CCLXX. TO GEORGE SAND
Saturday evening, 28 February, 1874
Dear master,
The first performance of le Candidat is set for next Friday, unless
it is Saturday, or perhaps Monday the 9th? It has been postponed by
Delannoy's illness and by l'Oncle Sam, for we had to wait until the
said Sam had come down to under fifteen hundred francs.
I think that my play will be very well given, that is all. For I
have no idea about the rest of it, and I am very calm about the
result, a state of indifference that surprises me greatly. If I were
not harassed by people who ask me for seats, I should forget
absolutely that I am soon to appear on the boards, and to expose
myself, in spite of my great age, to the derision of the populace.
Is it stoicism or fatigue?
I have been having and still have the grippe, the result of it for
your Cruchard, is a general lassitude accompanied by a violent (or
rather a profound) melancholy. While spitting and coughing beside my
fire, I muse over my youth. I dream of all my dead friends, I wallow
in blackness! Is it the result of a too great activity for the past
eight months, or the radical absence of the feminine element in my
life? But I have never felt more abandoned, more empty, more
bruised. What you said to me (in your last letter) about your dear
little girls moved me to the depths of my soul! Why haven't I that?
I was born with all the affections, however! But one does not make
one's destiny, one submits to it. I was cowardly in my youth, I had
a fear of life! One pays for everything.
Let us speak of other things, it will be gayer.
H. M. the Emperor of all the Russias does not like the Muses. The
censorship of the "autocrat of the north" had formally forbidden the
transportation of Saint-Antoine, and the proofs were returned me
from Saint Petersburg, last Sunday; the French edition even will be
prohibited. That is quite a serious money loss to me. It would have
taken very little for the French censorship to forbid my play. Our
friend Chennevieres gave me a good boost. Except for him I should
not be played. Cruchard does not please the temporal powers. Isn't
it funny, this simple hatred of authority, of all government
whatever, for art!
I am reading now books on hygiene. Oh! but they are comic! What
assurance physicians have! what effrontery! what asses for the most
part! I have just finished the Gaule poetique of Marchangy (the
enemy of Beranger). This book gave me hysterics.
So as to retemper myself in something stronger, I reread the great,
the most holy, the incomparable Aristophanes. There is a man, that
fellow! What a world in which such work were produced!
CCLXXI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, March, 1874
Our two little girls cruelly ill with the grippe have taken up all
my time, but I am following, in the papers, the course of your play.
I would go to applaud it, my cherished Cruchard, if I could leave
these dear little invalids. So it is on Wednesday that they are
going to judge it. The jury may be good or stupid, one never knows!
I have started grubbing again after having rested from the long and
successful novel published by the Revue. I shall send it to you when
it is published in book form.
Don't you delay to give me the news on Thursday, I don't need to
tell you that success and the lack of it prove nothing, and that it
is a ticket in a lottery. It is agreeable to succeed; to a
philosophical spirit it ought not to be very distressing to fail. As
for me, without knowing the play, I predict a success on the first
day. As for its continuance, that is always unknown and unforeseen
from day to day.
We all embrace you very affectionately.