TO GEORGE SAND.
Croisset, Tuesday, 1866.
You are alone and sad where you are, and I am the same here. Whence come the black moods that sometimes sweep over us? They creep up like the rising tide and we are suddenly overwhelmed and must flee. My method is to lie flat on my back and do nothing, and the wave passes after a time.
My romance has been going badly for a quarter of an hour. Then, too, I have just heard of two deaths, that of Cormenin, a friend for the past twenty-five years, and of Gavarni. Other things have troubled me, too, but all this will soon pass over.
You do not know what it is to sit a whole day with your head in your hands, squeezing your unhappy brain in trying to find a word. Your ideas flow freely, incessantly, like a river. But with me they run slowly, like a tiny rill. I must have great works of art to occupy me in order to obtain a cascade. Ah! I know what they are—the terrors of style!
In short, I pass my life gnawing my heart and my brain—that is the real truth about your friend.
You ask whether he thinks sometimes of his old troubadour of the clock. He does, indeed! And he regrets him. Our little nocturnal chats were very charming. There were moments when I had to restrain myself to keep from babbling to you like a big baby.
Your ears must have burned last night. I dined with my brother and his family. We spoke of scarcely anyone but you, and everyone sang your praises, dear and well-beloved master!
I re-read, à propos of your last letter (and by a natural train of ideas), Father Montaigne’s chapter entitled “Some Verses of Virgil.” That which he says about chastity is precisely my own belief.
It is the effort that is difficult, and not abstinence in itself. Otherwise, it would be a curse to the flesh. Heaven knows whither this would lead. So, at the risk of eternal reiteration, and of being like Prudhomme, I repeat that your young man was wrong. If he had been virtuous up to twenty years of age, his action would be an ignoble libertinage at fifty. Everyone gets his deserts some time! Great natures, that are also good, are above all things generous, and do not calculate expense. We must laugh and weep, work, play, and suffer, so that we may feel the divine vibration throughout our being. That, I believe, is the characteristic of true manhood.