Yesterday I dined out; a dinner of twenty-five persons at a restaurant;
but what a dinner! It would have cost two or three thousand roubles in
the 60th degree of latitude. I went this morning to see Bertin and have
come home to tell you that all is concluded. Three thousand one hundred
and fifty francs a volume, like those of "Les Mystères." That will make
nine thousand five hundred. I am going to bed, worn-out with fatigue.
February 19.
Shrove-Tuesday, February 19. Oh joy! I have your letter and have just
read it. You ask why I no longer go in the Versailles direction.
Simply because one does not seek that which annoys and displeases. Do
you want to know the only way in which to cease to be to me _unica_ and
_dilecta_? it is to speak of that to me. All that was a bad dream which
must be forgotten in order not to blush for it to one's self. Deprived
of your letters I no longer lived; nor did I live again until once more
I saw your dear handwriting. And you speak to me of Versailles; the
very name sickens me, with the ideas attached to it, and this when I am
so far from you with vast spaces parting us! But you do not know how in
your absence I am deprived of soul and brain. I live by the reception
of one letter, and I no sooner have it than I want another.
Ah! your letter was indeed due me amidst the annoyances and troubles
of all kinds that assail me and the crushing work which implores peace
and has never found it except near you. Even Hetzel, whom I thought a
friend, is getting up with Bertin a foolish squabble with me. If you
only knew in what a fit of misanthropy I went to bed. It was frightful.
But also, with what delight I read those pages so full of sincerity and
affection! One hour of such pure, heavenly enjoyment would make one
accept the martyrdoms of human existence.
Yes, you have every reason to be proud of your child. It is through
seeing young girls of her sphere, those who are the best brought-up
here, that I say to you, and repeat it: you have the right to be proud
of your Anna. Tell her that I love her, for you, whose happiness she
is, and for her own angelic soul which I appreciate so truly. You tell
me, dear countess, that, in the midst of your good success, there is
something in the supreme decision which thwarts you, but you do not
tell me what it is. Please repair that omission; do not let me fancy
evil out of this uncertainty. Nothing, no event in the things of life,
no woman however beautiful, _nothing_ can disturb that which _is_ for
ten years past, because I love your soul as much as your person, and
you will ever be to me the Daffinger. Do you know what is the most
lasting thing in sentiment? It is _la sorcellerie à froid_--charm that
can be deliberately judged. Well, that charm in you has undergone the
coolest examination, and the most minute as well as the most extended
comparison, and all is more than favourable to you. Dear fraternal
soul, you are the saintly and noble and devoted being to whom a man
confides his life and happiness with ample security. You are the
pharos, the light-giving star, the _sicura richezza, senza brama_.
I have understood you, even to your sadnesses, which I love. Among
all the reasons which I find to love you--and to love you with that
flame of youth which was the only happy moment of my past life--there
is not one against my loving, respecting, admiring you. With you
no mental satiety can exist: in that I say to you a great thing; I
say the thing that makes happiness. You will learn henceforth, from
day to day, from year to year, the profound truth of what I am now
writing to you. Whence comes it? I know not; perhaps from similarity
of characters, or that of minds; but, above all, from that wonderful
phenomenon called _entente cordiale_--intimate comprehension--and also
from the circumstances of our lives. We have both been deeply tried
and tortured in the course of our existence; each has had a thirst for
rest in our heart and in our outward life. We have the same worship of
the ideal, the same faith, the same devotion to each other. Well, if
those elements do not produce happiness, as their contraries produce
unhappiness, then we must deny that saltpetre, coal, etc., produce
ashes. But beyond these good reasons, it must be said, dear, that there
is another, a fact, a certainty, the inspiration of a feeling beyond
all else--the inexplicable, intangible, invisible flame which God has
given to certain of his creatures, and which impassions them; for I
love you as we love that which is beyond our reach; I love you as we
love God, as we love happiness.
If the hope of all my life were to fail me, if I lost you, I should not
kill myself, I should not make myself a priest, for the thought of you
would give me strength to endure my life; but I would go to some lonely
corner of France, in the Pyrenees, or the Ariège, and slowly die, doing
and knowing nothing more in this world; I should go at long intervals
to see Anna and talk of you at my ease with her. I should write no
more. Why should I? Are you not the whole world to me? Examining what
I feel in merely waiting for a letter, and what I suffer from a day's
delay, it seems proved to me that I should die of grief. Oh! take care
of yourself! Think that there is more than one life bound to yours.
Take care in everything! Each day my double egotism increases; each day
hope adds to her treasury dreams, longings, expectations. Oh! remain
what I saw you on the Neva!
If you ask me, Madame la comtesse, why I yield myself up to this
verbiage, which, some day soon, will bring a frown to that Olympian
brow, if you would know why I have launched with such a flow upon the
letter-tide, I shall tell you that I have just re-read your letter,
that this is Mardi-gras, and I am taking the sole pleasure that I seek
from the carnival.
Now I must talk health; you will not pardon me if I forget it in
writing to you. I am well, in spite of a slight grippe, and I think
I shall be able to master the enormous work that I must do between
now and March 20. Do not dwell too much upon my troubles and my
toils; do not pity me too much; without this avalanche to sweep away
I should die, consumed by an indefinable ill, called absence, fever,
consumption, nerves, languor--what Chénier has described in his "Jeune
Malade." Therefore I bless heaven for the obligations which misfortune
has placed upon me. I do not count, as I think I told you, on a
theatre success to pay my debts; I count only on the fifty folios of
LA COMÉDIE HUMAINE which I have to do, and which will give me about
fifty thousand francs. It is true that I also expect to bring to a
good conclusion the affair of illustrating "Eugénie Grandet" and the
"Physiologie;" and those two things represent twenty thousand at least.
So I shall fully have enough, and over, for my journey and stay in
Dresden.
Adieu until to-morrow. To-morrow I continue my journal after putting
this one into the post. If you knew what emotion seizes me when I throw
these packets into the box! My soul flies to you with the papers; I
tell them a thousand foolish things; like a fool, I fancy they are
going to repeat them to you; it is impossible to me to comprehend that
these papers impregnated with me should be in eleven days in your hands
and yet that I stay here. Well, you will see that during the last
fourteen days I have been much driven about; I have worked little, I
have thought of you, I have been agitated by the expectation of work
for Frédérick. "Les Mystères" which, thanks to him, have had a success,
little durable however, have cast me on the deserted boards of the
"Gymnase." I am chasing Henri Monnier; you can, on reading these pages,
scribbled in haste, tell yourself that your poor servant is working
desperately; every moment is precious; a scene must be written, a
proof corrected, copy sent. You will therefore have but little from me
as writing, but much as thought in the journal which will follow the
present one.
Adieu. Yesterday I was sad; to-day, thanks to your adorable letter, I
am gay, happy. You are my life, my strength, my consolation; I have
learned through disappointments and bitterness that I have but you in
this world.
Adieu, then; be sure that I live more at the feet of your chair than in
my own.
PARIS, February 28, 1844.
Dear countess; I have decided to finish the seventh volume of LA
COMÉDIE HUMAINE with "Le Lys dans la Vallée" which can certainly go
under the head of "Scènes de la Vie de province." This arrangement
spares me the writing of three volumes which I should not have time to
publish separately first; besides I wish not to have a single line to
write between now and October 1.
In spite of what you tell me of your plans for Dresden, I hardly
believe in them. You leave Petersburg about the middle of May; you
will be at home, at Wierzchownia, by the end of June; how can you
expect between July and October (four months) to be put in possession
of your rights, to have received the accounts of administration
and guardianship, and to have re-established the _status quo_ of
your personal government? Oh! if you only knew with what sadness I
count upon my fingers and add up all these difficulties: the time
required for the journey, the accounts to examine and verify, the
current affairs, and the unexpected hindrances! Such thoughts bring
me dreadful, pitiless, implacable hours. You are my whole life; the
infinitely little incidents as well as the gravest events of that
life depend on you, and solely on you; the two months that I spent in
Petersburg have, alas! sufficiently enlightened me as to that. No, you
can never leave in October, for I know your anxious tenderness for your
child; you would never let her travel in winter,--I have the certainty
of conviction as to that. Do you understand what there is of despair
in those words? Existence was endurable with the hope of Dresden; it
overwhelms me, it annihilates me if I have to wait longer.
You ought to profit by your stay in Petersburg to obtain recovery of
the administration from Anna's guardians, so that there be no one but
you and her uncle to manage her affairs. You will do this, I am sure,
unless you think it simpler and easier to manage at home, I mean in the
chief town of your department, or I should say government, inasmuch as
your provinces are divided into governments, not departments, as they
are in France.
In any case, dear countess, when you return to Wierzchownia examine
well the _ifs_ and _buts_, the _fors_ and the _yes and nos_, and decide
whether I may go to you. If your high wisdom decides that I cannot, I
shall ask of toil its absorption and its excitements in default of the
resignation which I cannot promise you. _Mon Dieu_, one year lost! It
is a lifetime for a being who finds a life in a day, when that day is
passed with you.
I leave you to dine with M. de Margonne and to pay a little visit to
the Princesse Belgiojoso, who lives next door to him.
February 29.
I had yesterday, after writing to you, a violent rush of blood to the
head. From three in the morning till three in the afternoon I corrected
without pausing six folios of LA COMÉDIE HUMAINE ("Les Employés"), into
which I inserted passages taken from the "Physiologie de l'Employé,"
a little book, written in haste, about which you know nothing. This
work, which was equivalent to writing in twelve hours an 8vo volume,
brought on the attack. My nose bled from yesterday until this morning.
But I feel myself more relieved than weakened by this little natural
bleeding,--beneficial, I make no doubt.
I have been to fetch the proofs of what I have so far done
on "Les Petits Bourgeois." The printing-office is close to
Saint-Germain-des-Prés; the idea came to me to enter the church, where
they are painting the cupola, and I prayed for you and your dear child
at the altar of the Virgin. Tears came into my eyes as I asked God to
keep you both in life and health. My thought streamed even to the
Neva. Perhaps, returning from those heights, I have brought back a
gleam from that ideal throne before which we kneel. With what fervour,
what ardour, what abandonment of myself, do I feel bound to you
forever,--"for time and for eternity," as the devout people say.
On my way home I bought, for fifteen sous on the quay, the "Mémoires de
Lauzun," which I had never read.[1] I looked them over in the omnibus,
returning to Passy, where your serf, having reintegrated himself into
his arm-chair, is writing this to you while awaiting dinner. What a
strange thing that an honourable, courageous man, who seems to have had
plenty of heart on all occasions when he needed it, could dishonour
with such levity the women he professed to love! I think conceit, being
the dominant feature of his character, smothered what was really good
and generous within him. Does he not sub-suggest to us that he would
not have Marie-Antoinette in the flower of her youth and the prestige
of her grandeur? It was an odious calumny and a useless cruelty, when
we think of the position of that poor queen at the period when these
Memoirs were being written, In other respects this poor Lauzun makes
one pity him; he never so much as suspects, while believing himself
adored, that he was never loved, even feebly. A man so vain is not
endured by the majority of women, who want an exclusive worship for
themselves, and will not accept, unless for a moment, the presence
of a rivalry as aggressive as it is insatiable--that of a lover of
_himself_. So, we see how Princesse C... quickly quitted him; it is
frightful.
After reading and closing that bad book, I cried out to myself, "How
happy he is who loves but one woman!" I persist in that opinion; it is
both a cry of the heart and the result of reasoning and observation;
for I analyze you with the utmost coolness, and I recognize, with
conviction and joy, that none can be compared to you. I do not know
in this world a finer intellect, a nobler heart, a gentler or more
charming temper, a nature more straightforward, a judgment more
sure, based on reason and virtue. I will say no more, for fear of
being scolded; and yet, _this_ is what explains and justifies an
enthusiasm stronger to-day than it was in 1833; which sends the blood
in waves to my heart at sight of that page of poor Töpfer, which will
lie on my table all my life; which transports me as I look at the
Daffinger. Ah! you do not know what passed within me when, in that
courtyard,--every stone of which is engraved in my memory, with its
planks, its coach-house, etc.,--I saw your sweet face at the window. I
no longer felt my own body, and when I spoke to you I was stultified.
That stultification, that arrested torrent, arrested in its course to
bound with greater force, lasted two days. "What must she think of me?"
was a madman's phrase that I said and resaid in terror. No, truly,
and believe it absolutely, I am not yet accustomed to know you after
all these years. Centuries would not suffice, and life is short! You
saw the effect during those two months in Petersburg. I left you in
the same ecstasy in which I was the day I saw you once more. Of all
the faces you made me see and know in Petersburg none remain in my
memory. All have fled, evaporated, leaving no trace. But I can tell
with certainty the smallest little detail of everything about you,
even to the number of steps to your staircase, and the flower-pots
that are massed at its angles. Of my apartment at Madame Tardif's,
nothing remains in my mind; nothing of Petersburg either, unless it be
the bench on which we sat in the Summer Garden, and the steps of the
Imperial Quay where I gave you my hand. Oh! if you knew how precious
to me is that pin which rolled along the quay! I have fastened to my
mantel-piece, on the red velvet which drapes the side of it, a leaf
of your ivy, that lustrous ivy which frightened you! Well, that leaf
casts me into endless reveries. My dinner is brought; I must stop until
to-morrow.
[Footnote 1: Armand Louis de Gontant Biron, Duc de Lauzun; born 1747,
executed 1793.--TR.]
March 1.
On waking at two this morning, I took up your journal number 10, which
I read very rapidly yesterday and have now re-read; I have given
one hour to it; it is now three o'clock--can it be one hour? It is
a thousand hours of paradise! What a strange thing! you say to me
regarding the month of October the very fears I expressed to you a
short time ago. Have we two thoughts? You tell me of the pain in your
heart, and I was praying for your health in Saint-Germain-des-Prés! You
are surely not ignorant that your life is my life, your death would be
mine; your joys are my joys, your griefs my griefs. There was never in
the world an affection like it; space has no part in it; I have felt
my heart beat violently when I read your account of the throbbing of
yours. And that page in which you say such gracious truths about my
deep, unalterable, infinite attachment to you leaves me with moist
eyes. No, such a letter makes all acceptable, burdens, griefs, all
miseries! Yes, dear, distant yet present star, rely on me as you would
on yourself; neither I nor my devotion will fail you more than the life
in your body. At my age, dear fraternal soul, what I say of life may be
believed; well, then, believe that for me there is no other life than
yours. My plan is made. If harm happens to you, I shall bury myself in
some hidden corner of the world, unknown to all; this is no vain saying.
If happiness for a woman is to know herself alone and singly in a
heart, filling it in a manner indispensable, certain of shining in
a man's intellect as its light, certain of being his life's blood
pulsing in his heart, of living in his thought as the substance of that
thought, and having the certainty that this is and ever will be--ah!
then, dear sovereign of my soul, you can say that you are happy, happy
_senza brama_, for such you are to me--till death. We may feel satiety
for things human, there is none for things divine; and that last word
alone expresses what you are to me.
No letter has ever made me feel more enjoyments than the one I have
just read. It is full of a dear, delicate wit, so graceful, of an
infinite kindness, wholly without paltriness. That forehead of a man of
genius which I have so admired is visible everywhere. Yet, I have been
to blame; how could I ever have thought that what you would do would
not be well done, and properly done? From the point of view of the
world, that jealousy was pretty, and perhaps flattering to some women,
but from the point of view of an affection as exceptional as mine, it
was a distrust for which I blame myself and entreat you to pardon me.
The idea of your novel is so pretty that, if you want to give me an
immense pleasure, you will write it and send it to me; I will correct
it and publish it under my own name. You shall not change the whiteness
of your stockings, nor stain your pretty fingers with ink to benefit
the public, but you shall enjoy all the pleasures of authorship in
reading what I will preserve of your beautiful and charming prose.
[This book was "Modeste Mignon."]
In the first place you must paint a provincial family, and place the
romantic, enthusiastic young girl in the midst of the vulgarities of
such an existence; and then, by correspondence, _make a transit_ to the
description of a poet in Paris. The friend of the poet, who continues
the correspondence, must be one of those men of talent who make
themselves the kite-tails of a fame. A pretty picture, could be made of
the _cavaliere serventi_, who watch the newspapers, do useful errands,
etc. But the dénouement must be in favour of this young man against
the great poet. Also there must be shown, with truth, the manias and
the asperities of a great soul which alarm and rebuff inferior souls.
Do this, and you will help me; you will make me win the sympathy of
certain choice minds by this employment of a leisure I lack so much.
What a temptation for a soul like yours!
Adieu for to-day; leisure lacks and toil is calling. To-morrow I will
re-read your adorable letter and answer it.
March 2.
Yesterday I had that tiresome judge from Bourges to dinner. The vote
of the Chamber on Queen Pomaré kept him late; and it followed that
having been up since two in the morning I went to bed at half-past
eight and slept all night like a dormouse. So my work is compromised,
and I am heavy, without ideas, without activity. The regularity of my
hours saves me. I am expecting the Florentine furniture; meantime, I
have re-read that adorable letter. Suzette's death seems to me a small
calamity. She was gay, she loved you, and that is a great claim to
my remembrance, in which she will remain eternally, if only for her
arrivals at the Arc with your missives. Dear countess, I entreat you,
never fight my battles, either for me or for my works. I am afraid of
some trap set for your good friendship and your gracious, sympathetic
partiality. The best way to hoax critics is to satirically agree with
them; carrying the matter farther than they reckoned or wished, and
when you have enticed them into absurdity, leave them there. The more I
think of it the more charming do I find the idea of your novel. Write
it out for me and I will use it.
Nodier died as he had lived, with grace and good-humour; in full
possession of his mind and sensibility, of his head, in short; and
religiously,--he confessed and desired to receive the sacraments.
He died not only with calmness, but with joy. Five minutes before
his death he asked for news of all his grandchildren, and said: "Are
none of them ill? Then all is well." He wished to be buried in his
daughter's marriage veil. Mass was said in his room, and he heard it
with great collectedness. In short, his conduct was becoming, gay,
charming, gracious to the last moment. He sent me word that he had been
deeply touched by my letter, that he regretted dying before he had
brought the Academy to repair its injustice towards me, that he had
always wished I might be his successor there and hoped I should be. I
give you these details, knowing the interest that you will take in them.
You may have thought me a little cool about the announcement of your
suit being won; and, in truth, if I am glad of it, it is especially in
knowing that you are at last delivered from legal annoyances. Believe
that though I am little solicitous of fortune for myself (no matter
what is said of me), I am too devoted to you not to wish you all the
comforts of ease; because one cannot enjoy life or what it offers of
good and charming if forced to struggle against ill fortune. If I am
destined to live always apart from you, I shall not think the less,
with childlike joy, that you are free from cares in the present and
in the future, that you are enabled to do good to those about you
according to the compassionate and generous instincts of your kindness,
and I shall say, with the satisfaction of Pehméja, "I have nothing, but
Dubreuil is rich." Let us believe, however, that the future will not
be gloomy for me either, from this point of view at least; and that,
my debts once paid, I can give myself up to the leisure and repose so
awaited, so longed-for, so dearly bought, before I sleep the eternal
sleep in which we rest from all, especially from ourselves.
Meantime, my garden is greening; there are fresh young shoots; before
long there will be flowers; I will put some in my letter before
closing it. The page of your letter produced by that engraving of
Töpfer, and the infinite pleasure the latter caused me have given fresh
impetus and new vigour to my courage. With such support and such words,
waiting is no longer heroism, it becomes a duty. Yes, I suffer much,
more perhaps than you can believe, to be nailed, chained here, while
you, free in all your actions, are absent and so far away. But hope
rocks us ever! so persuasive, so obliging is she that she succeeds in
reassuring me, and even in convincing me that the reality will not
forever escape me.
When I am thus calmed, and the inspiration and enthusiasm of work takes
part in it, all goes fairly well; but it does not continue. Alas! there
are moments when discouragement is so strong and lassitude so complete
that work becomes impossible to me; my faculties are no longer free; I
am distracted from my thoughts by something imperative, inexplicable,
arbitrary, which rules my brain and grasps my heart. There is a form, I
know not what, which goes and comes, which crosses my room and returns,
which lays its finger upon me and says: "Why work? what folly! why wear
yourself out in this way? Think that a few months more and you will
see her. Amuse yourself while waiting!" I am not romancing, believe
me; I am telling this as it happens, be it revery, hallucination, or
no matter what phenomenon of a wearied brain that wanders. But I soon
return to my _fixed idea_; I take up the past, crumb by crumb; I make
myself happy in it; I am with the future like children with the white
cloth that hides their New Year's gifts, and I return to your letters
as to the pasture of my soul.
I entered a church to-day, to pray and to ask God for your health, with
an ardour full of egotism--as all fanaticisms are. I was afraid; I
dared not pray. I said to myself, "This is so full of selfish interest
perhaps I shall irritate him." And I stopped suddenly, like a bigoted
old woman, or a silly schoolgirl. To this are we brought by force
of preoccupation, or to speak more truly, obsession. This is what we
become when we have but one idea in the brain and one sole being in the
heart.
March 4.
I don't know whether it is a phase of the brain, but I have no
continuity of will. I plot, I conceive books, but when it comes to
execution, all escapes me. I have turned over and over a hundred times
your idea for a novel, which is a very fine thing; it is the duel
between poesy and reality, between the ideal and the practical, between
physical poesy and that which is a faculty, an effect of the soul. I
will do that work; it may become something grand and noble. But at this
moment all has fled me; there is some evil influence, as if a sirocco
had swept across the strings of a harp; a memory, a nothing, a turning
backward, the caprice of some elf that wants a prey--all dissolves my
energy and beats me down, body and soul. Well, why not let it consume
a portion of my time, that sacred and sublime passion? I am so happy
in loving thus! But it is a frightful extravagance! I am royally a
spendthrift! "Les Petits Bourgeois" is there, on my desk, the "Débats"
has announced it; you know in whose name the book is written; yet I
dare not touch it. That mountain of proofs terrifies me, and I rush
to the banks of the Neva, where there are no Petits Bourgeois, and I
plunge into a blue arm-chair, so enticing to the _far niente_.
What reading can ever give me the pleasure of those dry, academic
notices of Mignet, or any of those books that I picked up at random on
the table of your salon, while awaiting the rustle of a silk gown. If
I could draw I would make from memory a sketch of the moujik lighting
the stove! I see that little bit of cord unsewn from the back of the
causeuse under the ivy--such are my grand occupations! Now and then
I go over in memory the gowns I have seen you wear, from the white
muslin lined with blue that first day at Peterhof to the magnificence
of a robe all covered with lace, with which you adorned yourself to go
to parties. Ah! 'tis the best poem known by heart that ever was or will
be--the verses, stanzas, cantos of those two months!
Yes, I shall never have loved but once in my life, and, happily, that
affection will fill my whole life. But I must leave these sacred orgies
of memory, for I desire to appear with éclat in the journal.
I put into this packet the first flower that has bloomed in my garden;
it smiled to me this morning, and I send it laden with many thoughts
and impulses that cannot be written. Do not be astonished to find me
so garrulous, saying the same thing for the millionth time; I have no
other confidant than you, you only. Never in my living life have I said
one word of you, nor of my worship, nor of my faith; and probably the
stone which will some day lie above my body will keep the silence I
have kept in life. Therefore, there was never in this world a fresher,
more immaculate feeling in any soul than that you know of. I hope that
the Cyclop of toil will soon return, but not to chase away entirely the
Ariel of memory.
Adieu; try to think a little of him who thinks of you at every moment,
as the miser of his hidden hoard; as the pious heart of its saint.