But this depends still on several administrative points to settle. May fate grant it success! It is high time. I feel that a few days more like the last, and I am vanquished.
I, who know so amply what misfortune is, I cry to you from the depths of my study, enjoy the material good that M. Hanski bestows upon you, and which you justly boast of to me. I wish with all the power of my soul that you may never know such miseries as mine.
If this affair takes place, and taking place, succeeds, you shall be the first informed of it; and never letter more joyous will rush through Europe! But I have reached the point of very great doubt in all business affairs.
You will some day read "La Femme Supérieure," and if ever I needed a serious and sincere opinion upon a composition, it is on this. Twenty letters of reprobation reach the newspaper daily, from persons who stop their subscriptions, etc., saying that nothing could be more wearisome, it is all insipid gabbling, etc.; and they send me these letters! There is one, among others, from a man who calls himself my great admirer, which says that "he cannot conceive the stupidity of such a composition." If that is so, I must have been heavily mistaken.
This distrust, into which such communications throw an author, is little propitious to a start on "César Birotteau" which I make to-day and must push with the greatest celerity. I have robbed you of the manuscript and proofs of "La Femme Supérieure" to the profit of my cara sorella, who has none of these things, and who, on seeing the bound proofs brought home to me for you, said, in a melancholy tone, "Am I never to have any of them myself?" So I thought to give her those of "La Femme Supérieure;" I will keep those of the reprints for you.
On coming out of my painful labour of forty-five days, I have religiously put your dear Anna's heart's-ease into my "Imitation of Jesus Christ," where there is another on a fragment of a yellow sash.
What events, what thoughts have passed beneath heaven's arch in seven years! and what terror must one feel as one sees one's self advancing ever, with no lull in the storm! One must not think of happy fancies pictured on the horizon, especially when the soul is ever in mourning.
I send you a thousand caressing desires; I would that you had all the happiness that flees from me. I see but too well that my life can never be other than a life of toil, and that I must place my pleasure there, in the occupation by which I live. And yet, when my pen is free, two or three months hence, I shall once more tempt fortune; I shall make a last effort. But if I do so, it is because there is no risk of money. After that, if nothing comes of it, I shall retire into some corner, to live there like a country curate without parishioners, indifferent to all material interests, and resting on my heart and my imagination,—those two great motive powers of life. This is only telling you that you count for more than half in that vision.
I did not finish "Berthe la Repentie" without thinking at every line that I began it with fury at Pré-l'Évêque in 1834, now nearly four years ago. I ought never to have had debts; I ought to have lived like a canon in the Ukraine, having no other function than to drive away your blue devils and those of M. Hanski and write a dizain every year. 'T would have been too beautiful a life. Between repose and me there are twelve thousand ducats of debt, and the farther I go, the more they increase. Chateaubriand is dying of hunger. He sold his past as author, and he has sold his future. The future gives him twelve thousand francs a year, so long as he publishes nothing; twenty-live thousand if he publishes. That to him is poverty; he is seventy-five years old, an age at which all genius is extinct, but the memories of youth reflower. That is how we love—the first time in reality, the second time in memory.
Addio, cara. I must leave you to take up my dizain and "César Birotteau" alternately. I would give I know not what, all, except our dear friendship, to have finished those two works which will bring me in nothing but insults.