You see that as I advance in my own work I act on another and parallel line, important and broader; in a word, I shall not stop short in politics any more than in literature. Time presses, events are complicating. I should have been stopped for want of a hundred thousand francs; but I think I am about to write a drama, under the name of my future secretary, to procure them. I must be done with this money question which strangles me.
You see that, in spite of your coldness, I keep you informed of the great operations of your devoted moujik. But if the law passes, the new law which requires that political articles be signed, I shall have to renounce a great deal in order to go to Paulowska. In short, we cannot have intellect for nothing!
To speak to you of my every-day affairs would be to tell you of too many great miseries. I have always an infinite number of errands, goings and comings to pay my notes and meet my engagements, without ever being able to end them. In Paris everything involves a frightful loss of time, and time is the great material of which life is made.
So, when I am bending over my paper in the light of my candles in the salon of the "Fille aux yeux d'or," or lying, weary, on the sofa, I am breathless with pecuniary difficulties, sleeping little, eating little, seeing no one,—in short, like a republican general making a campaign without bread, without shoes. Solitude, however, pleases me much. I hate society. I must finish what I have begun, and whatever turns me from it is bad, especially when it is wearisome.
You ask me, I think, about Madame de C... She has taken the thing, as I told you, tragically, and now distrusts the M... family. Beneath all this, on both sides there is something inexplicable, and I have no desire to look for the key of mysteries which do not concern me. I am with Madame de C... on the proper terms of politeness and as you yourself would wish me to be.
Do not make any comparison between the affection which you inspire, and that which you grant; for in that, those who love you have the advantage. Never believe that I cease to think of you, for even though I be occupied as I am now, it is impossible that in hours of fatigue and despair, hours when our energy relaxes, and we sit with pendent arms and sunken head, body weary and mind distressed, the wings of memory should not bear us back to moments when we refreshed our soul beneath green shades, to her who smiled to us, who has nothing in her heart that is not sincere, who is to us a spirit, who reanimates us, and renews, so to speak, by distractions of the soul, those powers to which others give the name of talent. You are all these things to me, you know it; therefore never jest about my feelings; I fear lest there mingle in it too much of gratitude.
Adieu. At Wierzchownia! I must cross Europe to show you an aging face, but a heart that is ever deplorably young, which beats at a word, at a line ill-written, an address, a perfume, as though it were not thirty-six years old.
I hope when you are regularly settled in your Wierzchownia, that you will write me the journal of your daily life and be to me more faithfully a friend, so that we shall be as if we had seen ourselves yesterday when I arrive. A thousand kind things to M. Hanski. Write me whether the parcel is lost or you received it. I am afraid it went to Ischl after you had left. Also write me by return of courier, inclosing in your letter a seal in red wax of your arms, which are to be engraved on the title-page of "Séraphita," in the edition of the "Études philosophiques" and "Le Livre Mystique." Isn't it a piece of gallantry to sound the heraldic chord which you have within you, I know not where, for it is not in your heart? Kiss Anna on the forehead for me. All tender sentiments, and recall me to the recollection of the Viennese, to whom I owe memories.
Paris, August 24, 1835.
My letters are becoming short, you say, and you no longer know whom I see. I see no one; I work so continually that I have not a moment for writing. But I do have moments of lassitude for thinking. Some day you will be astonished at what I have been able to do, and yet write to a friend at all.