busy in the hours he must ravish from felicity, to keep that felicity ever equal in its strength. The summers could be passed on the Lake of Garda in a house as tiny. Twelve thousand francs a year would give this luxury. May the angel who so fatally has departed forgive me, but, now that all is over, I may say to you that the happiness to which Nature puts an end in our lifetime is not complete happiness. Twenty years, and more, of difference in age is too great. We ought to be able to grow old together; and it was permissible in me, before that house, to wish for the years that I once had, but with a woman who would be like her, with youth added.

The future and the past are melted thus into one emotion, which is something that of Tantalus, for I have the conviction that I alone am an obstacle to that beautiful life. My engagements are, for at least two years to come, a barrier of honour; and when I think that in two years I shall be forty, and that until that age all my life will have been toil, toil that uses up and destroys, it is difficult to believe that I can ever be the object of a passion. Yes, the ice that study heaps about us may be preservative, but each thought casts snow upon our heads; and evening finds us with no flowers in our hands. Ah! believe me, a poor poet as sincerely loving as I shed bitter tears before that little house.

Yes, I cannot wrong Madame Delannoy, that second mother, who has intrusted to me as much as twenty-six thousand francs, nor my own mother whose life is mortgaged on my pen, nor those gentlemen who have just invested in my inkstand nearly seventy thousand francs. Ah! if I could win for myself two months of tranquillity at Wierzchownia, where I might do one or two fine plays, all my life would be changed! Those two months, so precious, I have just spent, you will tell me, in travel. Yes, but I started only because I was without ideas, without strength, my brain exhausted, my soul dejected, worn-out with my last struggles, which, believe me, were dreadful, horrible! There came a day of despair when I went to get a passport to Russia. There seemed nothing for me but to ask you for shelter for a year or two, abandoning to fools and enemies my reputation, my conscience, my life, which they would have rent and blasted until the day that I returned to triumph. But had they known where I was—and they would have known—what would have been said! That prospect stopped me. I can own it to you, now that the tempest is lulled, and I have only a few more efforts to make to reach tranquillity. During this month, though my soul is not refreshed, at least my brain is rested. I hope, on my return, that “César Birotteau,” the third dizain, and “La Haute Banque” may lift my name to the stars, higher than before. I begin to have nostalgia for my inkstand, my study, my proofs. That which caused me nausea before I came away now smiles to me. Moreover, the memory of that little house in Venice will give me courage; it has made me conceive that after my liberation fortune will signify nothing; that I shall have enough by writing one book a year,—and that I may then unite both work and happiness in that Villa Diodati on the water!

April 11.

I have just seen several of the salas in the Pitti. Oh! that portrait of Margherita Doni by Raffaelle! I stood confounded before it. Neither Titian, nor Rubens, nor Tintoret, nor Velasquez—no brush can approach such perfection. I also saw the Pensiero, and I understood your admiration. I have had much pleasure in looking at what, two years ago, you admired. I caught up your thoughts. To-morrow I am going to the Medici gallery, though I have not fully seen the Pitti; I perceive that one ought to stay months in Florence, whereas I have but hours. Economy requires that I return by Livorno, Genoa, Milan, and the Splugen. That is the shortest route in reality, though the longest to the eye; for one can go from Florence to Milan in thirty-six hours; and from Milan by the Splugen there are but eighty relays to Paris. By this route I can see Neufchâtel, and I own I have a tender affection for the street and the courtyard where I had the happiness of meeting you. I shall go and see the Île Saint-Pierre and the Crêt, and your house; after which I shall take that route through the Val de Travers which seemed to me so beautiful on my way to Neufchâtel.

I am kept here at the mercy of a steamboat which may call for me to-morrow or six days hence; it is very irregular. If I had not been detained for this horrible quarantine in a shocking lazaretto (which I could not have imagined as a prison for brigands), I should have had enough time to see Florence well. I went yesterday to the Cascine, where you took your walks; but the day was not fine. Bad weather has pursued me, everywhere it has snowed and rained; but my troubles began by losing my travelling companion. I was to have had Théophile Gautier, that man whose mind so pleases you; he was to share with me the costs of the journey and write a pendant to his “Voyage en Belgique;” but the necessity of doing the Exhibition, rendering an account of all that spoilt canvas in the Louvre, obliged him to remain in Paris. Italy has lost by it; for he is the only man capable of comprehending her and saying something fresh about her; but when I make the journey again he will come. We will choose our time better.

I have met Frankowski twice, once in Milan and again in Venice; he will take to you my New-Year’s souvenir, or else he will send it to you. Each time that I have seen him the acquaintance ripens. I think him a man of honour and high integrity. He is a Pole of the vieille roche; his sentiments are frank. You could, that is, M. Hanski could do him a great service. You have property, I think, that is difficult to manage, and which, until now, has been badly managed by unfaithful stewards. Well, I think this brave colonel does not know where to turn for a living. He came to Paris to see what he could do with a novel. A man must be at the end of his hopes to land himself in a foreign country where publishers are refusing two or three hundred manuscripts a year. He asked me for a letter to M. de Metternich,—as if I could do anything for him with the prince, whom I never saw, as you know. However delicate such business is, if M. Hanski is thinking to send an honest man to manage his distant property and make it profitable, giving an honourable share to him who would bring it under cultivation, he might save a married man who, I think, despairs of his present position, and would blow his brains out rather than fail in the sternest honour. In case M. Hanski should think of trying this colonel, write me a line; I will then write to Frankowski to know if the place suits him; and if he answers affirmatively, I will give him a note for M. Hanski. Besides, the time this correspondence would take brings me to the period of my visit to Poland, and he could be useful to me as a guide in your country. I have a conviction that M. Hanski would do a good business for himself in doing this good action. I have had means of studying the colonel; and besides, M. Hanski is too prudent not to study his compatriot himself. When you see Frankowski, don’t speak to him of the letter he asked of me for Metternich, for he asked it in a letter that was mad with despair, and I have known so well the despair of an honest man struggling against misfortune that I divined everything. I hope that this idea of mine may reach you in time. But, in all such cases, one should always save a man of honour the terrible shock of an interest caused only by compassion. This sentiment, in me, is stripped of what makes it so wounding; but others are not expected to know that. If all the world knew my heart, of what value would be the opening of it to those I love? So after explaining all this to you, you will read it to M. Hanski, and he will do what he thinks proper. But, in any case, it would be better to find an honest man to manage his estates well than to sell them; for after the late rise in value of the lands of Europe there is no doubt that those who possess them, in whatever part of Europe they may be, will have in the course of some years an enormous capital.

Not knowing that I should be detained in quarantine, and thinking to be absent only one month, I ordered my letters to be kept for me; so that I am without news of you since the last of February. Do you know, this seemed so hard to me that I inquired at Genoa if there was a vessel going to Odessa; they told me it took a month to go from Genoa to Odessa. Then I gazed into the sky at the point where the Ukraine must be, and I sent it a sorrowful farewell. At that moment I was capable, had it taken but twelve days to go to Odessa, of going to see you and not returning to Paris without my play. But then my debts, my obligations came back to my memory. What a life! Fame, when I have it, and if I have it, can never be a compensation for all my privations and all my sufferings!

I saw yesterday at La Pergola, a Princess Radziwill and a Princess Galitzin (who is not Sophie). There seem to be a good many Princesses Radziwill and Galitzin! There was also a Countess Orloff, who used to be an actress in Paris under the name of Wentzell. I hoped to enjoy my dear incognito; but, as at Milan and at Venice, I was recognized by strangers. Also I met the husband of a cousin of Madame de Castries, and Alexandre de Périgord, son of the Duc de Dino. Happily, I came to Florence en polisson, as they used to say for the trips to Marly. I have neither clothes nor linen nor anything suitable to go into society, and so I preserve my dear independence.

April 13.

I have seen the gallery of the Medici, but in a hurry. I must come back here if I want to study art. A letter from the consul at Livorno, just received, tells me there will be no steamer till the 20th, and I must be in Paris from the 20th to 25th. So there is nothing for me to do but to take the mail-cart, and I leave in a few hours. I close my letter, which I would like to make longer, but will write again at Milan, through which I pass and where I shall stop two days, for I go by Como and the Saint-Gothard.

Adieu, cara contessina. I hope that all is well and that I shall find good news of you in Paris. At this moment of writing, you ought to have received my little souvenirs, if Frankowski is a faithful man. In a few months I shall have the happiness of seeing you, and that hope will render life and time the easier to bear. Do not forget to remember me to all, and permit your moujik to send you the expression—not new, but ever increasing in strength—of his devoted sentiments and tenderest thoughts.

Paris, May 10, 1837.

Here I am, back in Paris. My health is perfect, and my brain so much refreshed that it seems as though I had never written anything. I found three long letters from you which are delightful to me. I fished them out of the two hundred which awaited me and read them in the bath I took to unlimber me after my fatiguing journey; and certainty, I count that hour as the most delightful of all my trip. Before beginning my work, I am going to give myself the festival of a long talk with you.

In the first place, cara carina, put into that beautiful forehead, which shines with such sublime intelligence, that I have blind confidence in your literary judgment, and that I make you, in that respect, the heiress of the angel I have lost, and that what you write to me becomes the subject of long meditations. I now await your criticisms on “La Vieille Fille;” such as the dear conscience I once had, whose voice will ever echo in my ears, knew how to make them; that is to say, read the work over and point out to me, page by page, in the most exact manner, the images and the ideas that displease you; telling me whether I should take them out wholly and replace them, or modify them. Show neither pity nor indulgence; go boldly at it. Cara, should I not be most unworthy of the friendship you deign to feel for me if in our intimate correspondence I allowed the petty vanity of an author to affect me? So I entreat you, once for all, to suppress long eulogies. Tell me on three tones: that is good, that is fine, that is magnificent; you will then have a positive, comparative, and superlative, which are so grandiose in their line that I blush to offer them for your incense-pot. But they are still so far below the gracious praise you sometimes offer me that they are modest—though they might seem singular to a third person. I beg you therefore to be concise in praise and prolix in criticism; wait for reflection; do not write to me after the first reading. If you knew how much critical genius there is in what you said to me about my play you would be proud of yourself. But you leave that sentiment to your friends. Yes, Planche himself would not have been wiser; you have made me reflect so much that I am now employed in remodelling my ideas about it. Remember, carina, that I am sincere in all things, and especially in art; that I have none of that paternal silliness which ties so cruel a bandage round the eyes of many authors, and that if “La Vieille Fille” is bad, I shall have the courage to cut it out of my work.

I laughed much at what you write of the three heiresses of Warsaw, and at the tale you tell me, which was also told and invented in Milan. There they maintained mordicus that I had just married an immensely rich heiress, the daughter of a dealer in silks. There is no absurd story of which I am not made the hero, and I will amuse you heartily by telling them all to you when I see you.

I received M. Hanski’s letter two days ago from the Rothschilds, and the five hundred francs were at Rougemont de Löwenberg’s. The portrait has just been returned from the Exhibition. Boulanger will make the copy in a few weeks and the picture will soon be with you. You are to have the original, which has had the utmost success at the Salon; many critics consider it among the best of our modern works, and it has given rise to arguments which must have enchanted Boulanger. I am very sorry that the admirable frame I unearthed in Touraine cannot adorn your gallery; but there is no use in opposing the rigours of the custom-house. The statue will reach you about the same time. You will, I dare say, order a little corner closet on which to place the statue, and in it you can keep the enormous collection of manuscripts you will receive from me; so that, knowing how much you have of the man’s heart, you will have his labours as well. I shall then be wholly at Wierzchownia.

Your three letters, read all at once, bathed my soul in the purest and sweetest affections, as the native waters of the Seine refreshed my body; it was more to me to read again and again those pages full of your adorable little writing than to rest myself.

I have made a horribly beautiful return journey; but it is good to have made it. It was like our retreat from Russia. Happy he who has seen the Beresina and come out, safe and sound, upon his legs. I crossed the Saint-Gothard with fifteen feet of snow on the path I took; the road not even distinguishable by the tall stone posts which mark it. The bridges across the mountain torrents were no more visible than the torrents themselves. I came near losing my life several times in spite of the eleven guides who were with me. We crossed the summit at one o’clock in the morning by a sublime moonlight; and I saw the sunrise tint the snow. A man must see that once in his life. I came down so rapidly that in half an hour I passed from twenty-five degrees below freezing (which it was on the summit) to I don’t know what degree of heat in the valley of the Reuss. After the horrors of the Devil’s bridge, I crossed the Lake of the Four Cantons at four in the afternoon. It has been a splendid journey; but I must do it again in summer, to see all those noble sights under a new aspect. You see that I renounced my purpose of going by Berne and Neufchâtel. I returned by Lucerne and Bâle, having come by the Ticino and Como. I thought that route the most economical of time and money, whereas, on the contrary, I spent enormously of both. But I had the worth of my money; it was indeed a splendid journey; my excursion has been like a dream, but a dream in which presided the face of my faithful companion, of her of whom I have already told you the pleasure I had in seeing her, and who did not suffer from the cold [her miniature].

Here I am, returned to my work. I am about to bring out immediately, one after the other: “César Birotteau,” “La Femme Supérieure;” I shall finish “Illusions Perdues,” then “La Haute Banque,” and “Les Artistes.” After that, I shall fly to the Ukraine, where, perhaps, I shall have the happiness to write a play which will end my financial agonies. Such is my plan of campaign, cara contessina.

May 11.

I have been very egotistical. I began by speaking of myself, answering the first things that struck me in your letters, and I ought to have said at once how glad I was to know you relieved of the deplorable but sublime duty of nurse, which you fulfilled so courageously and successfully. The reproach you make me for harshness in a sentence of mine, I feel very much. That sentence, believe me, was only the expression of my desire to see you perfect; and perhaps that desire was rather senseless, for it may be that contrasts are necessary in a character. But, however it is, I will never complain again, even when you accuse me unjustly, reflecting that an affection as sincere and as old as ours can be troubled only on the surface.

We are going no doubt to bring out a new edition of the “Études Philosophiques,” the one in which is “Les Ruggieri.” I have just re-read that fragment, and I see that it shows the effect of the state of anguish in which I was when I wrote it, and the feebleness of a brain which had produced too much. It needs much retouching. I do not know what has been thought of that poor preface to a book called “Illusions Perdues.” I am going now to write the continuation and complete the work.

Your monotonous life tempts me much; and especially after travelling about do your tales of it please me. I owe to you the sole Homeric laugh I have had for a year, when I read of your fib to the Countess Marie, and when I read her letter so full of oratorical sugarplums. I do not think that woman true, and I really don’t know how to answer her, for I am as stupid when I have nothing in my heart as I often am when my heart is full.

May 13.

I have now been at home eight days, and for eight days I have been making vain efforts to resume my work. My head refuses to give itself to any intellectual labour; I feel it to be full of ideas, but nothing comes out. I am incapable of fixing my thought; of compelling it to consider a subject under all aspects and deciding its march. I don’t know when this imbecility will cease; but perhaps it is only my broken habit that is in fault. When a workman drops his tools for a time, his hand gets divorced. He must renew the fraternity that comes from habit, that links the hand to the tool, as the tool to the hand.

May 14.

I went last night to see “La Camaraderie,” and I think the play is immensely clever. Scribe knows the business, but he does not know art; he has talent, but he will never have genius. I met Taylor, the royal comissioner to the Théâtre-Français, who has just brought from Spain, for a million francs, four hundred Spanish pictures, very fine ones. In a very few minutes it was arranged between us that he should undertake to have accepted, rehearsed, and played a piece of mine at the Théâtre-Français, without my name being known until the time comes to name the author; also to give me as many rehearsals as I want, and to spare me all the annoyances which accompany the reception and representation of a play. Now, which shall I write? Oh! how many conversations with you I need; for you are the only person—now that I am widowed of that soul which uplifted, followed, strengthened my attempts—the only one in whom I have faith. Yes, persons whose hearts are as noble as their birth, who have contracted the habit of noble sentiments and of things lofty in all ways, they alone are my critics. It is now some time since I have accustomed myself to think with you, to put you as second in my ideas, and you would hardly believe what sweetness I find in again beginning, after this travelling interregnum, to write to you the life of my thought—for as to that of my heart I have no need; in spite of certain melancholy passages, you know well that souls high-poised change little. Like the summits I have just seen, the clouds may sometimes cover them, the day may light them variously; but their snow remains pure and dazzling.

I went yesterday to see Boulanger. The picture has come back to him from the Exhibition. He wants another three weeks to make the copy which I give to my mother, but the canvas will start for Berditchef early in June, so that you will get it before the statue.

Adieu, for to-day. I must examine my thoughts about the stage, and start upon a journey through the dramatic limbo, to find out to what I must give life or death. This affair is of the highest importance to my financial interests, and is very serious for my reputation as a writer. To-morrow I will close my letter and send it. If I failed to write to you during my journey you will see by the frequency of my letters that I am repairing omissions.

May 15.

This is the eve of my fête-day, still my poor fête-day, for my financial affairs are not beauteous. The law about the National Guard will oblige me to make a violent move,—that of living in the country two leagues from Paris; but this time I will live in a house by myself. I shall thus be obliged very seriously to work my sixteen hours a day for three or four months; but at least (if the friendly indorsements I gave to that poor stupid Werdet do not cause trouble) I am all but easy in mind on financial matters.

Adieu. You will receive still another letter this week. Many tender things to you and my remembrances to all about you. I reply this week to M. Hanski.

Paris, May 20-29, 1837.

I write to you on rising, for this is my birthday, and I shall be all day long with my sister and mother.

Mon Dieu! how I should like to have news of you; but I am deprived of it by my own fault, for you have put the lex talionis into our correspondence by not writing to me when I do not write to you. But that is very wrong. I am a man, and subject to crises. At this moment, for instance, Werdet has gone into bankruptcy, and I am summoned to pay the indorsements I gave him out of kindness, just as he had given some to me; but with this difference, that I have paid all the notes he endorsed for me, and he has not paid those I guaranteed for him. So now I must work night and day to get out of the embarrassment into which I have put myself.

You could never believe how crushing this last misfortune is. My business agents all tell me now is the time to make a journey.

Make a journey!—when I owe to Girardin, for the “Presse,” “La Haute Banque” and “La Femme Supérieure;” to the “Figaro,” “César Birotteau,” and “Les Artistes;” to Schlesinger, for the “Gazette Musicale,” “Gambara;” and the end of the third dizain to Werdet’s capitalist,—six works, all clamoured for by the four persons to whom I owe them, and which represent fifteen thousand francs, ten thousand of which have already been paid.

To pay my most pressing debts. I took all the money my new publishers gave me, and they only begin their monthly payments to me when I give them two unpublished volumes 8vo. I need at least three months to finish the six works named above as due, then three months for their two new volumes; so that here I am for six months without resources and without any means of getting money. Happily, the brain is in good health, thanks to my journey.

This is a bad birthday. I have begun it by dismissing my three servants and giving up my apartment in the rue des Batailles [Chaillot], though I don’t know whether the proprietor will be willing to cancel the lease. And finally, I have heroically resolved to live, if necessary, as I lived in the rue Lesdiguières, and to make an end to a secret misery which is dishonouring to the conscience.

Apropos of misery; I wrote you from Florence under the impression of distresses revealed by one of your countrymen. I beg you not to be vexed with me. Tell M. Hanski that in view of what has just happened to me, I have made the good resolution never to guarantee any one, either financially or morally. I beg him to regard all I said about that man as not said, and, inasmuch as I recommended him through your gracious lips, I beg him to do nothing in his favour. Do not accuse me of carelessness, but of ignorance. Later I will explain by word of mouth the reason of this change. The present makes me alter the past.

May 23.

Boulanger has written me a very free and easy, ungrateful letter, he will not make the copy he engaged to make, which distresses my mother and sister. The packer is at this moment making the case for the original; it leaves in a few days, and I shall address it, according to M. Hanski’s letter, to MM. Halperine, at Brody, by diligence, direct; for neither the Rothschilds nor Rougemont de Löwenberg are willing to take charge of so cumbersome a parcel, and the colour-merchant who is packing the canvas, assures me that he has sent the most valuable pictures in this way. That’s enough about my effigy. It is one of the finest things of the school. The most jealous painters have admired it. I am glad you will not be disappointed after waiting so long. I shall write you a little line the day I put the parcel in the diligence, and tell you the route it will take.

I have persuaded my mother to go and live two years in Switzerland at Lausanne. The sight of my struggle and that of my brother kills her. She sees us always working without pecuniary result, and she suffers dreadfully without having the material conflict which calls up strength.

If you knew all I have done for Boulanger you would feel the bitterness that fills my soul at this betrayal; for if he had not trifled with me for nearly a year you would have had the portrait six months ago, and it has now become ridiculous.

May 28.

Here I am, as you have often desired to see me. I have broken away from every one, and I go, in a few weeks, to a hidden garret, having blocked all the roads about me. I have been making a recapitulation of my work, and I have enough to do for four years, without, even then, completing all the series of the “Études de Mœurs.” My monk’s gown must not be a lie. I have but two things which make me live: work, and the hope of finding all my secret desires realized at the close of this toil. To whoever can live by those two potent ideas, life is still grand; and if I do not find again in the solitude to which I return that noble Madame de Berny, whom my sister Laure now calls my Josephine, at least she is not replaced by a Marie-Louise, but by glorious hope, the sole companion of a poet in travail. This journey, in refreshing my brain, rejuvenated me, and gave me back my force; I need it to accomplish my last efforts.

I have just finished a work which is called “Massimilla Doni,” the scene of which is in Venice. If I can realize all my ideas as they present themselves in my brain it will be, assuredly, a book as startling as “La Peau de Chagrin,” better written, more poetic possibly. I will not tell you anything about it. “Massimilla Doni” and “Gambara” are, in the “Études Philosophiques,” the apparition of Music, under the double form of execution and composition, subjected to the same trial as Thought in “Louis Lambert:” that is to say, the work and its execution are killed by the too great abundance of the creative principle,—that which dictated to me the “Chef-d’œuvre inconnu” in respect to painting; a study which I rewrote last winter. You will soon receive two Parts of the “Études Philosophiques” in which the work has been tremendous.

I have just finished a little study, entitled “Le Martyr calviniste,” which with “Le Secret des Ruggieri” and “Les Deux Rêves” completes my study of the character of Catherine de’ Medici. I have begun to write “La Femme Supérieure” for the “Presse,” and in a few days I shall have finished “César Birotteau.” All this in manuscript only; for, after composition, comes the battle of the proofs. You see that my ideas for the stage are again drowned in the flood of my obligations and my other work.

As soon as the above manuscripts are done I shall go into Berry, to Madame Carraud, and there finish the third dizain, begun alas! in Geneva and dated from Eaux-Vives and the dear Pré-l’Évêque!

It is now two years since I saw you. So, when my head refuses ideas, when the ink-pot of my brain is empty, and I must have rest, by that time I hope I shall have bought, through privations, the necessary sum for a journey to Poland and to see Wierzchownia this autumn. God grant that I then have a mind free of all care, and that I complete between now and then the books that are to liberate me! Happily, except for a few sums, it is only a question of blackening paper, and that, fortunately, is in my own power. I am anxious to finish the two other volumes which, under the title of “Un Grand homme de Province à Paris” is to complete “Illusions Perdues” of which the introduction alone has appeared. That is, certainly, with “César Birotteau,” my greatest work in dimensions.

May 29.

From the way I have started I hope to finish “La Femme Supérieure” in four days. I am stirred by a species of fury to finish the works for which I have already received the money. I live before my table; I leave it only to sleep; I dine there. Never did poet stay thus in a moral world; but yesterday some one told me I was said to be in Germany. I hope that the ridiculous stories spread about me will cease in consequence of the absolute seclusion in which I am about to live. At any rate, the commercial proceedings instituted against me by Werdet’s creditors will have this good effect, that, being driven to hide myself, no one can gossip about me. But they will make fantastic tales about my disappearance!

I entreat you not to forget my request relative to corrections of “La Vieille Fille” and, in general, to all you find faulty in my works. I have none but you in the world to do me this friend’s service. Be curt in your verdicts. When there was something very bad Madame de Berny never discussed; she wrote, “Bad” or, “Passage to be rewritten.” Be, I pray you, my dear star and my literary conscience, as you are in so many other things my guide and my counsellor. You have a sure taste; you have the habit of comparison, because you read everything. This will be, moreover, an occupation in your desert.

Alas! I can only talk to you about myself. I am now without letters from you, delivered over to all sorts of anxieties, because I had the misfortune, in travelling, to leave you a month in silence,—though I wrote to you from Sion in the Valais, and expected to find an answer in Milan on my return from Florence. I have written to Milan, to Prince Porcia, to forward your letter here.

Have the kindness to write to Madame Jeroslas... that I can more easily go four months hence and lay my homage at her feet than write her a letter at this moment. Seriously, I go to bed with a tired hand. I will send you a page for her in my next letter, though I shall not write you till I can announce the termination of “César Birotteau” and “La Femme Supérieure,” the two great thorns I have in my foot at this moment. The third dizain may amuse me perhaps at Frapesle, Madame Carraud’s house, where I shall live ten days among the flowers, well cared for by her, who is like a sister to me. She is very delicate, very feeble; she will go, too, I foresee it, that fine and noble intellect; and of the three truly grand women whom I have known, you alone will remain. Such friendships are not renewed, cara. Therefore, mine for you grows greater from all my losses, and, I dare to say it, from all the illusions that experience mows down like the flowers of the field. All my recent griefs, that ignoble little treachery of Boulanger, this present misfortune due to my attachment to the weak, all these things cast me with greater force to you, in whom I believe as in God, to whom the troubles of earth drive us back. There are affections that are like great rivers; all flows into them. So the longer I live, the more the river swells; the sea into which it casts itself is death.

I hope that all goes well with you, and that M. Hanski will be so kind as not to be vexed with me if I do not answer his gracious letter; I am so hurried! Tell him all that I would say to him; passing through such an interpreter that which I should write to him will be bettered. Take great care of yourself; after the long night-nursing you have borne, I tremble lest you should be ill; if that should happen, in God’s name let me know; I must go and nurse you.

Adieu. I wish you good health, and Anna also. If my theory on human forces is true, you ought to live in the atmosphere that my soul makes for you by surrounding you with sacred wishes. Would that it were like the thorny hedges placed about private fields, that cattle may neither feed nor trample there. I would that I could thus drive off all griefs, all disappointments, all that herd of worries, pain, and maladies. To you, who give me such strength, would I could return it!

Paris, May 31, 1837.

I have this instant received yours (number 28) of the 12th, written after you received the one I wrote you from Florence. But did you not receive one from Sion? which I do not, however, count as a letter, for there were only fifteen lines on a page. It is clear that some one kept the money for the postage, and read, or burned the letter. Mon Dieu! how vexed I am! I stopped at Sion expressly to write it. You ought to have received it early in March. Let us say no more about it.

I admire the capacity of your intelligence in regard to the person about whom I wrote you from Florence. The reasons that struck your mind struck mine later. But your letter grieves me. Such profound sadness reigns through the religious ideas it expresses. It seems as though you had lost all hope on earth. You ask me to make you confidences as I would to my best friend; but have I not told you all my life? I have often confided too much of my anguish to you, for it did you harm.

This letter comes to me at a bad moment. It has singularly added to the dumb grief that gnaws me and will kill me. I am thirty-eight years old, still crippled by debt, with nought but uncertainty as to my position. Scarcely have I taken two months to rest my brain before I repent them as a crime when I see the evils that have come through my inaction. This precarious life, which might be a spur in youth, becomes at my age an overwhelming burden. My head is turning white, and whatever pleasant things may be said about it, it is clear that I must soon lose all hope of pleasing. Pure, tranquil, openly avowed happiness, for which I was made, escapes me; I have only tortures and vexations, through which a few rare gleams of blue sky shine.

My works are little understood and little appreciated; they serve to enrich Belgium, but they leave me in poverty. The only friend who came to me at my start in life, who was to me a true mother, has gone to heaven. And you, you write me there are as many ideas as there is distance between us, and you dissuade me from going to see you!

Your letter has done me great harm. Believe me, there is a certain measure of religious ideas beyond which all is vicious. You know what my religion is. I am not orthodox, and I do not believe in the Roman Church. I think that if there is a scheme worthy of our kind it is that of human transformations causing the human being to advance toward unknown zones. That is the law of creations inferior to ourselves; it ought to be the law of superior creations. Swedenborgianism, which is only a repetition in the Christian sense of ancient ideas, is my religion, with the addition which I make to it of the incomprehensibility of God. That said (and I say it to you because I know you to be so truly Roman Catholic that nothing can influence your mind about it), I must surely see more clearly than you see it what your detachment from all things here below conceals, and deplore it if it rests on false ideas. To comfort myself as to this, I have read over a letter in which you told me you wished to be always yourself, to show yourself—in your hours of melancholy, of piety, and of spring-tide returns.

June 1.

Your letter has left long traces upon me, and I can scarcely say what impressions I have had on reading the part where you separate your readings into profane and religious. There is a whole world between your last but one letter and this letter. You have taken the veil. I am deathly sad.

June 2.

I have begun “La Femme Supérieure” in a manner that promised to finish it in four days, and now it is impossible for me to write a line. My faculties seem unstrung. I had made my mother decide on spending two years in Switzerland to spare her the sight of my struggle, the triumph of which I placed at that date. But she is now ill. Two nephews to bring up, my mother to support, and my work insufficient!—that is one of the aspects of my life. Continual injustice, constant calumny, the betrayal of friends, that is another.1 The embarrassments into which Werdet’s failure flung me, and my new treaty which keeps me in a state of extreme poverty, that is a third. The literary difficulties of what I do and the continuity of toil, that is another. I am worn-out on the four faces of the square by an equal pressure of trouble. If my soul finds the ivory door through which it flees into lands of illusion, dreams of happiness, closed, what will become of it? Solitude, farewell to the world? It is sorrowful for those who live by the heart to have no life possible but that of the brain.

When you receive this letter Boulanger’s portrait will be on its way to you; it was packed this week. I wished to have it rolled, but the colour-dealer and a picture-restorer whom I consulted assured me it would go safely in a square box the size of the picture. You will have a fine work, so several painters say. The eyes especially are well rendered, but more in the general physical expression of the worker than with the loving soul of the individual. Boulanger saw the writer, and not the tenderness of the imbecile always taken-in, not the softness of the man before the sufferings of others, which made all my miseries come from holding out a helping hand to weaklings in the rut of ill-luck. In order to do a service in 1827 to a working printer, I found myself, in 1829, crushed down under a debt of one hundred and fifty thousand francs and cast, without bread, into a garret. In 1833, just as my pen was giving signs of enabling me to clear my obligations, I connected myself with Werdet; I wanted to make him my only publisher, and in my desire to make him prosper, I signed engagements, so that in 1837, I find myself again with a hundred and fifty thousand francs of debt, and on that account so threatened with arrest that I am obliged to live in hiding. I make myself, as I go along, the Don Quixote of the feeble; I wanted to give courage to Sandeau, and I dropped upon that head four or five thousand francs that would have saved another man! I need a barrier between the world and me; I must content myself with producing without spending; I must shut myself up within a narrow circle, under pain of succumbing.

June 5.

Yesterday I sent away my three servants; Auguste, whom you have seen, remains, on a salary that my new publishers, the printers, and I pay. He will carry proofs. I am trying to get rid of my apartment rue des Batailles; that of rue Cassini is paid up, and the lease ends October 1 of this year. I must resume the life I led in the rue Lesdiguières: live on little, and work always. Alas! I need a family! Perhaps I will go and settle in some village in Touraine. A garret in Paris is still dangerous.

I have seven years’ work before me, counting three works a year like the “Lys,” and I shall be forty-five when the principal lines of my work are defined and the portions very nearly filled in. At forty-five one is no longer young, in form at least; one must, to preserve a few fine days, plunge into the ice of complete solitude.

My mind is not tranquil enough to write for the stage. A play is the easiest and the most difficult work for the human mind; either it is a German toy, or an immortal statue, Polichinello or Venus, the “Misanthrope” or “Figaro.” The miserable melodramas of Hugo frighten me. I need a whole winter at Wierzchownia to adjust a play, and I have four months of crushing work to do before I can know if I shall have the money, and when and how I shall have it, to enable me to go there.

Perhaps I shall take one of those sublime resolutions which turn life inside out like a glove. That is very possible. Perhaps I shall leave literature, to enrich myself, and take it up later if it suits me to do so; I have been reflecting about this for some days past.

Are you not tired of hearing me ring my song on every key? Does not this continual egotistery of a man fighting forever in a narrow circle bore you? Say so, because in your letter you seemed disposed to turn away from me, as from a beggar who knows nothing but the Pater, and says it over and over again.

Cara, I hold Florence to be a great lady, a glorious city, where we breathe the middle ages; but, as I told you, Venice and Switzerland are two conceptions which resemble nothing. I have not dared to say any harm to you of your bust, because it gave me too much joy to see it. As for the mouth, do not complain of Bartolini; he has made it beautiful and true. Your mouth is one of the sweetest creations I have ever seen; in the bust it has, certainly, the expression your aunt and others blame; but that is only on the surface of the thing. Without your mouth, the forehead would be hydrocephalus. There is an exact balance in the two, between sensations and ideas, between the heart and the brain; there is, above all, in the expression thus blamed, an extreme nobility and infinite sweetness, two attributes which render you adorable to those who know you well. No one has analyzed your head and face more than I. The last time that I could study you, and have enough coolness to do so, was in Daffinger’s studio [in Vienna], and it was only there that I detected on your lips a few faint signs of cruel passion. Do not be astonished at those two words: it is such indications that give to your mouth the expression those ladies complain of; but such evidences are repressed by goodness. You have something violent in your first impulse, but reflection, kindness, gentleness, nobleness, follow instantly. I do not regard this as a defect. The first impulse has its cause, and I will tell it to you in your chimney-corner at Wierzchownia, if you think to ask me; and I will give you proofs of what I say about you, examples taken from what I saw you do in Vienna—in the affair of the letter, for instance, which was written under one such impulse. If you were exclusively good you would be a sheep—which is too insipid.

Well, adieu, cara; a thousand tender regards, quand même motto of the friends of the throne. Many prettinesses to the pretty Anna for her thought and for herself. I shall write this week to M. Hanski.

Paris, July 8, 1837.

I just receive your number 29, in which there is an “at last!” which makes me tremble, dear, for it is now nearly a month since I wrote to you.

The explanation of my silence is in “La Femme Supérieure,” which fills seventy-five columns of the “Presse” and which was written in a month, day by day. I sat up thirty nights of that damned month, and I don’t believe that I slept more than sixty-odd hours in the course of it; I never had time to trim my beard, and I, the enemy of all affectation, now wear the goat’s beard of La Jeune France. After writing this letter I must take a bath, not without terror, for I am afraid of relaxing the fibres which are strung up to the highest tension; and I must begin again on “César Birotteau,” which is growing ridiculous on account of its delays. Besides, it is now ten months since the “Figaro” paid me for it.

Nothing can express to you the sweeping onward of such mad work. At any price I must have my freedom of mind, for, another year of this life, and I shall die at my oar. I have done during this month, “Les Martyrs ignorés” “Massimilla Doni,” and “Gambara.” When I have finished “César Birotteau” I must then do “La Maison Nucingen et Compagnie” and another book, which will bring me to the end of these miseries that give me so much toil and no money. I found time to see about the packing of that portrait, which you will surely have, I think, before this letter reaches you.

The long delay of your number 29 has added to all my troubles the fear of some illness in your home; you cannot think what anxiety that puts into my mind. And I fear so much lest some breath of poisoned slander, some calumny may reach you, lest the sorrows of my life may have wearied you, that the failure of your letters puts me in a fever.

I will not talk to you again of the difficulties of my life, for the affair you know of has rendered them enormous and insurmountable. While I work night and day to free my pen, my new publishers give me nothing until I work for them; so that I must run in debt, and all my money worries will begin again. Werdet’s failure has killed me. I imprudently indorsed for him, I was sued, and I was forced to hide and defend myself. The men whose duty it is to arrest debtors discovered me, thanks to treachery, and I had the pain of compromising the persons who had generously given me an asylum. It was necessary, in order not to go to prison, to find the money for the Werdet debt at once, and, consequently, to involve myself again to those who lent it to me.

Such a little episode in the midst of my toil!

I will no longer wring your heart with the details of my struggle. Besides, it would take volumes to tell you all of them and explain them. The truth is, I do not live. Always toil! I cannot support this life for more than three or four months at a time. I have still forty-five days more of it; after that I shall be utterly broken down, and then I will go and revive in the solitude of the Ukraine, if God permits it. I hope to last till the end of “César Birotteau.”

“La Femme Supérieure” makes two thick 8vo volumes. It is ended in the newspaper, but not in the book form; I am adding a fourth Part.

I wish I had strength enough to give the end of “Illusions Perdues.” But that is very difficult; though very urgent, because my payment of fifteen hundred francs a month does not begin till then.

Not only have I not closed the gulf of sorrows, but I have not closed that of my business affairs. I have hoped so often that I am weary of hope, as I told you. I am a prey to deep disgust, and I shut myself up in complete solitude. Nevertheless, a grand affair is preparing for me in the publication of my works, with vignettes, etc., resting upon an enterprise both inciting and attractive to the public. This is an interest in a tontine, created from a portion of the profit of subscribers, who are divided into classes and ages; one to ten, ten to twenty, twenty to thirty, thirty to forty, forty to fifty, fifty to sixty, sixty to seventy, seventy to eighty. So, the subscriber will obtain a magnificent volume, as to typographic execution, and the chance of thirty thousand francs income for having subscribed. Also the capital of the income will remain to the subscriber’s family.

It is very fine; but it needs three thousand subscribers per class to make it practicable. But imagine that, in spite of the ardour of my imagination, I have received so many blows that I shall see this project played with an indifferent eye. An enormous sum is required for advertising; and four hundred thousand francs for the vignettes alone. The work will be in fifty volumes, published in demi-volumes. It will include the “Études de Mœurs” complete, the “Études Philosophiques” complete, and the “Études Analytiques” complete, under the general title of “Études Sociales.” In four years the whole will have been published. The vignettes will be in the text itself, and there will be seventy-five in a volume, which will prevent all piracy in foreign countries.

But this depends still on several administrative points to settle. May fate grant it success! It is high time. I feel that a few days more like the last, and I am vanquished.

I, who know so amply what misfortune is, I cry to you from the depths of my study, enjoy the material good that M. Hanski bestows upon you, and which you justly boast of to me. I wish with all the power of my soul that you may never know such miseries as mine.

If this affair takes place, and taking place, succeeds, you shall be the first informed of it; and never letter more joyous will rush through Europe! But I have reached the point of very great doubt in all business affairs.

You will some day read “La Femme Supérieure,” and if ever I needed a serious and sincere opinion upon a composition, it is on this. Twenty letters of reprobation reach the newspaper daily, from persons who stop their subscriptions, etc., saying that nothing could be more wearisome, it is all insipid gabbling, etc.; and they send me these letters! There is one, among others, from a man who calls himself my great admirer, which says that “he cannot conceive the stupidity of such a composition.” If that is so, I must have been heavily mistaken.

This distrust, into which such communications throw an author, is little propitious to a start on “César Birotteau” which I make to-day and must push with the greatest celerity. I have robbed you of the manuscript and proofs of “La Femme Supérieure” to the profit of my cara sorella, who has none of these things, and who, on seeing the bound proofs brought home to me for you, said, in a melancholy tone, “Am I never to have any of them myself?” So I thought to give her those of “La Femme Supérieure;” I will keep those of the reprints for you.

On coming out of my painful labour of forty-five days, I have religiously put your dear Anna’s heart’s-ease into my “Imitation of Jesus Christ,” where there is another on a fragment of a yellow sash.

What events, what thoughts have passed beneath heaven’s arch in seven years! and what terror must one feel as one sees one’s self advancing ever, with no lull in the storm! One must not think of happy fancies pictured on the horizon, especially when the soul is ever in mourning.

I send you a thousand caressing desires; I would that you had all the happiness that flees from me. I see but too well that my life can never be other than a life of toil, and that I must place my pleasure there, in the occupation by which I live. And yet, when my pen is free, two or three months hence, I shall once more tempt fortune; I shall make a last effort. But if I do so, it is because there is no risk of money. After that, if nothing comes of it, I shall retire into some corner, to live there like a country curate without parishioners, indifferent to all material interests, and resting on my heart and my imagination,—those two great motive powers of life. This is only telling you that you count for more than half in that vision.

I did not finish “Berthe la Repentie” without thinking at every line that I began it with fury at Pré-l’Évêque in 1834, now nearly four years ago. I ought never to have had debts; I ought to have lived like a canon in the Ukraine, having no other function than to drive away your blue devils and those of M. Hanski and write a dizain every year. ’T would have been too beautiful a life. Between repose and me there are twelve thousand ducats of debt, and the farther I go, the more they increase. Chateaubriand is dying of hunger. He sold his past as author, and he has sold his future. The future gives him twelve thousand francs a year, so long as he publishes nothing; twenty-live thousand if he publishes. That to him is poverty; he is seventy-five years old, an age at which all genius is extinct, but the memories of youth reflower. That is how we love—the first time in reality, the second time in memory.

Addio, cara. I must leave you to take up my dizain and “César Birotteau” alternately. I would give I know not what, all, except our dear friendship, to have finished those two works which will bring me in nothing but insults.

I think it surprising that you had not received my New Year’s gift in June, for Colonel Frankowski has been in Poland three months. Put a kiss on Anna’s forehead from her horse, the quietest she will ever have in her stables. Remember me to all about you and to M. Hanski. I send nothing to you who possess the whole of this Parisian moujik.

I conceived yesterday a work grand in its thought, small in its volume; it is a book I shall do immediately. It will be called by some man’s name, such as “Jules, or the new Abeilard.” The subject will be the letters of two lovers led to the religious life by love, a true heroic romance à la Scudéry.

Paris, July 19, 1837.

Cara, you will end by being so weary of my jeremiads that when you receive a letter from me you will fling it into the fire without opening it, certain that it is a garretful of blue devils and the amplest stock of melancholy in the world. If my fat and daring countenance is at this moment installed before you, you will never behold my griefs on that swelling forehead—less ample, less beautiful than yours—nor on those rotund cheeks of a lazy monk. But so it is. He who was created for pleasure and happy carelessness, for love and for luxury, works like a galley-slave.

I was talking to Heine yesterday about writing for the stage. “Beware of that,” he said; “he who is accustomed to Brest cannot accustom himself to Toulon. Stay in your own galley.”

I am the lighter by three works: here is the third dizain done in manuscript, but not in proofs; here is “Gambara” finished, and I am at the last proof of “Massimilla Doni;” and finally, in three days I shall begin the end of “César Birotteau.” I hope the woodman brings down trees; I hope the workman is no bungler. But I am always meeting worthy people, Parisians, who say to me, “Why don’t you publish something?” Yesterday, after leaving Heine, I met Rothschild on the boulevard, that is to say, all the wit and money of the Jews; and he said to me, “What are you doing now?” “La Femme Supérieure” has been inundating the “Presse” for the last fortnight!

Cara, you talk to me still of my dissipation, my travels, and society. That is wrong in you. I travel when it is impossible to rouse my broken-down brain. When I return, I shut myself up and work night and day until death comes—of the brain, be it understood, though a man may die of work. I did wrong not to go to the Ukraine, but I am the first punished; that wrong was caused by my poverty. But I have just discovered an economical means of conveyance which I shall use as soon as I am free. It is to go from here to Havre, Havre to Hamburg, Hamburg to Berlin, Berlin to Breslau, Breslau to Lemberg, Lemberg to Brody. I think that route will not be dear, as so much is done by water. From Paris to Hamburg, four days, is two hundred francs, everything included. Only, will you come and fetch me at Brody, where I shall be without a vehicle and ignorant of the language? That is the project I am caressing; and it makes me hasten my work.

There is nothing new about the grand affair of my publication on the tontine plan. But the petty newspapers are already laughing at this enterprise, which they know nothing about, and solely because it makes to my profit.

Is not this singular? I was just here when Auguste brought me your kind and very amiable number 30—in the sense that there is an adorable number of pages. In the first place, cara, I see that you are not speaking to me with a frank heart in fearing that your letter would be flung down with disdain! and you came near using a worse word. Ah! have we never understood each other? Have you no idea of friendship,—no knowledge of true sentiments? It must be so, if you can imagine I am not more interested in your missing book and all that happens around you than I am in the finest or the most hideous events of the world. I am so angry, so shaken by that passage in your letter that my hand trembles as if I had killed my neighbour. It is you who have killed something in me. But you can revive it by pouring out to me without fear your reveries. Next, you tell me that I am hiding from you some gambling loss, some disaster, and that I am a poor head financially.

Dear and beautiful châtelaine, you talk of poverty like one who does not know it and who never will know it. The unfortunate are always wrong, because they begin by being unfortunate.

Must I for the fifth or sixth time explain to you the mechanism of my poverty, and how it is that it only grows and increases? I will do so, if only to prove to you that I am the greatest financier of the epoch. But we will never return to the subject again, will we?—for there is nothing sadder than to relate troubles from which we still suffer:—

In 1828 I was flung into this poor rue Cassini, when my family would not even give me bread, in consequence of a liquidation to which they compelled me, owing one hundred thousand francs and being without a penny. There, then, was a man who had to have six thousand francs to pay his interests, and three thousand francs on which to live; total, nine thousand francs a year. Now, during the years 1828, 1829, and 1830 I did not earn more than three thousand francs, for M. de Latouche paid only one thousand for “Les Chouans;” the publisher Mame failed and paid me only seven hundred and fifty francs, instead of fifteen hundred, for the “Scènes de la Vie privée;” the “Physiologie du Mariage” brought me only one thousand francs, through the bad faith of the publisher; and M. de Girardin paid me only fifty francs a feuille [16 pages] in his paper “La Mode.” Thus in the course of three years my debt was increased by twenty-four thousand francs.

1830 came; general disaster to the publishing business. “La Peau de Chagrin” paid me only seven hundred francs; three thousand later by adding the “Contes Philosophiques” to it. Then the “Revue de Paris” took ten feuilles a year, at one hundred and sixty francs: total, sixteen hundred francs. So 1830 and 1831 together gave me only ten thousand francs; but I had to pay eighteen thousand francs for interest and my living. Thus I increased the debt by eight thousand francs. The capital of the debt then amounted to one hundred and thirty-two thousand francs.

1833 came; and then by making my agreement with Madame Bêchet I found myself equal to my living and my debt; that is to say, I could live and pay my interest; because from 1833 to 1836 I earned ten thousand francs a year; I then owed six thousand two hundred francs interest, and I supposed I could live on four thousand francs. But, at this moment of success, new disasters came.

A man who has only his pen, and who must meet ten thousand francs a year when he does not have them, is compelled to many sacrifices. It was soon, not one hundred and thirty-two thousand francs that I owed, but one hundred and forty thousand, for how did I fight the necessity that pressed upon me? With an aide-de-camp who may be compared to the vulture of Prometheus [Werdet]; with usurers who made me pay nine, ten, twelve, twenty per cent interest, and who consumed in applications, proceedings, and errands fifty per cent and more of my time. Moreover, I had signed agreements with publishers who had advanced me money on work to be done; so that when I signed the Bêchet agreement I had to deduct from the thirty thousand francs she was to pay me for the first twelve volumes of the “Études de Mœurs” ten thousand francs to indemnify Gosselin and two other publishers. So it was not thirty thousand, but twenty thousand francs only; and those twenty thousand are reduced to ten thousand by a loss I have lately met with, of copies that were worth that sum. The fire in the rue du Pot-de-Fer consumed the volumes I bought back from Gosselin.

So my position in 1837 exactly corresponds with these facts, when it places me with one hundred and sixty-two thousand francs of debt; for all that I have earned has never covered interests and expenses. My expenditure in luxury, for which you sometimes blame me, is produced by two necessities. First: when a man works as I do, and his time is worth to him twenty to fifty francs an hour, he heeds a carriage, for a carriage is an economy. Then he must have lights all night, coffee at all hours, much fire, and everything orderly about him; it is that which constitutes the costly life of Paris. Second: in Paris, those who speculate in literature have no other thought than to extort from it. If I had stayed in a garret I should have earned nothing. This is what ruins the men of letters in Paris,—Karr, Goslan, etc. They are needy, and it is known; publishers pay them five hundred francs for what is worth three thousand. I therefore considered it good business to exhibit an exterior of fortune, so as not to be bargained with and to fix my own price.

If you do not regard with admiration a man who, bearing the weight of such a debt, writing with one hand, lighting with the other, never committing a baseness, cringing to no usurer, nor to journalism, imploring no man, neither his creditor nor his friend, never tottering in the most suspicious, most selfish, most miserly country in the world, where they lend to the rich only,—-a man whom calumny has pursued and is still pursuing, a man who they said was in Sainte Pélagie when he was with you in Vienna,—then you know nothing of the world! 1

The enterprise of the “Chronique de Paris” was undertaken to play a bold stroke and pay off my debt. Instead of winning, I lost.

It was a horrible reverse.

And in the midst of this hell of conflicting interests, of days without bread, of friends who betrayed me, of jealousies that tried to injure me, I had to write ceaselessly, to think, to toil; to have droll ideas when I wept, to write of love with a heart bleeding from inward wounds, with scarce a hope on the horizon—and that hope reproachful, and asking from a knight brought back from the battle, where and why he was wounded.

Cara, do not condemn in the midst of this long torture the poor struggler who seeks a corner where to sit down and recover breath, where to breathe the sweet air of the shore and not the dusty air of the arena; do not blame me for having spent a few miserable thousand francs in going to Neufchâtel, Geneva, Vienna, and twice to Italy. (You do not comprehend Italy; in that you are dull, and I will tell you why.) Do not blame me for going to spend two or three months near you; for without these halts I should be dead.

Imprint this very succinct explanation in your beautiful and noble, pure, sublime head, and never return to these ideas that I gamble, etc.; for I have never gambled, never had any other disasters than those into which my own kindness dragged me.

Alas! I thought my pious offering for the new year had reached your hands; for allow me the intoxicating pleasure of thinking that what I give you caused me a little privation. It is in that way that poverty can equal riches. If that poor man has sold it he must have been much in need. But I shall never console myself for knowing that the chain you gave me in Geneva is not in your hands. The misfortune I can repair. What is irreparable is that the mails arrive without bringing me any letters from you. You make to yourself false ideas about me, and you do not know to what black dragons I fall a victim when a fortnight passes without manna from the Ukraine.

What! you did not receive that letter from Sion? In future, when I travel I shall prepay my letters myself. Oh! the honour of Swiss innkeepers! The rascal in whom I trusted must have burned the letter and kept the francs I gave him to prepay it.

You and I are not of the same opinion on religious questions, but I should be in despair if you adopted my ideas; I like better to see you keep your own; and I shall never do anything, even though I think I am right, to destroy them. Only, knowing you to be a good and true Catholic, I prefer the pages in which you disappoint me to those in which you preach to me Catholicism; and yet, they all give me the greatest pleasure. That is only telling you that I want both. I conceive of Catholicism as poesy, and I am preparing a work in which two lovers are led by love to the religious life; then that bag of nails whom you call your aunt will like me much and declare that I make a good use of my talents!

Addio. You have very cruelly proved to me that you have a prudent friendship for me; you judge very sternly the poor strivings of a stormy life which, from its youth up, has never had the satisfaction of saying to itself, “This is really mine.”

I send you a letter I received yesterday from my sister; you will see that the poor child cannot help weeping when I weep, and laughing when I laugh. But then, it is true, she is near me, and you are in the Ukraine. And besides, those who are truly beloved are always sure of not wounding, for from them all is dear—even unjust blame.

A thousand friendly compliments to M. Hanski and remembrances to all. A kiss on the hair of your dear Anna. Thanks for the heart’s-ease.

For you only.

I should be most unjust if I did not say that from 1823 to 1833 an angel sustained me through that horrible war. Madame de Berny, though married, was like a God to me. She was a mother, friend, family, counsellor; she made the writer, she consoled the young man, she created his taste, she wept like a sister, she laughed, she came daily, like a beneficent sleep, to still his sorrows. She did more; though under the control of a husband, she found means to lend me as much as forty-five thousand francs, of which I returned the last six thousand in 1836, with interest at five per cent, be it understood. But she never spoke to me of my debt, except now and then; without her, I should, assuredly, be dead. She often divined that I had eaten nothing for days; she provided for all with angelic goodness; she encouraged that pride which preserves a man from baseness,—for which to-day my enemies reproach me, calling it a silly satisfaction in myself—the pride that Boulanger has, perhaps, pushed to excess in my portrait.

Therefore, that memory is for much in my life; it is ineffaceable, for it mingles with everything. Tears are in me now for two persons only,—for her who is no more, and for her who still is, and, I hope, ever will be. Thus I am inexplicable to all; for none have ever known the secret of my life; I would not deliver it up to any one. You have detected it; keep it for me securely.

Addio. It was natural that I should not mix this great history of the heart with the tale of my disasters and that of a material life so difficult. But I could not let your analytical forehead cast a thought on my confession of misery that would say I had forgotten her who gave me the strength to resist it, or her who continues that rôle.

But let us leave all this henceforth. Let me take up once more my burden. I bear it alone; and I can but smile at those who ask why I do not run thus laden.

But neither do I wish you, in thinking of me, to see me always suffering and harassed. There come hours when I look from my window, my eyes to the sky, forgetting all, lost as I am in memories. If the sorrowful had not the power to forget their sorrows, if they could not make themselves an oasis where the springs and the palms are, what would become of us?

Adieu; do not blame me again without thinking of all that ought to keep you from saying that I conceal some great catastrophe. Do you think that I lose millions in the boudoir of an opera girl?

Saché, August 25, 1837.

I receive your number 31 here. I ended by getting an inflammation of the lungs, and I came to Touraine by order of the doctor, who advised me not to work, but to amuse myself, and walk about. To amuse myself is impossible. Nothing but travel can counterbalance my work. As for working, that is still impossible; even the writing of these few lines has given me an intolerable pain in the back between the shoulders; and as for walking, that is still more impossible; for I cough so agedly that I fear to check the perspiration it causes by passing from warm to cool spots and breezy openings. I thought Touraine would do me good. But my illness has increased. The whole left lung is involved, and I return to Paris to submit to a fresh examination. But as I must, no matter what state I am in, resume my work and leave a mild and milky regimen for that of stimulants, I feel that toil will carry me off.

I have reached a point where I no longer regret life; hopes are too distant; tranquillity too laborious to attain. If I had only moderate work to do I would submit without a murmur to this fate; but I have too much grief, too many enemies. The third Part of the “Études Philosophiques” is now for sale. Not a paper has noticed it. Fourteen copies have been sold, though nearly all was new and unpublished! The indorsements I so imprudently gave to that miserable Werdet have given rise to a keener pursuit of me than I ever had for real debt; for I never met with such severity, having, ever since I lived in the world, been strictly punctual. Never was an illness more untimely for my affairs.

You must think that your dear letter came as a benefaction from Providence in the solitude of Saché. But, dear, why do you make, like those spiteful little feuilletonists and so many others, the false reasoning that considers an author guilty of all that he puts into the mouth of his actors? Because I paint a journalist without faith or law, make him talk as he thinks, and begin the portrait of that hideous and cancerous sore, does it follow that my literature is that of a commercial traveller? You are so wrong in this that I will not insist; only, I don’t like to find my polar star at fault, nor to catch myself smiling as I kiss her pages. You are infallible for me. Do not quarrel with me too much in the little time I have to live.

The grand affair is coming on. They engrave, design, and print vigorously. But, if there is success, success will come too late. I feel myself decidedly ill. I should have done better to go and pass six months at Wierzchownia than to stay on the battle-field, where I shall end by being knocked over. When one has neither supports nor ammunition there comes a moment when one must capitulate. The whole world of Paris rises in arms against inflexible virtue, and beats it down at any cost.

I meditate retiring to Touraine; but I cannot be there alone. There is no one to see there. One must have all in one’s own home.

The moments when my energy deserts me are becoming more frequent, and, in those terrible phases, it is impossible to answer for one’s self. There is neither reasoning, nor sentiment, nor doctrine that can quell the excesses of that crisis, when the soul is, so to speak, absent. Journeys cost so much money, and ruin me for a year or more; thus I am forced to remain in France. The law about the National Guard drives me into going to Touraine, for it is impossible for me to submit to that rule. So I think that towards the middle of September I shall have chosen a little house on the banks of the Cher or the Loire. I am even in treaty for one now, which would suit me very well, but there are serious difficulties.

I am surprised that you have not yet received Boulanger’s picture. They assured me it would go by a flying-waggon which went so fast that in a month it would be delivered in Brody. Now it is more than two months since I announced to you its departure.

This distance between us is something very dreadful. Your letter has been so delayed that I feared illnesses; I feared lest your fatigues had affected your health. I see now that you and yours are well. I will write you from Paris after seeing the doctor.

Why are you vexed with me for not having told you of Madame Contarini? I shall be angry with you till death for always believing that I need foreign female preachers to refresh my memory of my country. Alas! I think of it too much. I have too much subordinated all my thoughts to what you, so distant from me, think, to be happy. In short, I am neither converted nor to be converted, for I have but one religion and I do not divide my sentiments. If my religion is too terrestrial, the fault is in God, who made it what it is. Madame Contarini did not know that she was following in your religious foot-prints; for it is you who have undertaken my conversion.

You are always the providence of some one. That poor Swiss girl, will she love you better than the other? For we ought never to judge those we love; I am very fixed on that principle. The affection that is not blind is no affection at all.

I resume this letter at midnight, before going to bed. My bedroom here, which people come to see out of curiosity, looks out on woods that are two or three times centennial, and I take in a view of the Indre and the little château that I called Clochegourde. The silence is marvellous.

I leave to-morrow, 26th, for Tours with M. de Margonne, and the 28th for Paris, where my deplorable affairs need me. I always leave this lonely valley with regret.

My mother is very unwell. She sinks under the distress which the precarious position of her children gives her; for we have to take charge, my brother-in-law, my sister and myself, of the children of my poor dead sister Laurence. What makes me spur the principle of my courage so much is my desire to succeed in time to gild her old age.

Do you know that your letter is dated July 27, and that I received it August 21?—a whole month! A month without news of you is a very long time for a friendship watching for it at all hours, and often, between two proofs, taking its head in its hands and asking itself, “What is she thinking of?”

Well, adieu, for my fatigue is returning; I am going to bed and shall think of all I have not told you, forgetfulnesses which come of so short a letter; in Paris I shall have more to tell you. But, no matter what I say, find ever on my pages the purest and sweetest flowers of an affection that distance cannot lessen, which springs across that distance,—an affection known to you, and which, in a word, is ever prolix.

Paris, September 1, 1837.

Cara, I hasten to tell you that the inflammation, which turned into bronchitis, is now cured. But I must begin work again, and God knows what will happen in consequence of new excesses. Though all goes well physically, all goes ill pecuniarily; and I will not tell you the particulars, lest they bring upon me more unjust suspicions.

I begin this evening a comedy in five acts, entitled, “Joseph Prudhomme;” for I must come to that last resource; I am in the condition of “My kingdom for a horse!”

Three months hence you will receive three very important works: “César Birotteau,” the third dizain, and the “Lettres de deux Amants, ou le nouvel Abeilard.” I count the comedy as nothing. I think I have never done anything that can be compared to “Berthe la Repentie,” the diamond of the third dizain. You brought luck to that poem, for the first chapter was written in Geneva, three days after my arrival.

I wish not to tell you anything about the “Lettres de deux Amants;” that is a surprise I desire to make to my dear preacheress, to teach her to comprehend that when one has undertaken to paint the whole of a moral world, one must paint it under all its aspects, with believers and unbelievers, and every one in his place. Apropos of the comedy which I am now going to attempt and to put upon the stage, I admire to see how persistence is necessary in art. That comedy has been in my head for ten years; it has come back and back under divers faces, it has been a score of times cast and recast, modified, made, remade, and made again, and now it is about to come to the surface, new and vulgar, grand and simple. I am delighted with it; I foresee a great success and a work which may maintain itself on the repertory among the score of plays which make the glory of the Théâtre-Français. I have a second sight about it, as about “La Peau de Chagrin” and “Eugénie Grandet.” After being reassured by the friend to whom I confided the first doubt I had about it, I have seen in it the elements of a great thing. There is comedy and dumb tragedy, laughter and tears both. It has five acts, as long and fertile as those of “Le Mariage de Figaro.” This work, brought to birth in the midst of my present miseries, is, at this moment, like a carbuncle glowing in the shadows of a muddy grotto. A terrible desire seizes me to go and write it in Switzerland, at Geneva; but the dearness of living among those Swiss alarms me.

I have just seen the drawings made for “La Peau de Chagrin,” and they are wonderful. This enterprise is gigantic. Four thousand steel engravings, drawn on copper-plate in the text itself. One hundred per volume! In short, if this affair succeeds, the “Études Sociales” will be brought forth in their entirety, in a magnificent costume, with regal trappings.

Admit that if, in a few months, Fortune visits my threshold, I shall have earned her well; and be sure that I shall cling fast hold on whatever she deigns to fling to me.

Never did I find myself in such a tempest as now, and never did hope show herself so serene or so beautiful; she is lustrous in her turquoise, she smiles to me, and I let myself go to that smile which helps me to bear my misfortunes. Without these celestial apparitions what would become of poets and of artists when unhappy?

Adieu, dear. I must not tire you too long with the echoes of the storm—unless, indeed, they make Wierzchownia the sweeter to you, and the long expanse of the Ukraine more placid to your eye.

I do not understand bow it is that I am not, in the middle of August, installed in some corner of your mansion, duly framed and mounted, with all the monastic dignity that painter gave me.

You cannot imagine how beautiful Paris is becoming. We needed the reign of a trowel to arrive at such grand results. This magnificence, which advances daily and on all sides, will make us worthy of being the capital of the world. The boulevards paved with asphalt, lighted by bronze candelabra with gas, the increasing splendour of the shops, of that fair, two leagues long, perpetually going on and varied by ever new handiworks, compose a spectacle that is unequalled. In ten years we shall be clean; “Paris mud” will be out of the dictionaries; we shall become so magnificent that Paris will be really a great lady, the first of queens, crowned with battlements.

I renounce Touraine and remain a citizen of the intellectual metropolis. But I shall exempt myself from the draconian tyranny of the National Guard by putting three leagues of distance between me and this terrible queen. Respect is good taste towards royalties. An obscure village will receive my miseries and my grandeurs. Your moujik will have a very humble cottage, whence he will now and then depart at half-past six to reach the Italian Opera at eight, for music is a distraction, the only one that remains to him. Those beneficent voices refresh both soul and mind.

Adieu, dear. You share in sorrows; it is right that I should send you rays of gentle hope when she makes an azure rift athwart the dais of gray cloud. God grant that star may not fall like others, but lead me to some treasure-trove.

I please myself in thinking that you are happy; that your life has taken, after the departure of your guests, its accustomed way, that Paulowska brings you in her golden fleeces, that no one steals your books, that no wicked page of mine has furrowed that brow so full of dazzling majesty; in short, that you have all the crumbs of little happiness, for that is much. Materialities, which are the half of life, are not lacking to you; and if they bring monotony, at least the energy that may spend itself in sacred regions—where you bear it to the detriment of this poor passionate earth—is not exhausted. You know, this long time, what wishes I make that life be light upon you. I hope that Anna, and your tall young ladies, and the master, and the Swiss maid, in short, all your household, are well, and that you have no grief that makes you lift your eyes to heaven.

After that phrase I pick up my spade, I mean my pen, and dig in the field “Birotteau,” which still needs delving and rolling and raking and watering; and when you read the letter of François to César, remember that it was there that my thought made a pause to turn to you and send you this letter across your steppe, like a flower of friendship asking asylum in your soil, which, in spite of wintry snows, will be always coloured and perfumed by a sincere affection.

Sèvres, October 10, 1837.

Much time has gone by without my writing to you; I have lived so tempestuously that I am not sure whether on my return from Touraine and after my convalescence I thought to tell you that my chest was quite well and had nothing the matter with it.

In order to put myself outside of that atrocious law of the National Guard, I have removed from the rue Cassini and the rue des Batailles, and legally quitted Paris; that is to say, I have gone before three mayors and declared that I quitted the capital; after which I installed myself and live here at Sèvres. Therefore take note that after you receive this letter you must address your letters to “Monsieur Surville, rue de la Ville-d’Avray, Sèvres, Seine-et-Oise,” for I must receive my letters under that name for some months to come, so that my address may not be known at the post-office, partly for secret reasons (which are Werdet’s failure, and the pursuit which I must endure till I can earn the money to pay up my indorsements), and partly to escape the great quantity of letters with which unknown men and women overwhelm me.

I have bought here a bit of ground containing some forty rods, on which my brother-in-law is going to build me a tiny house, where I shall henceforth live until my fortune is made, or where I shall remain forever if I stay a beggar. When it is built, and I am in it, which will be in January next, I will let you know, and you can then write to me under my own name, and put the address of my poor hermitage, which is “Les Jardies,” the name of the piece of ground on which I hang like a worm on a green leaf. Land about Paris is so parcelled out that I had to negotiate with three peasants to collect this lot of forty rods, and a rod contains only seventeen square feet. I am here at a distance which allows me to go and come from Paris in two hours. I can go to the theatre and sleep at home. I am in Paris without being there. There are neither heavy taxes nor tolls; living is cheaper, and the day when I can make sure of having a thousand francs a month for myself I can have a carriage. And finally, I escape that perpetual inquisition which publishes every step I take and every word I say. I shall neither see nor receive any one. Then instead of spending twenty thousand francs with other people where I may lodge, I shall spend them on my own home, and nothing shall ever get me out of that. You would never believe how I like fixedness. Constancy is one of the corner-stones of my nature.

You can easily understand that these turmoils have not left me a minute to myself. I have looked at a hundred houses around Paris, and been in negotiations for several. For a whole month I have roamed the environs to find what I wanted on the exact boundary of the department of the Seine and Seine-et-Oise. I came very near buying one house; but after convincing myself that I should have to spend twenty thousand francs in repairs and alterations to suit myself, I determined to buy a piece of ground and build; for a house would cost only twelve thousand francs, built as I wished it, and the land, with the peasant’s house on it, came to not more than five thousand. Reckoning the interior at three thousand, the whole would be twenty thousand, and allowing five thousand for mistakes, that would make twenty-five thousand; that is, a rental of twelve hundred francs a year, and the comfort of having one’s cabin to one’s self without the annoyances of noise, for my land backs upon the park of Saint-Cloud. I have retained the apartment in the rue de Batailles for a few months to store my furniture until I install myself at Les Jardies.

I hasten to write to you, because to-morrow I begin “La Maison Nucingen” for the “Presse.” That means fifty columns to hatch out before the end of the month, and then?—then my pen will be free, for my new editors have compromised with the defunct “Figaro,” now about to rise from its ashes, and I have finished that third dizain. So, about November 1 my pen will owe nothing to any one, and I can begin the execution of my new treaty by the publication of “César Birotteau.” But, as that work cannot appear before January 1, and as I have had an advance of two months, I shall receive no money till March. My distress must therefore go on for six months longer, and it is frightful.

This illness has made me lose six irreparable weeks. I think ever, if my embarrassments are too great, of going to take refuge with you for three months. I keep that project for a last resource, and I now repent that I have not already put it into execution; for when I am known to be travelling everybody waits, and nobody says anything. After that, returning with one or two plays in hand, all my money troubles could be pacified. But I cannot do that until I have paid my pen debts and given one work to my new editors; which throws me over to the month of February,—if, always, my house is finished and I am in it.

I cannot give you an idea of the turmoil in which I have been for the last six weeks, and the disconnectedness of my life, usually (in body) so peaceful. And all the while I had to read proofs and write. You are ignorant, in your Ukraine, of what Parisian removals are; nothing describes them but a provincial saying: “Three removals are equal to one conflagration.”

In the midst of these worries and fatigues I have had two joys: they are your two letters, which I shall answer in a few days, for I have united them with their elders in a precious casket which I took to my sister, in order not to subject them to these removal agitations. I think there is something in them I ought to answer.

It is probable that I shall not go to the Opera, and this will be, I assure you, a great privation; because there is nothing that distracts my mind like music, and I do not know how else to relax my soul. Nothing will remain to me but the contemplation of the azure waves of hope, and I don’t know whether this hovering with spread wings above that infinite, which recedes as we approach it, is not a pain—which pleases perhaps, but is none the less painful.

I have had many griefs since I wrote to you. In the passing crisis in which I am, every one has fled me like a leper. I am all alone. But I prefer this solitude within my solitude to the fawning hatred which is called, in Paris, friendship.

I have still a conte to write for my third dizain, to replace one which was too free, and it is now a month that I have been trying to find something, without avail. Nothing but the want of that feuille delays the publication.... Next month the announcement of our tontine on the “Études Sociales” will, no doubt, appear; and from the 1st to the 15th the magnificent edition will be ready. They have begun with “La Peau de Chagrin.” The second volume will be “Le Médecin de campagne,” and the third “Le Lys dans la Vallée.” God grant that the affair succeed!

I am in despair at hearing that your cassolette is in Warsaw, and I cannot imagine why it has not been sent to you by some opportunity. Is there no communication between you and Warsaw? There are now strong reasons for suspecting the person in question, whose journey is inexplicable. I add to this letter a line for him, which you must seal and send to him, to hasten the delivery of that jewel.

Write me a line, I beg of you, to let me know if the picture has reached Brody. Double the time it ought to have taken has elapsed, and I am very impatient to know if anything unlucky has happened to it on the journey. I hear nothing of the statue from Milan. Those Italians are really very singular.

You wrote me that you might go to Vienna, but have never again mentioned that project. If you go there I could bring you, myself, a whole library of manuscripts which belong to you, and are beginning to be difficult to transport.

This is the first time I have ever answered two letters from you; for if you reckon up, you will see that in letter-writing I have the advantage, in spite of what you call, so insultingly, your chatter. Whatever it is, I am grieved when I do not get it, and it is now a fortnight since I have seen Auguste enter, bearing respectfully a little packet, neatly folded and very spruce, which comes from such distance and yet has nothing of the immensity of the steppes in its form.

My play, the comedy in five acts, is all laid out, and as your opinion has made me change and modify the one I first began, I dare not tell you this one, because when your reply comes it will be written, and if you are against it you will throw me into terrible perplexities. Is not this falling on one’s knees before one’s critic? Wherefore, behold me there! I place myself at your feet with a good grace, entreating you to pay no attention to what I have just said, and to go your way with your female scissors through my plot, and cut up my dramatic calico mercilessly, for, in my present situation, this play represents a hundred thousand francs, and I must make it a masterpiece well and quickly, or succumb.

You know “Monsieur Prudhomme,” the type made by Henri Monnier? I take it boldly; because in order to seize success one must not have to obtain acceptance for a creation. One must, like the ambassador making love, buy it ready-made. Hence, there is no anxiety about the personage; I am sure of the laughter so far. Only, I must annihilate Monnier, and my Prudhomme must be the Prudhomme. Monnier made only a poor vaudeville of burlesques; I shall make five acts for the Théâtre-Français.

Prudhomme, as type of our present bourgeoisie, as image of the Gannerons, of the Aubés, of the National Guard, of that middle-class on which il padrone rests, is a personage far more comic than Turcaret, droller than Figaro. He is wholly of the present day. Here is the subject:—

At thirty-seven years of age, Prudhomme is seized with a passion for the daughter of a porter,—charming person, who studies at the Conservatoire and has carried off prizes. She sees before her the career of Mademoiselle Mars; she has distinction, jargon, she is quite comme il faut; she is eighteen, but she has been already betrayed in a first love; she has had a son by a pupil at the Conservatoire, who has gone to America out of love for his child, being alarmed by his poverty, and resolved to make his fortune. Pamela mourns him, but she has the child on her arms. The desire to support and bring up her child makes her marry Prudhomme, from whom she conceals her situation. Prudhomme, at thirty-seven, possesses thirty thousand francs in savings; he has invested them in the mines of Anzin in 1815, and his shares are worth, in 1817, three hundred thousand francs. That incites him to marry. The marriage takes place. He has a daughter by his wife. The thousand-franc shares of Anzin are worth, in 1834, one hundred and fifty thousand francs. This is the prologue; for the play itself begins in 1834, eighteen years later.

Monsieur Prudhomme has realized fifteen hundred thousand francs on half his shares, and keeps the rest. He has made himself a banker; and, as happens to all imbeciles, he has prospered under the advice of his wife, who is an angelic and superior woman, full of propriety and good taste. She has known how to play the rôle of a woman of means. But her attachment to her husband, inspired by the really good qualities of that ridiculous man, strengthened by the passion that he has for her, by the comfort that he gives her through his wealth, is balanced by the maternal sentiment exalted to the highest pitch which Pamela bears to her first child, whom, thanks to this wealth, she was enabled to bring up, with an invisible hand, until two years earlier, when she introduced him into her own home, without his knowing the truth. Adolphe is made head clerk, and the poor mother has played her dreadful part so carefully that no one, not even Adolphe, suspects the great love that envelops him. M. Prudhomme is very fond of Adolphe. Mademoiselle Prudhomme is seventeen years old. The play is entitled “Le Mariage de Mademoiselle Prudhomme.” M. Prudhomme, rich from the shares of Anzin, rich with the profits of his bank, and possessing much private property, will give his daughter a million. She is, therefore, with a million and expectations, one of the best matches in Paris.

I must tell you that, unlike the Antonys, Adolphe is a gay, practical young fellow, happy in his position, delighted not to have either father or mother, and never inquiring about them. In that lies a dreadful drama between the mother and her son, for poor Madame Prudhomme is tortured a dozen times a day by the indifference of her son in the matter of his mother, and by a crowd of circumstances I cannot explain here; they make the play itself.

The fortune of Mademoiselle Prudhomme tempts a young notary, who owes his business to his predecessor, who is eager to be paid for it. This old notary is a friend of Prudhomme; he has introduced the young notary to the house. Madame Prudhomme’s tenderness for Adolphe does not escape his eye; he believes that she intends to give him her daughter; and the two notaries open Prudhomme’s eyes to his wife’s love for Adolphe. Here, then, is the wife unjustly accused of an imaginary sin, from which she does not know how to vindicate herself. The comedy comes, you understand, from the pathos of Prudhomme, and from his efforts to convict his wife. His wife accepts the singular combat of silencing her husband as if she were guilty, which is a satirical situation completely in the style of Molière. But she sees whence the blow has come. She fences with the two notaries, and, pressed by them, she shows them the infamy of their conduct, and declares that she will never give her daughter to a man capable of soiling the honour of the mother to obtain the daughter. They are forced to retract to Prudhomme, and the mother, to secure the tranquillity of her husband, is forced to separate from her son.

That is the main play; but, you understand, there is an enormous quantity of situations, scenes, movements. Servants are mixed up in it. It is a picture of our present bourgeoisie. There is a return of Adolphe’s father, which complicates everything, and brings about the dénouement. There is a horrible scene in which Prudhomme, in order to get light on his wife’s passion, proposes the marriage of brother and sister, and arms himself with his wife’s terror. There is also the most fruitful of all subjects, great ridicule of men and things through Prudhomme’s magniloquence. Madame Prudhomme is the Célimène of the bank, the true character of our women of the present day. But there is, above all, a keen satire on manners and morals. Prudhomme, accepting this false disaster, vanquished by the superiority of his wife, is a figure that was lacking to the stage. The solid happiness, marred by the slander of self-interested persons and restored by them for their own interests, has the true ring of comedy. Mademoiselle Prudhomme does not marry. Apparently, all this is vague; but the vagueness and want of outline is that of the “Misanthrope,” the plot of which is in ten lines. The rôle of Madame Prudhomme, who is forty years old, can be played only by Mademoiselle Mars; but, with her tacit maternity, crushed down at every moment, she can be superb.

Ecco, cara, the card on which I am about to stake my whole future; for I have but that chance left, so deplorable is the state of the publishing business now; and I must, if our grand affair fails, have something to fall back upon. I shall not do that play only. I shall do two others at the same time, so as to obtain the receipts of two theatres at least.

Addio. I will write you between now and November 1, when I shall have got some pressing matters off my hands. But, I entreat you, do not forget, and continue to me the tale of your tranquil Ukrainean life. I have flowers beneath my windows, dahlias, plants that make me think of your gardens. When I open the book in which I put all the thoughts of my work, and so many other things, I turn ever to the one saying, “I will be Richelieu to preserve you.” That, in this great corral of my ideas, is the flower that my eye caresses oftenest.

Be indulgent to the poor third dizain, the third of which was written at the hôtel de l’Arc. “Berthe la Repentie” is decidedly the finest thing in the “Contes Drolatiques.” I gossip to you about my poor thoughts; my life is such a desert; there are so many misconceptions, recent betrayals, difficulties, that I dare not talk to you of my material life. It is too sad.

October 12.

The “Conte” is rewritten and sent to the printing-office, and I can say that I am heartily glad to have finished at last that eternally “in the press” dizain. I have many other books to finish also. “Massimilla Doni” lacks a chapter on “Moïse,” which requires long studies of the score; and as I must make them with a consummate musician, I cannot be master of my own work. Next I have a preface to sew on, like a collaret, to “La Femme Supérieure;” and a fourth Part also, like a bustle; for the sixty-five columns in the “Presse” did not furnish forth a volume; hence the preface and the added end of the volume. You cannot imagine how these mendings, these replasterings, weary me; I am worn-out with such secondary toils.

I have forgotten to tell you, I think, about Mademoiselle de Fauveau, who remembers you very well. She and her sister are such Catholics that the latter made difficulties about marrying the son of Bautte (the millionaire jeweller of Geneva where you and I went together, you remember?) on account of his religion, and yet these two poor women are in great poverty. Is not that splendid in faith? Mademoiselle de Fauveau, to whom I said that many persons objected to what I made Madame de Mortsauf say before dying, fell into a holy wrath with such profane ones, for she holds in admiration the “Lys dans la Vallée.” When I told her that I had modified the cries of the flesh she said:—

“At least, do not take out: I will learn English to say ‘my dear.’”

She thought the Catholic theme magnificently laid down; for it is the combat of mind over matter.

“Unhappily,” I said to her, “it seems that none but you and I see it so.”

She is a charming person, but rather too mystical and mythic. She made me go to San Miniato to see primitive triglyphs, superb, in relation to the Trinity; but I saw nothing of the kind. Don’t call me a “commercial traveller” again, on account of that blindness. I would like to be a traveller and travel to your cara patria, but not a commercial one.

Adieu; I hope that this frail paper will tell you all I think, and that you will not think of my distress, or of my griefs; but that you will do as I do myself—lift, gaily and sadly both, my head to heaven, whence I have awaited, from my youth up, the Orient of full happiness.

Do not scold me too much, cara, for my silence, for there has been no truce or rest to me since my last letter; and I have been saying to myself that I must have made you anxious, without being able to sit down and write; for to write one word only is what I can never do. Some day, beside your fire, make me relate to you this month; you will then see what it has been. These are real novels that must be kept for private talks; and then the lord of Wierzchownia will laugh, as he did when I told him of my campaigns in China.

Chaillot, October 20, 1837.

I receive this morning your number 34 and have just read the tale of your journey. I am here for my mother’s fête-day.

Those cursed builders demand the whole month of November to arrange my cabin at Sèvres; and I shall be here at least a fortnight to attend to the proofs of “La Maison Nucingen.” My editors have arranged with the “Figaro” and have bought back my agreement with it, so that my pen owes nothing to any one, no matter who, after the publication of “La Maison Nucingen.” I am unusually content with the third dizain. But you don’t know how that literature is proscribed; it is so blamed for obscenity that I should not be surprised at a general hue and cry against it. English manias are gaining on us; it is enough to make one adore Catholicism.

“Massimilla Doni,” another book which will be much misunderstood, gives me immense labour from its difficulties; but I have never caressed anything so much as those mythical pages, because the myth is so profoundly buried beneath reality. You have, no doubt, before this read “Gambara” in the “Revue de Saint-Pétersbourg;” for those worthy pirates will not have overlooked that work, which cost me six months toil.

I have seen Versailles; Louis Philippe’s action was so far good, as it saved the palace; but it is the most ignoble and the silliest piece of work in itself I ever saw; so bad is it in art and so niggardly in execution. When you see it you will be amazed; and when I explain to you what is Louis XIV., Louis XV., Louis XVI., and Empire, you will think the rest horribly mean and bourgeois. Your Aunt Leczinska is there a dozen times in family portraits, and I took pleasure in looking at her and saying to myself with a laugh, “Better a live emperor than a buried dowdy;” for you are a queen of beauty, and she an ugly dowdy; though that must be the fault of the painters, for she was really very handsome. An extraordinary thing is, that there is not one of her portraits that is like another; so many portraits, so many different women. She was, no doubt, variable. What is really fine at Versailles, worthy of Titian and all that is noblest in painting, is the “Consecration of Napoleon” and the “Crowning of Josephine,” the “Blessing of the Eagles” and “Napoleon pardoning Arabs” in the pictures of David and Guérin. What a great painter David is! He is colossal. I never saw those three pictures before.

I write to you also in presence of a friend [her portrait] in the contemplation of whom I lose myself as in the infinite. I have a quarrel to make with you, apropos of an insincere sentence in your number 33, about your regret at not having friends who can travel for your benefit. That sentence is one of the wounds that reach my heart; for you know well that if for you and yours it were necessary that I should go to the ends of the earth, or do daily something difficult and binding (which is more than exhibiting one’s self in greater ways), I would not reflect a moment, I would do it with the blind obedience of a dog. If you know that, your remark is bad; if you do not know it, put me to the proof. My character, my manners and morals, all that is I, is so horribly calumniated that despair seizes me when I see that I have not even one little corner where doubt and suspicion do not enter.

You tell me that I write to you less often; there is not a letter of yours without an answer, and I often write to you in a scramble amid the desperate struggles I maintain, which will end, perhaps, in conquering my courage.

The announcement of our grand affair is postponed to the period of the general elections, a moment when the newspapers are much read. The first number will probably appear November 15. It will be my Austerlitz, or my Waterloo.

You spoke of the material obstacles to your presence among the works at Wierzchownia; but I own that if you understand very little my material obstacles, I understand yours still less; I cannot conceive expense in the solitude of a steppe. Make me your bailiff, and you will see that the man who created Grandet understands domestic economy. I would rather be your bailiff than be Lord Byron; Lord Byron was not happy, and I should be very happy.

The farther I go, the more frequent are my moments of depression and despair. This solitude and this constant toil without compensation kill me. Every day I think back to those days when the person of whom I have told you provisioned me with courage, and shared my labour. What an immense loss! What can fill it? An image? That image is mute and does not even look at me. But, whatever she be, and in spite of the imperfections of memory, she gilds my solitude and I can say that she enlightens it.

You cannot think how many dark distresses have resulted from the blow that deprived me of Madame de Berny. First, the tardy reparations of all my family, who did not like her, and who repeated the scene of “Clarissa Harlowe.” Then, all those little things of the heart which ought to lie burned, or remain in one’s own possession. Her son has understood nothing of all that; he has not returned me such things, and I do not venture to ask for them. So that I, whom neither work, nor grief, nor anything else seems likely to kill, I am making arrangements as if I were to die to-morrow, that I may grieve the heart of none.

I heard yesterday your dear “Norma.” But Rubini was replaced by a wretched tenor and they skipped his airs. I came away before the scene where Norma declares her passion to the Druids. The strangest set of people were in the boxes, for no one has yet returned from the country; the vine harvest was late this year, and the weather superb. Prince Ed. Schonberg occupied the box of the Apponys, who are still absent. But no princess.

Was I not right when I said to you in Vienna that the fortnight I passed there was like an oasis in my life? Since that moment I have never had a day or an hour of repose. I travelled to gain a truce to such life; and no doubt the month, or months, I might again take, in which Paris could be completely forgotten, would be another oasis. But can I take them? There are days when a ferocious desire seizes me to drop everything. It would have been wise had I committed that folly. That alone would enable me to bring back a play; here, I am too much pursued by my obligations.

You can hardly imagine how your letters carry me to you; and how those which seem to you long and diffuse are precious to me. Where there is heart and constancy, one cannot dwell on the merit and the grace that mark each detail; but I do assure you they make me very fastidious. There come heavy and peculiarly gloomy hours when I have only to read through some past page, taken at random, to soothe my soul; it is as if I issued from a dungeon to cast eyes on a lovely landscape. Only—there have been some sad things, or rather, saddening things; for example, when you believe on the word of your sister Caroline; when you say you would not know what to do at Wierzchownia with a Parisian, a wit, who needs Paris and would be bored in the Ukraine. That proves that a hundred letters will not make you know me, nor the forty-five days we spent together. I own I am not saddened, but humiliated, by that tirade from a charming creature.

Apropos of the third dizain; I earnestly desire that you will not read it until M. Hanski has first passed judgment on it; for if it were likely to injure me in your mind I would rather that it should never go upon your bookshelves. It is specially a book for men; and I suffer when that easy and inoffensive pleasantry is ill-understood or ill-taken. Do me this favour; let it unwrinkle the boyard’s brow when he has his blue devils; but hide the book away.

I believe you are right as to the route I had better take, and that from Havre to Lubeck and from Lubeck to Berlin would be best. But by Berlin, one must go through Warsaw; and I wanted to avoid Warsaw, because I hate those stupid occasions when one is recognized and receptions are made for one without heart or soul, purely from vanity. But it is the better route Perhaps also the least costly.

When you spoke to me in your number 33 of a happiness that I did not dream of in the rue de Lesdiguières, believing that I should see disappointment in a peaceful, obscure, secluded existence, happy in a home and confidence, you did not know how much ballast I have thrown into the sea, how many of my soap-bubbles have burst, how little I now cling to that which men call fame (which is here the privilege of being calumniated, vilified, disgraced). Reputation, political consistency, all is in the water. That which is not in the water, and on which I rely, is the youth of heart that will enable me to love for twenty years a woman who might then be forty-six—this counts the form for little, and the soul for all!

Why do you speak to me of a journal in which I am a shareholder? Journal yourself, as the school-boys say. You believe in advertisements! You think our names are respected! People take them for puffs of a spurious Macassar, a sham perfume; but whoever would attack this singular humbug would be well scoffed at. I shall never again concern myself in business or a newspaper; a scalded cat fears cold water.

I have a persecutor who wants to put me in prison (always that business of Werdet, who has got his certificate of bankruptcy and walks about Paris free of creditors). Jules Sandeau quarrelled with this man, whom he despised on his personal account. Well, he has now made up with him, and dines with him. I have been a father to Jules. I cry to myself, “Here’s another man stricken from the list of the living for me!” Do you think that makes me love Paris?

Adieu for to-day. I will write you a few more lines before closing my letter. I must now apply myself to “La Maison Nucingen” and, like Sisyphus, roll my rock.

Monday, 23.

I don’t know anything more wearying than to sit a whole night, from midnight till eight o’clock, beneath the light of shaded candles, before blank paper, unable to find thoughts, listening to the noise of the fire and that of carriages sounding beyond the window panes from the Barrière des Bons-Hommes and the quay. This is what your servant has done for five nights past, without meeting the moment when some inner voice, I know not what it is, says to him, “Go on!” Such useless fatigues count for nothing to every one.

Thursday, 26.

Three days during which I have not been able to do anything—except torture myself.

Yesterday I met one of your guests at Geneva, that relater of anecdotes, who spoke of the Z... He is to come and see me this morning; and I would like much to know, by return mail, whether, in case he returns to la cara patria, I can give him some of the manuscripts that belong to you; for I think they will have to be sent in detachments.

My brain must be fatigued by the proofs of “Les Contes Drolatiques” and of “Massimilla Doni,” for complete impotence in respect to what I have to do reigns there. I have often had these checks, but they have never before lasted so long.

I must bid you farewell and send this letter, which, by the blessed invention of the “bon roy Loys le unzième,” will be in your hands within twenty days. Winter is about to begin, so all chance of going to see you is postponed till spring,—though snow-drifts do not terrify me any more than wolves; those who are very unhappy need fear no accidents. They are the anointed of sorrows. Death respects them.

I will own to you that when I found myself so ill at Saché I had a sort of sensuous tranquillity in feeling my dull pains, for I live from duty only.

I am now to make two grand essays for fortune: the tontine affair and my comedy. After that, I shall let myself go with the current and see what comes of it. Believe that after a struggle of eighteen years, and a bitter fight of seven, if “a campaign of France” should end them, I must, willing or unwilling, find my Saint Helena. Between now and the month of April all will be decided. The tontine will have failed, “Mademoiselle Prudhomme” will have been hissed, and I shall have flung myself into a diligence from Lubeck to Berlin in search of a rest most needful. You will see a literary soldier covered with wounds to nurse. But he will not be hard to amuse, “quoi qu’on die.”

Well, adieu. Write to me oftener, and do not forget to remember me to your colony. Tell M. Hanski that I think I have found a means to naturalize madder in Russia. That will wake him up. Many caressing things to your Anna. Tell me confidentially of something that would please her from Paris, and find here the homage of my attachment, and the flowers of a heart that can never be withered of them.

Chaillot, November 7, 1837.

I have decidedly begun my comedy; but, after defining its principal lines, I perceived the difficulties, and that gives me a profound admiration for the great geniuses who have left their works on the stage.

Yesterday I went to hear Beethoven’s symphony in C minor. Beethoven is the only man who makes me know jealousy. I would rather be Beethoven than Rossini or Mozart. There is a divine power in that man. In that finale, it seems as though some enchanter raised you into a land of marvels, amid the noblest palaces filled with the treasures of all arts; and there, at his command, gates, like those of the Baptistry, turn on their hinges, letting you see beauties of an unknown kind—the fairy land of fantasy. There, flutter beings with the beauties of woman and the rainbow-tinted wings of the angel; you are bathed in an upper air, that air which, according to Swedenborg, sings and sheds fragrance, has colour and feeling, which flows to you, and beatifies you!

No, the mind of the writer can never give such joys, because what we paint is finite, fixed, and what Beethoven flings to you is infinite! You understand that I only know the symphony in C minor, and that fragment of the Pastoral symphony which we heard rattled off at Geneva on a second floor—of which I heard little, because two steps away from you stood a young man, who asked me, with straining eyes and a petrified air, if I knew who that beautiful lady was; the which was you, and I was proud as though I were a woman, young, beautiful, and vain.

I live so solitary a life that I have nothing to tell you of Paris, nor can I paint its life, or repeat its cancans. I can only speak to you of myself, a subject of perpetual sadness. My little house gets on; the masonry will be finished by the 30th of this month. But, no doubt, it will not be habitable for three or four months.

I am plunged at this moment into laughable trouble, in the sense that I have in my own home one of the pleasures of wealth. My “faithful” Auguste doubts my future fortune and leaves me, alleging a certain paternal will which desires him to abandon domestic service for commerce; but the real truth of this flight is his own disbelief in my future opulence, and a species of certainty that my present distress will last, and thus prevent him from doing his own little business. I let him go; and I groan at having to find some other rascal. I like those I know; though this one cared as little for me as for the year I. of the Republic. He paid no attention to anything; he left me, ill in bed, one whole day without a drop to drink; though when he was ill I gave him a nurse, and I paid a thousand francs this year to exempt him from the conscription. He had become intolerable to me through his negligence, so that his present ingratitude suits me.

Imagine that for the last three years, at least, I have had on my hands an Irish lady, a Miss Patrickson, who has appointed herself to translate my works and propagate them in England. The story is droll. Madame de C..., furious against me for various reasons, took her to teach English to R... and invented a trick to play me through her. She made her write me a love-letter signed “Lady Nevil.” I take the English “Almanach” and I could not find in it either a Lord or a Sir Nevil. Moreover, the letter was very equivocal. You know that when such things are feigned there is either too much or too little of them; I saw therefore what it was. I replied with ardour. A rendezvous was given me at the Opera. I went that day to see Madame de C..., who made me stay to dinner. But I excused myself, saying I had an engagement at the Opera. She said, “Very good, I’ll take you there.” But in saying so she could not help exchanging a glance with her demoiselle de compagnie, and that glance sufficed me. I guessed all. I saw she was laying a trap for me and meant to make me ridiculous forever after. I went to the Opera. No one there. Then I wrote a letter, which brought the miss, old, horrible, with hideous teeth, but full of remorse for the part she had played, full also of affection for me and contempt and horror for the marquise. Though my letters were extremely ironical and written for the purpose of making a woman masquerading as a false Lady blush, she had got them back into her own possession. Thus I had the whip hand of Madame de C... and she ended by divining that in this intrigue she was on the down side. From that time forth she vowed me a hatred which will end only with life. In fact, she may rise out of her grave to calumniate me. She never opened “Séraphita” on account of its dedication, and her jealousy is such that if she could annihilate the book she would weep for joy.

So this horrible, old, and toothless Miss Patrickson, feeling herself bound to make reparation, lives only as my translator. I met at Poissy a Madame Saint-Clair, daughter of some English admiral, I don’t know who, sister of Madame Delmar, who is also infatuated to translate me, and has proposed to me a lucrative arrangement with the English reviews. I have said neither yes nor no, on account of my Patrickson. As it is now three years that the poor creature has been struggling with the affair, which is her livelihood, I imagined she would be glad of this help. I went to see her Wednesday evening, she lives on a fifth floor, but I myself know nothing more grandiose than poverty. I mount, I arrive! I find the poor creature as drunk as a Suisse. Never in my life was I so embarrassed; she spoke between her teeth; she did not know what I was saying; and finally, when she did understand that I was proposing to her collaboration in her translations, she burst into tears; she told me that if this work did not remain solely hers she would kill herself; that it was her living and her glory; and then she told me her troubles. I never listened to anything so dreadful; I came away frozen with horror, not knowing whether she drank from a liking for it, or to drown the sense of her misery. I therefore refused Madame Saint-Clair. You could not imagine the filth, the hole, the frightful disorder in which that woman lives. It surpasses her ugliness. That is the chief episode of my week.

In the desert of her life that woman has clung to my work as to a fruitful palm-tree, but it will be to her unfruitful, and I have no money with which to succour her. Yesterday, however, I went by chance into the rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg, where there is an English pastry-cook who makes the most delicious oyster-patties; I had an English lady on my arm. Whom did I find there? My Patrickson at table, eating and drinking. Certainly I am neither a monk nor a ninny, and I comprehend that the more unhappy one is the more compensations are sought, and it is lucky indeed to find them at a pastry-cook’s. But the lady who was with me said she was sure that this unfortunate woman drank gin, for she had all the characteristics of a person who drank gin. I had said nothing to her about my miss of the translations. But whether she drinks gin or not, she is none the less in the greatest poverty. It remains to be discovered whether she is in poverty because she drinks gin, or whether she drinks gin because she is miserable. As for me, the misery of others wrings my heart. I never condemn the unfortunate. I am stoical under my own misfortunes; I would give my bread while dying of hunger. That has happened to me several times, and those I served never returned it to me. Example: Jules Sandeau, who for two months never came to see me, and would not if I were dying. Well, though I know that, I don’t acquire experience. If I marry, my wife must rule my property and interpose between me and the whole world, or I shall exhaust the treasures of Aladdin on others. Happily, I have nothing. When I do have something, I shall have to make myself fictitiously avaricious.

I have taken my mother to Poissy, to a very agreeable pension. I took her by the railroad, by which one goes very fast. My heart bled in taking her there; I, who have dreamed of making her a comfortable end of life with a fine fortune, and who advance so little that my poverty is becoming, as I told you, burlesque. It has taken more diplomacy to get wood to burn this month than it would take to negotiate a treaty of peace between France and any power you please ten years hence. And the comedy gets on but slowly; it is like my portrait, which I was told yesterday had arrived, but the despatching agent did not know in what town! I hope it is Brody. God grant the same may not happen to my comedy! What I perceive most at this moment is the immense judgment that is needed for the poet of comedy. Every word must be a verdict pronounced on the manners and morals of an epoch. The subjects chosen must not be thin or paltry. The poet must go to the bottom of things; he must steadily embrace the whole social state and judge it under a pleasing form. There are a thousand things to say, but only the good things must be said. This work confounds me. I need not say that in saying this I am considering works of genius; for as to the thirty thousand plays given to us in the last forty years, nothing would be easier to write. I am absorbed by this comedy; I think of nothing else, and each thought extends the difficulties. It is not only the doing of it, there is also the representing of it, and it may fail. I am in despair at not having gone to Wierzchownia and shut myself up this winter to keep to this work in your cenobitic life. I should have done like Beaumarchais, who ran to read his comedy, scene by scene, to women, and rewrote it by their advice.

I am now at a moment of extreme depression. Coffee does nothing for me; it does not bring to the surface the inner man, who stays in his prison of flesh and bones. My sister is ill, and when Laure is ill the universe seems to me topsy-turvy. My sister is all to me in my poor existence. I am not working with facility. I do not believe in what they call my talent. I spend nights in despairing.

“La Maison Nucingen” is there in proofs before me, and I cannot touch it; yet it is the last link in my chain, and with three days’ work I should break it. The brain will not stir. I have taken two cups of clear coffee; it is just as if I had drunk water. I am going to try a change of place and go to Berry, to Madame Carraud, who has been expecting me these two years; every three months I have said that I am going to see her. My little house will not be ready till December; the workmen will be in it until my return.

To crown all troubles, no letters from you. You might write to me every week, but you scarcely write every fortnight. You have much more time than I have, in your steppe, where there are neither symphonies of Beethoven, asphalt boulevards, operas, newspapers, books to write, proofs to correct, nor other miseries, and where you have a forest of a hundred thousand acres. Dieu! if you had that near Paris you would have an income of two millions, and your forest would be worth fifty millions. All is in juxtaposition; I am here, and you are there.

November 12

Reparation to the poor miss. She drinks nothing but water; it was my unexpected visit that intoxicated her. I retract all I wrote to you, and leave it for my punishment; but you will not think me the worse or the better for it.

I am about to start for Marseille, to go to Corsica and from there to Sardinia. I shall try to be back the first week in December. It is an affair of fortune of the highest importance that takes me there, and I can only tell you about it if it fails; for if it succeeds I must whisper it into the tube of your ear. It is now three weeks since I began to think of this journey; but the money for it lacks and I do not know where to find it. I need about twelve hundred francs to go and get a “yes” or a “no” about a fortune, a rapid fortune, to be made in a few months.1

Addio, cara. Here are three letters that I have written you against your one. I have never seen Provence or Marseille, and I promise myself a little diversion on this trip. I shall go by the mail-cart to the sea; the rest of the way by steamboat; so that I hope to have finished my errand in fifteen days, for no one must perceive my absence. My publishers would grumble.

The tontine is withdrawn; my works will appear purely and simply in parts, with steel engravings inserted in the text. So we fall back once more into the rut of publications such as have been made for the last hundred years in France.

November 13.

My comedy has begotten a preliminary. It is impossible to make “Prudhomme parvenu” without first showing “Prudhomme se mariant;” all the more because “Le Mariage de Prudhomme” is excellent comedy and full of comic situations. So here I am, with eight acts on my hands instead of five.

November 14.

Adieu; I must throw myself into unexpected labour which may give me an arachnitis. I am offered twenty thousand francs for “César Birotteau” by December 10. It is one volume and a half to do, but my poverty has made me promise it. I must work twenty-five nights and twenty-five days. So, to you all tender things. I must rush to Sèvres and find the manuscript already begun and the proofs of the work. There are only nine feuilles done, and forty-six are needed; thirty-five to do. There’s not a minute to be lost. Adieu, I must be twenty-five days without writing to you.

Paris, December 20, 1837.

I have just finished, as I promised to do, and I wrote you hastily in my last letter I should do, “César Birotteau.” I had to do at the same time “La Maison Nucingen” for the “Presse.” That is enough to tell you that I am worn-out, in a state of inexpressible annihilation. It requires a certain effort to write to you, and I do it under the inspiration of horrible fears and anxieties. I have heard nothing from you since your number 34, dated October 6. You have never left me so long without news of you, and you could scarcely believe how, in the midst of my work, this silence has alarmed me, for I know it is not without some reason that you have failed to write to me.

To-day I can only write in haste, to tell you that I am not dead with fatigue or inflammation of the brain; that “César Birotteau” and the third dizain are both out; that “La Maison Nucingen,” finished a month ago, will soon appear; that I am about to finish “Massimilla Doni;” that the edition called “Balzac Illustrated” will appear, and will be an astounding thing in typography and engraving; that for twenty-five days I have only slept a few hours; that I have been within an ace of apoplexy; that I shall never again undertake such a feat of strength; that my cot at Sèvres is nearly built; and that you can now always address your letters to “Madame Veuve Durand, 13 rue des Batailles,” because I am still obliged to stay there to finish certain pressing works which need constant communication between the printing-office and me. My house will not be ready till February 15 at the earliest.

My portrait makes my head swim. I don’t know precisely where it is. In any case, write to M. Halperine, who ought to have it, or could reclaim it on the road between Strasburg and Brody. M. Hanski may not know that the Rothschilds do not do business with the Halperines, and their couriers do not take charge of such large packages.

I have no interesting news to give you, for I have not left my study and proofs since my last letter. Heine came to see me and told me all about the L... affair. It goes beyond anything I had imagined, as much for the illness as for the family details. The English lords are infamous. Koreff and Wolowski are demigods; I do not think a million could pay them. We will talk of this later in the chimney-corner.

Perhaps you have been away; perhaps you have left Wierzchownia to nurse your sister. My imagination rushes through all the possibilities in the circumference of suppositions till it reaches the absurd. What has happened to you? I see no case in which you would leave me without one word from you or another. Adieu. Find here the expression of an old and tried friendship and the effusions of an affection that resembles no other. I cannot write more, for I am in such a state of exhaustion that nothing can better prove my attachment than this very letter. Nevertheless, I must, in a few days, resume my yoke of misery. Then I can write to you more at length and tell you all that I keep in my heart.

Remember me to all of yours, and beg M. Hanski to claim the portrait from the Halperines, so that they in turn may inquire for it all along the line. I have been to see the shippers here, and I shall sue them if you do not get the picture within a fortnight. Therefore, answer me by a line on this subject.

Your devoted

Noré.

Notes

1 Madame Hanska’s miniature by Daffinger, a copy of which she had sent him.

1 Palazzo Contarini-Fasān.—TR.

1 See Memoir, pp. 231, 232, 329.—TR.

1 For a fuller understanding of this, I refer the reader to his sister’s account of his pecuniary trials, and to a brief statement of the then existing system of literary payments, which will be found in my “Memoir of Balzac,” pp. 70, 71, 81, 89, 90, 158-160. It is possible that had Balzac been another man he might have rid himself of his incubus of debt—though it is difficult to say how a young man owing 100,000 francs and 6 per cent interest on them, without one penny to pay either debt or interest, could have done so. But the question here is: Could the man whose business it was to know men live apart from their lives, a beggar in a garret? Can the genius whose mission it was to grasp the whole of human society be judged in his business methods like a city banker? Edmond Werdet, the publisher, who said he suffered through his publication of Balzac’s works, and who, nine years after his death, wrote a book upon him partly for revenge (“Portrait intime de Balzac, sa vie, son humeur, et son caractère.” 1 vol., Paris, 1859), brought no charge against him of want of probity, or of failure to keep his money engagements. On the contrary, he says in one place: “He was an honest man; an honest man in debt, not a business man in debt, as M. Taine has said of him.” In another place he says: “Balzac had his absurdities if you will, but he was exempt from vices.”—TR.

1 For the amusing history of this chimera, see his sister’s account of it; “Memoir of Balzac,” pp. 103-107.—TR.