June 5.
I have just been to the post-office to see if any one had had the idea to write to me poste restante. There I found a letter from the kind Countess Loulou [Louise Turheim], who loves you and whom you love, and in whose letter your name is mentioned in a melancholy sentence which drew tears from my eyes; for, in the species of nostalgia under which I am, imagine what it was to me to recall the Landstrasse and the Gemeindegasse! I sat down on a bench before a café and stayed there for nearly an hour, with my eyes fixed on the Duomo, fascinated by all that letter recalled; and the incidents of my stay in Vienna passed before me, one by one, in their truth, their marble candour. Ah! what do I not owe—not to her who causes such memories, but—to this frail paper that awakens them! You must remember that I am without news of you for three months, by my own fault. You know why. But you will never know whence this thirst for making a fortune comes to me.
I am going to write to the good chanoinesse without telling her all she has done by her letter, for such things are difficult to express, even to that kind German woman. But she spoke of you with such soul that I can tell her that what in her is friendship in me is worship that can never end. She says so prettily that one of my friends—not the veritable one, but the other—is in Venice; truly, she moved me to tears. What perpetual grief to be always so near you in thought and so distant in reality! Ah, dear, the Duomo was very sublime to me on the 5th of June at eleven o'clock! I lived there a whole year.
Well, adieu. I leave to-morrow, and in ten days I shall answer all your letters, treasures amassed during this dreadful journey. May God guard you and yours, and forget not the poor exile who loves you well.
Aux Jardies, Sèvres, July 26, 1838.
I receive to-day your number 44, and I answer it, together with the three letters I found awaiting me in the rue des Batailles a month ago.
In the first place, dear, you must know that the "Veuve Durand" no longer exists. The poor woman was killed by the little journals which pushed their baseness towards me so far as to betray a secret which to any men of honour would have been sacred. So now I am established for always at Sèvres, and my hovel is called "Les Jardies;" therefore my address now is and long will be: "M. de Balzac, aux Jardies, à Sèvres."
You predicted truly in your last letter; I ought to pass a month here doing nothing but turning round and round to settle myself upon my muck-heap. I am still in the midst of plasterers, masons, diggers, painters, and other workmen. I arrived quite full of that book which does not exist, which has never been done, and which I desire to do, and I found the most foolish mercantile hindrances; the two volumes of "La Femme Supérieure," taken from the "Presse," lack a few pages before they can be sold as a book, which I must fill out by adding the beginning of "La Torpille." I found the contractor for my house at bay; I found the hounds of my debts awaiting me, with annoyances of all kinds. I have enough to do for a month in goings and comings, etc. I took a week to rest; my journey back was very fatiguing; I risked an ophthalmia on the Mont Cenis; having left the great heat of Lombardy, I came, in a few hours, into twenty degrees below freezing on the summit of the Alps, with snow and wind.
August 7.
Fifteen days' interruption, during which this letter has been constantly under my eyes, on my table, without my being able to tell you that the wind on the Mont Cenis drove a fine dust into my eyes, which pricked them with blinding particles. I know that my letters, which tell you my life, give you as much pleasure as yours give me. Only, your words sustain and refresh me; whereas mine communicate to you my vertigoes, my worries, my disappointments, my lassitudes, my terrors, my toils. Your existence is calm, gentle, and religious; it rolls slowly along, like a stream on its gravelly bed between two verdant shores. Mine is a torrent, all noise and rocks. I am ashamed of the exchange, in which I bring you only troubles, and obtain from you the treasures of peace. You are patient; I am in revolt. You have not understood the last cry I uttered, at Milan. I had, there, a double nostalgia, and I had not, against the more dreadful of the two, the resource, horrible as it is, of my struggles here. Here, moral and physical combat, debts, and literature have something exciting, bewildering. See it yourself; I am interrupted in a sentence in the middle of the night, and I cannot resume that sentence for perhaps two weeks.