called Marengo Lirondelle widow Dodin
Rue Lanion, 47, Belleville.
XXXVII. TO GEORGE SAND
Wednesday night, 5th December, 1866
Oh! how lovely the letter of Marengo the Swallow is! Seriously, I
think it a masterpiece, not a word which is not a word of genius. I
have laughed aloud many times. I thank you very dear master, you are
as good as can be.
You never tell me what you are doing. How far has the play gone?
I am not at all surprised that you don't understand my literary
agonies. I don't understand them myself. But they exist
nevertheless, and violent ones.
I don't in the least know how to set to work to write, and I begin
by expressing only the hundredth part of my ideas after infinite
gropings. Not one who seizes the first impulse, your friend, no! not
at all! Thus for entire days I have polished and re-polished a
paragraph without accomplishing anything. I feel like weeping at
times. You ought to pity me!
As for our subject under discussion (a propos of your young man),
what you write me in your last letter is so my way of thinking, that
I have not only practised it but preached it. Ask Theo. However, let
us understand one another. Artists (who are priests) risk nothing in
being chaste; on the contrary. But the bourgeois, what is the use in
it for them? Of course there must be certain ones among humanity who
stick to chastity. Happy indeed those who don't depart from it.
I don't agree with you that there is anything worth while to be done
with the character of the IDEAL ARTIST; he would be a monster. Art
is not made to paint the exceptions, and I feel an unconquerable
repugnance to putting on paper something from out of my heart. I
even think that a novelist HASN'T THE RIGHT TO EXPRESS HIS OPINION
on any subject whatsoever. Has the good God ever uttered it, his
opinion? That is why there are not a few things that choke me which
I should like to spit out, but which I swallow. Why say them, in
fact! The first comer is more interesting than Monsieur Gustave
Flaubert, because he is more GENERAL and therefore more typical.
Nevertheless, there are days when I consider myself below
imbecility. I have still a globe of goldfish and that amuses me.
They keep me company while I dine. Is it stupid to be interested in
such simple things? Adieu, it is late, I have an aching head.