I think it surprising that you had not received my New Year's gift in June, for Colonel Frankowski has been in Poland three months. Put a kiss on Anna's forehead from her horse, the quietest she will ever have in her stables. Remember me to all about you and to M. Hanski. I send nothing to you who possess the whole of this Parisian moujik.
I conceived yesterday a work grand in its thought, small in its volume; it is a book I shall do immediately. It will be called by some man's name, such as "Jules, or the new Abeilard." The subject will be the letters of two lovers led to the religious life by love, a true heroic romance à la Scudéry.
Paris, July 19, 1837.
Cara, you will end by being so weary of my jeremiads that when you receive a letter from me you will fling it into the fire without opening it, certain that it is a garretful of blue devils and the amplest stock of melancholy in the world. If my fat and daring countenance is at this moment installed before you, you will never behold my griefs on that swelling forehead—less ample, less beautiful than yours—nor on those rotund cheeks of a lazy monk. But so it is. He who was created for pleasure and happy carelessness, for love and for luxury, works like a galley-slave.
I was talking to Heine yesterday about writing for the stage. "Beware of that," he said; "he who is accustomed to Brest cannot accustom himself to Toulon. Stay in your own galley."
I am the lighter by three works: here is the third dizain done in manuscript, but not in proofs; here is "Gambara" finished, and I am at the last proof of "Massimilla Doni;" and finally, in three days I shall begin the end of "César Birotteau." I hope the woodman brings down trees; I hope the workman is no bungler. But I am always meeting worthy people, Parisians, who say to me, "Why don't you publish something?" Yesterday, after leaving Heine, I met Rothschild on the boulevard, that is to say, all the wit and money of the Jews; and he said to me, "What are you doing now?" "La Femme Supérieure" has been inundating the "Presse" for the last fortnight!
Cara, you talk to me still of my dissipation, my travels, and society. That is wrong in you. I travel when it is impossible to rouse my broken-down brain. When I return, I shut myself up and work night and day until death comes—of the brain, be it understood, though a man may die of work. I did wrong not to go to the Ukraine, but I am the first punished; that wrong was caused by my poverty. But I have just discovered an economical means of conveyance which I shall use as soon as I am free. It is to go from here to Havre, Havre to Hamburg, Hamburg to Berlin, Berlin to Breslau, Breslau to Lemberg, Lemberg to Brody. I think that route will not be dear, as so much is done by water. From Paris to Hamburg, four days, is two hundred francs, everything included. Only, will you come and fetch me at Brody, where I shall be without a vehicle and ignorant of the language? That is the project I am caressing; and it makes me hasten my work.
There is nothing new about the grand affair of my publication on the tontine plan. But the petty newspapers are already laughing at this enterprise, which they know nothing about, and solely because it makes to my profit.
Is not this singular? I was just here when Auguste brought me your kind and very amiable number 30—in the sense that there is an adorable number of pages. In the first place, cara, I see that you are not speaking to me with a frank heart in fearing that your letter would be flung down with disdain! and you came near using a worse word. Ah! have we never understood each other? Have you no idea of friendship,—no knowledge of true sentiments? It must be so, if you can imagine I am not more interested in your missing book and all that happens around you than I am in the finest or the most hideous events of the world. I am so angry, so shaken by that passage in your letter that my hand trembles as if I had killed my neighbour. It is you who have killed something in me. But you can revive it by pouring out to me without fear your reveries. Next, you tell me that I am hiding from you some gambling loss, some disaster, and that I am a poor head financially.
Dear and beautiful châtelaine, you talk of poverty like one who does not know it and who never will know it. The unfortunate are always wrong, because they begin by being unfortunate.