Now, adieu. Think of me! I send you my tenderest thoughts.
TO GEORGE SAND.
Wednesday night, 1867.
Dear Master, dear friend of the good God, “let us talk a little of Dozenval,” let us growl about Monsieur Thiers! Could there ever be a more triumphant imbecile, a more abject fellow, a meaner bourgeois! No, no words could ever give an idea of the nausea that overcomes me when I contemplate that old pumpkin of a diplomat, fattening his stupidity under the muck of the bourgeoisie. Would it be possible to treat with more naïve and more inappropriate unceremoniousness, matters of religion, the people, liberty, the past and the future, national history and natural history, everything? He seems to me as eternal as mediocrity itself! He prostrates me! But the finest thing of all is the spectacle of the brave National Guards, whom he threw out in 1848, now beginning to applaud him! What absolute lunacy! It proves that everything depends upon temperament. Prostitutes—represented in this case by France—are said to have always a weakness for old rascals!
I shall attempt, in the third part of my romance (when I shall have had the reaction following the June days), to insinuate a panegyric about him, à propos of his book: De la Propriété, and I hope that he will be pleased with me!
What care should one take sometimes, in expressing an opinion on things of this world, not to risk being considered an imbecile later? It is a rude problem. It seems to me that the best way is to describe, with the simplest precision, those things that exasperate one. The dissection itself is a vengeance!
Ah, well! it is not at him alone that I am enraged, nor at the others—it is at our people in general.
However, if we had spent our time in instructing the higher classes on the subject of agriculture; if we had thought more of our stomachs than of our heads, probably we should resemble him!
I have just read the preface of Buchez to his Histoire parlementaire. Like other similar publications, it is full of stupidities, of which we feel the weight to this day.
It is not kind to say I do not think of my “old troubadour;” of what else should I think? Of my little book, perhaps,—but that is more difficult and not nearly so agreeable.