All the bourgeois can have a great deal of heart and delicacy, be
full of the best sentiments and the greatest virtues, without
becoming for all that, artists. In short, I believe that the form
and the matter are two subtleties, two entities, neither of which
can exist without the other.

This anxiety for external beauty which you reproach me with is for
me a METHOD. When I discover a bad assonance or a repetition in one
of my phrases, I am sure that I am floundering in error; by dint of
searching, I find the exact expression which was the only one and
is, at the same time, the harmonious one. The word is never lacking
when one possesses the idea.

Note (to return to the good Sedaine) that I share all his opinions
and I approve his tendencies. From the archeological point of view,
he is curious and from the humanitarian point of view very
praiseworthy, I agree. But what difference does it make to us today?
Is it eternal art? I ask you that.

Other writers of his period have formulated useful principles also,
but in an imperishable style, in a more concrete and at the same
time more general manner.

In short, the persistence of the Comedie Francais in exhibiting that
to us as "a masterpiece" had so exasperated me that, having gone
home in order to get rid of the taste of this milk-food, I read
before going to bed the Medea of Euripides, as I had no other
classic handy, and Aurora surprised Cruchard in this occupation.

I have written to Zola to send you his book. I shall tell Daudet
also to send you his Jack, as I am very curious to have your opinion
on these two books, which are very different in composition and
temperament, but quite remarkable, both of them.

The fright which the elections caused to the bourgeois has been
diverting.



CCCVI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
Nohant, 15th March, 1876

I should have a good deal to say about the novels of M. Zola, and it
would be better to say it in an article than in a letter, because
there is a general question there which must be formulated with a
refreshed brain. I should like to read M. Daudet's book first, the
book you spoke of to me, the title of which I cannot recall. Have
the publisher send it to me collect, if he does not want to give it
to me; that is very simple. On the whole, the thing that I shall not
gainsay, meanwhile making a PHILOSOPHICAL criticism of the method,
is that Rougon is a STRONG book, as you say, and worthy of being
placed in the first rank.

That does not change anything in my way of thinking, that art ought
to be the search for the truth, and that truth is not the picture of
evil. It ought to be the picture of good and evil. A painter who
sees only one is as false as he who sees only the other. Life is not
crammed with monsters only. Society is not formed of rascals and
wretches only. The honest people are not the minority, since society
exists in a certain order and without too many unpunished crimes.
Imbeciles dominate, it is true, but there is a public conscience
which weighs on them and obliges them to respect the right. Let
people show up and chastise the rascals, that is good, it is even
moral, but let them tell us and show us the opposite; otherwise the
simple reader, who is the average reader, is discouraged, saddened,
horrified, and contradicts you so as not to despair.

How are you? Tourgueneff wrote me that your last work was very
remarkable: then you are not DONE FOR, as you pretend?

Your niece continues to improve, does she not? I too am better,
after cramps in my stomach that made me blue, and continued with a
horrible persistence. Physical suffering is a good lesson when it
leaves one freedom of spirit. One learns to endure it and to conquer
it. Of course one has some moments of discouragement when one throws
oneself on the bed; but, for my part, I always think of what my old
cure used to say to me, when he had the gout: THAT WILL PASS, OR I
SHALL PASS. And thereupon he would laugh, content with his joke.

My Aurore is beginning history, and she is not very well pleased
with these killers of men whom they call heroes and demigods. She
calls them horrid fellows.

We have a confounded spring; the earth is covered with flowers and
snow, one gets numb gathering violets and anemones.

I have read the manuscript of l'Etrangere. It is not as DECADENT as
you say. There are diamonds that sparkle brightly in this
polychrome. Moreover, the decadences are transformations. The
mountains in travail roar and scream, but they sing beautiful airs,
also.

I embrace you and I love you. Do have your legend published quickly,
so that we may read it.

Your old troubadour,

G. Sand



CCCVII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
30th March, 1876

Dear Cruchard,

I am enthusiastic about Jack, and I beg you to send my thanks to M.
Daudet. Ah, yes! He has talent and heart! and how well all that is
done and SEEN!

I am sending you a volume of old things that have just been
collected. I embrace you, and I love you.

Your old troubadour,

G. Sand



CCCVIII. TO GEORGE SAND
Monday evening, 3rd April, 1876

I have received your volume this morning, dear master. I have two or
three others that have been loaned to me for a long time; I shall
send them off, and I shall read yours at the end of the week, during
a little two-days' trip that I am forced to take to Pont-l'Eveque
and to Honfleur for my Histoire d'un coeur simple, a trifle now "on
the stocks," as M. Prudhomme would say.

I am very glad that Jack has pleased you. It is a charming book,
isn't it? If you knew the author you would like him even better than
his book. I have told him to send you Risler and Tartarin. I am sure
in advance that you would thank me for the opportunity of reading
these two books.

I do not share in Tourgueneff's severity as regards Jack, nor in the
immensity of his admiration for Rougon. The one has charm, the other
force. But neither one is concerned ABOVE ALL else with what is for
me the end of art, namely, beauty. I remember having felt my heart
beat violently, having felt a fierce pleasure in contemplating a
wall of the Acropolis, a perfectly bare wall (the one on the left as
you go up to the Propylaea). Well! I wonder if a book independently
of what it says, cannot produce the same effect! In the exactness of
its assembling, the rarity of its elements, the polish of its
surface, the harmony of its ensemble, is there not an intrinsic
virtue, a sort of divine force, something eternal as a principle? (I
speak as a Platonist.) Thus, why is a relation necessary between the
exact word and the musical word? Why does it happen that one always
makes a verse when one restrains his thought too much? Does the law
of numbers govern then the feelings and the images, and is what
seems to be the exterior quite simply inside it? If I should
continue a long time in this vein, I should blind myself entirely,
for on the other side art has to be a good fellow; or rather art is
what one can make it, we are not free. Each one follows his path, in
spite of his own desire. In short, your Cruchard no longer knows
where he stands.

But how difficult it is to understand one another! There are two men
whom I admire a great deal and whom I consider real artists,
Tourgueneff and Zola. Yet they do not admire the prose of
Chateaubriand at all, and even less that of Gautier. Phrases which
ravish me seem hollow to them. Who is wrong? And how please the
public when one's nearest friends are so remote? All that saddens me
very much. Do not laugh.



CCCIX. TO GEORGE SAND
Sunday evening... 1876

You OUGHT to call me inwardly, dear master, "a confounded pig,"--for
I have not answered your last letter, and I have said nothing to you
about your two volumes, not to mention a third that I received this
morning from you. But I have been, for the last two weeks, entirely
taken up by my little tale which will be finished soon. I have had
several errands to do, various readings to finish up with, and a
thing more serious than all that, the health of my poor niece
worries me extremely and, at times, disturbs my brain, so that I do
not know at all what I am doing! You see that my cup is bitter! That
young woman is anemic to the last degree. She is wasting away. She
has been obliged to leave off painting, which is her sole
distraction. All the usual tonics do no good. Three days ago, by the
orders of another physician, who seems to me more learned than the
others, she began hydrotherapy. Will he succeed in making her digest
and sleep? in building up her strength? Your poor Cruchard takes
less and less pleasure in life, and he even has too much of it,
infinitely too much. Let us speak of your books, that will be
better.

They have amused me, and the proof is that I have devoured with one
gulp and one after another, Flamarande and the Deux Freres. What a
charming woman is Madame Flamarande, and what a man is M. Salcede.
The narrative of the kidnapping of the child, the trip in the
carriage, and the story of Zamora are perfect passages. Everywhere
the interest is sustained and at the same time progressive. In
short, what strikes me the most in these two novels (as in all
yours, moreover), is the natural order of the ideas, the talent, or
rather the genius for narrative. But what an abominable wretch is
your M. Flamarande! As for the servant who tells the story and who
is evidently in love with Madame, I wonder why you did not show more
plainly his personal jealousy.

Except for the count, all are virtuous persons in that story, even
extraordinarily virtuous. But do you think them really true to life?
Are there many like them? It is true that while reading, one accepts
them because of the cleverness of the execution; but afterwards?

Well, dear master, and this is to answer your last letter, this is,
I think what separates us essentially. You, on the first bound, in
everything, mount to heaven, and from there you descend to the
earth. You start from a priori, from the theory, from the ideal.
Thence your pity for life, your serenity, and to speak truly, your
greatness.--I, poor wretch, I am stuck on the earth as with soles of
lead; everything disturbs me, tears me to pieces, ravages me, and I
make efforts to rise. If I should take your manner of looking at the
whole of life I should become laughable, that is all. For you preach
to me in vain. I cannot have another temperament than my own; nor
another esthetics than what is the consequence of it. You accuse me
of not letting myself go, according to nature. Well, and that
discipline? that virtue? what shall we do with it? I admire M.
Buffon putting on cuffs when he wrote. This luxury is a symbol. In
short I am trying simply to be as comprehensive as possible. What
more can one exact?

As for letting my personal opinion be known about the people I put
on the stage: no, no, a thousand times no! I do not recognize the
right to that. If the reader does not draw from a book the moral
that should be found there, the reader is an imbecile or the book is
false from the point of view of accuracy. For, the moment that a
thing is true, it is good. Obscene books likewise are immoral only
because they lack truth. Things are not "like that" in life.

And observe that I curse what they agree to call realism, although
they make me one of its high priests; reconcile all that.

As for the public, its taste disgusts me more and more. Yesterday,
for instance, I was present at the first night of the Prix Martin, a
piece of buffoonery that, for my part, I think full of wit. Not one
of the witty things in the play produced a laugh, and the
denouement, which seems out of the ordinary, passed unperceived.
Then to look for what can please seems to me the most chimerical of
undertakings. For I defy anyone to tell me by what means one
pleases. Success is a consequence and must not be an end. I have
never sought it (although I desire it) and I seek it less and less.

After my little story, I shall do another,--for I am too deeply
shaken to start on a great work. I had thought first of publishing
Saint-Julien in a periodical, but I have given the plan up.



CCCX. TO GEORGE SAND
Friday evening...1876

Ah! thank you from the bottom of my heart, dear master! You have
made me pass an exquisite day, for I have read your last volume, la
Tour de Percemont.--Marianne only to-day; as I had many things to
finish, among others my tale of Saint-Julien, I had shut up the
aforesaid volume in a drawer so as not to succumb to the temptation.
As my little story was finished last night, I rushed upon your book
when morning came and devoured it.

I find it perfect, two jewels! Marianne moved me deeply and two or
three times I wept. I recognized myself in the character of Pierre.
Certain pages seemed to me fragments of my own memoirs, supposing I
had the talent to write them in such a way! How charming, poetic and
true to life all that is! La Tour de Percemont pleased me extremely.
But Marianne literally enchanted me. The English think as I do, for
in the last number of the Athenaeum there is a very fine article
about you. Did you know that? So then, for this time, I admire you
completely and without the least reserve.

There you are, and I am very glad of it. You have never done
anything to me that was not good; I love you tenderly!



CCCXI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Sunday, Nohant, 5th April, 1876.

Victor Borie is in Italy, what must I write him? Are you the man to
go to find him and explain the affair to him? He is somewhere near
Civita-Vecchia, very much on the go and perhaps not easy to catch up
with.

I am sure that he would receive you with open arms, for, although a
financier to his finger-tips he has remained very friendly and nice
to us. He does not tell us if he is on his mountain of alum for
long. Lina is writing to him and will know soon, shall she tell him
that you are disposed to go to meet him, or that you will wait until
his return to Paris? anyway until the 20th of May he will get
letters addressed to him at the Hotel Italy in Florence. We shall
have to be on the watch, for he writes AT LONG INTERVALS.

I have not the time to say any more to you today. People are coming
in. I have read Fromont et Risler; I charge you to thank M. Daudet,
to tell him that I spent the night in reading it and that I do not
know whether I prefer Jack or Risler; it is interesting, I might
almost say GRIPPING.

I embrace you and I love you, when will you give me some Flaubert to
read?

G. Sand



CCCXII. To GEOBGE SAND
Monday evening

Dear master,  Thanks to Madame Lina's kind note, I betook myself to
V. Borie's yesterday and was most pleasantly received. My nephew
went to carry him the documents today. Borie has promised to look
after the affair; will he do it?

I think that he is in just the position to do me indirectly the
greatest service that any one could do me. If my poor nephew should
get the capital which he needs in order to work, I could get back a
part of what I have lost and live in peace the rest of my days.

I presented myself to Borie under your recommendation, and it is to
you that I owe the cordiality of his reception. I do not thank you
(of course) but you can tell him that I was touched by his kind
reception (and stimulate his zeal if you think that may be useful).

I have been working a great deal lately. How I should like to see
you so as to read my little medieval folly to you! I have begun
another story entitled Histoire d'un coeur simple. But I have
interrupted this work to make some researches on the period of Saint
John the Baptist, for I want to describe the feast of Herodias.

I hope to have my readings finished in a fortnight, after which I
shall return to Croisset from which spot I shall not budge till
winter,--my long sessions at the library exhaust me. Cruchard is
weary.

The good Tourgueneff leaves this evening for Saint Petersburg. He
asks me if I have thanked you for your last book? Could I be guilty
of such an oversight?  You will see by my Histoire d'un coeur simple
where you will recognize your immediate influence, that I am not so
obstinate as you think. I believe that the moral tendency, or rather
the human basis of this little work will please you!

Adieu, dear good master. Remembrances to all yours.

I embrace you very tenderly.

Your old Gustave Flaubert



CCCXIII. To MAURICE SAND
Tuesday evening, 27th

All I can say to you, in the first place, my dear friend, is, that
your book has made me pass a sleepless night. I read it instantly,
at one fell swoop, only stopping to fill my good pipe from time to
time and then to resume my reading.

When the impression is a little less fresh I shall take up your book
again to find the flaws in it. But I think that there are very few.
You must be content? It ought to please? It is dramatic and as
amusing as possible!

Beginning with the first page I was charmed with the sincerity of
the description. And at the end I admired the composition of the
whole, the logical way the events were worked out and the characters
related.

Your chief character, Miss Mary, is too hateful (to my taste) to be
anything but an exact picture. That is one of the choicest parts of
your book, together with the homelife, the life in New York?

Your good savage makes me laugh out loud when he is at the Opera.

I was struck by the house of the missionaries (Montaret's first
night). You make it seem real.  Naissa scalping, and then wiping her
hands on the grass, seemed to me especially well done. As well as
the disgust that she inspires in Montaret,

I venture a timid observation: it seems to me that the flight of
father Athanasius and of Montaret, when they escape from their
prison, is not perfectly clear? Is not the material explanation of
the event too short?

I do not care for, as language, two or three ready-made locutions,
such as "break the ice." You can see that I have read you
attentively! What a pedagogue I make, eh! I am telling you all that
from memory, for I have lent your book, and it has not been returned
to me yet. But my recollection of it is of a thing very well done.

Don't you agree with me that a play of very great effect could be
made from it for a boulevard theatre?

By the way, how is Cadio going?

Tell your dear mamma that I adore her.

Harrisse, from whom I have received a letter today, charges me to
remember him to her, and, for my part, I charge you to embrace her
for me.

And I grasp your two hands heartily and say "bravo" to you again,
and faithfully yours.

Gustave Flaubert



CCCXIV. To MADAM MAURICE SAND
Thursday evening, 25th May, 1876

Dear Madam,

I sent a telegram to Maurice this morning, asking for news of Madam
Sand.

I was told yesterday that she was very ill, why has not Maurice
answered me?

I went to Plauchut's this morning to get details. He is in the
country, at Le Mans, so that I am in a state of cruel uncertainty.

Be good enough to answer me immediately and believe me, dear madam,

Your very affectionate,

Gustave Flaubert

4 rue Murillo, Parc Monceau



CCCXV. To MADAM LINA SAND

Dear Madam,

Your note of this morning reassures me a little. But that of last
night had absolutely upset me.

I beg you to give me very frequent news of your dear mother-in-law.

Embrace her for me and believe that I am

Your very devoted

Gustave Flaubert

Beginning with the middle of next week, about Wednesday or Thursday,
I shall be at Croisset.

Saturday morning, 3d June, 1876.



CCCXVI. To MAURICE SAND
Croisset, Sunday, 24 June, 1876

You had prepared me, my dear Maurice, I wanted to write to you, but
I was waiting till you were a little freer, more alone. Thank you
for your kind thought.

Yes, we understood each other, yonder! (And if I did not remain
longer, it is because my comrades dragged me away.) It seemed to me
that I was burying my mother the second time. Poor, dear, great
woman! What genius and what heart! But she lacked nothing, it is not
she whom we must pity.

What is to become of you? Shall you stay in Nohant? That good old
house must seem horribly empty to you! But you, at least, are not
alone! You have a wife...a rare one! and two exquisite children.
While I was with you, I had, over and above my grief, two desires:
to run off with Aurore and to kill M. Marx.[Footnote: A reporter for
le Figaro.] There you have the truth, it is unnecessary to make you
see the psychology of the thing. I received yesterday a very
sympathetic letter from good Tourgueneff. He too loved her. But
then, who did not love her? If you had seen in Paris the anguish of
Martine![Footnote: George Sand's maid.] That was distressing.

Plauchut is still in Nohant, I suppose. Tell him that I love him
because I saw him shed so many tears.

And let yours flow, my dear friend, do all that is necessary not to
console yourself,--which would, moreover, be impossible. Never mind!
In a short time you will feel a great joy in the idea alone that you
were a good son and that she knew it absolutely. She used to talk of
you as of a blessing.

And when you shall have rejoined her, when the great-grand-children
of the grandchildren of your two little girls shall have joined her,
and when for a long time there shall have been no question of the
things and the people that surround us,--in several centuries,--
hearts like ours will palpitate through hers! People will read her
books, that is to say that they will think according to her ideas
and they will love with her love. But all that does not give her
back to you, does it? With what then can we sustain ourselves if
pride desert us, and what man more than you should have pride in his
mother!

Now dear friend, adieu! When shall we meet now? How I should feel
the need of talking of her, insatiably!

Embrace Madam Maurice for me, as I did on the stairway at Nohant,
and your little girls.

Yours, from the depths of my heart,

Your Gustave Flaubert



CCCXVII. To MAURICE SAND
Croisset, Tuesday, 3rd October, 1876

Thank you for your kind remembrance, my dear friend. Neither do I
forget, and I dream of your poor, dear mamma in a sadness that does
not disappear. Her death has left a great emptiness for me. After
you, your wife and the good Plauchut, I am perhaps the one who
misses her most! I need her.

I pity you the annoyances that your sister causes you. I too have
gone through that! It is so easy moreover to be good! Besides that
causes less evil. When shall we meet? I want so much to see you,
first just to see you--and second to talk of her.

When your business is finished, why not come to Paris for some time?
Solitude is bad under certain conditions. One should not become
intoxicated with one's grief, however much attraction one finds in
doing so.

You ask me what I am doing. This is it: this year I have written two
stories, and I am going to begin another so as to make the three
into one volume that I want to publish in the spring. After that I
hope to resume the big novel that I laid aside a year ago after my
financial disaster. Matters are improving in that direction, and I
shall not be forced to change anything in my way of living. If I
have been able to start at work again, I owe it partly to the good
counsel of your mother. She had found the best way to bring me back
to respect myself.

In order to get the quicker at work, I shall stay here till New
Year's Day,--perhaps later than that. Do try to put off your visit
to Paris.

Embrace your dear little girls warmly for me, my respects to Madam
Maurice, and-sincerely yours, ex imo.

Gustave Flaubert



CCCXVIII. To MAURICE SAND
Saint-Gratien par Sannois, 20th August, 1877

Thank you for your kind remembrance, my dear Maurice. Next winter
you will be in Passy, I hope,--and from time to time we can have a
good chat. I even count on seeing myself at your table by the side
of your friends whose "idol" I am.

You speak to me of your dear and illustrious mamma! Next to you I do
not think that any one could think of her more often than I do! How
I miss her! How I need her!

I had begun un coeur simple solely on account of her, only to please
her. She died while I was in the midst of this work. Thus it is with
our dreams.

I still continue not to find diversion in existence. In order to
forget the weight of it, I work as frantically as possible.

What sustains me is the indignation that the Imbecility of the
Bourgeois affords me! Summed up at present by the large party of law
and order, it reaches a dizzy height!

Has there been anything in history more inept than the 16th of May?
Where is there an idiot comparable to the Bayard of modern times?

I have been in Paris, or rather at Saint-Gratien, for three days.
Day after tomorrow I leave the princess, and in a fortnight I shall
make a little trip to Lower Normandy for the sake of literature.
When we meet I shall talk a long time with you, if you are
interested, about the terrible book that I am in the process of
concocting. I shall have enough work in it to take me three or four
years. Not less!

Don't leave me so long without news. Give a long look for me at the
little corner of the holy ground!...My regards to your dear wife,
embrace the dear little girls and sincerely yours, my good Maurice,

Your old friend

Gustave Flaubert



CCCXIX. To MAURICE SAND
Tuesday morning, April, 1880

My dear Maurice,

No! Erase Cruchard and Polycarp and replace those words by what you
like.

The Public ought not to have all of us,--let us reserve something
for ourselves. That seems to me more decent (quod decet). You do not
speak of a COMPLETE EDITION? Ah! your poor dear mamma! How often I
think of her! And what need I have of her! There is not a day when I
do not say: "If she were there, I should ask her advice."

I shall be at Croisset till the 8th or the 10th of May. So, my old
fellow, when you wish to come there, you will be welcome. I embrace
you all from the oldest to the youngest.

Cruchard for you,

Polycarp for the human race,

Gustave Flaubert for Literature



THE END OF THE GEORGE SAND-GUSTAVE FLAUBERT LETTERS