Does that astonish you, dear master? Oh well! it doesn't me! I told
you so but you would not believe me.
I am sorry for you. For it is sad to see the friends one loves
change. This replacement of one soul by another, in a body that
remains the same as it was, is a distressing sight. One feels
oneself betrayed! I have experienced it, and more than once.
But then, what idea have you of women, O, you who are of the third
sex? Are they not, as Proudhon said, "the desolation of the Just"?
Since when could they do without delusions? After love, devotion; it
is in the natural order of things. Dorine has no more men, she takes
the good God. That is all.
The people who have no need of the supernatural, are rare.
Philosophy will always be the lot of the aristocrats. However much
you fatten human cattle, giving them straw as high as their bellies,
and even gilding their stable, they will remain brutes, no matter
what one says. All the advance that one can hope for, is to make the
brute a little less wicked. But as for elevating the ideas of the
mass, giving it a larger and therefore a less human conception of
God, I have my doubts.
I am reading now an honest book (written by one of my friends, a
magistrate), on the Revolution in the Department of Eure. It is full
of extracts from writings of the bourgeois of the time, simple
citizens of the small towns. Indeed I assure you that there is now
very little of that strength! They were literary and fine, full of
good sense, of ideas, and of generosity.
Neo-catholicism on the one hand, and Socialism on the other, have
stultified France. Everything moves between the Immaculate
Conception and the dinner pails of the working people.
I told you that I did not flatter the democrats in my book. But I
assure you that the conservatives are not spared. I am now writing
three pages on the abominations of the national guard in June, 1848,
which will cause me to be looked at favorably by the bourgeois. I
am rubbing their noses in their own dirt as much as I can. But you
don't give me any details about Cadio. Who are the actors, etc.? I
mistrust your novel about the theatre. You like those people too
much! Have you known any well who love their art? What a quantity of
artists there are who are only bourgeois gone astray!
We shall see each other in three weeks at the latest. I shall be
very glad of it and I embrace you.
And the censorship? I really hope for you that it will make some
blunders. Besides, I should be distressed if it was wanting in its
usual habits.
Have you read this in the paper? "Victor Hugo and Rochefort, the
greatest writers of the age." If Badinguet now is not avenged, it is
because he is hard to please in the matter of punishments.