CLXXII. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset, Wednesday, 3 August, 1870
What! dear master, you too are demoralized, sad? What will become of
the weak souls?
As for me, my heart is oppressed in a way that astonishes me, and I
wallow in a bottomless melancholy, in spite of work, in spite of the
good Saint-Antoine who ought to distract me. Is it the consequence
of my repeated afflictions? Perhaps. But the war is a good deal
responsible for it. I think that we are getting into the dark.
Behold then, the NATURAL MAN. Make theories now! Boast the progress,
the enlightenment and the good sense of the masses, and the
gentleness of the French people! I assure you that anyone here who
ventured to preach peace would get himself murdered. Whatever
happens, we have been set back for a long time to come.
Are the wars between races perhaps going to begin again? One will
see, before a century passes, several millions of men kill one
another in one engagement. All the East against all Europe, the old
world against the new! Why not? Great united works like the Suez
Canal are, perhaps, under another form, outlines and preparations
for these monstrous conflicts of which we have no idea.
Is Prussia perhaps going to have a great drubbing which entered into
the schemes of Providence for reestablishing European equilibrium?
That country was tending to be hypertrophied like France under Louis
XIV and Napoleon. The other organs are inconvenienced by it. Thence
universal trouble. Would formidable bleedings be useful?
Ah! we intellectuals! Humanity is far from our ideal! and our
immense error, our fatal error, is to think it like us and to want
to treat it accordingly.
The reverence, the fetichism, that they have for universal suffrage
revolts me more than the infallibility of the pope (which has just
delightfully missed its point, by the way). Do you think that if
France, instead of being governed on the whole by the crowd, were in
the power of the mandarins, we should be where we are now? If,
instead of having wished to enlighten the lower classes, we had
busied ourselves with instructing the higher, we should not have
seen M. de Keratry proposing the pillage of the duchy of Baden, a
measure that the public finds very proper!
Are you studying Prudhomme now? He is gigantic! He admires Musset's
Rhin, and asks if Musset has done anything else. Here you have
Musset accepted as the national poet and ousting Beranger! What
immense buffoonery is...everything! But a not at all gay buffoonery.
Misery is very evident. Everyone is in want, beginning with myself!
But perhaps we were too accustomed to comfort and tranquillity. We
buried ourselves in material things. We must return to the great
tradition, hold no longer to life, to happiness, to money nor to
anything; be what our grandfathers were, light, effervescing people.
Once men passed their life in starving. The same prospect is on the
horizon. What you tell me about poor Nohant is terrible. The country
has suffered less here than with you.
CLXXIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croisset.
Nohant, 8 August, 1870
Are you in Paris in the midst of all this torment? What a lesson the
people are getting who want absolute masters! France and Prussia are
cutting each other's throats for reasons that they don't understand!
Here we are in the midst of great disasters, and what tears at the
end of it all, even should we be the victors! One sees nothing but
poor peasants mourning for their children who are leaving.
The mobilization takes away those who were left with us and how they
are being treated to begin with! What disorder, what disarray in
that military administration, which absorbed everything and had to
swallow up everything! Is this horrible experience going to prove to
the world that warfare ought to be suppressed or that civilization
has to perish?
We have reached the point this evening of knowing that we are
beaten. Perhaps tomorrow we shall know that we have beaten, and what
will there be good or useful from one or the other?
It has rained here at last, a horrible storm which destroyed
everything.
The peasant is working and ploughing his fields; digging hard
always, sad or gay. He is imbecile, people say; no, he is a child in
prosperity, a man in disaster, more of a man than we who complain;
he says nothing, and while people are killing, he is sowing,
repairing continually on one side what they are destroying from the
other. We are going to try to do as he, and to hunt a bubbling
spring fifty or a hundred yards below ground. The engineer is here,
and Maurice is explaining to him the geology of the soil.
We are trying to dig into the bowels of the earth to forget all that
is going on above it. But we cannot distract ourselves from this
terror!
Write me where you are; I am sending this to you on the day agreed
upon to rue Murillo. We love you, and we all embrace you.