CCLXXXIV. TO GEORGE SAND
Wednesday, 2nd December, 1874
I am having remorse about you. It is a crime to let so long a time
elapse without answering such a letter as your last. I was waiting
to write to you until I had something definite to tell you about le
Sexe faible. What is definite is that I took it away from the Cluny
a week ago. The cast that Weinschenk proposed to me was odiously
stupid and he did not keep the promises that he made. But, God be
thanked, I withdrew in time. At present my play has been offered to
the Gymnase. No news up to now from Montigny.
I am worrying like five hundred devils about my book, asking myself
sometimes if I am not mad to have undertaken it. But, like Thomas
Diafoirus, I am stiffening myself against the difficulties of
execution which are frightful. I need to learn a heap of things
about which I am ignorant. In a month I hope to finish with the
agriculture and the gardening, and I shall only then be at the
second third of my first chapter.
Speaking of books, do read Fromont et Risler, by my friend Daudet,
and les Diaboliques, by my enemy Barbey d'Aurevilly. You will writhe
with laughter. It is perhaps owing to the perversity of my mind,
which likes unhealthy things, but the latter work seemed to me
extremely amusing; it is the last word in the involuntary grotesque.
In other respects, dead calm, France is sinking gently like a rotten
hulk, and the hope of salvage, even for the staunchest, seems
chimerical. You need to be here, in Paris, to have an idea of the
universal depression, of the stupidity, of the decrepitude in which
we are floundering.
The sentiment of that agony penetrates me and I am sad enough to
die. When I am not torturing myself about my work, I am groaning
about myself. That is the truth. In my leisure moments, all I do is
to think of the dead, and I am going to say a very pretentious thing
to you. No one understands me; I belong to another world. The men of
my profession are so little of my profession! There is hardly anyone
except Victor Hugo with whom I can talk of what interests me. Day
before yesterday he recited by heart to me from Boileau and from
Tacitus. That was like a gift to me, the thing is so rare. Moreover,
the days when there are not politicians at his house, he is an
adorable man.
CCLXXXV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
Nohant, 8th December, 1874
Poor dear friend,
I love you all the more because you are growing more unhappy. How
you torment yourself, and how you disturb yourself about life! for
all of which you complain, is life; it has never been better for
anyone or in any time. One feels it more or less, one understands it
more or less, one suffers with it more or less, and the more one is
in advance of the age one lives in, the more one suffers. We pass
like shadows on a background of clouds which the sun seldom pierces,
and we cry ceaselessly for the sun which can do no more for us. It
is for us to clear away our clouds.
You love literature too much; it will destroy you and you will not
destroy the imbecility of the human race. Poor dear! imbecility,
that, for my part, I do not hate, that I regard with maternal eyes:
for it is a childhood and all childhood is sacred. What hatred you
have devoted to it! what warfare you wage on it!
You have too much knowledge and intelligence, you forget that there
is something above art: namely, wisdom, of which art at its apogee
is only the expression. Wisdom comprehends all: beauty, truth,
goodness, enthusiasm, in consequence. It teaches us to see outside
of ourselves, something more elevated than is in ourselves, and to
assimilate it little by little, through contemplation and
admiration.
But I shall not succeed in changing you. I shall not even succeed in
making you understand how I envisage and how I lay hold upon
HAPPINESS, that is to say, the acceptation of life whatever it may
be! There is one person who could change you and save you, that is
father Hugo; for he has one side on which he is a great philosopher,
while at the same time he is the great artist that you require and
that I am not. You must see him often. I believe that he will quiet
you: I have not enough tempest in me now for you to understand me.
As for him, I think that he has kept his thunderbolts and that he
has all the same acquired the gentleness and the compassion of age.
See him, see him often and tell him your troubles, which are great,
I see that, and which turn too much to spleen. You think too much of
the dead, you think that they have too soon reached their rest. They
have not. They are like us, they are searching. They labor in the
search.
Every one is well, and embraces you. As for me, I do not get well,
but I have hopes, well or not, to keep on still so as to bring up my
grandchildren, and to love you as long as I have a breath left.