“La Côte St André, July 1832.—You have set me, Madame, a new and most agreeable task.
“An intellectual woman not only desires that I should write her my musings, but undertakes to read them without emphasizing too much their ridiculous side.
“It is hardly generous of me to take advantage of your kindness, but are we not all selfish?
“For my part, I must own that whenever such a temptation comes I shall fall into it with the utmost alacrity.
“I should have done so sooner had I not, on my descent from the Alps, been caught like a ball on the bound and tossed from villa to villa round Grenoble.
“My fear was that, on returning to France, I might have to parody Voltaire and say: ‘The more I see of other lands, the less I love my country.’ But all the glories of the glorious kingdom of Naples are powerless beside the ineffable charms of my beautiful vale of the Isère.
“Of society, however, I cannot say the same. The advantage is entirely with the absent, who are not ‘always wrong’ in spite of the proverb.
“Despite my herculean efforts to turn the conversation, the good folks here will insist on talking art, music and poetry to me, and you may imagine how provincials talk! They have most weird notions, theories and ideas that make an artist’s blood curdle in his veins, and, withal, the calmest assumption of infallibility.
“One would think to hear them talk of Byron, Goethe, Beethoven, that they were respectable bootmakers or tailors, with a little more talent than their compeers.
“Nothing is good enough, there is no reverence, no respect, no enthusiasm!