Wednesday, August 8.
There are many things in your last four letters to which I ought to reply; but they are locked up in Paris, and before I can get them too much time will have passed. I will answer in another letter, quickly following this.
But among other things that struck me in them was the extreme melancholy of your religious ideas. You write to me as if I believed in nothing, as if you wished to send me to La Grande-Chartreuse, or as if you meant to say to me, "Earth no longer interests me." You cannot think how many inductions, possibly false, I draw from that state of mind; but (and you tell me so with sincerity) you express to me what you feel; otherwise you would be false and distrustful when you should be all truth with a friend like me. Even if I displease you, I must say to you with confidence that I am not satisfied, and I would rather see you otherwise. To go thus to God is to renounce the world; and I do not comprehend why you should renounce it when you have so many ties that bind you to it, so many duties to accomplish. None but feeble souls will take that course. The reflections that I make on this subject are not of a nature to be communicated to you. They are, moreover, very selfish, and concern only me. Like those that I expressed in Milan, they would displease you, because, as you say, they trouble you; and for those my heart sinks down. I see clearly that happiness will never come to me; and who would have no bitterness in thinking that thought? I was very unhappy in my youth, but Madame de Berny balanced all by an absolute devotion, which was understood to its full extent only when the grave had seized its prey. Yes, I was spoilt by that angel; I prove my gratitude by striving to perfect that which she sketched out in me.
I meant to speak to you of new vexations; but I ought to be silent. In one of my letters, I don't know which, there is a promise that I made to us both not to speak to you again of my troubles, to write to you only at the moments when all looked rosy, and to tell my jeremiads to the passing clouds, going northward. When you see them look gray they are telling them to you. How many black confidences have I not smothered! There is many a corner that I hide from you; and it is those corners that would amaze you could you penetrate them and find—behind so many agitations, preoccupations, toils, travels, "inward dissipations," as you say—a fixed idea, daily more intense, which surely has little virtue since it cannot remove mountains, that miracle promised to faith! Often, friends have seen me turn pale at the loud cracking of a whip and rush to the window. They ask me what the matter is; and I sit down, palpitating, and saddened for days. Such fevers, such starts, shaken by inward convulsions, break me, crush me. There are days when I fancy that my fate is being decided, that something happy or unhappy will occur to me, is preparing, and I not there! These are the follies of poets, comprehended by them alone. There are days when I take real life and all about me for a dream; so much is this present life, for me, against nature. But now all that will cease amid these fields, which always calm me.
Have I secured material existence, beneath which I would fain compress the life of the heart that I see is lost and useless, in spite of the ten good years that still remain to me?—for my passion has a will of which you can form to yourself no idea. It must have all or nothing. As to that, I am as I was on the day I left college. I am much to be pitied, and I will not be pitied. I have never done anything to disprove the absurd and silly lies of society which give me the good graces of charming women, all of which are derived from the coquetries of Madame de Castries and a few others. I have accepted the accusation of self-conceit; I am willing that absurdity on absurdity should accumulate about me to hide the true man, who has but one sentiment, one ideal!
I am at this moment-engaged in doing a part of my book on love, which will be detached; I want to paint well the soul of a young girl before the invasion of that love (which will lead her into a convent), and I have thought it true to make her abhor the Carmelites (to whom she will eventually return) at the beginning of life, when she longs for the world and its pleasures. As she has been eight years in the convent, she arrives in Paris as much a stranger to it as Montesquieu's Persian; and by the power of that idea I shall make her judge and depict the modern Paris, instead of employing the dramatic method of novels. That is a novel idea, and I am putting it into execution.
Nevertheless, it is very difficult for me to resume my life of labour, getting up at midnight and working till five in the afternoon. This is the first morning that I have passed without dozing between six and eight o'clock. Six months' interruption have made ravages; there are forces that come from habit, and when habit is broken, farewell forces. I hope to continue working for three or four months, in order to repair the breaches caused by absence, and, if my plays succeed, perhaps I shall have earned, over and above my debts, enough capital for the bread and water on my table, and my flowers and fruit. The rest may come, perhaps, hereafter.
Addio, cara; I could not tell you how my comic-opera house, that cottage they push forward on the stage and where lovers give themselves a rendezvous, has awakened the housekeeping and bourgeois instincts in me. One could be so happy here! All the advantages of Paris, and none of its disadvantages! I am here as at Saché, with the possibility of being in Paris in fifteen minutes—just time enough to reflect on what one is going to do there.
Mon Dieu! have you read in the "Lettres d'un Voyageur" the part about Moulin-Joli? the engraving of which I saw in her house without then knowing the terrible passage to which it gave rise, terrible to ill-mated beings. Well, Les Jardies are Moulin-Joli without the woman who engraves. If you do not know this history, read it. George Sand never related anything as well.
I send you many caressing homages and all those flowers of the soul which are so exactly the same that I fear they bore you. Many kind remembrances to those about you. I cannot send you an autograph, unfortunately; I had one of Manzoni for you, but they have just lit my fire with it! This is the second time something precious has been burned up here.