To-day I meant to have closed and sent to you a letter begun a month ago; but it is lost,—lost from my desk. I have spent three hours of this night in looking for it. I am vexed, I weep for it, because, to me, all expression of the soul fallen into the gulf of oblivion seems irreparable. You would have known what has happened to me since the date of my last letter. In two words, I am about to enter a happier period, or, to use a truer word, a less unhappy period than the past, financially speaking. A few days more and I shall, perhaps, have paid off half my debt. Material success is coming; it begins. My works are to be issued in several formats at the same time. My publishers allow me to buy off my agreement, which bound me too closely, and I am going, in a few months, to be free. These are results. You will be ignorant, until I can tell them to you, of the marches and countermarches, and goings and comings, and conferences which have made me mount and descend all the rungs of the ladder of hope.
My pen will have brought in mounds of gold this month.[1] "Qui Terre a, Guerre a" more than ten thousand francs; "Le Cabinet des Antiques" five thousand francs, etc., etc.; "Massimilla Doni" a thousand francs. I have sold for twenty thousand francs the right to sell thirty-six thousand 18mo volumes, selected from my works. "La Physiologie du Mariage" in 18mo has been sold for five thousand francs. In short, it is a sudden, unhoped-for harvest, and it comes in the nick of time. I hope, between now and five months hence, to have paid off one hundred thousand francs of my debt. But I have eight volumes to finish. They have bought prefaces of a feuille in length for five hundred francs. All this will give you pleasure, will it not? Nothing will as yet give me any ease; for this money goes only to clear off the old debt; but at least I can breathe. Another thing that will give you pleasure and rejoice your Catholic soul is that my affairs took on this smiling aspect from the day when my mother hung about my neck a medal blessed by a saint, which I have religiously worn with another amulet [probably her miniature], which I believe to be more efficacious. The two talismans get on very well together, and have not displeased each other. I am not willing to disappoint my mother, but this miracle does not convert me, because I am ignorant which of the two charms is the most powerful.
I have been very miserable of late; my publishers are piling up their ducats, while I have not had a brass farthing, and this war of diplomatic conferences costs me much. I have now returned to my shell, at Sèvres, where nothing is yet finished or habitable. I have the removal of my furniture to do and many other expenses besides.
The moral is less satisfactory than the material condition. I am growing older, I feel the need of a companion, and every day I regret the adored being who sleeps in a village cemetery near Fontainebleau. My sister, who loves me much, can never receive me in her own home. A ferocious jealousy bars everything. My mother and I do not suit each other, reciprocally. I must rely on work unless I have a family of friends about me; which is what I should like to arrive at. A good and happy marriage, alas! I despair of it, though no one is more fitted than I for domestic life.
I have interior griefs that I can tell only to you, which oppress me. Ever since I have had ideas and sentiments I have thought wholly of love; and the first woman that I met was a faultless heroine, angelic in heart, a mind most keen, education most extensive, graces and manners perfect. Diabolical Nature placed its fatal but upon all this. But she was twenty-two years older than I; so that if the ideal was morally surpassed, the material, which is much, erected insurmountable barriers. Therefore, the unlimited passion that has always been in my soul has never found true fulfilment. The half of all was lacking. Do you think, therefore, that I can meet with it now that time is flying at a gallop with me? My life will be a failure, and I feel it bitterly. There is no fame that lasts; I am resigned to that. There are no chances for me. My life is a desert. That which I desired is lacking,—that for which I could have made the greatest sacrifices, that which will never come to me, that on which I must no longer count! I say it mathematically, without the poesy of wailing, which I could lift to the height of Job; but the fact is there. I should not lack adventures; I could play, if I chose, the rôle of a man à bonnes fortunes, but my stomach turns against it with disgust. Nature made me for one sole love. I am an ignored Don Quixote. I have ardent friendships. Madame Carraud, in Berry, has a noble soul; but friendship does not take the place of love,—the love of every day, of every hour; which gives infinite pleasures in the sound at all moments of a voice, a step, the rustle of a gown through the house; such as I have had, though imperfectly, at times in the last ten years. Add to this that I hold in profound detestation all young girls, that I count much higher developed beauties than those that will develop, and the problem is still more difficult to solve.
Madame Carraud, whose letters give me great pleasure—if that word can be employed for other letters than yours—-has divined my situation. She awakes my sorrows by a letter I have just received from her, in which she talks marriage to me, which makes me furious for a long time. I will not listen to it. You know how fixed my opinion is. I must have much fortune for that, and I have none. I must have a person who knows me well, and I doubt if that is possible in one who is, after all, a stranger. What a sad thing is life, cara!
You will certainly see me when my great works are done. At the first inanition of the brain I shall turn to your dear Wierzchownia, and pay you a visit; for I cannot endure to be so long without seeing you. Last night at the Opera, where I heard Duprez in "Guillaume Tell," I was the whole evening in Switzerland,—the Switzerland of Pré-l'Évêque and the two shores of the lake where we walked together. There are details of our trips to Coppet and Diodati which occupy me more than my own life. Looking at the scene of the Lake of the Four Cantons, I remembered, word for word, all you said to me as we passed the Galitzin house, and what you said about such and such a portrait at Coppet. And I said to myself—in my way of telling myself the future—"Such a period will not pass without my seeing the Ukraine; as I live so much by memories, these are the treasures I ought to seek, and not silver mines." I was happier in that Opera-Switzerland than the millionnaire Greffulhe, who yawned above me.
From those letters of yours, so serious, so dun-coloured and ascetic, I fear to find you changed. No matter, we must love our friends as they are.
What I do not like in your last letter is the remark that "old friendships are timid." In that there is a distrust of yourself or of me that I do not like. You know that nothing can prevail against you, that you are apart from whatever may happen to me, like a true king who can never be reached. I am afraid that you forge ogres. If my letters are delayed, be sure there is some good reason; that I have been hurried about night and day, without truce or rest; that I have not written to a living soul, and that, if I were ill or happy, you, in spite of distance, would be the first informed of it.
You know the good your letters do me, whatever they are, religious, or sad, or gay, or domestic. I am the more reserved because I have nothing but troubles to send you, and no flower other than that of an eternal affection, as much above all petty, worldly imitations as Mont Blanc is above the lake. Do not be surprised therefore if I hold back a letter which tells you of misery and toil without other compensation than that of talking to you about them.