I am notified that the pictures from Rome will be here in five or six days, and the picture from Heidelberg in three or four. They were very reasonable in Rome. I had only to pay twenty-five Roman crowns in duties (about one hundred and fifty francs), but the total expense is more than three hundred. So if the other Italian pictures arrive, what will become of me? I must make preparations, for I have received no letter from the consul-general, which seems to me ominous.
I asked Bertin to send you the beginning of Charles de Bernard's novel. Tell me if you have received all, and whether you are satisfied. I re-read yesterday, according to your sovereign orders, "L'Instruction criminelle." You are right, as usual; it is a fine thing.
Your semi-compatriot Walewski is to marry, they say, Mademoiselle Ricci, grand-daughter of Stanislas Poniatowski, and descendant of Macchiavelli through the women. She has, I am told, a hundred thousand francs as dot, and three hundred thousand in expectation. Walewski was madly in love with her, and, in his quality of dandy he found no other way of proving it to her than to marry her. What will become of the son of the great man, le grand Colonna Walewski with such a poor little civil list?
I leave you to return to my old musician. I am very well; my head is full of ideas; I work easily, for I have the hope of going to see you at Kreuznach as soon as I have finished my three volumes: there's the secret of my courage.
[1] Armand Bertin; his father, Louis-François, founded the "Journal des Débats;" after the latter's death in 1841, Armand Bertin edited the paper.—TR.
July 18.
No letters, dear countess! that is not nice of you. Here I am very uneasy, very much worried, not to say quite discouraged. It is midday; I got back at one in the morning from Madame de Girardin's. The dinner was given for a Madame de Hahn, a famous German actress, whom a gentleman endowed with fifty thousand francs a year withdrew from the stage and married, in spite of all the petty magnates of his family and caste. Madame de Girardin had her two great men, Hugo and Lamartine, the two Germans, husband and wife, Dr. Cabarrus and his daughter (the doctor is the son of Ouvrard and Madame de Tallien, and a friend from childhood of Émile de Girardin), and your servant. The dinner was over by ten o'clock. At the end of a political disquisition by Hugo I let myself go to an improvisation in which I fought him and beat him, with some success I do assure you. Lamartine seemed charmed and thanked me effusively. He wants me more than ever to go to the Chamber; but do not be anxious, I will never cross the threshold of mine to enter there.
I won Lamartine by my appreciation of his last speech (on Syrian affairs); I was sincere, as I always am, for, truly, the speech was magnificent from end to end. Lamartine has been very great, very dazzling during this session. But what destruction from the physical point of view! That man of fifty-six looks to be fully eighty; he is destroyed, ended; he has but a few years of life in him; he is consumed by ambition, and worn-out by the bad state of his pecuniary affairs. Émile de Girardin went off to the Chamber, so I had no chance to speak of "Les Paysans;" it must be for another time. As to Véron, he takes my novel of "La Cousine Bette;" but we have not yet agreed as to price and quantity. I am expecting the editor of "La Semaine" M. Hippolyte Castille. Beside "Les Paysans" to finish, I have eighteen more folios to do for La Comédie Humaine.
July 19.
I went to bed at half-past six last evening and slept the deepest sleep, in spite of the 32 degrees of heat which we have here. I am now ready to work from two to ten in the morning, when Dubochet and Furne are to breakfast with me. We are to have a conference about the Comédie Humaine, and God knows what will come of it; new griefs and worries perhaps! So I shall count only on my work and what I earn from the newspapers for my financial solutions. If I spend the whole of the month of August in doing "Les Paysans," Véron must have the manuscript of "La Cousine Bette" the first days of the same month. I shall correct "Cousine Bette" while I do "Les Paysans."