My works are little understood and little appreciated; they serve to enrich Belgium, but they leave me in poverty. The only friend who came to me at my start in life, who was to me a true mother, has gone to heaven. And you, you write me there are as many ideas as there is distance between us, and you dissuade me from going to see you!
Your letter has done me great harm. Believe me, there is a certain measure of religious ideas beyond which all is vicious. You know what my religion is. I am not orthodox, and I do not believe in the Roman Church. I think that if there is a scheme worthy of our kind it is that of human transformations causing the human being to advance toward unknown zones. That is the law of creations inferior to ourselves; it ought to be the law of superior creations. Swedenborgianism, which is only a repetition in the Christian sense of ancient ideas, is my religion, with the addition which I make to it of the incomprehensibility of God. That said (and I say it to you because I know you to be so truly Roman Catholic that nothing can influence your mind about it), I must surely see more clearly than you see it what your detachment from all things here below conceals, and deplore it if it rests on false ideas. To comfort myself as to this, I have read over a letter in which you told me you wished to be always yourself, to show yourself—in your hours of melancholy, of piety, and of spring-tide returns.
June 1.
Your letter has left long traces upon me, and I can scarcely say what impressions I have had on reading the part where you separate your readings into profane and religious. There is a whole world between your last but one letter and this letter. You have taken the veil. I am deathly sad.
June 2.
I have begun "La Femme Supérieure" in a manner that promised to finish it in four days, and now it is impossible for me to write a line. My faculties seem unstrung. I had made my mother decide on spending two years in Switzerland to spare her the sight of my struggle, the triumph of which I placed at that date. But she is now ill. Two nephews to bring up, my mother to support, and my work insufficient!—that is one of the aspects of my life. Continual injustice, constant calumny, the betrayal of friends, that is another.[1] The embarrassments into which Werdet's failure flung me, and my new treaty which keeps me in a state of extreme poverty, that is a third. The literary difficulties of what I do and the continuity of toil, that is another. I am worn-out on the four faces of the square by an equal pressure of trouble. If my soul finds the ivory door through which it flees into lands of illusion, dreams of happiness, closed, what will become of it? Solitude, farewell to the world? It is sorrowful for those who live by the heart to have no life possible but that of the brain.
When you receive this letter Boulanger's portrait will be on its way to you; it was packed this week. I wished to have it rolled, but the colour-dealer and a picture-restorer whom I consulted assured me it would go safely in a square box the size of the picture. You will have a fine work, so several painters say. The eyes especially are well rendered, but more in the general physical expression of the worker than with the loving soul of the individual. Boulanger saw the writer, and not the tenderness of the imbecile always taken-in, not the softness of the man before the sufferings of others, which made all my miseries come from holding out a helping hand to weaklings in the rut of ill-luck. In order to do a service in 1827 to a working printer, I found myself, in 1829, crushed down under a debt of one hundred and fifty thousand francs and cast, without bread, into a garret. In 1833, just as my pen was giving signs of enabling me to clear my obligations, I connected myself with Werdet; I wanted to make him my only publisher, and in my desire to make him prosper, I signed engagements, so that in 1837, I find myself again with a hundred and fifty thousand francs of debt, and on that account so threatened with arrest that I am obliged to live in hiding. I make myself, as I go along, the Don Quixote of the feeble; I wanted to give courage to Sandeau, and I dropped upon that head four or five thousand francs that would have saved another man! I need a barrier between the world and me; I must content myself with producing without spending; I must shut myself up within a narrow circle, under pain of succumbing.
[1] See Memoir, pp. 231, 232, 329.—TR.
June 5.
Yesterday I sent away my three servants; Auguste, whom you have seen, remains, on a salary that my new publishers, the printers, and I pay. He will carry proofs. I am trying to get rid of my apartment rue des Batailles; that of rue Cassini is paid up, and the lease ends October 1 of this year. I must resume the life I led in the rue Lesdiguières: live on little, and work always. Alas! I need a family! Perhaps I will go and settle in some village in Touraine. A garret in Paris is still dangerous.