have not seen the reverence of Saint-Victor for la Paiva. And this
falseness (which is perhaps a consequence of romanticism,
predominance of passion over form, and of inspiration over rule) was
applied especially in the manner of judging. They extolled an
actress not as an actress, but as a good mother of a family! They
asked art to be moral, philosophy to be clear, vice to be decent,
and science to be within the range of the people.

But this is a very long letter. When I start abusing my
contemporaries, I never get through with it.

CLXXXIX. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset, Sunday evening, 10 June, 1871

Dear master,

I never had a greater desire or a greater need to see you than now.
I have just come from Paris and I don't know to whom to talk. I am
choking. I am overcome, or rather, absolutely disheartened.

The odor of corpses disgusts me less than the miasmas of egotism
that exhale from every mouth. The sight of the ruins is as nothing
in comparison with the great Parisian inanity. With a very few
exceptions it seemed to me that everybody ought to be tied up.

Half the population wants to strangle the other half, and VICE
VERSA. This is clearly to be seen in the eyes of the passers-by.

And the Prussians exist no longer! People excuse them and admire
them. The "reasonable people" want to be naturalized Germans. I
assure you it is enough to make one despair of the human race.

I was in Versailles on Thursday. The excesses of the Right inspire
fear. The vote about the Orleans is a concession made to it, so as
not to irritate it, and so as to have the time to prepare against
it.

I except from the general folly, Renan who, on the contrary, seemed
to me very philosophical, and the good Soulie who charged me to give
you a thousand affectionate messages.

I have collected a mass of horrible and unpublished details which I
spare you.

My little trip to Paris has troubled me extremely, and I am going to
have a hard time in getting down to work again.  What do you think
of my friend Maury, who kept the tricolor over the Archives all
during the Commune? I think few men are capable of such pluck.

When history clears up the burning of Paris, it will find several
elements among which are, without any doubt: (1) the Prussians, and
(2) the people of Badinguet; they have NO LONGER ANY written proof
against the Empire, and Haussman is going to present himself boldly
to the elections of Paris.

Have you read, among the documents found in the Tuileries last
September, a plot of a novel by Isidore? What a scenario!

CXC. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Paris
[FOOTNOTE: Evidently an answer to a lost letter.] Nohant, 23 July,
1871

No, I am not ill, my dear old troubadour, in spite of the sorrow
which is the daily bread of France; I have an iron constitution and
an exceptional old age, abnormal even, for my strength increases at
the age when it ought to diminish. The day that I resolutely buried
my youth, I grew twenty years younger. You will tell me that the
bark undergoes none the less the ravages of time. I don't care for
that, the heart of the tree is very good and the sap still runs as
in the old apple trees in my garden, which bear fruit all the better
the more gnarly they are. Thank you for having worried over the
illness which the papers have bestowed upon me. Maurice thanks you
also and embraces you. He is still mingling with his scientific,
literary, and agricultural studies, beautiful marionette shows. He
thinks of you every time and says that he would like to have you
here to note his progress, for he continually improves.

In what condition are we, according to your opinion?

In Rouen, you no longer have any Prussians at your back, that's
something, and one would say that the bourgeois Republic wants to
impose itself. It will be foolish. You foretold that, and I don't
doubt it; but after the inevitable rule of the Philistines, life
will extend and spread on all sides. The filth of the Commune shows
us dangers which were not sufficiently foreseen and which enforce a
new political life on everybody, carrying on one's affairs oneself
and forcing the charming proletariat created by the Empire to know
what is possible and what is not. Education does not teach honesty
and disinterestedness overnight. The vote is immediate education.
They have appointed Raoul Rigault and company. They know how much
people like that cost now by the yard; let them go on and they will
die of hunger. There is no other way to make them understand in a
short time.

Are you working? Is Saint-Antoine going well? Tell me what you are
doing in Paris, what you are seeing, what you are thinking. I have
not the courage to go there. Do come to see me before you return to
Croisset. I am blue from not seeing you, it is a sort of death.

G. Sand

CXCI. TO GEORGE SAND
25 July, 1871

I find Paris a little less mad than in June, at least on the
surface. They are beginning to hate Prussia in a natural manner,
that is to say, they are getting back into French tradition. They no
longer make phrases in praise of her civilizations. As for the
Commune, they expect to see it rise again later, and the
"established order" does absolutely nothing to prevent its return.
They are applying old remedies to new woes, remedies that have never
cured (nor prevented) the least ill. The reestablishment of credit
seems to me colossally absurd. One of my friends made a good speech
against it; the godson of your friend Michel de Bourges, Bardoux,
mayor of Clermont-Ferrand.

I think, like you, that the bourgeois republic can be established.
Its lack of elevation is perhaps a guarantee of stability. It will
be the first time that we have lived under a government without
principles. The era of positivism in politics is about to begin.

The immense disgust which my contemporaries give me throws me back
on the past, and I am working on my good Saint-Antoine with all my
might. I came to Paris only for it, for it is impossible for me to
get in Rouen the books that I need
now; I am lost in the religions of Persia. I am trying to get a
clear idea of the God Horn, and it isn't easy. I spent all the month
of June in studying Buddhism, on which I already had many notes. But
I wanted to get to the bottom of the subject as soon as possible.
And I also did a little Buddha that I consider charming. Don't I
want to read you that book (mine)!

I am not going to Nohant, for I don't care to go further I away from
my mother now. Her society afflicts me and unnerves me, my niece
Caroline takes turns with me in carrying on the dear and painful
burden.

In a fortnight I shall be back in Croisset. Between the 15th and the
20th of August I am expecting the good Tourgueneff there. It would
be very kind of you to come after him, dear master. I say come
after, for we have only one decent room since the visit of the
Prussians. Come, make a good effort. Come in September.

Have you any news of the Odeon? I can't get any response whatsoever
from de Chilly. I have been to his house several times and I have
written three letters to him: not a word! Those gay blades behave
towards one like great lords, which is charming.  I don't know if he
is still director, or if the management has been given to the
Berton, Laurent, Bernard company, do you?

Berton wrote to me to recommend him (and them) to d'Osmoy, deputy
and president of the dramatic commission, but since then I have not
heard anything mentioned.

CXCII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
Nohant, August, 1871

You want to see me, and you need me, and you don't come see me! That
is not nice; for I too, and all of us here, sigh for you. We parted
so gaily eighteen months ago, and so many atrocious things have
happened in the meantime! Seeing each other would be the consolation
DUE us. For my part, I cannot stir, I have not a penny, and I have
to work like a negro. And then I have not seen a single Prussian,
and I would like to keep my eyes pure from that stain. Ah! my
friend, what years we are going through! We cannot go back again,
for hope departs with the rest.

What will be the reaction from the infamous Commune? Isidore or
Henry V. or the kingdom of incendiaries restored by anarchy? I who
have had so much patience with my species and who have so long
looked on the bright side, now see nothing but darkness. I judge
others by myself. I had improved my real character, I had
extinguished useless and dangerous enthusiasms, I had sowed grass
and flowers that grew well on my volcanoes, and I imagined that all
the world could become enlightened, could correct itself, or
restrain itself; that the years passed over me and over my
contemporaries could not be lost to reason and experience: and now I
awaken from a dream to find a generation divided between idiocy and
delirium tremens! Everything is possible at present.

However, it is bad to despair. I shall make a great effort, and
perhaps I shall become just and patient again; but today I cannot. I
am as troubled as you, and I don't dare to talk, nor to think, nor
to write, I have such a fear of touching the wounds open in every
soul.

I have indeed received your other letter, and I was waiting for
courage to answer it; I would like to do only good to those I love,
especially to you, who feel so keenly. I am no good at this moment.
I am filled with a devouring indignation and a disgust which is
killing me.

I love you, that is all I know. My children say the same. Embrace
your good little mother for me.

G. Sand

CXCIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 6 September, 1871

Where are you, my dear old troubadour?

I don't write to you, I am quite troubled in the depths of my soul.
But that will pass, I hope; but I am ill with the illness of my
nation and my race. I cannot isolate myself in my reason and in my
own IRREPROACHABILITY. I feel the great bonds loosened and, as it
were, broken. It seems to me that we are all going off, I don't know
where. Have you more courage than I have? Give me some of it?

I am sending you the pretty faces of our little girls. They remember
you, and tell me I must send you their pictures. Alas! they are
girls, we raise them with love like precious plants. What men will
they meet to protect them and continue our work? It seems to me that
in twenty years there will be only hypocrites and blackguards!

Give me news of yourself, tell me of your poor mother, your family,
of Croisset. Love us still, as we love you.

G. Sand

CXCIV. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset, Wednesday, 6 September

Well, dear master, it seems to me that you are forgetting your
troubadour, aren't you? Are you then quite overwhelmed with work!
How long a time it is since I saw your good firm writing! How long
it is since we have talked together! What a pity that we should live
so far from each other! I need you very much.

I don't dare to leave my poor mother! When I am obliged to be away,
Caroline comes to take my place. If it were not for that, I should
go to Nohant. Shall you stay there indefinitely? Must we wait till
the middle of the winter to embrace each other?

I should like very much to read you Saint-Antoine, which is half
done, then to stretch myself and to roar at your side.

Some one who knows that I love you and who admires you brought me a
copy of le Gaulois in which there were parts of an article by you on
the workmen, published in le Temps. How true it is! How just and
well said! Sad! Sad! Poor France! And they accuse me of being
skeptical.

But what do you think of Mademoiselle Papevoine, the incendiary,
who, in the midst of a barricade, submitted to the assaults  of
eighteen citizens! That surpasses the end of l'Education
sentimentale where they limit themselves to offering flowers.

But what goes beyond everything now, is the conservative party,
which is not even going to vote, and which is still in a panic! You
cannot imagine the alarm of the Parisians. "In six months, sir, the
Commune will be established everywhere" is the answer or rather the
universal groan.

I do not look forward to an imminent cataclysm because nothing that
is foreseen happens. The International will perhaps triumph in the
end, but not as it hopes, not as they dread. Ah! how tired I am of
the ignoble workmen, the incompetent bourgeois, the stupid peasant
and the odious ecclesiastic!

That is why I lose myself as much as I can in antiquity. Just now I
am making all the gods talk in a state of agony. The subtitle of my
book could be The Height of Insanity. And the printing of it
withdraws further and further into my mind. Why publish? Who pray is
bothering about art nowadays? I make literature for myself as a
bourgeois turns napkin rings in his garret. You will tell me that I
had better be useful. But how? How can I make people listen to me?

Tourgueneff has written me that he is going to stay in Paris all
winter beginning with October. That will be some one to talk to. For
I can't talk of anything whatever with anyone whatever.

I have been looking after the grave of my poor Bouilhet today; so
tonight I have a twofold bitterness.

CXCV. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset, 8 September, 1871

Ah! how sweet they are! What darlings! What fine little heads so
serious and sweet! My mother was quite touched by it, and so was I.
That is what I call a delicate attention, dear master, and I thank
you very much for it. I envy Maurice, his existence is not arid as
mine is.  Our two letters crossed again. That proves beyond a doubt
that we feel the same things at the same time in the same degree.

Why are you so said?  Humanity offers nothing new.  Its irremediable
misery has filled me with sadness ever since my youth.  And in
addition I now have no disillusions.  I believe that the crowd, the
common herd will always be hateful.  The  only important thing is a
little group of minds--always the same--which passed the torch from
one to another.

As long as we do not bow to mandarins, as long as the Academy of
Sciences does not replace the pope, politics as a whole and society,
down to its very roots, will be nothing but collection of
disheartening humbugs. We are floundering in the after-birth of the
Revolution, which was an abortion, a failure,  a misfire, "whatever
they say." And the reason is that it proceeded from the Middle Ages
and Christianity. The idea of equality (which is all the modern
democracy) is an essentially Christian idea and opposed to that of
justice. Observe how mercy predominates now. Sentiment is
everything, justice is nothing. People are now not even indignant
against murderers, and the people who set fire to Paris are less
punished than the calumniator of M. Favre.

In order for France to rise again, she must pass from inspiration to
science, she must abandon all metaphysics, she must enter into
criticism, that is to say into the examination of things.

I am persuaded that we shall seem extremely imbecile to posterity.
The words republic and monarchy will make them laugh, as we on our
part, laughed, at realism and nominalism. For I defy anyone to show
me an essential difference between those two terms. A modern
republic and a constitutional monarchy are identical. Never mind!
They are squabbling about that, they are shouting, they are
fighting!

As for the good people, "free and compulsory" education will do it.
When every one is able to read le Petit Journal and le Figaro, they
won't read anything else, because the bourgeois and the rich man
read only these. The press is a school of demoralization, because it
dispenses with thinking. Say that, you will be brave, and if you
prevail, you will have rendered a fine service.

The first remedy will be to finish up with universal suffrage, the
shame of the human mind. As it is constituted, one single element
prevails to the detriment of all the others: numbers dominate over
mind, education, race and even money, which is worth more than
numbers.

But society (which always needs a good God, a Saviour), isn't it
perhaps capable of taking care of itself? The conservative party has
not even the instinct of the brute (for the brute at least knows how
to fight for its lair and its living). It will be divided by the
Internationals, the Jesuits of the future. But those of the past,
who had neither country nor justice, have not succeeded and the
International will founder because it is in the wrong. No ideas,
nothing but greed!

Ah! dear, good master, if you only could hate! That is what you
lack, hate. In spite of your great Sphinx eyes, you have seen the
world through a golden color. That comes from the sun in your heart;
but so many shadows have arisen that now you are not recognizing
things any more. Come now! Cry out! Thunder! Take your great lyre
and touch the brazen string: the monsters will flee. Bedew us with
the drops of the blood of wounded Themis.

Why do you feel "the great bonds broken?" What is broken? Your bonds
are indestructible, your sympathy can attach itself only to the
Eternal.

Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times. Man has
always been like that. Several years of quiet deceived us. That is
all. I too, I used to believe in the amelioration of manners. One
must wipe out that mistake and think of oneself no more highly than
they did in the time of Pericles or of Shakespeare, atrocious epochs
in which fine things were done. Tell me that you are lifting your
head and that you are thinking of your old troubadour, who cherishes
you.

CXCVI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croisset
Nohant, 8 September, 1871

As usual our letters have crossed; you should receive today the
portraits of my little grandchildren, not pretty at this period of
their growth, but with such beautiful eyes that they can never be
ugly.

You see that I am as disheartened as you are and indignant, alas!
without being able to hate either the human race or our poor, dear
country. But one feels too much one's helplessness to pluck up one's
heart and spirit. One works all the same, even if only turning
napkin rings, as you say: and, as for me, while serving the public,
I think about it as little as possible. Le Temps has done me the
service of making me rummage in my waste basket. I find there the
prophecies that the conscience of each of us has inspired in him,
and these little returns to the past ought to give us courage; but
it is not at all so. The lessons of experience are of no use until
too late.

I think that without subvention, the Odeon will be in no condition
to put on well a literary play such as Aisse, and that you should
not let them murder it. You had better wait and see what happens. As
for the Berton company, I have no news of it; it is touring the
provinces, and those who compose it will not be reengaged by Chilly,
who is furious with them.

The Odeon has let Reynard go, an artist of the first rank, whom
Montigny had the wit to engage. There really is no one left at the
Odeon, as far as I know. Why don't you consider the Theatre
Francais?

Where is the Princess Mathilde? At Enghien, or in Paris, or in
England? I am sending you a note which you must enclose in the first
letter that you have occasion to write to her.

I cannot go to see you, dear old man, and yet I had earned one of
those happy vacations; but I cannot leave the HOME, for all sorts of
reasons too long to tell and of no interest, but inflexible. I do
not know even if I shall go to Paris this winter. Here am I so old!
I imagine that I can only bore others and that people cannot endure
me anywhere except at home. You absolutely must come to see me with
Tourgueneff, since you are planning to go away this winter; prepare
him for this abduction. I embrace you, as I love, and my world does
too.

G. Sand

CXCVII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
14 September, 1871, Nohant
[Footnote: Appeared in le Temps, 3 October, 1871, under the title,
Reponse a un ami, and published in Impressions et Souvenirs, p. 53.]

And what, you want me to stop loving? You want me to say that I have
been mistaken all my life, that humanity is contemptible, hateful,
that it has always been and always will be so? And you chide my
anguish as a weakness, and puerile regret for a lost illusion? You
assert that the people has always been ferocious, the priest always
hypocritical, the bourgeois always cowardly, the soldier always
brigand, the peasant always stupid? You say that you have known all
that ever since your youth and you rejoice that you never have
doubted it, because maturity has not brought you any disappointment;
have you not been young then? Ah! We are entirely different, for I
have never ceased to be young, if being young is always loving.

What, then, do you want me to do, so as to isolate myself from my
kind, from my compatriots, from my race, from the great family in
whose bosom my own family is only one ear of corn in the terrestrial
field? And if only this ear could ripen in a sure place, if only one
could, as you say, live for certain privileged persons and withdraw
from all the others!

But it is impossible, and your steady reason puts up with the most
unrealizable of Utopias. In what Eden, in what fantastic Eldorado
will you hide your family, your little group of friends, your
intimate happiness, so that the lacerations of the social state and
the disasters of the country shall not reach them? If you want to be
happy through certain people--those certain people, the favorites of
your heart, must be happy in themselves. Can they be? Can you assure
them the least security?

Will you find me a refuge in my old age which is drawing near to
death? And what difference now does death or life make to me for
myself? Let us suppose that we die absolutely, or that love does not
follow into the other life, are we not up to our last breath
tormented by the desire, by the imperious need of assuring those
whom we leave behind all the happiness possible? Can we go
peacefully to sleep when we feel the shaken earth ready to swallow
up all those for whom we have lived? A continuous happy life with
one's family in spite of all, is without doubt relatively a great
good, the only consolation that one could and that one would enjoy.
But even supposing external evil does not penetrate into our house,
which is impossible, you know very well, I could not approve of
acquiescing in indifference to what causes public unhappiness.

All that was foreseen. ... Yes, certainly, I had foreseen it as well
as anyone! I saw the storm rising. I was aware, like all those who
do not live without thinking, of the evident approach of the
cataclysm. When one sees the patient writhing in agony is there any
consolation in understanding his illness thoroughly? When lightning
strikes, are we calm because we have heard the thunder rumble a long
time before?

No, no, people do not isolate themselves, the ties of blood are not
broken, people do not curse or scorn their kind. Humanity is not a
vain word. Our life is composed of love, and not to love is to cease
to live.

The people, you say! The people is yourself and myself. It would be
useless to deny it. There are not two races, the distinction of
classes only establishes relative and for the most part illusory
inequalities. I do not know if your ancestors were high up in the
bourgeoisie; for my part, on my mother's side my roots spring
directly from the people, and I feel them continually alive in the
depth of my being. We all have them, even if the origin is more or
less effaced; the first men were hunters and shepherds, then farmers
and soldiers. Brigandage
crowned with success gave birth to the first social distinctions.
There is perhaps not a title that was not acquired through the blood
of men. We certainly have to endure our ancestors when we have any,
but these first trophies of hatred and of violence, are they a glory
in which a mind ever so little inclined to be philosophical, finds
grounds for pride? THE PEOPLE ALWAYS FEROCIOUS, you say? As for me,
I say, the nobility always savage!

And certainly, together with the peasants, the nobility is the class
most hostile to progress, the least civilized in consequence.
Thinkers should congratulate themselves on not being of it, but if
we are bourgeois, if we have come from the serf, and from the class
liable to forced labor, can we bend with love and respect before the
sons of the oppressors of our fathers? Whoever denies the people
cheapens himself, and gives to the world the shameful spectacle of
apostasy. Bourgeoisie, if we want to raise ourselves again and
become once more a class, we have only one thing to do, and that is
to proclaim ourselves the people, and to fight to the death against
those who claim to be our superiors by divine right. On account of
having failed in the dignity of our revolutionary mandate, of having
aped the nobility, of having usurped its insignia, of having taken
possession of its playthings, of having been shamefully ridiculous
and cowardly, we count for nothing; we are nothing any more: the
people, which ought to unite with us, denies us, abandons us and
seeks to oppress us.

The people ferocious? No, it is not imbecile either, its real
trouble is in being ignorant and foolish. It is not the people of
Paris that has massacred the prisoners, destroyed the monuments, and
tried to burn the town. The people of Paris is all who stayed in
Paris after the siege, since whoever had any means hastened to
breathe the air of the provinces and to embrace their absent
families after the physical and moral sufferings of the siege. Those
who stayed in Paris were the merchant and the workman, those two
agents of labor and of exchange, without whom Paris would exist no
longer. Those are what constitutes positively the people of Paris;
it is one and the same family, whose political blunders cannot
restore their relationship and solidarity. It is now recognized that
the oppressors of that torment were in the minority. Then the people
of Paris was not disposed to fury, since the majority gave evidence
only of weakness and fear. The movement was organized by men already
enrolled in the ranks of the bourgeoisie, who belong no longer to
the habits and needs of the proletariat. These men were moved by
hatred, disappointed ambition, mistaken patriotism, fanaticism
without an ideal, sentimental folly or natural maliciousness--there
was all that in them--and even certain doctrinaire points of honor,
unwilling to withdraw in the face of danger. They certainly did not
lean on the middle class, which trembled, fled or hid itself. They
were forced to put in action the real proletariat which had nothing
to lose. Well, the proletariat even escaped them to a great degree,
divided as it was by various shades of opinion, some wanting
disorder to profit by it, others dreading the consequences of being
drawn in, the most of them not reasoning at all, because the evil
had become extreme and the lack of work forced them to go to war at
thirty sous a day.

Why should you maintain that this proletariat which was shut up in
Paris, and was at most eighty thousand soldiers of hunger and
despair, represented the people of France? They do not even
represent the people of Paris, unless you desire to maintain the
distinction between the producer and the trader, which I reject.

But I want to follow you up and ask on what this distinction rests.
Is it on more or less education? The limit is incomprehensible if
you see at the top of the bourgeoisie, cultivated and learned
people, if you see at the bottom of the proletariat, savages and
brutes, you have none the less the crowd of intermediaries which
will show to you, here intelligent and wise proletarians, there
bourgeois who are neither wise nor intelligent. The great number of
civilized citizens dates from yesterday and many of those who know
how to read and write, have parents still living who can hardly sign
their names.

Would it then be only more or less wealth that would classify men
into two distinct parties? The question then is where the people
begins and where it ends, for each day competencies shift, ruin
lowers one, and fortune raises another; roles change, he who was a
bourgeois this morning is going to become again a proletarian this
evening, and the proletarian of just now, may turn into a bourgeois
in a day, if he finds a purse, or inherits from an uncle.

You can well see that these denominations have become idle and that
the work of classifying, whatever method one desired to use, would
be impracticable.

Men are only over or under one another because of more or less
reason or morality. Instruction which develops only egoistic
sensuality is not as good as the ignorance of the proletarian,
honest by instinct or by custom. This compulsory education which we
all desire through respect for human rights, is not, however, a
panacea whose miracles need to be exaggerated. Evil natures will
find there only more ingenious and more hidden means to do evil. It
will be as in all the things that man uses and abuses, both the
poison and the antidote. It is an illusion that one can find an
infallible remedy for our woes. We have to seek from day to day, all
the means immediately possible, we must think of nothing else in
practical life except the amelioration of habits and the
reconciliation of interests. France is agonizing, that is certain;
we are all sick, all corrupt, all ignorant, all discouraged: to say
that it was WRITTEN, that it had to be so, that it has always been
and will always be, is to begin again the fable of the pedagogue and
the child who is drowning. You might as well say at once.

It is all the same to me; but if you add: That does not concern me,
you are wrong. The deluge comes and death captures us. In vain you
are prudent and withdraw, your refuge will be invaded in its turn,
and in perishing with human civilization you will be no greater a
philosopher for not having loved, than those who threw themselves
into the flood to save some debris of humanity. The debris is not
worth the effort, very good! They will perish none the less, that is
possible. We shall perish with them, that is certain, but we shall
die while in the fulness of life. I prefer that to a hibernation in
the ice, to an anticipated death. And anyway, I could not do
otherwise. Love does not reason. If I asked why you have the passion
for study, you would not explain it to me any better than those who
have a passion for idleness can explain their indolence.

Then you think me upset, since you preach detachment to me? You tell
me that you have read in the papers some extracts from my articles
which indicate a change of ideas, and these papers which quote me
with good will, endeavor to believe that I am illuminated with a new
light, while others which do not quote me believe that perhaps I am
deserting the cause of the future. Let the politicians think and say
what they want to. Let us leave them to their critical
appreciations. I do not have to protest, I do not have to answer,
the public has other interests to discuss than those of my
personality. I wield a pen, I have an honorable position of free
discussion in a great paper; if I have been wrongly interpreted, it
is for me to explain myself better when the occasion presents
itself. I am reluctant to seize this opportunity of talking of
myself as an isolated individual; but if you judge me converted to
false notions, I must say to you and to others who are interested in
me: read me as a whole, and do not judge me by detached fragments; a
spirit which is independent of party exactions, sees necessarily the
pros and cons, and the sincere writer tells both without busying
himself about the blame or the approbation of partizan readers. But
every being who is not mad maintains a certain consistency, and I do
not think that I have departed from mine. Reason and sentiment are
always in accord in me to make me repulse whatever attempts to make
me revert to childhood in politics, in religion, in philosophy, in
art. My sentiment and my reason combat more than ever the idea of
factitious distinctions, the inequality of conditions imposed as a
right acquired by some, as a loss deserved by others. More than ever
I feel the need of raising what is low, and of lifting again what
has fallen. Until my heart is worn out it will be open to pity, it
will take the part of the weak, it will rehabilitate the slandered.
If today it is the people that is under foot, I shall hold out my
hand to the people--if it is the oppressor and executioner, I shall
tell it that it is cowardly and odious. What do I care for this or
that group of men, these names which have become standards, these
personalities which have become catchwords? I know only wise and
foolish, innocent and guilty. I do not have to ask myself where are
my friends or my enemies. They are where torment has thrown them.
Those who have deserved my love, and who do not see through my eyes,
are none the less dear to me. The thoughtless blame of those who
leave me does not make me consider them as enemies. All friendship
unjustly withdrawn remains intact in the heart that has not merited
the outrage. That heart is above self-love, it knows how to wait for
the awakening of justice and affection.

Such is the correct and easy role of a conscience that is not
engaged in the party interests through any personal interest. Those
who can not say that of themselves will certainly have success in
their environment, if they have the talent to avoid all that can
displease them, and the more they have of this talent, the more they
will find the means to satisfy their passions. But do not summon
them in history to witness the absolute truth. From the moment that
they make a business of their opinion, their opinion has no value.

I know sweet, generous and timorous souls, who in this terrible
moment of our history, reproach themselves for having loved and
served the cause of the weak. They see only one point in space, they
believe that the people whom they have loved and served exist no
longer, because in their place a horde of bandits followed by a
little army of bewildered men has occupied momentarily the theatre
of the struggle.

These good souls have to make an effort to say to themselves that
what good there was in the poor and what interest there was in the
disinherited still exists, only it is no longer in evidence and the
political disturbance has sidetracked it from the stage. When such
dramas take place, those who rush in light-heartedly are the vain or
the greedy members of the family, those who allow themselves to be
pulled in are the idiots.

There is no doubt that there are greedy souls, idiots, and vain
persons by the thousands in France; but there are as many and
perhaps more in the other states. Let an opportunity present itself
similar to too frequent opportunities which put our evil passions in
play, and you will see whether other nations are any better than we
are. Wait till the Germanic race gets to work, the race whose
disciplinary aptitudes we admire, the race whose armies have just
shown us brutal appetites in all their barbarous simplicity, and you
will see what will be its license! The people of Paris will seem
sober and virtuous by comparison.

That ought not to be what is called a crumb of comfort, we shall
have to pity the German nation for its victories as much as
ourselves for our defeats, because this is the first act of its
moral dissolution. The drama of its degradation has begun, and as
this is being worked out by its own hands it will move very quickly.
All these great material organizations in which right, justice, and
the respect for humanity are not recognized, are colossi of clay, as
we have found to our cost. Well! the  moral abasement of Germany is
not the future safety of France, and if we are called upon to return
to her the evil that has been done us, her collapse will not give us
back our  life. It is not in blood that races are re-invigorated and
rejuvenated. Vital exhalations can issue still from the corpse of
France, that of Germany will be the focus of the pestilence of
Europe. A nation that has lost its ideals does not survive itself.
Its death fertilizes nothing and those who breathe its fetid
emanations are struck by the ill that killed it. Poor Germany! the
cup of the wrath of the Eternal is poured out on you quite as much
as on us, and while you rejoice and become intoxicated, the
philosophic spirit is weeping over you and prepares your  epitaph.
This pale and bleeding, wounded thing that is called France, holds
still in its tense hands, a fold of the starry mantle of the future,
and you drape yourself in a soiled flag, which will be your winding
sheet. Past grandeurs have no longer a place to take in the history
of men. It is all over with kings who exploit the peoples; it is all
over with exploited   peoples who have consented to their own
abasement.

That is why we are so sick and why my heart is broken.

But it is not in scorn of our misery that I regard the extent of it.
I do not want to believe that this holy country, that this cherished
race, all of whose chords I feel vibrate in me, both harmonious and
discordant,--whose qualities and whose defects I love in spite of
everything, all of whose good or bad responsibilities I consent to
accept rather than to detach  myself from them through disdain; no,
I do not want to believe that my country and my race are struck to
death, I feel it in my suffering, in my mourning, in my hours of
pure dejection even, I love, therefore I live; let us love and live.

Frenchmen, let us love one another, my God! my God! 1et us love one
another or we are lost. Let us destroy, let us deny, let us
annihilate politics, since it divides us and arms us against one
another; let us ask from no one what he was and what he wanted
yesterday. Yesterday all the world was mistaken, let us know what we
want today. If it is not liberty for all and fraternity towards all,
do not let us attempt to solve the problem of humanity, we are not
worthy of defining it, we are not capable of comprehending it.
Equality is a thing that does not impose itself, it is a free plant
that grows only on fertile lands, in salubrious air. It does not
take root on barricades, we know that now! It is immediately trodden
under the foot of the conqueror, whoever he may be. Let us desire to
establish it in our customs, let us be eager to consecrate it in our
ideas. Let us give it for a starting point, patriotic charity, love!
It is the part of a madman to think that one issues from a battle
with respect for human rights. All civil war has brought forth and
will bring forth great crime....

Unfortunate International, is it true that you believe in the lie
that strength is superior to right? If you are as numerous, as
powerful as one fancies, is it possible that you profess destruction
and hatred as a duty? No, your power is a phantom of death. A great
number of men of every nationality would not, could not, deliberate
and act in favor of an iniquitous principle. If you are the
ferocious party of the European people, something like the
Anabaptists of Munster, like them you will destroy yourself with
your own hands. If, on the contrary, you are a great and legitimate
fraternal association, your duty is to enlighten your adherents and
to deny those who cheapen and compromise your principles. I hope
still that you include in your bosom, humane and hard-working men in
great numbers, and that they suffer and blush at seeing bandits take
shelter under your name. In this case your silence is inept and
cowardly. Have you not a single member capable of protesting against
ignoble attacks, against idiotic principles, against furious
madness? Your chosen chiefs, your governors, your inspirers, are
they all brigands and idiots? No, it is impossible; there are no
groups, there is no club, there are no crossroads where a voice of
truth could not make itself heard. Speak then, justify yourself,
proclaim your gospel. Dissolve yourself in order to make yourself
over if the discord is in your own midst. Make an appeal to the
future if you are not an ancient invasion of Barbarians. Tell those
who still love the people what they ought to do for them, and if you
have nothing to say, if you cannot speak a word of life, if the
iniquities of your mysteries are sealed by fear, renounce noble
sympathies, live on the scorn of honest folk, and struggle between
the jailer and the police.

All France has heard the word of your destiny which might have been
the word of hers. She has waited for it in vain. I too, simple, I
waited. While blaming the means I did not want to prejudice the end.
There has always been one in revolutions, and the revolutions that
fail are not always those with the weakest basis. A patriotic
fanaticism seems to have been the first sentiment of this struggle.
These lost children of the democratic army were going perhaps to
subscribe to an inevitable peace that they judged shameful: Paris
had sworn to bury herself under her ruins.

The democratic people were going to force the bourgeois to keep
their word. They took possession of the cannon, they were going to
turn them on the Prussians, it was mad, but it was grand.... Not at
all. The first act of the Commune is to consent to the peace, and in
all the course of its management, it does not have an insult, not a
threat for the enemy, it conceives and commits the remarkable
cowardice of overturning under the eyes of the enemy the column that
recalls his defeats and our victories. It is angry against the
powers emanating from universal suffrage, and yet it invokes this
suffrage in Paris to constitute itself. It is true that this was not
favorable to it; it dispenses with the appearance of legality that
it intended to give itself and functions by brute force, without
invoking any other right than that of hate and scorn for all that is
not itself. It proclaims POSITIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE of which it calls
itself the sole depository, but about which it does not let a word
escape in its deliberations and in its decrees.  It declares that it
is going to free man from his shackles and his prejudices, and at
that very instant, it exercises a power without control and
threatens with death whoever is not convinced of its infallibility.
At the same time it pretends to take up the tradition of the
Jacobins, it usurps the papal social authority and assumes the
dictatorship. What sort of a republic is that? I see nothing vital
in it, nothing rational, nothing constituted, nothing constitutable.
It is an orgy of false reformers who have not one idea, not one
principle, not the least serious organization, not the least
solidarity with the nation, not the least outlook towards the
future. Ignorance, cynicism and brutality, that is all that emanates
from this false social revolution. Liberation of the lowest
instincts, impotence of bold ambitions, scandal of shameless
usurpations. That is the spectacle which we have just seen.
Moreover, this Commune has inspired the most deadly disgust in the
most ardent political men, men most devoted to the democracy. After
useless essays, they have understood that there was no
reconciliation possible where there were no principles; they
withdrew from it with consternation, with sorrow, and, the next day,
the Commune declared them traitors, and decreed their arrest. They
would have been shot if they had remained in its hands.

And you, friend, you want me to see these things with a stoic
indifference? You want me to say: man is made thus, crime is his
expression, infamy is his nature?

No, a hundred times no. Humanity is outraged in me and with me. We
must not dissimulate nor try to forget this indignation which is one
of the most passionate forms of love. We must make great efforts in
behalf of brotherhood to repair the ravages of hate. We must put an
end to the scourge, wipe out infamy with scorn, and inaugurate by
faith the resurrection of the country.

G. Sand

CXCVIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 16 September, 1871

Dear old friend,

I answered you day before yesterday, and my letter took such
proportions that I sent it as an article to le Temps for my next
fortnightly contribution; for I have promised to give them two
articles a month. The letter a un ami does not indicate you by even
an initial, for I do not want to argue against you in public. I tell
you again in it my reasons for suffering and for hoping still. I
shall send it to you and that will be talking with you again. You
will see that my chagrin is a part of me, and that believing
progress to be a dream does not depend on me. Without this hope no
one is good for anything. The mandarins do not need knowledge and
even the education of a limited number of people has no longer
reason for existing unless there is hope of influence on the masses;
philosophers have only to keep silent and those great minds on whom
the need of your soul leans, Shakespeare, Moliere, Voltaire, etc.
have no reason for existing and for expressing themselves.

Come, let me suffer! That is worth more than viewing INJUSTICE WITH
A SERENE COUNTENANCE, as Shakespeare says. When I have drained my
cup of bitterness, I shall feel better. I am a woman, I have
affections, sympathies, and wrath. I shall never be a sage, nor a
scholar.

I received a kind little note from the Princess Mathilde. Is she
then again settled in Paris? Has she anything to live on from the
effects of M. Demidoff, her late and I think unworthy husband? On
the whole it is brave and good of her to return near to her friends,
at the risk of new upsets.

I am glad that these little faces of children pleased you. I embrace
you very much, you are so kind, I was sure of it. Although you are a
mandarin, I do not think that you are like a Chinaman at all, and I
love you with a full heart.

I am working like a convict.

G. Sand

CXCIX. TO GEORGE SAND

Dear master, I received your article yesterday, and I should answer
it at length if I were not in the midst of preparations for my
departure for Paris. I am going to try to finish up with Aisse.

The middle of your letter made me SHED A TEAR, without converting
me, of course. I was moved, that was all, without being persuaded.

I look vainly in your article for one word: "justice," and all our
ill comes from forgetting absolutely that first notion of morality,
which to my way of thinking composes all morality. Humanitarianism,
sentiment, the ideal, have played us sufficiently mean tricks for us
to try righteousness and science.

If France does not pass in a short time to the crisis, I believe
that she will be irrevocably lost. Free compulsory education will do
nothing but augment the number of imbeciles. Renan has said that
very well in the preface to his Questions contemporaines. What we
need most of all, is a natural, that is to say, a legitimate
aristocracy. No one can do anything without a head, and universal
suffrage as it exists is more stupid than divine right. You will see
remarkable things if they let it keep on! The masses, the numbers,
are always idiotic. I have few convictions, but I have that one
strongly. But the masses must be respected, however inept they may
be, because they contain the germs of an incalculable fecundity.
Give it liberty but not power.

I believe no more than you do in class distinction. Castes belong to
archeology. But I believe that the poor hate the rich, and that the
rich are afraid of the poor. It will be so forever. It is as useless
to preach love to the one as to the other. The most important thing
is to instruct the rich, who, on the whole, are the strongest.
Enlighten the bourgeois first, for he knows nothing, absolutely
nothing. The whole dream of democracy is to elevate the proletarian
to the level of the imbecility of the bourgeois. The dream is partly
accomplished. He reads the same papers and has the same passions.

The three degrees of education have shown within the last year what
they can accomplish: (1) higher education made Prussia win; (2)
secondary education, bourgeois, produced the men of the 4th of
September; (3) primary education gave us the Commune. Its minister
of public instruction was the great Valles, who boasted that he
scorned Homer!

In three years every Frenchman can know how to read. Do you think
that we shall be the better off? Imagine on the other hand that in
each commune, there was ONE bourgeois, only one, who had read
Bastiat, and that this bourgeois was respected, things would change.

However I am not discouraged as you are, and the present government
pleases me, because it has no principle, no metaphysics, no humbug.
I express myself very badly. Moreover you deserve a different
response, but I am much hurried.

I hear today that the mass of the Parisians regrets Badinguet. A
plebiscite would declare for him, I do not doubt it, universal
suffrage is such a fine thing.

CC. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 10 October, 1871

I am answering your post scriptum, if I had answered Flaubert I
should not have ... ANSWERED, knowing well that your heart does not
always agree with your mind, a discordance into which we all
moreover are continually compelled to fall. I answered a part of a
letter of some friend whom no one knows, no one can recognize, since
I address myself to a part of your reasoning that is not you
entirely.

You are a troubadour all the same, and if I had to write to you
PUBLICLY the character would be what it ought to be. But our real
discussions ought to remain between ourselves, like caresses between
lovers, and even sweeter, since friendship also has its mysteries
without the storms of personality.

That letter that you wrote me in haste, is full of well expressed
truths against which I do not protest. But the connection and
agreement between your truths of reason and my truths of sentiment
must be found. France, alas! is neither on your side nor my side;
she is on the side of blindness, ignorance and folly. Oh! that I do
not deny, it is exactly that over which I despair.

Is this a time to put on Aisse? You told me it was a thing of
distinction, delicate like all that HE did, and I hear that the
public of the theatres is more THICKHEADED than ever. You would do
well to see two or three plays, no matter which, in order to
appreciate the literary condition of the Parisian. The provinces
will contribute less than in the past. The little fortunes are too
much cut down to permit frequent trips to Paris.

If Paris offered, as in my youth, an intelligent and influential
nucleus, a good play would perhaps not have a hundred performances,
but a bad play would not have three hundred. But this nucleus has
become imperceptible and its influence is swamped. Who then will
fill the theatres? The shopkeepers of Paris, without a guide, and
without good criticism? Well, you are not the master in the matter
of Aisse. There is an heir who is impatient, probably.--They write
me that Chilly is very; seriously ill, and that Pierre Berton is
reengaged.

You must be very busy; I will not write a long letter to you.

I embrace you affectionately, my children love you and ask to be
remembered to you.

G. Sand

CCI. TO GEORGE SAND

Never, dear good master, have you given such a proof of your
inconceivable candor! Now, seriously, you think that you have
offended me! The first page is almost like excuses! It made me laugh
heartily! Besides, you can always say everything to me, to me!
everything! Your blows will be caresses to me.

Now let us talk again! I continually repeat my insistence on
justice! Do you see how they are denying it everywhere? Has not
modern criticism abandoned art for history? The intrinsic value of a
book is nothing in the school of Sainte-Beuve and Taine. They take
everything into consideration there except talent. Thence, in the
petty journals, the abuse of personality, the biographies, the
diatribes. Conclusion: lack of respect on the part of the public.

In the theatre, the same thing. They don't bother about the play,
but the lesson to be preached. Our friend Dumas dreams the glory of
Lacordaire, or rather of Ravignan! To prevent the tucking up of
petticoats has become with him obsession. We can not have progressed
very far since all morality consists for women, in not committing
adultery, and for men in abstaining from theft! In short, the first
injustice is practised by literature; it has no interest in
esthetics, which is only a higher justice. The romantics will have a
fine account to render with their immoral sentimentality. Do you
recall a bit of Victor Hugo in la Legende des siecles, where a
sultan is saved because he had pity on a pig? it is always the story
of the penitent thief blessed because he has repented! To repent is
good, but not to do evil is better. The school of rehabilitations
has led us to see no difference between a rascal and an honest man.
I became enraged once before witnesses, against Sainte-Beuve, while
begging him to have as much indulgence for Balzac as he had for
Jules Lecomte. He answered me, calling me a dolt! That is where
BREADTH OF VIEW leads you.

They have so lost all sense of proportion, that the war council at
Versailles treats Pipe-en-Bois more harshly than M. Courbet,
Maroteau is condemned to death like Rossel! It is madness! These
gentlemen, however, interest me very little. I think that they
should have condemned to the galleys all the Commune, and have
forced these bloody imbeciles to clear up the ruins of Paris, with a
chain on their necks, like ordinary convicts. But that would have
wounded HUMANITY. They are kind to the mad dogs, and not at all to
the people whom the dogs have bitten.

That will not change so long as universal suffrage is what it is.
Every man (as I think), no matter how low he is, has a right to ONE
voice, his own, but he is not the equal of his neighbor, who may be
worth a hundred times more. In an industrial enterprise (Societe
anonyme), each holder votes according to the value of his
contribution. It ought to be so in the government of a nation. I am
worth fully twenty electors of Croisset. Money, mind, and even race
ought to be reckoned, in short every resource. But up to the present
I only see one! numbers! Ah! dear master, you who have so authority,
you ought to take the lead. Your articles in le Temps, which have
had a great success, are widely read and who knows? You would
perhaps do France a great service?

Aisse keeps me very busy, or rather provokes me. I have not seen
Chilly, I have had to do with Duquesnel. They are depriving me
definitely of the senior Berton and proposing his son. He is very
nice, but he is not at all the type conceived by the author. The
Theatre Francais perhaps would ask nothing better than to take
Aisse! I am very perplexed, and it is going to be necessary for me
to decide. As for waiting till a literary wind arises, as it will
never arise in my lifetime, it is better to risk the thing at once.

These theatrical affairs disturb me greatly, for I was in great
form. For the last month I was even in an exaltation bordering on
madness!

I have met the unavoidable Harrisse, a man who knows everyone, and
who is a judge of everything, theatre, novels, finances, politics,
etc. What a race is that of enlightened men!!! I have seen Plessy,
charming and always beautiful. She asked me to send you a thousand
friendly messages.

For my part, I send you a hundred thousand affectionate greetings.

Your old friend

CCII. TO GEORGE SAND
14 November, 1871

Ouf! I have just finished MY GODS, that is to say the mythological
part of my Saint-Antoine, on which I have been working since the
beginning of June. How I want to read it to you, dear master of the
good God!

Why did you resist your good impulse? Why didn't you come this
autumn? You should not stay so long without seeing Paris. I shall be
there day after tomorrow, and I shall have no amusement there at all
this winter, what with Aisse, a volume of verse to be printed (I
should like to show you the preface), and Heaven knows what else. A
lot of things that are not at all diverting.

I did not receive the second article that was announced. Your old
troubadour has an aching head. My longest nights these three months
have not exceeded five hours. I have been grubbing in a frantic
manner. Furthermore, I think I have brought my book to a pretty
degree of insanity. The idea of the foolish things that it will make
the bourgeois utter sustains me, or rather I don't need to be
sustained, as such a situation pleases me naturally.

The good bourgeois is becoming more and more stupid! He does not
even go to vote! The brute beasts surpass him in their instinct for
self-preservation. Poor France! Poor us!

What do you think I am reading now to distract myself? Bichat and
Cabanis, who amuse me enormously. They knew how to write books then.
Ah! how far our doctors of today are from those men!

We suffer from one thing only: Absurdity. But it is formidable and
universal. When they talk of the brutishness of the plebe, they are
saying an unjust, incomplete thing. Conclusion: the enlightened
classes must be enlightened. Begin by the head, which is the
sickest, the rest will follow.

You are not like me! You are full of compassion. There are days when
I choke with wrath, I would like to drown my contemporaries in
latrines, or at least deluge their cockscombs with torrents of
abuse, cataracts of invectives. Why? I wonder myself.

What sort of archeology is Maurice busy with? Embrace your little
girls warmly for me.

Your old friend

CCIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 23 November, 1871

I hear from Plauchut that you won't let yourself be abducted for our
Christmas Eve REVELS. You say you have too much to do. That is so
much the worse for us, who would have had such pleasure in seeing
you.--You were at Ch. Edmond's successful play, you are well, you
have a great deal to do, you still detest the silly bourgeois; and
with all that, is Saint-Antoine finished and shall we read it soon?

I am giving you an easy commission to do, this is it: I have had to
aid a respectable and interesting person [Footnote:  Mademoiselle de
Flaugergues.] to whom the Prussians have left for a bed and chair,
only an old garden bench. I sent her 300 francs, she needed 600. I
begged from kind souls. They sent me what was necessary, all except
the Princess Mathilde, from whom I asked 200 francs. She answered me
the 19th of this month: HOW SHALL I SEND THIS TO YOU?

I replied the same day; simply by mail. But I have received nothing.
I do not insist, but I fear that the money may have been stolen or
lost, and I am asking you to clear up the affair as quickly as
possible.

With this, I embrace you, and Lolo, AURORE EMBRACES YOU TOO and all
the family which loves you.

G. Sand

[The words 'Aurore embraces you too' were written by the little girl
herself.]

CCIV. TO GEORGE SAND
1 December

Your letter which I have just found again, makes me remorseful, for
I have not yet done your errand to the princess. I was several days
without knowing where the princess was. She was to have come to get
settled in Paris, and send me word of her arrival. Today at last I
learn that she is at Saint-Gratien where I shall go on Sunday
evening probably. Anyway your commission shall be done next week.

You must forgive me, for I have not had for the last two weeks ten
minutes of freedom. The revival of Ruy Blas which was going to be
put ahead of Aisse had to be PUT OFF (it was a hard job). Well, the
rehearsals are to begin on Monday next. I read the play to the
actors today, and the roles are to be verified tomorrow. I think it
will go well. I have had Bouilhet's volume of verse printed, the
preface of which I re-wrote. In short I am worn out! and sad! sad
enough to croak. When I have to get into action I throw myself into
it head first. But my heart is breaking in disgust. That is the
truth.

I have seen none of our friends except Tourgueneff, whom I have
found more charming than ever. Give a good kiss to Aurore for her
sweet message, and let her kiss you for me.

Your old friend

CCV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 7 December, 1871

The money was stolen, I did not receive it, and it can not be
claimed, for the sender would be liable to a suit. Thank the
princess just the same for me, and for poor Mademoiselle de
Flaugergues whom by the way, the minister is aiding with 200 francs.
Her pension is 800.

You are in the midst of rehearsals, I pity you, and yet I imagine
that in working for a friend one puts more heart in it, more
confidence and much more patience. Patience, there is everything in
that, and that is acquired.

I love you and I embrace you, how I would like to have you at
Christmas! You can not, so much the worse for us. We shall drink you
a toast and many speaches [sic].

G. Sand

CCVI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 4 January, 1872

I want to embrace you at the first of the year and tell you that I
love my old troubadour now and always, but I don't want you to
answer me, you are in the thick of theatrical things, and you have
not the time and the calmness to write. Here we called you at the
stroke of midnight on Christmas, we called your name three times,
did you hear it at all?

We are all getting on well, our little girls are growing, we speak
of you often; my children embrace you also. May our affection bring
you good luck!

G. Sand

CCVII. TO GEORGE SAND
Sunday, January, 1872

At last I have a moment of quiet and I can write to you. But I have
so many things to chat with you about, that I hardly know where to
begin: (1) Your little letter of the 4th of January, which came the
very morning of the premiere of Aisse, moved me to tears, dear well-
beloved master. You are the only one who shows such delicacies of
feeling.

The premiere was splendid, and then, that is all. The next night the
theatre was almost empty. The press, in general, was stupid and
base. They accused me of having wanted to advertise by INSERTING an
incendiary tirade! I pass for a Red (sic). You see where we are!

The management of the Odeon has done nothing for the play! On the
contrary. The day of the premiere it was I who brought with my own
hands the properties for the first act! And on the third performance
I led the supernumeraries.

Throughout the rehearsals they advertised in the papers the revival
of Ruy Blas, etc., etc. They made me strangle la Baronne quite as
Ruy Blas will strangle Aisse. In short, Bouilhet's heir will get
very little money. Honor is saved, that is all.

I have had Dernieres Chansons printed. You will receive this volume
at the same time as Aisse and a letter of mine to the Conseil
municipal de Rouen. This little production seemed too violent to le
Nouvelliste de Rouen, which did not dare to print it; but it will
appear on Wednesday in le Temps, then at Rouen, as a pamphlet.

What a foolish life I have been leading for two and a half months!
How is it that I have not croaked with it? My longest nights have
not been over five hours. What running about! What letters! and what
anger!--repressed--unfortunately! At last, for three days I have
slept all I wanted to, and I am stupefied by it.

I was present with Dumas at the premiere of Roi Carotte. You can not
imagine such rot! It is sillier and emptier than the worst of the
fairy plays of Clairville. The public agreed with me absolutely.

The good Offenbach has had another failure at the Opera-Comique with
Fantasio. Shall one ever get to hating piffle? That would be a fine
step on the right path.

Tourgueneff has been in Paris since the first of December. Every
week we have an engagement to read Saint-Antoine and to dine
together. But something always prevents and we never meet. I am
harassed more than ever by life and am disgusted with everything,
which does not prevent me from being in better health than ever.
Explain that to me.

CCVIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 18 January, 1872

You must not be sick, you must not be a grumbler, my dear old
troubadour. You must cough, blow your nose, get well, say that
France is mad, humanity silly, and that we are crude animals; and
you must love yourself, your kind, and your friends above all. I
have some very sad hours. I look at MY FLOWERS, these two little
ones who are always smiling, their charming mother and my wise
hardworking son whom the end of the world will find hunting,
cataloguing, doing his daily task, and gay withal AS PUNCH, in the
RARE moments when he is resting.

He said to me this morning: "Tell Flaubert to come, I will take a
vacation at once. I will play the marionettes for him, I will make
him laugh."

Life in a crowd forbids reflection. You are too much alone. Come
quickly to our house and let us love you.

G. Sand

CCIX. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Friday, 19 January, 1872

I did not know about all that affair at Rouen and I now understand
your anger. But you are too angry, that is to say too good, and too
good for them. With a BITTER and vindictive man these louts would be
less spiteful and less bold. You have always called them brutes, you
and Bouilhet, now they are avenging themselves on the dead and on
the living. Ah! well, it is indeed that and nothing else.

Yesterday I was preaching the calmness of disdain to you. I see that
this is not the moment, but you are not wicked, strong men are not
cruel! With a bad mob at their heels, these fine men of Rouen would
not have dared what they have dared!

I have the Chansons, tomorrow I shall read your preface, from
beginning to end.

I embrace you.

CCX. TO GEORGE SAND

You will receive very soon: Dernieres Chansons, Aisse and my Lettre
au Conseil municipal de Rouen, which is to appear tomorrow in le
Temps before appearing as a pamphlet.

I have forgotten to tell you something, dear master. I have used
your name. I have COMPROMISED you in citing you among the
illustrious people who have subscribed to the monument for Bouilhet.
I found that it looked well in the sentence. An effect of style
being a sacred thing with me, don't disavow it.

Today I am starting again my metaphysical readings for Saint-
Antoine. Next Saturday, I shall read a hundred and thirty pages of
it, all that is finished, to Tourgueneff. Why won't you be there!

I embrace you.

Your old friend

CCXI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 25 January, 1872

You were quite right to put me down and I want to CONTRIBUTE too.
Put me down for the sum you would like and tell me so that I may
have it sent to you.

I have read your preface in le Temps: the end of it is very
beautiful and touching. But I see that this poor friend was, like
you, one who DID NOT GET OVER HIS ANGER, and at your age I should
like to see you less irritated, less worried with the folly of
others. For me, it is lost time, like complaining about being bored
with the rain and the flies. The public which is accused often of
being silly, gets angry and only becomes sillier; for angry or
irritated, one becomes sublime if one is intelligent, idiotic if one
is silly.

After all, perhaps this chronic indignation is a need of your
constitution; it would kill me. I have a great need to be calm so as
to reflect and to think things over. At this moment I am doing THE
USEFUL at the risk of your anathemas. I am trying to simplify a
child's approach to culture, being persuaded that the first study
makes its impression on all the others and that pedagogy teaches us
to look for knots in bulrushes. In short, I am working over A
PRIMER, do not EAT ME ALIVE.

I have ONLY ONE regret about Paris: it is not to be a third with
Tourgueneff when you read your Saint-Antoine. For all the rest,
Paris does not call me at all; my heart has affections there that I
do not wish to hurt, by disagreement with their ideas. It is
impossible not to be tired of this spirit of party or of sect which
makes people no longer French, nor men, nor themselves. They have no
country, they belong to a church. They do what they disapprove of,
so as not to disobey the discipline of the school. I prefer to keep
silent. They would find me cold or stupid; one might as well stay at
home.

You don't tell me of your mother; is she in Paris with her
grandchild? I hope that your silence means that they are well.
Everything has gone wonderfully here this winter; the children are
excellent and give us nothing but joy. After the dismal winter of
'70 to '71, one ought to complain of nothing.

Can one live peaceably, you say, when the human race is so absurd? I
submit, while saying to myself that perhaps I am as absurd as every
one else and that it is time to turn my mind to correcting myself.

I embrace you for myself and for all mine.

G. Sand

CCXII. TO GEORGE SAND

No! dear master! it is not true. Bouilhet never injured the
bourgeois of Rouen; no one was gentler to them, I add even more
cowardly, to tell the truth. As for me, I kept apart from them, that
is all my crime.

I find by chance just today in Nadar's Memoirs du Geant, a paragraph
on me and the people of Rouen which is absolutely exact. Since you
own this book, look at page 100.

If I had kept silent they would have accused me of being a coward. I
protested naively, that is to say brutally. And I did well.

I think that one ought never begin the attack; but when one answers,
one must try to kill cleanly one's enemy. Such is my system.
Frankness is part of loyalty; why should it be less perfect in blame
than in praise?

We are perishing from indulgence, from clemency, from COWISHNESS and
(I return to my eternal refrain) from lack of JUSTICE!

Besides, I have never insulted any one, I have kept to
generalities,--as for M. Decorde, my intentions are for open
warfare;--but enough of that! I spent yesterday, a fine day, with
Tourgueneff to whom I read the hundred and fifteen pages of Saint-
Antoine that are finished. After which, I read to him almost half of
the Dernieres Chansons. What a listener! What a critic! He dazzled
me by the depth and the clearness of his judgment. Ah! if all those
who attempt to judge books had been able to hear, what a lesson!
Nothing escapes him. At the end of a passage of a hundred lines, he
remembers a weak epithet! he gave me two or three suggestions of
exquisite detail for Saint-Antoine.

Do you think me very silly since you believe I am going to blame you
for your primer? I have enough philosophic spirit to know that such
a thing is very serious work.

Method is the highest thing in criticism, since it gives the means
of creating.

CCXIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 28 January, 1872

Your preface is splendid and the book [Footnote: Dernieres Chansons,
by Louis Bouilhet.] is divine! Mercy! I have made a line of poetry
without realizing it, God forgive me. Yes, you are right, he was not
second rank, and ranks are not given by decree, above all in an age
when criticism undoes everything and does nothing. All your heart is
in this simple and discreet tale of his life. I see very well now,
why he died so young; he died from having lived too extensively in
the mind. I beg of you not to absorb yourself so much in literature
and learning. Change your home, move about, have mistresses or
wives, whichever you like, and during these phases, must change the
end that one lights.  At my advanced age I throw myself into
torrents of far niente; the most infantile amusements, the silliest,
are enough for me and I return more lucid from my attacks of
imbecility.

It was a great loss to art, that premature death. In ten years there
will not be one single poet. Your preface is beautiful and well
done. Some pages are models, and it is very true that the bourgeois
will read that and find nothing remarkable in it. Ah! if one did not
have the little sanctuary, the interior little shrine, where,
without saying anything to anyone, one takes refuge to contemplate
and to dream the beautiful and the true, one would have to say:
"What is the use?"

I embrace you warmly.

Your old troubadour.

CCXIV. TO GEORGE SAND

Dear good master,

Can you, for le Temps, write on Dernieres Chansons? It would oblige
me greatly. Now you have it.

I was ill all last week. My throat was in a frightful state. But I
have slept a great deal and I am again afloat. I have begun anew my
reading for Saint-Antoine.

It seems to me that Dernieres Chansons could lend itself to a
beautiful article, to a funeral oration on poetry. Poetry will not
perish, but its eclipse will be long and we are entering into the
shades.

Consider if you have a mind for it and answer by a line.

CCXV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, in Paris
Nohant, 17 February

My troubadour, I am thinking of what you asked me to do and I will
do it; but this week I must rest. I played the fool too much at the
carnival with my grandchildren and my great-nephews.

I embrace you for myself and for all my brood.

G. Sand

CCXVI. TO GEORGE SAND

What a long time it is since I have written to you, dear master. I
have so many things to say to you that I don't know where to begin.
Oh! how horrid it is to live so separated when we love each other.

Have you given Paris an eternal adieu? Am I never to see you again
there? Are you coming to Croisset this summer to hear Saint-Antoine?

As for me, I can not go to Nohant, because my time, considering my
straitened purse, is all counted; but I have still I a full month of
readings and researches in Paris. After that I am going away with my
mother: we are in search of a companion for her. It is not easy to
find one. Then, towards Easter I shall be back at Croisset, and
shall start to work again at the manuscript. I am beginning to want
to write.

Just now, I am reading in the evening, Kant's Critique de la raison
pure, translated by Barni, and I am freshening up my Spinoza. During
the day I amuse myself by looking over bestiaries of the middle
ages; looking up in the "authorities" all the most baroque animals.
I am in the midst of fantastic monsters.

When I have almost exhausted the material I shall go to the Museum
to muse before real monsters, and then the researches for the good
Saint-Antoine will be finished.

In your letter before the last one you showed anxiety about my
health; reassure yourself! I have never been more convinced that it
was robust. The life that I have led this winter was enough to kill
three rhinoceroses, but nevertheless I am well. The scabbard must be
solid, for the blade is well sharpened; but everything is converted
into sadness! Any action whatever disgusts me with life! I have
followed your counsels, I have sought distractions! But that amuses
me very little. Decidedly nothing but sacrosanct literature
interests me.

My preface to the Dernieres Chansons has aroused in Madame Colet a
pindaric fury. I have received an anonymous letter from her, in
verse, in which she represents me as a charlatan who beats the drum
on the tomb of his friend, a vulgar wretch who debases himself
before criticism, after having "flattered Caesar"! "Sad example of
the passions," as Prudhomme would say.

A propos of Caesar, I can not believe, no matter what they say, in
his near return. In spite of my pessimism, we have not come to that!
However, if one consulted the God called Universal Suffrage, who
knows?...Ah! we are very low, very low!

I saw Ruy Blas badly played except for Sarah. Melingue is a sleep-
walking drain-man, and the others are as tiresome. As Victor Hugo
had complained in a friendly way that I had not paid him a call, I
thought I ought to do so and I found him ...charming! I repeat the
word, not at all "the great man," not at all a pontiff! This
discovery greatly surprised me and did me worlds of good. For I have
the bump of veneration and I like to love what I admire. That is a
personal allusion to you, dear, kind master.

I have met Madame Viardot whom I found a very curious temperament.
It was Tourgueneff who took me to her house.

CCXVII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
Nohant, from the 28 to the 29 February 1872. Night of Wednesday to
Thursday, three o'clock in the morning.

Ah! my dear old friend, what a dreadful twelve days I have spent!
Maurice has been very ill. Continually these terrible sore throats,
which in the beginning seem nothing, but which are complicated with
abscesses and tend to become membranous. He has not been in danger,
but always IN DANGER OF DANGER, and he has had cruel suffering, loss
of voice, he could not swallow; every anguish attached to the
violent sore throat that you know well, since you have just had one.
With him, this trouble continually tends to get worse, and his
mucous membrane has been so often the seat of the same illness that
it lacks energy to react. With that, little or no fever, almost
always on his feet, and the moral depression of a man used to
continual exercise of body and mind, whom the mind and body forbids
to exercise. We have looked after him so well that he is now, I
think, out of the woods, although, this morning, I was afraid again
and sent for Doctor Favre, our USUAL savior.

Throughout the day I have been talking to him, to distract him,
about your researches on monsters; he had his papers brought so as
to hunt among them for what might be useful you; but he has found
only the pure fantasies of his own invention. I found them so
original and so funny that I have encouraged him to send them to
you. They will be of no use to you except to make you burst out
laughing in your hours recreation.

I hope that we are going to come to life again without new relapses.
He is the soul and the life of the house. When he is depressed we
are dead; mother, wife, and children. Aurore says that she would
like to be very ill in her father's place We love each other
passionately, we five, and the SACROSANCT LITERATURE as you call it,
is only secondary in my life. I have always loved some one more than
it and my family more than that some one.

Pray why is your poor little mother so irritable and desperate, in
the very midst of an old age that when I last saw her was still so
green and so gracious? Is her deafness sudden? Did she entirely lack
philosophy and patience before these infirmities? I suffer with you
because I understand what you are suffering.

Another old age which is worse, since it is becoming malicious, is
that of Madame Colet. I used to think that all her hatred was
directed against me, and that seemed to me a bit of madness; for I
had never done or said anything against her, even after that vile
book in which she poured out all her fury WITHOUT cause. What has
she against you now that passion has become ancient history?
Strange! strange! And, a propos of Bouilhet, she hated him then, him
too this poor poet? She is mad.

You may well think that I was not able to write an iota for these
twelve days. I am going, I hope, to start at work as soon as I have
finished my novel which has remained with one foot in the air at the
last pages. It is on the point of being published but has not yet
been finished. I am up every night till dawn; but I have not had a
sufficiently tranquil mind to be distracted from my patient.

Good night, dear good friend of my heart.

Heavens! don't work nor sit up too much, as you also have sore
throats. They are terrible and treacherous illnesses. We all love
you, and we embrace you. Aurore is charming; she learns all that we
want her to, we don't know how, without seeming to notice it.

What kind of a woman do you want as a companion for your mother?
Perhaps I know of such a one. Must she converse and read aloud? It
seems to me that the deafness is a barrier to that. Isn't it a
question of material care and continual diligence? What are the
stipulations and what is the compensation?

Tell me how and why father Hugo did not have one single visit after
Ruy Blas? Did Gautier, Saint-Victor, his faithful ones, neglect him?
Have they quarreled about politics?

CCXVIII. TO GEORGE SAND
March, 1872

Dear master,

I have received the fantastic drawings, which have diverted me. Is
there perhaps profound symbolism hidden in Maurice's work? But I did
not find it. ... Revery!

There are two very pretty monsters: (1) an embryo in the form of a
balloon on four feet; (2) a death's head emanating from an
intestinal worm.

We have not found a companion yet. It seems difficult to me, we must
have someone who can read aloud and who is very gentle; we should
also give her some charge of the household. She would not have much
bodily care to give, as my mother would keep her maid.

We must have someone who is kind above all, and perfectly honest.
Religious principles are not objected to! The rest is left to your
perspicacity, dear master! That is all.

I am uneasy about Theo. I think that he is getting strangely old. He
must be very ill, doubtless with heart trouble, don't you think so?
Still another who is preparing to leave me.

No! literature is not what I love most in the world, I explained
myself badly (in my last letter). I spoke to you of distractions and
of nothing more. I am not such a pedant as to prefer phrases to
living beings. The further I go the more my sensibility is
exasperated. But the basis is solid and the thing goes on. And then,
after the Prussian war there is no further great annoyance possible.

And the Critique de la raison pure of the previously mentioned Kant,
translated by Barni, is heavier reading than the Vie Parisienne of
Marcelin; never mind! I shall end by understanding it.

I have almost finished the scenario of the last part of Saint
Antoine. I am in a hurry to start writing. It is too long since I
have written. I am bored with style!

And tell me more about you, dear master! Give me at once news of
Maurice, and tell me if you think that the lady you know would suit
us.

And thereupon I embrace you with both arms.

Your old troubadour always agitated, always as wrathful as Saint
Polycarp.

CCXIX. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
17 March, 1872

No, dear friend, Maurice is almost well again but I have been tired,
worn out with URGENT work: finishing my novel, and correcting a mass
of proof from the beginning. And then unanswered letters, business,
no time to breathe! That is why I have not been able to write the
article on Bouilhet, and as Nanon has begun, as they are publishing
five numbers a week in le Temps, I don't see where I shall publish
that article very soon.

In the Revue des Deux Mondes, they don't want me to write criticism;
whoever is not, or was not of their circle, has no talent, and they
do not give me the right to say the contrary.

There is, to be sure, a new review wide open to me, which is
published by very fine people, but it is more widely read in other
countries than in France, and you will find perhaps that an article
in that would not excite comment. It is the Revue universelle
directed by Amedee Marteau. Discuss that with Charles Edmond. Ask
him if, in spite of the fact that Nanon is being published, he could
find me a little corner in the body of the paper.

As for the companion, you may rest assured that I am looking for
her. The one whom I had in view is not suitable, for she could not
read aloud, and I am not sure enough of the others to propose them.
I thought that your poor mother was too deaf to listen to reading,
and to converse, and that it would be enough for her to have some
one very gentle, and charming, to care for her, and to stay with
her.

That is all, my dear old friend, it is not my fault, I embrace you
with all my heart. For the moment that is the only thing that is
functioning. My brain is too stupefied.

G. Sand

CCXX. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset

Here I am, back again here, dear master, and not very happy; my
mother worries me. Her decline increases from day to day, and almost
from hour to hour. She wanted me to come home although the painters
have not finished their work, and we are very inconveniently housed.
At the end of next week, she will have a companion who will relieve
me in this foolish business of housekeeping.

As for me, I have quite decided not to make the presses groan for
many years, solely not to have "business" to look after, to avoid
all connection with publishers, editors and papers, and above all
not to hear of money.

My incapacity, in that direction, has developed to frightful
proportions. Why should the sight of a bill put me in a rage? It
verges on madness. Aisse has not made money. Dernieres Chansons has
almost gotten me into a lawsuit. The story of la Fontaine is not
ended. I am tired, profoundly tired, of everything.

If only I do not make a failure also of Saint-Antoine. I am going to
start working on it again in a week, when I have finished with Kant
and Hegel. These two great men are helping to stupefy me, and when I
leave them I fall with eagerness upon my old and thrice great
Spinoza. What genius, how fine a work the Ethics is!

CCXXI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
9 April, 1872

I am with you all day and all night, and at every instant, my poor
dear friend. I am thinking of all the sorrow that you are in the
midst of. I would like to be near you. The misfortune of being tied
here distresses me. I would like a word so as to know if you have
the courage that you need. The end of that noble and dear life has
been sad and long; for from the day that she became feeble, she
declined and you could not distract her and console her. Now, alas!
the incessant and cruel task is ended, as the things of this world
end, anguish after struggle! What a bitter achievement of rest! and
you are going to miss this anxiety, I am sure of that. I know the
sort of dismay that follows the combat with death.

In short, my poor child, I can only open a maternal heart to you
which will replace nothing, but which is suffering with yours, and
very keenly in each one of your troubles.

G. Sand

CCXXII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 14 April, 1872

My daughter-in-law has been staying several days with our friends,
at Nimes, to stop a bad case of WHOOPING-COUGH that Gabrielle was
suffering with, to separate her from Aurore, from fear of contagion,
and to recuperate, for she has not been well for some time. As for
me, I am well again. That little illness and this departure suddenly
resolved upon and accomplished, have upset my plans somewhat. I had
to look after Aurore so that she might be reconciled to it, and I
have not had a moment to answer you. I am wondering too if you don't
like it better to be left to yourself these first few days. But I
beguile the need I feel of being near you at this sad time, by
telling you over and over again, my poor, dear friend, how much I
love you. Perhaps, too, your family has taken you to Rouen or to
Dieppe, so as not to let you go back at once into that sad house. I
don't know anything about your plans, in case those which you made
to absorb yourself in work are changed. If you have any inclination
to travel, and the sinews of war are lacking, I have ready for you a
few sous that I have just earned, and I put them at your disposal.
Don't feel constrained with me any more than I would with you, dear
child. They are going to pay me for my novel in five or six days at
the office of le Temps; you need only to write me a line and I shall
see that you get it in Paris. A word when you can, I embrace you,
and so does Maurice, very tenderly.

CCXXIII. TO GEORGE SAND
Tuesday, 16 April, 1872

Dear good master,

I should have answered at once your first, very kind letter.  But I
was too sad. I lacked physical strength.

At last, today, I am beginning to hear the birds singing and to see
the leaves growing green. The sun irritates me no longer, which is a
good sign. If I could feel like working again I should be all right.

Your second letter (that of yesterday) moved me to tears! You are so
good! What a splendid creature you are! I do not need money now,
thank you. But if I did need any, I should certainly ask you for it.

My mother has left Croisset to Caroline with the condition that I
should keep my apartments there. So, until the estate is completely
settled, I stay here. Before deciding on the future, I must know
what I have to live on, after that we shall see.

Shall I have the strength to live absolutely alone in solitude?  I
doubt it, I am growing old. Caroline cannot live here now. She has
two dwellings already, and the house at Croisset is expensive. I
think I shall give up my Paris lodging. Nothing calls me to Paris
any longer. All my friends are dead, and the last one, poor Theo, is
not for long, I fear. Ah! it is hard to grow a new skin at fifty
years of age!

I realized, during the last two weeks, that my poor dear, good
mother was the being that I have loved the most! It is as if someone
had torn out a part of my vitals.

CCXXIV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 28 April, 1872

I hold my poor Aurore, who has a terrible case of whooping-cough,
day and night in my arms. I have an important piece of work that I
must finish, and which I shall finish in spite of everything. If I
have not already done the article on Bouilhet, rest assured it is
because it is IMPOSSIBLE. I shall do it at the same time as that on
l'Annee terrible. I shall go to Paris between the 20th and 25th of
May, at the latest. Perhaps sooner, if Maurice takes Aurore to Nimes
where Lina and the littlest one are. I shall write to you, you must
come to see me in Paris, or I will go to see you.

I thirst too to embrace you, to console you--no, but to tell you
that your sorrows are mine. Good-bye till then, a line to tell me if
your affairs are getting settled, and if you are coming out on top.

Your old G. Sand

CCXXV. TO GEORGE SAND

What good news, dear master! In a month and even before a month, I
shall see you at last!

Try not to be too hurried in Paris, so that we may have the time to
talk. What would be very nice, would be, if you came back here with
me to spend several days. We should be quieter than there; "my poor
old mother" loved you very much, would be sweet to see you in her
house, when she has been gone only such a short time.

I have started work again, for existence is only tolerable when one
forgets one's miserable self.

It will be a long time before I know what I have to live on. For all
the fortune that is left to us is in meadowland, and in order to
divide it, we have to sell it all.

Whatever happens, I shall keep my apartments at Croisset. That will
be my refuge, and perhaps even my only habitation. Paris hardly
attracts me any longer. In a little while I shall have no more
friends there. The human being (the eternal feminine included)
amuses me less and less.

Do you know that my poor Theo is very ill? He is dying from boredom
and misery. No one speaks his language anymore! We are like fossils
who subsist astray in a new world.

CCXXVI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 18 May, 1872

Dear friend of my heart, your inability does not disturb me at all,
on the contrary. I have the grippe and the prostration that follows
it. I cannot go to Paris for a week yet, and shall be there during
the first part of June. My little ones are both in the sheepfold. I
have taken good care of and cured the eldest, who is strong. The
other is very tired, and the trip did not prevent the whooping-
cough. For my part, I have worked very hard in caring for my dear
one, and as soon as my task was over, as soon as I saw my dear world
reunited and well again, I collapsed. It will be nothing, but I have
not the strength to write. I embrace you, and I count on seeing you
soon.

G. Sand

CCXXVII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Paris, Monday, 3 June, 1872, Rue Gay Lussac, 5

I am in Paris, and for all this week, in the horror of personal
business. But next week will you come? I should like to go to see
you in Croisset, but I do not know if I can. I have taken Aurore's
whooping-cough, and, at my age, it is severe. I am, however, better,
but hardly able to go about. Write me a line, so I can reserve the
hours that you can give me. I embrace you, as I love you, with a
full heart.

G. Sand

CCXXVIII. TO GEORGE SAND
1872

The hours that I could give you, dear Master! Why, all the hours,
now, by and by, and forever.

I am planning to go to Paris at the end of next week, the 14th or
the 16th. Shall you be there still? If not, I shall go earlier.

But I should like it much better if you came here. We should be
quieter, without callers or intruders! More than ever, I should like
to have you now in my poor Croisset.

It seems to me that we have enough to talk about without stopping
for twenty-four hours. Then I would read you Saint-Antoine, which
lacks only about fifteen pages of being finished. However, don't
come if your cough continues. I should be afraid that the dampness
would hurt you.

The mayor of Vendome has asked me "to honor with my presence" the
dedication of the statue of Ronsard, which occurs the 23rd of this
month: I shall go. And I should even like to deliver an address
there which would be a protest against the universal modern flap-
doodle. The occasion is good. But for the production of a really
appropriate little gem, I lack the snap and vivacity.

Hoping to see you soon, dear master, your old troubadour who
embraces you.

CCXXIX. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
7 June, 1872

Dear friend,

Your old troubadour has such a bad cough that a little bit more
would be the last straw. On the other hand, they cannot get on
without me at our house, and I cannot stay longer than next week,
that is to say, the 15th or the 16th. If you could come next
Thursday, the 13th, I should reserve the 13th, the 14th, even the
15th, to be with you at my house for the day for dinner, for the
evening, in short, just as if we were in the country, where we could
read and converse. I would be supposed to have gone away.

A word at once, I embrace you as I love you.

G. Sand

CCXXX. TO GEORGE SAND

Dear master,

Have you promised your support to the candidacy of Duquesnel? if
not, I should like to beg you to use to the utmost your influence to
support my friend, Raymond Deslandes, as if he were

Your old troubadour,

G. Flaubert

Thursday, three o'clock, 13 June, 1872.

Answer me categorically, so that we may know what you will do.

CCXXXI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
..Nohant, 5 July, 1872

I must write to you today. Sixty-eight years old. Perfect health in
spite of the cough, which lets me sleep now that I am plunging daily
in a furious little torrent, cold as ice. It boils around the
stones, the flowers, the great grasses in a delicious shade. It is
an ideal place to bathe.

We have had some terrible storms: lightning struck in our garden;
and our stream, the Indre, has become like a torrent in the
Pyrenees. It is not unpleasant. What a fine summer! The grain is
seven feet high, the wheat fields are sheets of flowers. The peasant
thinks that there are too many; but I let him talk, it is so lovely!
I go on foot to the stream, I jump, all boiling hot, into the icy
water. The doctor says that is madness. I let him talk, too; I am
curing myself while his patients look after themselves and croak. I
am like the grass of the fields: water and sun, that is all I need.

Are you off for the Pyrenees? Ah! I envy you, I love them so! I have
taken frantic trips there; but I don't know Luchon. Is it lovely,
too? You won't go there without seeing the Cirque of Gavarnie, and
the road that leads there, will you? And Cauterets and the lake of
Gaube? And the route of Saint-Sauveur? Heavens! How lucky one is to
travel and to see the mountains, the flowers, the cliffs! Does all
that bore you?

Do you remember the editors, the theatrical managers, the readers
and the public when you are running about the country! As for me, I
forget everything as I do when Pauline Viardot is singing.

The other day we discovered, about three leagues from here, a
wilderness, an absolute wilderness of woods in a great expanse of
country, where not one hut could be seen, not a human being, not a
sheep, not a fowl, nothing but flowers, butterflies and birds all
day. But where will my letter find you? I shall wait to send it to
you till you give me an address!

CCXXXII. TO GEORGE SAND
Bagneres de Luchon, 12th July, 1872

I have been here since Sunday evening, dear master, and no happier
than at Croisset, even a little less so, for I am very idle. They
make so much noise in the house where we are that it is impossible
to work. Moreover, the sight of the  bourgeois who surround us is
unendurable. I am not made for travelling. The least inconvenience
disturbs me. Your old troubadour is very old, decidedly! Doctor
Lambron, the  physician of this place, attributes my nervous
tendencies to the excessive use of tobacco. To be agreeable I am
going to smoke less; but I doubt very much if my virtue will cure
me!

I have just read Dickens's Pickwick. Do you know that? There are
superb passages in it; but what defective composition!  All English
writers are the same; Walter Scott excepted, all lack a plot. That
is unendurable for us Latins.

Mister ***** is certainly nominated, as it seems. All the people who
have had to do with the Odeon, beginning with you, dear master, will
repent of the support that they have given him. As for me, who,
thank Heaven, have no more connection with that establishment, I
don't give a whoop.

As I am going to begin a book which will exact much reading,  and
since I don't want to ruin myself in books, do you know of any
dealer in Paris who would rent me all the books that I designated?

What are you doing now? We saw each other so little and so
inconveniently the last time.

This letter is stupid. But they are making such a noise over my head
that it is not clear (my head).

In the midst of my bewilderment, I embrace you and yours also. Your
old blockhead who loves you.

CCXXXIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 19 July, 1872

Dear old troubadour,

We too are going away, but without knowing yet where we are going;
it doesn't make any difference to me. I wanted to take my brood to
Switzerland; they would rather go in the opposite direction, to the
Ocean; the Ocean will do! If only we travel and bathe, I shall be
out of my mind with joy.  Decidedly our two old troubadourships are
two opposites. What bores you, amuses me; I love movement and noise,
and even the tiresome things about travelling find favor in my eyes,
provided they are a part of travelling. I am much more sensible to
what disturbs the calm of sedentary life, than to that which is a
normal and necessary disturbance in the life of motion.

I am absolutely like my grandchildren, who are intoxicated
beforehand without knowing why. But it is curious to see how
children, while loving the change, want to take with them their
surroundings, their accustomed playthings, when they go out into the
world. Aurore is packing her dolls' trunk, and Gabrielle, who likes
animals better, intends to take her rabbits, her little dog, and a
little pig that she is taking care of until she eats it. SUCH IS
LIFE [sic].

I believe that, in spite of your bad temper, this trip will do you
good. It will make you rest your brain, and if you have to smoke
less, so much the better! Health above all. I hope that your niece
will make you move around a bit; she is your child; she ought to
have some authority over you, or the world would be turned upside
down.

I cannot refer you to the bookshop that you need for borrowing
books. I send for such things to Mario Proth, and I don't know where
he finds them. When you get back to Paris, tell him from me to
inform you. He is a devoted fellow, as obliging as possible. He
lives at 2 rue Visconti. It occurs to me that Charles Edmond, too,
might give you very good information; Troubat, [Footnote: Sainte-
Beuve's secretary.] also.

You are surprised that spoken words are not contracts; you are very
simple; in business nothing holds except written documents. We are
Don Quixotes, my old troubadour; we must resign ourselves to being
trimmed by the innkeepers. Life is like that, and he who does not
want to be deceived must go to live in a desert. It is not living to
keep away from all the evil of this nether-world. One must swallow
the bitter with the sweet.

As to your Saint-Antoine, if you let me, I shall see about finding
you a publisher or a review on my next trip to Paris, but we ought
to talk about it together and you ought to read it to me. Why
shouldn't you come to us in September? I shall be at home until
winter.

You ask me what I am doing now: I have done, since I left Paris, an
article on Mademoiselle de Flaugergues, which will appear in
l'Opinion nationale with a work by her; an article for le Temps on
Victor Hugo, Bouilhet, Leconte de Lisle and Pauline Viardot. I hope
that you will be pleased with what I said about your friend; I have
done a second fantastic tale for the Revue des Deux Mondes, a tale
for children. I have written about a hundred letters, for the most
part to make up for the folly or to soften the misery of imbeciles
of my acquaintance. Idleness is the plague of this age, and life is
passed in working for those who do not work. I do not complain. I am
well! every day I plunge into the Indre and into its icy cascades,
my sixty-eight years and my whooping-cough. When I am no longer
useful nor agreeable to others, I want to go away quietly without
saying OUF! or at least, not saying anything except that against
poor mankind, which is not worth much, but of which I am part, not
being worth perhaps very much myself.

I love you and I embrace you. My family does too, Plauchut included.
He is going to travel with us.

When we are SOMEWHERE FOR SEVERAL DAYS I shall write to you for
news.

G. Sand

CCXXXIV. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset, Thursday

Dear master,

In the letter I received from you at Luchon a month ago, you told me
that you were packing up, and then that was all. No more news! I
have permitted myself to assume, as the good Brantome would say,
that you were at Cabourg! When do you return? Where do you go then?
To Paris or to Nohant? A question.

As for me, I am not leaving Croisset. From the 1st to the 20th or
25th of September I shall have to go about a bit on business. I
shall go to Paris. Write then to rue Murillo.

I should like very much to see you: (1) to see you; (2) to read you
Saint-Antoine, then to talk to you about another more important
book, etc., and to talk about a hundred other things privately.

CCXXXV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 31 August, 1872

My old troubadour,

Here we are back again at home, after a month passed, just as you
said, at Cabourg, where chance more than intention placed us. We all
took wonderful sea baths, Plauchut, too. We often talked of you with
Madame Pasca who was our neighbor at table, and had the room next
us. We have returned in splendid health, and we are glad to see our
old Nohant again, after having been glad to leave it for a little
change of air.

I have resumed my usual work, and I continue my river baths, but no
one will accompany me, it is too cold. As for me, I found fault with
the sea for being too warm. Who would think that, with my appearance
and my tranquil old age, I would still love EXCESS? My dominant
passion on the whole is my Aurore. My life depends on hers. She was
so lovely on the trip, so gay, so appreciative of the amusements
that we gave her, so attentive to what she saw, and curious about
everything with so much intelligence, that she is real and
sympathetic company at every hour. Ah! how UNLITERARY I am! Scorn me
but still love me.

I don't know if I shall find you in Paris when I go there for my
play. I have not arranged with the Odeon for the date of its
performance. I am waiting for Duquesnel for the final reading.--And
then I expect Pauline Viardot about the 20th of September, and I
hope Tourgueneff too, won't you come also? it would be so nice and
so complete!

In this hope which I will not give up, I love you and I embrace you
with all my soul, and my children join me in loving you and
summoning you.

G. Sand

CCXXXVI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Paris
Nohant, 25 October, 1872

Your letters fall on me like a rain that refreshes, and develops at
once all that is germinating in the soil; they make me want to
answer your reasons, because your reasons are powerful and inspire a
reply.

I do not assume that my replies will be strong too; they are
sincere, they issue from the roots of my being, like the plants
aforesaid. That is why I have just written a paper on the subject
that you raise, addressing myself this time TO A WOMAN FRIEND, who
has written me also in your vein, but less well than you, of course,
and a little from an aristocratically intellectual point of view, to
which she has not ALL THE RIGHTS SHE DESIRES.

My roots, one can't extirpate them, and I am astonished that you ask
me to make tulips come from them when they can answer you by
producing only potatoes. Since the beginning of my intellectual
blooming, when, studying quite alone at the bedside of my paralyzed
grandmother, or in the fields at the times when I entrusted her to
Deschartres, I asked myself the most elementary questions about
society; I was no more advanced at seventeen than a child of six,
not as much! thanks to Deschartres, my father's teacher, who was a
contradiction from his head to his feet, much learning and little
sense; thanks to the convent, into which they stuck me, God knows
why, as they believed in nothing; thanks also to a purely
Restoration surrounding in which my grandmother, a philosopher, but
dying, breathed her last without resisting further the monarchical
current.

Then I read Chateaubriand, and Rousseau; I passed from the Gospels
to the Contrat social. I read the history of the Revolution written
by the pious, the history of France, written by philosophers; and,
one fine day, I made all that agree like light proceeding from two
lamps, and I had PRINCIPLES. Don't laugh, very candid, childish
principles which have remained with me through all, through Lelia
and the romantic epoch, through love and doubt, enthusiasm and
disenchantments. To love, to make sacrifices, only to reconsider
when the sacrifice is harmful to those who are the object of it, and
to sacrifice oneself again in the hope of serving a real cause,
love.

I am not speaking here of personal passion, but of love of race, of
the widening sentiment of self-love, of the horror of THE ISOLATED
MOI. And that ideal of JUSTICE of which you speak, I have never seen
it apart from love, since the first law on which the existence of a
natural society depends, is that we shall serve each other mutually,
like the bees and the ants. This concurrence of all to the same end,
we have agreed to call instinct among beasts, and it does not
matter, but among men, the instinct is love; he who withdraws
himself from love, withdraws himself from truth, from justice.

I have experienced revolutions, and I have seen the principal actors
near to; I have seen the depth of their souls, I should say the
bottom of their bag: NO PRINCIPLES! and no real intelligence, no
force, nor endurance. Nothing but means and a personal end. Only one
had principles, not all of them good, but in comparison with their
integrity, he counted his personality for nothing: Barbes.

Among artists and literary men, I have found no depth. You are the
only one with whom I have been able to exchange other ideas than
those of the profession. I don't know if you were at Magny's one day
when I said to them that they were all GENTLEMEN. They said that one
should not write for ignoramuses. They spurned me because I wanted
to write only for them, as they are the only ones who need anything.
The masters are provided for, are rich, satisfied. Imbeciles lack
everything, I am sorry for them. Loving and pitying are not to be
separated. And there you have the uncomplicated mechanism of my
thought.

I have the passion for goodness and not at all for prejudiced
sentimentality. I spit with all my might upon him who pretends to
hold my principles and acts contrary to them. I do not pity the
incendiary and the assassin who fall under the hand of the law; I do
pity profoundly the class which a brutal, degenerate life without
upward trend and without aid, brings to the point of producing such
monsters. I pity humanity, I wish it were good, because I cannot
separate myself from it; because it is myself; because the evil it
does strikes me to the heart; because its shame makes me blush;
because its crimes gnaw at my vitals, because I cannot understand
paradise in heaven nor on earth for myself alone.

You ought to understand me, you who are goodness from head to foot.

Are you still in Paris? It has been such fine weather that I have
been tempted to go there to embrace you, but I don't dare to spend
the money, however little it may be, when there is so much poverty.
I am miserly because I know that I am extravagant when I forget, and
I continually forget. And then I have so much to do!...I don't know
anything and I don't learn anything, for I am always forced to learn
it over again. I do very much need, however, to see you again, for a
little bit; it is a part of myself which I miss.

My Aurore keeps me very busy. She understands too quickly and we
have to take her at a hard gallop. To understand fascinates her, to
know repels her. She is as lazy as monsieur, her father, was. He has
gotten over it so well that I am not impatient. She promises me to
write you a letter soon. You see that she does not forget you.
Titite's Punch has lost his head, literally, because he has been so
embraced and caressed. He is loved as much without his head; what an
example of fidelity in misfortune! His stomach has become a
receptacle where playthings are put.

Maurice is deep in his archeological studies, Lina is always
adorable, and all goes well except that the maids are not clean.
What a road the creatures have still to travel who do not keep
themselves clean!

I embrace you. Tell me how you are getting on with Aisse, the Odeon
and all that stuff you are busy about. I love you; that is the end
of all my discourses.

G. Sand

CCXXXVII. TO GEORGE SAND

Dear master,

In your last letter, among the nice things that you say to me, you
praise me for not being "haughty"; one is not haughty with what is
high. Therefore, in this aspect, you cannot know me. I object.

Although I consider myself a good man, I am not always an agreeable
gentleman, witness what happened to me Thursday last. After having
lunched with a lady whom I had called "imbecile," I went to call on
another whom I had said was "ninny"; such is my ancient French
gallantry. The first one had bored me to death with her
spiritualistic discourses and her pretensions to ideality; the
second outraged me by telling me that Renan was a rascal. Observe
that she confessed to me that she had not read his books. There are
some subjects about which I lose patience, and, when a friend is
slandered before my very face, the savage in my blood returns, I see
red. Nothing more foolish! for it serves no purpose and hurts me
frightfully.

This vice, by the way, BETRAYING ONE'S FRIENDS IN PUBLIC, seems to
me to be taking gigantic proportions!

CCXXXVIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 26 October, 1872

Dear friend,

Here is another chagrin for you; a sorrow foreseen, but none the
less distressing. Poor Theo! I pity him deeply, not because he is
dead, but because he has not been really living for twenty years;
and if he had consented to live, to exist, to act, to forget a bit
his intellectual personality so as to conserve his material
personality, he could have lived a long time yet, and have renewed
his resources which he was too much inclined to make a sterile
treasure. They say that he suffered greatly from hardship during the
siege. I understand it, but afterward? why and how?

I am worried at not having had news from you for a long time. Are
you at Croisset? You must have been in Paris for the funeral of this
poor friend. What cruel and repeated separations! I am angry with
you for becoming savage and discontented with life. It seems to me
that you regard happiness too much as a possible thing, and that the
absence of happiness which is our chronic state, angers you and
astonishes you too much. You shun friends, you plunge into work, and
reckon ass lost the time you might employ in loving or in being
loved. Why didn't you come to us with Madame Viardot and
Tourgueneff? You like them, you admire them, you know that you are
adored here, and you run away to be alone. Well, how about getting
married? Being alone is odious, it is deadly, and it is cruel also
for those who love you. All your letters are unhappy and grip my
heart. Haven't you any woman whom you love or by whom you would be
loved with pleasure? Take her to live with you. Isn't there anywhere
a little urchin whose father you can believe you are? Bring him up.
Make yourself his slave, forget yourself in him.

What do I know? To live in oneself is bad. There is intellectual
pleasure only in the possibility of returning to it when one has
been out for a long time; but to live always in this Moi which is
the most tyrannical, the most exacting, the most fantastic of
companions, no, one must not.--I beg you, listen to me! You are
shutting up an exuberant nature in a jail, you are making out of a
tender and indulgent heart, a deliberate misanthrope,--and you will
not make a success of it. In short, I am worried about you, and I am
saying perhaps some foolishness to you; but we live in cruel times
and we must not undergo them with curses. We must rise above them
with pity. That's it! I love you, write to me.

I shall not go to Paris until after a month's time to put on
Mademoiselle La Quintinie. Where shall you be?

CCXXXIX. TO GEORGE SAND
Monday night, 28 October, 1872

You have guessed rightly, dear master, that I had an increase of
sorrow, and you have written me a very tender, good letter, thanks;
I embrace you even more warmly than usual.

Although expected, the death of poor Theo has distressed me. He is
the last of my intimates to go. He closes the list. Whom shall I see
now when I go to Paris? With whom shall I talk of what interests me?
I know some thinkers (at least people who are called so), but an
artist, where is there any? For my part, I tell you he died from the
"putrescence of modern times." That is his word, and he repeated it
to me this winter several times: "I am dying of the Commune," etc.

The 4th of September has inaugurated an order of things in which
people like him have nothing more in the world to do. One must not
demand apples of orange trees. Artisans in luxury are useless in a
society dominated by plebeians. How I regret him! He and Bouilhet
have left an absolute void in me, and nothing can take their place.
Besides he was always so good, and no matter what they say, so
simple. People will recognize later (if they ever return seriously
to literature), that he was a great poet. Meanwhile he is an
absolutely unknown author. So indeed is Pierre Corneille.

He hated two things: the hate of the Philistines in his youth, that
gave him his talent; the hate of the blackguards in his riper years,
this last killed him. He died of suppressed fury, of wrath at not
being able to say what he thought. He was OPPRESSED by Girardin, by
Fould, by Dalloz, and by the first Republic. I tell you that,
because _I_ HAVE SEEN abominable things and I am the only man
perhaps to whom he made absolute confidences. He lacked what was the
most important thing in life for him and for others: CHARACTER. That
he failed of the Academy was to him a dreadful chagrin. What
weakness! and how little he must have esteemed himself! To seek an
honor no matter what, seems to me, besides, an act of
incomprehensible modesty.

I was not at his funeral owing to the mistake of Catulle Mendes, who
sent me a telegram too late. There was a crowd. A lot of scoundrels
and buffoons came to advertise themselves as usual, and today,
Monday, the day of the theatrical paper, there must be bits in the
bulletins, THAT WILL MAKE COPY. To resume, I do not pity him, I ENVY
HIM. For, frankly, life is not amusing.

No, I don't think that HAPPINESS IS POSSIBLE, but certainly
tranquillity. That is why I get away from what irritates me. A trip
to Paris is for me now, a great business. As soon as I shake the
vessel, the dregs mount and permeate all. The least conversation
with anyone at all exasperates me because I find everyone idiotic.
My feeling of justice is continually revolted. They talk ONLY of
politics and in what a fashion! Where is there a sign of an idea?
What can one get hold of? What shall one get excited about?

I don't think, however, that I am a monster of egoism. My Moi
scatters itself in books so that I pass whole days without noticing
it. I have bad moments, it is true, but I pull myself together by
this reflection: "No one at least bothers me." After that, I regain
my balance. So I think that I am going on in my natural path; am I
right?

As for living with a woman, marrying as you advise me to do that is
a prospect that I find fantastic. Why? I don't know. But it is so.
Explain the riddle. The feminine being has never been included in my
life; and then, I am not rich enough, and then, and then--...I am
too old, and too decent to inflict forever my person on another.
There is in me an element of the ecclesiastical that people don't
know. We shall talk about that better than we can write of it.

I shall see you in Paris in December, but in Paris one is disturbed
by others. I wish you three hundred performances for Mademoiselle La
Quintinie. But you will have a lot of bother with the Odeon. It is
an institution where I suffered horribly last winter. Every time
that I attempted to do anything they dished me. So, enough! enough!
"Hide thy life," maxim of Epictetus. My whole ambition now is to
flee from bother, and I am sure by that means never to cause any to
others, that is much.

I am working like a madman, I am reading medicine, metaphysics,
politics, everything. For I have undertaken a work of great scope,
which will require a lot of time, a prospect that pleases me.

Ever since a month ago, I have been expecting Tourgueneff from week
to week. The gout is delaying him still.

CCXL. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
Nohant, 22 November, 1872

I don't think that I shall go to Paris before February. My play is
postponed on account of the difficulty of finding the chief actor. I
am content about it, for the idea of leaving Nohant, my occupations,
and the walks that are so lovely in this weather, didn't look good
to me at all; what a warm autumn and how good for old people! Two
hours distant from here, we have a real wilderness, where, the next
day after a rain, it is as dry as in a room, and where there are
still flowers for me, and insects for Maurice. The little children
run like rabbits in the heather which is higher than they are.
Heavens! how good it is to be alive when all one loves is living and
scurrying around one. You are the only BLACK SPOT in my heart-life,
because you are sad and don't want to look at the sun. As for those
about whom I don't care, I don't care either about the evils or the
follies they can commit against me or against themselves. They will
pass as the rain passes. The eternal thing is the feeling of beauty
in a good heart. You have both, confound it! you have no right not
to be happy.--Perhaps you ought to have had in your life the
INCLUSION OF THE FEMININE SENTIMENT which you say you have defied.--
I know that the feminine is worth nothing; but, perhaps, in order to
be happy, one must have been unhappy.

I have been, and I know enough about it; but I forget so well. Well,
sad or gay, I love you and I am still waiting for you, although you
never speak of coming to see us, and you cast aside the opportunity
emphatically; we love you here just the same, we are not literary
enough for you here, I know that, but we love, and that gives life
occupation.

Is Saint-Antoine finished, that you are talking of a work of great
scope? or is it Saint-Antoine that is going to spread its wings over
the entire universe? It could, the subject is immense.  I embrace
you, shall I say again, my old troubadour, since you have resolved
to turn into an old Benedictine? I shall remain a troubadour,
naturally.

G. Sand

I am sending you two novels for your collection of my writings: you
are not OBLIGED to read them immediately, if you are deep in serious
things.

CCXLI. TO GEORGE SAND
Monday evening, eleven o'clock, 25 November, 1872

The postman just now, at five o'clock, has brought your two volumes
to me. I am going to begin Nanon at once, for I am very curious
about it.

Don't worry any more about your old troubadour (who is becoming a
silly animal, frankly), but I hope to recover. I have gone through,
several times, melancholy periods, and I have come out all right.
Everything wears out, boredom with the rest.

I expressed myself badly: I did not mean that I scorned "the
feminine sentiment." But that woman, materially speaking, had never
been one of my habits, which is quite different. I have LOVED more
than anyone, a presumptuous phrase which means "quite like others,"
and perhaps even more than average person. Every affection is known
to me, "the storms of the heart" have "poured out their rain" on me.
And then chance, force of circumstances, causes solitude to increase
little by little around me, and now I am alone, absolutely alone.

I have not sufficient income to take unto myself a wife, nor even to
live in Paris for six months of the year: so it is impossible for me
to change my way of living.

Do you mean to say that I did not tell you that Saint-Antoine had
been finished since last June? What I am dreaming of just now, is
something of greater scope, which will aim to be comic. It would
take too long to explain to you with a pen. We shall talk of it when
we meet.

Adieu, dear good, adorable master, yours with his best affection,

Your old friend.

Always as indignant as Saint Polycarp.

Do you know, in all history, including that of the Botocudos,
anything more imbecile than the Right of the National Assembly?
These gentlemen who do not want the simple and frivolous word
Republic, who find Thiers too advanced!!! O profoundness! problem,
revery!

CCXLII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 27 November, 1872

Maurice is quite happy and very proud of the letter you wrote him;
there is no one who could give him as much pleasure and whose
encouragement counts more with him. I thank you too, for my part;
for I agree with him.

What! you have finished Saint-Antoine? Well, should I find a
publisher, since you are not doing so? You cannot keep it in your
portfolio. You don't like Levy, but there are others; say the word,
and I will act as if it were for myself.

You promise me to get well later, but in the mean time you don't
want to do anything to jolt yourself. Come, then, to read Saint-
Antoine to me, and we will talk of publishing it. What is coming
here from Croisset, for a man? If you won't come when we are gay and
having a holiday, come while it is quiet an I am alone.  All the
family embraces you.

Your old troubadour

G. Sand

CCXLIII. TO GEORGE SAND

Dear master,

Here it is a night and a day that I have spent with you. I had
finished Nanon at four o'clock in the morning, and Francia at three
o'clock in the afternoon. All of it is still dancing around in my
head. I am going to try to gather my ideas together to talk about
these excellent books to you. They have done me good. So thank you,
dear, good master. Yes, they were like a great whiff of air, and,
after having been moved, I feel refreshed.

In Nanon, in the first place I was charmed with the style, with a
thousand simple and strong things which are included in the web of
the work, and which make it what it is; for instance: "as the burden
seemed to me enormous, the beast seemed to me beautiful." But I did
not pay any attention to any thing, I was carried away, like the
commonest reader. (I don't think that the common reader could admire
it as much as I do.) The life of the monks, the first relations
between Emilien and Nanon, the fear caused by the brigands and the
imprisonment of Pere Fructueux which could be commonplace and which
it is not at all. What a fine page is 113! and how difficult it was
to stay within bounds! "Beginning with this day, I felt happiness in
everything, and, as it were, a joy to be in the world."

La Roche aux Fades is an exquisite idyll. One would like to share
the life of those three fine people.

I think that the interest slackens a little when Nanon gets the idea
of becoming rich. She becomes too strongminded, too intelligent! I
don't like the episode of the robbers either. The reappearance of
Emilien with his arm cut off, stirred me again, and I shed a tear at
the last page over the portrait of the Marquise de Francqueville in
her old age.

I submit to you the following queries: Emilien seems to me very much
up in political philosophy; at that period did people see as far
ahead as he? The same objection applies to the prior, whom I think
otherwise charming, in the middle of the book especially. But how
well all that is brought in, how well sustained, how fascinating,
how charming! What a creature you are! What power you have!

I give you on your two cheeks, two little nurse's kisses, and I pass
to Francia! Quite another style, but none the less good. And in the
first place I admire enormously your Dodore. This is the first time
that anyone has made a Paris gamin real; he is not too generous, nor
too intemperate, nor too much of a vaudevillist. The dialogue with
his sister, when he consents to her becoming a kept woman, is a
feat. Your Madame de Thievre, with her shawl which she slips up and
down over her fat shoulders, isn't she decidedly of the Restoration!
And the uncle who wants to confiscate his nephew's grisette! And
Antoine, the good fat tinsmith so polite at the theatre! The Russian
is a simple-minded, natural man, a character that is not easy to do.

When I saw Francia plunge the poignard into his heart, I frowned
first, fearing that it might be a classic vengeance that would spoil
the charming character of that good girl. But not at all! I was
mistaken, that unconscious murder completed your heroine.

What strikes me the most in the book is that it is very intelligent
and exact. One is completely in the period.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart for this twofold reading. It
has relaxed me. Everything then is not dead. There is still
something beautiful and good in the world.

CCXLIV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 29 November, 1872

You spoil me! I did not dare to send you the novels, which were
wrapped up addressed to you for a week. I was afraid of interrupting
your train of thought and of boring you. You stopped everything to
read Maurice first, and then me. We should be remorseful if we were
not egoists, very happy to have a reader who is worth ten thousand
others! That helps a great deal; for Maurice and I work in a desert,
never knowing, except from each other, if a thing is a success or a
mess, exchanging our criticisms, and never having relations with
accredited JUDGES.

Michel never tells us until after a year or two if a book has SOLD.
As for Buloz, if it is with him we have to do, he tells us
invariably that the thing is bad or poor. It is only Charles Edmond
who encourages us by asking us for copy. We write without
consideration for the public; that is perhaps not a bad idea, but we
carry it too far. And praise from you gives us the courage which
does not depart from us, but which is often a sad courage, while you
make it sparkling and gay, and healthful for us to breathe.

I was right then in not throwing Nanon into the fire, as I was ready
to do, when Charles Edmond came to tell me that it was very well
done, and that he wanted it for his paper. I thank you then, and I
send you back your good kisses, for Francia especially, which Buloz
only put in with a sour face and for lack of something better: you