about a woman fifty-eight years old, who is a mother to me, who folds me in her heart and protects me from stings? Do not be jealous of her; she would be so glad of our happiness. She is an angel, sublime. There are angels of earth and angels of heaven; she is of heaven.
I have the contempt for money that you profess; but money is a necessity; and that is why I am putting such ardour into the vast and extraordinary enterprise which will burst forth in January. You will like the result. To it I shall owe the pleasure of being able to travel rapidly and to go oftener toward you.
Una fides; yes, my beloved angel, one sole love and all for you. It is very late for a young man whose hairs are whitening; but his heart is ardent; he is as you wish him to be, naïve, childlike, confiding. I go to you without fear; yes, I will drive away the shyness which has kept me so young, and stretch to you a hand old in friendship, a brow, a soul that is full of you.
Let us be joyous, my adored treasure; all my life is in you. For you I would suffer everything!
You have made me so happy that I think no longer of my lawsuit. The loss is reckoned up. I have done like le distrait of La Bruyère—established myself well in my ditch. For three thousand eight hundred francs flung to that man, I shall have liberty on a mountain.
I will bring you your Chénier, and will read it to you in the nook of a rock before your lake. Oh, happiness!
What a likeness between us! both of us mismanaged by our mothers. How that misfortune developed sensitiveness. Why do you speak of a "cherished lamb"? Are you not my dear Star, an angel towards whom I strive to mount?
I have still three pages on which to talk with you, but here comes business, lawyers, conferences. À bientôt, A thousand tendernesses of the soul.
You speak to me of a faithless woman; but there is no infidelity where there was no love.
[1] This was one of his amusing visions of making a fortune.—TR.
Paris, September 9, 1833.
Winter is already here, my dear soul, and already I have resumed my winter station in the corner of that little gallery you know of. I have left the cool, green salon from which I saw the dome of the Invalides over twenty acres of leafage. It was in this corner that I received and read your first letter, so that now I love it better than before. Returning to it, I think of you more specially, you, my cherished thought; and I cannot resist speaking a little word to you, conversing one fraction of an hour with you. How could it be that I should not love you, you, the first woman who came across the spaces to warm a heart that despaired of love. I had done all to draw to me an angel from on high; fame was only a pharos to me, nothing more. Then you divined all—the soul, the heart, the man. And yesterday, re-reading your letter, I saw that you alone had the instinct to feel all that is my life. You ask me how I can find time to write to you. Well, my dear Eve (let me abridge your name, it will tell you better that you are all the sex to me, the only woman in the world, like the first woman to the first man)—well, you alone have asked yourself if a poor artist to whom time lacks, does not make sacrifices that are immense in thinking of and writing to her he loves. Here, no one thinks of that; they take my hours without scruple. But now I would fain consecrate my whole life to you, think only of you, and write for you only.
With what joy, if I were free of cares, would I fling all palms, all fame, and my finest works like grains of incense on the altar of love. To love, Eve—that is my life!
I should long ago have wished to ask you for your portrait if there were not some insult, I know not what, in the request. I do not want it until after I have seen you. To-day, my flower of heaven, I send you a lock of my hair; it is still black, but I hasten it to defy time. I am letting my hair grow, and people ask why. Why? Because I want enough to make you chains and bracelets!
Forgive me, my dearest, but I love you as a child loves, with all the joys, all the superstitions, all the illusions of its first love. Cherished angel, how often I have said to myself: "Oh! if I were loved by a woman of twenty-seven, how happy I should be; I could love her all my life without fearing the separations that age decrees." And you, my idol, you are forever the realization of that ambition of love.
Dear, I hope to start on the 18th for Besançon. It depends on imperative business. I would have broken that off if it did not concern my mother and many very serious interests. I should be thought a lunatic, and I have already trouble enough to pass for a man of sense.
If you will take "L'Europe littéraire" from the 15th of August you will find the whole of the "Théorie de la Démarche" and a "Conte Drolatique" called "Perseverance d'amour," which you can read without fear. It will give you an idea of the first two dizains.
You have now read "Le Médecin de campagne." Alas! my critical friends and I have already found more than two hundred faults in the first volume! I thirst for the second edition, that I may bring the book to its perfection. Have you laid down the book at the moment when Benassis utters the adored name?
I am working now at "Eugénie Grandet," a composition which will appear in "L'Europe littéraire" when I am travelling.
I must bid you adieu. Do not be sad, my love; it is not allowable that you should be when you can live at all moments in a heart where you are sure of being as you are in your own, and where you will find more thoughts full of you than there are in yours.
I have had a box made to hold and perfume letter-paper; and I have taken the liberty to have one like it made for you. It is so sweet to say, "She will touch and open this little casket, now here." And then, I think it so pretty; besides, it is made of bois de France; and it can hold your Chénier, the poet of love—the greatest of French poets, whose every line I would like to read to you on my knees.
Adieu, treasure of joy, adieu. Why do you leave blank pages in your letters? But leave them, leave them. Do nothing forced. Those blanks I fill myself. I say to myself, "Her arm passed here," and I kiss the blank! Adieu, my hopes. À bientôt. The mail-cart goes, they say, in thirty-six hours to Besançon.
Well, adieu, my cherished Eve, my eloquent and all-gracious star. Do you know that when I receive a letter from you a presentiment, I don't know what, has already announced it. So to-day, 9th, I am certain I shall get one to-morrow. Your lake—I see it; and sometimes my intuition is so strong that I am sure that when I really see you I shall say, "'Tis she!"—"She, my love, is thou!"
Adieu; à bientôt.
Paris, September 13, 1833.
Your last letter, of the 9th, has caused me I cannot tell what keen pain; it has entered my heart to desolate it. It is now three hours that I have been sitting here plunged in a world of painful thoughts. What crape you have fastened on the sweetest, most joyous hopes which ever caressed my soul! What! that book, which I now hate, has given you weapons against me? Do you not know with what impetuosity I spring to happiness? I was so happy! You put God between us! You will not have my joys, you divide your heart: you say, "There, I will live with him; here, I will live no more." You make me know all the agonies of jealousy against ideas, against reason! Mon Dieu, I would not say to you wicked sophisms; I hate corruption as much as violation; I would not owe a woman to seduction, nor even to the power of good. The sentiment which crowns me with joy, which delights me, is the free and pure sentiment which yields neither to the grace of evil nor to the attraction of good; an involuntary sentiment, roused by intuitive perception and justified by happiness. You gave me all that; I lived in a clear heaven, and now you have flung me into the sorrows of doubt. To love, my angel, is to have nothing in the heart but the person loved. If love
