I tell you these silly trifles because I have just been thrashed by them; and every time I go out I am wounded by something of the kind, which, however, does not concern you, and therefore I bear it better than what touches you.
That silly Princess R... came here, and does not distinguish between Vienna and Paris; she has, perhaps, the same bonhomie, but Paris is not bonhomme. There are, as your brother told you, ideas in the very air, and an animation which is not to be seen in any other people or any other capital. Imagine what a city is in which superiorities of all kinds are collected.
I made George Sand repeat to me that she had never seen a Pole or a Russian of your brother's name. I spent, two days ago, a charming evening with Lamartine, Hugo, Madame d'Agoult, Gautier, and Karr at Madame de Girardin's. I have not laughed so much since our days in Geneva.[1]
Adieu, dear; à bientôt. I shall start for Germany, in all probability, in May, and I hope, after so much toil, to have well earned seeing you and saying, Sempre medesimo.
[1] See Lamartine's portrait of Balzac at Mme. de Girardin's; Memoir to this edition, pp. 123-125.—TR.
Passy, June 1, 1841.
This night, dear countess, I have seen you in a dream, in a manner most accurate, most precise, and I renew the fable of "Les Deux Amis." I write to you instantly. I was frightened by seeing you so distinctly; then I woke, went to sleep again, and read a good, long letter from you. You were not changed; and I was in ecstasies at seeing you thus. You were both far and near; I did not even have the pleasure of pressing your hand.
Did this come from my speaking of you to a Russian lady the evening before, at the house of the daughter of the late Prince Koslowski,—a Mademoiselle Crewuzki, who was in Vienna when we were there, and who tried to prove to me that you were not beautiful (she is hideous)? Or is it that a letter from you is on its way to me? The same thing happened to Madame de Berny; whenever I wrote to her, she dreamed of the letter. That thought overcame me just now, at my desk, before beginning to write to you.
Alas! dear, no journey; at any rate, not for another year at least. So many events have happened that I know not how to relate them all. I sum them up.
When I wrote to you, "I am coming," I doubted the possibility of living in France amid the dreadful struggles which consumed my life; and I had the idea of going to you in Petersburg and renouncing France. But a last effort has drawn me out of the claws of the publisher to whom I owed a hundred thousand francs. By working day and night, and pledging myself for six months to the labours of a literary Hercules, I have paid him that money.