This work is still incomplete, though it bears this time the pompous title of "Histoire Intellectuelle de Louis Lambert." When this edition is exhausted, I will publish another "Louis Lambert" more complete.
I tell you naïvely all that you want to know about me. I am still waiting for you to speak to me with equal confidence. You are afraid of ridicule? And of whose? That of a poor child, victim yesterday and victim to-morrow of his feminine bashfulness, his shyness, his beliefs. You have asked me with distrust to give an explanation of my two handwritings; but I have as many handwritings as there are days in the year, without being on that account the least in the world versatile. This mobility comes from an imagination which can conceive all and yet remain virgin, like glass which is soiled by none of its reflections. The glass is in my brain. But my heart, my heart is known but to one woman in the world as yet,—the et nunc et semper dilectæ dicatum of the dedication of "Louis Lambert." Ties eternal and ties broken! Do not blame me. You ask me how we can love, live, and lose each other while still loving. That is a mystery of life of which you know nothing as yet, and I hope you never may know it. In that sad destiny no blame can be attached except to fate; there are two unfortunates, but they are two irreproachable unfortunates. There is no fault to absolve because there is no cause to blame. I cannot add another word.
I am very curious to know if "La Femme abandonnée," "La Grenadière," the "Lettre à Nodier" (in which there are enormous typographical errors), the "Voyage à Java," and "Les Maranas" have pleased you?...
Some days after receiving this letter you will read "Une Fille d'Ève," who will be the type of the "La Femme abandonnée," taken between fifteen and twenty years of age.
At this moment I am finishing a work that is quite evangelical, and which seems to me the "Imitation of Jesus Christ" poetized. It bears an epigraph which will tell the disposition of mind I was in when writing the book: To wounded hearts, silence and shade. One must have suffered to understand that line to its full extent; and one must also have suffered as much as I have done to give birth to it in a day of mourning.
I have flung myself into work, as Empedocles into the crater, to stay there. "La Bataille" will come after "Le Médecin de campagne" (the book I have just told you of); and is there not something to shudder at when I tell you that "La Bataille" is an impossible book? In it I undertake to initiate the reader into all the horrors and all the beauties of a battle-field; my battle is Essling, Essling with all its consequences. This book requires that a man, in cold blood, seated in his chair, shall see the country, the lay of the land, the masses of men, the strategic events, the Danube, the bridges; shall behold the details and the whole of the struggle, hear the artillery, pay attention to all the movements on the chess-board; see all, and feel, in each articulation of the great body, Napoleon—whom I shall not show, or shall only allow to be seen, in the evening, crossing the Danube in a boat! Not a woman's head; cannon, horses, two armies, uniforms. On the first page the cannon roars, and never ceases until the last. You read through smoke, and, the book closed, you have seen it all intuitively; you remember the battle as if you had been present at it.
It is now three months that I have been measuring swords with that work, that ode in two volumes, which persons on all sides tell me is impossible!
I work eighteen hours a day. I have perceived the faults of style which disfigure "La Peau de Chagrin." I corrected them to make it irreproachable; but after two months' labour, the volume being reprinted, I discover another hundred faults. Such are the sorrows of a poet.