Upon my word, you are very sharp!
I went the other day to see the judges, and was imprudent enough to have in my pocket a thousand-franc note. I have not seen it since, yet it is incredible that, among persons of such high position, pickpockets should find their way. Therefore the note must have vanished of itself; so let us give the matter no more thought.
The same day I had the misfortune to touch a man supposed to have the plague, and it has been thought prudent to quarantine me for two weeks: a great calamity, truly! My friend, M. Bocher, is to go to prison the last of June, and we shall be there together. Meantime, I need very much to see you!
My revenge has begun already. My friend Saulcy was yesterday at a house where they were discussing the judgment against me, whereupon, without seeing how the land lay, my champion rushes heedlessly into the fray, using such severe words as imbecility, fatuity, stupidity, conceit of jackanapes, and the like, and appealing to a gentleman in evening dress, whom he knew by sight, but of whose profession he was ignorant. It happened to be M. ——, one of my judges, who would have preferred, at that moment, to be elsewhere. I imagine the state of mind of the hostess, the guests, and of Saulcy himself, who, informed too late, fell on a sofa, splitting his sides with laughter, and saying: “Indeed, I’ll not retract a word!”
CXLIX
Monday evening, June 1, 1852.
... I spend all my time reading the letters of Beyle. This makes me feel at least twenty years younger. It is as if I were making an autopsy of the thoughts of a man whom I knew intimately, and whose ideas of things and of men have had a singular influence on mine. This makes me alternately sad and cheerful twenty times an hour, and I regret having destroyed the letters that Beyle wrote to me....
CL
Marseilles, September 12, 1852.
... I went to Touraine, where I visited Chambord in a beating rain, and Saint Aignan in showers of rain. I returned to Paris in the rain the 7th, left the same day in a storm, and came down the Rhône through a fog which was thick enough to cut. Not until I reached Canebière did I see the sun once more, and for the last two days it has shone in all its glory. I found there (in Marseilles, not in the sun) my cousin and his wife. I went yesterday to see them off on the Leonidas upon a sea of heavenly blue, and in weather neither cold nor warm. You, who live in the dreary climate of the North, have no conception of such a temperature as this. These are my only living relatives, and are the owners of that salon which you condescended to honour with your approval.