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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
banker on whom I can count; in Genoa also. Therefore, you must
not be surprised at the great delay of this letter. After leaving
Corsica, I shall probably have neither time nor facilities for writing;
but the letter is all ready, and I shall pay the postage when I can.
The Mediterranean has been very bad; there are merchants here
who think their ships are lost. To risk as little as possible, I took the
land route from Marseille to Toulon, and the steamboat that carries
despatches from Toulon here. Nevertheless, I suffered terribly, and
spent much money. I think, however, that the sea route to Odessa
would be the safest, most direct, and least costly way of going to
you. From Marseille to Odessa by sea it is only four hundred francs.
From Odessa to Berditchef it ought not to cost much, especially if
you came to Kiew to meet me. You see that wherever I go I think of
your dear Wierzchownia.
Corsica is one of the most beautiful countries in the world; there are
mountains as in Switzerland, but no lakes. France is not making the
most of this fine country. It is as large as ten of our departments,
but does not yield as much as one of them; it ought to have five
million of inhabitants, but there are barely three hundred thousand.
We are beginning to make roads and clear forests which will yield
immense wealth, like the soil, which is now completely neglected.
There may be the finest mines in the world of marble, coal, and
metals, etc.; but no one has studied the country, on account of
bandits and the savage state in which it is left.
In the midst of my maritime sufferings on the steamboat I
bethought me of the indiscretion I committed in asking you to get
me a hookah from Moscow, in my passionate ardour for the latakia
which I smoked at George Sand's, and which Lamartine had brought
her. I was so spasmodically unhappy about it that I laugh now as I
remember my sickness. I am sorry I could not get a hookah in Paris;
it would have wiled away my time here and dispelled the ennui
which, for the first time in my life, has laid hold upon me; this is the
first time that I have known what a desert with semi-savages upon it
is.
This morning I have learned that there is a library here, and to-
morrow, at ten o'clock, I can go there to read. What? That is an
anxious question. There are in this place neither reading-rooms, nor
women, nor popular theatres, nor society, nor newspapers, nor any
of the impurities that proclaim civilization. The women do not like
foreigners; the men walk about the whole day, smoking. The
laziness is incredible. There are eight thousand souls, much poverty,
and extreme ignorance of the simplest current events. I enjoy a
complete incognito. No one knows what literature or social life is.
The men wear velveteen jackets; there is so much simplicity in
clothing that I, who have dressed myself to seem poor, look like a
rich man. There is a French battalion here, and you should see the
poor officers, idling in the streets from morning till night. There is
nothing to do! I shall now begin to sketch scenes and lay out
projects. I must work with fury. How people must love on this desert
rock! and truly the place swarms with children, like gnats of a
summer's evening.
Adieu for to-day. I was only eighteen hours at Marseille and ten at
Toulon, and so could not write to you until to-day.

Ajaccio, April 1.
I leave to-morrow for Sardinia in a little row-boat. I have just re-read
what I wrote to you, and I see I did not finish about the hookah.
You understand that if it gives you the least trouble you are to drop
my commission. As for the latakia, I have just discovered (laugh at
me for a whole year) that Latakia is a village of the island of Cyprus,
a stone's throw from here, where a superior tobacco is made, named
from the place, and that I can get it here. So mark out that item.
I have just seen a poor French soldier who lost both hands by a
cannon-ball, and has nothing but stumps; he earns his living by
writing, beating a drum, playing the violin, playing at cards, and
shaving in the streets. If I had not seen it I never should believe it.
The Ajaccio library has nothing. I have re-read "Clarissa Harlowe,"
and read for the first time "Pamela" and "Sir Charles Grandison,"
which I found horribly dull and stupid. What a fate for Cervantes and
Richardson to have been able to do but one work! The same might
be said of Sterne.
I have had the misfortune to be recognized by a cursed law-student
of Paris, just returned to make himself a lawyer in his own land. He
had seen me in Paris. Hence an article in a Corsican paper. And I,
who wanted to keep my journey as secret as possible! Alas, alas!
What a bore! Is there no way for me to do either good or evil
without publicity? This is the eighth day of my placid life. But Ajaccio
is like one household.
I have had a great escape. If I had not taken the route I did take,
and had come direct from Marseille, I should have encountered a
dreadful tempest which wrecked three ships on the coast.

Ajaccio, April 2.
This evening, at ten o'clock, a little boat will carry me away; then I
have five days' quarantine at Alghiero, a little harbour you may see
on the map of Sardinia. It is there, between Alghiero and Sassari,
that the district of Argentara lies, and it is there that I am going to
see mines, abandoned at the time of the discovery of America. I
cannot tell you more than that.
When this letter is in your possession in that pretty room at beautiful
Wierzchownia, I shall be either a fool or a man of wisdom; perhaps
neither the one nor the other, simply an ambitious heart defeated in
an ingenious hope.
Addio, cara; I hope that all goes well at Wierzchownia, that you have
wept a little over "César Birotteau," that you have written me your
feelings and impressions about that book, and that I shall thus be
rewarded for it in this world. All caressing things to those you love. I
have again put off writing to M. Hanski, because I shall do so at
Milan after receiving certain news. But give him my regards, and
keep for yourself the most attaching and coquettish, which are your
due.

Off Alghiero, Sardinia, April 8.

I am here, after five days of rather lucky navigation in a coral-boat
on its way to Africa. But I now know the privations of sailors; we had
nothing to eat but the fish we caught, which they boiled into
execrable soup. I had to sleep on deck and be devoured by fleas,
which abound, they say, in Sardinia. And finally, although here, we
are condemned to remain five days in quarantine on this little boat,
in view of port, and those savages will give us nothing. We have just
gone through a frightful tempest; they would not let us fasten a
cable to a ring on the quay; but, as we are Frenchmen, one sailor
jumped into the water and fastened it himself by force. The
governor came down and ordered the cable loosed as soon as the
sea calmed down; which, under their system of contagion, was
absurd; because we had already given the cholera or we had not
given it. It was a pure notion of the governor, who wants things
done as he says. Africa begins here; I see a ragged population,
almost naked, brown as Ethiopians.

Cagliari, April 17.

I have just crossed the whole of Sardinia and seen things such as
they relate of the Hurons and about Polynesia. A desert kingdom,
real savages, no husbandry; long stretches of palm-trees and cactus;
goats everywhere browsing on the undergrowth and keeping it down
to the level of the waist. I have been seventeen and eighteen hours
on horseback—I who have not mounted a horse these four years—
without seeing a single dwelling. I came through a virgin forest,
lying on the neck of my horse in fear of my life; for I had to ride
down water-courses arched over with branches and climbing plants
which threatened to put out my eyes, break my teeth or wrench off
my head. Gigantic oaks, cork-trees, laurel, and heather thirty feet
high,—nothing to eat.
No sooner did I reach the end of my expedition than I had to think
of returning; so, without taking any rest, I started on horseback
from Alghiero to Sassari, the second capital of the island, from which
a diligence, lately established, was to bring me here, where there is,
in port, a steamboat for Genoa. But, as the weather is bad here I
must stay for two days.
From Sassari to Cagliari I came through the whole of Sardinia,
through the middle of it. It is alike everywhere. There is one district
where the inhabitants make a horrible bread by pounding acorns of
the live-oak to flour and mixing it with clay, and this within sight of
beautiful Italy! Men and women go naked with a strip of linen, a
tattered rag, to cover their nudity. I saw masses of human beings
trooped in the sun along the walls of their hovels, for Easter-day. No
habitation has a chimney; they make their fires in the middle of the
huts, which are draped with soot. The women spend their days in
pounding the acorns and kneading the bread; the men tend the
goats and the cattle; the soil is untilled in this, the most fertile spot
on earth! In the midst of this utter and incurable misery there are
villages which have costumes of amazing richness.

Genoa, April 22.

Now I can tell you the object of my journey. I have been both right
and wrong. Last year, at this time, in Genoa, a merchant told me
that the careless neglect of Sardinia was so great that there were, in
a certain locality, disused silver mines with mountains of scoriæ
containing refuse lead from which the silver had been taken. At
once, I told him to send me specimens of these scoriæ to Paris, and
that after assaying them I would return and get a permit in Turin to
work those mines with him. A year passed, and the man sent me
nothing.
Here is my reasoning: The Romans and the metallurgists of the
middle ages were so ignorant of docimasy that these scoriæ must,
necessarily, still contain a great amount of silver. Now, a friend of
Borget, a great chemist, possesses a secret by which to extract gold
and silver in whatever way and in whatever proportion they are
mixed with other material, at no great cost. By this means I could
get all the silver from these scoriæ.
While I was waiting and expecting the specimens, my Genoese
merchant obtained for himself the right to work the mine; and, while
I was inventing my ingenious deduction, a Marseille firm went to
Cagliari, assayed the lead and the scoriæ, and petitioned, in rivalry
with the Genoese, for a permit in Turin. An assayer from Marseille,
who was taken to the spot, found that the scoriæ gave ten per cent
of lead, and the lead ten per cent of silver by the ordinary methods.
So my conjectures were well-founded; but I had the misfortune not
to act promptly enough. On the other hand, misled by local
information, I rode to the Argentara, another abandoned mine,
situated in the wildest part of the island, and I brought away
specimens of mineral. Perhaps chance may serve me better than the
reasonings of intellect.
I am detained here by the refusal of the Austrian consul to viser my
passport for Milan, where I must go before returning to Paris, to get
some money. I will send you my letter from there, which is in the
Austrian dominions, and time will be saved in its going to Brody.
I thought I should only be a month on this trip, and I shall have
been from forty-five to fifty days. I do not surfer less in my affairs
than in my habits by such a break. It is now fifty days since I had
news of you! And my poor house which is building! Grant it be
finished, and that I may be able to regain time lost. I must do three
works at once without unharnessing.
Adieu, cara. If you have seen Genoa you know how dull the life is
here. I shall go to work on my comedy. Do not scold me too much
when you answer this letter about my journey, for the vanquished
should be consoled. I have thought often of you during my
adventurous trip; and I imagined that M. Hanski was saying more
than once, "What the devil is he doing in that galley?"
À propos, the statue from Milan has been received in Paris
[Puttinati's statue], and is thought bad; so I shall not insist on
sending you a copy; you have enough of me on Boulanger's canvas.

Milan, May 20, 1838.

Dear countess, you know all that this date says [his birthday]. I
begin the year at the end of which I shall belong to the great and
numerous regiment of resigned souls; for I swore to myself in the
days of misfortune, struggle, and faith which made my youth so
wretched, that I would struggle no longer against anything when I
reached the age of forty. That terrible year begins to-day,—far from
you, far from my own people, in a mortal sadness which nothing
alleviates, for I cannot change my fate myself, and I no longer
believe in fortunate accidents. My philosophy will be the child of
lassitude, not of despair.
I came here to find an opportunity to get back to France, and I have
remained to do a work, the inspiration for which has come to me
here after I had vainly implored it for some years. I have never read
a book in which happy love is pictured. Rousseau is too impregnated
with rhetoric; Richardson is too much of a reasoner; the poets are
too flowery; the romance-writers are too slavish to facts; and
Petrarch too busy with his images, his concetti; he sees poesy better
than he sees woman. Pope has given too many regrets to Héloïse.
None have described the unreasoning jealousies, the senseless
fears, or the sublimity of the gift of self. It may be that God, who
created love with humanity, alone understands it, for none of his
creatures have, as I think, rendered the elegies, imaginations, and
poesies of that divine passion, which every one talks of and so few
have known.
I want to end my youth—not my earliest youth—by a work outside
of all my other work, by a book apart, which shall remain in all
hands, on all tables, ardent and innocent, containing a sin that there
may be a return, passionate, earthly and religious, full of
consolations, full of tears and joys; and I wish this book to be
without a name, like the "Imitation of Jesus Christ." I would I could
write it here. But I must return to France, to Paris, re-enter my shop
of vendor of phrases, and between now and then I can only sketch
it.
Since I wrote you nothing new has happened. I have seen once
more the Duomo of Milan, and I have made the tour of the Corso.
But I have nothing to say of all that which you do not know already.
I have made acquaintance with the Chimæras of the grand
chandelier on the altar of the Virgin, which I had seen superficially;
with Saint Bartholomew holding his skin as a mantle; with certain
delightful angels sustaining the circle of the choir; and that is all. I
have heard, at the Scala, the Boccabadati in "Zelmira." But I go
nowhere; the Countess Bossi came bravely up to me in the street
and reminded me of our dear evening at the Sismondis'. She was
not recognizable. The change in her forced me to a terrible
examination of myself.
It is now two months that I have had no news of you. My letters
remain in Paris; no one writes to me because I have been wandering
in lands where there are no mails. Nothing has better proved to me
that I am an animal living by caresses and affection, neither more
nor less like a dog. Skin-deep friendships do not suit me; they weary
me; they make me feel more vividly what treasures are inclosed in
the hearts where I lodge. I am not a Frenchman, in the frivolous
acceptation of that term.
The inn became intolerable to me, and I am, by the kindness of
Prince Porcia, in a little chamber of his house, overlooking gardens,
where I work much at my ease, as with a friend who is all kindness
for me. Alphonso-Serafino, Principe di Porcia, is a man of my own
age, the lover of a Countess Bolognini, more in love this year than
he was last year, unwilling to marry unless he can marry the
countess, who has a husband from whom she is separated a mensâ
et thero. You see they are happy. The countess is very witty. The
prince's sister is the Countess San-Severino, about whom I think I
have already told you.
Milan is all excitement about the coronation of the emperor as King
of Lombardy; the house of Austria has to spend itself in costs and
fireworks. Though I have seen Florence only through the crevice of a
half-week, I prefer Florence to Milan as a residence. If I had the
happiness to be so loved by a woman that she would give me her
life, it would be upon the banks of the Arno that I should go and
spend my life. But after all, in spite of the romances of my friend
George Sand, and my own, it is very rare to meet with a Prince
Porcia who has enough fortune to live where he likes. I am poor, and
I have wants. I must work like a galley-slave. I cannot say to
Arabella d'Agoult (see the "Lettres d'un Voyageur"), "Come to
Vienna, and three concerts will give us ten thousand francs; let us
go to Saint-Petersburg, and the ivory keys of my piano will buy us a
palace." I need that insulting Paris, its publishers, its printing-offices,
twelve hours' stupefying work a day. I have debts, and debt is a
countess who loves me too tenderly. I cannot send her away; she
puts herself obstinately betwixt peace, love, idleness, and me. It is
too hideous, that fate, to cast upon any one, even my enemies.
There is only one woman in the world from whom I could accept
anything, because I am sure of loving her all my life; but if she did
not love me thus, I should kill myself in thinking of the part I had
played.
You see I must, within a few months, take refuge in the life of La
Fontaine. Whichever side I turn I see only difficulties, toil, and vain
and useless hope. I have not even the resource of two years at
Diodati on the Lake of Geneva, for I am now too hardened in work
to die of it. I am like a bird in its cage, which has struck against all
its bars, and now sits motionless on its perch, above which a white
hand stretches the green net that protects it from breaking its head.
You would never believe what gloomy meditations this happy life of
Porcia's costs me; he lives upon the Corso, ten doors from the
Bolognini. But I am thirty-nine to-day, with one hundred and fifty
thousand francs of debt upon me; Belgium has the million I have
earned, and——I have not the courage to go on, for I perceive that
the sadness which consumes me would be cruel upon paper, and I
owe to friendship the grace of keeping it in my heart.
To-morrow, after writing a few letters for my lovers, I shall be gayer,
and I will come to you with a virtue that shall make a saint despair.

May 23.
Cara, I have home-sickness! France and its sky—gray for most of the
time—wrings my heart beneath this pure blue sky of Milan. The
Duomo, decked with its laces, does not lift my soul from
indifference; the Alps say nothing to me. This soft, relaxing air
fatigues me; I go and come without soul, without life, without power
to say what the matter is; and if I stay thus for two weeks longer, I
shall be dead. To explain is impossible. The bread I eat has no
savour; meat does not nourish me, water can scarcely slake my
thirst; this air dissolves me. I look at the handsomest woman in the
world as if she were a monster, and I do not even have that
common sensation that the sight of a flower gives. My work is
abandoned. I shall recross the Alps, and I hope in a week to be in
the midst of my own dear hell. What a horrible malady is nostalgia!
It is indescribable. I am happy only at the moment when I write to
you, and say to myself that this paper will go from Milan to
Wierzchownia; then only does thought break through this black
existence beneath the sun, this atony which relaxes every fibre of
the life. That is the only operative force which maintains the union of
soul and body.

May 24.
I have again seen the Countess Bossi; and I am struck with the few
resources of Italian women. They have neither mind nor education;
they scarcely understand what is said to them. In this country
criticism does not exist, and I begin to think that the saying is right
which attributes to Italian women something too material in love.
The only intelligent and educated woman I have met in Italy is La
Cortanza of Turin.
I have been to see the Luini frescos at Saronno; they are worthy of
their reputation. The one that represents the Marriage of the Virgin
is of peculiar sweetness. The faces are angelical, and, what is rare in
frescos, the tones are soft and harmonious.
There is no present opportunity to return to France. I must resolve
to take the wearisome and fatiguing means of the Sardinian and
French mail-carts.

June 1, 1838.
My departure is fixed for to-morrow, errors excepted, and I think
that never shall I have seen France again with such pleasure, though
my affairs must be greatly tangled by this too long absence. If I am
six days on the road that will make three months, and, in all, it has
been seven months of inaction. I need eight consecutive months of
work to repair this damage. I shall enter my new little house to
spend many nights in working.

June 5.
I have just been to the post-office to see if any one had had the idea
to write to me poste restante. There I found a letter from the kind
Countess Loulou [Louise Turheim], who loves you and whom you
love, and in whose letter your name is mentioned in a melancholy
sentence which drew tears from my eyes; for, in the species of
nostalgia under which I am, imagine what it was to me to recall the
Landstrasse and the Gemeindegasse! I sat down on a bench before
a café and stayed there for nearly an hour, with my eyes fixed on the
Duomo, fascinated by all that letter recalled; and the incidents of my
stay in Vienna passed before me, one by one, in their truth, their
marble candour. Ah! what do I not owe—not to her who causes such
memories, but—to this frail paper that awakens them! You must
remember that I am without news of you for three months, by my
own fault. You know why. But you will never know whence this thirst
for making a fortune comes to me.
I am going to write to the good chanoinesse without telling her all
she has done by her letter, for such things are difficult to express,
even to that kind German woman. But she spoke of you with such
soul that I can tell her that what in her is friendship in me is worship
that can never end. She says so prettily that one of my friends—not
the veritable one, but the other—is in Venice; truly, she moved me
to tears. What perpetual grief to be always so near you in thought
and so distant in reality! Ah, dear, the Duomo was very sublime to
me on the 5th of June at eleven o'clock! I lived there a whole year.
Well, adieu. I leave to-morrow, and in ten days I shall answer all
your letters, treasures amassed during this dreadful journey. May
God guard you and yours, and forget not the poor exile who loves
you well.

Aux Jardies, Sèvres, July 26, 1838.

I receive to-day your number 44, and I answer it, together with the
three letters I found awaiting me in the rue des Batailles a month
ago.
In the first place, dear, you must know that the "Veuve Durand" no
longer exists. The poor woman was killed by the little journals which
pushed their baseness towards me so far as to betray a secret which
to any men of honour would have been sacred. So now I am
established for always at Sèvres, and my hovel is called "Les
Jardies;" therefore my address now is and long will be: "M. de
Balzac, aux Jardies, à Sèvres."
You predicted truly in your last letter; I ought to pass a month here
doing nothing but turning round and round to settle myself upon my
muck-heap. I am still in the midst of plasterers, masons, diggers,
painters, and other workmen. I arrived quite full of that book which
does not exist, which has never been done, and which I desire to do,
and I found the most foolish mercantile hindrances; the two volumes
of "La Femme Supérieure," taken from the "Presse," lack a few
pages before they can be sold as a book, which I must fill out by
adding the beginning of "La Torpille." I found the contractor for my
house at bay; I found the hounds of my debts awaiting me, with
annoyances of all kinds. I have enough to do for a month in goings
and comings, etc. I took a week to rest; my journey back was very
fatiguing; I risked an ophthalmia on the Mont Cenis; having left the
great heat of Lombardy, I came, in a few hours, into twenty degrees
below freezing on the summit of the Alps, with snow and wind.

August 7.
Fifteen days' interruption, during which this letter has been
constantly under my eyes, on my table, without my being able to tell
you that the wind on the Mont Cenis drove a fine dust into my eyes,
which pricked them with blinding particles. I know that my letters,
which tell you my life, give you as much pleasure as yours give me.
Only, your words sustain and refresh me; whereas mine
communicate to you my vertigoes, my worries, my disappointments,
my lassitudes, my terrors, my toils. Your existence is calm, gentle,
and religious; it rolls slowly along, like a stream on its gravelly bed
between two verdant shores. Mine is a torrent, all noise and rocks. I
am ashamed of the exchange, in which I bring you only troubles,
and obtain from you the treasures of peace. You are patient; I am in
revolt. You have not understood the last cry I uttered, at Milan. I
had, there, a double nostalgia, and I had not, against the more
dreadful of the two, the resource, horrible as it is, of my struggles
here. Here, moral and physical combat, debts, and literature have
something exciting, bewildering. See it yourself; I am interrupted in
a sentence in the middle of the night, and I cannot resume that
sentence for perhaps two weeks.
I have a world of things to tell you. In the first place, remove from
your tranquil life a trouble like that of procuring my hookah. Just
fancy! all that came of my ignorance! I thought you lived near
Moscow, and that Moscow was the principal market for such things.
That was all,—except that I wanted to receive from you an article
which is, they say, a chasse-chagrin. But if it causes you the slightest
trouble it will be painful to me to see it.
Among the thousand and one things that I have had to do I must
put in the front line a negotiation about the "Mariage de Joseph
Prudhomme," with a theatre that agrees to give me twenty thousand
francs on the day the play is read; and you can imagine what thirst a
man has for twenty thousand francs when he is building a house,
and how he must work to obtain them!
I am, therefore, in spite of the doctor's orders forbidding me to live
in freshly plastered rooms, at Les Jardies. My house is situated on
the slope of the mountain, or hill, of Saint-Cloud, half-way up,
backing on the king's park and looking south. To the west I see the
whole of Ville d'Avray; to the south I look down upon the road to
Ville d'Avray, which passes along the foot of the hills where the
woods of Versailles begin; and easterly I overlook Sèvres and rest
my eyes upon a vast horizon where lies Paris, its smoky atmosphere
blurring the edges of the famous slopes of Meudon and Bellevue;
beyond which I see the plains of Montrouge and the Orléans
highroad which leads to Tours. It is all strangely magnificent, with
ravishing contrasts. The depths of the valley of Ville d'Avray have all
the freshness, shade, and verdure of the Swiss valleys, adorned with
charming buildings. The horizon on the other side shines on its
distant lines like the open sea. Woods and forests everywhere. To
the north is the royal residence. At the end of my property is the
station of the railway from Paris to Versailles, the embankment of
which runs through the valley of Ville d'Avray without injury to any
part of my view.
So, for ten sous and in ten minutes I can go from Les Jardies to the
Madeleine in the heart of Paris! Whereas at Chaillot, and in the rue
Cassini it took an hour and forty sous at least. Therefore, thanks to
that circumstance, Les Jardies will never be a folly, and its value will
be some day doubled. I have about one acre of land, ending,
towards the south, in a terrace of one hundred and fifty feet and
surrounded by walls. At present nothing is planted in it, but this
autumn I shall make this little corner of the earth an Eden of plants
and shrubs and fragrance. In Paris or its environs anything can be
had for money; so, I shall get magnolias twenty years old, tiyeuilles
of sixteen, poplars of twelve years, birches, etc., transplanted with
balls of roots, and white Chasselas grapes, brought in boxes, that I
may gather them next year. Oh! how admirable civilization is! To-day
my land is bare as my hand. In the month of May it will be
surprising. I must buy two more acres of ground about me, to have
a vegetable garden and fruit, etc. That will cost some thirty
thousand francs, and I shall try to earn them this winter.
The house is a parrot's perch; there is one room on each floor, and
there are three floors. On the ground-floor a dining-room and salon;
on the first floor a bedroom and dressing-room; on the second floor
a study, where I am writing to you at this moment in the middle of
the night. The whole is flanked by a staircase that somewhat
resembles a ladder. All round the building is a covered gallery to
walk in, which rises to the first floor. It is supported on brick
pilasters. This little pavilion, Italian in appearance, is painted brick-
colour, with stone courses at the four corners, and the appendix in
which is the well of the staircase is painted red also. There is room
in it only for me.
Sixty feet in the rear, towards the park of Saint-Cloud, are the
offices, composed, on the ground-floor, of a kitchen, scullery, pantry,
stable, coach-house, and harness-room, bath-room, woodhouse, etc.
Above is a large apartment which I can let if I choose, and above
that again are servants' rooms and a room for a friend, [He says
elsewhere that this building was the peasant's house, bought with
the land.] I have a supply of water equal to the famous Ville d'Avray
water, for it comes from the same source. There is no furniture here
as yet; but all that I own in Paris will be brought here, little by little.
I have, just now, my mother's old cook and her husband to serve
me. But for at least a month longer I shall live in the midst of
masons, painters and other workmen; and I am working, or am
going to work to pay them. When the interior is finished I will
describe it to you.[1]
I shall stay here until my fortune is made; and I am already so
pleased with it that after I have obtained the capital of my
tranquillity I believe that I shall end my days here in peace, bidding
farewell, without flourish of trumpets, to my hopes, my ambitions—
to all! The life that you lead, that life of country solitude, has always
had great charms for me. I wanted more, because I had nothing at
all, and in making to one's self illusions it costs a young man no
more to make them grand. To-day my want of success in everything
has wearied my character—I do not say my heart, which will hope
ever. That I may have a horse, fruits in abundance, the material
costs of living secured, such is my place in the sunshine, obtained,
not paid for, but sketched out. I pay the interest on capital, instead
of paying rent. That is the change of front I have performed. I am in
my own home, instead of being in the house of an oppressive
landlord. My debt and my money anxieties remain the same; but my
courage has redoubled under the lessening of my desires.
To-morrow, cara, I will continue my chatter and send it to you this
week.
[1] See Théophile Gautier's description of that interior; "Memoir of Balzac," pp.
224, 225.—TR.

Wednesday, August 8.
There are many things in your last four letters to which I ought to
reply; but they are locked up in Paris, and before I can get them too
much time will have passed. I will answer in another letter, quickly
following this.
But among other things that struck me in them was the extreme
melancholy of your religious ideas. You write to me as if I believed in
nothing, as if you wished to send me to La Grande-Chartreuse, or as
if you meant to say to me, "Earth no longer interests me." You
cannot think how many inductions, possibly false, I draw from that
state of mind; but (and you tell me so with sincerity) you express to
me what you feel; otherwise you would be false and distrustful when
you should be all truth with a friend like me. Even if I displease you,
I must say to you with confidence that I am not satisfied, and I
would rather see you otherwise. To go thus to God is to renounce
the world; and I do not comprehend why you should renounce it
when you have so many ties that bind you to it, so many duties to
accomplish. None but feeble souls will take that course. The
reflections that I make on this subject are not of a nature to be
communicated to you. They are, moreover, very selfish, and concern
only me. Like those that I expressed in Milan, they would displease
you, because, as you say, they trouble you; and for those my heart
sinks down. I see clearly that happiness will never come to me; and
who would have no bitterness in thinking that thought? I was very
unhappy in my youth, but Madame de Berny balanced all by an
absolute devotion, which was understood to its full extent only when
the grave had seized its prey. Yes, I was spoilt by that angel; I prove
my gratitude by striving to perfect that which she sketched out in
me.
I meant to speak to you of new vexations; but I ought to be silent.
In one of my letters, I don't know which, there is a promise that I
made to us both not to speak to you again of my troubles, to write
to you only at the moments when all looked rosy, and to tell my
jeremiads to the passing clouds, going northward. When you see
them look gray they are telling them to you. How many black
confidences have I not smothered! There is many a corner that I
hide from you; and it is those corners that would amaze you could
you penetrate them and find—behind so many agitations,
preoccupations, toils, travels, "inward dissipations," as you say—a
fixed idea, daily more intense, which surely has little virtue since it
cannot remove mountains, that miracle promised to faith! Often,
friends have seen me turn pale at the loud cracking of a whip and
rush to the window. They ask me what the matter is; and I sit down,
palpitating, and saddened for days. Such fevers, such starts, shaken
by inward convulsions, break me, crush me. There are days when I
fancy that my fate is being decided, that something happy or
unhappy will occur to me, is preparing, and I not there! These are
the follies of poets, comprehended by them alone. There are days
when I take real life and all about me for a dream; so much is this
present life, for me, against nature. But now all that will cease amid
these fields, which always calm me.
Have I secured material existence, beneath which I would fain
compress the life of the heart that I see is lost and useless, in spite
of the ten good years that still remain to me?—for my passion has a
will of which you can form to yourself no idea. It must have all or
nothing. As to that, I am as I was on the day I left college. I am
much to be pitied, and I will not be pitied. I have never done
anything to disprove the absurd and silly lies of society which give
me the good graces of charming women, all of which are derived
from the coquetries of Madame de Castries and a few others. I have
accepted the accusation of self-conceit; I am willing that absurdity
on absurdity should accumulate about me to hide the true man, who
has but one sentiment, one ideal!
I am at this moment-engaged in doing a part of my book on love,
which will be detached; I want to paint well the soul of a young girl
before the invasion of that love (which will lead her into a convent),
and I have thought it true to make her abhor the Carmelites (to
whom she will eventually return) at the beginning of life, when she
longs for the world and its pleasures. As she has been eight years in
the convent, she arrives in Paris as much a stranger to it as
Montesquieu's Persian; and by the power of that idea I shall make
her judge and depict the modern Paris, instead of employing the
dramatic method of novels. That is a novel idea, and I am putting it
into execution.
Nevertheless, it is very difficult for me to resume my life of labour,
getting up at midnight and working till five in the afternoon. This is
the first morning that I have passed without dozing between six and
eight o'clock. Six months' interruption have made ravages; there are
forces that come from habit, and when habit is broken, farewell
forces. I hope to continue working for three or four months, in order
to repair the breaches caused by absence, and, if my plays succeed,
perhaps I shall have earned, over and above my debts, enough
capital for the bread and water on my table, and my flowers and
fruit. The rest may come, perhaps, hereafter.
Addio, cara; I could not tell you how my comic-opera house, that
cottage they push forward on the stage and where lovers give
themselves a rendezvous, has awakened the housekeeping and
bourgeois instincts in me. One could be so happy here! All the
advantages of Paris, and none of its disadvantages! I am here as at
Saché, with the possibility of being in Paris in fifteen minutes—just
time enough to reflect on what one is going to do there.
Mon Dieu! have you read in the "Lettres d'un Voyageur" the part
about Moulin-Joli? the engraving of which I saw in her house without
then knowing the terrible passage to which it gave rise, terrible to ill-
mated beings. Well, Les Jardies are Moulin-Joli without the woman
who engraves. If you do not know this history, read it. George Sand
never related anything as well.
I send you many caressing homages and all those flowers of the
soul which are so exactly the same that I fear they bore you. Many
kind remembrances to those about you. I cannot send you an
autograph, unfortunately; I had one of Manzoni for you, but they
have just lit my fire with it! This is the second time something
precious has been burned up here.
The newspapers have told you of the deplorable end of the poor
Duchesse d'Abrantès. She has ended like the Empire. Some day I will
explain her to you,—some good evening at Wierzchownia.
I can now reply to your bucolics on your beautiful flowers and turf
by idyls on my own; but alas! there's a difference in quantity. You
have a thousand acres, and I have a thousand square feet!
All affectionate and good things. Do not neglect to tell me about
your health, your beauty, your incidents in the depths of the
Ukraine; you will do so if you form the least idea of the value I
attach to the most minute particular.

Aux Jardies, September 17, 1838.

Since I last wrote I have done nothing but work desperately; for one
must conquer during the last years, or bury one's self under a barren
success.
I have just written for the "Presse" the beginning of "La Torpille,"
and the "Presse" would not have it. I have written the beginning of
"Le Curé de Village," the religious pendant of the philosophical book
you know as "Le Médecin de campagne." I have written the preface
to two volumes about to be published, containing "La Femme
Supérieure," "La Maison Nucingen," and "La Torpille." I have written
two volumes in 8vo, entitled, "Qui Terre a, Guerre a;" and finally, I
have written for the "Constitutionnel" the end of "Le Cabinet des
Antiques," under the title of "Les Rivalités de Province."
You will understand from that, cara, that I have been unable to write
you even two lines in the midst of this avalanche of ideas and labour.
Nothing of all that gives me a sou. I had prepared, to save me,
certain dramas, and they are all begun; but I wish to go to the
grand, and I am discontented; so much so that, seeing how ill I do
things while I see such fine things to do, I have abandoned my
attempts. And yet, my salvation is in the theatre. A success there
would give me a hundred thousand francs. Two successes would
clear me, and two successes are only matters of intelligence and toil,
—nothing else.
At the moment of present writing I have begun a drama in three
acts, entitled, "La Gina." It is Othello the other way. La Gina will be a
female Othello. The scene is in Venice. I must essay the stage.
Proposals are not lacking to me. I am offered in one direction twenty
thousand francs first payment for fifteen acts; and I have the fifteen
acts in my head, but not on paper.
Well, all the manuscripts are at the printing-office; proofs are rolling;
the printers will not beat me in rapidity, for it is not the mechanical
invention with its thousand arms that gets on fastest, it is the brain
of your poor friend!

September 18.
The time to turn the page, and I find "La Gina" too difficult. Reasons
have killed it. In "Othello" Iago is the pillar which supports the
conception; I have only a money motive, instead of the motive of
hidden love. I found my personage inadmissible. A vaudeville writer
would not have been stopped by that difficulty. So I return to a
former play, imagined some time ago, called "Richard Cœur-
d'Éponge." I will tell you about it if I do it.
My house does not get on. I have the walls of the enclosure still to
do, and much to the interior. It is alarming. I have found a source—
not of fortune! only clear water.

October 1.
I am into money matters up to my neck. It is demoralizing. I have
not had two hours to myself for reflection since I wrote you the
above few lines. Do not be vexed with me. I need calmer times to
relate to you a life like mine. I must say mass every second, and ring
it. I have had the hope of buying out my publishers, who are ruining
me, and I have just spent two weeks in Paris in crushing, killing
efforts. You must remember that I have no help or succour, but, on
the other hand, infinite obstacles, without number. If I cannot
overcome them I shall go to you for six months' rest at
Wierzchownia, where I can write my plays in peace before returning
here. Many persons whom I love and esteem advise this, telling me
to "go somewhere." But as for me, I cannot abandon a battlefield.
The two volumes containing "La Femme Supérieure," "La Maison
Nucingen," and "La Torpille" are out.

October 10.
For the last seven years or so, whenever I have read a book in which
Napoleon was mentioned, if I found any new and striking thought
said by him, I put it at once into a cook-book that never leaves my
desk and lies on that little book you know of, which will belong to
you—alas, soon, perhaps—in which I put my subjects and my first
ideas. In a day of distress (one of my recent days), being without
money, I looked to see how many of those thoughts there were. I
found five hundred; hence, the finest book of the century; I mean
the publication of the "Maximes et Pensées de Napoléon." I sold the
work to a former hosier, who is the big-wig of his arrondissement,
and wants the cross of the Legion of honour, which he can have by
dedicating this book to Louis-Philippe. It is about to appear. Get it.
You will have one of the finest things of the day; the soul, the
thought of that great man, gathered through much research by your
moujik, Honoré de Balzac. Nothing has made me laugh so much as
this idea of getting the cross for a sort of grocer, who may perhaps
recommend himself to your Grace by his title of administrator of a
charitable enterprise. Napoleon will have brought me four thousand
francs and the hosier may get a hundred thousand. I had such great
distrust of myself that I would not work my own idea. To the hosier,
both fame and profit. But you will recognize the hand of your serf in
the dedication to Louis-Philippe. May the shade of Napoleon forgive
me![1]
[1] This book, extremely rare to-day, appeared at the close of the year 1838,
without the name of any publisher, under the following title: "Maximes et Pensées
de Napoléon, recueillies par J. L. Gaudy jeune. Paris. 1838."

October 15.
I receive to-day your answer to my last letter. Never before did it
happen to me to receive a reply to one letter while I was writing
another. This phenomenon takes place now at the end of five years,
during which time I have written to you once a fortnight at least. To
tell you all the whys and wherefores belongs to the domain of talk,
not to that of epistolary conversation.
Cara, you are more than ever bent on converting me. Your letter is
that of a grave and serious abbess and an omnipotent, omni-
scavante, gracious and witty Countess Hanska. I kneel at your feet,
dear and beautiful sister-Massillon, to tell you here that the sorrow
of my life is a long prayer, that my soul is very white, not because I
do not sin, but because I have no time to sin, which makes it
perhaps all the blacker in your eyes. But you know that I have in the
shrine of my heart a madonna who sanctifies all. What have I said or
done to you that should bring me all this Christian advice? I work so
hard that I have not always time to sleep or, more alarming
symptom, to write to you. A man so unfortunate is either the most
guilty or the most innocent of men on earth; and in either case
there's nothing to be done. Would you know what that means? I am
weary of the life thus allotted to me, and, were it not for my duties,
I would take another. I must have received many blows, be very
tired of my fate, to abandon myself to chance, as I do to-day, with a
character as strongly tempered as mine.
You have reticences about my affections which grieve me all the
more because I cannot reply to them (the reticences), and you ask
me superfluous questions about my health. Why have you not
divined, with that grand perspicacious forehead of yours and your
other attributes, that the unhappy are always robust in health? They
can pass through seas, conflagrations, battles, bivouacs, and fresh
plaster; they are always sound and well! Yes, I am perfectly well,
without aches or pains, in my young house. Have no uneasiness as
to that. Beyond a great and general fatigue after my excesses of
work during the last fortnight, I am well, and if white hairs did not
abound I should think I were the younger by ten years.
Mon Dieu! how I suffer when, in reading your letter, I see that you
have suffered from my silence, and that you have taken to heart my
anxieties and the agonies of my poor life. Do you know it? do you
feel it? No—never see me, as you say, joyous and tranquil! When I
write to you joyously all is at its worst, and I am trying to conceal
how ill that is. When things are going ill with me if I do not write to
you, it is because—No, I cannot write it to you; I will talk of it to you
some day, and then you will regret having written to me some words
that are sweet and cruel both in relation to my delayed letters. There
are things that you will never divine. Do not fear that anything can
change or diminish an attachment like mine. You think me light-
minded, giddy; it makes me laugh. Believe, once for all, that he in
whom you have been good enough to recognize some depth of
thought, has depth in his heart, and that while he displays such
courage in the battle he is fighting, there is just as great constancy
in his affections. But you are ignorant of the claims of each day; the
dreadful difficulties on which I spend myself. If you knew what wiles
were necessary—like those of the "Mariage de Figaro"—to make that
hosier pay four thousand francs for the thoughts and maxims of
Napoleon; if you realized that my publishers will not give me money;
that I am trying to break up that agreement; that to break it I must
pay them fifty thousand francs; and that after believing that my life
was secured and tranquil it is now more in peril than ever, you would
not treat as folly my enterprise in Sardinia! Oh! I entreat you, do not
advise or blame those who feel themselves sunk in deep waters and
are struggling to the surface. Never will the rich comprehend the
unfortunate. One must have been one's self without friends, without
resources, without food, without money, to know to its depths what
misfortune is. I have the knowledge of all that; and I no longer
complain that I am the victim of a poor unfortunate man who, for
food, sells a jest of mine that I may have said on the boulevard, but
which, when published, forms a horrible attack upon me. I complain
no longer of calumnies and insults; those poor unfortunates live
upon them, and though I would rather die than live so, I have not
the courage to blame them, for I know what it is to suffer.
However rare my letters are, they are the only ones that I write to-
day (except those on business); and what quarrels and ill-will I have
brought upon myself by not answering letters! You cannot know
what a literary life busy as mine is must be. Whatever they tell you,
or however my silence may appear to you, know this: that I work
day and night; that the phenomenon of my production is doubled,
trebled; that I have brought myself to correct a volume in a single
night, and to write one in three days. The world is foolish. It thinks
that a book is spoken. This grieves me only from you; I laugh with
pity at others.
I have done eight works since the month of last November. Cara,
each of those eight works would have foundered for a year the
strongest of the French writers, who barely do half a volume a year.
Among those eight I do not mention the book of love, of which I
have told you something, which is there, on my table, beneath your
letter; I have about twenty-five feuilles of that written. Neither do I
speak of five "Contes Drolatiques" written within two months.
Mon Dieu! I have not one soul to understand me; I have never had
but one. Poor, dear Madame de Berny came to see me daily in those
days when she thought that I should perish beneath my burden.
What would she say now if she saw it tenfold heavier? Yes, I work
tenfold harder in 1838 than I did in 1828, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833.
In those days I believed in fortune; to-day I believe in misery. There
are men who want me to sell myself to the present order of things. I
would rather die! I must have my freedom of speech.
When you speak to me of fatal death, such as that of your cousin, I
call it happy death, for I do not believe we are placed here below for
happiness. Withold was right; I pity his mother much; but he is
happy, believe it.
You asked me when I shall calm that French fury which carried me
to Italy, to Sardinia. Is not that asking me when I shall be imbecile?
Do you expect a man who can write in five nights "Qui Terre a,
Guerre a" or "César Birotteau" to measure his steps like a capitalist
who takes his dog to walk on the boulevard, reads the
"Constitutionnel," comes home to dinner, and plays billiards in the
evening? I will allow you here five seconds to laugh at the most
charming person in the world, who, to my thinking, is Madame Eve.
Nothing remains now but to blame la furia which will take me to see
certain Northern people in their steppe. Know, beautiful great lady,
that if I abandoned myself to Providence, as you propose to me,
Providence would already have put me in prison for debt; and I don't
see that there is anything providential in a sojourn at Clichy. What
would the plants that creep out of caves in search of the sun say if
they heard a pretty dove asking them why they climbed that fissure
to the air? You curse our civilization; I await you in Paris! But I
would also like to know who are the impertinent people who write to
you about me; and who think there is a sun for me elsewhere than
in the North.
Théophile Gautier is a young man of whom I think I have spoken to
you. He is one of the talents that I discovered; but he is without
force of conception. "Fortunio" is below "Mademoiselle de Maupin,"
and his poems, which have pleased you, alarm me as a decadence
in poesy and language. He has a ravishing style, much intellect, of
which I think he will not make the most because he is in journalism.
He is the son of a custom-house receiver at the Versailles barrier of
Paris. He is very original, knows a great deal, and talks well on art,
of which he has the sentiment. He is an exceptional man, who will,
no doubt, lose his way. You have divined the man; he loves colour
and flesh; but he comprehends Italy, without having seen it.
I am struck by the manner in which you return, three several times
to the "levity of my character, and the multiplicity of my
enthusiasms." There must be under all that some calumny which has
snaked its way to Wierzchownia, God knows how!
Well, I must bid you farewell, without having said one tenth part of
the things I had to say to you, and which I will return to later. After
all, it would be only describing to you the worries of my present life,
which are innumerable. I must correct for to-morrow "Le Curé de
Village" for it annoys me to have further dealings with the "Presse."
Adieu, dear azure flower; keep all safely for one who lays up
treasures of affections and feelings in your direction. I know not why
you say that old friendships are timid; mine grows very bold with
time.
All graceful things to those about you, and to M. Hanski my friendly
regards.

October 16.
I am in treaty with the "Débats" to take all my prose at a franc a
line. That would make M. Sedlitz, the German poet, howl; but he is a
baron, and has estates, and was scandalized in the Landstrasse at
hearing me talk about the profits of literature. If this affair comes off
you will see me very soon at Wierzchownia. I want to be there in
winter.
Much tenderness, preaching or laughing, mundane or Catholic. À
bientôt.

Aux Jardies, November 15, 1838.

To-day I meant to have closed and sent to you a letter begun a
month ago; but it is lost,—lost from my desk. I have spent three
hours of this night in looking for it. I am vexed, I weep for it,
because, to me, all expression of the soul fallen into the gulf of
oblivion seems irreparable. You would have known what has
happened to me since the date of my last letter. In two words, I am
about to enter a happier period, or, to use a truer word, a less
unhappy period than the past, financially speaking. A few days more
and I shall, perhaps, have paid off half my debt. Material success is
coming; it begins. My works are to be issued in several formats at
the same time. My publishers allow me to buy off my agreement,
which bound me too closely, and I am going, in a few months, to be
free. These are results. You will be ignorant, until I can tell them to
you, of the marches and countermarches, and goings and comings,
and conferences which have made me mount and descend all the
rungs of the ladder of hope.
My pen will have brought in mounds of gold this month.[1] "Qui
Terre a, Guerre a" more than ten thousand francs; "Le Cabinet des
Antiques" five thousand francs, etc., etc.; "Massimilla Doni" a
thousand francs. I have sold for twenty thousand francs the right to
sell thirty-six thousand 18mo volumes, selected from my works. "La
Physiologie du Mariage" in 18mo has been sold for five thousand
francs. In short, it is a sudden, unhoped-for harvest, and it comes in
the nick of time. I hope, between now and five months hence, to
have paid off one hundred thousand francs of my debt. But I have
eight volumes to finish. They have bought prefaces of a feuille in
length for five hundred francs. All this will give you pleasure, will it
not? Nothing will as yet give me any ease; for this money goes only
to clear off the old debt; but at least I can breathe. Another thing
that will give you pleasure and rejoice your Catholic soul is that my
affairs took on this smiling aspect from the day when my mother
hung about my neck a medal blessed by a saint, which I have
religiously worn with another amulet [probably her miniature], which
I believe to be more efficacious. The two talismans get on very well
together, and have not displeased each other. I am not willing to
disappoint my mother, but this miracle does not convert me, because
I am ignorant which of the two charms is the most powerful.
I have been very miserable of late; my publishers are piling up their
ducats, while I have not had a brass farthing, and this war of
diplomatic conferences costs me much. I have now returned to my
shell, at Sèvres, where nothing is yet finished or habitable. I have
the removal of my furniture to do and many other expenses besides.
The moral is less satisfactory than the material condition. I am
growing older, I feel the need of a companion, and every day I
regret the adored being who sleeps in a village cemetery near
Fontainebleau. My sister, who loves me much, can never receive me
in her own home. A ferocious jealousy bars everything. My mother
and I do not suit each other, reciprocally. I must rely on work unless
I have a family of friends about me; which is what I should like to
arrive at. A good and happy marriage, alas! I despair of it, though
no one is more fitted than I for domestic life.
I have interior griefs that I can tell only to you, which oppress me.
Ever since I have had ideas and sentiments I have thought wholly of
love; and the first woman that I met was a faultless heroine, angelic
in heart, a mind most keen, education most extensive, graces and
manners perfect. Diabolical Nature placed its fatal but upon all this.
But she was twenty-two years older than I; so that if the ideal was
morally surpassed, the material, which is much, erected
insurmountable barriers. Therefore, the unlimited passion that has
always been in my soul has never found true fulfilment. The half of
all was lacking. Do you think, therefore, that I can meet with it now
that time is flying at a gallop with me? My life will be a failure, and I
feel it bitterly. There is no fame that lasts; I am resigned to that.
There are no chances for me. My life is a desert. That which I
desired is lacking,—that for which I could have made the greatest
sacrifices, that which will never come to me, that on which I must no
longer count! I say it mathematically, without the poesy of wailing,
which I could lift to the height of Job; but the fact is there. I should
not lack adventures; I could play, if I chose, the rôle of a man à
bonnes fortunes, but my stomach turns against it with disgust.
Nature made me for one sole love. I am an ignored Don Quixote. I
have ardent friendships. Madame Carraud, in Berry, has a noble
soul; but friendship does not take the place of love,—the love of
every day, of every hour; which gives infinite pleasures in the sound
at all moments of a voice, a step, the rustle of a gown through the
house; such as I have had, though imperfectly, at times in the last
ten years. Add to this that I hold in profound detestation all young
girls, that I count much higher developed beauties than those that
will develop, and the problem is still more difficult to solve.
Madame Carraud, whose letters give me great pleasure—if that word
can be employed for other letters than yours—-has divined my
situation. She awakes my sorrows by a letter I have just received
from her, in which she talks marriage to me, which makes me furious
for a long time. I will not listen to it. You know how fixed my opinion
is. I must have much fortune for that, and I have none. I must have
a person who knows me well, and I doubt if that is possible in one
who is, after all, a stranger. What a sad thing is life, cara!
You will certainly see me when my great works are done. At the first
inanition of the brain I shall turn to your dear Wierzchownia, and
pay you a visit; for I cannot endure to be so long without seeing
you. Last night at the Opera, where I heard Duprez in "Guillaume
Tell," I was the whole evening in Switzerland,—the Switzerland of
Pré-l'Évêque and the two shores of the lake where we walked
together. There are details of our trips to Coppet and Diodati which
occupy me more than my own life. Looking at the scene of the Lake
of the Four Cantons, I remembered, word for word, all you said to
me as we passed the Galitzin house, and what you said about such
and such a portrait at Coppet. And I said to myself—in my way of
telling myself the future—"Such a period will not pass without my
seeing the Ukraine; as I live so much by memories, these are the
treasures I ought to seek, and not silver mines." I was happier in
that Opera-Switzerland than the millionnaire Greffulhe, who yawned
above me.
From those letters of yours, so serious, so dun-coloured and ascetic,
I fear to find you changed. No matter, we must love our friends as
they are.
What I do not like in your last letter is the remark that "old
friendships are timid." In that there is a distrust of yourself or of me
that I do not like. You know that nothing can prevail against you,
that you are apart from whatever may happen to me, like a true king
who can never be reached. I am afraid that you forge ogres. If my
letters are delayed, be sure there is some good reason; that I have
been hurried about night and day, without truce or rest; that I have
not written to a living soul, and that, if I were ill or happy, you, in
spite of distance, would be the first informed of it.
You know the good your letters do me, whatever they are, religious,
or sad, or gay, or domestic. I am the more reserved because I have
nothing but troubles to send you, and no flower other than that of
an eternal affection, as much above all petty, worldly imitations as
Mont Blanc is above the lake. Do not be surprised therefore if I hold
back a letter which tells you of misery and toil without other
compensation than that of talking to you about them.
You complain of Polish divorces, whereas here we are doing all we
can to restore the admirable section on divorce to the Civil Code
such as Napoleon contrived it; which met all social disasters, without
giving an opening to libertinism, change, vice, or passion. It is the
only institution which can secure happy marriages. There are in Paris
forty thousand households on promise only, without either civil or
religious contract; and they are among the best, for each fears to
lose the other. This is not said publicly, but the statistic is correct.
Cauchois-Lemaire, for instance, is married in that way. The
Napoleonic law allowed only one divorce in a woman's life, and
forbade even that after ten years of marriage. In this it was wrong.
There are tyrannies which can be borne in youth, that are later
intolerable. I knew an adorable woman who waited till she was forty-
five and her daughters were married, in order to separate from her
husband; having put off until that moment when she could no longer
be suspected the liberation without which she would have died.
What! do you dare to tell us there is but one man in this "stupid
nineteenth century"? Napoleon is he? And Cuvier, cara! And
Dupuytren, cara! And Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, cara! And Masséna,
carina! And Rossini, carissima! And our chemists, our secondary
men, who are equal to the talents of the first order! And Lamennais,
George Sand, Talma, Gall, Broussais (just dead), etc.! You are very
unjust. Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and Cowper belong to this century.
Weber also, and Meyerbeer; also several gamins de Paris who could
make a revolution by a wave of their hand. Victor Hugo, Lamartine,
and Musset are, they three, the small change of a poet, for neither
of them is complete. Apropos, "Ruy Blas" is immense nonsense, and
an infamy in verse. The odious and the absurd never danced a more
dissolute saraband. He has cut out two horrible lines:—
... affreuse compagnone,
Dont la barbe fleurie et dont le nez trognonne;
but they were said at the first two representations. At the fourth
representation, when the public became aware of them, they were
hissed.
I cannot tell you anything of the war in the Caucasus, except that I
deplore for you the loss that grieves you [Count Withold Rzewuski].
Cara, I would like you to explain to me how I have deserved a
phrase thus worded and addressed to me in your last letter: "The
natural levity of your character." In what do I show levity? Is it
because for the last twelve years I pursue, without relaxing, an
immense literary work? Is it because for the last six years I have had
but one affection in my heart? Is it because for twelve years I have
worked night and day to pay an enormous debt which my mother
saddled upon me by a senseless calculation? Is it because in spite of
so many miseries I have not asphyxiated or drowned myself, or
blown out my brains? Is it because I work ceaselessly, and seek to
shorten by ingenious schemes, that fail, the period of my hard
labour? Explain yourself. Is it because I flee society and intercourse
with others to give myself up to my passion, my work, my release
from debt? Can it be because I have written twelve volumes instead
of ten? Can it be because they do not appear with regularity? Is it
because I write to you with tenacity and constancy, sending you with
incredible levity autographs? Is it because I go to live in the country,
away from Paris, in order to have more time and spend less money?
Come, tell me; have no hidden thought from your friend. Can it be
because, in spite of so many misfortunes, I preserve some gaiety
and make campaigns into China and Sardinia? For pity's sake, be
fearless, and speak out. Can it be because I am delaying to write my
plays that I may not risk a fiasco? Or is it because you are—through
the blind confidence of a son for his mother, a sister for a brother, a
husband for a wife, a lover to his mistress, a penitent to his
confessor, an angel towards God, all, in short, that is most confiding
and most a unit—so aware of what passes in my poor existence, my
poor brain, my poor heart, my poor soul, that you arm yourself with
my confidences to make of me another myself whom you scold and
lecture and strike at your ease?
Levity of nature! Truly, you are like the worthy bourgeois who,
seeing Napoleon turn to right and left, and on all sides to examine
his field of battle, remarked: "That man cannot keep quiet in one
place; he has no fixed ideas." Do me the pleasure to go wherever
you have put the portrait of your poor moujik and look at the space
between his two shoulders, thorax and forehead, and say to
yourself: "There is the most constant, least volatile, most steadfast
of men." That is your punishment. But, after all, scold, accuse your
poor Honoré de Balzac; he is your thing; and I do wrong to argue;
for if you will have it so, I will be frivolous in character, I will go and
come without purpose, and say sweet things without object to the
Duchesse d'O...; I will fall in love with a notary's wife, and write
feuilletons to enrage the actresses, and I will make myself a
superlative rip. I will sell Les Jardies; I will await your sovereign
orders. There is but one thing in which I shall disobey you, and that
is the thing of my heart—where, nevertheless, you have all power.
I entreat you to add also that I am a light-weight in body and thin as
a skeleton. The portrait will then be complete.
Explain also, if you can, the "multiplicity of my dissipations
[entraînements],"—I, of whom it is said that no one can make me do
anything but what I choose to do! (Those who say so do not know
that I am moujik on the estate of Paulowska, the subject of a
Russian countess, and the admirer of the autocratic power of my
sovereign.)
Alas! I never doubt you, I never rebel against anything—except the
invasion of mystical ideas. And even that is from an admirable
instinct of jealousy. Moreover, if I must say so, I hold the devout
spirit in horror. It is not piety which alarms me, but devoutness. To
fly from this and that to the bosom of God, so be it; but the more I
admire those sublime impulses, the more the minute practices of
devoutness harden me. Quibbling is not law.
Addio, cara; I must finish "Massimilla Doni," do the opening part of
"Le Curé de Village" (in that book you will adore me in the quality of
Brother of the Church; it will be pure Fénelon), correct "Qui Terre a,
Guerre a," and, finally, deliver within ten days the manuscript of "Un
Grand homme de Province à Paris," which is the conclusion of
"Illusions Perdues." So you see that my idleness is a busy one.
Find here all treasures of affection, and prayers for the happiness of
you and yours in the present and in the future. If God heard or paid
attention to what I ask of him, you would have no anxieties, and you
would be the happiest woman upon earth.
I have busied myself about your Parisian pearls, and I shall have an
opportunity to send them. God grant they may get to you in time for
the New Year. Did you receive the autographs of Scribe, Hugo, and
Byron? I sent them all.
[1] In the midst of this constant calculation of the money to be gained by his
work, it is well to remind ourselves now and then that never did he sacrifice that
work, the fruit of his genius, to gain, terrible as his need of money was. His
difficulty in his art was with form; and his laborious nights were spent in
unflinching efforts to remedy that defect in his mechanism.—TR.

VII.

LETTERS DURING 1839, 1840, 1841.

 Aux Jardies, February 12, 1839.
When this letter reaches you, it is probable that the fate of "L'École
des Ménages" [formerly "La Première Demoiselle"] will have been
decided; and while you read these words they may be representing
that play, so long meditated, which perhaps may fall flat in two
hours. It has taken on great proportions; there are five leading rôles
and the subject is vast. It touches the painful spot of modern
morals: marriage; but perhaps the personages lack certain
conditions in order to become types. To my eyes, the play is
precisely the bourgeois family. But it has a certain inferiority through
that very thing.
I am going to-morrow to come to an understanding with the
managers of the Renaissance, after many protocols exchanged
between them and a friend who has undertaken to fight for my
interests; the play will be mounted in twenty days. I took, to lay out
my ideas and write them down for me, a poor young man of letters,
named Lassailly, who has not written two lines worth preserving. I
never saw such incapacity. But he has been useful to me in making
the first germ, on which I can work. Nevertheless, I would have liked
some one of more intelligence and wit. Théophile Gautier is coming
to do the second play in five acts, and I expect much from him.
Nevertheless, dear countess, it is impossible for me to do all that I
have undertaken, and all that I must do to get out of my
embarrassments. Here is what I have accomplished the last month:
"Béatrix, ou Les Amours Forcés," two volumes 8vo, wholly written
and corrected, which is coming out in the "Siècle;" "Un Grand
homme de Province à Paris," the end of "Illusions Perdues," of which
only the second volume remains to do, and that will be done this
week. Besides which, three plays: "L'École des Ménages," "La Gina,"
and "Richard Cœur d'Éponge."
Well, after such great labour (for I have just as much for the month
of March) shall I gain my liberty, shall I owe nothing to any one,
shall I have the tranquillity of soul of a man from whom no one has
money to demand? I begin to feel some fatigue. Just now, on
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