To-morrow, after writing a few letters for my lovers, I shall be gayer, and I will come to you with a virtue that shall make a saint despair.
May 23.
Cara, I have home-sickness! France and its sky—gray for most of the time—wrings my heart beneath this pure blue sky of Milan. The Duomo, decked with its laces, does not lift my soul from indifference; the Alps say nothing to me. This soft, relaxing air fatigues me; I go and come without soul, without life, without power to say what the matter is; and if I stay thus for two weeks longer, I shall be dead. To explain is impossible. The bread I eat has no savour; meat does not nourish me, water can scarcely slake my thirst; this air dissolves me. I look at the handsomest woman in the world as if she were a monster, and I do not even have that common sensation that the sight of a flower gives. My work is abandoned. I shall recross the Alps, and I hope in a week to be in the midst of my own dear hell. What a horrible malady is nostalgia! It is indescribable. I am happy only at the moment when I write to you, and say to myself that this paper will go from Milan to Wierzchownia; then only does thought break through this black existence beneath the sun, this atony which relaxes every fibre of the life. That is the only operative force which maintains the union of soul and body.
May 24.
I have again seen the Countess Bossi; and I am struck with the few resources of Italian women. They have neither mind nor education; they scarcely understand what is said to them. In this country criticism does not exist, and I begin to think that the saying is right which attributes to Italian women something too material in love. The only intelligent and educated woman I have met in Italy is La Cortanza of Turin.
I have been to see the Luini frescos at Saronno; they are worthy of their reputation. The one that represents the Marriage of the Virgin is of peculiar sweetness. The faces are angelical, and, what is rare in frescos, the tones are soft and harmonious.
There is no present opportunity to return to France. I must resolve to take the wearisome and fatiguing means of the Sardinian and French mail-carts.
June 1, 1838.
My departure is fixed for to-morrow, errors excepted, and I think that never shall I have seen France again with such pleasure, though my affairs must be greatly tangled by this too long absence. If I am six days on the road that will make three months, and, in all, it has been seven months of inaction. I need eight consecutive months of work to repair this damage. I shall enter my new little house to spend many nights in working.