The insensibility of the bourgeois, who watches the fire seated in his armchair, is charming, and you wind up with one sublime stroke: the apparition of the soutane of the Abbé Serge at the bedside of his dying mother, as a consolation or a chastisement!
There is one bit of chicanery, however. The reader (that has no memory) does not know by instinct what motive prompts M. Rougon and Uncle Macquart to act as they do. Two paragraphs of explanation would have been sufficient.
Never mind! it is what it is, and I thank you for the pleasure it has given me.
Sleep on both ears, now your work is done!
Lay aside for me all the stupid criticisms it draws forth. That kind of document interests me very much.
TO GUY DE MAUPASSANT.
Dieppe, July 28, 1874.
My dear friend: As Saturday is for you a kind of consecrated day, and as I could be in Paris only one day, which was last Saturday, I shall not be able to see you on your return from Helvetia.
Know, then, that Le Sexe Faible was enthusiastically received at the Cluny Theatre, and it will be acted there after Zola’s piece, that is, about the last of November.
Winschenk, the director of this little box of a theatre, predicts a great pecuniary success. Amen!