I forgot! Levy promises to send you my complete works, they are
endless. You must stick them on a shelf in a corner and dig into
them when your heart prompts you.
XVI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
Nohant, 21 September, 1866
I have just returned from a twelve days trip with my children, and
on getting home I find your two letters. That fact, added to the joy
of seeing Mademoiselle Aurore again, fresh and pretty, makes me
quite happy. And you my Benedictine, you are quite alone in your
ravishing monastery, working and never going out? That is what it
means TO HAVE ALREADY gone out too much. Monsieur craves Syrias,
deserts, dead seas, dangers and fatigues! But nevertheless he can
make Bovarys in which every little cranny of life is studied and
painted with mastery. What an odd person who can also compose the
fight between the Sphinx and the Chimaera! You are a being quite
apart, very mysterious, gentle as a lamb with it all. I have had a
great desire to question you, but a too great respect for you has
prevented me; for I know how to make light only of my own
calamities, while those which a great mind has had to undergo so as
to be in a condition to produce, seem to me like sacred things which
should not be touched roughly nor thoughtlessly.
Sainte-Beuve, who loves you all the same, claims that you are
horribly vicious. But perhaps he may see with somewhat unclean eyes,
like this learned botanist who asserts that the germander is of
DIRTY yellow color. The observation was so false, that I could not
refrain from writing on the margin of his book: IT IS BECAUSE YOU
HAVE DIRTY EYES.
I suppose that a man of intelligence may have great curiosity. I
have not had it, lacking the courage. I have preferred to leave my
mind incomplete, that is my affair, and every one is free to embark
either on a great ship in full sail, or on a fisherman's vessel. The
artist is an explorer whom nothing ought to stop, and who does
neither good nor ill when turning to the right or to the left. His
end justifies all.
It is for him to know after a little experience, what are the
conditions of his soul's health. As for me, I think that yours is in
a good condition of grace, since you love to work and to be alone in
spite of the rain.
Do you know that, while there has been a deluge everywhere, we have
had, except a few downpours, fine sunshine in Brittany? A horrible
wind on the shore, but how beautiful the high surf! and since the
botany of the coast carried me away, and Maurice and his wife have a
passion for shellfish, we endured it all gaily. But on the whole,
Brittany is a famous see-saw.
However, we are a little fed up with dolmens and menhirs and we have
fallen on fetes and have seen costumes which they said had been
suppressed but which the old people still wear. Well! These men of
the past are ugly with their home-spun trousers, their long hair,
their jackets with pockets under the arms, their sottish air, half
drunkard, half saint. And the Celtic relics, uncontestably curious
for the archaeologist, have naught for the artist, they are badly
set, badly composed, Carnac and Erdeven have no physiognomy. In
short, Brittany shall not have my bones! I prefer a thousand times
your rich Normandy, or, in the days when one has dramas in his HEAD,
a real country of horror and despair. There is nothing in a country
where priests rule and where Catholic vandalism has passed, razing
monuments of the ancient world and sowing the plagues of the future.
You say US a propos of the fairy play. I don't know with whom you
have written it, but I still fancy that it ought to succeed at the
Odeon under its present management. If I was acquainted with it, I
should know how to accomplish for you what one never knows how to do
for one's self, namely, to interest the directors. Anything of yours
is bound to be too original to be understood by that coarse Dumaine.
Do have a copy at your house, and next month I shall spend a day
with you in order to have you read it to me. Le Croisset is so near
to Palaiseau!--and I am in a phase of tranquil activity, in which I
should love to see your great river flow, and to keep dreaming in
your orchard, tranquil itself, quite on top of the cliff. But I am
joking, and you are working. You must forgive the abnormal
intemperance of one who has just been seeing only stones and has not
perceived even a pen for twelve days.
You are my first visit to the living on coming out from the complete
entombment of my poor Moi. Live! There is my oremus and my
benediction and I embrace you with all my heart.