2. They secure me, for the first year, fifteen hundred francs a month.
The second year, I may have three thousand monthly; and the fourth,
four thousand, up to the fifteenth year, if I supply them with a
certain number of volumes. We are in partnership for fifteen years.
We are not author and publishers, but associates, partners. I bring
to them the management of all my books made or to be made for fifteen
years. My three associates agree to advance all costs and give me half
the profits above the cost of the volume. My eighteen, twenty-four, or
forty-eight thousand francs a year and the fifty thousand francs paid
down are charged upon my profits.
Such is the basis of the treaty which delivers me forever from
newspapers, publishers, and lawsuits; these gentlemen being substituted
for me in all my rights as to management, sale, etc. They share the
profits of my pen with me, like all other profits of sale. It is
like a farm on shares, where my intellect is the soil, with this
difference,--that I, the owner, have no costs or risks, and that I
finger my profits without anxiety.
This agreement is a great deal more advantageous than that of M. de
Chateaubriand, beside whom speculation places me; for I sell nothing of
my future; whereas for one hundred thousand francs, and twelve thousand
francs a year, rising to twenty-five thousand when he published
anything, M. de Chateaubriand gave up everything.
I would not send you word of all this until the papers were signed.
They were signed on Saturday, 19th, and I started for Tours the 20th;
and now, after one day's rest, I send you this little scrap of a
letter, scribbled in haste.
I have no doubt that between now and spring we shall employ the means
I discovered of preventing piracy; and if I make a journey on that
account, God and you alone know with what rapidity I shall go to
Wierzchownia to tell you all that time, business, cares, and the narrow
limits of a letter, have prevented me from putting, as yet, into my
correspondence, smothered by so many causes!
I am very uneasy about you and yours. It is now an immense time since I
have received any word from you. It has been a torture the more to add
to all my other pains and distresses. You have moments of cruelty which
make me doubt your friendship; then, when I fancy you may be ill, that
your little Anna is a cause of anxiety, or that--that--etc, then my
head decamps!
I was all the more obliged to come here because the National Guard, for
whom I have ten more days of prison to do, worries me horribly. The
grocers and gendarmes are at my heels. I have not been able to go to
my dear Italian Opera for fear they should arrest me. At this moment I
must finish "Illusions Perdues" in order to be done with Werdet, and
the third _dizain_; also two works for the "Presse" and two for the
"Figaro." After which, my pen is free, and my new treaty will go into
execution. Now, as Werdet is much disposed to torment me, I must give
him his devil of a volume as soon as may be.
I shall have a hard year, because, to reach a tolerable condition, I
must complete what my pen already owes; and besides that, show a value
of ten volumes to my associates. Until I do that, I shall be miserable.
After having killed my janissaries (creditors), I must, like Mahmoud,
introduce a vast reform into my States. So here I am in my garret,
having paid all, evacuated the rue Cassini, and keeping no one but
Auguste and a boy for all service. I have resolved never to dine from
home and to continue my monk's life for three years.
I left Paris so hurriedly that I have not brought with me the sacred
seal, nor the autograph I wanted to send you; this will prove to you
the perturbations of my triumph.
Three days hence I shall go, I think, to Rochecotte, to see the
Duchesse de Dino, and the Prince de Talleyrand, whom I have never seen;
and you know how I desire to see the witty turkey who plucked the eagle
and made it tumble into the ditch of the house of Austria. As for
Madame de Dino, I have already met her at Madame Appony's.
I finished this very morning "L'Enfant Maudit." You will not recognize
that poor nugget; it is chased, mounted, and set with pearls. Read it
again in the "Études Philosophiques" with "Le Secret des Ruggieri" and
"Le Martyr Calviniste," and ask yourself what sort of iron head it was
that could fight and write and suffer all at once. I wrote "La Vieille
Fille" in the midst of these worries, struggles, and preoccupations.
Have you sometimes prayed God for me, with all the force of your
beautiful, ingenuous soul, that I might obtain some sort of
tranquillity?--for I still owe the sums I owed before. But I have no
longer to find them. This mode of payment leaves me my time free and
relieves me of worry. I spare you the details of the agreement, which
has been the object of long examination by my lawyers, and business
agents, very devoted men, who think it good and honourable.
You could never believe how I miss the bulletin of your calm and
solitary life, what interest I take in that life, and what peace the
contemplation of it sheds upon my agitated life. Either it is very bad
of you to cut me off, or you are ill; on each side anxiety, thinking
that you suffer or that your friendship diminishes.
Well, adieu. I meant to write you only one word: there is truce between
misfortune and me. But when once I begin to talk to you, the pen is
never heavy in my fingers. I wish you all mercies in your life, for
this letter and its wishes will reach you, I suppose, about Christmas
day. Many amiable things to M. Hanski, and a kiss to your dear Anna on
the forehead.
I return to my corrections, for I must finish "Illusions Perdues" for
December 10, in default of which I shall fall back into lawsuits.
La Grenadière has escaped me; it is sold; but the cruel event that has
weighed me down this year has changed my desire for that poor cottage.
I could not live in it if I had it. I am looking for a vineyard where I
could build without the cost being much.
PARIS, December 1, 1836.
I have just returned from Touraine, where I wrote you the letter of
a man of business. You will know, at the moment when this letter is
racing along the roads, that you have no more anxieties to share in
relation to the financial affairs of the monk of Chaillot. I kneel
humbly at your feet and beg you to grant me plenary indulgence for all
the tears I have heretofore shed upon them.
You made me smile when you reproached me in your good letter (number
20) for not reading your prose attentively. If I read the Holy
Scriptures as I read your letters I should have to go and stand by
Saint-Jérôme; and if I read my own books in that way, there would be
no faults in them. You say that I do not answer certain things. As to
that, I can only be silent.
Now, before all, business. Poor Boulanger is an artist both proud and
poor, a noble and kind nature. As soon as I got any money I carried him
the five hundred francs, pretending that I had received them; for from
me, perhaps, he would not have taken them. Now that the matter concerns
me only, there is no hurry, and to say it once for all, you need only
send me a bill of exchange on Rothschild to my order. Now that you
have sent me the proper address, all is well. You will receive the
picture after our Exhibition, which begins in February. I have not the
courage to allow the copy only to be exhibited. Poor Boulanger would
die of grief. He sees a whole future in it. Since I wrote to you about
it many stern judges have seen it, and they all put this work above
many others. There was question of a poor engraver for the picture.
Planche went to see Boulanger and advised him to despise the thousand
francs offered, and wait the effect the picture would produce in the
Salon,--assuring him he would then have the best engravers and a better
price at his command. There's a little of Titian and Rubens mingled in
it. The copy will be substituted for the original for my mother, who
will see no difference, and who, between ourselves, cares little for
it. You will therefore have the canvas on which Boulanger has put all
his strength and for which I posed thirty times.
What a misfortune that I cannot send you a beautiful frame that I
brought from Touraine and which is now being regilt! I got it for
twenty francs, and there is in it more than two hundred francs of days'
work paid fifty years ago to the carver who made it.
Since I wrote you I have been very ill. All these distresses,
discussions, toils, and fatigues produced, at Saché, a nervous,
sanguineous attack. I was at death's door for one whole day. But much
sleep and the woods of Saché put me right in three days.
In your letter I find a reproach which, between ourselves, is serious;
that relating to an evening at the Opera. You must know me very little
if you do not think that after the sorrow that fell upon me my mourning
is eternal, at every moment; that it follows me in all my joys, at
my work, everywhere. Oh! for pity's sake, since you alone can touch
that wound in my heart, never touch it roughly. My affections of that
kind are immutable; they are held in a part of my heart and soul where
nothing else enters. There is room there for two sentiments only; it
was needful for the first to terminate, as it has, before the other
could take all its strength; and now that other is infinite. Of what
good would be the power with which I am invested if not to make within
myself a sanctuary, pure and ever ardent, where nothing of outside
agitation can penetrate? The image placed on high upon that rock, pure,
inaccessible, can never be taken down; and if she herself descended
from it, she could never prevent her place from being marked there
forever.
Under this point of view, whether I go to hear "Guillaume Tell" or
remain to weep in my chimney-corner, all is immutable in that centre
where few words ever come. But, dear, remember also that I am not
worldly; I am so little that that the few steps I take in society
assume a gravity that alarms me. Once more, use your analytical mind
and ask yourself, writing down on paper the dates of my works, what
time I should have to write them if I allowed myself a pleasure, a
festivity, a distraction. Since the winter began, which is now two
months, I have been but twice to the Opera, and each time with Madame
Delannoy and her daughter, Madame Visconti being absent.
Now that I have gained the relief of having no more financial
anxieties, I have exchanged those cares for incessant labour. The ten
days a month that material struggle cost me will now be employed in
work; for, to gather the fruits of this new arrangement, I must not
leave for eighteen months this garret that you think so salubrious. It
is not. The dormer-window is too high up; I cannot look out of it. As
soon as I can, I shall go down to work on the second floor, where the
air is better, more abundant.
Any other than myself would be frightened at my _pen obligations_. I
must give within the next three months: "La Haute Banque" and "La Femme
Supérieure" to the "Presse;" "César Birotteau" and "Les Artistes" to
the "Figaro;" publish the "Illusions Perdues" and the third _dizain_,
and prepare for April the "Mémoires d'une jeune Mariée" without
counting what I have to do on the third and fourth Parts of the "Études
Philosophiques." Believe me, the man who achieves such work has no time
for puerile amusements. It is now three years that I have not taken a
_penful_ of ink without seeing your name; for accident made me keep
one of your visiting cards, and I placed it on my inkstand. You will
not believe that since that time I have never become _blasé_ on the
infantile pleasure of seeing your name married to all my thoughts.
I put it there to be able to write correctly your name and address,
and yet you reproach me with not reading your letters properly! You
understand that I respect too much the pure friendship that you allow
me to feel for you to talk to you about things that I despise; in the
first place, it would give me a conceited air; and you know whether I
have ever been accused of conceit.
Seriously, I live much at Wierzchownia. I am interested in all you
tell me; your visits to neighbours, your affairs, your pleasures,
your park which extends to right and left; all that occupies my mind.
Read this as I write it, with a childlike heart; for these affairs of
yours are my affairs, as, perhaps, you and M. Hanski make mine yours,
in the evenings, deploring my troubles--now over. If you are sad, I
am saddened; when your letter is gay I am gay. Solitude produces this
quick exchange of affections. The soul has the faculty of living on the
spot that pleases it. Certainly, it needed the desire to be with you,
at least in painting, to make me bear the loss of thirty days which
Boulanger required. You alone are in the secret of my affairs, as you
are in the secret of what Madame de Berny was to me. You alone know my
mourning and a loss which can never be repaired; for here the sky is
inclement, it "is too high," as you say in Poland, and you are too far
off. But keep me, very whole and without diminution, that affection
which makes me less sad in sad hours, and gayer in the bright ones.
Remember that I have no life but one of toil, that I am not in the
midst of the talk that is made about me, that the emotions of fame do
not reach me, that I live by a little hope and sun, in a hidden nest!
The autograph of Mademoiselle Mars is addressed to me. It relates
to her part in "La Grande Mademoiselle." There's the mysterious
simplified. As soon as I have the "George Sand" I will send it to you;
but I should like you also to have the "Aurore Dudevant," so that you
should possess her under both forms.
Continue, I beg you, to tell me all you think of me, without paying
heed to my laments. You are right; better any suffering than
dissimulation. But, seriously speaking, I see that you listen too much
to your first impulse; you are, forgive me, violent and excitable, and
in your first anger you are capable of breaking things without knowing
whether they can be mended. I have put the word _seriously_ to give
weight to my jesting. Do not therefore allow yourself to be carried
away by the tattle of calumny; if any one were to come and tell me--as
they did you--that you had married Alexandre Dumas, do you not think I
should have laughed heartily--all the while regretting that a life so
beautiful and noble should become a subject for tattle? Yes, seriously,
I should always regret to see calumny brush the noble forehead of a
woman, even if it left nothing behind it. In that I am just as positive
as M. Hanski in my opinions. We men, we can defend ourselves; we have
a stronger flight, which can put us above the rubbish of the press
and the slanders of society. But you! you, who live calm and solitary
within the precincts of a home, without our forum and our sword, truly
it pains me when I know that a woman who is indifferent to me is made
the object of calumny, or even ridicule. From you to me, you know
whether in my judgments I am actuated by the narrow sentiments with
which artists and writers usually speak of their comrades. I live apart
from all such matters. Well, D... is a smirched man, a mountebank, and
worse than that, a man of no talent. They have again offered me the
cross, and I have again refused it.
I flattered myself that the post would carry to you more quickly than
usual the letter in which I announced to you the end of the money
troubles that caused you so much pain. Have I sufficiently proved my
friendship in telling you sorrows that I concealed from the rest of the
world? Now, I shall have only my work to talk to you about.
When I see you I will tell you in detail about these days of penury,
these fights of which you know only the main features, for I sent you
merely bulletins. If there is some confusion in my letters it is that
their dates are irregular; I quit them and return to them as my hurried
occupations will allow. My way of working is still so difficult!
I entreat you, read each letter as if we were at the day on which it
was written; and remember that nothing can prevail against her to whom
it is addressed. It grieves me that, apropos of this joy set into the
brass of my work, you should speak of hopes being lost! We will explain
all that later, for, if I accomplish my tasks by the months of May or
June, I shall take my flight to your great plain, and you will see
your white serf otherwise than in painting. Then you shall see him
famous, for by that time I shall have published: "César Birotteau," "La
Torpille," the third _dizain_, "Illusions Perdues," "La Haute Banque,"
"La Femme Supérieure," "Les Mémoires d'une jeune Mariée,"--all great
and fine paintings added to my gallery.
What an outcry has been made against "La Vieille Fille"! When you laugh
on reading it, you will ask yourself what the manners and morals of
these French journalists are--the most infamous that I know of!
I cannot tell you much that is new about my life; for my life is
eighteen hours' daily work in a garret, where there is a bed (I never
leave it), and six hours' sleep. My health will require great care,
because it is beginning to be much impaired by the toil and the great
anxieties to which I have been a prey. What I say is based on serious
facts. I must submit to physicians, humbly, or I shall quickly be
destroyed.
Without vanity of author, _yes_, re-read the "Lys;" the work gains by
being read a second time. But I am not deceived about the blemishes
that are still in it. But they shall disappear; although the angel who
is no more declared it without a fault.
You must never forget, dear, that I have _all_ to paint, and that each
subject needs different colours. We can't relate Mademoiselle Cormon,
the Chevalier de Valois, Suzanne, and du Bousquier in the style of
Madame de Mortsauf, especially before a herd of envious beings who will
say that I am aging unless I differentiate myself.
You send me wishes for my happiness; pray for me only that God will
support me in my strength for work and in my resignation. Solitude
with one hope--that is my life; it was that of the Fathers in the
wilderness. Work is the staff with which I walk, indifferent to all,
except the thought that is placed in the sanctuary. _Una fides._
Outside of that, there are nought but distractions in which the heart
has no share. I mean the lifted heart, which is full of grief, but in
which lives a sacred hope. You do not wholly know that vast domain; if
you did you would not scold me.
In "Illusions Perdues" there is a young girl named Eve, who, to my
eyes, is the most delightful creation that I have ever made.
Adieu; here's a half-day stolen from proofs, business, work. But in
writing to you I see you, just as if I were studying the Almanach de
Gotha at your house in Geneva; and when I think of that halt made in my
sorrows, I fancy that all about me is gold and that I have nothing to
do.
I will tell you another time of the visit I paid to Madame de Dino
and M. de Talleyrand at Rochecotte in Touraine. M. de Talleyrand is
amazing. He had two or three gushes of ideas that were prodigious. He
invited me strongly to go and see him at Valençay, and if he lives I
shall not fail to do so. I still have Wellington and Pozzo di Borgo to
see, so that my collection of antiques may be complete.
Anna's dog is always on my desk. Tell her that her _horse_ commends
himself to her memory. A thousand compliments to the inhabitants
of your kingdom. Are your affairs doing well? is M. Hanski more at
liberty? are his enterprises successful? You cut me off too many
details of your proprietary mechanism. When you think of it, trace me a
few itineraries of how to go to you. I have my reasons for wishing to
know the various routes that lead there.
Well, again adieu, and tender wishes for all that concerns you. I am
in terror when I think of you on the roads where there are wolves and
Jewish coachmen.
This week I give Boulanger his last sitting. As soon as I have finished
"Illusions Perdues" I will write to you. Till then I am caught in a
vice, day and night.