Doesn't your head swim in reading me? Now you see where the travail of my nights goes. And by the end of December I shall finish a comedy called "Les Rubriques de Quinola." Do you feel what there is under all this? There is you! Your friend must be a giant, a truly great man; and it is with the greatest of men that I set up a rivalry. I hope that when we meet again you will find the Honoré of Geneva much taller, that you will not be so old as you say you are, and that after so much time spent apart from each other we may have, both of us, a second youth. Don't calumniate yourself, dear.
Borget, who has returned from China after making the tour of the world, will reduce the Wierzchownia landscape and make a pretty picture of it. Alas! it is still unframed in my study; you will not believe my poverty till it is all over and I tell you about it. I suffer less on that account than I have done, without as yet being at ease; I must still be earning the bread of the morrow; but Gavault maintains with firmness the plan formed for my release from debt and my freedom.
I no longer have Les Jardies, and I do not live under my own name; consequently no more prosecutions and costs. I am in reality as if I owed nothing; I am asked for nothing, and all my earnings are accumulating in Gavault's hands without loss, until they reach the total of my debt; and I live on three hundred francs a month at Passy. There, dear. Ten more novels and two plays, if they succeed, will buy me back Les Jardies and liberty. When once I reach that point, I shall think of making myself a fortune equal to that I have earned to pay my debts, and that will give me an income of twenty thousand francs a year!
After the sensation of grief your letter gave me came the unspeakable pleasure of knowing you still my friend, though pained; but why not have taken, dear, the following course on the return of the first letter? What had you done with your wits? Has the heart no wits? At any rate, put this into your beautiful head, behind that splendid forehead: direct always to "M. de Balzac, Paris, poste restante." Even a husband cannot obtain the letters for his wife; the post gives them only to her without her husband; it writes to the person to whom they are addressed to come and fetch them; and as the post is always informed of my whereabouts, a letter poste restante will always reach me.
I cannot write to you, dear, oftener than once a month; but I will never fail in that, unless from illness, or too hard labour. By the end of October I may be able to send you, through Bellizard, the original edition, fifty copies only being printed, of "Les Frères de la Consolation."
January 5, 1842.
I have this instant received, dear angel, your letter sealed with black [telling him of the death of M. Hanski, on November 10, 1841], and, after reading it, I could not perhaps wish to have received any other from you, in spite of the sad things you tell me about yourself and your health. As for me, dear, adored one, although this event makes me attain to that which I have ardently desired for nearly ten years, I can, before you and God, do myself this justice, that I have never had in my heart any other thing than complete submission, and that I have not, in my most cruel moments, stained my soul with evil wishes. No one can prevent certain involuntary transports. Often I have said to myself, "How light my life would be with her!" No one can keep his faith, his heart, his inner being without hope. Those two motive powers, of which the Church makes virtues, have sustained me in my struggle.
But I conceive the regrets that you express to me; they seem to me natural and true; especially after a protection that has never failed you since that letter at Vienna. I am, however, joyful to know that I can write to you with open heart to tell you all those things on which I have kept silence, and disperse the melancholy complaints you have founded on misconceptions, so difficult to explain at a distance. I know you too well, or I think I know you too well, to doubt you for one moment; and I have often suffered, very cruelly suffered, that you have doubted me, because, since Neufchâtel, you are my life. Let me say this to you plainly, after having so often proved it to you. The miseries of my struggle and of my terrible work would have worn-out the greatest and strongest men; and often my sister has desired to put an end to them, God knows how; I always thought the remedy worse than the disease. It is therefore you alone who have supported me till now; yet I have never counted on more than we saw—that day at Les Chênes, you remember?—of that old couple Sismonde de Sismondi, Philemon and Baucis, which so touched us. Nothing in me has changed.
I have redoubled in work to go and see you this year, and I have succeeded. Since I last wrote to you I have not slept more than two hours of a night, and I have written, above my promised books and articles, two plays in live acts, one with a prologue, which begin their rehearsal to-morrow at the Odéon. I hoped by working for some months longer like the last eighteen months to pay my crushing debts and save Les Jardies. This constant labour has, especially during the last five years, parted me wholly from society. To-day I want my patent of eligibility, for Lamartine has a rotten-borough for me, and to be one of the coming legislature is a future for us.
To conceive of this in the thick of the battle, is it not loving well to have such courage, such boldness, when, your letters becoming so rare, I was tortured, week by week, with the desire to go to you and learn the reason of your silence?—for the few words, almost illegible, which ended your letters were always to me fresh beams of hope. "Be patient," you said to me; "you are loved as much as you love. Do not change, for others change not."