You ask him if he sometimes thinks of his "old troubadour of the
clock," most certainly! and he mourns for him. Our nocturnal talks
were very precious (there were moments when I restrained myself in
order not to KISS you like a big child).

Your ears ought to have burned last night. I dined at my brother's
with all his family. There was hardly any conversation except about
you, and every one sang your praises, unless perhaps myself, I
slandered you as much as possible, dearly beloved master.

I have reread, a propos of your last letter (and by a very natural
connection of ideas), that chapter of father Montaigne's entitled
"some lines from Virgil." What he said of chastity is precisely what
I believe. It is the effort that is fine and not the abstinence in
itself. Otherwise shouldn't one curse the flesh like the Catholics?
God knows whither that would lead. Now at the risk of repetition and
of being a Prudhomme, I insist that your young man is wrong.
[Footnote: Refers to Francis Laur.] If he is temperate at twenty
years old, he will be a cowardly roue at fifty. Everything has its
compensations. The great natures which are good, are above
everything generous and don't begrudge the giving of themselves. One
must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate
as much as possible in all his being.

That is, I think, the real human existence.



XXXIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croisset
Palaiseau, 29 November, 1866

One need not be spiritualist nor materialist, you say, but one
should be a naturalist. That is a great question.

My Cascaret, that is what I call the little engineer, will decide it
as he thinks best. He is not stupid and he will have many ideas,
deductions and emotions before realizing the prophecy that you make.
I do not catechise him without reserve, for he is stronger than I am
on many points, and it is not Catholic spiritualism that stifles
him. But the question by itself is very serious, and hovers above
our art, above us troubadours, more or less clock-bearing or
clockshaped.

Treat it in an entirely impersonal way; for what is good for one
might be quite the reverse for another. Let us ask ourselves in
making an abstract of our tendencies or of our experiences, if the
human being can receive and seek its own full physical development
without intellectual suffering. Yes, in an ideal and rational
society that would be so. But, in that in which we live and with
which we must be content, do not enjoyment and excess go hand in
hand, and can one separate them or limit them, unless one is a sage
of the first class? And if one is a sage, farewell temptation which
is the father of real joys.

The question for us artists, is to know if abstinence strengthens us
or if it exalts us too much, which state would degenerate into
weakness,--You will say, "There is time for everything and power
enough for every dissipation of strength." Then you make a
distinction and you place limits, there is no way of doing
otherwise. Nature, you think, places them herself and prevents us
from abusing her. Ah! but no, she is not wiser than we who are also
nature.

Our excesses of work, as our excesses of pleasure, kill us
certainly, and the more we are great natures, the more we pass
beyond bounds and extend the limits of our powers.

No, I have no theories. I spend my life in asking questions and in
hearing them answered in one way or another without any victoriously
conclusive reply ever being given me. I await the brilliance of a
new state of my intellect and of my organs in a new life; for, in
this one, whosoever reflects, embraces up to their last
consequences, the limits of pro and con. It is Monsieur Plato, I
think, who asked for and thought he held the bond. He had it no more
than we. However, this bond exists, since the universe subsists
without the pro and con, which constitute it, reciprocally
destroying each other. What shall one call it in material nature?
EQUILIBRIUM, that will do, and for spiritual nature? MODERATION,
relative chastity, abstinence from excess, whatever you want, but
that is translated by EQUILIBRIUM; am I wrong, my master?

Consider it, for in our novels, what our characters do or do not do,
rests only on that. Will they or will they not possess the object of
their ardent desires? Whether it is love or glory, fortune or
pleasure, ever since they existed, they have aspired to one end. If
we have a philosophy in us, they walk right according to us; if we
have not, they walk by chance, and are too much dominated by the
events which we put in the way of their legs. Imbued by our own
ideas and ruled by fatality, they do not always appear logical.
Should we put much or little of ourselves in them? Shouldn't we put
what society puts in each one of us?

For my part, I follow my old inclination, I put myself in the skin
of my good people. People scold me for it, that makes no difference.
You, I don't really know if by method or by instinct, take another
course. What you do, you succeed in; that is why I ask you if we
differ on the question of internal struggles, if the hero ought to
have any or if he ought not to know them.

You always astonish me with your painstaking work; is it a coquetry?
It does not seem labored. What I find difficult is to choose out of
the thousand combinations of scenic action which can vary
infinitely, the clear and striking situation which is not brutal nor
forced. As for style, I attach less importance to it than you do.

The wind plays my old harp as it lists. It has its HIGH NOTES, its
LOW NOTES, its heavy notes--and its faltering notes, in the end it
is all the same to me provided the emotion comes, but I can find
nothing in myself. It is THE OTHER who sings as he likes, well or
ill, and when I try to think about it, I am afraid and tell myself
that I am nothing, nothing at all. But a great wisdom saves us; we
know how to say to ourselves, "Well, even if we are absolutely
nothing but instruments, it is still a charming state and like no
other, this feeling oneself vibrate."

Now, let the wind blow a little over your strings. I think that you
take more trouble than you need, and that you ought to let THE OTHER
do it oftener. That would go just as well and with less fatigue.

The instrument might sound weak at certain moments, but the breeze
in continuing would increase its strength. You would do afterwards
what I don't do, what I should do. You would raise the tone of the
whole picture and would cut out what is too uniformly in the light.

Vale et me ama.



XXXIV. TO GEORGE SAND
Saturday morning

Don't bother yourself about the information relative to the
journals. That will occupy little space in my book and I have time
to wait. But when you have nothing else to do, jot down on paper
whatever you can recall of '48. Then you can develop it in talking.
I don't ask you for copy of course, but to collect a little of your
personal memories.

Do you know an actress at the Odeon who plays Macduff in Macbeth?
Dugueret? She would like to have the role of Nathalie in Mont-
reveche. She will be recommended to you by Girardin, Dumas and me. I
saw her yesterday in Faustine, in which she showed talent. My
opinion is that she has intelligence and that one could profit by
her.

If your little engineer has made a VOW, and if that vow does not
cost him anything, he is right to keep it; if not, it is pure folly,
between you and me. Where should liberty exist if not in passion?

Well! no, IN MY DAY we didn't take such vows and we loved! and
swaggeringly. But all participated in a great eclecticism and when
one strayed FROM LADIES it was from pride, in defiance of one's
self, and for effect. In short, we were Red Romantics, perfectly
ridiculous to be sure, but in full bloom. The little good which
remains to me comes from that epoch.



XXXV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Palaiseau, 30 November, 1866

There would be a good deal to say on all that, my comrade. My
Cascaret, that is to say, the fiance in question, keeps himself for
his fiancee. She said to him, "Let us wait till you have
accomplished certain definite work," and he works. She said to him,
"Let us keep ourselves pure for each other," and he keeps himself
pure. It is not that he is choked by Catholic spiritualism; but he
has a high ideal of love, and why counsel him to go and lose it when
his conscience and his honor depend on keeping it?

There is an equilibrium which Nature, our ruler, herself puts in our
instincts, and she sets the limit to our appetites. Great natures
are not the most robust. We are not developed in all our senses by a
very logical education. We are compressed in every way, and we
thrust out our roots and branches when and how we can. Great artists
are often weak also, and many are impotent. Some too strong in
desire are quickly exhausted. In general I think that we have too
intense joys and sorrows, we who work with our brains. The laborer
who works his land and his wife hard by day and night is not a
forceful nature. His brain is very feeble. You say to develop one's
self in every direction? Come, not all at the same time, not without
rest.

Those who brag of that, are bluffing a bit, or IF THEY DO
everything, do everything ill. If love for them is a little bread-
and-butter and art a little pot-boiler, all right; but if their
pleasure is great, verging on the infinite, and their work eager,
verging on enthusiasm, they do not alternate these as in sleeping
and waking.

As for me, I don't believe in these Don Juans who are Byrons at the
same time. Don Juan did not make poems and Byron made, so they say,
very poor love. He must have had sometimes--one can count such
emotions in one's life--a complete ecstasy of heart, mind and
senses. He knew enough about them to be one of the poets of love.
Nothing else is necessary for the instrument of our vibration. The
continual wind of little appetites breaks them.

Try some day to write a novel in which the artist (the real artist)
is the hero, you will see what great, but delicate and restrained,
vigor is in it, how he will see everything with an attentive eye,
curious and tranquil, and how his infatuations with the things he
examines and delves into, will be rare and serious. You will see
also how he fears himself, how he knows that he can not surrender
himself without exhaustion, and how a profound modesty in regard to
the treasures of his soul prevents him from scattering and wasting
them.

The artist is such a fine type to do, that I have never dared really
to do him. I do not consider myself worthy to touch that beautiful
and very complicated figure; that is aiming too high for a mere
woman. But if it could certainly tempt you some day, it would be
worth while.

Where is the model? I don't know, I have never REALLY known any one
who did not show some spot in the sunlight, I mean some side where
the artist verged on the Philistine. Perhaps you have not that spot;
you ought to paint yourself. As for me I have it. I love
classifications, I verge on the pedagogue. I love to sew and to care
for children, I verge on the servant. I am easily distracted and
verge on the idiot. And then I should not like perfection; I feel it
but I shouldn't know how to show it.

But one could give him some faults in his nature. What ones? We
shall hunt for them some day. That is not really what you are
working on now and I ought not to distract you from it.

Be less cruel to yourself. Go ahead and when the afflatus shall have
produced everything you must elevate the general tone and cut out
what ought not to come down front stage. Can't that be done? It
seems to me that it can. What you do appears so easy, so abundant!
It is a perpetual overflow, I do not understand your anguish.  Good
night, dear brother, my love to all yours. I have returned to my
solitude at Palaiseau, I love it. I leave it for Paris, Monday. I
embrace you warmly. Good luck to your work.

G. Sand



XXXVI. Monsieur Gustave Flobert at Croisset,
Rouen [The postage stamp bears the mark, Paris, 4, December, 1866]

Sir the noise that you make in literature by your distinguished
talent I also made in my day in the manner that my means permitted
me I began in 1804 under the auspices of the celebrated Madame Saqui
and bore off palms and left memories in the annals of the tight-rope
and coregrafie balancer in all countries where I have been there
appreciated by generals and other officers of the Empire by whom I
have been solicited up to an advanced age so that wives of prefects
and ministers could not have been complimented about it I have read
your distinguished works notably Madame Bovarie of which I think I
am capable of being a model to you when she breaks the chains of her
feet to go where her heart calls her. I am well preserved for my
advanced age and if you have a repugnance for an artist in
misfortune, I should be content with your ideal sentiments. You can
then count on my heart not being able to dispose of my person being
married to a man of light character who squandered my wax cabinet
wherein were all figures of celebrities, kings, emperors, ancient
and modern and celebrated crimes, which if I had had your permission
about it you would have been placed in the number I had then a place
in the railroad substation to have charge of the cabinets which the
jealousy of my rival made me lose, it is in these sentiments that I
write you if you deign to write the history of my unhappy life you
alone would be worthy of it and would see in it things of which you
would be worthy of appreciating I shall present myself at your house
in Rouen whose address I had from M. Bouilhet who knows me well
having come to see me in his youth he will tell you that I have the
phthisic still agreeably and always faithful to all who knew me
whether in the civil or in the military and in these sentiments for
life your affectionate

Victoire Potelet

called Marengo Lirondelle widow Dodin
Rue Lanion, 47, Belleville.



XXXVII. TO GEORGE SAND
Wednesday night, 5th December, 1866

Oh! how lovely the letter of Marengo the Swallow is! Seriously, I
think it a masterpiece, not a word which is not a word of genius. I
have laughed aloud many times. I thank you very dear master, you are
as good as can be.

You never tell me what you are doing. How far has the play gone?

I am not at all surprised that you don't understand my literary
agonies. I don't understand them myself. But they exist
nevertheless, and violent ones.

I don't in the least know how to set to work to write, and I begin
by expressing only the hundredth part of my ideas after infinite
gropings. Not one who seizes the first impulse, your friend, no! not
at all! Thus for entire days I have polished and re-polished a
paragraph without accomplishing anything. I feel like weeping at
times. You ought to pity me!

As for our subject under discussion (a propos of your young man),
what you write me in your last letter is so my way of thinking, that
I have not only practised it but preached it. Ask Theo. However, let
us understand one another. Artists (who are priests) risk nothing in
being chaste; on the contrary. But the bourgeois, what is the use in
it for them? Of course there must be certain ones among humanity who
stick to chastity. Happy indeed those who don't depart from it.

I don't agree with you that there is anything worth while to be done
with the character of the IDEAL ARTIST; he would be a monster. Art
is not made to paint the exceptions, and I feel an unconquerable
repugnance to putting on paper something from out of my heart. I
even think that a novelist HASN'T THE RIGHT TO EXPRESS HIS OPINION
on any subject whatsoever. Has the good God ever uttered it, his
opinion? That is why there are not a few things that choke me which
I should like to spit out, but which I swallow. Why say them, in
fact! The first comer is more interesting than Monsieur Gustave
Flaubert, because he is more GENERAL and therefore more typical.

Nevertheless, there are days when I consider myself below
imbecility. I have still a globe of goldfish and that amuses me.
They keep me company while I dine. Is it stupid to be interested in
such simple things? Adieu, it is late, I have an aching head.

I embrace you.



XXXVIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT,
at Paris December, 1866

"Not put one's heart into what one writes?" I don't understand at
all, oh! not at all! As for me, I think that one can not put
anything else into it. Can one separate one's mind from one's heart?
Is it something different? Can sensation itself limit itself? Can
existence divide itself? In short, not to give oneself entirely to
one's work, seems to me as impossible as to weep with something else
than one's eyes, and to think with something else than one's brain.

What was it you meant? You must tell me when you have the time.



XXXIX. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Paris, 8 December, 1866

You ask me what I am doing? Your old troubadour is content this
evening. He has passed the night in re-doing a second act which did
not go properly and which has turned out well, so well that my
directors are delighted, and I have good hopes of making the end
effective--it does not please me yet, but one must pull it through.
In short, I have nothing to tell you about myself which is very
interesting. When one has the patience of an ox and the wrist broken
from crushing stones well or badly, one has scarcely any unexpected
events or emotions to recount. My poor Manceau called me the ROAD-
MENDER, and there is nothing less poetic than those beings.

And you, dear friend, are you experiencing the anguish and labors of
childbirth? That is splendid and youthful. Those who want them don't
always get them!

When my daughter-in-law brings into the world dear little children,
I abandon myself to such labor in holding her in my arms that it
reacts on me, and when the infant arrives, I am sicker than she is,
and even seriously so. I think that your pains now react on me, and
I have a headache on account of them. But alas! I cannot assist at
any birth and I almost regret the time when one believed it hastened
deliverances to burn candles before an image.

I see that that rascal Bouilhet has betrayed me; he promised me to
copy the Marengo letter in a feigned hand to see if you would be
taken in by it. People have written to me seriously things like
that. How good and kind your great friend is. He is adored at the
Odeon, and this evening they told me that his play was going better
and better. I went to hear it again two or three days ago and I was
even more delighted with it than the first time.

Well, well, let's keep up our heart, whatever happens, and when you
go to rest remember that someone loves you. Affectionate regards to
your mother, brother and niece.

G. Sand



XL. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset, Saturday night

I have seen Citizen Bouilhet, who had a real ovation in his own
country. His compatriots who had absolutely ignored him up to then,
from the moment that Paris applauded him, screamed with enthusiasm.-
-He will return here Saturday next, for a banquet that they are
giving him,--80 covers, at least.

As for Marengo the Swallow, he kept your secret so well, that he
read the letter in question with an astonishment which duped me.

Poor Marengo! she is a figure! and one that you ought to put in a
book. I wonder what her memoirs would be, written in that style?--
Mine (my style) continues to give me no small annoyance. I hope,
however, in a month, to have crossed the most barren tract. But at
the moment I am lost in a desert; well, by the grace of God, so much
the worse for me! How gladly I shall abandon this sort of thing,
never to return to it to my dying day! Depicting the modern French
bourgeois is a stench in my nostrils! And then won't it be time
perhaps to enjoy oneself a bit in life, and to choose subjects
pleasant to the author?

I expressed myself badly when I said to you that "one should not
write from the heart." I meant to say: not put one's personality
into the picture. I think that great art is scientific and
impersonal. One should, by an effort of mind, put oneself into one's
characters and not create them after oneself. That is the method at
least; a method which amounts to this: try to have a great deal of
talent and even of genius if you can. How vain are all the poetic
theories and criticisms!--and the nerve of the gentlemen who compose
them sickens me. Oh! nothing restrains them, those boneheads!

Have you noticed that there is sometimes in the air a current of
common ideas? For instance, I have just read my friend Du Camp's new
novel: Forces Perdues. It is very like what I am doing, in many
ways. His book is very naive and gives an accurate idea of the men
of our generation having become real fossils to the young men of
today. The reaction of '48 opened a deep chasm between the two
Frances.

Bouilhet told me that you had been seriously ill at one of the
recent Magny's, although you do pretend to be a "woman of wood." Oh!
no you are not of wood, dear good great heart! "Beloved old
troubadour," would it not perhaps be opportune to rehabilitate him
at the Theatre Almanzor? I can see him with his toque and his guitar
and his apricot tunic howling at the black-gowned students from the
top of a rock. The talk would be fine. Now, good night; I kiss you
on both cheeks tenderly.



XLI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Paris, 7 December, 1866

Something like a week ago someone came to my house in the morning to
ask me the address of the bootmaker, my maid did not want to awaken
me, and it was not until noon that I read the letter; the bearer
said he came from the Hotel Helder on the rue Helder. I answered at
once that Simonin lived at 15 rue Richelieu, I wrote to your mother
thinking that it was she who wrote to me. I see that she did not
receive my note and I don't understand about it, but it is not my
fault.

Your old Troubadour is sick as a dog again today, but it will not
prevent him from going to Magny's this evening. He could not die in
better company; although he would prefer the edge of a ditch in the
spring.

Everything else goes well and I leave for Nohant on Saturday.  I am
trying hard to push the entomological work which Maurice is
publishing. It is very fine.

I am doing for him what I have never done for myself. I am writing
to the newspaper men.

I shall recommend Mademoiselle Bosquet to whom I can, but that
appeals to another public, and I don't stand in as well with the
literary men as I do with the scholars. But certainly Marengo the
Swallow MUST BE DONE and the apricot troubadour also. All that was
of the Cadios of the revolution who began to be or who wanted to be
something, no matter what. I am of the last comers and you others
born of us, you are between the illusions of my time and the crude
deception of the new times. It is quite natural that Du Camp should
go parallel with you in a series of observations and ideas, that
does not mean anything. There will be no resemblance.

Oh no! I have not found a title for you, it is too serious, and then
I should need to know everything. In any case I am no good today to
do anything except to draw up my epitaph. Et in Arcadia ego, you
know, I love you, dear friend brother, and bless you with all my
heart.

G. Sand
Monday.



XLII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
Paris, 9 January, 1867

Dear comrade,

Your old troubadour has been tempted to bite the dust. He is still
in Paris. He should have left the 25th of December; his trunk was
strapped; your first letter was awaiting him every day at Nohant. At
last he is all ready to leave and he goes tomorrow with his son
Alexandre [Footnote: Alexandre Dumas fils.] who is anxious to
accompany him.

It is stupid to be laid on one's back and to lose consciousness for
three days and to get up as enfeebled as if one had done something
painful and useful. It was nothing after all, except temporary
impossibility of digesting anything whatever. Cold, or weakness, or
work, I don't know. I don't think of it any longer. Sainte-Beuve is
much more disquieting, somebody have written you about it. He is
better also, but there will be serious trouble, and on account of
that, accidents to look out for. I am very saddened and anxious
about it.

I have not worked for two weeks; so my task has not progressed very
much, and as I don't know if I am going to be in shape very soon, I
have given the Odeon A VACATION. They will take me when I am ready.
I think of going a little to the south when I have seen my children.
The plants of the coast are running through my head. I am
prodigiously uninterested in anything which is not my little ideal
of peaceful work, country life, and of tender and pure friendship. I
really think that I am not going to live a long time, although I am
quite cured and well. I get this warning from the great calm,
CONTINUALLY CALMER, which exists in my formerly agitated soul. My
brain only works from synthesis to analysis, and formerly it was the
contrary. Now, what presents itself to my eyes when I awaken is the
planet; I have considerable trouble in finding again there the MOI
which interested me formerly, and which I begin to' call YOU in the
plural. It is charming, the planet, very interesting, very curious
but rather backward, and as yet somewhat unpractical; I hope to pass
into an oasis with better highways and possible to all. One needs so
much money and resources in order to travel here! and the time lost
in order to procure. these necessaries is lost to study and to
contemplation. It seems to me that there is due me something less
complicated, less civilized, more naturally luxurious, and more
easily good than this feverish halting-place. Will you come into the
land, of my dreams, if I succeed in finding the road? Ah! who can
know?

And the novel, is it getting on? Your courage has not declined?
Solitude does not weigh on you? I really think that it is not
absolute, and that somewhere there is a sweetheart who comes and
goes, or who lives near there. But there is something of the
anchorite in your life just the same, and if envy your situation. As
for me, I am too alone at Palaiseau, with a dead soul; not alone
enough at Nohant, with the children whom I love too much to belong
to myself,--and at Paris, one does not know what one is, one forgets
oneself entirely for a thousand things which are not worth any more
than oneself. I embrace you with all my heart, dear friend; remember
me to your mother, to your dear family, and write me at Nohant, that
will do me good.

The cheeses? I don't know at all, it seems to me that they spoke to
me of them, but I don't remember at all. I will tell you that from
down there.



XLIII. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset, Saturday night

No, dear master, you are not near your end. So much the worse for
you perhaps. But you will live to be old, very old, as giants live,
since you are of that race: only you MUST rest. One thing astonishes
me and that is that you have not died twenty times over, having
thought so much, written so much and suffered so much. Do go then,
since you have the desire, to the Mediterranean. Its azure sky
quiets and invigorates. There are the Countries of Youth, such as
the Bay of Naples. Do they make one sadder sometimes? I do not know.

Life is not easy! What a complicated and extravagant affair! I know
something about that. One must have money for everything! So that
with a modest revenue and an unproductive profession one has to make
up one's mind to have but little. So I do! The habit is formed, but
the days that work does not go well are not amusing. Yes indeed! I
would love to follow you into another planet. And a propos of money,
it is that which will make our planet uninhabitable in the near
future, for it will be impossible to live here, even for the rich,
without looking after one's property; one will have to spend several
hours a day fussing over one's INCOME. Charming! I continue to fuss
over my novel, and I shall go to Paris when I reach the end of my
chapter, towards the middle of next month.

And whatever you suspect, no "lovely lady" comes to see me. Lovely
ladies have occupied my mind a good deal, but have taken up very
little of my time. Applying the term anchorite to me is perhaps a
juster comparison than you think.

I pass entire weeks without exchanging a word with a human being,
and at the end of the week it is not possible for me to recall a
single day nor any event whatsoever. I see my mother and my niece on
Sundays, and that is all. My only company consists of a band of rats
in the garret, which make an infernal racket above my head, when the
water does not roar or the wind blow. The nights are black as ink,
and a silence surrounds me comparable to that of the desert.
Sensitiveness is increased immeasurably in such a setting. I have
palpitations of the heart for nothing.

All that results from our charming profession. That is what it means
to torment the soul and the body. But perhaps this torment is our
proper lot here below?

I told you, didn't I, that I had reread Consuelo and the Comtesse de
Rudolstadt; it took me four days. We must discuss them at length,
when you are willing. Why am I in love with Siverain? Perhaps
because I am of both sexes.



XLIV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT at Croissset
Nohant, 15 January, 1867

Here I am at home, fairly strong except for several hours during the
evening. Yet, THAT WILL PASS. THE EVIL OR HE WHO ENDURES IT, my old
cure used to say, CAN NOT LAST. I received your letter this morning,
dear friend of my heart. Why do I love you more than most of the
others, even more than old and well-tried friends? I am asking, for
my condition at this hour, is that of being

THOU WHO GOEST SEEKING,
AT SUNSET,
FORTUNE! ...

Yes, intellectual fortune, LIGHT! Oh well, here it is: one gets,
being old, at the sunset of life,--which is the most beautiful hour
of tones and reflections,--a new idea of everything and of affection
above all.

In the age of power and of personality, one tests one's friends as
one tests the earth, from the point of view of reciprocity. One
feels oneself solid, one wants to find that which bears one or leads
one, solid. But, when one feels the intensity of the moi fleeing,
one loves persons and things for what they are in themselves, for
what they represent in the eyes of one's soul, and not at all for
what they add further to one's destiny. It is like the picture or
the statue which one would like to own, when one dreams at the same
time of a beautiful house of one's own in which to put it.

But one has passed through green Bohemia without gathering anything
there; one has remained poor, sentimental and troubadourish. One
knows very well that it will always be the same, and that one will
die without a hearth or a home. Then one thinks of the statue, of
the picture which one would not know what to do with and which one
would not know where to place with due honor, if one owned it. One
is content to know that they are in some temple not profaned by cold
analysis, a little far from the eye, and one loves them so much the
more. One says: I will go again to the country where they are. I
shall see again and I shall love always that which has made me love
and understand them. The contact of my personality will not have
changed them, it will not be myself that I shall love in them.

And it is thus, truly, that the ideal which one does not dream of
grasping, fixes itself in one because it remains ITSELF. That is all
the secret of the beautiful, of the only truth, of love, friendship,
of art, of enthusiasm, and of faith. Consider it, you will see.

That solitude in which you live would be delicious to me in fine
weather. In winter I find it stoical, and am forced to recall to
myself that you have not the moral need of locomotion AS A HABIT. I
used to think that was another expenditure of strength during this
season of being shut in;--well, it is very fine, but it must not
continue indefinitely; if the novel has to last longer, you must
interrupt it, or vary it with distractions. Really, my dear friend,
think of the life of the body, which gets upset and nervous when you
subdue it too much. When I was ill in Paris, I saw a physician, very
mad, but very intelligent, who said very true things on that
subject. He said that I SPIRITUALIZED myself in a disquieting
manner, and when I told him, exactly, a propos of you, that one
could abstract oneself from everything except work, and have more
rather than less strength, he answered that the danger was as great
in accumulating as in losing, and a propos of this, many excellent
things which I wish I could repeat to you.

Besides, you know them, but you never pay any attention to them.
Then this work which you abuse so in words, is a passion, and a
great one! Now, I shall tell you what you tell me. For our sake and
for the sake of your old troubadour, do SPARE yourself a little.

Consuelo, La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, what are they? Are they mine? I
don't recall a single word in them. You are reading that, you? Are
you really amused? Then I shall read them one of these days and I
shall love myself if you love me.

What is being hysterical? I have perhaps been that also, I am
perhaps; but I don't know anything about it, never having profoundly
studied the thing, and having heard of it without having studied it.
Isn't it an uneasiness, an anguish caused by the desire of an
impossible SOMETHING OR OTHER? In that case, we are all attacked by
it, by this strange illness, when we have imagination; and why
should such a malady have a sex?

And still further, there is this for those strong in anatomy: THERE
IS ONLY ONE SEX. A man and a woman are so entirely the same thing,
that one hardly understands the mass of distinctions and of subtle
reasons with which society is nourished concerning this subject. I
have observed the infancy and the development of my son and my
daughter. My son was myself, therefore much more woman, than my
daughter, who was an imperfect man.

I embrace you. Maurice and Lina who have tasted your cheese, send
you their regards, and Mademoiselle Aurore cries to you, WAIT, WAIT,
WAIT! That is all that she knows how to say while laughing like a
crazy person; for, at heart she is serious, attentive, clever with
her hands as a monkey and amusing herself better with games she
invents, than with those one suggests to her. I think that she will
have a mind of her own.

If I do not get cured here, I shall go to Cannes, where some friends
are urging me to come. But I can not yet mention it to my children.
When I am with them it is not easy to move. There is passion and
jealousy. And all my life has been like that, never my own! Pity
yourself then, you who belong to yourself!



XLV. TO GEORGE SAND
Wednesday evening

I have followed your counsel, dear master, I have EXERCISED!!! Am I
not splendid; eh?

Sunday night, at eleven o'clock, there was such lovely moonlight
along the river and on the snow that I was taken with an itch for
movement, and I walked for two hours and a half imagining all sorts
of things, pretending that I was travelling in Russia or in Norway.
When the tide came in and cracked the cakes of ice in the Seine and
the thin ice which covered the stream, it was, without any
exaggeration, superb. Then I thought of you and I missed you.

I don't like to eat alone. I have to associate the idea with someone
with the things that please me. But this someone is rare. I too
wonder why I love you. Is it because you are a great man or a
charming being? I don't know. What is certain is that I experience a
PARTICULAR sentiment for you and I cannot define it.

And a propos of this, do you think (you who are a master of
psychology), that one can love two people in the same way and that
one can experience two identical sensations about them? I don't
think so, since our individuality changes at every moment of its
existence.

You write me lovely things about "disinterested affection." That is
true, so is the opposite! We make God always in our own image. At
the bottom of all our loves and all our admirations we find
ourselves again: ourselves or something approaching us. What is the
difference if the OURSELVES is good!

My moi bores me for the moment. How this fool weighs on my shoulders
at times! He writes too slowly and is not bluffing at all when he
complains of his work. What a task! and what a devil of an idea to
have sought such a subject! You should give me a recipe for going
faster: and you complain of seeking a fortune! You! I have received
a little note from Saint-Beuve which reassures about his health, but
it is sad. He seemed to me depressed at not being able to haunt the
dells of Cyprus.  He is within the truth, or at least within his own
truth, which amounts to the same thing. I shall be like him perhaps,
when I am his age. However, I think not. Not having had the same
youth, my old age will be different.

That reminds me that I once dreamed a book on Saint Perrine.
Champfleury treated that subject badly. For I don't see that he is
comic: I should have made him atrocious and lamentable. I think that
the heart does not grow old; there are even people whose hearts grow
bigger with age. I was much drier and more bitter twenty years ago
than now. I am feminized and softened by wear, as others get harder,
and that makes me INDIGNANT. I feel that I am becoming a COW, it
takes nothing to move me; everything troubles and agitates me,
everything is to me as the north wind is to the reed.

A word from you, which I remembered, has made me reread now the Fair
Maid of Perth. It is a good story, whatever one says about it. That
fellow decidedly had an imagination.

Well, adieu. Think of me. I send you my best love.



XLVI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
Nohant, 1867

Bah! zut! troulala! Well! well! I am not sick any more, or at least
I am only half sick. The air of the country restores me, or
patience, or THE OTHER person, the one who wants to work again and
to produce. What is my illness? Nothing. Everything is all right,
but I have something that they call anemia, an effect without a
tangible cause, a breakdown which has been threatening for several
years, and which became noticeable at Palaiseau, after my return
from Croisset. An emaciation that is too rapid to be within reason,
a pulse too slow, too feeble, an indolent or capricious stomach,
with a sensation of stifling and a fondness for inertia. I was not
able to keep a glass of water on my poor stomach for several days,
and that brought me so low that I thought I was hardly curable; but,
all is getting on, and I have even been working since yesterday.

You, dear, you go walking in the night, in the snow. That is
something which for an exceptional excursion, is rather foolish and
might indeed make you ill also. Good Heavens! It is not the moon, it
is the sun that I advise; we are not owls, OBVIOUSLY! We have just
had three spring days. I wager that you have not climbed up to my
dear orchard which is so pretty and which I love so much. If it was
only in remembrance of me, you ought to climb up every fine day at
noon. Your work would flow more abundantly afterward and you would
regain the time you lost and more too.

Then you are worrying about money? I don't know what that is, since
I have not a sou in the world. I live by my day, work as does the
proletarian; when I can no longer do my day's work, I shall be
packed up for the other world, and then I shall have no more need of
anything. But you must live. How can you live by your pen if you
always let yourself be duped and shorn? It is not I who can teach
you how to protect yourself But haven't you a friend who knows how
to act for you? Alas, yes, the world is going to the devil in that
respect; and I was talking of you, the other day, to a very dear
friend, while I was showing him the artist, a personage become so
rare, and cursing the necessity of thinking of the material side of
life. I send you the last page of his letter; you will see that you
have in him a friend whom you did not suspect, and whose name will
surprise you.

No, I shall not go to Cannes, in spite of a strong temptation!
Imagine, I received a little box filled with flowers gathered out-
doors, five or six days ago; for the package followed me to Paris
and to Palaiseau. Those flowers are adorably fresh, they smell
sweetly, they are as pretty as anything.--Ah! to go, go at once to
the country of the sun. But I have no money, and besides I have no
time. My illness has delayed me and put me off. Let us stay here. Am
I not well? If I can't go to Paris next month, won't you come to see
me here? Certainly, it is an eight hours' journey. You can not see
this ancient nook. You owe me a week, or I shall believe that I love
a big ingrate who does not pay me back.

Poor Sainte-Beuve! More unhappy than we, he who has never had any
great disappointments and who has no longer any material worries. He
bewails what is the least regrettable and the least serious in life
understood as he understood it! And then very proud, having been a
Jansenist, his heart has cooled in that direction. Perhaps the
intelligence was developed, but that does not suffice to make us
live, and does not teach us how to die. Barbes, who has expected for
a long time that a stroke would carry him off, is gentle and
smiling. It does not seem to him, and it does not seem to his
friends, that death will separate him from us. He who quite goes
away, is he who believes he ends and does not extend a hand so that
anyone can follow him or rejoin him.

And good-night, dear friend of my heart. They are ringing for the
performance. Maurice regales us this evening with marionettes. They
are very amusing, and the theatre is so pretty! A real artist's
jewel. Why aren't you here? It is horrid not to live next door to
those one loves.



XLVII. TO GEORGE SAND
Wednesday

I received yesterday your son's book. I shall start it when I have
gotten rid of less amusing readings, probably. Meanwhile, don't
thank him any the less, dear master.

First, let's talk of you; "arsenic." I am sure of it! You must drink
iron, walk, and sleep, and go to the south, no matter what it costs,
there! Otherwise the WOODEN WOMAN will break down. As for money, we
shall find it; and as for the time, take it. You won't do anything
that I advise, of course. Oh! well, you are wrong, and you hurt me.

No, I have not what you call worries about money; my revenues are
very small, but they are sure. Only, as it is your friend's habit to
anticipate them he finds himself short at times, and he grumbles "in
the silence of his closet," but not elsewhere. Unless I have
extraordinary reverses, I shall have enough to feed me and warm me
until the end of my days. My heirs are or will be rich (for it is I
who am the poor one of the family). Then, zut!

As for gaining money by my pen, that is an aspiration that I have
never had, recognizing that I was radically incapable of it.

I have to live as a small retired countryman, which is not very
amusing. But so many others who are worth more than I am not having
the land, it would be unfair for me to complain. Accusing Providence
is, moreover a mania so common, that one ought to refrain from it
through simple good taste.

Another word about money and one that shall be quite between
ourselves. I can, without being inconvenienced at all, as soon as I
am in Paris, that is to say from the 20th to the 23rd of the present
month, lend you a thousand francs, if you need them in order to go
to Cannes. I make you this proposition bluntly, as I would to
Bouilhet, or any other intimate friend. Come, don't stand on
ceremony!

Between people in society, that would not be correct, I know that,
but between troubadours many things are allowable.

You are very kind with your invitation to go to Nohant. I shall go,
for I want very much to see your house. I am annoyed not to know it
when I think of you. But I shall have to put off that pleasure till
next summer. Now I have to stay some time in Paris. Three months are
not too long for all I want to do there.

I send you back the page from the letter of your friend Barbes,
whose real biography I know very imperfectly. All I know of him is
that he is honest and heroic. Give him a hand-shake for me, to thank
him for his sympathy. Is he, BETWEEN OURSELVES, as intelligent as he
is good?

I feel the importance now, of getting men of that class to be rather
frank with me. For I am going to start studying the Revolution of
'48. You have promised me to hunt in your library at Nohant for (1)
an article of yours on faience; (2) a novel by father X---, a
Jesuit, on the Holy Virgin.

But what sternness for the father Beuve who is neither Jesuit nor
virgin! He regrets, you say, "what is the least regrettable,
understood as he understood it." Why so? Everything depends upon the
intensity that one puts on the thing.

Men always find that the most serious thing of their existence is
enjoyment.

Woman for us all is the highest point of the infinite. That is not
noble, but that is the real depth of the male. They exaggerate that
unmercifully, God be thanked, for literature and for individual
happiness also.

Oh! I have missed you so much. The tides are superb, the wind
groans, the river foams and overflows. It blows from the ocean,
which benefits one.



XLVIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Paris
Nohant, 8 February, 1867

No, I am not Catholic, but I reject monstrosities. I say that the
hideous old man who buys young girls does not make love and that
there is in it neither death nor birth, nor infinity, nor male nor
female. It is a thing against nature; for it is not desire that
drives the young girl into the arms of the ugly old man, and where
there is not liberty nor reciprocity there is an attack against holy
nature. Therefore that which he regrets is not regrettable, unless
he thinks that his little cocottes will regret his person, and I ask
you if they will regret anything else than their dirty wages? That
was the gangrene in this great and admirable mind, so lucid and so
wise on all other subjects. One pardons everything in those one
loves, when one is obliged to defend them from their enemies. But
what we say between ourselves is buried, and I can tell you that
vice has quite spoiled my old friend.

We must believe that we love one another a great deal, dear comrade,
for we both had the same thought at the same time. You offer me a
thousand francs with which to go to Cannes; you who are as hard up
as I am, and, when you wrote to me that you WERE BOTHERED about
money matters, I opened my letter again, to offer you half of what I
have, which still amounts to about two thousand francs; it is my
reserve. And then I did not dare. Why? It is quite stupid; you were
better than I, you came straight to the point. Well, I thank you for
that kind thought and I do not accept. But I would accept, be sure
of it, if I did not have other resources. Only I tell you that if
anyone ought to lend to me, it is Buloz who has bought chateaux and
lands with my novels. He would not refuse me, I know. He even offers
it to me. I shall take from him then, if I have to. But I am not in
a condition to leave, I have had a relapse these last few days. I
slept thirty-six hours together, exhausted. Now I am on my feet
again, but weak. I confess to you that I have not the energy TO WISH
TO LIVE. I don't care about it; moving from where I am comfortable,
to seek new fatigues, working like a dog to renew a dog's life, it
is a little stupid, I think, when it would be so sweet to pass away
like that, still loving, still loved, at strife with no one, not
discontent with oneself and dreaming of the wonders of other worlds-
-this assumes that the imagination is still fresh. But I don't know
why I talk to you of things considered sad, I have too much the
habit of looking at them pleasantly. I forget that they appear
afflicting to those who seem in the fulness of life. Don't let's
talk about them any longer and let spring do the work, spring which
perhaps will breathe into me the desire to take up my work again. I
shall be as docile to the interior voice that tells me to walk as to
that telling me to sit down.

It is not I who promised you a novel on the Holy Virgin. At least I
don't think so. I can not find my article on faience. Do look and
see if it was printed at the end of one of my volumes to complete
the last sheet. It was entitled Giovanni Freppa ou les Maioliques.

Oh! what luck! While writing to you it has come back to me that
there is a corner where I have not looked. I hasten there, I find
it! I find something better than my article, and I send you three
works which will make you as learned as I am. That of Passeri is
charming.

Barbes has intelligence, certainly! but he is a sugar loaf. Brain on
a lofty scale, head of an Indian, with gentle instincts, almost
impossible to find; all for metaphysical thought which becomes an
instinct and a passion that dominates everything. Add to that a
character that one can only compare to Garibaldi. A creature of
incredible sanctity and perfection. Immense worth without immediate
application in France. The setting of another age or another country
is what this hero needs. And now good-night,--O God, what a CALF I
am! I leave you the title of COW, which you give yourself in your
days of weariness. Never mind, tell me when you are to be in Paris.
It is probable that I shall have to go there for a few days for one
thing or another. We must embrace each other and then you shall come
to Nohant this summer. It is agreed, it must be!

My affectionate regards to your mother and to your lovely niece.

Please acknowledge the receipt of the three pamphlets; they would be
a loss.



XLIX. TO GEORGE SAND

Dear master,

You really ought to go to see the sun somewhere; it is foolish to be
always suffering; do travel; rest; resignation is the worst of the
virtues.

I have need of it in order to endure all the stupidities that I
hear! You can not imagine to what a degree they have reached. France
which has been sometimes taken with St. Vitus dance (as under
Charles VI), seems to me now to have a paralysis of the brain. They
are mad with fear. Fear of the Prussians, fear of the strikes, fear
of the Exposition which does not go well, fear of everything. We
have to go back to 1849 to find such a degree of imbecility.