Part 34

It is now two years since I saw you. So, when my head refuses ideas, when the ink-pot of my brain is empty, and I must have rest, by that time I hope I shall have bought, through privations, the necessary sum for a journey to Poland and to see Wierzchownia this autumn. God grant that I then have a mind free of all care, and that I complete between now and then the books that are to liberate me! Happily, except for a few sums, it is only a question of blackening paper, and that, fortunately, is in my own power. I am anxious to finish the two other volumes which, under the title of "Un Grand homme de Province à Paris" is to complete "Illusions Perdues" of which the introduction alone has appeared. That is, certainly, with "César Birotteau," my greatest work in dimensions.

May 29.

From the way I have started I hope to finish "La Femme Supérieure" in four days. I am stirred by a species of fury to finish the works for which I have already received the money. I live before my table; I leave it only to sleep; I dine there. Never did poet stay thus in a moral world; but yesterday some one told me I was said to be in Germany. I hope that the ridiculous stories spread about me will cease in consequence of the absolute seclusion in which I am about to live. At any rate, the commercial proceedings instituted against me by Werdet's creditors will have this good effect, that, being driven to hide myself, no one can gossip about me. But they will make fantastic tales about my disappearance!

I entreat you not to forget my request relative to corrections of "La Vieille Fille" and, in general, to all you find faulty in my works. I have none but you in the world to do me this friend's service. Be curt in your verdicts. When there was something very bad Madame de Berny never discussed; she wrote, "Bad" or, "Passage to be rewritten." Be, I pray you, my dear star and my literary conscience, as you are in so many other things my guide and my counsellor. You have a sure taste; you have the habit of comparison, because you read everything. This will be, moreover, an occupation in your desert.

Alas! I can only talk to you about myself. I am now without letters from you, delivered over to all sorts of anxieties, because I had the misfortune, in travelling, to leave you a month in silence,--though I wrote to you from Sion in the Valais, and expected to find an answer in Milan on my return from Florence. I have written to Milan, to Prince Porcia, to forward your letter here.

Have the kindness to write to Madame Jeroslas ... that I can more easily go four months hence and lay my homage at her feet than write her a letter at this moment. Seriously, I go to bed with a tired hand. I will send you a page for her in my next letter, though I shall not write you till I can announce the termination of "César Birotteau" and "La Femme Supérieure," the two great thorns I have in my foot at this moment. The third _dizain_ may amuse me perhaps at Frapesle, Madame Carraud's house, where I shall live ten days among the flowers, well cared for by her, who is like a sister to me. She is very delicate, very feeble; she will go, too, I foresee it, that fine and noble intellect; and of the three truly grand women whom I have known, you alone will remain. Such friendships are not renewed, _cara_. Therefore, mine for you grows greater from all my losses, and, I dare to say it, from all the illusions that experience mows down like the flowers of the field. All my recent griefs, that ignoble little treachery of Boulanger, this present misfortune due to my attachment to the weak, all these things cast me with greater force to you, in whom I believe as in God, to whom the troubles of earth drive us back. There are affections that are like great rivers; all flows into them. So the longer I live, the more the river swells; the sea into which it casts itself is death.

I hope that all goes well with you, and that M. Hanski will be so kind as not to be vexed with me if I do not answer his gracious letter; I am so hurried! Tell him all that I would say to him; passing through such an interpreter that which I should write to him will be bettered. Take great care of yourself; after the long night-nursing you have borne, I tremble lest you should be ill; if that should happen, in God's name let me know; I must go and nurse you.

Adieu. I wish you good health, and Anna also. If my theory on human forces is true, you ought to live in the atmosphere that my soul makes for you by surrounding you with sacred wishes. Would that it were like the thorny hedges placed about private fields, that cattle may neither feed nor trample there. I would that I could thus drive off all griefs, all disappointments, all that herd of worries, pain, and maladies. To you, who give me such strength, would I could return it!

PARIS, May 31, 1837.

I have this instant received yours (number 28) of the 12th, written after you received the one I wrote you from Florence. But did you not receive one from Sion? which I do not, however, count as a letter, for there were only fifteen lines on a page. It is clear that some one kept the money for the postage, and read, or burned the letter. _Mon Dieu!_ how vexed I am! I stopped at Sion expressly to write it. You ought to have received it early in March. Let us say no more about it.

I admire the capacity of your intelligence in regard to the person about whom I wrote you from Florence. The reasons that struck your mind struck mine later. But your letter grieves me. Such profound sadness reigns through the religious ideas it expresses. It seems as though you had lost all hope on earth. You ask me to make you confidences as I would to my best friend; but have I not told you all my life? I have often confided too much of my anguish to you, for it did you harm.

This letter comes to me at a bad moment. It has singularly added to the dumb grief that gnaws me and will kill me. I am thirty-eight years old, still crippled by debt, with nought but uncertainty as to my position. Scarcely have I taken two months to rest my brain before I repent them as a crime when I see the evils that have come through my inaction. This precarious life, which might be a spur in youth, becomes at my age an overwhelming burden. My head is turning white, and whatever pleasant things may be said about it, it is clear that I must soon lose all hope of pleasing. Pure, tranquil, openly avowed happiness, for which I was made, escapes me; I have only tortures and vexations, through which a few rare gleams of blue sky shine.

My works are little understood and little appreciated; they serve to enrich Belgium, but they leave me in poverty. The only friend who came to me at my start in life, who was to me a true mother, has gone to heaven. And you, you write me there are as many _ideas_ as there is distance between us, and you dissuade me from going to see you!

Your letter has done me great harm. Believe me, there is a certain measure of religious ideas beyond which all is vicious. You know what my religion is. I am not orthodox, and I do not believe in the Roman Church. I think that if there is a scheme worthy of our kind it is that of human transformations causing the human being to advance toward unknown zones. That is the law of creations inferior to ourselves; it ought to be the law of superior creations. Swedenborgianism, which is only a repetition in the Christian sense of ancient ideas, is my religion, with the addition which I make to it of the incomprehensibility of God. That said (and I say it to you because I know you to be so truly Roman Catholic that nothing can influence your mind about it), I must surely see more clearly than you see it what your detachment from all things here below conceals, and deplore it if it rests on false ideas. To comfort myself as to this, I have read over a letter in which you told me you wished to be always yourself, to show yourself--in your hours of melancholy, of piety, and of spring-tide returns.

June 1.

Your letter has left long traces upon me, and I can scarcely say what impressions I have had on reading the part where you separate your readings into profane and religious. There is a whole world between your last but one letter and this letter. You have taken the veil. I am deathly sad.

June 2.

I have begun "La Femme Supérieure" in a manner that promised to finish it in four days, and now it is impossible for me to write a line. My faculties seem unstrung. I had made my mother decide on spending two years in Switzerland to spare her the sight of my struggle, the triumph of which I placed at that date. But she is now ill. Two nephews to bring up, my mother to support, and my work insufficient!--that is one of the aspects of my life. Continual injustice, constant calumny, the betrayal of friends, that is another.[1] The embarrassments into which Werdet's failure flung me, and my new treaty which keeps me in a state of extreme poverty, that is a third. The literary difficulties of what I do and the continuity of toil, that is another. I am worn-out on the four faces of the square by an equal pressure of trouble. If my soul finds the ivory door through which it flees into lands of illusion, dreams of happiness, closed, what will become of it? Solitude, farewell to the world? It is sorrowful for those who live by the heart to have no life possible but that of the brain.

When you receive this letter Boulanger's portrait will be on its way to you; it was packed this week. I wished to have it rolled, but the colour-dealer and a picture-restorer whom I consulted assured me it would go safely in a square box the size of the picture. You will have a fine work, so several painters say. The eyes especially are well rendered, but more in the general physical expression of the worker than with the loving soul of the individual. Boulanger saw the writer, and not the tenderness of the imbecile always taken-in, not the softness of the man before the sufferings of others, which made all my miseries come from holding out a helping hand to weaklings in the rut of ill-luck. In order to do a service in 1827 to a working printer, I found myself, in 1829, crushed down under a debt of one hundred and fifty thousand francs and cast, without bread, into a garret. In 1833, just as my pen was giving signs of enabling me to clear my obligations, I connected myself with Werdet; I wanted to make him my only publisher, and in my desire to make him prosper, I signed engagements, so that in 1837, I find myself again with a hundred and fifty thousand francs of debt, and on that account so threatened with arrest that I am obliged to live in hiding. I make myself, as I go along, the Don Quixote of the feeble; I wanted to give courage to Sandeau, and I dropped upon that head four or five thousand francs that would have saved another man! I need a barrier between the world and me; I must content myself with producing without spending; I must shut myself up within a narrow circle, under pain of succumbing.

[Footnote 1: See Memoir, pp. 231, 232, 329.--TR.]

June 5.

Yesterday I sent away my three servants; Auguste, whom you have seen, remains, on a salary that my new publishers, the printers, and I pay. He will carry proofs. I am trying to get rid of my apartment rue des Batailles; that of rue Cassini is paid up, and the lease ends October 1 of this year. I must resume the life I led in the rue Lesdiguières: live on little, and work always. Alas! I need a family! Perhaps I will go and settle in some village in Touraine. A garret in Paris is still dangerous.

I have seven years' work before me, counting three works a year like the "Lys," and I shall be forty-five when the principal lines of my work are defined and the portions very nearly filled in. At forty-five one is no longer young, in form at least; one must, to preserve a few fine days, plunge into the ice of complete solitude.

My mind is not tranquil enough to write for the stage. A play is the easiest and the most difficult work for the human mind; either it is a German toy, or an immortal statue, Polichinello or Venus, the "Misanthrope" or "Figaro." The miserable melodramas of Hugo frighten me. I need a whole winter at Wierzchownia to adjust a play, and I have four months of crushing work to do before I can know if I shall have the money, and when and how I shall have it, to enable me to go there.

Perhaps I shall take one of those sublime resolutions which turn life inside out like a glove. That is very possible. Perhaps I shall leave literature, to enrich myself, and take it up later if it suits me to do so; I have been reflecting about this for some days past.

Are you not tired of hearing me ring my song on every key? Does not this continual _egotistery_ of a man fighting forever in a narrow circle bore you? Say so, because in your letter you seemed disposed to turn away from me, as from a beggar who knows nothing but the _Pater_, and says it over and over again.

_Cara_, I hold Florence to be a great lady, a glorious city, where we breathe the middle ages; but, as I told you, Venice and Switzerland are two conceptions which resemble nothing. I have not dared to say any harm to you of your bust, because it gave me too much joy to see it. As for the mouth, do not complain of Bartolini; he has made it beautiful and true. Your mouth is one of the sweetest creations I have ever seen; in the bust it has, certainly, the expression your aunt and others blame; but that is only on the surface of the thing. Without your mouth, the forehead would be hydrocephalus. There is an exact balance in the two, between sensations and ideas, between the heart and the brain; there is, above all, in the expression thus blamed, an extreme nobility and infinite sweetness, two attributes which render you adorable to those who know you well. No one has analyzed your head and face more than I. The last time that I could study you, and have enough coolness to do so, was in Daffinger's studio [in Vienna], and it was only there that I detected on your lips a few faint signs of cruel passion. Do not be astonished at those two words: it is such indications that give to your mouth the expression those ladies complain of; but such evidences are repressed by goodness. You have something violent in your first impulse, but reflection, kindness, gentleness, nobleness, follow instantly. I do not regard this as a defect. The first impulse has its cause, and I will tell it to you in your chimney-corner at Wierzchownia, if you think to ask me; and I will give you proofs of what I say about you, examples taken from what I saw you do in Vienna--in the affair of the letter, for instance, which was written under one such impulse. If you were exclusively good you would be a sheep--which is too insipid.

Well, adieu, _cara_; a thousand tender regards, _quand même_ motto of the friends of the throne. Many prettinesses to the pretty Anna for her thought and for herself. I shall write this week to M. Hanski.

PARIS, July 8, 1837.

I just receive your number 29, in which there is an "at last!" which makes me tremble, dear, for it is now nearly a month since I wrote to you.

The explanation of my silence is in "La Femme Supérieure," which fills seventy-five columns of the "Presse" and which was written in a month, day by day. I sat up thirty nights of that damned month, and I don't believe that I slept more than sixty-odd hours in the course of it; I never had time to trim my beard, and I, the enemy of all affectation, now wear the goat's beard of La Jeune France. After writing this letter I must take a bath, not without terror, for I am afraid of relaxing the fibres which are strung up to the highest tension; and I must begin again on "César Birotteau," which is growing ridiculous on account of its delays. Besides, it is now ten months since the "Figaro" paid me for it.

Nothing can express to you the sweeping onward of such mad work. At any price I must have my freedom of mind, for, another year of this life, and I shall die at my oar. I have done during this month, "Les Martyrs ignorés" "Massimilla Doni," and "Gambara." When I have finished "César Birotteau" I must then do "La Maison Nucingen et Compagnie" and another book, which will bring me to the end of these miseries that give me so much toil and no money. I found time to see about the packing of that portrait, which you will surely have, I think, before this letter reaches you.

The long delay of your number 29 has added to all my troubles the fear of some illness in your home; you cannot think what anxiety that puts into my mind. And I fear so much lest some breath of poisoned slander, some calumny may reach you, lest the sorrows of my life may have wearied you, that the failure of your letters puts me in a fever.

I will not talk to you again of the difficulties of my life, for the affair you know of has rendered them enormous and insurmountable. While I work night and day to free my pen, my new publishers give me nothing until I work for them; so that I must run in debt, and all my money worries will begin again. Werdet's failure has killed me. I imprudently indorsed for him, I was sued, and I was forced to hide and defend myself. The men whose duty it is to arrest debtors discovered me, thanks to treachery, and I had the pain of compromising the persons who had generously given me an asylum. It was necessary, in order not to go to prison, to find the money for the Werdet debt at once, and, consequently, to involve myself again to those who lent it to me.

Such a little episode in the midst of my toil!

I will no longer wring your heart with the details of my struggle. Besides, it would take volumes to tell you all of them and explain them. The truth is, I do not live. Always toil! I cannot support this life for more than three or four months at a time. I have still forty-five days more of it; after that I shall be utterly broken down, and then I will go and revive in the solitude of the Ukraine, if God permits it. I hope to last till the end of "César Birotteau."

"La Femme Supérieure" makes two thick 8vo volumes. It is ended in the newspaper, but not in the book form; I am adding a fourth Part.

I wish I had strength enough to give the end of "Illusions Perdues." But that is very difficult; though very urgent, because my payment of fifteen hundred francs a month does not begin till then.

Not only have I not closed the gulf of sorrows, but I have not closed that of my business affairs. I have hoped so often that I am weary of hope, as I told you. I am a prey to deep disgust, and I shut myself up in complete solitude. Nevertheless, a grand affair is preparing for me in the publication of my works, with vignettes, etc., resting upon an enterprise both inciting and attractive to the public. This is an interest in a tontine, created from a portion of the profit of subscribers, who are divided into classes and ages; one to ten, ten to twenty, twenty to thirty, thirty to forty, forty to fifty, fifty to sixty, sixty to seventy, seventy to eighty. So, the subscriber will obtain a magnificent volume, as to typographic execution, and the chance of thirty thousand francs income for having subscribed. Also the capital of the income will remain to the subscriber's family.

It is very fine; but it needs three thousand subscribers per class to make it practicable. But imagine that, in spite of the ardour of my imagination, I have received so many blows that I shall see this project played with an indifferent eye. An enormous sum is required for advertising; and four hundred thousand francs for the vignettes alone. The work will be in fifty volumes, published in demi-volumes. It will include the "Études de Mœurs" complete, the "Études Philosophiques" complete, and the "Études Analytiques" complete, under the general title of "Études Sociales." In four years the whole will have been published. The vignettes will be in the text itself, and there will be seventy-five in a volume, which will prevent all piracy in foreign countries.

But this depends still on several administrative points to settle. May fate grant it success! It is high time. I feel that a few days more like the last, and I am vanquished.

I, who know so amply what misfortune is, I cry to you from the depths of my study, enjoy the material good that M. Hanski bestows upon you, and which you justly boast of to me. I wish with all the power of my soul that you may never know such miseries as mine.

If this affair takes place, and taking place, succeeds, you shall be the first informed of it; and never letter more joyous will rush through Europe! But I have reached the point of very great doubt in all business affairs.

You will some day read "La Femme Supérieure," and if ever I needed a serious and sincere opinion upon a composition, it is on this. Twenty letters of reprobation reach the newspaper daily, from persons who stop their subscriptions, etc., saying that nothing could be more wearisome, it is all insipid gabbling, etc.; and they send me these letters! There is one, among others, from a man who calls himself my great admirer, which says that "he cannot conceive the stupidity of such a composition." If that is so, I must have been heavily mistaken.

This distrust, into which such communications throw an author, is little propitious to a start on "César Birotteau" which I make to-day and must push with the greatest celerity. I have robbed you of the manuscript and proofs of "La Femme Supérieure" to the profit of my _cara sorella_, who has none of these things, and who, on seeing the bound proofs brought home to me for you, said, in a melancholy tone, "Am I never to have any of them myself?" So I thought to give her those of "La Femme Supérieure;" I will keep those of the reprints for you.

On coming out of my painful labour of forty-five days, I have religiously put your dear Anna's heart's-ease into my "Imitation of Jesus Christ," where there is another on a fragment of a yellow sash.

What events, what thoughts have passed beneath heaven's arch in seven years! and what terror must one feel as one sees one's self advancing ever, with no lull in the storm! One must not think of happy fancies pictured on the horizon, especially when the soul is ever in mourning.

I send you a thousand caressing desires; I would that you had all the happiness that flees from me. I see but too well that my life can never be other than a life of toil, and that I must place my pleasure there, in the occupation by which I live. And yet, when my pen is free, two or three months hence, I shall once more tempt fortune; I shall make a last effort. But if I do so, it is because there is no risk of money. After that, if nothing comes of it, I shall retire into some corner, to live there like a country curate without parishioners, indifferent to all material interests, and resting on my heart and my imagination,--those two great motive powers of life. This is only telling you that you count for more than half in that vision.