Passy, December 13, 1845.
Dear countess; I am overcome by the same nostalgia which I felt before I went to Chalon. It is excessively difficult for me to write; my thought is not free; it no longer belongs to me. I believe that I cannot recover my faculties under eighteen months, perhaps. You must resign yourself to endure me beside you. Since Dresden I have done no great thing. The beginning of "Les Paysans" and the end of "Béatrix" were my last efforts; since then, nothing has been possible to me. Yesterday, during the whole day, I felt a sombre and dreadful gloom within me.
Yet I must finish the six folios of La Comédie Humaine. Furne has come. He has excellent intentions. On my side, I must complete this undertaking, which is all my future. But the heart is as absolute as the brain, it is indifferent to whatever is not itself; millions to win, a fortune of fame and self-love satisfied is nothing to the heart.
Your letter describes to me a similar state with much truth and eloquence. That letter, in which pain is more contagious than the plague, and over which I wept your tears, shuddering to find there what I felt myself, that letter has filled the measure of my inward and hidden malady. Nothing but my interests can drag me out of the deep despondency that has now laid hold upon me. Paris is a dreadful desert; nothing gives me pleasure, nothing contents me; I am under the empire of some passionate invading force without analogy in my life. I compare the twenty-four towns we saw together with one another; I try to recall your observations, your ideas, your advice; motion fatigues me, rest depresses me. I get up, I walk, but my body is absent, I see it, I feel it; at times, as I tell you, this is madness. It is very probable that if my six folios of La Comédie Humaine were finished I could go to Naples; and that thought is the only means of making me do them. What could I not obtain from myself under the hope of that immense joy, were it only for one week? I tell myself there are a thousand reasons why I ought to see you, consult you; that I can do nothing without you. In short my mind is the accomplice of my heart and will.
Meantime, awaiting the result, I make no complaint, I am dull and gloomy; I am like a Breton conscript, regretting his dear scones and his Bretagne. All that is not you was once without interest to me, now it is odious.
December 14.
Yesterday, dear countess, I went to see, in detail, the Conciergerie, and I saw the queen's dungeon and that of Madame Elisabeth. It is all dreadful. I saw everything thoroughly; it took the whole morning, and I had no time to go to the rue Dauphine to do Georges' commissions. When I went back towards the court of assizes I heard that the trial then going on was that of Madame Colomès, niece of Maréchal Sebastiani, a woman forty-five years of age whom I wished to see. And I found, seated on the prisoner's bench of the court of assizes, the living image of Madame de Berny! It was awful. She was madly in love with a young man, and to give him money, which he spent on actresses of the Porte-Saint-Martin, she forged indorsements in negotiating the notes of imaginary persons. She took everything on herself (he has taken to flight), and would not allow her lawyer to charge the blame to him.
I had never heard a case pleaded in court and I stayed to hear Crémieux, who spoke well, ma foi! The unhappy creature, in order to get money to give the young man, had abandoned herself to usurers, to old men! Crémieux told me that she said to her lover: "I only ask you to deceive me enough to let me fancy I am loved." She is the daughter of a brother of the maréchal, and the wife of the engineer-in-chief of Bridges and Highways, and a deputy. I was so deeply interested in finding a novel seated on that bench, that I stayed till half-past four o'clock beside the poor creature, who has been very handsome and who wept like a Magdalen; every now and then I heard her sigh out, "Aie! aie! aie!" in three heart-rending tones.
M. Lebel, governor of the Conciergerie, who has locked the door on every sort of crime for the last fifteen years, is, they tell me, the grandson of the Lebel who opened the doors of Louis XV. to the beauties of the Parc-aux-cerfs. These vicissitudes, these striking analogies, occur in obscure families as in the most august. The heir of the original Lebel, the successor of him of royal pomps, had nothing to leave on going to his death but a worn-out cravat and an old prayer-book. When you come to Paris I must certainly show you the Palais; it is curious and thrilling and completely unknown. Now I can do my work ["La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin">[.