TO MADAME X.
Croisset,
Monday Night, June, 1853.
FEELING myself in a grand humor of style this morning, after giving my niece her lesson in geography, I seized upon my Bovary, sketching three pages in the afternoon which I have just rewritten this evening. Its movement is furious and full, and I shall doubtless discover a thousand repetitions which it will be necessary to strike out as soon as I come to look it over a little. What a miracle it would be for me to write even two pages in a day, when heretofore I have scarcely been able to write three in a week! With the Saint Antony that was, indeed, the way I worked, but I can no longer content myself with that. I wish Bovary to be at the same time heavier and more flowing. I believe that this week will see me well advanced, and that in about a fortnight I shall be able to read Bouilhet the whole of the beginning (a hundred and twenty pages), which, if it goes well, would be a great encouragement, and I shall have passed if not the most difficult part at least the most annoying. But there are so many delays! I am not yet at the point where I can credit our last interview at Mantes. What foolish and severe vexation you must have passed through that week, my poor friend! About cases like M——, who throw themselves at your feet, the best thing to do is to pass the sponge over them immediately; but if you would care the least bit in the world for the elder Lacroix or the great Sainte-Beuve to receive something on the face or elsewhere, you have only to tell me and it is a commission of which I shall acquit myself with despatch on my next visit to Paris, in the old-time manner between two journeys; but could you not show Lacroix the door with a single word? What good is there in discussing, replying to, and angering him? This is all very easy to say in cold blood, is it not? It is always this accursed passion element which causes us all our annoyances. How true is Larochefoucauld’s remark: “The virtuous man is he who allows himself to be concerned with nothing.” Yes, it is necessary to bridle the heart, to hold it in leash like an enraged bulldog, and then let it loose at a bound at the opportune moment. Run, run, my old fellow, bark loudly and go at top speed; what these rogues have that is superior to us is patience. So in this story, Lacroix by his cowardly tenacity wearies De Lisle, who ends by becoming vexed and leaving the game and Le Jeune irrité (the whole of Sainte-Beuve is in these words) will not have had finally either a sword in his paunch or a foot to his coat-tails, and will privately begin his machinations anew, as Homais would say.
You are astonished to find yourself the butt of so much calumny, opposition, indifference and ill-will. You will be more so and have more of it; it is the reward of the good and the beautiful: one may calculate the value of a man from the number of his enemies and the importance of a work by the evil said of it. Critics are like fleas which always jump upon white linen and adore lace. That reproach sent by Sainte-Beuve to the Paysanne establishes my belief in the Paysanne more firmly than Victor Hugo’s praise of it; we give our praise to everybody, but our blame, no! Who is there that has not made a parody on the mediocre?
In regard to Hugo, I do not believe that it is time to write to him; you gave him a month for an answer, and it is not more than two weeks since our packet left; so it is necessary to wait at least as long as that, provided it has not been seized. Every precaution was taken, my mother addressing the letter herself.
What can this phrase in your letter this morning mean in speaking of De Lisle? “I believe that I was deceived in my impression of yesterday.” The words of the bourgeois at Préault are good. Have I told you what a curate of Trouville said one day after I had dined with him? When I refused champagne (I had already eaten and drunk enough to make me fall under the table), my curate was astonished and turned on me an eye! such an eye! an eye expressing envy, admiration, and disdain together, and said to me, shrugging his shoulders: “Come, now! all you young people from Paris who gulp down champagne with your fine suppers, make very little mouths when you come to the provinces!” And it was so easy to understand that between the words “fine suppers” and “gulp” he meant to say “with the actresses!” What horizons! and to know that I excited this brave man! In this connection I am going to allow myself a quotation: “Come now!” said the chemist, shrugging his shoulders, “do you know about these fine parties at the house of the traitor! the masked balls! the champagne? All this goes on, I assure you.”
“I do not believe that it injures him,” objected Bovary.
“Nor I either,” quickly replied M. Homais, “and it may be necessary for him to keep them up or be taken for a Jesuit. But if you only knew what lives those fellows lead, in the Latin Quarter with their actresses! Generally speaking, students are well looked upon in Paris. For the little attractiveness that they have, they are received into the best society, and there are even ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain who fall in love with them and, in consequence sometimes give them opportunities of making fine marriages.” In two pages I believe I have collected all the stupidity that one hears in the provinces about Paris,—student life, actresses, the pickpockets you encounter in the public gardens, and the cooking at the restaurants, “always more unwholesome than provincial cooking.”
That stiffness of which Préault accuses me is astonishing; it appears that when I have on a black coat, I am not the same man. And it is certain that I am then wearing a kind of disguise which my face and manners ought to resent, so much effect has the exterior upon the interior. It is the cap that moulds the head, and all troopers have about them the imbecile stiffness of hard lines. Bouilhet pretends that, out in the world, I have the air of a drilled, bourgeois officer. Is it on this account that the illustrious Turgan calls me “the major?” He also maintains that I have a military air, and one could pay me no compliment that would be less agreeable. If Préault knew me, he would, on the contrary, find that I have a too bare-breasted air like the good captain; but how beautiful Ferrat must have been with his “good southern fury;” I can see him there now gasconading; it is tremendous. And, speaking of the grotesque, I was overwhelmed at the funeral of Madame Pouchet; decidedly, the good God is romantic, for he continually mingles the two kinds together. Nevertheless, while I was looking at the poor Pouchet, who was in torture, shaking like a reed in the wind, do you know what came up before me? A gentleman who asked me, on my voyage: “What kind of museums have they in Egypt? What is the condition of their public libraries?” And when I demolished his illusions, he was desolate. “Is it possible!” said he. “What an unfortunate country! What a civilization!” etc....
The burial was Protestant, the priest speaking in French beside the grave; Monsieur would prefer it so ... “since Catholicism is denuded of the flowers of rhetoric.” O humans! O mortals! and to think we are always duped, that we have the vanity to believe ourselves imaginative, when the reality crushes us! I went to that ceremony with the intention of elevating my mind to the point of penetration; to try to discover a few pebbles; and then—these blocks fell upon my head! The grotesque deafened my ears, and the pathetic was in convulsions before my eyes. Whence I draw (or rather withdraw) this conclusion: It is never necessary to fear exaggerating; all the great ones have done it: Michael-Angelo, Rabelais, Shakespeare and Molière. It is a question of making a man take an injection when he has no syringe; well, we must fill the theatre with apothecaries’ syringes; that is clearly the way to reach genius in its true centre, which is very ridiculous. But to suppress exaggeration, there must be continuity, proportion, and harmony in itself. If your good men have a hundred feet, your mountains should be twenty miles high; and what is the ideal if it is not a magnifying?