I am reading the novel of my friend Madame de Boigne.[36] It is pitiful. She is a woman of much intelligence, who lays bare her own defects, and criticises them with excessive bitterness, but who still persists in them. She passed more than thirty years without saying a word to me of this novel, and in her will she ordered its publication. It was as great a surprise to me as if I had learned that you had just published a treatise on geometry.
Although the subject is not an agreeable one, I must tell you something of my health. I am becoming more and more short-breathed. Sometimes I feel as robust as a Turk. I take long walks, and it seems to me that I am as well as when we used to tramp through our woods together. The sun goes down, my chest becomes inflated, I suffocate and the slightest exertion is very painful. The singular thing is, that I am no worse. I am even better in a horizontal position than when standing or sitting.
Good-bye, dear friend. I wish you health and prosperity.
CCXCIV
Paris, Thursday, April 4, 1867.
Dear Friend: Here I am, at last, in Paris, but more dead than alive. I have not written, because I was too melancholy, and had only doleful things to tell you of myself and of this sublunary world. You will find me very miserable, but happy to see you again.
Friday morning, if the weather be fine, we might walk together to the Museum of the Louvre. I dare hardly go out, I have such a dread of the cold, but I am ordered to take exercise.
I send you the eighth volume of Guizot, which will entertain you. The dull weather depresses me, and makes me much worse. I hope you are still in great prosperity.
My house is undergoing improvements, and I am reduced to living in my salon, which is as gloomy as a prison. Come and cheer me up. You shall carry away all the books you like, and I shall not require you to leave me anything as security.