When your business is finished, why not come to Paris for some time? Solitude is bad under certain conditions. One should not become intoxicated with one's grief, however much attraction one finds in doing so.
You ask me what I am doing. This is it: this year I have written two stories, and I am going to begin another so as to make the three into one volume that I want to publish in the spring. After that I hope to resume the big novel that I laid aside a year ago after my financial disaster. Matters are improving in that direction, and I shall not be forced to change anything in my way of living. If I have been able to start at work again, I owe it partly to the good counsel of your mother. She had found the best way to bring me back to respect myself.
In order to get the quicker at work, I shall stay here till New Year's Day,—perhaps later than that. Do try to put off your visit to Paris.
Embrace your dear little girls warmly for me, my respects to Madam
Maurice, and-sincerely yours, ex imo.
Gustave Flaubert
CCCXVIII. To MAURICE SAND
Saint-Gratien par Sannois, 20th August, 1877
Thank you for your kind remembrance, my dear Maurice. Next winter you will be in Passy, I hope,—and from time to time we can have a good chat. I even count on seeing myself at your table by the side of your friends whose "idol" I am.
You speak to me of your dear and illustrious mamma! Next to you I do not think that any one could think of her more often than I do! How I miss her! How I need her!
I had begun un coeur simple solely on account of her, only to please her. She died while I was in the midst of this work. Thus it is with our dreams.
I still continue not to find diversion in existence. In order to forget the weight of it, I work as frantically as possible.