Dear countess, I cannot understand your silence. It is many days now that I have looked for your answer. I have written to you twice since I received your last letter, and I am a prey to the keenest anxiety. These fears and uncertainties seize me in the midst of my work; I interrupt it to ask myself where you are, and what you are doing. Perhaps you have been elsewhere than at Wierzchownia; perhaps you have only lately returned there. In short, I torment myself strangely, and I have, in my laborious life, amid all my thoughts, one thought which masters the rest and puts among them an anxiety that is truly dreadful, for it attacks the sentiment by which I live.
I have succinctly related to you the business I have done, and how I have drawn myself out of certain bad troubles. The physical and moral fatigue which labours of all kinds caused me, made me make a little journey of two weeks into Bretagne in April and a few days in May. I returned ill, and spent the rest of the month in taking baths of three hours to quell the inflammation that threatened me and in following a debilitating regimen. No more work, not the slightest strength, and I continued till the beginning of the present month in the agreeable condition of an oyster. At last, Dr. Nacquart being satisfied, I began to write again, and I have done "Ursule Mirouët," one of the privileged books, which you will read, and I am now going to work on a book for the prix Montyon.
To relate to you my life, dear, is only to enumerate my labours, and what labours! The edition of La Comédie Humaine (that is the title of the complete work, the fragments of which have, until now, composed the works I have published) will take two years to bring out; it contains five hundred folios of compact type. These I must read three times! It is as if I had fifteen hundred folios [24,000 pages] of compact type to read! And my regular work must not be allowed to suffer. My publishers have decided to add to each Part a vignette. This general revision of my works, their classification, the completion of the divers portions of the edifice, give me an increase of work which I alone know, and it is crushing.
Dear, this is what I shall have written this year: 1. "Le Curé de village;" 2. "Une Ténébreuse Affaire;" 3. "Le Martyr calviniste;" 4. "Le Ménage d'un Garçon;" 5. "Ursule Mirouët;" 6. The book for the prix Montyon. And besides those ten volumes I shall have written the amount of two volumes in little detached articles; and I must also, for my living, write two novels that are rather indispensable to the part of my works which is to be first published, namely: "Scènes de la Vie privée," which is to have twenty books.[1] That will make eighteen volumes in all. Judge, therefore, of what I shall have done. I have lived in ink, proofs, and literary difficulties to solve. I have slept little. I have, I think, ended, like Mithridates, in being impervious to coffee.
If my lawyer puts me, as to my affairs, in a tranquil state, I could travel in September and October. I could go as far as the Ukraine for a few days. But that depends entirely on my work; for all that the publisher pays goes to my lawyer to settle my affairs, and for my living I have only what the newspapers give me. So you can judge the difficulty of working for two masters, two necessities.
I shall wait a few days before sending this letter, hoping that you will have written to me. Since the last two pages were written I have been present at Victor Hugo's reception [at the Academy], where the poet deserted his colours and the Elder Branch, and tried to justify the Convention. His speech has caused extreme pain to his friends. He tried to caress parties; but that which might pass in shadow and privacy never goes well in public. This great poet, this fine maker of imagery, received his spurs, from whom?—Salvandy! The assemblage was brilliant; but the two orators were both bad. Praises were given to France, which I thought ridiculous. Let our pens be the masters of the world of intellect, I desire it; but that we should say it of ourselves, without contradictors, in our own Academy, is bad taste, and it disgusts me.
I am worried about my affairs. I am forced to await the conclusion of my lawyer's principal arrangement, which is to sell Les Jardies. The sale takes place July 15th.
[1] For complete bibliographical lists of Balzac's Works of all kinds, with dates of publication, etc., see Memoir to this translated edition, pp. 351-369.—TR.
July 15.
Les Jardies were sold this morning for seventeen thousand five hundred francs, having cost me a hundred thousand! Here I am, without house, hearth, or home. A few days hence I shall begin to fulfil my last pen obligations; there are but six volumes still to do, and then, having neither house, nor furniture, nor prosecution to fear, I can travel! But still I am separated from that travel by six volumes, and the reprinting of La Comédie Humaine, which would appear during my journey. It seems hardly likely I could do the six volumes and four of the reprints between now and October 15; however, I shall try.