2. At what dates ought they to have reached me?
Your answer is of great importance to my tranquillity; for I must discover through what causes your letters have not been delivered to me.
Nothing ever made such an impression on me as your little letter sent through my publisher. I have more than suffered, I have been ill from it. I have had a species of congestion of the head, which was, apparently, the result of it. The letter you will have received a few days before you receive this will paint to you my anxieties. When putting it myself into the post, I spoke to the postmaster, telling him that I had put four letters into his office to which I had had no answer; and that never had my correspondence, lasting eight or nine years, been thus interrupted; that I did not know whether my letters were received, and I feared this might be on account of some error in the prepayment of mine. He answered that if there had been an error it was his affair and would not affect the delivery of the letters. But if I had not received this letter through Souverain, or your answer to my last in the needed time (two and a half months), I should have started, dear, even if so rash a journey had stopped the species of prosperity which Gavault, the lawyer, is introducing into my affairs. Imagine, therefore, what a revulsion there was in my mind on reading your letter so full of melancholy, of deep sadness, which shows me that some evil trick has been played, to repress which I have need of an answer to the above questions.
Dear, and very dear, you must know that my activity the past year has been cruel; I can only use that word. I have made an agreement to write forty thousand lines in the newspapers from October, 1841, to October, 1842; and if I obtain two francs and a half a line, all my indebtedness will be cleared off, or nearly so, and I shall have won an independence I have never had since I existed. I shall owe not a sou nor a line to any one in the world. It is to that result that I have immolated my dearest affections, and renounced that journey I had planned. But it is impossible that after the coming winter I shall not need some violent and long diversion, and in April I will go to Germany, and beyond it, to you.
The sorrowful eloquence of your dear letter of a wounded heart made me weep; my heart was wrung as I read, at its close, your assurances of old affection, when in me all was the same as ever while you were blaming me. These flashes of joy on learning that all our pain came from neither you nor myself, and that amid this disaster, which has darkened eight months of our life, we each had the same confidence in the other—though you were saddened and I impatient, almost unjust—were needed to send some balm into my heart. Must I again tell you that you and my sister are the sole deities of my heart. It was, dear, extreme misfortune which made me give you that hope of my visit. But I have been stronger against excessive work than I expected. After ten months of labour, to have written "Ursule Mirouët" in twenty days is one of those things which printers and witnesses of that remarkable effort will not believe. It has nothing analogous to it but "César Birotteau."
Well! God owed me the joy, mingled with tears, that your letter brought me; without it I might not have been able to do another like effort this month, when I must give a rival to "Le Médecin de campagne." To win the Montyon prize for 1842, I am now writing "Les Frères de la Consolation." They talk of giving me the cross, for which I care very little; it is not at forty years of age that it can give pleasure; but I could not refuse Villemain.
"Les Mémoires de deux jeunes Mariées" will be out in a few days. In another month I shall finish, in the "Presse," my story of "La Rabouilleuse," the first part of which appeared under the title of "Les Deux Frères."
I have great need to see Germany thoroughly in order to be able to write the "Scènes de la Vie militaire;" and I shall go straight to Dresden to view the battle-field.
The affair of the publication of my great work, under the title of La Comédie Humaine in which all my compositions will be classed and definitively corrected, is about to begin. In order to travel, I must leave four volumes ready with my publishers, four compact volumes. The whole will be in twenty-eight volumes at four francs, with illustrations.