I laughed much at your reckoning of my work by quantity, not quality. I laughed, because I thought of your analytical forehead; I laughed, because I thought that at the moment when I was reading those falsely accusing pages, you, perhaps, were holding in your hand "Séraphita" and making me in the depths of your heart some honourable amends.
Ah! cara, if you were in the secret of those work-sessions, which begin at midnight and end at midday, if you knew that the new edition of the "Médecin de campagne" and the second of the "Livre Mystique" have cost me six hundred hours, that I must deliver February 1 the manuscripts of two new octavo volumes, and that I have business and lawsuits besides, you would see, with pain, that you have accused a friend falsely, that "Marie Touchet" is going on, and that—that—etc.
To-day, I have so much on my hands that I am compelled to extreme rapidity. I am irreconcilably parted from the two Revues. I have in my own hands "La Chronique de Paris," a newspaper that comes out twice a week, and expresses my royalist sympathies. I have begun the year by "La Messe de l'Athée," a work conceived, written, and printed in a single night. I must deliver in February a work entitled "L'Interdiction," which is equivalent to seventy pages of the "Revue de Paris." This is over and above what I have to do for Madame Bêchet and Werdet. In two months I shall have ended the agreement with Madame Bêchet, and be free of her.
In the enumeration which you make of my works you count as nothing the enormous corrections which the reprints cost me. Is it not sad to have to count up with you,—to make for friendship calculations such as I have to make with my publishers? You took amiss what I said to you in asking you not to cause me false sorrows, because I was bending beneath the weight of real ones. To tell you those, I should have to write you volumes. They are such that the success of "Séraphita" did not bring into my soul the slightest joy. Did there not come a moment when Sisyphus neither wept nor smiled, but became of the nature of the rocks he was ever lifting?
My life is becoming too much that of a steam-engine. Toil to-day, toil to-morrow; always toil, and small results. 1836 is begun. I shall soon be thirty-seven years old. I have six months before me, during which I have accumulated fifty thousand francs to pay. Those paid, I shall have paid off what I owe to strangers. There remains my mother. But I shall have spent nine years of life at the edge of a table, with an inkstand before me. I have had but three diversions, permit me to say three happinesses: my three journeys,—three recreations snatched, stolen, perilously torn from the midst of my battles, leaving the enemy to make headway; three halts, during which I breathed!
And you find fault with the poor soldier who has resumed his life of abnegation, his life militant, the poor writer who has not taken a penful of ink these two years without looking at your visiting card placed below his inkstand.
No, surely, I would not have you hide from me a single one of the sad or gay thoughts that come to you; but while I sympathize keenly with all that is of you, believe that I suffer horribly from the worries that you make for yourself about me, by supposing facts or sentiments that are false or foreign to my nature. Then it is that I measure the distance that parts us, and drop my head. The wound is given, here, at the moment when at Wierzchownia you ought, on receiving a letter from me, to regret having been too quick to blame a heart which is wholly devoted to you. Here are explanations enough.
I am very desirous that you should have the second edition of the "Livre Mystique" in which I have made some changes, but all is not done yet in the matter of corrections. Madame de Berny sent me her observations too late, and I could not rewrite the second chapter, entitled "Séraphita." She alone had the courage to tell me that the angel talked too much like a grisette; that what seemed pretty so long as the end was not known is paltry. I see now that I must synthesize woman, as I have all the rest of the book. Unhappily, I need six months to remake this part, and during that time noble souls will all blame me for that fault which will be so obvious to their eyes.
I send Hammer a copy of the second edition, in memory of his kind deeds and his friendly reception.