Adieu; Colonel Frankowski is still here. That grieves me, because you will not have your pretty cassolette for New Year's day. It is on my mantelpiece for the last three months. Well, addio; grant heaven that I may go to Germany on the same business that may take me to England. I shall know as to this in February. I should not consider a matter of two hundred leagues. If I go to Stuttgard I shall go to Wierzchownia.
You know all I have to say to your little world of the Ukraine. Good health above all; that is the prayer of those who have just been ill.
Paris, February 10, 1837.
I have received your last sad letter, in which you tell me of the illness and convalescence of M. Hanski from the prostration of the grippe. I have, as to my own health, barring all danger however, the same thing to tell you. Nearly the whole of my month of January was taken up by an attack of very intense cholerine, which deprived me of all energy and all my faculties. Then, after getting over that semi-ridiculous illness, I was seized by the grippe, which kept me ten days in bed.
So you have been practising the profession of nurse, cara, and M. Hanski has been ill to the point of keeping his bed for a long time,—he who went into the deserts of the Ukraine to lead a patriarchal life. If I joke, it is because I imagine that by the time my letter reaches you his convalescence will be over and all will be well with him, and with you—for I am not ignorant of the nursing you have just done; I know how fatiguing it is. In such cares about a patient's bed, the limbs swell and cause dull pains which affect the heart; I have nursed my mother.
Before my grippe I had, luckily, finished the last Part of the "Études de Mœurs," or God knows what difficulties I should have fallen into! So that brings the first twelve volumes of the "Études," begun at the time of my visit to Geneva in 1834, to an end in January, 1837. I am much grieved not to be able to make you a little visit after this accomplishment of one of my hardest tasks. You accompanied "Eugénie Grandet" with a smile; I would have liked to see the same smile on "Illusions Perdues"—on the beginning and on the end of the way.
You are very right, you who know the empire that my work exercises on my life, to let drop into a bottomless abyss all the follies that are said about me, whether they come from a princess or a fish-woman. Did not some one come and ask me if it was true I had married one of the Ellslers, a dancer,—I, who cannot endure any of the people who set foot upon the stage? But here, in Paris, in the same town with me, not two steps away from me, they tell the most unheard-of things about me. Some describe me as a monster of dissoluteness and debauchery, others as a dangerous and vindictive animal whom every one should attack. I could not tell you all they say of me. I am a spendthrift; sometimes a lax man, sometimes an intractable one.
But let us leave such nonsense; it is enough that it weighs on me; it would be too much to let it weigh upon our dear correspondence.
So now I am delivered from the most odious contract and the most odious people in the world. The last Part was published a few days ago. It contains "La Grande Bretèche" rearranged; that is to say, better framed than it was originally, and accompanied by two other adventures. Also "La Vieille Fille," one of my best things (in my opinion), though it has roused a cloud of feuilletons against me. But Du Bousquier is as fine an image of the men who managed affairs under the Republic and became liberals under the Restoration as the Chevalier de Valois is of the old remains of the Louis XV. period. Mademoiselle Cormon is a very original creation, in my opinion. That is one of the figures which are almost unapproachable for the novelist, on account of the few salient points they offer to take hold of. But difficulties like these are little appreciated, and I resign myself in such cases to having worked for my own ideas.
"Illusions Perdues" is the introduction to a much more extensive work. These barbarous editors, impelled by money considerations, insist on their three hundred and sixty pages, no matter what they are. "Illusions Perdues" required three volumes; there are still two to do, which will be called "Un Grand Homme de Province à Paris;" this will, later, be joined to "Illusions Perdues," when the first twelve volumes are reprinted; just as the "Cabinet des Antiques" will conclude "La Vieille Fille."