I have real need of seeing Vienna. I must explore the fields of Wagram and Essling before next June. I specially want engravings which show the uniforms of the German army, and I must go in search of them. Have the kindness to tell me merely if such things exist.
To-day, 25th, it is almost twelve days since I have received any letters from you. I live in such isolation that I count upon and look eagerly for the pleasures that come into my desert. Alas! Madame de Berny's illness has cast me into horrible thoughts. That angelic creature who, since 1821, has shed the fragrance of heaven into my life is transformed; she is turning to ice. Tears, griefs, and I can do nothing. One daughter become insane, another daughter dead, a third dying, what blows!—And a wound more violent still, of which nothing can be told. And at last, after thirty years of patience and devotion, she is forced to separate from her husband under pain of dying if she remains with him. All this in a short space of time. This is what I suffer through the heart that created me.
Then, in Berry, Madame Carraud's life is in peril through her pregnancy. Borget is in Italy. My mother is in despair about my brother's marriage; she has aged twenty years in twenty days. I am hemmed in by enormous, obligatory work, and by money cares, also by two little lawsuits which I have brought to solve the last difficulties of my literary life.
For all this one needs, as my doctor says, a skull of iron. Unhappily, the heart may burst the skull. I counted on the trip to Vienna as the traveller counts on the oasis in the desert; but the impossibility of it faces me. I must be in Paris from the 20th to the 30th of September. I have then to pay five hundred ducats, and when one digs the soil with a pen gold is rare. However, labour will suffice. I shall be free in a few months, if the abuse of study does not kill me. I begin to fear it.
Tuesday, 26.
To-day I have finished "La Recherche de l'Absolu." Heaven grant that the work be good and beautiful. I cannot judge of it; I am too weary with toil, too exhausted by the fatigues of conception. I see only the reverse side of the canvas. Everything in it is pure. Conjugal love is here a sublime passion. The love of the young girl is fresh. It is the Home, at its source. You will read it. You will also read "Souffrances inconnues," which have cost me four months' labour. They are forty pages of which I could not write but two sentences a day. It is a horrible cry, without brilliancy of style, without pretensions to drama. There are too many thoughts in it, and too much drama to show on the outside. It is enough to make you shudder, and it is all true. Never have I been so stirred by any work. It is more than "La Grenadière," more than "La Femme abandonnée."
At the present moment I am making the final corrections of style on the "Peau de Chagrin." I reprint it and remove the last blemishes. Oh! my sixteen hours a day are well employed! I go to the Opera only once a week now.
Day before yesterday Madame Sand, or Dudevant, just returned from Italy, met me in the foyer of the Opera, and we took two or three turns together. I was to breakfast with her the next day, but I could not go. To-day I have had Sandeau to breakfast, who told me that the day after that woman abandoned him he took such a quantity of acetate of morphia that his stomach rejected it, and threw it up without there having been the slightest absorption. I was sorry I had not received the confidences of Madame George Sand. He regretted it too,—-Jules Sandeau. The poor lad is very unhappy at this moment. I have advised him to come and take Borget's room, and share with me until he can make himself an existence with his plays. That is what has most struck me the last few days.