I entreat you not to forget my request relative to corrections of "La Vieille Fille" and, in general, to all you find faulty in my works. I have none but you in the world to do me this friend's service. Be curt in your verdicts. When there was something very bad Madame de Berny never discussed; she wrote, "Bad" or, "Passage to be rewritten." Be, I pray you, my dear star and my literary conscience, as you are in so many other things my guide and my counsellor. You have a sure taste; you have the habit of comparison, because you read everything. This will be, moreover, an occupation in your desert.
Alas! I can only talk to you about myself. I am now without letters from you, delivered over to all sorts of anxieties, because I had the misfortune, in travelling, to leave you a month in silence,—though I wrote to you from Sion in the Valais, and expected to find an answer in Milan on my return from Florence. I have written to Milan, to Prince Porcia, to forward your letter here.
Have the kindness to write to Madame Jeroslas ... that I can more easily go four months hence and lay my homage at her feet than write her a letter at this moment. Seriously, I go to bed with a tired hand. I will send you a page for her in my next letter, though I shall not write you till I can announce the termination of "César Birotteau" and "La Femme Supérieure," the two great thorns I have in my foot at this moment. The third dizain may amuse me perhaps at Frapesle, Madame Carraud's house, where I shall live ten days among the flowers, well cared for by her, who is like a sister to me. She is very delicate, very feeble; she will go, too, I foresee it, that fine and noble intellect; and of the three truly grand women whom I have known, you alone will remain. Such friendships are not renewed, cara. Therefore, mine for you grows greater from all my losses, and, I dare to say it, from all the illusions that experience mows down like the flowers of the field. All my recent griefs, that ignoble little treachery of Boulanger, this present misfortune due to my attachment to the weak, all these things cast me with greater force to you, in whom I believe as in God, to whom the troubles of earth drive us back. There are affections that are like great rivers; all flows into them. So the longer I live, the more the river swells; the sea into which it casts itself is death.
I hope that all goes well with you, and that M. Hanski will be so kind as not to be vexed with me if I do not answer his gracious letter; I am so hurried! Tell him all that I would say to him; passing through such an interpreter that which I should write to him will be bettered. Take great care of yourself; after the long night-nursing you have borne, I tremble lest you should be ill; if that should happen, in God's name let me know; I must go and nurse you.
Adieu. I wish you good health, and Anna also. If my theory on human forces is true, you ought to live in the atmosphere that my soul makes for you by surrounding you with sacred wishes. Would that it were like the thorny hedges placed about private fields, that cattle may neither feed nor trample there. I would that I could thus drive off all griefs, all disappointments, all that herd of worries, pain, and maladies. To you, who give me such strength, would I could return it!
Paris, May 31, 1837.
I have this instant received yours (number 28) of the 12th, written after you received the one I wrote you from Florence. But did you not receive one from Sion? which I do not, however, count as a letter, for there were only fifteen lines on a page. It is clear that some one kept the money for the postage, and read, or burned the letter. Mon Dieu! how vexed I am! I stopped at Sion expressly to write it. You ought to have received it early in March. Let us say no more about it.
I admire the capacity of your intelligence in regard to the person about whom I wrote you from Florence. The reasons that struck your mind struck mine later. But your letter grieves me. Such profound sadness reigns through the religious ideas it expresses. It seems as though you had lost all hope on earth. You ask me to make you confidences as I would to my best friend; but have I not told you all my life? I have often confided too much of my anguish to you, for it did you harm.
This letter comes to me at a bad moment. It has singularly added to the dumb grief that gnaws me and will kill me. I am thirty-eight years old, still crippled by debt, with nought but uncertainty as to my position. Scarcely have I taken two months to rest my brain before I repent them as a crime when I see the evils that have come through my inaction. This precarious life, which might be a spur in youth, becomes at my age an overwhelming burden. My head is turning white, and whatever pleasant things may be said about it, it is clear that I must soon lose all hope of pleasing. Pure, tranquil, openly avowed happiness, for which I was made, escapes me; I have only tortures and vexations, through which a few rare gleams of blue sky shine.