She will have no marks. There were bores there, so I came away—one of them that enemy to all laughter, the bibliophile X … , about whom you ask me for news. Alas! I can tell you all in a word. He has married an actress, a low and obscure woman of bad morals, who, the week before marrying him, had sent to one of my classmates, S … , the editor of the "National," a bill of her debts, by way of flinging him the handkerchief. The bibliophile had said much harm of this actress; he did not then know her. He went behind the scenes of the Odéon, fell in love with her, and she, in revenge, married him. The vengeance is complete; she is the most dreadful tyrant I ever knew. She has resumed her actress allurements, and rules him. There is no talent possible to him under such circumstances. He calls himself a bibliophile and does not know what bibliography is; Nodier and the amateurs laugh at him. He needs much money, and he stays in literature for want of funds to be a banker or a merchant of fashions. Hence his books—"Divorce," "Vertu et Tempérament," and all that he does. He is the culminating point of mediocrity. By one of those chances that seem occult, I knew of his behaving horribly to a poor woman whose seduction he had undertaken as if it were a matter of business. I have seen that woman weeping bitter tears at having belonged to a man whom she did not esteem and who had no talent.
Sandeau has just gone to Italy; he is in despair; I thought him crazy. …
As for Janin, another alas! … Janin is a fat little man who bites everybody. The preface to "Barnave" is not by him, but by Béquet, on the staff of the "Journal des Débats," a witty man, ill-conducted, who was hiding with Janin to escape his creditors. Béquet was a school-mate of mine; he came to me, already an old man from his excesses, to weep over his trouble. Janin had taken from him a poor singer who was all Béquet's joy. The "Chanson de Barnave" is by de Musset; the infamous chapter about the daughters of Sejanus is by a young man named Félix Pyat.
For mercy's sake, leave me free to be silent about these things when they are too revolting. They run from ear to ear in the salons, and one must needs hear them. I have already told you about H … ; well! married for love, having wife and children, he fell in love with an actress named J … , who, among other proofs of tenderness, sent him a bill of seven thousand francs to her laundress, and H … was forced to sign notes of hand to pay the love-letter. Fancy a great poet, for he is a poet, working to pay the washerwoman of Mademoiselle J … ! Latouche is envious, spiteful, and malicious; he is a fount of venom; but he is faithful to his political creed, honest, and conceals his private life. Scribe is very ill; he has worn himself out in writing.
General rule: there are few artists or great men who have not had their frailties. It is difficult to have a power and not to abuse it. But then, some are calumniated. Here, except about the washerwoman's bill, a thing I have only heard said, all that I have told you are facts that I know personally.
Adieu for to-day, my dear star; in future I will only tell you of things that are good or beautiful in our country, for you seem to me rather ill-disposed towards it. Do not see our warts; see the poor and luckless friends of Sandeau subscribing to give him the needful money to go to Italy; see the two Johannots, so united, so hard-working, living like the two Corneilles. There are good hearts still.
Adieu; I shall re-read your pages to-night before I sleep, and to-morrow I will write you my day. This day I have corrected the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of the "Médecin de campagne" and signed an agreement for the publication of the "Scènes de la Vie Parisienne." I wish I knew what you were doing at the moments when my mind is occupied with you.
During my absence a horse I was fond of died, and three beautiful unknown ladies came to see me. They must have thought me disdainful. I opened their letters on arriving. There was no address; all was mysterious as a bonne fortune. But I am exclusive; I write to none but you, and chance has sent my answer to those inquisitive women.
Paris, July 19-August 8, 1833.
You have not been either forgotten or less loved; but you yourself have been a little forgetful. You have not written to me how long a time you were to stay in Vienna, so that I might know if my reply would reach you there. Then you have written the name of your correspondent so illegibly that I copy it with fear that there may be some mistake.
That said, I have written you several letters which I have burned for fear of displeasing you, and I will now sum up for you in very few words my recent life.
An odious lawsuit was instituted against me by a publisher, à propos of "Le Médecin de campagne." The work was finished to-day, July 19, and will be sold by a publisher appointed by the court. As for that book, I have buried therein since I last wrote to you more than sixty nights. You will read it, you, my distant angel, and you will see how much of heart and life has been spent in that work, with which I am not yet very content.
My work has so absorbed me that I could not give you my thoughts; I am so weary, and for me life is such a desert! The only sentiment apparently true that dawns in my real life is a thousand leagues away from me. Does it not need all the power of a poet's heart to find consolation there; to say to itself amid such toil: "She will quiver with joy in seeing that her name has occupied me, that she herself was present to my thought, and that what I dwelt on as loveliest and noblest in that young girl I have named for her"? You will see in reading the book that you were in my soul as a light.
I have nothing to tell you about myself, because I have been working night and day without seeing any one. Nevertheless, a few unknown ladies have rapped at my door and have written to me. But I have not a vulgar soul, and, as la dilecta says, "If I were young and pretty I should come, and not write this." So I drop all that into the void. There is something of you in this feminine reserve. A crown of the nature of that to which I aspire is given in its entirety; it cannot be divided.
Well, still some days, some months of labour, and I shall have ended one of my tasks. I shall then take a brief repose and refresh my brain by a journey; friends have already proposed to me Germany, Austria, Moravia, Russia. Non so. I do not yet know what I shall do. You are so despotic in your orders that I am afraid to go your way; there would be a double danger there for me.
Your letters delight me; they make me love you more and more; but this life, which turns incessantly toward you, is consumed in efforts and returns to me no richer. To love one another without personal knowledge is torture.
August 1, 1833.
Twelve days' interval without being able to resume my letter! Judge my life by that. It is a perpetual combat, without relaxing. The wretches! they don't know what they destroy of poesy.
My lawsuit will be decided to-morrow. "L'Europe Littéraire" has quoted the "Story of the Emperor" told by a soldier of the Imperial Guard to peasants in a barn (one of the chief things in the "Médecin de campagne"). Bah! And here are speculators who for the last week have stolen me, printed me without my permission, and have sold over twenty thousand copies of that fragment! I could use the law with rigour, but that's unworthy of me. They neither give my name, nor that of the work; they murder me and say nothing; they rob me of my fame and my pittance—me, a poor man! You will some day read that gigantic fragment, which has made the most unfeeling weep, and which a hundred newspapers have reproduced. Friends tell me that from end to end of France there has risen a cry of admiration. What will it be for the whole work!
I send herewith a scrap of a former letter which I had not entirely burned.
Since the 19th of last month I have had nothing but troubles, anxieties, and toil. To finish this little letter, I have to take part of a night, and I think it a gentle recreation.
I leave in a week for the country so as to finish in peace the third dizain of the "Contes Drolatiques" and a great historical novel called "Privilège." Always work! You can, I think, without blushing, allow yourself to read the third dizain. It is almost
