I have received, I know not from whom, the last book of M. Gustave Flaubert, the author of Madame Bovary, which you have read, I fancy, although you will not admit that you have. I suppose he had talent, which he was squandering under the pretext of realism. He has just perpetrated a new novel, called Salammbô. In any other place than Cannes, particularly, where there was nothing to read but La Cuisinière Bourgeoise, I should not have opened this volume. It is a story of Carthage several years before the Second Punic War. By reading Bouillet and some other works of the same class, the author has acquired a sort of false erudition, and he accompanies this with a lyricism imitated from the very worst of Victor Hugo’s. There are passages which will please you, doubtless, since, like all persons of your sex, you like magniloquence. As for me, I detest it, and it has made me furious.
Since I have been here, and especially since the rain, I have continued my Cossack article. It will take long, I fear, to finish. I shall send soon to Paris a second instalment, and there will be more to follow. I discover that I forgot to bring with me a map of Poland, and I am embarrassed in writing Polish names, of which I have only the Russian translation. If you have within your reach some means of ascertaining it, will you endeavour to find out if a city which in Russian is called Lwow, is not perhaps the same as Lemberg in Galicia? You will be doing me a great service.
Good-bye, dear friend, I hope winter is not using you too severely, and that you are taking care to avoid colds. Is your little niece still amiable? Do not spoil her, so that she will store up future unhappiness for herself.
I wish you would go to see the comedy of my friend M. Augier, and that you would give me your candid opinion of it. Good-bye once more.
CCLIX
Cannes, January 3, 1863.
Dear Friend: I began the year badly enough, in my bed, with a very painful attack of lumbago, which did not allow me even the privilege of turning over. This is what you get in these beautiful climates, where, so long as the sun is above the horizon, you imagine that it is summer, but where immediately after sunset comes a quarter of an hour of damp chilliness that penetrates to the very marrow of your bones. It is precisely as in Rome, with the difference that here it is rheumatism, and there fever, against which one must guard. To-day my back has regained some of its elasticity, and I have begun to walk.
I have had a visit from my old friend M. Ellice, who spent twenty-four hours with me and renewed my stock of news, and my ideas, which had become strikingly shrivelled by my sojourn in Provence. Everything considered, this is the only inconvenience of living away from Paris. One soon comes to be a log when one does not share the tastes of my friend, M. de Laprade, who would like to be an oak. This transformation has in it nothing agreeable.
If I continue to improve I think of returning to Paris on the 18th or 20th, to hear the discussion of the address, which they tell me will be warm and interesting. After having paid my respects, I shall come back to the sunshine; for if I had to endure the sleets and winds and mud of Paris in February, I should assuredly kick the bucket....
You are wrong not to read Salammbô. It is perfectly mad, it is true, and it contains even more of anguish and more of abominations than the Vie de Chmielnicki; but, after all, it has talent, and one gains an amusing idea of the author, and one even more droll of his admirers, the bourgeois, who wish to discuss affairs with honest folk. It is these same bourgeois whom my friend, M. Augier, has ridiculed so well. I am assured that no one with any self-respect will confess that he has been to see Le Fils de Giboyer. For all that, the cash-box of the theatre, and the purse of the author are filled to overflowing.