Mon Dieu! how I love your rather broad accent, your mouth of kindness, of voluptuousness—permit me to say it to you, my angel of love!
I work night and day to go and see you for a fortnight in December. I shall cross the Jura covered with snow, but I shall think of the snowy shoulders of my love, my well-beloved. Ah! to breathe your hair, to hold your hand, to strain you in my arms! that's where my courage comes from. I have friends here who are stupefied at the fierce will I am displaying at this moment. Ah! they don't know my darling [ma mie], my soft darling, her, whose mere sight robs pain of its stings! Yes, Parisina and her lover must have died without feeling the axe, as they thought of one another!
A kiss, my angel of earth, a kiss tasted slowly. Adieu. The nightingale has sung too long; I am allured to write to you, and Eugénie Grandet scolds.
Saturday, 12, midday.
The protocols are exchanged, our reflections made, to-morrow the signature. But to-morrow all may be changed. I have scarcely done anything to "Eugénie Grandet" and the "Aventures d'une idée." There are moments when the imagination jolts and will not go on. And then, "L'Europe littéraire" has not come. I am too proud to set foot there because they have behaved so ill to me. So, since my return I am without money. I wait. They ought to have come yesterday to explain matters; they did not. They ought to come to-day. At this moment the price of "Eugénie Grandet" is a great sum for me. So here I am, rebeginning my trade of anguish. Never shall I cease to resemble Raphael in his garret; I still have a year before me to enjoy my last poverty, to have noble, hidden prides.
I am a little fatigued; but the pain in my side has yielded to quiet sitting in my arm-chair, to that constant tranquillity of the body which makes a monk of me.
For the time being, my fancies are calmed; when there is famine in the house I don't think of my desires. My silver chafing-dishes are melted up. I don't mind that. No more dinners in October. But I enjoy so much in thought the things I have not, and these desires make them so precious when I do possess them. It is now two years that, month by month, I counted on a balance for my dishes, but they vanish. I have a crowd of little pleasures in that way. They make me love the little nest where I live; it is what makes me love you—a perpetual desire. Those who call me ill-natured, satirical, deceptive, don't know the innocence of my life, my life of a bird, gathering its nest twig by twig and playing with a straw before it uses it.
O dear confidant of my most secret thoughts, dear, precious conscience, will you some day know, you, the companion of love, how you are loved,—you, who, coming on faithful wing toward your mate, did not reject him after seeing him. How I feared that I might not please you! Tell me again that you liked the man, after liking his mind and heart—since the mind and heart have pleased you, I could not doubt it. My idol, my Eva, welcomed, beloved, if you only knew how all that you said and did laid hold upon me, oh! no, you would have no doubts, no dishonouring fears. Do not speak to me as you did, saying, "You will not love a woman who comes to you, who, who, who—" you know what I mean.
Angel, the angels are often forced to come down from heaven; we cannot go up to them. Besides, it is they who lift us on their white wings to their sphere, where we love and where pleasures are thoughts.
Adieu, you, my treasure, my happiness, you, to whom all my desires fly, you, who make me adore solitude because it is full of you.