PARIS, August 11, 1834.
Thank you, madame, for your good and amiable letter of the 3rd of this
month. The envelope delighted me with its hieroglyphics, in which you
have put such religious ideas.
I have many answers to give you. But a thousand million wafts
of incense for your ideas on "Philippe le Discret." You share my
sentiments on Schiller and my ideas of what I ought to do.
Oh! spend the winter in Vienna? I shall be there, yes--You have the
books? Good.
No, I see no one, neither man nor woman. My _tigers_ bore me; they have
neither claws nor brains. Besides, I seldom go to the Opera now.
How sweet your letter is! with what happiness I have read it! that
description of your house, the flowers, the garden, your life so well
arranged, even the blue devils on the watch for M. Hanski. Thank you
for all the details you give me.
At the moment when I was reading the religious part of your letter,
that where the good thoughts went to my heart, my Carmelite nuns, who
had opened the windows of their chapel on account of the heat, began
to sing a hymn which crossed our little street and my courtyard. I was
strangely moved. Your writing gleamed in my eyes and softly entered
my heart, more living than ever. This is not poesy, but one of those
realities that are rare in life.
"La Recherche de l'Absolu" kills me. It is an immense subject; the
finest book I can do, say _some_. Alas! I shall not be through with
it before the 20th of this month, in nine days. After that, I spread
my wings and take a three weeks' furlough, for my head cannot sustain
another idea. On the 21st I shout: "Vive l'Almanach de Gotha!" God
grant that ten days later I present to you myself the "Absolu." I will
not tell you anything about it. That's an author's coquetry, which you
will pardon when you lay down the book.
My life, it is fifteen hours' toil, proofs, author's anxieties, phrases
to polish; but, there's a distant gleam, a hope which lights me.
At last, France is beginning to bestir itself about my books. Fame
will come too late; I prefer happiness. I want to be something great
to increase the enjoyments of the person loved. I can only say that to
you. You understand me and you will not be jealous of that thought.
Madame de Castries is dying; the paralysis has attacked the other leg.
Her beauty is no more; she is blighted. Oh! I pity her. She suffers
horribly and inspires pity only. She is the only person I go to see,
and then for one hour every week. It is more than I really can do, but
that hour is compelled by the sight of that slow death. She lives with
a cataplasm of Burgundy pitch from the nape of the neck to the loins. I
give you these details because you ask for them.
So, constant labour, sundry griefs, the condition of Madame de Berny,
who, on her side, droops her head like a flower when its calyx is heavy
with rain. She cannot bear up under her last sorrows. Never did a woman
have more to endure. Will she come safely out of these crises? I weep
tears of blood in thinking that she is necessarily in the country,
while I am necessarily in Paris. Great sorrows are preparing for me.
That gentle spirit, that dear creature who put me in her heart, like
the child she most loved, is perishing, while our affection (that of
her eldest son, and mine) can do nothing to allay her wounds? Oh!
madame, if death takes this light from my life, be good and generous,
receive me. I could think only of going to weep near you. You are the
only person (Borget and Madame Carraud excepted) in whom I have found
the true and sanctifying friendship. In case she dies, France would be
horrible to me. Borget is away; Madame Carraud has not, in herself,
the feminine softness that one needs. Hers is an antique rectitude, a
reasoning friendship which has its angles. You _feel_, you!
Yes, I am overwhelmed by this sorrow which approaches; and that divine
soul prepares me for it, so to speak, in the few lines she is able to
write to me. Yes, I have only your heart into which I can shed the
tears that are in my eyes while writing this in Paris.[1] I am horribly
alone; no one knows the secrets of my heart. I suffer, and before
others I smile. Neither my sister nor my mother comprehend me.
These are sad pages. I have some hope. Mme. de Berny has such a rich
constitution; but her age makes me tremble; a heart so young in a body
that is nearly sixty, that is, indeed, a violent contrast. She has
dreadful inflammations between the heart and lungs. My hand, when I
magnetize her, increases the inflammation. We were obliged, therefore,
to renounce that means of cure; for, as I wrote you, I was able to
spend ten days with her the last of July. Oh! be well yourself! you and
yours! Let me not tremble for the only beings who are dear to me, for
all, at once!
I needed your letter this morning, for this morning I received a
letter from a mutual friend of Madame Bêchet and me, telling me of her
commercial distresses. If my book is not ready to appear she wants
compensation for the delay; the "Absolu" _ought_ to have been finished
in two months! That irritated me. I was weeping with rage--for he does
weep, this _tiger_; he cries out, this eagle!--when your letter came.
It fell into my heart like dew. I blessed you. I clasped you like a
friend. You serened me, you refreshed my soul. Be happy. Shall I ever
cause you a like joy? No, I shall always be your debtor in this way.
I have had other griefs. My Boileau [M. Charles Lemesle], my
hypercritic, my friend, who judges and corrects me without appeal,
has found a good many blunders in the first two 12mo volumes of the
"Médecin de campagne." That makes me desperate. However, we will take
them out. The work shall, some day, be perfect. I was ill for two days
after he showed me those blunders. They are real. We are washing up
between us "La Peau de Chagrin." There must be no faults left on that
edition. Add to all this money anxieties, which will not leave me
tranquil till January, 1835, and there you have all the secrets of my
life. There is one about which I do not speak to you. That one is the
very spring of my life; it is my azure heaven, my hope, my courage, my
strength, my star; it is all that one cannot tell, but it is that which
you will divine. It is the oleander, the rose-bay tree, a lovely form
adored beneath it, the twilight hour, a revery!
Adieu; I return to my furrow, my plough, my goad, and I shout to my
oxen, "Hue!" I am just now writing the _death of Madame Claës_. I write
to you between that scene of sorrow entitled the Death of a Mother,
and the chapter entitled, Devotions of Youth. Remember this. Remember
that between these two chapters your greeting, your letter, full of
friendship, came to give me back a little courage and drive away a
thousand gloomy phantoms. _There_ you were, shining like a star.
The happy husband, no longer _coquebin_ Spachmann, will bind the
manuscript which you must put with that of "Eugénie Grandet." As for
that of the "Duchesse de Langeais," it has been dispersed, I don't know
how. I am very careless about my manuscripts. You had to set a value
upon them which made me proud, in order to make me keep them for you.
So with those of "Séraphita," I am like a mother defending her young.
Do you know what courage there is in calling one's self legitimist?
That party is very abject. The three parties that divide France have
all descended into the mud. Oh! my poor country! I am humiliated,
unhappy at all this. We shall rise out of it, I hope.
I send you no commonplaces. To tell you that I keep in reserve a
thousand sincere and gentle, tender feelings would be nothing; a
feeble portion, indeed, of a friendship which makes me conceive of the
infinite. May the Danube make you strong and give you health; I love
the Danube better than I love the Seine.
I have seen Prince Puckler Muskau here, and he seemed to me a little
Mephistophelean, sprinkled with Voltaireanism. He told me that I was
much appreciated in Berlin, and that if I went there--Ha! ha! bravi!
brava!--But what I like in foreign lands is the good nonsense that I
shall talk in the chimney-corner of 73 Landstrasse.
Adieu; distribute my friendship, regards, and remembrances to those
about you as you will.
[Footnote 1: Compare this with the shameful letter supposed to have
been written about her to Mme. Hanska, Jan. 1834. See p. 112.--TR.]
PARIS, August 20, 1834.
Yesterday I had an inflammation of the brain, in consequence of my too
hard work; but, by the merest chance, I was with my mother, who had
a phial of _balm tranquil_, and bathed my head with it. I suffered
horribly for nine or ten hours. I am better to-day. The doctor wants me
to travel for two months. My unfortunate affairs allow me only twenty
days. I have still ten days' work on the "Recherche de l'Absolu," which
has, like "Louis Lambert," two years ago, very nearly carried me off.
But on the 1st or 2nd of September I shall be on my way to see Vienna.
Impossible to give myself a more agreeable object for a journey. So,
between the 7th and 10th, I shall have the pleasure, you will let me
say happiness, of seeing you.
No, I have had no more letters from your cousin. Something that I do
not know must have made her quarrel with me.
I think as you do on Lamennais' work, "Les Paroles d'un Croyant." I
nearly got myself devoured for saying that from a literary point of
view the form was mere silliness, and that Volney and Byron had already
employed it, and that as to doctrines, they were all taken from the
Saint-Simonians. Really, those kings on a slimy, evil-smelling rock are
only fit for children.
Adieu; you will be indulgent to a poor artist who rattles on with the
intention of having no thought, of being very boyish, and desires only
to let himself go to the one affection that never wearies: friendship
and the sweetest things of the heart. Thank M. Hanski in advance for
his good little letter. At this moment I have no strength to write more
than what I do here. That strength is what in the eighteenth century
they would have called "force of sentiment."
I am so glad to know that you are well lodged and pleased with your
house.
PARIS, August 25, 1834.
I may have alarmed you, madame, but Madame de Berny is better. She
is not recovered, however. No, she remains in a condition of cruel
weakness.
Two days ago I wrote that I should start for Germany; but that was
folly, for it takes ten or twelve days to get to Vienna, as much to
return, and I have but twenty to dispose of. No, it is not possible in
the situation in which I am. "La Recherche de l'Absolu" consumes so
much time that I find myself in arrears in all my deliveries of copy,
consequently in all my payments.
On another hand, I cannot go without leaving the end of "Séraphita" for
the "Revue de Paris," and how can I determine the time it will take me
to finish that work, angelical to some, diabolical to me?
All this worries me; I cannot have my liberty till the month of
November, and then will you still be in Vienna? Yes. But I shall have
only a month to myself, and the question will still be the same. I see
how it is; I must wait till "Philippe II. is done."
I have the weakness and the species of physical melancholy that comes
from abuse of toil. The life of Paris no longer suits me; and while I
feel in my heart a veritable childhood, all that is exterior is aging.
I begin to understand Metternichism in whatever is not the sole and
only sentiment by which I live.
A book has just appeared, very fine for certain souls, often
ill-written, feeble, cowardly, diffuse, which all the world has
proscribed, but which I have read courageously, and in which there are
fine things. It is "Volupté" by Sainte-Beuve. Whoso has not had his
Madame de Couaën is not worthy to live. There are in that dangerous
friendship with a married woman beside whom the soul crouches, rises,
abases itself, is undecided, never resolving on audacity, desiring the
wrong, not committing it, all the delicious emotions of early youth.
In this book there are fine sentences, fine pages, but nothing. It is
the nothing that I like, the nothing that permits me to mingle myself
with it. Yes, the first woman that one meets with the illusions of
youth is something holy and sacred. Unfortunately, there is not in
this book the enticing joyousness, the liberty, the imprudence which
characterize passions in France. The book is puritanical. Madame de
Couaën is not sufficiently a woman, and the danger does not exist. But
I regard the book as very treacherously dangerous. There are so many
precautions taken to represent the passion as weak that we suspect it
of being immense; the rarity of the pleasures renders them infinite in
their short and slight apparitions. The book has made me make a great
reflection. Woman has a duel with man: if she does not triumph, she
dies; if she is not right, she dies; if she is not happy, she dies. It
is appalling.
I have real need of seeing Vienna. I must explore the fields of Wagram
and Essling before next June. I specially want engravings which show
the uniforms of the German army, and I must go in search of them. Have
the kindness to tell me merely if such things exist.
To-day, 25th, it is almost twelve days since I have received any
letters from you. I live in such isolation that I count upon and look
eagerly for the pleasures that come into my desert. Alas! Madame de
Berny's illness has cast me into horrible thoughts. That angelic
creature who, since 1821, has shed the fragrance of heaven into my
life is transformed; she is turning to ice. Tears, griefs, and I can
do nothing. One daughter become insane, another daughter dead, a third
dying, what blows!--And a wound more violent still, of which nothing
can be told. And at last, after thirty years of patience and devotion,
she is forced to separate from her husband under pain of dying if she
remains with him. All this in a short space of time. This is what I
suffer through the heart that created me.
Then, in Berry, Madame Carraud's life is in peril through her
pregnancy. Borget is in Italy. My mother is in despair about my
brother's marriage; she has aged twenty years in twenty days. I am
hemmed in by enormous, obligatory work, and by money cares, also by two
little lawsuits which I have brought to solve the last difficulties of
my literary life.
For all this one needs, as my doctor says, a skull of iron. Unhappily,
the heart may burst the skull. I counted on the trip to Vienna as the
traveller counts on the oasis in the desert; but the impossibility of
it faces me. I must be in Paris from the 20th to the 30th of September.
I have then to pay five hundred ducats, and when one digs the soil with
a pen gold is rare. However, labour will suffice. I shall be free in a
few months, if the abuse of study does not kill me. I begin to fear it.
Tuesday, 26.
To-day I have finished "La Recherche de l'Absolu." Heaven grant that
the work be good and beautiful. I cannot judge of it; I am too weary
with toil, too exhausted by the fatigues of conception. I see only
the reverse side of the canvas. Everything in it is pure. Conjugal
love is here a sublime passion. The love of the young girl is fresh.
It is the Home, at its source. You will read it. You will also read
"Souffrances inconnues," which have cost me four months' labour. They
are forty pages of which I could not write but two sentences a day. It
is a horrible cry, without brilliancy of style, without pretensions
to drama. There are too many thoughts in it, and too much drama to
show on the outside. It is enough to make you shudder, and it is all
true. Never have I been so stirred by any work. It is more than "La
Grenadière," more than "La Femme abandonnée."
At the present moment I am making the final corrections of style on the
"Peau de Chagrin." I reprint it and remove the last blemishes. Oh! my
sixteen hours a day are well employed! I go to the Opera only once a
week now.
Day before yesterday Madame Sand, or Dudevant, just returned from
Italy, met me in the _foyer_ of the Opera, and we took two or three
turns together. I was to breakfast with her the next day, but I could
not go. To-day I have had Sandeau to breakfast, who told me that the
day after that woman abandoned him he took such a quantity of acetate
of morphia that his stomach rejected it, and threw it up without there
having been the slightest absorption. I was sorry I had not received
the confidences of Madame George Sand. He regretted it too,---Jules
Sandeau. The poor lad is very unhappy at this moment. I have advised
him to come and take Borget's room, and share with me until he can
make himself an existence with his plays. That is what has most struck
me the last few days.
Well, I must bid you adieu, and this adieu, in place of the _au revoir
bientôt_ on which I had counted, saddens me to a point I cannot
express. Remember me to all about you. I shall write next to M. Hanski
to thank him for his letter, and explain to him that the present
parliament will be, for the next five years, insignificant. All the
European questions in connection with France are postponed till 1839.
A thousand constant regards.