What I wrote you this morning is of a nature to show you how false are your fears. I never ceased to look at you while talking to Madame P...
Ah! dearest, my dear wife, my Eva, I would willingly sell my talent for two thousand ducats! I would follow you like a shadow. Do you wish to go back to Wierzchownia? I will follow you and stay there all my life. But we must have pretexts, and, unfortunate that I am, I cannot leave Paris without satisfying editors and creditors.
I have received two letters; one from that good Borget, the other from my sister. Troubles upon troubles. To have at all moments the sight of paradise and the sufferings of hell,—is that living?
Geneva, January, 1834.
My love, my only life, my only thought, oh! your letter! it is written forever on my heart.
Listen, celestial angel, for you are not of this earth. I will reply to you on these things once for all. Fame, vanity, self-love, literature, they are scarcely clouds upon our sky. You trample all that twenty times a day beneath your feet, which I kiss twenty times.
Oh, my angel, see me at your knees as I tell you this: if I have had the most fugitive of reputations it has come when I did not want it. I was drunk for it till I was twenty-two. I wanted it as a pharos to attract to me an angel. I had nothing with which to please; I blamed myself. An angel came; I let myself suffer in her bosom, hiding from her my desires for a young and beautiful woman. She saw those desires and said to me: "When she comes I will be your mother, I will have the love of a mother, the devotion of a mother."[1]
Then one day the misery of my life grew greater. The toils of night and day began. She who had offered me, on her knees, her fortune, which I had taken, which I was returning at the peril of my life, she watched, she corrected, she refined, as I refined, corrected, watched. Then all my desires were extinguished in work. It was no longer a question of fame, but of money. I owed, and I had nothing.
Three years I worked without relaxation, having drawn a brass circle around me from 1828 to 1831. I abhor Madame de C[astries], for she broke that life without giving me another,—I do not say a comparable one, but without giving me what she promised. There is not the shadow of wounded vanity, oh! but disgust and contempt.
You alone have made me know the vanities of fame. When I saw you at Neufchâtel I wanted to be something. In you then begins, more splendid than I dreamed it, that dreamed life.