Part 29

Madame de Berny is dead. I can say no more on that point. My sorrow is not of a day; it will react upon my whole life. For a year I had not seen her, nor did I see her in her last moments. This was why: at the moment when I ought to have been at Nemours I was obliged to wind up the affairs of the "Chronique" in Paris--in the midst of its greatest success. We could not support competition with daily papers at forty francs a year, while we cost sixty-four and appeared semi-weekly. To keep on, we needed fifty thousand francs, and no one could or would advance a farthing in the present circumstances of the press. I went to see all the shareholders and guaranteed to them the integral payment of what they had put in; so that at the moment when I received the heaviest blow my heart has ever known--for never, since the death of my grandmother, have I sounded so deeply the selfish gulf of eternal separation--at that moment I was meeting a loss of forty thousand francs. It was too much. Immediately after, Madame Bêchet, married, as I told you, to a certain Jacquillart, was constrained by him to sue me for my volumes; I was thus under the weight of a new suit which is all clear loss to me, for by the deed itself I am condemned to pay fifty francs for every day's delay, and I am now two months behind, since the time I received the summons.

The last letter of the angel who has now escaped the miseries of life, and who in her last days was not spared them,--for in two years her two finest children, her best loved son, twenty-three years old, he who was all _herself_, and her most beautiful daughter of nineteen, are both dead; her youngest daughter of seventeen, mad; and her remaining son the cause of her greatest grief,--well, her last letter came in the midst of those worries of mine; and _she_, who was always so lovingly severe to me, acknowledged that the "Lys" was one of the finest books in the French language; she decked herself at last with the crown which, fifteen years earlier, I had promised her, and, always coquettish, she imperiously forbade me to come and see her, because she would not have me near her unless she were beautiful and well. The letter deceived me. I waited until I had, by dint of efforts, conferences, and much ability, made Werdet buy the "Études de Mœurs" from Madame Bêchet for thirty thousand francs before I started for Nemours, and then, suddenly, the fatal news came, and almost killed me.

I do not speak to you here in detail of these forty and some days. I have given you the chief features, the outline. Some day I will tell you more. I will tell you how in this intelligent Paris we succumbed; how in order to settle the affair of the "Études de Mœurs" and the last lawsuit by which I can ever be threatened, the devotion of my tailor and the savings of a poor workingman were needed,--two men who had more faith in me than all the pompous admiration of men in high places.

When all was over,--struck down in the clearest illusions of my heart, ruined in money, undergoing a second Beresina such as befell me in 1828, and wearied out,--Werdet gave me twenty days' freedom, and we arranged for my payments till August 20. Rothschild gave me a letter of credit for Italy, and I seized a pretext of going to Milan to do a service to a man with whom I had a box at the opera, M. Visconti [Count Guidoboni-Visconti]. In twenty days I went there by the Mont Cenis, returning over the Simplon, having for companion a friend of Madame Carraud and Jules Sandeau [Madame Caroline Marbouty, to whom he dedicated "La Grenadière"]. You will divine that I lodged in your hotel Piazza Castello, and that in Geneva I stayed at the Arc with the Biolleys, and went to see Pré-l'Évêque and the Maison Mirabaud.

Alas! It is not forbidden to those who suffer to go and breathe a perfumed air. You alone and your memories could refresh a heart in mourning. I went over the road to Coppet and to Diodati. _Cara_, the Porte de Rive is enlarged, just as, suddenly, the affection I bear you is enlarged by all that I have lost. One no longer waits to enter Geneva; we can now come and go at any hour of the night. I stayed only one day in Geneva, and saw no one but de Candolle, who came near dying, but is better.

Here I am, returned, bearing a wound the scar of which will be ever visible, but which you alone have soothed unconsciously.

You must have had much uneasiness in consequence of my silence. Forgive me, dear. It was impossible for me to write, or think. I could only let myself be drawn along in a carriage, led by an inoffensive hand, guided like a dying man. My mind itself was crushed; for the failure of the "Chronique" came upon me at Saché, at M. de Margonne's, where I was, by a wise impulse, plunged in work to rid myself of that odious Bêchet (it was that which kept me from going to Nemours!); in eight days I had invented, composed, "Les Illusions Perdues," and I had written a THIRD of it! Think what such work was. All my faculties were strained; I wrote fifteen hours a day; I got up with the sun and wrote till the dinner-hour without taking anything but coffee.

One day, after dinner, which I naturally made substantial, the letters arrived, and I read that which announced to me the crisis of the "Chronique." I went out with M. and Mme. de Margonne into the park, and fell, struck down by a rush of blood to the head, at the foot of a tree. I could not write a word, I saw all my prospects ruined. I said to myself that nothing remained for me but to go and hide myself at Wierzchownia, and amass enough work and money to come back some day and pay all I owed. In short, I was stunned. Courage came back to me. I flew to Paris; I struggled; then the rest came unexpectedly, blow on blow. I was at Saché after the "Lys" appeared and my suit was won. Touraine had cured my fatigue then and restored my brain. I was enabled there to make a last effort.

The journey I have just made only did me good at Geneva. In seeing that lake, finding myself again in places where I won a friendship that is so sweet to me, I was wrapped in a delightful atmosphere which shed a balm upon the bleeding wounds. You will find all in that sentence.

I wished to go to Neufchâtel; but the twenty days were too short. That is what prevented me from going to you,--the little time and the little money; for I am still in debt. All illness costs.

Here I am returned, in face of my obligations. To be able to make the journey, I obtained the price of the "Mémoires d'une jeune Mariée;" so that I have four volumes 8vo to do, on which I shall not receive another sou. I have, besides, enormous engagements; and no resources to sustain them. I must have recourse to credit; that means paying enormous interest. What a position! Oh! _cara_, what a life! Apathy saved me. If I had felt it all fully, I should have flung myself into some torrent on the Simplon.

Yes, all the papers have been hostile to the "Lys;" they have all cried shame, they have spit upon it. Nettement tells me that the "Gazette de France" attacked it "because I do not go to mass." The "Quotidienne" from a private vengeance of the editor; in short all, for some reason or other. Instead of selling two thousand, as I hoped, for Werdet, we are only as far as thirteen hundred. Thus all material interests are endangered. There are some ignorant persons who cannot understand the beauty of Madame de Mortsauf's death; they do not see the struggle of matter with mind, which is the foundation of Christianity. They see only imprecations of the disappointed flesh, of the wounded physical nature; they will not do justice to the sublime placidity of the soul when the countess confesses and dies a saint.

When I am thus hurt I spring toward you,--toward you alone now; toward you who comprehend me, and who judge with enough critical mind to give value to your praises. With what happiness we feel ourselves appreciated, judged, by some one who loves us. A word, an observation from the celestial creature of whom Madame de Mortsauf is a pale representation made more impression upon me than the whole public, for she was true; she wanted only my good and my perfection. I make you her heir, you who have all her noble qualities; you who could have written that letter of Madame de Mortsauf, which is but the imperfect breath of her constant inspirations, you who could, at least, complete it.

I must plunge into stupefying work; I can live only in that way, for where are my hopes? They are very distant. Happiness and material tranquillity are very far from me. I shall go conscientiously before me, striving to be sufficient for each day.

Only, _cara_, do not aggravate my griefs by dishonouring doubts; believe that, to a man so heavily burdened otherwise, calumny is a light thing, and that now I must let it all be said against me without distressing myself. In your last letters, you know, you have believed things that are irreconcilable with what you know of me. I cannot explain to myself your tendency to believe absurd calumnies. I still remember your credulity in Geneva when you thought me married.

I hope to go and see you next spring, wherever you are. Perhaps some fortunate circumstances may happen. My brother-in-law's affairs are doing pretty well. He has the building of a bridge in Paris, and of a short railway, besides which the law on the lateral canal of the Lower Loire is promulgated. It is only necessary to find the money for it. At any rate it is an acquired right, and nothing can now destroy it. In that direction I may be able to arrange some good matter of business. The only thing which at this moment is serious is my double condition,--that of a man wounded to the heart, who has not yet recovered his vitality, and of a man garroted by material interests in jeopardy.

In the midst of these storms, I have received M. Hanski's inkstand, which has the misfortune of being far too magnificent for a man condemned to poverty. It is of a style that demands a mansion, horses, majordomos. Express to him, I beg of you, my admiring thanks for this beautiful thing, which I can only use in one way, namely: by placing it among my precious things, to remind me of our good days in Vienna, Geneva, and Neufchâtel when, seeking for ideas, my eyes may light upon it.

I do not think I commit sacrilege in sealing this letter to you with the seal I used to Madame de Berny. I have mislaid the key of the drawer where I keep my little articles. I made a vow always to wear this ring on my finger.

I received a letter from you at Saché, of later date than a letter I have since received in Paris. Perhaps this will make some confusion in what I wrote to you about "Séraphita" in reply to what you said in the letter received at Saché. Consider that I said nothing, if anything that I did say pained you. I received your number 15 yesterday.

No one knows what has become of Mitgislas ... He has left Paris without paying his debts, having sold everything, and allowing all sorts of suspicions to hover over him. But I do not concern myself with such things; I neither listen nor repeat.

You are right; I have no more serviceable friends than my enemies. The violence and absurdity of the attacks made upon me have revolted all honest men. Did I tell you that M. de Belleyme came to see me after the trial? The Court blamed the lawyer on the other side, Chaix d'Estanges.

It seems to me that you have divined my situation in what you say of sorrow, and also in what you say of those who, like Robert Bruce, return ever to the light in spite of their defeats.

Adieu! it has done me good to write this long letter. But time does not belong to me wholly. The most horrible wound of my life is to be never able to give myself up to my affections, joyous or sad. It is always work, under pain of perishing, and I have no right to perish. My death would injure too many. I owe money to devoted friends who give me of their blood. Therefore I am much misjudged.

Adieu; to you the most beautiful and richest flowers of my soul and memory. I did not know all that the Pré-l'Évêque was to me, and the hill from which we see the lake and the bridge; I had to see it all again, alone and unhappy, to know the value of those memories.

CHAILLOT, October 1, 1836.

Friendship ought to be an infallible consolation in the great misfortunes of life. Why should it aggravate them? I ask myself sadly that question on reading to-night your last letter. In the first place, your sadness reacts strongly upon me; then it betrays such wounding sentiments. There were phrases in it that pierced my heart. Doubtless you did not know what profound sorrow was in my soul, nor what sombre courage accompanies this, my second great disaster, undergone in middle life. When I was wrecked the first time, in 1828, I was only twenty-nine years old and I had an angel at my side. To-day I am at an age when a man no longer inspires the lovable sentiment of a protection which has nothing wounding, because it is of the essence of youth to receive it, and it seems natural that youth be aided. But to a man who is nearer to forty than to thirty, protection must needs be wanting; it would be an insult. A weak man, without resources at that age, is judged in all lands.

Fallen from all my hopes, having abdicated wholly, forced to take refuge here in Jules Sandeau's former garret at Chaillot on September 30, the day when, for the second time in my life, I failed to honour my signature, and when to the lamentations of integrity, which weeps within me, was added the sense of solitude,--for here, this time, I am alone,--I thought, soothingly, that at least I lived complete in certain chosen hearts. I thought of you. Your letter, so sad, so discouraged, came. With what avidity I took it, with what tears I locked it up before taking the little sleep I allow myself! But I cling to your last words as to the last branch of a tree when the current is bearing us away. Letters are endowed with a fatal power. They possess a force which is either beneficent or fatal, according to the sensations in the midst of which they come to us. I would that, between two friends very sure of themselves, signs were agreed upon by which from the aspect of a letter each might know if it was one of expansive gaiety or plaintive moaning. We could then choose the moment for reading it.

I had but nineteen days before me; I could not go to the Ukraine and return. Talma's letter was given to me in Gérard's salon. What trifles you lay hold of! Perhaps you will not even remember what you have written to me on this subject when you receive this letter. Am I to send you that of Mademoiselle Mars? Will you not think that she has been _paid_? If you ever go to Italy and pass through Turin, I wish you may see Madame la Marquise de Saint-Thomas. You would know then what the autographs of Silvio Pellico and Nota _cost_.

You told me that your sister Caroline was the most dangerous of women; and in your letter she is an angel, and you tell me she is about to do what I call signal folly; for I have not forgotten what you wrote to me about the colonel. She will be very unhappy.

I am cast down, but not without courage; what Boulanger has painted, and what I am pleased with, is the persistence _à la_ Coligny, _à la_ Peter the Great, which is the basis of my character,--the intrepid faith in the future.

Must I renounce the Italian Opera, the only pleasure that I have in Paris, because I have no other seat than in a box where there is also a charming and gracious woman [Countess Guidoboni-Visconti]? I was in a box among men who were an injury to me, and brought me into disrepute. I had to go elsewhere, and, in all conscience, I was not willing for Olympe's box. But let us drop the subject.

The feeling of abandonment and of the solitude in which I am stings me. There is nothing selfish in me; but I need to tell my thoughts, my efforts, my feelings to a being who is not myself; otherwise I have no strength. I should wish for no crown if there were no feet at which to lay that which men may put upon my head. What a long and sad farewell I have said to my lost years, engulfed beyond return! they gave me neither complete happiness nor complete misery; they kept me living, frozen on one side, scorched on the other! To be no longer held to life by aught but the sentiment of duty!

I entered the garret where I am with the conviction that I should die exhausted with my work. I thought that I should bear it better than I do. It is now a month that I have risen at midnight and gone to bed at six; I have compelled myself to the least amount of food that will keep me alive, so as not to drive the fatigue of digestion to the brain. Well, not only do I feel weaknesses that I cannot describe, but so much life communicated to the brain has brought strange troubles. Sometimes I lose the sense of vertically, which is in the cerebellum. Even in bed my head seems to fall to right or left, and when I rise I am impelled by an enormous weight that is in my head. I understand how Pascal's absolute continence and his immense labour led him to see an abyss around him, so that he could not do without two chairs, one on each side of him.

I have not abandoned the rue Cassini without pain. To-day, I do not know if I shall save some parts of my furniture to which I am attached, or have my library. I have made, in advance, every sacrifice of lesser pleasures and memories that I may keep the little joy of knowing that these things are still mine. They would be trifles indeed to quench the thirst of creditors, but they would slake mine during my march across the desert, through the sands. Two years of toil would pay my debt in full; but it is impossible that I should not succumb under two years of such a life. Besides which, piracy is killing us. The farther we go, the less my books sell. Have the newspapers influenced the sale of the "Lys"? I do not know; but what I do know is that out of two thousand copies Werdet sold only twelve hundred, while Belgium has sold three thousand! I have the certainty, from that fact, that my works do not find purchasers in France. Consequently, the success of sales that might save me is still distant.

I am here with Auguste, whom I have kept. Can I still keep him? As yet I know not.

To let you know how far my courage goes, I must tell you that "Le Secret des Ruggieri" was written in a single night. Think of that when you read it. "La Vieille Fille" was written in three nights. "La Perle brisée," which ends at last the "Enfant Maudit," was written in a single night. It is my Brienne, my Champaubert, my Montmirail, my campaign of France! But it was the same with "La Messe de l'Athée" and "Facino Cane." I wrote the first fifty _feuillets_ of the "Illusions Perdues" in three days at Saché.

What kills me is the corrections. The first part of "L'Enfant Maudit" cost me more than many volumes. I wanted to bring that part up to the level of "La Perle brisée" and make them a sort of little poem of melancholy in which there would be nothing to gainsay. That took me a dozen nights. And now, at the moment of writing to you, I have before me the accumulated proofs of four different works which ought to appear in October. I must be equal to all that. I have promised Werdet to bring out his third Part of the "Études Philosophiques" this month, and also the third _dizain_, and to give him for November 15 "Illusions Perdues." That makes five volumes 12mo, and three volumes 8vo. One must surpass one's self, inasmuch as purchasers are indifferent; and surpass one's self in the midst of protested notes, griefs, cruel embarrassments, and solitude!

This is the last plaint that I shall cast into your heart. In my confidences there has been something selfish which I must put an end to. When you are sad I will not aggravate your sadness, for your sadness aggravates mine. I know that the Christian martyrs smiled. If Guatimozin had been a Christian he would have gently consoled his minister, and not have said to him, "And I--am I on a bed of roses?" A fine saying for a savage, but Christ has made us more courteous, if not better.

I see with pain that you read the mystics. Believe me, such reading is fatal to souls constituted like yours. It is poison; it is an intoxicating narcotic. Such books have an evil influence. There is madness in virtue as there is madness in dissipation. I would not deter you if you were neither wife, nor mother, nor friend, nor relation, because then you could go into a convent if it pleased you, though your death would there come quickly. But, in your situation, such reading is bad. The rights of friendship are too weak for my voice to be listened to. I address you, on this subject, a humble prayer. Do not read anything of that kind. I have been there; I have experience of it.

I have taken all precautions that your wishes shall be fulfilled relating to the sternest of your requests, but under circumstances which your intelligence will no doubt lead you to foresee. I am not Byron; but I know this: Borget is not Thomas Moore; he has the blind fidelity of a dog, as your faithful moujik has also.

Send me word exactly the way by which I must despatch Boulanger's picture--about which no one will say to you what you heard about that very wretched thing of Grosclaude's;--it is not enough to say to Rothschild, "For Russia." To what house am I to address it? Grosclaude is an artist, but nothing eminent. He sees form, but he goes no farther; he has no style, he is common, without elevation. His _Buveurs_ are good painting, but the nature is low. If he were in Paris he would re-form himself. But in Geneva he will stay what he is. Your portrait by him is an infamous daub. Daffinger, in Vienna, caught your likeness much better; but I do not like miniature very much, unless it is that of Madame de Mirbel. I saw some others in the last Exhibition, and I perceived then that Daffinger was much beneath her. We must still, if we want to have good portraits, spring back to the principles of Rubens, Velasquez, Van Dyck, and Titian.

I am astonished that you have not yet received Werdet's "Lys;" the true "Lys" in which there is a portrait. They say that I have painted Madame Visconti! Such are the judgments to which we are exposed! You know that I had the proofs in Vienna, and that portrait was written at Saché, and corrected at La Boulonnière before I ever saw Madame Visconti. I have received five _formal complaints_ from persons about me, who say that I have unveiled their private lives. I have very curious letters on this subject. It appears that there are as many Monsieurs de Mortsauf as there are angels at Clochegourde; angels rain down upon me, but _they are not white_.

A thousand, little cavillings of this kind make me take to solitude with less regret. Yesterday, September 29, my sister, for her birthday, gave herself the little pleasure of coming to see me, for we see each other very little. Her husband's affairs move slowly, and her life also; she is running to waste in the shade; her fine powers exhaust themselves in a hidden struggle without credit. What a diamond in the mud! The finest diamond that I know in France. For her fête we exchanged our tears! And, poor little thing! she held her watch in her hand; she had but twenty minutes. Her husband is jealous of me. For coming to see a brother for a pleasure trip!

Adieu, the day is dawning, my candles pale. For three hours I have been writing to you, line after line, hoping that in each you would hear the cry of a true friendship, far above all petty and transitory irritations, infinite as heaven, and incapable of thinking it can ever change, because all other sensations are below it. Of what good would intellect be if not to place a noble thing on a rock above us, where nothing material can touch it?