[1] This story, with details quite absurd on the face of them, Werdet quotes from M. Philarète Chasles; which shows how even his friends and gentlemen united with his enemies in creating myths about him.—TR.
Paris, March 24, 1836.
At length I have received your last letter, numbered 5, a whole month after its predecessor! Being in the rue Cassini, I cannot verify whether I have received No. 4.
To what you ask of me, the friend says: No. But there is, in me, another personage, too proud to answer otherwise than by a yes when the matter concerned is something that amuses you. There are two things in my nature: childlike trust, and a total lack of egoism.
You are amusing yourself at Kiew, while I am interdicted even the Italian Opera. Never was my solitude so complete, nor my work so cruelly continuous. My health is so affected that I cannot pretend to recover that air of youth to which I had the weakness to cling. All is said. If, at my age, a man has never tasted pure, unshackled happiness, Nature will later prevent its being possible for him to wet his lips in the cup. White hairs cannot approach it. Life will have been for me a most sorrowful jest. My ambitions are falling one by one. Power is a small matter. Nature created in me a being of love and tenderness, and chance has constrained me to write my desires instead of satisfying them.
If between now and three years hence nothing is changed in my existence, I shall retire, peacefully, to Touraine, living on the banks of the Loire, hidden from all, and working only to fill the empty hours. I shall even abandon my great work. My forces are being exhausted in this struggle; it is lasting too long; it is wearing me out.
And yet, the affair of the "Cent Contes Drolatiques" seems as if it might be settled, and that would render my financial condition endurable; but it drags along in a despairing way. It will save me when I am dead. I have earned in the mass this year a sum much greater than what I owe; but the debts have fixed dates for becoming due, and the receipts are capricious.
Around me I have no one, or else only powerless friendships; for the nature of certain souls is to attach themselves only to those who suffer.
Frightened by this struggle, and not being willing even to see it, Jules Sandeau has fled from here, leaving me his rent, and a few debts on my hands. He is a man at sea, drifting, as they say of a vessel wrecked in mid-ocean, and battered by the gale. Like Medea, I have myself only against all. Nothing is changed in my situation. I might write you for six months, and say but one thing: I toil. I have no longer any distractions, any amusements—the desert, and the sun!
I smiled in thinking that Madame Eve Hanska, to whom "Séraphita" is dedicated, plays lansquenet, and that this solitary personage is immersed in all mundane things.