You trample all that twenty times a day beneath your feet, which I kiss twenty times.
Oh, my angel, see me at your knees as I tell you this: if I have had the most fugitive of reputations it has come when I did not want it. I was drunk for it till I was twenty-two. I wanted it as a pharos to attract to me an angel. I had nothing with which to please; I blamed myself. An angel came; I let myself suffer in her bosom, hiding from her my desires for a young and beautiful woman. She saw those desires and said to me: "When she comes I will be your mother, I will have the love of a mother, the devotion of a mother."[1]
Then one day the misery of my life grew greater. The toils of night and day began. She who had offered me, on her knees, her fortune, which I had taken, which I was returning at the peril of my life, she watched, she corrected, she refined, as I refined, corrected, watched. Then all my desires were extinguished in work. It was no longer a question of fame, but of money. I owed, and I had nothing.
Three years I worked without relaxation, having drawn a brass circle around me from 1828 to 1831. I abhor Madame de C[astries], for she broke that life without giving me another—I do not say a comparable one, but without giving me what she promised. There is not the shadow of wounded vanity, oh! but disgust and contempt.
You alone have made me know the vanities of fame. When I saw you at Neufchâtel I wanted to be something. In you then begins, more splendid than I dreamed it, that dreamed life.
Oh! my Eve, you alone in my life to come!—Alas! like Louis Lambert I wish that I could give you my past. Thus, nothing that is success, fame, Parisian distractions, moves me. There is but one power that makes me accept my present life: Toil. It calms the exactions of my fiery temperament. It is because I fear myself that I am chaste.
As for this seclusion that you want, hey! I want it as much as you. It is not being a fop to tell you that since Neufchâtel three ravishing women have come to the rue Cassini, and that I did not even cast a man's glance on seeing them.
My Eve, I love you better than you love me, for I am alone in the secret of what I lose, and you know nothing of love but the sentiments of love. Besides, I love you better, for I have more reasons to love you. If I were free I would live near you, happy to be the steward of your fortune and the artisan of your wealth, as Madame Carraud's brother is for Madame d'Argout. I have a security of love, a plenitude of devotion, which you will only know with time. It needs time to fathom the infinite. To suffer the whole of life with you, taking a few rare moments of happiness, yes! To have a lifetime in two years, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years, and die, yes! Never to speak to a woman, to refuse myself to all, to live in you, oh, angel! but that is my thought at all hours. The … which I told you about Madame P … was because she had vexed you, and before your suffering I became besotted, as you before mine.
Mon Dieu! if we lived together, if I had twenty ducats a month, to you should belong my poems. I would write books, and read them to you, and we would burn them in our fire. My adored minette, I weep sometimes in thinking that I sell my ideas, that people read me! Ah! you do not know what I could be if, free for one evening, I could speak to you, see you, caress you by my thoughts and by myself. Oh! you would then know that your thoughts of purity, of exclusive tenderness are mine. Angel of my life, I live in you, for you, by you. Only, if I am mistaken, tell me so without anger. There is never any false or bad intention in me. I obey my heart in all that is sentiment. I have never known what a calculation is. If I mistake, it is in good faith.
My love, let us never separate. In six months I shall be free. Well, then, no power on earth can disunite us. La dilecta was forty-six when I was twenty-two. Why talk about your forty years? We have thirty years before us. Do you think that at sixty-four a man betrays thirty years' affection?
What! you think that the opera, the salons, fame can distract me from you? Then you don't know how I love you. I shall be more angry at that than you at Madame P … No, believe me, I love you as a woman loves and as a man loves. In my life to come there is nothing but you and work. My dear gift, my dear star, my sweet spirit, let yourself be caressed by hope, and say to yourself that I am not amorous or passionate; all that passes. I love you, I adore you in æternum. I believe in you as I do in myself. Mon Dieu! I would like to know words which could infuse into you my soul and my thought, which could tell you that you are in my heart, in my blood, in my brain, in my thought—in short, the life of my life; that each beating of my heart gives birth to a desire full of thee. Oh! you do not know what are three years of chastity, which spring at every moment to the heart and make it bound, to the head and make it palpitate. If I were not sober and did not work, this purity would drive me mad. I alone am in the secret of the terrible emotions which the emanations from your dear person give me. It is an unspeakable delirium which, by turns, freezes my nature by the omnipotence of desire, and makes me burn. I resist follies like those of the young seigneur cut down by the Elector.
We have, both of us, our sufferings; do not let us dispute that. Let us love each other, and do not refuse me that which makes all accepted. In other respects, in all things, angel, I am submissive to you as to God. Take my life, ask me to die, order me all things, except not to love you, not to desire you, not to possess you. Outside of that all is possible to me in your name.
[1] Madame de Berny is meant, and the invention of this letter is infamous. See letter to Madame Carraud in Appendix, written at the same time as this spurious letter.—TR
Geneva, January, 1834.
If you only knew the superstitions you give me! When I work I put the talisman on my finger; I put it on the first finger of the left hand, with which I hold my paper, so that your thought clasps me. You are there, with me. Now, in seeking from the air for words and ideas, I ask them of that delicious ring; in it I have found the whole of "Séraphita."
Love celestial, what things I have to say to you, for which one needs the sacred hours during which the heart feels the need of baring itself. The adorable pleasures of love are the only means of arriving at that union, that fusion of souls. Dear, with what joy I see the fortunes of my heart and the fate of my soul secured to me. Yes, I will love you alone and solely through my life. You have all that pleases me. You exhale, for me, the most intoxicating perfume a woman can have; that alone is a treasure of love.
I love you with a fanaticism that does not exclude the quietude of a love without possible storms. Yes, say to yourself well that I breathe by the air you breathe, that I can never have any other thought than you. You are the end of all for me. You shall be the young dilecta—already I call you the pre dilecta.
Do not murmur at this alliance of the two sentiments. I should like to think I loved you in her, and that the noble qualities which touched me and made me better than I was were all in you.
I love you, my angel of earth, as they loved in the middle ages, with the most complete fidelity, and my love will always be grand, without stain; I am proud of my love. It is the principle of a new life. Hence, the new courage that I feel under my last adversities. I would be greater, be something glorious, so that the crown to place upon your head should be the most leafy, the most flowery of all those that great men have nobly won!
Never, therefore, have fear or distrust; there are no abysses in heaven! A thousand kisses full of caresses; a thousand caresses full of kisses! Mon Dieu! shall I never be able to make you see how I love you, you, my Eve!
À bientôt; a thousand kisses will be in my first look.
Geneva, January, 1834.
My loved love,
