CCXXXVI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Paris
Nohant, 25 October, 1872
Your letters fall on me like a rain that refreshes, and develops at
once all that is germinating in the soil; they make me want to
answer your reasons, because your reasons are powerful and inspire a
reply.
I do not assume that my replies will be strong too; they are
sincere, they issue from the roots of my being, like the plants
aforesaid. That is why I have just written a paper on the subject
that you raise, addressing myself this time TO A WOMAN FRIEND, who
has written me also in your vein, but less well than you, of course,
and a little from an aristocratically intellectual point of view, to
which she has not ALL THE RIGHTS SHE DESIRES.
My roots, one can't extirpate them, and I am astonished that you ask
me to make tulips come from them when they can answer you by
producing only potatoes. Since the beginning of my intellectual
blooming, when, studying quite alone at the bedside of my paralyzed
grandmother, or in the fields at the times when I entrusted her to
Deschartres, I asked myself the most elementary questions about
society; I was no more advanced at seventeen than a child of six,
not as much! thanks to Deschartres, my father's teacher, who was a
contradiction from his head to his feet, much learning and little
sense; thanks to the convent, into which they stuck me, God knows
why, as they believed in nothing; thanks also to a purely
Restoration surrounding in which my grandmother, a philosopher, but
dying, breathed her last without resisting further the monarchical
current.
Then I read Chateaubriand, and Rousseau; I passed from the Gospels
to the Contrat social. I read the history of the Revolution written
by the pious, the history of France, written by philosophers; and,
one fine day, I made all that agree like light proceeding from two
lamps, and I had PRINCIPLES. Don't laugh, very candid, childish
principles which have remained with me through all, through Lelia
and the romantic epoch, through love and doubt, enthusiasm and
disenchantments. To love, to make sacrifices, only to reconsider
when the sacrifice is harmful to those who are the object of it, and
to sacrifice oneself again in the hope of serving a real cause,
love.
I am not speaking here of personal passion, but of love of race, of
the widening sentiment of self-love, of the horror of THE ISOLATED
MOI. And that ideal of JUSTICE of which you speak, I have never seen
it apart from love, since the first law on which the existence of a
natural society depends, is that we shall serve each other mutually,
like the bees and the ants. This concurrence of all to the same end,
we have agreed to call instinct among beasts, and it does not
matter, but among men, the instinct is love; he who withdraws
himself from love, withdraws himself from truth, from justice.
I have experienced revolutions, and I have seen the principal actors
near to; I have seen the depth of their souls, I should say the
bottom of their bag: NO PRINCIPLES! and no real intelligence, no
force, nor endurance. Nothing but means and a personal end. Only one
had principles, not all of them good, but in comparison with their
integrity, he counted his personality for nothing: Barbes.
Among artists and literary men, I have found no depth. You are the
only one with whom I have been able to exchange other ideas than
those of the profession. I don't know if you were at Magny's one day
when I said to them that they were all GENTLEMEN. They said that one
should not write for ignoramuses. They spurned me because I wanted
to write only for them, as they are the only ones who need anything.
The masters are provided for, are rich, satisfied. Imbeciles lack
everything, I am sorry for them. Loving and pitying are not to be
separated. And there you have the uncomplicated mechanism of my
thought.
I have the passion for goodness and not at all for prejudiced
sentimentality. I spit with all my might upon him who pretends to
hold my principles and acts contrary to them. I do not pity the
incendiary and the assassin who fall under the hand of the law; I do
pity profoundly the class which a brutal, degenerate life without
upward trend and without aid, brings to the point of producing such
monsters. I pity humanity, I wish it were good, because I cannot
separate myself from it; because it is myself; because the evil it
does strikes me to the heart; because its shame makes me blush;
because its crimes gnaw at my vitals, because I cannot understand
paradise in heaven nor on earth for myself alone.
You ought to understand me, you who are goodness from head to foot.
Are you still in Paris? It has been such fine weather that I have
been tempted to go there to embrace you, but I don't dare to spend
the money, however little it may be, when there is so much poverty.
I am miserly because I know that I am extravagant when I forget, and
I continually forget. And then I have so much to do!...I don't know
anything and I don't learn anything, for I am always forced to learn
it over again. I do very much need, however, to see you again, for a
little bit; it is a part of myself which I miss.
My Aurore keeps me very busy. She understands too quickly and we
have to take her at a hard gallop. To understand fascinates her, to
know repels her. She is as lazy as monsieur, her father, was. He has
gotten over it so well that I am not impatient. She promises me to
write you a letter soon. You see that she does not forget you.
Titite's Punch has lost his head, literally, because he has been so
embraced and caressed. He is loved as much without his head; what an
example of fidelity in misfortune! His stomach has become a
receptacle where playthings are put.
Maurice is deep in his archeological studies, Lina is always
adorable, and all goes well except that the maids are not clean.
What a road the creatures have still to travel who do not keep
themselves clean!
I embrace you. Tell me how you are getting on with Aisse, the Odeon
and all that stuff you are busy about. I love you; that is the end
of all my discourses.