CCII. TO GEORGE SAND
14 November, 1871
Ouf! I have just finished MY GODS, that is to say the mythological
part of my Saint-Antoine, on which I have been working since the
beginning of June. How I want to read it to you, dear master of the
good God!
Why did you resist your good impulse? Why didn't you come this
autumn? You should not stay so long without seeing Paris. I shall be
there day after tomorrow, and I shall have no amusement there at all
this winter, what with Aisse, a volume of verse to be printed (I
should like to show you the preface), and Heaven knows what else. A
lot of things that are not at all diverting.
I did not receive the second article that was announced. Your old
troubadour has an aching head. My longest nights these three months
have not exceeded five hours. I have been grubbing in a frantic
manner. Furthermore, I think I have brought my book to a pretty
degree of insanity. The idea of the foolish things that it will make
the bourgeois utter sustains me, or rather I don't need to be
sustained, as such a situation pleases me naturally.
The good bourgeois is becoming more and more stupid! He does not
even go to vote! The brute beasts surpass him in their instinct for
self-preservation. Poor France! Poor us!
What do you think I am reading now to distract myself? Bichat and
Cabanis, who amuse me enormously. They knew how to write books then.
Ah! how far our doctors of today are from those men!
We suffer from one thing only: Absurdity. But it is formidable and
universal. When they talk of the brutishness of the plebe, they are
saying an unjust, incomplete thing. Conclusion: the enlightened
classes must be enlightened. Begin by the head, which is the
sickest, the rest will follow.
You are not like me! You are full of compassion. There are days when
I choke with wrath, I would like to drown my contemporaries in
latrines, or at least deluge their cockscombs with torrents of
abuse, cataracts of invectives. Why? I wonder myself.
What sort of archeology is Maurice busy with? Embrace your little
girls warmly for me.