Decidedly, I shall send to Tours for that secretary and bureau of Louis XVI.; the bedroom will then be complete. It is an affair of a thousand francs; but for that money what sort of modern furniture does one get? bourgeois platitudes, paltry things without taste or value.
November 22.
I have your letters, yours and those of the children. Thanks be to God, they tell me you are better, and that I can meet you on the 6th at Leipzig. I have just re-read your letter, for the paper is so thin that one side of the page prevented me from reading the other in a carriage. I went to the post, from there to your house, where nothing is getting on. You tell me not to work so hard, to take care of my health, to amuse myself, to go into society. But, dear countess, did I not write you that I had pledged myself to the payment of my last debts, counting on a rise to sell my shares in the Chemin de Fer du Nord? Well the Nord fell yesterday from 627 frs. to 575—two hundred francs below the price at which I bought them. So, you see, my pen must earn what the shares should have given me, and work to pay my creditors, to whom I will keep my word. Do you think I have time to amuse myself? It will be a miracle if I pull through at all. I have almost doubled in production; I have done forty-eight folios of La Comédie Humaine instead of twenty-four; and you know that can't be done by scribbling as I am doing now to you. Ah! bon Dieu, it is fearful! I tremble as I write of it. I am not sure that even that will get me through. I must finish "Les Paysans" and perhaps something more. It is necessary, even indispensable. If I go to you I shall hardly see you, for I could not leave my table and papers. I cannot think about my health, or take any care or thought of myself; I am a copy-machine, and nothing else. My courage is really amazing; I recognize that, and you will be convinced of it when I tell you that since my return from Wiesbaden I have done all you will read of "La Cousine Bette,"—which, parenthetically, has a prodigious success—all those twenty chapters, dear countess, were written currente calamo, done at night for the next day, without proofs. You have been, this time as ever, my inspiring genius.
November 23, 1846.
Yesterday I went to see Laurent-Jan and proposed to him to dialogue my play for the Variétés, for I have an avalanche of work up to November 30, and as I want to start December 1, I have no time to do the play. It would have paid him some thousands of francs, but he declined, on the pretext that it was too strong, too colossal for his "feeble talent." The real cause of this touching modesty is his invincible laziness. Nature gives talent, but it is for man to put it to work and bring it to sight by force of will, perseverance, and courage. Now, that fellow has talent, but he will never do anything with it except spend it in pure waste, wearing it out, like his boots, on the boulevards, or in the boxes of the lesser theatres with actresses who laugh at him.
Here I was interrupted by Dr. Nacquart; he scolded me well when he found me at my table writing, after all he had said to me about it. Neither he nor any of his friends the doctors can conceive how a man should subject his brain to such excesses. He said to me, and repeated his words with a threatening air, that harm would come of it. He entreated me to at least put some interval of time between the "debauches of the brain," as he called them. The efforts on "Cousine Bette," improvised in a week, especially alarmed him. He said, "This will necessarily end in something fatal."
The fact is, I feel myself in some degree affected; sometimes in conversation I search, and often very painfully, for nouns. My memory for names fails me. It is true that I ought to rest. If I had not had so much anxiety about my last financial affairs, the cares to be given to the arrangement of my little house would have been a happy and good diversion to my literary occupations. I have continued to be unlucky financially. When the doctor made me the above observations on my literary excesses, I said to him:—
"My friend, you forget my debts. I have obligations which I have bound myself to meet at certain fixed dates, at the end of each month, and I will not fail to do so; I must therefore earn money; that is to say, I must write until I make my chains fall off by force of courage and toil."
You will never divine the doctor's answer. It paints the man; but start with the principle that he is a friend, who loves me truly and has not only much affection, but also much esteem for me.
"Well, my friend," he said, "I can't write fine things like you, but I manage my affairs better. As a proof, I'll tell you that I bought at auction three days ago, a house of five stories in the rue de Trévise, for which I paid two hundred and thirty-five thousand francs; as there were twenty-five thousand to pay on costs, that makes two hundred and sixty thousand francs."