Yes, you have every reason to be proud of your child. It is through seeing young girls of her sphere, those who are the best brought-up here, that I say to you, and repeat it: you have the right to be proud of your Anna. Tell her that I love her, for you, whose happiness she is, and for her own angelic soul which I appreciate so truly. You tell me, dear countess, that, in the midst of your good success, there is something in the supreme decision which thwarts you, but you do not tell me what it is. Please repair that omission; do not let me fancy evil out of this uncertainty. Nothing, no event in the things of life, no woman however beautiful, nothing can disturb that which is for ten years past, because I love your soul as much as your person, and you will ever be to me the Daffinger. Do you know what is the most lasting thing in sentiment? It is la sorcellerie à froid—charm that can be deliberately judged. Well, that charm in you has undergone the coolest examination, and the most minute as well as the most extended comparison, and all is more than favourable to you. Dear fraternal soul, you are the saintly and noble and devoted being to whom a man confides his life and happiness with ample security. You are the pharos, the light-giving star, the sicura richezza, senza brama. I have understood you, even to your sadnesses, which I love. Among all the reasons which I find to love you—and to love you with that flame of youth which was the only happy moment of my past life—there is not one against my loving, respecting, admiring you. With you no mental satiety can exist: in that I say to you a great thing; I say the thing that makes happiness. You will learn henceforth, from day to day, from year to year, the profound truth of what I am now writing to you. Whence comes it? I know not; perhaps from similarity of characters, or that of minds; but, above all, from that wonderful phenomenon called entente cordiale—intimate comprehension—and also from the circumstances of our lives. We have both been deeply tried and tortured in the course of our existence; each has had a thirst for rest in our heart and in our outward life. We have the same worship of the ideal, the same faith, the same devotion to each other. Well, if those elements do not produce happiness, as their contraries produce unhappiness, then we must deny that saltpetre, coal, etc., produce ashes. But beyond these good reasons, it must be said, dear, that there is another, a fact, a certainty, the inspiration of a feeling beyond all else—the inexplicable, intangible, invisible flame which God has given to certain of his creatures, and which impassions them; for I love you as we love that which is beyond our reach; I love you as we love God, as we love happiness.
If the hope of all my life were to fail me, if I lost you, I should not kill myself, I should not make myself a priest, for the thought of you would give me strength to endure my life; but I would go to some lonely corner of France, in the Pyrenees, or the Ariège, and slowly die, doing and knowing nothing more in this world; I should go at long intervals to see Anna and talk of you at my ease with her. I should write no more. Why should I? Are you not the whole world to me? Examining what I feel in merely waiting for a letter, and what I suffer from a day's delay, it seems proved to me that I should die of grief. Oh! take care of yourself! Think that there is more than one life bound to yours. Take care in everything! Each day my double egotism increases; each day hope adds to her treasury dreams, longings, expectations. Oh! remain what I saw you on the Neva!
If you ask me, Madame la comtesse, why I yield myself up to this verbiage, which, some day soon, will bring a frown to that Olympian brow, if you would know why I have launched with such a flow upon the letter-tide, I shall tell you that I have just re-read your letter, that this is Mardi-gras, and I am taking the sole pleasure that I seek from the carnival.
Now I must talk health; you will not pardon me if I forget it in writing to you. I am well, in spite of a slight grippe, and I think I shall be able to master the enormous work that I must do between now and March 20. Do not dwell too much upon my troubles and my toils; do not pity me too much; without this avalanche to sweep away I should die, consumed by an indefinable ill, called absence, fever, consumption, nerves, languor—what Chénier has described in his "Jeune Malade." Therefore I bless heaven for the obligations which misfortune has placed upon me. I do not count, as I think I told you, on a theatre success to pay my debts; I count only on the fifty folios of La Comédie Humaine which I have to do, and which will give me about fifty thousand francs. It is true that I also expect to bring to a good conclusion the affair of illustrating "Eugénie Grandet" and the "Physiologie;" and those two things represent twenty thousand at least. So I shall fully have enough, and over, for my journey and stay in Dresden.
Adieu until to-morrow. To-morrow I continue my journal after putting this one into the post. If you knew what emotion seizes me when I throw these packets into the box! My soul flies to you with the papers; I tell them a thousand foolish things; like a fool, I fancy they are going to repeat them to you; it is impossible to me to comprehend that these papers impregnated with me should be in eleven days in your hands and yet that I stay here. Well, you will see that during the last fourteen days I have been much driven about; I have worked little, I have thought of you, I have been agitated by the expectation of work for Frédérick. "Les Mystères" which, thanks to him, have had a success, little durable however, have cast me on the deserted boards of the "Gymnase." I am chasing Henri Monnier; you can, on reading these pages, scribbled in haste, tell yourself that your poor servant is working desperately; every moment is precious; a scene must be written, a proof corrected, copy sent. You will therefore have but little from me as writing, but much as thought in the journal which will follow the present one.
Adieu. Yesterday I was sad; to-day, thanks to your adorable letter, I am gay, happy. You are my life, my strength, my consolation; I have learned through disappointments and bitterness that I have but you in this world.
Adieu, then; be sure that I live more at the feet of your chair than in my own.
Paris, February 28, 1844.
Dear countess; I have decided to finish the seventh volume of La Comédie Humaine with "Le Lys dans la Vallée" which can certainly go under the head of "Scènes de la Vie de province." This arrangement spares me the writing of three volumes which I should not have time to publish separately first; besides I wish not to have a single line to write between now and October 1.