You have too much knowledge and intelligence, you forget that there
is something above art: namely, wisdom, of which art at its apogee
is only the expression. Wisdom comprehends all: beauty, truth,
goodness, enthusiasm, in consequence. It teaches us to see outside
of ourselves, something more elevated than is in ourselves, and to
assimilate it little by little, through contemplation and
admiration.

But I shall not succeed in changing you. I shall not even succeed in
making you understand how I envisage and how I lay hold upon
HAPPINESS, that is to say, the acceptation of life whatever it may
be! There is one person who could change you and save you, that is
father Hugo; for he has one side on which he is a great philosopher,
while at the same time he is the great artist that you require and
that I am not. You must see him often. I believe that he will quiet
you: I have not enough tempest in me now for you to understand me.
As for him, I think that he has kept his thunderbolts and that he
has all the same acquired the gentleness and the compassion of age.

See him, see him often and tell him your troubles, which are great,
I see that, and which turn too much to spleen. You think too much of
the dead, you think that they have too soon reached their rest. They
have not. They are like us, they are searching. They labor in the
search.

Every one is well, and embraces you. As for me, I do not get well,
but I have hopes, well or not, to keep on still so as to bring up my
grandchildren, and to love you as long as I have a breath left.

G. Sand



CCLXXXVI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
Nohant, 16th January, 1875

I too, dear Cruchard, embrace you at the New Year, and wish that you
may have a tolerable one, since you do not care to hear the myth
happiness spoken of. You admire my serenity; it does not come from
my depths, it comes from my necessity of thinking only of others.
There is but a little time left, old age creeps on and death is
pushing me by the shoulders.

I am as yet, if not necessary, at least extremely useful, and I
shall go on as long as I have a breath, thinking, talking, working
for them.

Duty is the master of masters, it is the real Zeus of modern times,
the son of Time, and has become his master. It is that which lives
and acts outside of all the agitations of the world. It does not
reason, does not discuss. It examines without fear, it walks without
looking behind it; Cronos, the stupid, swallowed stones, Zeus breaks
them with the lightning, and the lightning is the will. I am not a
philosopher, I am a servant of Zeus, who takes away half of their
souls from slaves, but who leaves them entire to the brave.

I have no more leisure to think of myself, to dream of discouraging
things, to despair of human-kind, to look at my past sorrows and
joys and to summon death.

Mercy! If one were an egoist, one would see it approach with joy; it
is so easy to sleep in nothingness, or to awaken in a better life!
for it opens these two hypotheses, or to express it better, this
antithesis.

But, for the one who must continue working, death must not be
summoned before the hour when exhaustion opens the doors of liberty.
You have had no children. It is the punishment of those who wish to
be too independent; but that suffering is nevertheless a glory for
those who vow themselves to Apollo. Then do not complain for having
to grub, and describe your martyrdom to us; there is a fine book to
be written about that.

You say that Renan is despairing; for my part, I don't believe that:
I believe that he is suffering as are all those who look high and
far ahead; but he ought to have strength in proportion to his
vision. Napoleon shares his ideas, he does well if he shares them
all. He has written me a very wise and good letter. He now sees
relative safety in a wise republic, and I, too, think it still
possible. It will be very bourgeois and not very ideal, but one has
to begin at the beginning. We artists have no patience at all. We
want the Abbey of Theleme at once; but before saying, "Do what you
want!" one must go through with "Do what you can!" I love you and I
embrace you with all my heart, my dear Polycarp. My children large
and small join with me.

Come now, no weakness! We all ought to be examples to our friends,
our neighbors, our fellow citizens. And how about me, don't you
think that I need help and support in my long task that is not yet
finished? Don't you love anyone, not even your old troubadour, who
still sings, and often weeps, but who conceals himself when he
weeps, as cats do when they die?



CCLXXXVII. TO GEORGE SAND
Paris, Saturday evening

Dear master,

I curse once more THE DRAMATIC MANIA and the pleasure that certain
people have in announcing remarkable news! Someone had told me that
you were VERY ill. Your good handwriting came to reassure me
yesterday morning, and this morning I have received the letter from
Maurice, so the Lord be praised!

What to tell you about myself? I am not stiff, I have ... I don't
know what. Bromide of potassium has calmed me and given me eczema on
the middle of my forehead.

Abnormal things are going on inside me. My psychic depression must
relate to some hidden cause. I feel old, used up, disgusted with
everything, and others bore me as I do myself.

However, I am working, but without enthusiasm: as one does a stint,
and perhaps it is the work that makes me ill, for I have undertaken
a senseless book.

I lose myself in the recollections of my childhood like an old man
... I do not expect anything further in life than a succession of
sheets of paper to besmear with black. It seems to me that I am
crossing an endless solitude to go I don't know where. And it is I
who am at the same time the desert, the traveller, and the camel.

I spent the afternoon today at the funeral of Amedee Achard. The
Protestant ceremonies were as inane as if they had been Catholic.
ALL PARIS and the reporters were there in force!

Your friend, Paul Meurice, came a week ago to ask me to "do the
Salon" in le Rappel. I declined the honor, for I do not admit that
anyone can criticise an art of which he does not know the technique!
And then, what use is so much criticism!

I am reasonable. I go out every day, I exercise, and I come home
tired, and still more irritated, that is the good I get out of it.
In short, your troubadour (not very troubadourish) has become a sad
bonehead.

It is in order not to bore you with my complaints that I write so
rarely to you now, for no one has a livelier sense than I of my
unbearableness.

Send me Flamarande; that will give me a little air.

I embrace you all, and especially you, dear master, so great, so
strong, and so gentle. Your Cruchard, who is more and more cracked,
if cracked is the right word, for I perceive that the contents are
escaping.



CCLXXXVIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
20th February

Then you are quite ill, dear old fellow? I am not worried about it,
since it concerns only nerves and rheumatisms, and I have lived
seventy years with all that nuisance in my body, and I am still
healthy. But I am sad to know that you are bored, suffering, and
your spirit turned to darkness as it necessarily is when one is ill.

I was sure that a moment would come when someone would prescribe
walking to you. All your illness comes from the lack of exercise, a
man of your strength and your complexion ought to have lived an
athletic life.

Don't sulk then about the very wise order that condemns you to an
hour's walk each day.

You fancy that the work of the spirit is only in the brain, you are
very much mistaken, it is also in the legs.

Tell me that two weeks of this regime has cured you. It will happen,
I am sure of it.

I love you, and I embrace you, as does every one of my brood.

Your old troubadour



CCLXXXIX. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 25th March, 1875

Don't be worried about me, my Polycarp. I have nothing serious, a
little grippe, and this right arm which hardly moves but which
electricity will cure. One thinks that it is an effort.

I am much more worried about you, although you are ten times as
strong as I am, but your morale is affected whereas mine takes what
comes, in a cowardly way, if you like, but there is perhaps a
philosophy in knowing how to be cowardly rather than angry.

Do write to me, tell me that you are going out of doors, that you
are walking, that you are better.--I have finished going over the
proofs of Flamarande. That is the most boring part of the task.

I shall send you the book when it is published. I know that you do
not like to read bit by bit.

I am a little tired; however, I want to begin something else. Since
it is not warm enough to go out, I get bored with not having
anything on the stocks. Everything is going well in the nest, except
for a few colds. Spring is so peevish this year! At last the pale
sun will become the dear Phoebus-Appolo with the shining hair, and
all will go well.

Aurore is getting so big that one is surprised to hear her laugh and
play like a child, always good, and tender, the other is always very
funny and facetious.

Tell us of yourself and always love us as we love you.

Your old troubadour



CCXC. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 7th May, 1875

You leave me without news of you? You say that you prefer to be
forgotten, rather than to complain ceaselessly, as it is very
useless and since you will not be forgotten; complain then, but tell
us that you are alive and that you still love us.

As you are much nicer, the more surly you are, I know that you are
not rejoicing over the death of poor Michel. For me, it is a great
loss in every way, for he was absolutely devoted to me and proved it
all the time by his care and services without number.

We are all well here. I am better since it is not cold any more, and
I am working a great deal. I am also doing many water colors, I am
reading the Iliad with Aurore, who does not like any translation
except Leconte de Lisle's, insisting that Homer is spoiled by
approximate renderings.

The child is a singular mixture of precocity and childishness. She
is nine years old and so large that one would think her twelve. She
plays dolls with passion, and she is as LITERARY as you or I,
meanwhile learning her own language which she does not yet know.

Are you still in Paris in this lovely weather? Nohant is now
STREAMING with flowers, from the tips of the trees to the turf;
Croisset must be even prettier, for it is cool, and we are
struggling with a drought that has now become chronic in Berry. But
if you are still in Paris, you have that beautiful Pare Monceau
under your eyes where you are walking, I hope, since you have to.
Life is at the price of walking!

Won't you come to see us? Whether you are sad or gay, we love you
the same here, and we wish that affection meant something to you,
but we shall give it to you, and we give it to you without
conditions.

I am thinking of going to Paris next month, shall you be there?

G. Sand



CCXCI. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset, 10th May, 1875

A wandering gout, pains that go all over me, an invincible
melancholy, the feeling of "universal uselessness" and grave doubts
about the book that I am writing, that is what is the matter with
me, dear and valiant master. Add to that worries about money with
melancholic recollections of the past, that is my condition, and I
assure you that I make great efforts to get out of it. But my will
is tired. I cannot decide about anything effective! Ah! I have eaten
my white bread first, and old age is not announcing itself under gay
colors. Since I have begun hydrotherapy, however, I feel a little
less like a COW, and this evening I am going to begin work without
looking behind me.

I have left my apartment in the rue Murillo, and I have taken a
larger one which is next to the one that my niece has just reserved
on the Boulevard Reine Hortense. I shall be less alone next winter,
for I cannot endure solitude.

Tourgueneff seemed to me, however, to be very well pleased with the
two first chapters of my frightful book. But Tourgueneff loves me
too much, perhaps to judge impartially. I am not going to leave my
house for a long time now, for I WILL get ahead in my task, which
weighs on my chest like a burden of a million pounds. My niece will
come to spend all the month of June here. When she has gone away, I
shall make a little archeological and geological excursion in
Calvados, and that will be all.

No, I do not rejoice at Michel Levy's death, and I even envy him
that death so quiet. Just the same, that man did me a great deal of
harm. He wounded me deeply. It is true that I am endowed with an
absurd sensitiveness; what scratches others tears me to pieces. Why
am I not organized for enjoyment as I am for suffering!

The bit you sent me about Aurore who is reading Homer, did me good.
That is what I miss: a little girl like that! But one does not
arrange one's own destiny, one submits to it. I have always lived
from day to day, without plans for the future and pursuing my end
(one alone, literature) without looking to the right or to the left.
Everything that was around me has disappeared, and now I find I am
in a desert. In short, the element of distraction is absolutely
lacking to me. One needs a certain vivacity to write good things!
What can one do to get it again? How can one proceed, to avoid
thinking continually about one's miserable person? The sickest thing
in me is my humor: the rest doubtless would go well. You see, dear,
good master, that I am right to spare you my letters. Nothing is as
imbecile as the whiners.



CCXCII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Thursday morning, 10th June, 1875

We are leaving, Lina and I, on Saturday morning, and up to   then we
shall be on the move. If you wanted to come to dine with us Friday
at Magny's at six o'clock, at least we could say farewell. You
should be free at nine o'clock, for we go to bed with the chickens
in order to leave early the next day. What do you say?

I love you with all my heart.



CCXCIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Friend, I shall come at your call as soon as you say to me, "I have
finished."

I love you, and I embrace you.

G. Sand



CCXCIV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 15 August

My poor, dear, old fellow,

I learn only today in a letter from that dear, lazy soul of a
Tourgueneff, about the misfortune which has come to your niece. Is
it then irreparable? Her husband is very young and intelligent,
can't he begin over again, or take a position that will give him a
living? They have no children, they do not need millions to live on,
young and well as they both are. Tourgueneff tells me that your
property has been affected by this failure. If it is AFFECTED MERELY
you will bear this serious annoyance philosophically. You have no
vices to satisfy, nor ambitions to appease. I am sure that you will
accommodate your life to your resources. The hardest thing for you
to bear, is the chagrin of that young woman who is as a daughter to
you. But you will give her courage and consolation, it is the moment
to be above your own worries, in order to assuage those of others. I
am sure that as I write, you have calmed her mind and soothed her
heart. Perhaps, too, the disaster is not what it seems at the first
moment. There will be a change for the better, a new way will be
found, for it is always so, and the worth of men is measured
according to their energy, to the hopes which are always a sign of
their force and intelligence. More than one has risen again bravely.
Be sure that better days will come and tell them so continually, for
it is true. Your moral and physical welfare must not be shaken by
this rebuff. Think of healing those whom you love, and forget
yourself. We shall be thinking of you, and we shall be suffering for
you; for I am keenly affected at seeing that you have a new subject
of sadness amidst your spleen.

Come, dear splendid old fellow, cheer up, do us a new successful
novel, and think of those who love you, and whose hearts are
saddened and torn by your discouragements. Love them, love us, and
you will find once more your strength and your enthusiasm.

We all embrace you very tenderly. Do not write if it bores you, say
to us only, "I am well, and I love you."

G. Sand



CCXCV. TO GEORGE SAND
Wednesday

Will you forgive my long delay, dear master? But I think that I must
bore you with my eternal jeremiads. I repeat myself like a dotard! I
am becoming too stupid! I am boring everybody. In short, your
Cruchard has become an intolerable old codger, because he has been
intolerant. And as I cannot do anything that I ought to do, I must,
out of consideration for others, spare them the overflow of my bile.

For the last six months, especially, I don't know what has been the
trouble with me, but I feel dreadfully ill, without being able to
get to the root of the matter, and I know many people are in the
same condition. Why? Perhaps we are suffering from the illness of
France; here in Paris, where her heart beats, people feel better
than at her extremities, in the provinces.

I assure you that every one now is suffering with some
incomprehensible trouble. Our friend Renan is one of the most
desperate, and Prince Napoleon feels exactly the way he does. But
they have strong nerves. But, as for me, I am attacked by a well
defined melancholia. I should be resigned to it, and I am not.

I work all the more, so as not to think about myself. But since I
have undertaken a book that has absurd difficulties in its
execution, the feeling of my powerlessness adds to my chagrin.

Don't tell me again that imbecility is sacred like childhood, for
imbecility contains no germ. Let me believe that the dead do not
"search any more," and that they are at rest. We are sufficiently
tormented on earth to be at rest when we are beneath it! Ah! How I
envy you, how I long to have your serenity! To say nothing of the
rest! and your two dear little girls, whom I embrace as tenderly as
I do--you.



CCXCVI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
Nohant, 7th September, 1875

You are distressed, you are discouraged, you distress me too. That
is all right, I would rather have you complain than keep silent,
dear friend. And I don't want you to stop writing to me.

I also have great and frequent sorrows. My old friends are dying
before I do. One of the dearest, the one who brought up Maurice and
whom I was expecting to help me to bring up my grandchildren, has
just died, almost in an instant. That is a deep sorrow. Life is a
succession of blows at one's heart. But duty is there: we must go on
and do our tasks without saddening those who suffer with us.

I ask you absolutely to WILL, and not to be indifferent to the
griefs which we are sharing with you. Tell us that calm has   come
and that the horizon has cleared.

We love you, sad or gay.

Give us news of yourself.

G. Sand



CCXCVII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 8th October, 1875

Well, well, your health has come back in spite of you, since you are
sleeping all night. The sea air forces you to live and   you have
made progress, you have given up a work that would not have made a
success. Do something more of earth earthy, which would reach
everybody. Tell me what price they would sell Croisset for if they
are obliged to sell it. Is it a house and garden, or is there a farm
and grounds! If it is not beyond my means I might buy it and you
should spend the rest of your life there. I have no money, but I
should try to shift a little capital. Answer me seriously, I beg of
you; if I can do it, it shall be done.

I have been ill all the summer, that is to say, that I have suffered
continually, but I have worked all the more not to think of it. In
fact they are to put on Villemer and Victorine at the Theatre
Francais again. But there is nothing now in preparation.  I do not
know at what time in the autumn or winter I shall have to go to
Paris. I shall find you there ready and courageous, shan't I? If you
have made, through goodness and devotion, as I think, a great
sacrifice for your niece, who, in truth, is your real daughter, you
will forget all about it and will begin your life again as a young
man. Is one old when one does not choose to be? Stay at the seaside
as long as you can. The important thing is to patch up the physical
machine. Here with us it is as warm as in midsummer. I hope that you
still have the sun down there. Study the life of the mollusc! They
are creatures better endowed than one thinks, and, for my part, I
should love to take a walk with Georges Pouchet! Natural history is
the inexhaustible source of agreeable occupations for even those who
seek only amusement in it, and if you actually attacked it you would
be saved. But you must by all means save yourself, for you are
somebody, and you cannot drop out of the running, as can a mere
ruined grocer. We all embrace you with our best love.

G. Sand



CCXCVIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, in Paris
Nohant, 15 November, 1875

So you are there in Paris, and have you left your apartment at the
rue Murillo? You are working? Good luck and good courage! The old
man is coming to the top again! I know that they are rehearsing
Victorine at the Theatre Francais; but I don't know whether I shall
go to see that revival. I have been so ill all the summer and I am
still suffering so much with intestinal trouble, that I do not know
if I shall ever be strong enough to move in winter. Well, we shall
see. The hope of finding you there will give me courage; that is not
what will be lacking, but, since I passed my seventieth birthday, I
have been very much upset, and I do not yet know if I shall get over
it. I cannot walk any more, I who used to love to be on my feet so
much, without risking atrocious pains. I am patient with these
miseries, I work all the more, and I do water-colors in my hours of
recreation.

Aurore consoles and charms me; I should like to live long enough to
get her married. But God disposes, and one must   take death and
life as He wills.

Well, this is just to say to you that I shall go to embrace you
unless the thing is ABSOLUTELY impossible. You shall read me what
you have begun. Meanwhile, give me news of yourself; for I shall not
stir until the last rehearsals. I know my cast, I know that they
will all do well, according to their capabilities, and, besides,
that Perrin will look after them.

We all KISS you very tenderly, and we love you, Cruchard or not.

G. Sand



CCXCIX. TO GEORGE SAND
Paris, 11 December, 1875

Things are going a little better, and I am profiting by the occasion
to write to you, dear, good, adorable master.

You know that I have abandoned my big novel in order to write a
little MEDIEVAL bit of nonsense, which won't run to more  than
thirty pages. It puts me in a more decent setting than that of
modern times, and does me good. Then I am hunting for a contemporary
novel, but I am hesitating among several embryonic ideas; I should
like to do something concise and violent. The string of the necklace
(that is to say, the main idea) is still to seek.

Externally my life is scarcely changed: I see the same people, I
receive the same visits. My faithful ones on Sunday are first of
all, the big Tourgueneff, who is nicer than ever, Zola, Alphonse
Daudet, and Goncourt. You have never spoken to me of the first two.
What do you think of their books?

I am not reading anything at all, except Shakespeare, whom am going
through from beginning to end. That tones you up and puts new air
into your lungs, just as if you were on a high mountain. Everything
appears mediocre beside that prodigious felow.

As I go out very little, I have not yet seen Victor Hugo. However,
this evening I am going to resign myself to putting on my boots, so
that I can go to present my compliments to him. His personality
pleases me infinitely, but his court! ... mercy!

The senatorial elections are a subject of diversion to the public of
which I am a part. There must have occurred, in the corridors of the
Assembly, dialogues incredibly grotesque and base. The XlXth century
is destined to see all religions perish. Amen! I do not mourn any of
them.

At the Odeon, a live bear is going to appear on the boards. That is
all that I know about literature.



CCC. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, in Paris
Nohant, 18th and 19th December, 1875

At last I discover my old troubadour who was a subject of chagrin
and serious worry to me. Here you are yourself again, trusting in
the very natural luck of external events, and discovering in
yourself the strength to control them, whatever they may be, by
effort. What is it that you call some one in HIGH FINANCE? For my
part, I don't know; I am in relations with Victor Borie. He will do
me a favor if he sees it to his interest. Must I write him?

Then you are going to start grubbing again? So am I; for since
Flamarande I have done nothing but mark time, while waiting for
something better. I was so ill all summer! but my strange and
excellent friend Favre has cured me wonderfully, and I am taking a
new lease on life.

What's our next move? For you, of course, DESOLATION, and, for me,
consolation. I do not know on what our destinies depend; you see
them pass, you criticise them, you abstain from a literary
appreciation of them, you limit yourself to depicting them, with
deliberate meticulous concealment of your personal feelings.
However, one sees them very clearly through your narrative, and you
make the people sadder who read you. As for me, I should like to
make them less sad. I cannot forget that my personal victory over
despair was the work of my will and of a new way of understanding
which is entirely opposed to what I had before.

I know that you criticise the intervention of the personal doctrine
in literature. Are you right? Isn't it rather a lack of conviction
than a principle of esthetics? One cannot have a philosophy in one's
soul without its appearing. I have no literary advice to give you, I
have no judgment to formulate on the author friends of whom you
speak. I, myself have told the Goncourts all my thought; as for the
others, I firmly believe that they have more education and more
talent than I have. Only I think that they, and you especially, lack
a definite and   extended vision of life. Art is not merely
painting. True painting, moreover, is full of the soul that wields
the brush. Art is not merely criticism and satire: criticism and
satire depict only one side of the truth.

I want to see a man as he is, he is not good or bad, he is good and
bad. But he is something more ... nuance. Nuance which is for me the
purpose of art, being good and bad, he has an internal force which
leads him to be very bad and slightly good,--or very good and
slightly bad.

I think that your school is not concerned with the substance, and
that it dwells too much on the surface. By virtue of seeking the
form, it makes the substance too cheap! it addresses  itself to the
men of letters. But there are no men of letters, properly speaking.
Before everything, one is a man. One wants to find man at the basis
of every story and every deed. That was the defect of l'Education
sentimentale, about which I have so often reflected since, asking
myself why there was so general a dislike of a work that was so well
done and so solid. This defect was the absence of ACTION of the
characters on themselves. They submitted to the event and never
mastered it. Well, I think that the chief interest in a story is
what you did not want to do. If I were you, I would try the
opposite; you are feeding on Shakespeare just now, and you are doing
well! He is the author who puts men at grips with events; observe
that by them, whether for good or for ill, the event is always
conquered. In his works, it is crushed underfoot.

Politics is a comedy just now. We have had tragedy, shall we end
with the opera or with the operetta? I read my paper conscientiously
every morning; but aside from that moment, it is impossible for me
to think of it or to be interested in it. All of it is absolutely
void of any ideal whatsoever, and therefore I cannot get up any
interest in any of the persons concerned in that scullery. All of
them are slaves of fact because they have been born slaves of
themselves.

My dear little girls are well. Aurore is a well-set-up girl, a
beautiful upright soul in a strong body. The other one is grace and
sweetness. I am always an assiduous and a patient teacher, and very
little time is left to me to write PROFESSIONALLY, seeing that I
cannot keep awake after midnight and that I want to spend all my
evening with my family; but this lack of time stimulates me and
makes me find a true pleasure in digging away; it is like a
forbidden fruit that I taste in secret.

All my dear world embraces you and rejoices to hear that you are
better. Did I send you Flamarande and the pictures of my little
girls? If not, send me a line, and I send you both.

Your old troubadour who loves you,

G. Sand

Embrace your charming niece for me. What a good and lovely letter
she wrote me! Tell her that I beg her to take care of herself and to
please get well quickly.

What do you mean! Littre a senator? It is impossible to believe it
when one knows what the Chamber is. All the same it must be
congratulated for this attempt at self-respect.



CCCI. TO GEORGE SAND
December, 1875

Your good letter of the 18th, so maternally tender, has made me
reflect a great deal. I have reread it ten times, and I shall
confess to you that I am not sure that I understand it. Briefly,
what do you want me to do? Make your instructions exact.

I am constantly doing all that I can to enlarge my brain, and I work
in the sincerity of my heart. The rest does not depend on me.

I do not enjoy making "desolation," believe me, but I cannot change
my eyes! As for my "lack of convictions," alas! I choke with
convictions. I am bursting with anger and restrained indignation.
But according to the ideal of art that I have, I think that the
artist should not manifest anything of his own feelings, and that
the artist should not appear any more in his work than God in
nature. The man is nothing, the work is everything! This method,
perhaps mistakenly conceived, is not easy to follow. And for me, at
least, it is a sort of permanent sacrifice that I am making to good
taste. It would be agreeable to me to say what I think and to
relieve Mister Gustave Flaubert by words, but of what importance is
the said gentleman?

I think as you do, dear master, that art is not merely criticism and
satire; moreover, I have never tried to do intentionally the one nor
the other. I have always tried to go into the soul of things and to
stick to the greatest generalities, and I have purposely turned
aside from the accidental and the dramatic. No monsters and no
heroes!

You say to me: "I have no literary advice to give you; I have no
judgments to formulate on the authors, your friends, etc." Well?
indeed! but I implore advice, and I am waiting for your judgments.
Who, pray, should give them, and who, pray, should formulate them,
if not you?

Speaking of my friends, you add "my school." But I am ruining my
temperament in trying not to have a school! A priori, I spurn them,
every one. The people whom I see often and whom you designate
cultivate all that I scorn and are indifferently disturbed about
what torments me. I regard as very secondary, technical detail,
local exactness, in short the historical and precise side of things.
I am seeking above all for beauty, which my companions pursue but
languidly. I see them insensible when I am ravaged with admiration
or horror. Phrases make me swoon with pleasure which seem very
ordinary to them. Goncourt is very happy when he has seized upon a
word in the street that he can stick in a book, and I am well
satisfied when I have written a page without assonances or
repetitions. I would give all the legends of Gavarni for certain
expressions and master strokes, such as "the shade was NUPTIAL,
august and solemn!" from Victor Hugo, or this from Montesquieu: "the
vices of Alexander were extreme like his virtues. He was terrible in
his wrath. It made him cruel."

In short, I try to think well, IN ORDER TO write well. But writing
well is my aim, I do not deny it.

"I lack a well-defined and extended vision of life." You are right a
thousand times over, but by what means could it be otherwise? I ask
you that. You do not enlighten my darkness with metaphysics, neither
mine nor that of others. The words religion or Catholicism on the
one hand; progress, fraternity, democracy on the other, do not
correspond to the spiritual needs of the moment. The entirely new
dogma of equality which radicalism praises is experimentally denied
by physiology and history. I do not see the means of establishing
today a new principle, any more than of respecting the old ones.
Therefore I am hunting, without finding it, that idea on which all
the rest should depend.

Meanwhile I repeat to myself what Littre said to me one day: "Ah! my
friend, man is an unstable compound, and the earth an inferior
planet."

Nothing sustains me better than the hope of leaving it soon, and of
not going to another which might be worse. "I would rather not die,"
as Marat said. Ah! no! enough, enough weariness!

I am writing now a little silly story, which a mother can permit her
child to read. The whole will be about thirty pages, I shall have
two months more at it. Such is my energy, I shall send it to you as
soon as it appears (not my energy, but the little story).



CCCII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, in Paris
Nohant, 12th January, 1876

My cherished Cruchard,

I want to write to you every day; time is lacking absolutely. At
last here is a free moment; we are buried under the snow; it is the
sort of weather that I adore: this whiteness is like general
purification, and the amusements of the house seem more intimate and
sweeter. Can anyone hate the winter in the country? The snow is one
of the most beautiful sights of the year!

It appears that I am not clear in my sermons; I have that much in
common with the orthodox, but I am not of them; neither in my idea
of equality, nor of authority, have I any fixed plan. You seem to
think that I want to convert you to a doctrine. Not at all, I don't
think of such a thing. Everyone sets off from a point of view, the
free choice of which I respect. In a few words, I can give a resume
of mine: not to place oneself behind an opaque glass through which
one can see only the reflection of one's own nose. To see as far as
possible the good, the bad, about, around, yonder, everywhere; to
perceive the continual gravitation of all tangible and intangible
things towards the necessity of the decent, the good, the true, the
beautiful.

I don't say that humanity is on the way to the heights. I believe it
in spite of everything; but I do not argue about it, it is useless
because each one judges according to his own personal vision, and
the general aspect is for the moment poor and ugly. Besides, I do
not need to be sure of the safety of the planet and its inhabitants
in order to believe in the necessity of the good and the beautiful;
if the planet departs from that law it will perish; if the
inhabitants discard it they will be destroyed. Other stars, other
souls will pass over their bodies, so much the worse! But, as for
me, I want to gravitate up to my last breath, not with the certitude
nor the need of finding elsewhere a GOOD PLACE, but because my sole
joy is in keeping myself with my family on an upward road.

In other words, I am fleeing the sewer, and I am seeking the dry and
the clean, certain that it is the law of my existence. Being a man
amounts to little; we are still near the monkey from which they say
we proceed. Very well! a further reason for separating ourselves
still more from it and for being at least at the height of the
relative truth that our race has been admitted to comprehend; a very
poor truth, very limited, very humble! well, let us possess it as
much as we can and not permit anyone to take it from us. We are, I
think, quite agreed; but I practice this simple religion and you do
not practice it, since you let yourself become discouraged; your
heart has not been penetrated with it, since you curse life and
desire death like a Catholic who yearns for compensation, were it
only the rest eternal. You are no surer than another of this
compensation. Life is perhaps eternal, and therefore work is
eternal. If this is so, let us do our day's work bravely. If it is
otherwise, if the MOI perishes entirely, let us have the honor of
having done our stated task, it is our duty; for we have evident
duties only toward ourselves and our equals. What we destroy in
ourselves, we destroy in them. Our abasement lowers them, our falls
drag them down; we owe it to them to remain erect so that they shall
not fall. The desire for an early death, as that for a long life, is
therefore a weakness, and I do not want you to admit any longer that
it is a right. I thought that had it once; I believed, however, what
I believe today; but I lacked strength, and like you I said: "I
cannot help it." I lied to myself. One can help everything. One has
the strength that one thinks one has not, when one desires ardently
to GRAVITATE, to mount a step each day, to say to oneself: "The
Flaubert of tomorrow must be superior to the one of yesterday, and
the one of day after tomorrow more steady and more lucid still."

When you feel you are on the ladder, you will mount very quickly.
You are about to enter gradually upon the happiest and most
favorable time of life: old age. It is then that art reveals itself
in its sweetness; as long as one is young, it manifests itself with
anguish. You prefer a well-turned phrase to all metaphysics. I also,
I love to see condensed into a few words what elsewhere fills
volumes; but these volumes, one must have understood them completely
(either to admit them or to reject them) in order to find the
sublime resume which becomes literary art in its fullest expression;
that is why one should not scorn the efforts of the human mind to
arrive at the truth.

I tell you that, because you have excessive prejudices AS TO WORDS.
In truth, you read, you dig, you work much more than I and a crowd
of others do. You have acquired learning that I shall never attain.
Therefore you are a hundred times richer than all of us; you are a
rich man, and you complain like a poor man. Be charitable to a
beggar who has his mattress full of gold, but who wants to be
nourished only on well-turned phrases and choice words. But brute,
ransack your own mattress and eat your gold. Nourish yourself with
the ideas and feelings accumulated in your head and your heart; the
words and the phrases, THE FORM to which you attach so much
importance, will issue by itself from your digestion. You consider
it as an end, it is only an effect. Happy manifestations proceed
only from an emotion, and an emotion proceeds only from a
conviction. One is not moved at all by the things that one does not
believe with all one's heart.

I do not say that you do not believe: on the contrary, all your life
of affection, of protection, and of charming and simple goodness,
proves that you are the most convinced individual in the world. But,
as soon as you handle literature, you want, I don't know why, to be
another man, one who should disappear, one who destroys himself, who
does not exist! What an absurd mania! what a false rule of GOOD
TASTE! Our work is worth only what we are worth.

Who is talking about putting yourself on the stage? That, in truth,
is of no use, unless it is done frankly by way of a chronicle. But
to withdraw one's soul from what one does, what is that unhealthy
fancy? To hide one's own opinion about the characters that one puts
on the stage, to leave the reader therefore uncertain about the
opinion that he should have of them, that is to desire not to be
understood, and from that moment, the reader leaves you; for if he
wants to understand the story that you are telling him, it is on the
condition that you should show him plainly that this one is a strong
character and that one weak.

L'Education sentimentale has been a misunderstood book, as I have
told you repeatedly, but you have not listened to me. There should
have been a short preface, or, at a good opportunity, an expression
of blame, even if only a happy epithet to condemn the evil, to
characterize the defect, to signalize the effort. All the characters
in that book are feeble and come to nothing, except those with bad
instincts; that is what you are reproached with, because people did
not understand that you wanted precisely to depict a deplorable
state of society that encourages these bad instincts and ruins noble
efforts; when people do not understand us it is always our fault.
What the reader wants, first of all, is to penetrate into our
thought, and that is what you deny him, arrogantly. He thinks that
you scorn him and that you want to ridicule him. For my part, I
understood you, for I knew you. If anyone had brought me your book
without its being signed, I should have thought it beautiful, but
strange, and I should have asked myself if you were immoral,
skeptical, indifferent or heart-broken. You say that it ought to be
like that, and that M. Flaubert will violate the rules of good taste
if he shows his thought and the aim of his literary enterprise. It
is false in the highest degree. When M. Flaubert writes well and
seriously, one attaches oneself to his personality. One wants to
sink or swim with him. If he leaves you in doubt, you lose interest
in his work, you neglect it, or you give it up.

I have already combated your favorite heresy, which is that one
writes for twenty intelligent people and does not care a fig for the
rest. It is not true, since the lack of success irritates you and
troubles you. Besides, there have not been twenty critics favorable
to this book which was so well written and so important. So one must
not write for twenty persons any more than for three, or for a
hundred thousand.

One must write for all those who have a thirst to read and who can
profit by good reading. Then one must go straight to the most
elevated morality within oneself, and not make a mystery of the
moral and profitable meaning of one's book. People found that with
Madame Bovary. If one part of the public cried scandal, the
healthiest and the broadest part saw in it a severe and striking
lesson given to a woman without conscience and without faith, to
vanity, to ambition, to irrationality. They pitied her; art required
that, but the lesson was clear, and it would have been more so, it
would have been so for everybody, if you had wished it, if you had
shown more clearly the opinion that you had, and that the public
ought to have had, about the heroine, her husband, and her lovers.

That desire to depict things as they are, the adventures of life as
they present themselves to the eye, is not well thought out, in my
opinion. Depict inert things as a realist, as a poet, it's all the
same to me, but, when one touches on the emotions of the human
heart, it is another thing. You cannot abstract yourself from this
contemplation; for man, that is yourself, and men, that is the
reader. Whatever you do, your tale is a conversation between you and
the reader. If you show him the evil coldly, without ever showing
him the good he is angry. He wonders if it is he that is bad, or if
it is you. You work, however, to rouse him and to interest him; you
will never succeed if you are not roused yourself, or if you hide it
so well that he thinks you indifferent. He is right: supreme
impartiality is an anti-human thing, and a novel ought to be human
above everything. If it is not, the public is not pleased in its
being well written, well composed and conscientious in every detail.
The essential quality is not there: interest. The reader breaks away
likewise from a book where all the characters are good without
distinctions and without weaknesses; he sees clearly that that is
not human either. I believe that art, this special art of narration,
is only worth while through the opposition of characters; but, in
their struggle, I prefer to see the right prevail. Let events
overwhelm the honest men, I agree to that, but let him not be soiled
or belittled by them, and let him go to the stake feeling that he is
happier than his executioners.

15th January, 1876

It is three days since I wrote this letter, and every day I have
been on the point of throwing it into the fire; for it is long and
diffuse and probably useless. Natures opposed on certain points
understand each other with difficulty, and I am afraid that you will
not understand me any better today than formerly. However, I am
sending you this scrawl so that you can see that I am occupied with
you almost as much as with myself.

You must have success after that bad luck which has troubled you
deeply. I tell you wherein lie the certain conditions for your
success. Keep your cult for form; but pay more attention to the
substance. Do not take true virtue for a commonplace in literature.
Give it its representative, make honest and strong men pass among
the fools and the imbeciles that you love to ridicule. Show what is
solid at the bottom of these intellectual abortions; in short,
abandon the convention of the realist and return to the time
reality, which is a mingling of the beautiful and the ugly, the dull
and the brilliant, but in which the desire of good finds its place
and its occupation all the same.

I embrace you for all of us.

G. Sand



CCCIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 6th March, 1876

I am writing to you in a hurry this morning because I have just
received news from M. Perrin of the first performance of the revival
of the Mariage de Victorine, a play of mine, at the Theatre
Francais.

I have neither the time to go there, nor the wish to leave like that
at a moment's notice, but I should have liked to send some of my
friends there, and he does not offer me a single seat for them. I am
writing him a letter that he will receive tomorrow, and I am asking
him to send you at least one orchestra seat. If you do not get it,
please understand that it was not my fault. I shall have to say the
same thing to five or six other people.

I embrace you therefore in a hurry, so as not to lose the post.

Give me news of your niece and embrace her for me.

G. Sand



CCCIV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Paris
Nohant, 8th March, 1876

You scorn Sedaine, you great profane soul! That is where the
doctrine of form destroys your eye! Sedaine is not a writer, that is
true, although he falls but little short of it, but he is a man,
with a heart and soul, with the sense of moral truth, the direct
insight into human feelings. I don't mind his out-of-date reasonings
and dry phraseology! The right thought is always there, and it
penetrates you deeply!

My dear old Sedaine! He is one of my well-beloved papas, and I
consider le Philosophe sans le savior far superior to Victorine; it
is such a distressing drama and so well carried out! But you only
look for the well-turned phrase, that is one thing--only one thing,
it is not all of art, it is not even half of it, it is a quarter at
most, and if three-quarters are beautiful, one overlooks the part
that is not.

I hope that you will not go to seek for your country-side before the
good weather; here, we have been pretty well spared; but for the
past three days there has been a deluge, and it makes me ill. I
should not have been able to go to Paris. Your niece is better, God
be praised! I love you and I embrace you with all my soul.

G. Sand

Do tell M. Zola to send me his book. I shall certainly read it with
great interest.



CCCV. TO GEORGE SAND
Wednesday, 9th March, 1876

COMPLETE SUCCESS, dear master. The actors were recalled after each
act, and warmly applauded. The public was pleased and from time to
time cries of approval were heard. All your friends who had come at
your summons were sorry that you were not there.

The roles of Antoine and Victorine were especially well played.
Little Baretta is a real treasure.

How were you able to make Victorine from le Philosophe sans le
savoir? That is beyond me. Your play charmed me and made me weep
like an idiot, while the other bored me to death, absolutely bored
me to death; I longed to get to the end. What language! the good
Tourgueneff and Madame Viardot made saucer-eyes, comical to behold.
In your work, what produced the greatest effect is the scene in the
last act between Antoine and his daughter. Maubant is too majestic,
and the actor who plays Fulgence is inadequate. But everything went
very well, and this revival will have a long life.

The gigantic Harrisse told me that he was going to write to you
immediately. Therefore his letter will arrive before mine. I should
have started this morning for Pont-l'Eveque and Honfleur to see a
bit of the country that I have forgotten, but the floods stopped me.

Read, I beg of you, the new novel by Zola, Son Excellence Rougon: I
am very anxious to know what you think of it.

No, I do not SCORN Sedaine, because I do not scorn what I do not
understand. He is to me, like Pindar, and Milton, who are absolutely
closed to me; however, I quite understand that the citizen Sedaine
is not exactly of their calibre.

The public of last Tuesday shared my error, and Victorine,
independently of its real worth, gained by contrast. Madame Viardot,
who has naturally good taste, said to me yesterday, in speaking of
you: "How was she able to make one from the other?" That is exactly
what I think.

You distress me a bit, dear master, by attributing esthetic opinions
to me which are not mine. I believe that the rounding of the phrase
is nothing. But that WRITING WELL is everything, because "writing
well is at the same time perceiving well, thinking well and saying
well" (Buffon). The last term is then dependent on the other two,
since one has to feel strongly, so as to think, and to think, so as
to express.