I shall see Madame Viardot this evening, I shall go early and we will talk of you.
When shall we meet again, now? How far Nohant is from Croisset!
Yours, dear good master, all my affection.
Gustave Flaubert
otherwise called the R. P. Cruchard of the Barnabites, director of the Ladies of Disillusion.
CCLVII. TO GEORGE SAND
Dear master,
Cruchard should have thanked you sooner for sending him your last book; but his reverence is working like ten thousand negroes, that is his excuse. But it did not hinder him from reading "Impressions et Souvenirs." I already knew some of it, from having read it in le Temps (a pun). [Footnote: "Dans de temps" means also, "some time ago.">[
This is what was new to me and what struck me: (1) the first fragment; (2) the second in which there is a charming and just page on the Empress. How true is what you say of the proletariat! Let us hope that its reign will pass like that of the bourgeois, and for the same causes, as a punishment for the same folly and a similar egoism.
The "Reponse a un ami" I knew, as it was addressed to me.