Till to-morrow.
Wednesday.
After the 22nd, including the 22nd, do not post any more letters; I shall not receive them. Oh! I would like to intoxicate myself so as not to think during the journey. Three days to be saying to myself, "I am going to see her!" Ah! you know what that is, don't you? It is dying of impatience, of pleasure! I have just sent you the licensed letter, and I am now going to do up the parcel and arrange the box. I have returned the remainder of the pebbles; I had not the right to lose what Anna picked up; and I would not compromise Mademoiselle Hanska by keeping them.
Oh! let me laugh after weeping. I shall soon see you. I bring you the most sublime masterpiece of poesy, an epistle of Madame Desbordes-Valmore, the original of which I have; I reserve it for you. To-morrow, Thursday, I hope to be delivered of "Eugénie Grandet." The manuscript will be finished. I must immediately finish "Ne touchez pas à la hache."
I do not know how it is that you can go and put yourself so often into the midst of that atmosphere of Genevese pedantry. But also I know there is nothing so agreeable as to be in the midst of society with a great thought, oh! my beautiful angel, my Eva, my treasures, of which the world is ignorant.
Nothing could be more false than what that traveller told you about Madame C... You understand, my love, that the ambitious manner in which I now present myself in society must engender a thousand calumnies, a thousand absurd versions. To give you an example: I have a glass I value, a saucer, out of which my aunt, an angel of grace and goodness who died in the flower of her age, drank for the last time; and my grandmother, who loved me, kept it on her fireplace for ten years. Well, my lawyer heard some man in a literary reading-room say that my life was attached to a talisman, a glass, a saucer; and my talent also. There are things of love and pride and nobleness in certain lives which others would rather calumniate than comprehend.
Latouche has said a frightful thing of hatred to one of my friends. He met him on the quay; they spoke of me,—Latouche with immense praises (in spite of our separation). "What pleases me about him," he said, "is that I begin to believe he will bury them all."
Mon Dieu! how I love your dear letters; not those in which you scold, but those in which you tell me minutely what happens to you. Oh! tell me all; let me read in your soul as I would like to make you read in mine. Tell me the praises that your adorable beauty receives, and if any one looks at your hair, your pretty throat, your little hands, tell me his name. You are my most precious fame. We have, they say, stars in heaven; you, you are my star come down,—the light in which I live, the light toward which I go.
How is it that you speak to me of what I write. It is what I think and do not say that is beautiful, it is my love for you, its cortège of ideas, it is all that I fain would say to you, in your ear, with no more atmosphere between us.
I do not like "Marie Tudor;" from the analyses in the newspapers, it seems to me nasty. I have no time to go and see the play. I have no time to live. I shall live only in Geneva. And what work I must do even there! There, as here, I shall have to go to bed at six o'clock and get up at midnight. But from midday to five o'clock, O love! what strength I shall get from your glances. What pleasure to read to you, chapter by chapter, the "Privilège" or other tales, my cherished love!