This is now the 20th of January. My play "Vautrin," which is rehearsing at the Porte-Saint-Martin, will be played on the 20th of February, and it seems that I may count on a great financial success; I wrote it for that. Still, if Rothschild does not help me, it is quite impossible that I can get over the coming month. I shall have to lose my house, furniture, and everything I have gathered to myself for the last twelve years; and even that will not relieve me. My creditors will gain nothing. I shall lose all, and owe just as much. It is horrible; but it will happen; I foresee it. To tell you my efforts, my marches and countermarches for the last three months would be to write volumes. And all the while I had to work, to get my plays accepted, to invent them, to write them. The royal indifference that pursues French literature is communicated to all about us.
I have still two works to do, print, and publish to fulfil the agreement I signed in 1838, which obliged me to give fourteen volumes. I have given birth to ten between November, 1838, and January, 1840,—fourteen months. Those I shall now finish are "Sœur Marie des Anges," and "Le Ménage d'un Garçon."
You have said nothing to me about "Un Grand homme de Province à Paris," which has raised such storms around me.
I am preparing several works for the stage. May heaven grant me help and I shall be free through the profits of the stage combined with those from publishers. In three months I could earn a great sum by pledging myself for new books; and if luck would grant that publishers might think of selling me under a cheap form I should be saved.
If there is any good news of this kind you shall have it very quickly; as you shall that of the success or fall of "Vautrin." Frédérick Lemaître, that actor who is so sympathetic to the masses and who created the part of Robert Macaire, plays Vautrin.
At this moment I am organizing another play for a man of great talent, Henri Monnier, from which I hope success. It is a piece in which Prudhomme plays the leading part.
Adieu. Miserable or fortunate, I am always the same for you; and it is because of that unchangeableness of heart that I am painfully wounded by your abandonment. I may miss writing to you, carried away as I often am by a life that resembles a torrent; but you, dear countess, why do you deprive me of the sacred bread that came to me regularly and restored my courage? Tell me. How will you explain it to me?
February, 1840.
Ah! I think you at last excessively small; and it shows me that you are of this world. Ah! you write to me no longer because my letters are rare! Well, they were rare because I often did not have the money to post them, but I would not tell you that. Yes, my distress has reached that point and beyond it. It is horrible, and sad, but it is true, as true as the Ukraine where you are. Yes, there have been days when I proudly ate a roll of bread on the boulevard. I have had the greatest sufferings: self-love, pride, hope, prospects, all have been attacked. But I shall, I hope, surmount everything, I had not one farthing, but I earned for those atrocious Lecou and Delloye seventy thousand francs in a year. The Peytel affair cost me ten thousand francs—and people said I was paid fifty thousand! That affair and my fall which kept me forty days in bed retarded everything.