Still her destiny urged her forward, and she was more than ever resolved, in spite of the difficulty, to follow a literary career:
“My life is restricted here, but I feel that I now have an object. I am devoted to one task, and indeed to one passion. The love of writing is a violent, almost an indestructible one; when once it has taken possession of an unfortunate brain it never leaves it again.... I have had no success: my work has been found unnatural by people whose opinion I have asked.... Better known names must take precedence of mine, that is only fair: patience, patience.... Meantime I must live on. I am not above any work. I write even articles for Figaro. I wish you knew what that meant; but at least they pay me seven francs a column; and with that I can eat, drink, and go to the play, which is an opportunity for me to make the most useful and amusing observations.
“If one wishes to write, one must see everything, know everything, laugh at everything. Ah, ma foi, vive la vie d’artiste! notre devise est liberté.”
She thus describes her mornings spent in the editorial offices of the Figaro:
“I was not very industrious, I must confess, but then I understood nothing of the work. Delatouche would give me a subject, and a piece of foolscap paper, telling me not to exceed certain limits. I often scribbled over ten pages which I threw in the fire, and on which I had not written one word of sense. My colleagues were full of intelligence, energy, and facility. I listened, was much amused, but did no good work, and at the end of the month received an average of twelve francs fifty centimes, and am not sure I was not overpaid at that.”
She writes to M. Boucoiran:
“People blame me because I write for the Figaro. I do not care much what they say. I must live, and am proud enough of earning my bread myself. The Figaro is a means as well as another. I must pass through the apprenticeship of journalism. I know it is often disagreeable; but one need never dirty one’s hands with anything unworthy. Seven francs a column is not much to earn, but it is most important to get a good footing in a newspaper office.”
She painted the most vivid portraits of the various eminent men whose aid she sought, and who invariably tried to dissuade her from embarking on a literary career. Balzac, when she first knew him, lived in an “entresol” in the Rue de Cassini.
“I was introduced to him as a person greatly struck by his talent, which indeed was true, for although at that time he had not yet produced his ‘chefs-d’œuvre,’ I had admired his original manner of looking at things, and felt that he had a great future before him. Every one knows how satisfied he was with himself, a satisfaction which was so well justified that one forgave him for it. He loved to talk of his works, to describe them beforehand, and to read little bits of them aloud. Naïve and good-hearted, he asked advice of children, and then only made use of it as an argument to prove how right he was himself.
“One evening when we had dined with him in some eccentric manner on boiled beef, melon and iced champagne, he went and put on a beautiful new dressing-gown, which he showed off with the delight of a young girl. We could not dissuade him from going out in this costume to accompany us as far as the entrance to the Luxembourg. There was not a breath of wind, and he carried a lighted candle in his hand, talking continuously of four Arab horses, which he never owned, but which he firmly believed for some time were in his possession. He would have gone with us to the other end of Paris, had we permitted it.
“My employer Delatouche was not nearly so pleasant. He also talked continuously about himself, and read aloud his novels with more discretion than Balzac, but with still more complacency. Woe betide you if you moved the furniture, stirred the fire, or even sneezed while he was thus occupied. He would stop immediately to ask you, with polite solicitude, if you had a cold, or an attack of nerves, and pretending to forget the book he had been reading, he obliged you to beg and pray before he would open it again. He never could accept the idea of growing old with resignation, and always said: ‘I am not fifty, but twice twenty-five years of age.’ He had plenty of critical discernment, and his observations often kept me from affectations and peculiarities of style—the great stumbling-block of all young authors. Although he gave me good advice, he put what seemed to me insurmountable difficulties in my way. ‘Beware of imitation,’ he said, ‘make use of your own powers, read in your own heart, and in the life you see around you, and then record your impressions.... You are too absolute in your sentiments. Your character is too strong. You neither know the world, nor individuals, your brain is empty! Your works may be charming, but they are quite wanting in common sense. You must write them all over again.’ I perfectly agreed with him and went away, making up my mind to keep to the painting of tea-caddies and cigarette cases.”
At last “Indiana” was begun, aimlessly, and with no hope of success.
“I resolutely,” she says in the “Histoire de ma Vie,” “put all precept and example out of my mind, and neither sought in others, nor in my own individuality, a type or character. Of course it has been said that Indiana was me, and her history mine. She was nothing of the kind. I have drawn many different female personations, but I think when the world reads this confession of my impressions and reflections, it will see that none of them are intended for my own portrait. I am too elevated in my views to see a heroine of romance in my mirror. I never found myself handsome enough nor amiable enough to be either poetic or interesting; it would have seemed to me as impossible to dramatise my life, as to embellish my person.”