Chaillot, November 22, 1835.
Do not be surprised at the number of days since I have written to you. This interruption is due to the sharpness of the conflict, the necessity of a work that takes days and nights. I am in fear of succumbing. Also, events have become very serious in my family. Something had to be done about my brother,—get him off to India, or induce him to go.
You, so little concerned about money, you will never know, until I relate them to you by the fireside in your steppe, the difficulties there are in paying ten thousand francs a month, without other resource than one's pen. Still, I have almost the hope of arriving, if not free, at least with honour safe and no misfortune, at December 31.
You will comprehend nothing of these two months until you see the frightful labour on "Séraphita" and the "Lys" bound in green and placed upon your bookshelves. Then you will ask yourself, seeing that mass of proofs and corrections, if there were years in those months, days in those hours.
Madame Bêchet has paid us our thirty-three thousand francs; and we are offered forty-five thousand for the thirteen following volumes, which will complete, in twenty-five volumes, the first edition of the "Études de Mœurs." That is how our affairs stand now. We owe thirty-five thousand francs, and we possess, in expectation, fifty thousand. There's the account of our household. The sole point now is, not to die of fatigue on the day when the burden becomes endurable!
To-morrow, Sunday, 22, the first number of the "Lys dans la Vallée" appears in the "Revue de Paris." But learn from one fact the nature of my struggle and my daily combats. Since my return from Vienna the "Revue de Paris" made immense sacrifices for "Séraphita." After six months of toil and money spent, "Séraphita," finished, was to have appeared to-morrow. Suddenly the director told me it was incomprehensible, and that he preferred not to publish it on account of the long interruption which had occurred between the first numbers and the end, with a hundred other reasons which I spare you. I at once proposed to pay him his costs and take back my article. Accepted. I rushed to Werdet, and told him about it. He rushed to Buloz with the money; and the wrath of publisher and author is such that "Séraphita" has gone from one printing-press to the other and that the "Livre Mystique," will appear on Saturday, 28th. The literature of the periodical press will seize upon the singular anecdote of this refusal; it will make such an uproar, inasmuch as the editor of the "Revue" is not liked, that Werdet feels sure of selling "Séraphita" in a single day.[1] There is a copy on Chinese paper for you, besides the collection of manuscripts and proofs. But such displays of force require prodigious efforts: they are like the campaigns of Italy.
You understand that in a literary campaign like mine society is impossible. Therefore I have openly renounced it. I go nowhere, I answer no letter and no invitation. I only allow myself the Italian opera once a fortnight. Thursday last I saw Madame Kisseleff there. Alas! how little effect her beauty made! If you only knew how everything becomes belittled in Paris! In spite of her protecting passion for Poggi, she understands what I tried to tell her in Vienna, and Poggi now gives her the impression of a full stop in the Encyclopædia after hearing Rubini.
I cannot tell you the memories that assailed me when I found myself beside some one from Vienna, a friend of yours, and listening to the "Somnambula" which recalled to me two of our evenings. The Princess Schonberg was there also. I paid a visit of politeness to her; and I shall also go and see Madame Kisseleff once.
So, my life is a strange monotony, and your letters are so rare that I have no longer the regular event that varied it,—your letters, that always came of a Monday. I have no longer my good Monday. I can only tell you about my work and my payments,—a chant as monotonous as that of the waves of ocean surging upon a granite rock.
I am going to dine in town to get you an autograph of Sir Sidney Smith, the hero of Saint-Jean-d'Acre. I will also send you one of Alphonse Karr.