Dear countess, I have this moment received your last letter. Mon Dieu! what can I say to you? All that it contains of kind, expansive, and consoling is enough to make one accept worse miseries than mine, if such existed. I have only sad things to reply to sad things.
In the first place, I had completely settled the project of going to spend the winter with you; but my lawyer opposed it with wise reasons—that do not satisfy me. Yes, I dreamed of seven or eight months' peace and tranquillity, constant work, but without fatigue, complete forgetfulness of all my tortures of all kinds. My arrangements were made; I was to see Berlin and Dresden, and then go to you. Well, it is all put off. Your presentiment was true. All was to have taken place; I felt a joy so infinite that nothing can express it. But it would be, alas! mad and imprudent. My affairs are in too bad a state. I spike my cannon, I retreat, to return in force. I will explain all this in detail.
But, first of all, I must answer what you asked me, Which made me smile, for I thought that you did not need to ask it; you ought to have felt sure of that. Yes, I will never take any extreme resolution, in whatever way it be, without first letting you know of it. When I abandon myself, as they say, to the grace of God, I will begin by abandoning myself to the grace of your Highness, like a good moujik. You have precedence of God; for I confess to you, to my great detriment, that I love you much more than him. You will scold me, but why should I lie? I shall skip about your lands of Paulowska with you, reading to you. For a nothing I'd make myself Russian, if—But the if is too long to unravel. All is not said about my journey; they have made me abandon it—but I have not abandoned it. It depends a good deal on finance, and the outcome of political affairs, for we are furiously at war. I can't understand why an understanding is not come to.
If you knew what it is in the midst of my agitated life to get a letter from you, especially such a letter as I have just received, oh! you would write me oftener, you would tell me fully all you do and all you think.
By this time you must have received "Vautrin" and "Pierrette." "Pierrette" is a diamond. In another twenty days the "Curé de village" will be out, but lopped. I had not time to finish the book. It lacks precisely all that concerns the curé, the amount of a volume, which I shall write for the second edition [it was never written]. The publisher and I could not come to an understanding on this increase of volumes.
November 16, 1840.
Precisely one month and a half interval! And so many things to tell you that I can't tell you; it would take volumes. Perhaps this fact will enlighten you: From the time you receive this letter write to me at the following address: "Monsieur de Brugnol, rue Basse, No. 19, Passy, near Paris." I am here, in hiding for some time. Nevertheless, if, in the meantime, you have addressed me at Sèvres, I shall get the letters.
Dear countess, I had to move very hastily and hide myself here, where I am. But, as Marie Dorval says, money troubles are mere vexations; it is only in the things of the heart that grief and misery are. Though all goes badly with me, financially speaking, all goes well, for I'm going to Russia; I'm going to see you as soon as I can earn the money for the trip. I hope to leave for Berlin in February; I shall stay a month in Berlin, fifteen days in Dresden, and be with you by the middle of April.
I have taken my mother to live with me, and I cannot leave home without leaving the household provided-for for a year. It is probable that I shall stay, June and July, in Saint-Petersburg, and return to you a second time in the autumn.
During the period when this letter has lain, begun but unfinished, among my papers (which have been for the past month in boxes, mixed up with those of my whole library), I have received a letter from the banking-house of Rougemont and Löwenberg, telling me to send there for the picture you announced to me. So, be at ease on that subject, as well as on the other subjects that interest us, about which you write superfluous things.