Beginning with the middle of next week, about Wednesday or Thursday,
I shall be at Croisset.
Saturday morning, 3d June, 1876.
CCCXVI. To MAURICE SAND
Croisset, Sunday, 24 June, 1876
You had prepared me, my dear Maurice, I wanted to write to you, but
I was waiting till you were a little freer, more alone. Thank you
for your kind thought.
Yes, we understood each other, yonder! (And if I did not remain
longer, it is because my comrades dragged me away.) It seemed to me
that I was burying my mother the second time. Poor, dear, great
woman! What genius and what heart! But she lacked nothing, it is not
she whom we must pity.
What is to become of you? Shall you stay in Nohant? That good old
house must seem horribly empty to you! But you, at least, are not
alone! You have a wife...a rare one! and two exquisite children.
While I was with you, I had, over and above my grief, two desires:
to run off with Aurore and to kill M. Marx.[Footnote: A reporter for
le Figaro.] There you have the truth, it is unnecessary to make you
see the psychology of the thing. I received yesterday a very
sympathetic letter from good Tourgueneff. He too loved her. But
then, who did not love her? If you had seen in Paris the anguish of
Martine![Footnote: George Sand's maid.] That was distressing.
Plauchut is still in Nohant, I suppose. Tell him that I love him
because I saw him shed so many tears.
And let yours flow, my dear friend, do all that is necessary not to
console yourself,--which would, moreover, be impossible. Never mind!
In a short time you will feel a great joy in the idea alone that you
were a good son and that she knew it absolutely. She used to talk of
you as of a blessing.
And when you shall have rejoined her, when the great-grand-children
of the grandchildren of your two little girls shall have joined her,
and when for a long time there shall have been no question of the
things and the people that surround us,--in several centuries,--
hearts like ours will palpitate through hers! People will read her
books, that is to say that they will think according to her ideas
and they will love with her love. But all that does not give her
back to you, does it? With what then can we sustain ourselves if
pride desert us, and what man more than you should have pride in his
mother!
Now dear friend, adieu! When shall we meet now? How I should feel
the need of talking of her, insatiably!
Embrace Madam Maurice for me, as I did on the stairway at Nohant,
and your little girls.
Yours, from the depths of my heart,