In spite of what you tell me of your plans for Dresden, I hardly believe in them. You leave Petersburg about the middle of May; you will be at home, at Wierzchownia, by the end of June; how can you expect between July and October (four months) to be put in possession of your rights, to have received the accounts of administration and guardianship, and to have re-established the status quo of your personal government? Oh! if you only knew with what sadness I count upon my fingers and add up all these difficulties: the time required for the journey, the accounts to examine and verify, the current affairs, and the unexpected hindrances! Such thoughts bring me dreadful, pitiless, implacable hours. You are my whole life; the infinitely little incidents as well as the gravest events of that life depend on you, and solely on you; the two months that I spent in Petersburg have, alas! sufficiently enlightened me as to that. No, you can never leave in October, for I know your anxious tenderness for your child; you would never let her travel in winter,—I have the certainty of conviction as to that. Do you understand what there is of despair in those words? Existence was endurable with the hope of Dresden; it overwhelms me, it annihilates me if I have to wait longer.
You ought to profit by your stay in Petersburg to obtain recovery of the administration from Anna's guardians, so that there be no one but you and her uncle to manage her affairs. You will do this, I am sure, unless you think it simpler and easier to manage at home, I mean in the chief town of your department, or I should say government, inasmuch as your provinces are divided into governments, not departments, as they are in France.
In any case, dear countess, when you return to Wierzchownia examine well the ifs and buts, the fors and the yes and nos, and decide whether I may go to you. If your high wisdom decides that I cannot, I shall ask of toil its absorption and its excitements in default of the resignation which I cannot promise you. Mon Dieu, one year lost! It is a lifetime for a being who finds a life in a day, when that day is passed with you.
I leave you to dine with M. de Margonne and to pay a little visit to the Princesse Belgiojoso, who lives next door to him.
February 29.
I had yesterday, after writing to you, a violent rush of blood to the head. From three in the morning till three in the afternoon I corrected without pausing six folios of La Comédie Humaine ("Les Employés"), into which I inserted passages taken from the "Physiologie de l'Employé," a little book, written in haste, about which you know nothing. This work, which was equivalent to writing in twelve hours an 8vo volume, brought on the attack. My nose bled from yesterday until this morning. But I feel myself more relieved than weakened by this little natural bleeding,—beneficial, I make no doubt.
I have been to fetch the proofs of what I have so far done on "Les Petits Bourgeois." The printing-office is close to Saint-Germain-des-Prés; the idea came to me to enter the church, where they are painting the cupola, and I prayed for you and your dear child at the altar of the Virgin. Tears came into my eyes as I asked God to keep you both in life and health. My thought streamed even to the Neva. Perhaps, returning from those heights, I have brought back a gleam from that ideal throne before which we kneel. With what fervour, what ardour, what abandonment of myself, do I feel bound to you forever,—"for time and for eternity," as the devout people say.
On my way home I bought, for fifteen sous on the quay, the "Mémoires de Lauzun," which I had never read.[1] I looked them over in the omnibus, returning to Passy, where your serf, having reintegrated himself into his arm-chair, is writing this to you while awaiting dinner. What a strange thing that an honourable, courageous man, who seems to have had plenty of heart on all occasions when he needed it, could dishonour with such levity the women he professed to love! I think conceit, being the dominant feature of his character, smothered what was really good and generous within him. Does he not sub-suggest to us that he would not have Marie-Antoinette in the flower of her youth and the prestige of her grandeur? It was an odious calumny and a useless cruelty, when we think of the position of that poor queen at the period when these Memoirs were being written, In other respects this poor Lauzun makes one pity him; he never so much as suspects, while believing himself adored, that he was never loved, even feebly. A man so vain is not endured by the majority of women, who want an exclusive worship for themselves, and will not accept, unless for a moment, the presence of a rivalry as aggressive as it is insatiable—that of a lover of himself. So, we see how Princesse C... quickly quitted him; it is frightful.
After reading and closing that bad book, I cried out to myself, "How happy he is who loves but one woman!" I persist in that opinion; it is both a cry of the heart and the result of reasoning and observation; for I analyze you with the utmost coolness, and I recognize, with conviction and joy, that none can be compared to you. I do not know in this world a finer intellect, a nobler heart, a gentler or more charming temper, a nature more straightforward, a judgment more sure, based on reason and virtue. I will say no more, for fear of being scolded; and yet, this is what explains and justifies an enthusiasm stronger to-day than it was in 1833; which sends the blood in waves to my heart at sight of that page of poor Töpfer, which will lie on my table all my life; which transports me as I look at the Daffinger. Ah! you do not know what passed within me when, in that courtyard,—every stone of which is engraved in my memory, with its planks, its coach-house, etc.,—I saw your sweet face at the window. I no longer felt my own body, and when I spoke to you I was stultified. That stultification, that arrested torrent, arrested in its course to bound with greater force, lasted two days. "What must she think of me?" was a madman's phrase that I said and resaid in terror. No, truly, and believe it absolutely, I am not yet accustomed to know you after all these years. Centuries would not suffice, and life is short! You saw the effect during those two months in Petersburg. I left you in the same ecstasy in which I was the day I saw you once more. Of all the faces you made me see and know in Petersburg none remain in my memory. All have fled, evaporated, leaving no trace. But I can tell with certainty the smallest little detail of everything about you, even to the number of steps to your staircase, and the flower-pots that are massed at its angles. Of my apartment at Madame Tardif's, nothing remains in my mind; nothing of Petersburg either, unless it be the bench on which we sat in the Summer Garden, and the steps of the Imperial Quay where I gave you my hand. Oh! if you knew how precious to me is that pin which rolled along the quay! I have fastened to my mantel-piece, on the red velvet which drapes the side of it, a leaf of your ivy, that lustrous ivy which frightened you! Well, that leaf casts me into endless reveries. My dinner is brought; I must stop until to-morrow.
[1] Armand Louis de Gontant Biron, Duc de Lauzun; born 1747, executed 1793.—TR.