You may have thought me a little cool about the announcement of your suit being won; and, in truth, if I am glad of it, it is especially in knowing that you are at last delivered from legal annoyances. Believe that though I am little solicitous of fortune for myself (no matter what is said of me), I am too devoted to you not to wish you all the comforts of ease; because one cannot enjoy life or what it offers of good and charming if forced to struggle against ill fortune. If I am destined to live always apart from you, I shall not think the less, with childlike joy, that you are free from cares in the present and in the future, that you are enabled to do good to those about you according to the compassionate and generous instincts of your kindness, and I shall say, with the satisfaction of Pehméja, "I have nothing, but Dubreuil is rich." Let us believe, however, that the future will not be gloomy for me either, from this point of view at least; and that, my debts once paid, I can give myself up to the leisure and repose so awaited, so longed-for, so dearly bought, before I sleep the eternal sleep in which we rest from all, especially from ourselves.
Meantime, my garden is greening; there are fresh young shoots; before long there will be flowers; I will put some in my letter before closing it. The page of your letter produced by that engraving of Töpfer, and the infinite pleasure the latter caused me have given fresh impetus and new vigour to my courage. With such support and such words, waiting is no longer heroism, it becomes a duty. Yes, I suffer much, more perhaps than you can believe, to be nailed, chained here, while you, free in all your actions, are absent and so far away. But hope rocks us ever! so persuasive, so obliging is she that she succeeds in reassuring me, and even in convincing me that the reality will not forever escape me.
When I am thus calmed, and the inspiration and enthusiasm of work takes part in it, all goes fairly well; but it does not continue. Alas! there are moments when discouragement is so strong and lassitude so complete that work becomes impossible to me; my faculties are no longer free; I am distracted from my thoughts by something imperative, inexplicable, arbitrary, which rules my brain and grasps my heart. There is a form, I know not what, which goes and comes, which crosses my room and returns, which lays its finger upon me and says: "Why work? what folly! why wear yourself out in this way? Think that a few months more and you will see her. Amuse yourself while waiting!" I am not romancing, believe me; I am telling this as it happens, be it revery, hallucination, or no matter what phenomenon of a wearied brain that wanders. But I soon return to my fixed idea; I take up the past, crumb by crumb; I make myself happy in it; I am with the future like children with the white cloth that hides their New Year's gifts, and I return to your letters as to the pasture of my soul.
I entered a church to-day, to pray and to ask God for your health, with an ardour full of egotism—as all fanaticisms are. I was afraid; I dared not pray. I said to myself, "This is so full of selfish interest perhaps I shall irritate him." And I stopped suddenly, like a bigoted old woman, or a silly schoolgirl. To this are we brought by force of preoccupation, or to speak more truly, obsession. This is what we become when we have but one idea in the brain and one sole being in the heart.
March 4.
I don't know whether it is a phase of the brain, but I have no continuity of will. I plot, I conceive books, but when it comes to execution, all escapes me. I have turned over and over a hundred times your idea for a novel, which is a very fine thing; it is the duel between poesy and reality, between the ideal and the practical, between physical poesy and that which is a faculty, an effect of the soul. I will do that work; it may become something grand and noble. But at this moment all has fled me; there is some evil influence, as if a sirocco had swept across the strings of a harp; a memory, a nothing, a turning backward, the caprice of some elf that wants a prey—all dissolves my energy and beats me down, body and soul. Well, why not let it consume a portion of my time, that sacred and sublime passion? I am so happy in loving thus! But it is a frightful extravagance! I am royally a spendthrift! "Les Petits Bourgeois" is there, on my desk, the "Débats" has announced it; you know in whose name the book is written; yet I dare not touch it. That mountain of proofs terrifies me, and I rush to the banks of the Neva, where there are no Petits Bourgeois, and I plunge into a blue arm-chair, so enticing to the far niente.
What reading can ever give me the pleasure of those dry, academic notices of Mignet, or any of those books that I picked up at random on the table of your salon, while awaiting the rustle of a silk gown. If I could draw I would make from memory a sketch of the moujik lighting the stove! I see that little bit of cord unsewn from the back of the causeuse under the ivy—such are my grand occupations! Now and then I go over in memory the gowns I have seen you wear, from the white muslin lined with blue that first day at Peterhof to the magnificence of a robe all covered with lace, with which you adorned yourself to go to parties. Ah! 'tis the best poem known by heart that ever was or will be—the verses, stanzas, cantos of those two months!
Yes, I shall never have loved but once in my life, and, happily, that affection will fill my whole life. But I must leave these sacred orgies of memory, for I desire to appear with éclat in the journal.
I put into this packet the first flower that has bloomed in my garden; it smiled to me this morning, and I send it laden with many thoughts and impulses that cannot be written. Do not be astonished to find me so garrulous, saying the same thing for the millionth time; I have no other confidant than you, you only. Never in my living life have I said one word of you, nor of my worship, nor of my faith; and probably the stone which will some day lie above my body will keep the silence I have kept in life. Therefore, there was never in this world a fresher, more immaculate feeling in any soul than that you know of. I hope that the Cyclop of toil will soon return, but not to chase away entirely the Ariel of memory.
Adieu; try to think a little of him who thinks of you at every moment, as the miser of his hidden hoard; as the pious heart of its saint.