Part 28

It can only be in two years hence that we shall propose to ourselves to make a journey for the education of little Anna, and I have a presentiment, monsieur, that we shall find you sitting in the Chamber, and be present at some of your eloquent speeches. While awaiting the realization of that dream, accept the assurance of a true and sincere friendship.

VENCESLAS HANSKI.

P. S. I send you the design of the inkstand before you receive it; that you may know if you receive the right thing.

To MADAME HANSKA.

PARIS, May 16-June 16, 1836.

One year ago to-day, I was at the Hôtel de la Poire, in Vienna, at one o'clock, having made the journey in five days, and not having slept for three nights! At two o'clock, after an hour's sleep, I gave myself the _fête_ of going to the Walterische Haus. To-day, my only pleasure will be, in the midst of my perpetual battle, a halt of two hours to write you a line, _cara contessina_. But instead of sending you a bouquet of rosy hopes, I have only sad things to tell you. All that I announced to you of good has failed. Nothing of that which would have freed me succeeds.

However, to-day Madame Bêchet may perhaps cede her rights in the "Études de Mœurs" to Werdet; and this is more important than you know to my tranquillity; for if I have but one publisher I can regulate my work, I can manage to obtain a month's rest, and you know what I can make of a month's rest. The "Contes Drolatiques" affair still drags on.

During the last few days a great change has taken place in me. Ambition has disappeared. I no longer want to enter public life by the Chamber or by journalism. So my efforts will now tend to rid me of the "Chronique de Paris." This determination comes to me from the aspect of the Chamber of Deputies. The folly of the orators, the silliness of the debates, the little chance there is of triumphing against such miserable mediocrity, have made me renounce the idea of mixing myself in it otherwise than as a minister. Therefore, two years hence, I shall try to open, with cannon-shot, the doors of the Academy; for academicians can become peers, and I will endeavour to make a large enough fortune to reach the Upper Chamber and enter power through power itself.

"Le Lys dans la Vallée" is sapping me. Neither the lawsuit nor the book is finished. I have ten more _feuilles_, one hundred and sixty pages, to do wholly--to write and correct. I hope to finish in ten days, though it is almost a quarter of the book; but it is the easiest quarter. All is now settled, _posé_. I have only to conclude. The striking character is decidedly M. de Mortsauf. It was very difficult to draw that figure; but it is done now. I have raised the statue of the Emigration. I have collected in one and the same creation all the features of the _émigré_ returned to his estates, and perhaps all the features of the husband; for married men do, more or less, resemble M. de Mortsauf. The book will appear, I hope, by June 1. But how can I send you your copy? I could send it by the embassy, but I must know the address of some one who is devoted to you in Saint Petersburg.

June 16.

You could never understand what my life has been between these two dates. This letter has lain a month on my table without my being able to add a word. I have received two letters from you and one from M. Hanski without being able to answer them, and to-day I must lock my door and take a morning to write to you. I have so many things to tell you! So many events have happened to me I do not know where to begin. Besides, it is impossible to tell you all; it would fill volumes.

First, my lawsuit is won and my book is out. I have worked night and day to finish the book in time to have it appear the very day the verdict was given. You must know that the same sort of attack that was made against my credit during my journey to Vienna, when they declared me in prison for debt, my enemies have again made against my character and my integrity. All the most ignoble and basest calumny, all the mud that could be found has been heaped upon me. I had to write a defence, for the public, _in a single night_. You can read it in the "Lys," to which it forms an introduction [he suppressed it, later]. I won twice over, once before the public, and once before the judges, who were indignant. On what will they now attack me?[1]

Ah! you will never know how burning my life has been during this month. I was alone to meet it, harassed by the newspaper people demanding money; harassed by my own payments to meet; harassed by my book, for which I had day and night to correct proof. No, I wonder I lived through it. Life is too heavy; I have no pleasure in living.

You have grieved me much by sending back to me the foolish things your aunt has said,--that I am married to a lady whose name and person I do not know,--while I am laden here with the foolish things of Paris! Those from Constantinople are too much! Keep, I beg of you your credulity for good things. I really do not know what Madame Rosalie [Rzewuska] means, or what Hammer writes me; he says you are going to Constantinople, and that he has sent your "Livre Mystique" to your aunt, who will deliver it to you in person. I am lost in all this muddle of news.

Though I have won my suit and the "Lys" is out, my affairs do not prosper; it is one of the victories that kill. Another such, and I am dead. The production of books does not suffice to extinguish my debts; I must have recourse to the stage, and there I shall encounter such keen hatreds that they may bar my entrance, or deceive the public on the value of the works I produce there.

I received Monsieur Hanski's letter during those days. I have a better edition of the "Médecin de campagne" to send him. But I still do not know how to send it, therefore I keep it for him.

I am so encumbered with delayed business, cares, tentatives, that I write you with a sort of inebriated head that does not allow of logic; so I hasten to close this letter and send it off. You will receive another, acknowledging the reception of the inkstand, which from the drawing seems to me of crushing magnificence for a poor devil.

Boulanger has made a very fine thing of my portrait. It will have, I think, the honours of the King's corner in the coming Exhibition. Don't trouble yourself about the money for the copy, which will be an original, for I am to sit for yours as I did for this one. I will pay him the five hundred francs, fifty ducats, and when I go to Wierzchownia you can, if I am not rich, return them; if I am rich I shall have no need of them. But all artists think that Boulanger has done a fine thing, which, apart from its merit as a portrait, is great as a painting. I have had to give sittings of seven and eight hours--already ten of them--through the storms of this month.

At the moment when I am writing to you and when I need some repose to revive my brain, which drops like a jaded horse (for it is impossible not to see that there are organs the strength of which is limited), the manager of our newspaper sends me missive after missive to pay him thirteen thousand more francs, the last of the forty-five thousand which I owe on my purchase. These are pin-pricks into one's spinal marrow. So I must leave my letter a second time and rush about the city to realize on certain shares; and I must at the same time finish the "Ecce Homo" begun in the "Chronique" two days ago.

Again my letter is interrupted. Oh! this time it is too much! Do you know by what? By a legal notice from Madame Bêchet, who summons me to furnish her within twenty-four hours my two volumes in 8vo, with a penalty of fifty francs for every day's delay! I must be a great criminal and God wills that I shall expiate my crimes! Never was such torture! This woman has had ten volumes 8vo out of me in two years, and yet she complains at not getting twelve!

You will be some time without news of me, for I shall probably flee into the valley of the Indre and there write in twenty days the two volumes of that woman and get rid of her. For such an enterprise one must have no distraction, no thought other than that of the work we write. Yes, if I die for it, I must be done with these obligations. But if you only knew what an absence of twenty days is to me in my affairs. It is conflagration. I beg of you, do not be worried. If I do not write to you, it is that I am either fighting for serious interests, or working for something urgent, ardent, that brooks no delay. Here I am, rebeginning a horrible struggle--that of money interests and books to write! Put an end to the last of my contracts by satisfying Madame Bêchet, and write a fine book! And I have twenty days! And it shall be done! The "Héritiers Boirouge" and "Illusions Perdues" will be written in twenty days!

I leave you, as you see, more harassed, more persecuted, more occupied than ever. I have the sad presentiment that nothing can end well out of all this. Human nature has its limits, the strong as well as the weak, and I shall soon have attained my limit.

Well, adieu; you, one of the three persons who might know me, have you many doubts, have you left any dark corners without penetrating them, because I have not had the happiness to be long near you?

[Footnote 1: For a brief account of this lawsuit, which, though won, left cruel effects upon his life, see his sister's narrative in the Memoir of this edition, pp. 231, 232.--TR.]

June 16,----

My letter was again interrupted. Yesterday, I dined with the Abbé de Lamennais, Berryer, and I don't know whom besides. I saw the abbé for the first time; as for Berryer, we are old acquaintances. I was shocked at the atrocious face of the Abbé de Lamennais; I tried to seize a single feature to which one could attach one's self, but there was none.

Berryer takes a trip to Saint Petersburg. I advised him strongly to return by land and pass through the Ukraine. I told him that I had hopes of going to the Ukraine towards September; but I dare not yield myself to any hope at all. On the 20th I start for Saché [a beautiful estate near Tours, belonging to a family friend, M. de Margonne].

The "Chronique de Paris" is very well _posed_, politically speaking. But it needs funds. Berryer told me how fruitful the idea of a Right Centre was in results.

Madame de Berny is getting worse and worse. I hope to go and see her on my return from Touraine. But she cannot bear the least emotion.

Adieu; you will pardon my silence when you know all my griefs and pains. I send you many flowers of memory and affectionate homage. Present my friendly remembrances to Monsieur Hanski, to whom I shall write next, and recall me to the recollection of those about you.

SACHÉ, June, 1836.

I receive here your last letter in which you speak to me of Madame Rosalie and of "Séraphita." In relation to your aunt, I own that I am ignorant by what law it is that persons so well born and bred can believe such base calumnies. I, a gambler! Can your aunt neither reason, combine, nor calculate anything except whist? I, who work, even here, sixteen hours a day, how should I go to a gambling-house that takes whole nights? It is as absurd as it is crazy.

I went for the first time, at thirty-six years of age, and out of curiosity, to Frascati, where I found Bernhard. One night Bernhard presented me to the Cercle des Étrangers, where he invited me to dinner. I went for the third time the day he gave the dinner. Since then, though I have been invited several times, I have never returned there. The last time, I asked Bernhard to include me in his stake for a certain sum, which denotes the most profound ignorance of the passion. In all, during my life, I have lost thirty ducats at cards. So much for gambling. That vice will never catch me. I play for a stake far dearer and nobler.

Let your aunt judge in her way of my works, of which she knows neither the whole design nor the bearing; it is her right to do so. I submit to all judgments. That is one of the evils through which we have to pass. Resignation is one of the conditions of my existence.

Your letter was sad; I felt it was written under the influence of your aunt. To comprehend is to equal, said Raphael; and as you yourself declare that our poor age does not take the trouble to comprehend, it follows that our equals are few. That which I can pretend to for myself and my own person is the usage of a faculty given to man,--_reason_. Your aunt makes me a gambler and a debauchee; she _has the proofs_, you say. It is now seven or eight years that I work, as I have told you, sixteen hours a day. If I am a gambler and a debauchee, the man who has written thirty volumes in seven years must disappear. Both cannot live in the same skin; or, if they do, it must have pleased God to make an extraordinary creature--which I am not.

I was beginning to recover life and strength here, where I have been for the last five days. On leaving I told them with regard to the letters that might come, "Send me none but those from Russia;" and your letter has crushed me more than all the heavy nonsense that jealousy and calumny, lawsuit and money matters have cast upon me. My sensibility is a proof of friendship; there are none but those we love who can make us suffer. I am not angry with your aunt, but I am angry that a person as distinguished as you say she is should be accessible to such base and absurd calumny. But you yourself, at Geneva, when I told you I was free as air, you believed me to be married, on the word of one of those fools whose trade it is to sell money. I laughed. Here I cannot laugh; I have the horrible privilege of being horribly calumniated. A few debates like this, and I shall retire into Touraine, isolating myself from everything, renouncing all, striving to make myself an egoist, desiring neither sentiment nor happiness, and living by thought, and for thought.

Your aunt makes me think of the poor Christian who, entering the Sistine chapel just as Michel-Angelo had drawn a nude figure, asked why the popes allowed such horrors in Saint Peter's. She judges a work of at least the same range in literature, without putting herself at a distance and awaiting its end. She judges the artist without knowing him, and by the sayings of ninnies. All that gives me little pain for myself, but much for her, if you love her. But that you should let yourself be influenced by such errors, that _does_ grieve me and makes me very uneasy, for I live by my friendships only.

This is enough about that, or you will think me an angry author, a personage that does not exist in me. I forbade him ever to appear. Now let us come to what you say to me of "Séraphita." It is strange that no one sees that "Séraphita" is _all faith_. Faith affirms, and the whole is said. The angel has descended from the angelic sphere to come into the midst of the quibbles of reasoning; he opposes reasoning with reasoning. It is not for him to formulate doubt. As to his answer, no sacred author has ever more energetically proven God. The proof drawn from the infinitude of numbers has surprised learned men. They have lowered their heads. It was beating them on their own ground with their own weapons.

As for the orthodoxy of the book. Swedenborg is diametrically opposed to the Court of Rome; but who shall dare pronounce between Saint Peter and Saint John? The mystical religion of Saint John is logical; it will ever be that of superior beings. That of Rome will be that of the crowd.

As you say, one must try to penetrate the meaning of "Séraphita" in order to criticise the work; but I never counted on a success after "Louis Lambert" was so despised. These are books that I make for myself and a few others. When I have to write a book for all the world I know very well what ideas to appeal to, and what I must express. "Séraphita" has nothing of earth; if she loved, if she doubted, if she suffered, if she were influenceable by anything terrestrial, she would not be the angel. No one in Paris has comprehended the vision of old David, when he speaks of the efforts of all the elementary substances to recover their creature _with_ the spirit she has conquered; whereas they can have nought but her mortal remains. Séraphita is, as it were, a flower of the globe; all that has nourished her yearns after her. The "Path to God" is a far more lofty religion than that of Bossuet; it is the religion of Saint Teresa, of Fénelon, of Swedenborg, of Jacob Boehm, and of M. Saint-Martin.

But I am repeating myself. Your belief leads to it as much as mine. I thought I was making a beautiful and grand work, but I may have deceived myself. It is what it is; and it is now delivered over to the disputes of this world.

At the moment when I write you have doubtless read the "Lys dans la Vallée," another Séraphita, who, this one, is orthodox. But I will not say anything more about them. Literature and its accompaniments bore me. When a book is done, I like to forget it; I do forget it; and I never return to it except to purge its faults a year or two later. You will read the book in its flesh, not its skeleton, and I hope it may give you pleasure.

I have undertaken to do here the two volumes for Madame Bêchet, as I must have written you before I left Paris. Touraine has given me back some health, but at the moment I was working most, with your letter came a letter from a friend, who sent me a puff of vexations. Such things dishearten one for living. Happily, the book I am now writing, "Illusions Perdues," is sufficiently in that tone. All that I can put into it of bitter sadness will do marvellously well. It is one of the "novels" that will be understood. It is breast-high of all men.

I am at this moment in the little bedroom at Saché, where I have worked so much! I see again the noble trees I have so often looked at when searching out ideas. I am not more advanced in 1836 than I was in 1829; I owe, and I work, always. I still have in me the same young life, the heart, still childlike, though you ask me to say how many sentiments a man's existence can consume. It seems as though, like gamblers, I have an "angélique" which multiplies. My pretended successes are still another of the agreeable fables fastened on me. I don't know which critic it was who said that I had known very intimately all my models. But I will never reply to these exaggerations. Berryer is of my opinion, and I shall never forgive myself for having quitted my silent attitude to descend into this arena of mud, as I did in the Introduction to "Le Lys dans la Vallée."

I have, within the last few days, been contemplating the extent of my work and what still remains to do. It is enormous. And, therefore, looking at that immense fresco, I have a great mind to sell out the "Chronique," renounce all species of political ambition, and make some arrangements which would allow me to retire to a "cottage" in Touraine and there accomplish peaceably, without anxieties, a work which will help me to pass my life, if not happily, at least tranquilly. That my life should be _happy_, many other circumstances are needed.

What! Anna has been ill? Do not nurse her too much; excess of care, a great physician told me, is one of the evils that threaten the children of the rich. It is a way of bringing the influence of evils to bear upon them. But you know much already on this head. What I say is not one of those commonplaces addressed to mothers; it is the cry of a deep conviction. My sister adored a little girl whom she lost because she gave ear to everything for her. Her little Valentine is, to-day, on the contrary, left to herself and she is magnificent.

My brother still gives us much anxiety. My mother is consumed with grief. But my brother-in-law is succeeding better. The lateral canal of the Loire has been voted by both Chambers. Nothing is needed now but to find the capital to build it. Also he has lately obtained the building of a bridge in Paris, which is an excellent affair. So the skies are brightening, at least for him. But he has needed, like myself, much perseverance and courage.

In re-reading your letter, I think you make me out rather greater than I am, and you demand more of me than I can give. The desire to do well has brought me to certain means to produce that result, but the exercise of intellectual faculties does not bring with it real grandeur; one remains, humanly speaking, what one is: a poor being very _impressible_, whom God had made for happiness, and whom circumstances have condemned to the most wearying toil in the world.

At this moment I must leave you to complete my work; in five or six days, when I am delivered of these two volumes, which will terminate the hardest of the obligations I have ever contracted, I will write you at length, with a heart more joyful; for just now things are causing me more pain than pleasure. My soul and spirit are too strained by work. I am as nervous as a fashionable woman, but I shall, perhaps, recover a little gaiety when I feel myself the lighter by two volumes. Touraine is very beautiful just now. The weather is extremely warm, which has brought the vineyards into bloom. Ah! my God, when shall I have a little place, a little château, a little park, a fine library! and shall I ever inhabit it without troubles, lodging within it the love of my life?

The farther I go, the more these golden wishes take the tint of dreams; and yet to renounce them would be death to me. For ten years past I live by hope only.

Well, adieu; a thousand kindly things to M. Hanski. I place on Anna's forehead a kiss, full of good wishes, and I beg you to find here those pretty flowers of the soul, those caressing thoughts, which you awaken and which belong to you, sad or not; for mine is one of those unalterable friendships which resemble the sky; clouds may pass beneath it, the atmosphere may be more or less ardent, but above them the heavens are ever blue. When you are sad, all you need do is to go up a little higher.

I have thought of you much during these last days, not receiving any letters; and now I regret having begun this letter with harshness towards a person you love and who loves you, though from her portrait I should judge her very cold.

Adieu again; I confide all I think to this little paper, which, unfortunately, will be very discreet. You will talk to me about the "Lys," and say a little more than you have said this time?

PARIS, August 22, 1836.

This date, _cara_, is not without significance. All will be explained to you by three events which will leave their mark within my soul and on the history of my misfortunes.