GENEVA, January, 1834.
_Willingly_, but you will bring me back to your house, will you
not?--for I can't get accustomed to be two steps away from you, doing
nothing, without better employing my time.
If you go into the town I will ask you to be so kind--No, I will go
myself.
GENEVA, January, 1834.
MADAME,--To a man who considers happy moments as the most profitable
moments of existence, it is permitted to wish not to lose any part of
the sums he amasses. It is only in the matter of joy that I wish to be
Grandet.
If I take this morning the time that you would give me, from three to
ten o'clock, would you refuse me? No? Good. If you love me?--yes--you
will be visible at twelve or one o'clock.
Forgive my avarice; I possess as yet nothing but the happiness which
heaven bestows. Of that I may be avaricious, since I have nothing else.
To you, a thousand affectionate respects, and my obeisances to the
honourable Maréchal of the Ukraine and noble circumjacent regions.
GENEVA, January, 1834.
I cannot come because I am more unwell than I expected to be, and going
out might do me harm. If you would have the kindness to send me back a
little orgeat you would do me a real service, for I don't know what to
drink, and I have a consuming thirst.
I have spent my day very sadly, trying to work, and finding myself
incapable of it. So, I think I shall go to bed in a few hours.
A thousand thanks, and present my respects to the Grand Maréchal.
GENEVA, January, 1834.
MADAME,--If it were not that I get impatient and suffer at losing so
much time, both for that which gives me pleasure and also for my work,
I should be this morning well, and like a man who has had a fever. I
don't know whether I had better go out or keep my room; but I frankly
own that here, alone, I worry horribly.
A thousand thanks for your good care, and forgive me that, yesterday, I
was more surprised than grateful at your visit, which touched me deeply
after you had left. I don't know if you know that there are things that
get stronger as they get older.
A thousand thanks and grateful regards to M. Hanski. How stupid I am
to have made you anxious for so slight a matter; but how happy I am to
know that you have as much friendship for me as I for you.
GENEVA, January, 1834.
My love, this morning I am perfectly well. I was embarrassed yesterday
because there were for you, under the things you moved about, two
letters I send with this.
_Mon Dieu!_ my love, I am afraid that step of yours (your visit to my
room) may be ill taken, and that you exposed the two letters. For other
reasons, _Mon Dieu!_ certainly, I wanted to see you here! I have such
need to cure my cold that if I go out it cannot be till this evening.
I am up; I could not stay in bed longer, I am too uncomfortable. I must
talk or have something to do. Inaction kills me. Yesterday, I spent a
horrible evening thinking of what I had to do. I am this morning like a
man who has had a fever.
A thousand tender caresses. _Mon Dieu!_ how I suffer when I don't see
you. I have a thousand things to tell you.
GENEVA, January, 1834.
What have I done that last evening should end thus, my dear, beloved
Eve? Do you forget that you are my last hope in life? I don't speak
of love, or human sentiments, you are more than all that to me. Why
do you trample under your feet all the hopes of our life in a word?
You doubt one who loves you freely with delights; to whom to feel you
is delirious happiness, who loves you _in æternum_, and you do not
doubt...!
O my love! you play very lightly with a life you chose to have, and
which, moreover, has been given to you with an entire devotion which I
should have given you if you had not demanded it. I like better that
you did wish for it.
I love you with too much constancy that such disputes should not be
mortal to me. _Mon Dieu!_ I have told you the secrets of my life, and
you ought, in return for such unlimited confidence, to spare him who
lives in you the torture of such doubts. You hold me by the hand, and
the day you withdraw that adored hand you alone will know the reason of
what becomes of me.
My beloved Eve, I commit extravagance on extravagance. It is impossible
to think of anything but you. It is not a _desire_, though I have fully
the right to desire pleasure more keenly than other men, and this
desire renders me stupefied at times; no, it is a need to breathe your
air, to see you, and yesterday you gave me eternal memories of beauty.
If I had no sacred pecuniary obligations (and I commit the folly of
forgetting them sometimes), we would not think of the rue Cassini. No.
Yesterday at Diodati I said to myself: "Why should I quit my Eve; why
not follow her everywhere?" I wish it, myself. I accept all sufferings
when I see you; and you, you wounded me yesterday.
But you do not love as I do; you do not know what love is; I, for
my sorrow, have known its delights, and I see that from Neufchâtel
to my death I can reach the end desired through my whole youth, and
concentrate my life and my affections on a single heart!
Dearest, dearest, I am too unhappy from the things of life not to make
it a cruelty in her I love and idolize to cause me a shadow of grief. I
would like better the most horrible of agonies to causing you pain.
Must I come and seek a kiss?
GENEVA, January, 1834.
Your doubts do me harm. You are more powerful than all. Angel of my
life, why should I not follow you everywhere? Because of poverty. _Mon
Dieu_, you have nothing to fear. From the day on which I told you that
I loved you, nothing has altered this delicious life; it is my only
life. Do not dishonour it by suspicions; do not trouble our pleasures.
There was no one before you in my heart; you will fill it forever. Why
do you arm yourself with thoughts of my former life? Do not punish me
for my beautiful confidence. I wish you to know all my past, because
all my future is yours. Break your heart! Sacrifice you to anything
whatever! Why, you don't know me! I am ashamed to bring you sufferings.
I am ashamed not to be able to give you a life in harmony with the
life of the heart. I suffer unheard-of woes, which you efface by your
presence.
Pardon, my love, for what you call my coquetries. Pardon a Parisian
for a simple Parisian talk; but what you will shall be done. I will go
to see no one. Two visits of a quarter of an hour will end all. Perish
a thousand times the society of Geneva rather than see you sad for a
quarter of an hour's conversation. It would be ridiculous (for others)
that I should occupy myself with you only. I was bound to respect you,
and in order to talk to you so much it was necessary that I should
talk with Madame P... Besides, what trifles! Before the Ocean of which
you talk, are you going to concern yourself about a miserable spider?
_Mon Dieu!_ you don't know what it is to love _infinitely_.
What I wrote you this morning is of a nature to show you how false are
your fears. I never ceased to look at you while talking to Madame P...
Ah! dearest, my dear wife, my Eva, I would willingly sell my talent for
two thousand ducats! I would follow you like a shadow. Do you wish to
go back to Wierzchownia? I will follow you and stay there all my life.
But we must have pretexts, and, unfortunate that I am, I cannot leave
Paris without satisfying editors and creditors.
I have received two letters; one from that good Borget, the other from
my sister. Troubles upon troubles. To have at all moments the sight of
paradise and the sufferings of hell,--is that living?
GENEVA, January, 1834.
My love, my only life, my only thought, oh! your letter! it is written
forever on my heart.
Listen, celestial angel, for you are not of this earth. I will reply to
you on these things once for all. Fame, vanity, self-love, literature,
they are scarcely clouds upon our sky. You trample all that twenty
times a day beneath your feet, which I kiss twenty times.
Oh, my angel, see me at your knees as I tell you this: if I have had
the most fugitive of reputations it has come when I did not want it.
I was drunk for it till I was twenty-two. I wanted it as a pharos to
attract to me an angel. I had nothing with which to please; I blamed
myself. An angel came; I let myself suffer in her bosom, hiding from
her my desires for a young and beautiful woman. She saw those desires
and said to me: "When she comes I will be your mother, I will have the
love of a mother, the devotion of a mother."[1]
Then one day the misery of my life grew greater. The toils of night and
day began. She who had offered me, on her knees, her fortune, which I
had taken, which I was returning at the peril of my life, she watched,
she corrected, she refined, as I refined, corrected, watched. Then all
my desires were extinguished in work. It was no longer a question of
fame, but of money. I _owed_, and I had nothing.
Three years I worked without relaxation, having drawn a brass circle
around me from 1828 to 1831. I abhor Madame de C[astries], for she
broke that life without giving me another,--I do not say a comparable
one, but without giving me what she promised. There is not the shadow
of wounded vanity, oh! but disgust and contempt.
You alone have made me know the vanities of fame. When I saw you at
Neufchâtel I wanted to be something. In you then begins, more splendid
than I dreamed it, that dreamed life.
Oh! my Eve, you alone in my life to come!--Alas! like Louis Lambert I
wish that I could give you my past. Thus, nothing that is _success,
fame, Parisian distractions_, moves me. There is but one power that
makes me accept my present life: _Toil_. It calms the exactions of my
fiery temperament. It is because I fear myself that I am chaste.
As for this seclusion that you want, hey! I want it as much as you. It
is not being a fop to tell you that since Neufchâtel three ravishing
women have come to the rue Cassini, and that I did not even cast a
man's glance on seeing them.
My Eve, I love you better than you love me, for I am alone in the
secret of what I lose, and you know nothing of love but the sentiments
of love. Besides, I love you better, for I have more reasons to love
you. If I were free I would live near you, happy to be the steward
of your fortune and the artisan of your wealth, as Madame Carraud's
brother is for Madame d'Argout. I have a security of love, a plenitude
of devotion, which you will only know with time. It needs time to
fathom the infinite. To suffer the whole of life with you, taking a few
rare moments of happiness, yes! To have a lifetime in two years, three,
four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years, and die, yes! Never to
speak to a woman, to refuse myself to all, to live in you, oh, angel!
but that is my thought at all hours. The ... which I told you about
Madame P... was because she had vexed you, and before your suffering I
became besotted, as you before mine.
_Mon Dieu!_ if we lived together, if I had twenty ducats a month, to
you should belong my poems. I would write books, and read them to
you, and we would burn them in our fire. My adored _minette_, I weep
sometimes in thinking that I sell my ideas, that people read me! Ah!
you do not know what I could be if, free for one evening, I could speak
to you, see you, caress you by my thoughts and by myself. Oh! you would
then know that your thoughts of purity, of exclusive tenderness are
mine. Angel of my life, I live in you, for you, by you. Only, if I am
mistaken, tell me so without anger. There is never any false or bad
intention in me. I obey my heart in all that is sentiment. I have never
known what a calculation is. If I mistake, it is in good faith.
My love, let us never separate. In six months I shall be free. Well,
then, no power on earth can disunite us. _La dilecta_ was forty-six
when I was twenty-two. Why talk about your forty years? We have thirty
years before us. Do you think that at sixty-four a man betrays thirty
years' affection?
What! you think that the opera, the salons, fame can distract me from
you? Then you don't know how I love you. I shall be more angry at that
than you at Madame P... No, believe me, I love you as a woman loves and
as a man loves. In my life to come there is nothing but you and work.
My dear gift, my dear star, my sweet spirit, let yourself be caressed
by hope, and say to yourself that I am not amorous or passionate; all
that passes. I love you, I adore you _in æternum_. I believe in you
as I do in myself. _Mon Dieu!_ I would like to know words which could
infuse into you my soul and my thought, which could tell you that you
are in my heart, in my blood, in my brain, in my thought,--in short,
the life of my life; that each beating of my heart gives birth to
a desire full of thee. Oh! you do not know what are three years of
chastity, which spring at every moment to the heart and make it bound,
to the head and make it palpitate. If I were not sober and did not
work, this purity would drive me mad. I alone am in the secret of the
terrible emotions which the emanations from your dear person give me.
It is an unspeakable delirium which, by turns, freezes my nature by the
omnipotence of desire, and makes me burn. I resist follies like those
of the young seigneur cut down by the Elector.
We have, both of us, our sufferings; do not let us dispute that. Let us
love each other, and do not refuse me that which makes all accepted.
In other respects, in all things, angel, I am submissive to you as to
God. Take my life, ask me to die, order me all things, except not to
love you, not to desire you, not to possess you. Outside of that all is
possible to me in your name.
[Footnote 1: Madame de Berny is meant, and the invention of this letter
is infamous. See letter to Madame Carraud in Appendix, written _at the
same time_ as this spurious letter.--TR]
GENEVA, January, 1834.
If you only knew the superstitions you give me! When I work I put the
talisman on my finger; I put it on the first finger of the left hand,
with which I hold my paper, so that your thought clasps me. You are
there, with me. Now, in seeking from the air for words and ideas,
I ask them of that delicious ring; in it I have found the whole of
"Séraphita."
Love celestial, what things I have to say to you, for which one needs
the sacred hours during which the heart feels the need of baring
itself. The adorable pleasures of love are the only means of arriving
at that union, that fusion of souls. Dear, with what joy I see the
fortunes of my heart and the fate of my soul secured to me. Yes, I will
love you alone and solely through my life. You have all that pleases
me. You exhale, for me, the most intoxicating perfume a woman can have;
that alone is a treasure of love.
I love you with a fanaticism that does not exclude the quietude
of a love without possible storms. Yes, say to yourself well that
I breathe by the air you breathe, that I can never have any other
thought than you. You are the end of all for me. You shall be the young
_dilecta_--already I call you the _pre dilecta_.
Do not murmur at this alliance of the two sentiments. I should like to
think I loved you in her, and that the noble qualities which touched me
and made me better than I was were all in you.
I love you, my angel of earth, as they loved in the middle ages, with
the most complete fidelity, and my love will always be grand, without
stain; I am proud of my love. It is the principle of a new life. Hence,
the new courage that I feel under my last adversities. I would be
greater, be something glorious, so that the crown to place upon your
head should be the most leafy, the most flowery of all those that great
men have nobly won!
Never, therefore, have fear or distrust; there are no abysses in
heaven! A thousand kisses full of caresses; a thousand caresses full of
kisses! _Mon Dieu!_ shall I never be able to make you see how I love
you, you, my Eve!
_À bientôt_; a thousand kisses will be in my first look.
GENEVA, January, 1834.
My loved love, with a single caress you have returned me to life.
Oh! my dearest, I have not been able to either sleep or work. Lost
in the remembrance of that evening, I have said to you a world of
tendernesses. Oh! you have that divine soul to which one remains
attached during a lifetime. My soul, you have, through love, the
delicious language of love which makes all griefs and annoyances
fly away on wings. Loved angel, do not obscure with any doubt the
inspirations of love of which your dear caress is but the interpreter.
Do not think you can ever enter into comparison with any one, no matter
who. But, my loved darling, my flower of heaven, do you not understand,
you, all charm and all truth, that a poor poet can be struck at finding
the same heart, at being loved beyond his hopes? My adored wife, yes,
it was for you that the heart of the most delicate and sweetest woman
that ever was brought me up. I shall be permitted to say to her: "You
wished to be twenty years old to love me better and give me even the
pleasures of vanity. Well, I have met with what you wished me." She
will be joyous for _us_. Dear eternal idol, my beautiful and holy
religion, I know how the memories of another love must wound a proud
and delicate love. But not to speak of it to you would be to deprive
you of nameless fêtes of the soul, and joys of love. There are such
identities of tenderness and soul that I am proud for you, and I know
not if it is you I loved in her. Then, an ungovernable jealousy has so
habituated me to think with open heart, and say all to her in whom I
live, that I could never hide from you a thought. No, you are my own
heart.
Yes, to you all is permitted. I shall tell you naïvely all that I
think that is fine, and all that I think that is bad. You are an I,
handsomer, prettier.
My love has neither exaltation, nor more, nor less, nor anything that
is terrestrial. Oh! my dear Eve, it is the love of the angel always at
the same degree of force, of exaltation. To feel, to touch your hand of
love, that hand of soft, _proud_ sentiments,--do you understand me, my
angel, tender, kind, passionate,--that hand, polished and relaxed of
love, that is a happiness as great as your caress of honey and of fire.
This is what I wished to say to my timid angel, who thought that
all caresses were not _solidaire_. One, the lightest as the most
passionate, comprises all. In that you see to the bottom of my soul. A
kiss on your cherished lips,--those virgin lips that have no souvenirs
yet (which makes you in my eyes as pure as the purest young girl),--a
kiss will be a talisman for the desires of love, when it contains all
the caresses of love. Our poor kiss, still disinherited of all our
joys, only goes to your heart, and I would that it enwrapped all your
person. You would see that possession augments, enlarges love. You
would know your Honoré, your husband; and you would know that he loves
you more daily.
My dearest Eva, never doubt me, but doubt yourself less. I have
told you that there is in you, in your letters, in your love, in
its expression, a something I know not what that is more than in
other letters and expressions that I thought inimitable. But you are
twenty-eight years old,--that is the grand secret. But, dear treasure,
you have the most celestial soul that I know, and you have intoxicating
beauties. _Mon Dieu!_ how shall I tell you that I am drunk at the
faintest scent of you, and that had I possessed you a thousand times
you would see me more intoxicated still, because there would be hope
and memory where now there is only hope.
Do you remember the bird that has but one flower? That is the history
of my heart and my love. Oh! dear celestial flower, dear embalming
perfumes, dear fresh colours, my beautiful stalk, do not bend, guard
me always. At each advance of a love which goes and ever will go on
increasing, I feel in my heart _foyers_ of tenderness and adoration.
Oh! I want to be sure of you as I am of myself. I feel at each
respiration that I have in my heart a constancy that nothing can alter.
I wept on the road to Diodati, when, after having promised me all the
caresses that you have granted me, a woman was able, with a single
word, to cut the woof she seemed to have taken such pleasure in
weaving. Judge if I adore you, you who perceive nothing of these odious
manœuvres, who deliver yourself up with candour and happiness to love,
and who speaks thus to all my natures.
There is my confession made. I think that you have all the noblenesses
of the heart, for, adored angel, one should respect the weakness and
even the crimes of a woman, and if I hide nothing from your heart, it
is that it ought always to be _mine_. So I send you my sister's chatter
and the letter of Madame de C[astries] on condition that you burn all,
my angel. I know you so true, so great; ah! I would not hesitate to
read you the letter of the _dilecta_ if you wish it, for you are really
myself. I would not hide from you the shadow of a thought, and you
ought, at all hours, to enter my heart, as into the palace you have
chosen to spread your treasures in, to adorn it, and find pleasure in
it. All should there be yours.
If Madame C...'s letter displeases you, say so frankly, my love.
I will write to her that my affections are placed in a heart too
jealous for me to be permitted to correspond with a woman who has her
reputation for beauty, for charm, and that I act frankly in telling her
so. I wish to write this letter from myself. I would like well that you
should tell it to me.
As for my money troubles, do not be uneasy about them. It is the basis
of my life, till the end of July, love, which makes everything easy to
me to bear.
Pardon me for having made known to you yesterday's trouble. Oh, dear,
always beautiful flower, I am ashamed to have made you know the extent
of your mission, but you are an inexhaustible treasury of affection, of
love, of tenderness, and I shall always find in you more consolations
than I have troubles. You have put into my thoughts and all my hours a
light, a gleam, which makes me endure all.
I wake up happy to love you; I go to bed happy to be loved. It is the
life of angels; and my despair comes from feeling in it the discord
which my want of fortune and of liberty puts between the desires of
my heart, the impulses of my nature, and the works which keep me in
an ignoble cabin like the moujiks of Paulowska. If I were only at
Paulowska! I would that you were I for a moment to know how you are
loved. Then I would be sure that seeing so much love, so much devotion,
such great security of sentiment, you would never have a doubt, and you
would love _in æternum_ a heart that loves you thus.
A thousand kisses, and may each have in itself a thousand caresses to
you like that of yesterday to me.
GENEVA, January, 1834.
Dear soul of my soul, I entreat you, attach yourself solely--your
cares, your thoughts, your memory--to what will be in my life a
constant thought. Let the piece of malachite become by you alone an
inkstand. I will explain the shape. It should be cut six-sided; the
sides should be about the dimensions of the sides of your card-basket,
except that they ought to end, at the top, squarely, as at the base;
they should go up, enlarging from the base to the top, and, to decide,
logically, the conditions of the stand, the pot for the ink (hollowed
out in the malachite) must have at its surface a diameter equal to this
line [drawn]. The cover, shaped like a _marchepain_, must be round,
and sunk in the pot; it should be simple, and end in a silver-gilt
knob. Let the stand have a handle, fastened on by simple buttons,
and this handle, of bronzed silver-gilt, should be like that of your
card-basket. Have engraved upon it our motto: _Adoremus in æternum_,
between the date of your first letter and that of Neufchâtel.
The inkstand should be mounted on a pedestal, also of six sides,
suitably projecting; and on each side, at the junction of the
pedestal and the stand, there should be, in art-term, a moulding of
silver-gilt, which is simply a round cordon, which must harmonize with
the proportions of the inkstand. Then I think that at the top of the
sides this moulding should be repeated. In the middle of each side of
the pedestal put a star; then, in small letters, in the middle of each
large side, these words: _Exaudit,--Vox,--Angeli_, separated by stars
(which makes "Eva").
If you want to be magnificent you will add a paper-knife of a single
piece of malachite and a powder-pot, the shape of which I will explain
to you.
Not to displease that person I will give him Décamp's drawing which you
can get back, and I will ask him, in exchange, for a piece of malachite
for my alarm-clock.
Here is Susette. I can only say that this will make me renounce the
pleasure of making you pick up on the shores of the lake the pebbles
I intended to have made into an alarm-clock. I went, yesterday, to
see if we could walk along the shore. I wanted to connect you with
these souvenirs, to make you see that one can thus enlarge life and
the world, and have the right to surround you with my thought through
a thousand things, as I would like to surround myself with yours. Thus
sentiment moulds material objects and gives them a soul and a voice.
What! _bébête_, did you not guess that the dedication was a surprise
which I wished to give you? You are, for longer than you think, the
thought of my thought.
Yes, I shall try to come to-night at nine.
GENEVA, January 19, 1834.
My loved angel, I am almost mad for you, as one is mad. I cannot put
two ideas together that you do not come between them. I can think of
nothing but you. In spite of myself my imagination brings me back to
you. I hold you, I press you, I kiss you, I caress you; and a thousand
caresses, the most amorous, lay hold upon me.
As to my heart, you will always be there, _willingly_; I feel you there
deliciously. But, _mon Dieu!_ what will become of me if you have taken
away my mind. Oh! it is a monomania that frightens me. I rise every
moment, saying to myself, "Come, I'll go there!" Then I sit down again,
recalled by a sense of my obligations. It is a dreadful struggle. It is
not life. I have never been like this. You have consumed the whole of
me. I feel stupefied and happy when I let myself go to thinking of you.
I roll in a delicious revery, where I live a thousand years in a moment.
What a horrible situation. Crowned with love, feeling love in all my
pores, living only for love, and to find oneself consumed by grief and
caught in a thousand spider's-webs.
Oh! my dearest Eva, you don't know. I have picked up your card; it
is there, before me, and I speak to it as if you were there. I saw
you yesterday, beautiful, so admirably beautiful. Yesterday, all the
evening, I said to myself, "She is mine!" Oh! the angels are not as
happy in Paradise as I was yesterday.
GENEVA, February, 1834.
MADAME,--Bautte [chief clock-maker in Geneva] is a great seigneur who
is bored by small matters; and as you deign to attach some importance
to the chain of your slave, I send you the worthy Liodet, who will
understand better what is wanted, and will put more good-will into
doing it. I have told him to put a link to join the two little chains.
Accept a thousand compliments, and the respectful homage of your moujik,