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The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters

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Title: The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters

Author: George Sand
        Gustave Flaubert

Translator: Aimée L. McKenzie


        
Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #5115]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5115

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GEORGE SAND-GUSTAVE FLAUBERT LETTERS ***




Produced by Steve Harris, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.





The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters

Translated by A.L. McKenzie (1921)

Introduction by Stuart Sherman





PREFATORY NOTE

This translation of the correspondence between George Sand and
Gustave Flaubert was undertaken in consequence of a suggestion by
Professor Stuart P. Sherman. The translator desires to acknowledge
valuable criticism given by Professor Sherman, Ruth M. Sherman, and
Professor Kenneth McKenzie, all of whom have generously assisted in
revising the manuscript.

A. L. McKenzie



INTRODUCTION

The correspondence of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, if
approached merely as a chapter in the biographies of these heroes of
nineteenth century letters, is sufficiently rewarding. In a
relationship extending over twelve years, including the trying
period of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, these
extraordinary personalities disclose the aspects of their diverse
natures which are best worth the remembrance of posterity. However
her passionate and erratic youth may have captivated our
grandfathers, George Sand in the mellow autumn of her life is for us
at her most attractive phase. The storms and anguish and hazardous
adventures that attended the defiant unfolding of her spirit are
over. In her final retreat at Nohant, surrounded by her affectionate
children and grandchildren, diligently writing, botanizing, bathing
in her little river, visited by her friends and undistracted by the
fiery lovers of the old time, she shows an unguessed wealth of
maternal virtue, swift, comprehending sympathy, fortitude, sunny
resignation, and a goodness of heart that has ripened into wisdom.
For Flaubert, too, though he was seventeen years her junior, the
flamboyance of youth was long since past; in 1862, when the
correspondence begins, he was firmly settled, a shy, proud, grumpy
toiling hermit of forty, in his family seat at Croisset, beginning
his seven years' labor at L'Education Sentimentale, master of his
art, hardening in his convictions, and conscious of increasing
estrangement from the spirit of his age. He, with his craving for
sympathy, and she, with her inexhaustible supply of it, meet; he
pours out his bitterness, she her consolation; and so with equal
candor of self-revelation they beautifully draw out and strengthen
each the other's characteristics, and help one another grow old.

But there is more in these letters than a satisfaction for the
biographical appetite, which, indeed, finds ITS account rather in
the earlier chapters of the correspondents' history. What impresses
us here is the banquet spread for the reflective and critical
faculties in this intercourse of natural antagonists. As M. Faguet
observes in a striking paragraph of his study of Flaubert:

"It is a curious thing, which does honor to them both, that Flaubert
and George Sand should have become loving friends towards the end of
their lives. At the beginning, Flaubert might have been looked upon
by George Sand as a furious enemy. Emma [Madame Bovary] is George
Sand's heroine with all the poetry turned into ridicule. Flaubert
seems to say in every page of his work: 'Do you want to know what is
the real Valentine, the real Indiana, the real Lelia? Here she is,
it is Emma Roualt.' 'And do you want to know what becomes of a woman
whose education has consisted in George Sand's books? Here she is,
Emma Roualt.' So that the terrible mocker of the bourgeois has
written a book which is directly inspired by the spirit of the 1840
bourgeois. Their recriminations against romanticism 'which
rehabilitates and poetises the courtesan,' against George Sand, the
Muse of Adultery, are to be found in acts and facts in Madame
Bovary."

Now, the largest interest of this correspondence depends precisely
upon the continuance, beneath an affectionate personal relationship,
of a fundamental antagonism of interests and beliefs, resolutely
maintained on both sides. George Sand, with her lifelong passion for
propaganda and reformation, labors earnestly to bring Flaubert to
her point of view, to remould him nearer to her heart's desire. He,
with a playful deference to the sex and years of his friend,
addresses her in his letters as "Dear Master." Yet in the essentials
of the conflict, though she never gives over her effort, he never
budges a jot; he has taken his ground, and in his last unfinished
work, Bouvard and Pecuchet, he dies stubbornly fortifying his
position. To the last she speaks from a temperament lyrical,
sanguine, imaginative, optimistic and sympathetic; he from a
temperament dramatic, melancholy, observing, cynical, and satirical.
She insists upon natural goodness; he, upon innate depravity. She
urges her faith in social regeneration; he vents his splenetic
contempt for the mob. Through all the successive shocks of
disillusioning experience, she expects the renovation of humanity by
some religious, some semi-mystical, amelioration of its heart; he
grimly concedes the greater part of humanity to the devil, and can
see no escape for the remnant save in science and aristocratic
organization. For her, finally, the literary art is an instrument of
social salvation--it is her means of touching the world with her
ideals, her love, her aspiration; for him the literary art is the
avenue of escape from the meaningless chaos of existence--it is his
subtly critical condemnation of the world.

The origins of these unreconciled antipathies lie deep beneath the
personal relationship of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert; lie deep
beneath their successors, who with more or less of amenity in their
manners are still debating the same questions today. The main
currents of the nineteenth century, with fluent and refluent tides,
clash beneath the controversy; and as soon as one hears its "long
withdrawing roar," and thinks it is dying away, and is become a part
of ancient history, it begins again, and will be heard, no doubt, by
the last man as a solemn accompaniment to his final contention with
his last adversary.

George Sand was, on the whole, a natural and filial daughter of the
French Revolution. The royal blood which she received from her
father's line mingled in her veins with that of the Parisian
milliner, her mother, and predestined her for a leveller by
preparing in her an instinctive ground of revolt against all those
inherited prejudices which divided the families of her parents. As a
young girl wildly romping with the peasant children at Nohant she
discovered a joy in untrammeled rural life which was only to
increase with years. At the proper age for beginning to fashion a
conventional young lady, the hoyden was put in a convent, where she
underwent some exalting religious experiences; and in 1822 she was
assigned to her place in the "established social order" by her
marriage at seventeen to M. Dudevant. After a few years of rather
humdrum domestic life in the country, she became aware that this
gentleman, her husband, was behaving as we used to be taught that
all French husbands ultimately behave; he was, in fact, turning from
her to her maids. The young couple had never been strongly united--
the impetuous dreamy girl and her coarse hunting mate; and they had
grown wide apart. She should, of course, have adjusted herself
quietly to the altered situation and have kept up appearances. But
this young wife had gradually become an "intellectual"; she had been
reading philosophy and poetry; she was saturated with the writings
of Rousseau, of Chateaubriand, of Byron. None of the spiritual
masters of her generation counselled acquiescence in servitude or
silence in misery. Every eloquent tongue of the time-spirit urged
self-expression and revolt. And she, obedient to the deepest
impulses of her blood and her time, revolted.

At the period when Madame Dudevant withdrew her neck from the
conjugal yoke and plunged into her literary career in Paris, the
doctrine that men are created for freedom, equality and fraternity
was already somewhat hackneyed. She, with an impetus from her own
private fortunes, was to give the doctrine a recrudescence of
interest by resolutely applying it to the status of women. We cannot
follow her in detail from the point where she abandons the domestic
sewing-basket to reappear smoking black cigars in the Latin Quarter.
We find her, at about 1831, entering into competition with the
brilliant literary generation of Balzac, Hugo, Alfred de Musset,
Merimee, Stendhal, and Sainte-Beuve. To signalize her equality with
her brothers in talent, she adopts male attire: "I had a sentry-box
coat made, of rough grey cloth, with trousers and waist-coat to
match. With a grey hat and a huge cravat of woolen material, I
looked exactly like a first-year student." In the freedom of this
rather unalluring garb she entered into relations Platonic,
fraternal, or tempestuously passionate with perhaps the most
distinguished series of friends and lovers that ever fluttered about
one flame. There was Aurelien de Seze; Jules Sandeau, her first
collaborator, who "reconciled her to life" and gave her a nom de
guerre; the inscrutable Merimee, who made no one happy; Musset--an
encounter from which both tiger-moths escaped with singed wings; the
odd transitional figure of Pagello; Michel Euraed; Liszt; Chopin,
whom she loved and nursed for eight years; her master Lamennais; her
master Pierre Leroux; her father-confessor Sainte-Beuve; and Gustave
Flaubert, the querulous friend of her last decade.

As we have compressed the long and complex story of her personal
relationships, so we must compress the intimately related history of
her works and her ideas. When under the inspiration of Rousseau, the
emancipated George Sand began to write, her purposes were but
vaguely defined. She conceived of life as primarily an opportunity
for unlimited self-expansion, and of literature as an opportunity
for unrestricted self-expression. "Nevertheless," she declares, "my
instincts have formed, without my privity, the theory I am about to
set down,--a theory which I have generally followed unconsciously.
... According to this theory, the novel is as much a work of poetry
as of analysis. It demands true situations, and characters not only
true but real, grouped about a type intended to epitomize the
sentiment or the main conceptions of the book. This type generally
represents the passion of love, since almost all novels are love-
stories. According to this theory (and it is here that it begins)
the writer must idealize this love, and consequently this type,--and
must not fear to attribute to it all the powers to which he inwardly
aspires, or all the sorrows whose pangs he has observed or felt.
This type must in no wise, however, become degraded by the
vicissitude of events; it must either die or triumph."

In 1831, when her pen began its fluent course through the lyrical
works of her first period--Indiana, Valentine, Lelia, Jacques, and
the rest--we conceive George Sand's culture, temper, and point of
view to have been fairly comparable with those of the young Shelley
when, fifteen years earlier, he with Mary Godwin joined Byron and
Jane Clairmont in Switzerland--young revoltes, all of them,
nourished on eighteenth century revolutionary philosophy and Gothic
novels. Both these eighteenth century currents meet in the work of
the new romantic group in England and in France. The innermost
origin of the early long poems of Shelley and the early works of
George Sand is in personal passion, in the commotion of a romantic
spirit beating its wings against the cage of custom and circumstance
and institutions. The external form of the plot, whatever is
fantastic and wilful in its setting and its adventures, is due to
the school of Ann Radcliffe. But the quality in Shelley and in
George Sand which bewitched even the austere Matthew Arnold in his
green and salad days is the poetising of that liberative eighteenth
century philosophy into "beautiful idealisms" of a love emancipated
from human limitations, a love exalted to the height of its gamut by
the influences of nature, triumphantly seeking its own or shattered
in magnificent despair. In her novels of the first period, George
Sand takes her Byronic revenge upon M. Dudevant. In Indiana and its
immediate successors, consciously or unconsciously, she declares to
the world what a beautiful soul M. Dudevant condemned to sewing on
buttons; in Jacques she paints the man who might fitly have matched
her spirit; and by the entire series, which now impresses us as
fantastic in sentiment no less than in plot, she won her early
reputation as the apologist for free love, the adversary of
marriage.

In her middle period--say from 1838 to 1848--of which The Miller of
Aginbault, Consuelo, and The Countess of Rudolstadt are
representative works, there is a marked subsidence of her personal
emotion, and, in compensation, a rising tide of humanitarian
enthusiasm. Gradually satiated with erotic passion, gradually
convinced that it is rather a mischief-maker than a reconstructive
force in a decrepit society, she is groping, indeed, between her
successive liaisons for an elusive felicity, for a larger mission
than inspiring Musset's Alexandrines or Chopin's nocturnes. It is
somewhat amusing, and at the same time indicative of her vague but
deep-seated moral yearnings, to find her writing rebukingly to
Sainte-Beuve, as early as 1834, apropos of his epicurean Volupte:
"Let the rest do as they like; but you, dear friend, you must
produce a book which will change and better mankind, do you see? You
can, and therefore should. Oh, if poor I could do it! I should lift
my head again and my heart would no longer be broken; but in vain I
seek a religion: Shall it be God, shall it be love, friendship, the
public welfare? Alas, it seems to me that my soul is framed to
receive all these impressions, without one effacing another ... Who
shall paint justice as it should, as it may, be in our modern
society?"

To Sainte-Beuve, himself an unscathed intellectual Odysseus, she
declares herself greatly indebted intellectually; but on the whole
his influence seems to have been tranquillizing. The material for
the radical program, economic, political, and religious, which, like
a spiritual ancestor of H. G. Wells, she eagerly sought to
popularize by the novels of her middle years, was supplied mainly by
Saint-Simon, Lamennais, and Leroux. Her new "religion of humanity,"
a kind of theosophical socialism, is too fantastically garbed to
charm the sober spirits of our age. And yet from the ruins of that
time and from the emotional extravagance of books grown tedious,
which she has left behind her, George Sand emerges for us with one
radiant perception which must be included in whatever religion
animates a democratic society: "Everyone must be happy, so that the
happiness of a few may not be criminal and cursed by God."

One of George Sand's French critics, M. Caro, a member of the
Academy, who deals somewhat austerely with her religiose enthusiasms
and with her Utopian projects for social reformation, remarks
gravely and not without tenderness:

"The one thing needful to this soul, so strong, so rich in
enthusiasm, is a humble moral quality that she disdains, and when
she has occasion to speak of it, even slanders,--namely resignation.
This is not, as she seems to think, the sluggish virtue of base
souls, who, in their superstitious servitude to force, hasten to
crouch beneath every yoke. That is a false and degrading
resignation; genuine resignation grows out of the conception of the
universal order, weighed against which individual sufferings,
without ceasing to be a ground of merit, cease to constitute a right
of revolt. ... Resignation, in the true, the philosophical, the
Christian sense, is a manly acceptance of moral law and also of the
laws essential to the social order; it is a free adherence to order,
a sacrifice approved by reason of a part of one's private good and
of one's personal freedom, not to might nor to the tyranny of a
human caprice, but to the exigencies of the common weal, which
subsists only by the concord of individual liberty with obedient
passions."

Well, resigned in the sense of defeated, George Sand never became;
nor did she, perhaps, ever wholly acquiesce in that scheme of things
which M. Caro impressively designates as "the universal order." Yet
with age, the abandonment of many distractions, the retreat to
Nohant, the consolations of nature, and her occupation with tales of
pastoral life, beginning with La Mare au Diable, there develops
within her, there diffuses itself around her, there appears in her
work a charm like that which falls upon green fields from the level
rays of the evening sun after a day of storms. It is not the charm,
precisely, of resignation; it is the charm of serenity--the serenity
of an old revolutionist who no longer expects victory in the morning
yet is secure in her confidence of a final triumph, and still more
secure in the goodness of her cause. "A hundred times in life," she
declares, "the good that one does seems to serve no immediate
purpose; yet it maintains in one way and another the tradition of
well wishing and well doing, without which all would perish." At the
outset of her career we compared her with Shelley. In her last
phase, she reminds us rather of the authors of Far from the Madding
Crowd and The Mill on the Floss, and of Wordsworth, once, too, a
torch of revolution, turning to his Michaels and his leech-gatherers
and his Peter Bells. Her exquisite pictures of pastoral life are
idealizations of it; her representations of the peasant are not
corroborated by Zola's; to the last she approaches the shield of
human nature from the golden side. But for herself at least she has
found a real secret of happiness in country life, tranquil work, and
a right direction given to her own heart and conscience.

It is at about this point in her spiritual development that she
turns towards Gustave Flaubert--perhaps a little suspiciously at
first, yet resolved from the first, according to her natural
instinct and her now fixed principles, to stimulate by believing in
his admirable qualities. Writing from Nohant in 1866 to him at
Croisset, she epitomises her distinction as a woman and as an author
in this playful sally: "Sainte-Beuve, who loves you nevertheless,
pretends that you are dreadfully vicious. But perhaps he sees with
eyes a bit dirty, like that learned botanist who pretends that the
germander is of a DIRTY yellow. The observation was so false that I
could not help writing on the margin of his book: 'IT IS YOU, WHOSE
EYES ARE DIRTY.'"

We have spoken of George Sand as a faithful daughter of the French
Revolution; and by way of contrast we may speak of Flaubert as a
disgruntled son of the Second Empire. Between his literary advent
and hers there is an interval of a generation, during which the
proud expansive spirit and the grandiose aspirations imparted to the
nation by the first Napoleon dwindled to a spirit of mediocrity and
bourgeois smugness under a Napoleon who had inherited nothing great
of his predecessor but his name. This change in the time-spirit may
help to explain the most significant difference between Flaubert and
George Sand. He inherited the tastes and imagination of the great
romantic generation; but he inherited none of its social and
political enthusiasm. He was disciplined by the romantic writers;
yet his reaction to the literary culture of his youth is not ethical
but aesthetic; he finds his inspiration less in Rousseau than in
Chateaubriand. He is bred to an admiration of eloquence, the poetic
phrase, the splendid picture, life in the grand style; with
increasing disgust he finds himself entering a society which, he
feels, neither understands nor values any of these things, and which
threatens their destruction. Consequently, we find him actuated as a
writer by two complementary passions--the love of splendor and the
hatred of mediocrity--two passions, of which the second sometimes
alternates with the first, sometimes inseparably fuses with it, and
ultimately almost extinguishes it.

The son of an eminent surgeon of Rouen, Gustave Flaubert may have
acquired from his father something of that scientific precision of
observation and that cutting accuracy of expression, by which he
gained his place at the head of modern French realism and won the
discipleship of the Goncourts, Daudet, Zola, and Maupassant and the
applause of such connoisseurs of technique as Walter Pater and Henry
James. From his mother's Norman ancestry he inherited the physique
of a giant, tainted with epilepsy; a Viking countenance, strong-
featured with leonine moustaches; and a barbaric temper, habitually
somewhat lethargic but irritable, and, when roused, violent and
intolerant of opposition. He had a private education at Rouen, with
wide desultory reading; went to Paris, which he hated, to study law,
which he also hated; frequented the theatres and studios; travelled
in Corsica, the Pyrenees, and the East, which he adored, seeing
Egypt, Palestine, Constantinople, and Greece; and he had one, and
only one, important love-affair, extending from 1846 to 1854--that
with Mme. Louise Colet, a woman of letters, whose difficult
relations with Flaubert are sympathetically touched upon in Pater's
celebrated essay on "Style." When by the death of his father, in
1845, he succeeded to the family-seat at Croisset, near Rouen, he
settled himself in a studious solitude to the pursuit of letters,
which he followed for thirty-four years with anguish of spirit and
dogged persistence.

Flaubert probably loved glory as much as any man; but he desired to
receive it only on his own terms. He profoundly appeals to writers
endowed with "the artistic conscience" as "the martyr of literary
style." In morals something of a libertine, in matters of art he
exhibited the intolerance of weakness in others and the remorseless
self-examination and self-torment commonly attributed to the
Puritan. His friend Maxime Du Camp, who tried to bring him out and
teach him the arts of popularity, he rebuffed with deliberate
insult. He developed an aversion to any interruption of his work,
and such tension and excitability of nerves that he shunned a day's
outing or a chat with an old companion, lest it distract him for a
month afterward. His mistress he seems to have estranged by an ill-
concealed preference to her of his exacting Muse. To illustrate his
"monkish" consecration to his craft we cannot do better than
reproduce a passage, quoted by Pater, from his letters to Madame
Colet:

"I must scold you for one thing, which shocks, scandalises me, the
small concern, namely, you show for art just now. As regards glory
be it so--there I approve. But for art!--the one thing in life that
is good and real--can you compare with it an earthly love?--prefer
the adoration of a relative beauty to the cultus of the true beauty?
Well! I tell you the truth. That is the one thing good in me: the
one thing I have, to me estimable. For yourself, you blend with the
beautiful a heap of alien things, the useful, the agreeable, what
not?

"The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art, and
count everything else as nothing. Pride takes the place of all
beside when it is established on a large basis. Work! God wills it.
That, it seems to me, is clear.

"I am reading over again the Aeneid, certain verses of which I
repeat to myself to satiety. There are phrases there which stay in
one's head, by which I find myself beset, as with those musical airs
which are forever returning, and cause you pain, you love them so
much. I observe that I no longer laugh much, and am no longer
depressed. I am ripe, you talk of my serenity, and envy me. It may
well surprise you. Sick, irritated, the prey a thousand times a day
of cruel pain, I continue my labour like a true working-man, who,
with sleeves turned up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his
anvil, never troubling himself whether it rains or blows, for hail
or thunder. I was not like that formerly."

The half-dozen works which Flaubert beat out on his "anvil," with an
average expenditure of half-a-dozen years to each, were composed on
a theory of which the prime distinguishing feature was the great
doctrine of "impersonality." George Sand's fluent improvisations
ordinarily originated, as we have noted, in an impulse of her
lyrical idealism; she began with an aspiration of her heart, to
execute which she invented characters and plot so that she is always
on the inside of her story. According to Flaubert's theory, the
novel should originate in a desire to present a certain segment of
observed life. The author is to take and rigorously maintain a
position outside his work. The organ with which he collects his
materials is not his heart but his eyes, supplemented by the other
senses. Life, so far as the scientific observer can be sure of it,
and so far as the artist can control it for representation, is a
picture or series of pictures, a dramatic scene or a concatenation
of dramatic scenes. Let the novelist first, therefore, with
scrupulous fidelity and with minute regard for the possible
significance of every observable detail, fill his notebooks, amass
his materials, master his subject. After Flaubert, a first-rate
sociological investigator is three-fourths of a novelist. The rest
of the task is to arrange and set forth these facts so that they
shall tell the truth about life impressively, in scene and dramatic
spectacle, the meaning of which shall be implicit in the plot and
shall reach the reader's consciousness through his senses.

Critics have spent much time in discussing the conflict of
"romantic" and "realistic" tendencies in Flaubert's works. And it is
obviously easy, so far as subject-matter is concerned, to group his
books in two divisions: on the one hand, The Temptation of St.
Anthony, Salammbo, and two of the Trois Contes; on the other hand,
Madame Bovary, L'Education Sentimentale, and the incomplete Bouvard
and Pecuchet. We may call the tales in the first group romantic,
because the subject-matter is remote in time and place, and because
in them Flaubert indulges his passion for splendor--for oriental
scenery, for barbaric characters, the pomp of savage war and more
savage religion, events strange, terrible, atrocious. We may call
the stories in the other group realistic, because the subject-matter
is contemporary life in Paris and the provinces, and because in them
Flaubert indulges his hatred for mediocrity--for the humdrum
existence of the country doctor, the apothecary, the insipid clerk,
the vapid sentimental woman, and the charlatans of science. But as a
matter of fact, ALL his books are essentially constructed on the
same theory: all are just as "realistic" as Flaubert could make
them.

Henry James called Madame Bovary a brilliantly successful
application of Flaubert's theory; he pronounced L'Education
Sentimentale "elaborately and massively dreary"; and he briefly
dismissed Salammbo as an accomplished work of erudition. Salammbo is
indeed a work of erudition; years were spent in getting up its
archaeological details. But Madame Bovary is also a work of
erudition, and Bouvard and Pecuchet is a work of enormous erudition;
a thousand volumes were read for the notes of the first volume and
Flaubert is said to have killed himself by the labor of his
unfinished investigations. There is no important distinction to be
made between the method or the thoroughness with which he collected
his facts in the one case or the other; and the story of the war of
the mercenaries against the Carthaginians is evolved with the same
alternation of picture and dramatic spectacle and the same hard
merciless externality that distinguish the evolution of Emma
Bovary's history.

We may go still farther than that towards wiping out the distinction
between Flaubert's "romantic" and his "realistic" works; and by the
same stroke what is illusory in the pretensions of the realists,
namely, their aspiration to an "impersonal art."

If we were seeking to prove that an author can put NOTHING BUT
HIMSELF into his art, we should ask for no more impressive
illustions than precisely, Madame Bovary and Salammbo. These two
masterpieces disclose to reflection, no less patently than the works
of George Sand, their purpose and their meaning. And that purpose
and meaning are not a whit less personal to Flaubert than the
purpose and meaning of Indiana, let us say, are personal to George
Sand. The "meaning" of Madame Bovary and Salammbo is, broadly
speaking, Flaubert's sense of the significance--or, rather, of the
insignificance--of human life; and the "purpose" of the books is to
express it. The most lyrical of idealists can do no more to reveal
herself.

The demonstration afforded by a comparison of Salammbo and Madame
Bovary is particularly striking because the subject-matters are
superficially so unlike. But take any characteristic series of
pictures or incidents from Salammbo: take the passing of the
children through the fire to Moloch, or the description of the
leprous Hanno, or the physical surrender of the priestess to her
country's enemy, or the following picture of the crucified lion:

"They were marching through a wide defile, hedged in by two chains
of reddish hillocks, when a nauseous odor struck their nostrils, and
they believed that they saw something extraordinary at the top of a
carob tree; a lion's head stood up above the foliage.

"Running towards it, they found a lion attached to a cross by its
four limbs, like a criminal; his enormous muzzle hung to his breast,
and his forepaws, half concealed beneath the abundance of his mane,
were widely spread apart, like a bird's wings in flight; under the
tightly drawn skin, his ribs severally protruded and his hind legs
were nailed together, but were slightly drawn up; black blood had
trickled through the hairs, and collected in stalactites at the end
of his tail, which hung straight down the length of the cross. The
soldiers crowded around the beast, diverting themselves by calling
him 'Consul!' and 'Citizen of Rome!' and threw pebbles into his eyes
to scatter the swarming gnats."

And now take any characteristic series of pictures or incidents from
Madame Bovary: take Bovary's bungling and gruesome operations on the
club-footed ostler's leg, with the entire village clustering agape;
take the picture of the eyeless, idiotic beggar on the road to
Rouen; or the scene in which Emma offers herself for three thousand
francs to Rodolphe; or the following bit, only a bit, from the
detailed account of the heroine's last hours, after the arsenical
poisoning:

"Emma's head was turned towards her right shoulder, the corner of
her mouth, which was open, seemed like a black hole at the lower
part of her face; her two thumbs were bent into the palms of her
hands; a kind of white dust besprinkled her lashes, and her eyes
were beginning to disappear in that viscous pallor that looks like a
thin web, as if spiders had spun it over. The sheet sunk in from her
breast to her knees, and then rose at the tips of her toes, and it
seemed to Charles that infinite masses, an enormous load, were
weighing upon her.

"The church clock struck two. They could hear the loud murmur of the
river flowing in the darkness at the foot of the terrace. Monsieur
Bournisien from time to time blew his nose noisily and Homais' pen
was scratching over the paper."

In these two detached pictures--the one from a so-called "romantic,"
the other from a so-called "realistic" book--one readily observes
the likeness in the subjects, which are of a ghastly repulsiveness;
the same minuteness of observation--e.g., the lion's hind legs
"slightly drawn up," the woman's thumbs "bent into the palms of her
hands"; the same careful notation of effect on the several senses;
the same rhetorical heightening--e.g., the "stalactites at the end
of his tail," the web in the woman's eyes "as if spiders had spun it
over"; and finally, that celebrated detachment, that air as of a
medical examiner, recording the results of an autopsy. What can we
know of such an author? All, or nearly all, that he knew of himself,
provided we will searchingly ask ourselves what sort of mind is
steadily attracted to the painting of such pictures, to the
representation of such incidents, and what sort of mind expresses a
lifetime of brooding on the significance of life in two such books
as Madame Bovary and Salammbo.

At its first appearance, Madame Bovary was prosecuted, though
unsuccessfully, as offensive to public morals. In derision of this
famous prosecution, Henry James with studious jauntiness, asserts
that in the heat of his first admiration he thought what an
excellent moral tract it would make. "It may be very seriously
maintained," he continues, "that M. Flaubert's masterpiece is the
pearl of 'Sunday reading.'" As a work of fiction and recreation the
book lacks, in his opinion, one quite indispensable quality: it
lacks charm. Well, there are momentary flashes of beauty and grace,
dazzling bits of color, haunting melancholy cadences in every
chapter of Flaubert; but a charming book he never wrote. A total
impression of charm he never gave--he never could give; because his
total impression of life was not charming but atrocious. It is
perhaps an accident, as has been suggested, that one can so readily
employ Madame Bovary to illustrate that text on the "wages of sin."
Emma, to be sure, goes down the easy and alluring path to disgrace
and ruin. But that is only an incident in the wider meaning of
Flaubert's fiction, a meaning more amply expressed in Salammbo,
where not one foolish woman alone but thousands on thousands of men,
women, and children, mingled with charging elephants and vipers,
flounder and fight in indescribable welters of blood and filth, and
go down to rot in a common pit. If I read Flaubert's meaning right,
all human history is there; you may show it by painting on broad
canvas a Carthaginian battle-scene or by photographing the details
of a modern bedroom: a brief brightness, night and the odor of
carrion, a crucified lion, a dying woman, the jeering of ribald
mercenaries, the cackle of M. Homais. It is all one. If Flaubert
deserved prosecution, it was not for making vice attractive, but for
expressing with invasive energy that personal and desperately
pessimistic conception of life by which he was almost overwhelmed.

That a bad physical regimen, bad habits of work in excessive
quantities, and the solitude of his existence were contributory to
Flaubert's melancholy, his exacerbated egotism, and his pessimism is
sufficiently obvious in the letters. This Norman giant with his
aching head buried all day long in his arms, groping in anguish for
a phrase, has naturally a kindly disposition towards various
individuals of his species--is even capable of great generosity; but
as he admits with a truth and pathos, deeply appealing to the
maternal sympathies of his correspondent, he has no talent for
living. He has never been able, like richer and more resourceful
souls, to reconcile being a man with being an author. He has made
his choice; he has renounced the cheerful sanities of the world:

"I pass entire weeks without exchanging a word with a human being;
and at the end of the week it is not possible for me to recall a
single day nor any event whatsoever. I see my mother and my niece on
Sundays, and that is all. My only company consists of a band of rats
in the garret, which make an infernal racket above my head, when the
water does not roar or the wind blow. The nights are black as ink,
and a silence surrounds me comparable to that of the desert.
Sensitiveness is increased immeasurably in such a setting. I have
palpitations of the heart for nothing.

"All that results from our charming profession. That is what it
means to torment the soul and the body. But perhaps this torment is
our proper lot here below."

To George Sand, who wrote as naturally as she breathed and almost as
easily, seclusion and torment were by no means the necessary
conditions of literary activity. Enormously productive, with a
hundred books to his half-a-dozen, she has never dedicated and
consecrated herself to her profession but has lived heartily and a
bit recklessly from day to day, spending herself in many directions
freely, gaily, extravagantly. Now that she has definitely said
farewell to her youth, she finds that she is twenty years younger;
and now that she is, in a sense, dissipating her personality and
living in the lives of others, she finds that she is happier than
ever before. "It can't be imperative to work so painfully"--such is
the burden of her earlier counsels to Flaubert; "spare yourself a
little, take some exercise, relax the tendons of your mind, indulge
a little the physical man. Live a little as I do; and you will take
your fatigues and illnesses and occasional dolours and dumps as
incidents of the day's work and not magnify them into the
mountainous overshadowing calamities from which you deduce your
philosophy of universal misery." No advice could have been more
wholesome or more timely. And with what pictures of her own busy
felicity she reenforces her advice! I shall produce three of them
here in order to emphasize that precious thing which George Sand
loved to impart, and which she had the gift of imparting, namely,
joy, the spontaneous joyousness of her own nature. The first passage
is from a letter of June 14, 1867:

"I am a little remorseful to take whole days from your work, I who
am never bored with loafing, and whom you could leave for whole
hours under a tree, or before two lighted logs, with the assurance
that I should find there something interesting. I know so well how
to live OUTSIDE OF MYSELF. It hasn't always been like that. I also
was young and subject to indignations. It is over! Since I have
dipped into real nature, I have found there an order, a system, a
calmness of cycles which is lacking in mankind, but which man can,
up to a certain point, assimilate when he is not too directly at
odds with the difficulties of his own life. When these difficulties
return, he must endeavor to avoid them; but if he has drunk the cup
of the eternally true, he does not get too excited for or against
the ephemeral and relative truth."

The second passage is of June 21:

"I love everything that makes up a milieu, the rolling of the
carriages and the noise of the workmen in Paris, the cries of a
thousand birds in the country, the movement of the ships on the
waters. I love also absolute, profound silence, and, in short, I
love everything that is around me, no matter where I am."

The last passage gives a glimpse of the seventeenth of January,
1869, a typical day in Nohant:

"The individual named George Sand is well: he is enjoying the
marvellous winter which reigns in Berry, gathering flowers, noting
interesting botanical anomalies, making dresses and mantles for his
daughter-in-law, costumes for the marionettes, cutting out scenery,
dressing dolls, reading music, but above all spending hours with the
little Aurore, who is a marvellous child. There is not a more
tranquil or a happier individual in his domestic life than this old
troubadour retired from business, who sings from time to time his
little song to the moon, without caring much whether he sings well
or ill, provided he sings the motif that runs in his head, and who,
the rest of the time, idles deliciously.... This pale character has
the great pleasure of loving you with all his heart, and of not
passing a day without thinking of the other old troubadour, confined
in his solitude of a frenzied artist, disdainful of all the
pleasures of the world."

Flaubert did "exercise" a little--once or twice--in compliance with
the injunctions of his "dear master"; but he rather resented the
implication that his pessimism was personal, that it had any
particular connection with his peculiar temperament or habits. He
wished to think of himself as a stoic, quite indifferent about his
"carcase." His briefer black moods he might acknowledge had
transitory causes. But his general and abiding conceptions of
humanity were the result of dispassionate reflections. "You think,"
he cries in half-sportive pique, "that because I pass my life trying
to make harmonious phrases, in avoiding assonances, that I too have
not my little judgments on the things of this world? Alas! Yes! and
moreover I shall burst, enraged at not expressing them." And later:
"Yes, I am susceptible to disinterested angers, and I love you all
the more for loving me for that. Stupidity and injustice make me
roar,--and I howl in my corner against a lot of things 'that do not
concern me.'" "On the day that I am no longer in a rage, I shall
fall flat as the marionette from which one withdraws the support of
the stick."

So far as Flaubert's pessimism has an intellectual basis, it rests
upon his researches in human history. For Salammbo and The
Temptation of St. Anthony he ransacked ancient literature, devoured
religions and mythologies, and saturated himself in the works of the
Church Fathers. In order to get up the background of his Education
Sentimentale he studied the Revolution of 1848 and its roots in the
Revolution of 1789. He found, shall we say? what he was looking for-
-inexhaustible proofs of the cruelty and stupidity of men. After
"gulping" down the six volumes of Buchez and Roux, he declares: "The
clearest thing I got out of them is an immense disgust for the
French.... Not a liberal idea which has not been unpopular, not a
just thing that has not caused scandal, not a great man who has not
been mobbed or knifed. 'The history of the human mind is the history
of human folly,' as says M. Voltaire. ... Neo-Catholicism on the one
hand, and Socialism on the other, have stultified France." In
another letter of the same Period and similar provocation: "However
much you fatten human cattle, giving them straw as high as their
bellies, and even gilding their stable, they will remain brutes, no
matter what one says. All the advance that one can hope for, is to
make the brute a little less wicked. But as for elevating the ideas
of the mass, giving it a larger and therefore a less human
conception of God, I have my doubts."

In addition to the charges of violence and cruelty, which he brought
against all antiquity as well as against modern times, much in the
fashion of Swift or the older Mark Twain, Flaubert nursed four grave
causes of indignation, made four major charges of folly against
modern "Christian" civilization.  In religion, we have substituted
for Justice the doctrine of Grace. In our sociological
considerations we act no longer with discrimination but upon a
principle of universal sympathy. In the field of art and literature
we have abandoned criticism and research for the Beautiful in favor
of universal puffery. In politics we have nullified intelligence and
renounced leadership to embrace universal suffrage, which is the
last disgrace of the human spirit.

It must be acknowledged that Flaubert's arraignment of modern
society possesses the characteristics commended by the late Barett
Wendell: it is marked in a high degree by "unity, mass, and
coherence." It must be admitted also that George Sand possessed in a
high degree the Pauline virtue of being "not easily provoked," or
she never could have endured so patiently, so sweetly, Flaubert's
reiterated and increasingly ferocious assaults upon her own master
passion, her ruling principle. George Sand was one whose entire life
signally attested the power of a "saving grace," resident in the
creative and recuperative energies of nature, resident in the
magical, the miracle-working, powers of the human heart, the powers
of love and sympathy. She was a modern spiritual adventurer who had
escaped unscathed from all the anathemas of the old theology; and
she abounded, like St. Francis, in her sense of the new dispensation
and in her benedictive exuberance towards all the creatures of God,
including not merely sun, moon, and stars and her sister the lamb
but also her brother the wolf. On this principle she loves
Flaubert!--and archly asserts her arch-heresy in his teeth. He
complains that her fundamental defect is that she doesn't know how
to "hate." She replies, with a point that seems never really to have
pierced his thick casing of masculine egotism:

"Artists are spoiled children and the best are great egotists. You
say that I love them too well; I like them as I like the woods and
the fields, everything, everyone that I know a little and that I
study continually. I make my life in the midst of all that, and as I
like my life, I like all that nourishes it and renews it. They do me
a lot of ill turns which I see, but which I no longer feel. I know
that there are thorns in the hedges, but that does not prevent me
from putting out my hands and finding flowers there. If all are not
beautiful, all are interesting. The day you took me to the Abbey of
Saint-Georges I found the scrofularia borealis, a very rare plant in
France. I was enchanted; there was much----in the neighborhood where
I gathered it. Such is life!

"And if one does not take life like that, one cannot take it in any
way, and then how can one endure it? I find it amusing and
interesting, and since I accept EVERYTHING, I am so much happier and
more enthusiastic when I meet the beautiful and the good. If I did
not have a great knowledge of the species, I should not have quickly
understood you, or known you or loved you."

Two years later the principles and tempers of both these
philosophers were put to their severest trial. In 1870, George Sand
had opportunity to apply her doctrine of universal acceptance to the
Prussians in Paris. Flaubert had opportunity to welcome scientific
organization in the Prussian occupation of his own home at Croisset.
The first reaction of both was a quite simple consternation and
rage, in which Flaubert cries, "The hopeless barbarism of humanity
fills me with a black melancholy," and George Sand, for the moment
assenting, rejoins: "Men are ferocious and conceited brutes." As the
war thickens around him and the wakened militancy of his compatriots
presses him hard, Flaubert becomes more and more depressed; he
forebodes a general collapse of civilization--before the century
passes, a conflict of races, "in which several millions of men kill
one another in one engagement." With the curiously vengeful
satisfaction which mortals take in their own misery when it offers
occasion to cry "I told you so," he exclaims: "Behold then, the
NATURAL MAN. Make theories now! Boast the progress, the
enlightenment and the good sense of the masses, and the gentleness
of the French people! I assure you that anyone here who ventured to
preach peace would get himself murdered."

George Sand in her fields at Nohant--not "above" but a little aside
from the conflict--turns instinctively to her peasant doggedly,
placidly, sticking at his plow; turns to her peasant with a kind of
intuition that he is a symbol of faith, that he holds the keys to a
consolation, which the rest of us blindly grope for: "He is
imbecile, people say; no, he is a child in prosperity, a man in
disaster, more of a man than we who complain; he says nothing, and
while people are killing, he is sowing, repairing continually on one
side what they are destroying  on the other." Flaubert, who thinks
that he has no "illusions" about peasants or the "average man,"
brings forward his own specific of a quite different nature: "Do you
think that if France, instead of being governed on the whole by the
crowd, were in the power of the mandarins, we should be where we are
now? If, instead of having wished to enlighten the lower classes, we
had busied ourselves with instructing the higher, we should not have
seen M. de Keratry proposing the pillage of the duchy of Baden."

In the great war of our own time with the same foes, our
professional advocates of "preparedness," our cheerful chemists, our
scientific "intellectuals"--all our materialistic thinkers hard-
shell and soft-shell,--took the position of Flaubert, just
presented; reproached us bitterly for our slack, sentimental
pacificism; and urged us with all speed to emulate the scientific
spirit of our enemy. There is nothing more instructive in this
correspondence than to observe how this last fond illusion falls
away from Flaubert under the impact of an experience which
demonstrated to his tortured senses the truth of the old Rabelaisian
utterance, that "science without conscience is the ruin of the
soul."

"What use, pray," he cries in the last disillusion, "is science,
since this people abounding in scholars commits abominations worthy
of the Huns and worse than theirs, because they are systematic,
cold-blooded, voluntary, and have for an excuse, neither passion nor
hunger?" And a few months later, he is still in mad anguish of
desolation:

"I had some illusions! What barbarity! What a slump! I am wrathful
at my contemporaries for having given me the feelings of a brute of
the twelfth century! I'm stifling in gall! These officers who break
mirrors with white gloves on, who know Sanskrit, and who fling
themselves on the champagne; who steal your watch and then send you
their visiting card, this war for money, these civilized savages
give me more horror than cannibals. And all the world is going to
imitate them, is going to be a soldier! Russia has now four millions
of them. All Europe will wear a uniform. If we take our revenge, it
will be ferocious in the last degree; and, mark my word, we are
going to think only of that, of avenging ourselves on Germany."

Under the imminence of the siege of Paris, Flaubert had drilled men,
with an out-flashing of the savage fighting spirit of his ancestors,
of which he was more than half ashamed. But at heart he is more
dismayed, more demoralized, more thoroughly prostrated than George
Sand. He has not fortitude actually to face the degree of depravity
which he has always imputed to the human race, the baseness with
which his imagination has long been easily and cynically familiar.
As if his pessimism had been only a literary pigment, a resource of
the studio, he shudders to find Paris painted in his own ebony
colors, and his own purely "artistic" hatred of the bourgeois,
translated into a principle of action, expressing itself in the
horrors of the Commune, with half the population trying to strangle
the other half. Hatred, after all, contempt and hatred, are not
quite the most felicitous watchwords for the use of human society.
Like one whose cruel jest has been taken more seriously than he had
intended and has been turned upon his own head, Flaubert considers
flight: "I cherish the following dream: of going to live in the sun
in a tranquil country." As a substitute for a physical retreat, he
buries himself in a study of Buddhism, and so gradually returns to
the pride of his intellectual isolation. As the tumult in his senses
subsides, he even ventures to offer to George Sand the anodyne of
his old philosophical despair: "Why are you so sad? 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 passes the torch from one to another."

There we must leave Flaubert, the thinker. He never passes beyond
that point in his vision of reconstruction: a "legitimate
aristocracy" established in contempt of the average man--with the
Academy of Sciences displacing the Pope.

George Sand, amid these devastating external events, is beginning to
feel the insidious siege of years. She can no longer rally her
spiritual forces with the "bright speed" that she had in the old
days. The fountain of her faith, which has never yet failed of
renewal, fills more slowly. For weeks she broods in silence, fearing
to augment her friend's dismay with more of her own, fearing to
resume a debate in which her cause may be better than her arguments
and in which depression of her physical energy may diminish her
power to put up a spirited defence before the really indomitable
"last ditch" of her position.  When Flaubert himself makes a
momentary gesture towards the white flag, and talks of retreat, she
seizes the opportunity for a short scornful sally. "Go to live in
the sun in a tranquil country! Where? What country is going to be
tranquil in this struggle of barbarity against civilization, a
struggle which is going to be universal?" A month later she gives
him fair warning that she has no intention of acknowledging final
defeat: "For me, the ignoble experiment that Paris is attempting or
is undergoing, proves nothing against the laws of the eternal
progression of men and things, and, if I have gained any principles
in my mind, good or bad, they are neither shattered nor changed by
it. For a long time I have accepted patience as one accepts the sort
of weather there is, the length of winter, old age, lack of success
in all its forms." But Flaubert, thinking that he has detected in
her public utterances a decisive change of front, privately urges
her in a finely figurative passage of a letter which denounces
modern republicanism, universal suffrage, compulsory education, and
the press--Flaubert urges her to come out openly in renunciation of
her faith in humanity and her popular progressivistic doctrines. I
must quote a few lines of his attempt at seduction:

"Ah, dear good master, if you could only hate! That is what you
lack, hate. In spite of your great Sphinx eyes, you have seen the
world through a golden colour. That comes from the sun in your
heart; but so many shadows have risen 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 drops of the blood of wounded Themis."

That summons roused the citadel, but not to surrender, not to
betrayal. The eloquent daughter of the people caught up her great
lyre--in the public Reponse a un ami of October 3, 1871. But her
fingers passed lightly over the "brazen string" to pluck again with
old power the resonant golden notes. Her reply, with its direct
retorts to Flaubert, is not perhaps a very closely reasoned
argument. In making the extract I have altered somewhat the order of
the sentences:

"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 always has been and always will be so? ... What,
then, do you want me to do, so as to isolate myself from my kind,
from my compatriots, from the great family in whose bosom my own
family is only one ear of corn in the terrestrial field? ... But it
is impossible, and your steady reason puts up with the most
unreasonable 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? ... 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 people, you
say! The people is yourself and myself. It would be useless to deny
it. There are not two races. ... 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."

This is, if you please, an effusion of sentiment, a chant of faith.
In a world more and more given to judging trees by their fruits, we
should err if we dismissed this sentiment, this faith, too lightly.
Flaubert may have been a better disputant; he had a talent for
writing. George Sand may have chosen her side with a truer instinct;
she had a genius for living. This faith of hers sustained well the
shocks of many long years, and this sentiment made life sweet.

STUART P. SHERMAN




I. TO GEORGE SAND
1863

Dear Madam,

I am not grateful to you for having performed what you call a duty.
The goodness of your heart has touched me and your sympathy has made
me proud. That is the whole of it.

Your letter which I have just received gives added value to your
article [Footnote:  Letter about Salammbo, January, 1863, Questions
d'art et de litterature.] and goes on still further, and I do not
know what to say to you unless it be that _I_ QUITE FRANKLY LIKE
YOU.

It was certainly not I who sent you in September, a little flower in
an envelope. But, strange to say, at the same time, I received in
the same manner, a leaf of a tree.

As for your very cordial invitation, I am not answering yes or no,
in true Norman fashion. Perhaps some day this summer I shall
surprise you. For I have a great desire to see you and to talk with
you.

It would be very delightful to have your portrait to hang on the
wall in my study in the country where I often spend long months
entirely alone. Is the request indiscreet? If not, a thousand thanks
in advance. Take them with the others which I reiterate.




II. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Paris, 15 March, 1864

Dear Flaubert,

I don't know whether you lent me or gave me M. Taine's beautiful
book. In the uncertainty I am returning it to you. Here I have had
only the time to read a part of it, and at Nohant, I shall have only
the time to scribble for Buloz; but when I return, in two months, I
shall ask you again for this admirable work of which the scope is so
lofty, so noble.

I am sorry not to have said adieu to you; but as I return soon, I
hope that you will not have forgotten me and that you will let me
read something of your own also.

You were so good and so sympathetic to me at the first performance
of Villemer that I no longer admire only your admirable talent, I
love you with all my heart.

George Sand



III. TO GEORGE SAND
Paris, 1866

Why of course I am counting on your visit at my own house. As for
the hindrances which the fair sex can oppose to it, you will not
notice them (be sure of it) any more than did the others. My little
stories of the heart or of the senses are not displayed on the
counter. But as it is far from my quarter to yours and as you might
make a useless trip, when you arrive in Paris, give me a rendezvous.
And at that we shall make another to dine informally tete-a-tete.

I sent your affectionate little greeting to Bouilhet.

At the present time I am disheartened by the populace which rushes
by under my windows in pursuit of the fatted calf. And they say that
intelligence is to be found in the street!



IV. To M. Flobert (Justave) M.
of Letters Boulevard du Temple, 42, Paris Paris, 10 May, 1866

[The postage stamp bears the mark Palaiseau 9 May, '66.]

M. Flobaire, You must be a truly dirty oaf to have taken my name and
written a letter with it to a lady who had some favors for me which
you doubtless received in my place and inherited my hat in place of
which I have received yours which you left there. It is the lowness
of that lady's conduct and of yours that make me think that she
lacks education entirely and all those sentiments which she ought to
understand. If you are content to have written Fanie and Salkenpeau
I am content not to have read them. You mustn't get excited about
that, I saw in the papers that there were outrages against the
Religion in whose bosom I have entered again after the troubles I
had with that lady when she made me come to my senses and repent of
my sins with her and, in consequence if I meet you with her whom I
care for no longer you shall have my sword at your throat. That will
be the Reparation of my sins and the punishment of your infamy at
the same time. That is what I tell you and I salute you.

Coulard

At Palaiseau with the Monks

They told me that I was well punished for associating with the girls
from the theatre and with aristocrats.



V. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
1866

Sir,

After the most scrupulous combined searches I found at last the body
of my beloved brother. You are in belles-lettres and you would have
been struck by the splendor of that scene. The corpse which was a
Brother extended nonchalantly on the edge of a foul ditch. I forgot
my sorrow a moment to contemplate he was good this young man whom
the matches killed, but the real guilty one was that woman whom
passions have separated in this disordered current in which our
unhappy country is at the moment when it is more to be pitied than
blamed for there are still men who have a heart. You who express
yourself so well tell that siren that she has destroyed a great
citizen. I don't need to tell you that we count on you to dig his
noble tomb. Tell Silvanit also that she can come notwithstanding for
education obliges me to offer her a glass of wine. I have the honor
to salute you.

I also have the honor to salute Silvanit for whom I am a brother
much to be pitied.

Goulard the elder

Have the goodness to transmit to Silvanit the last wishes of my poor
Theodore. [Footnote: Letter written by Eugene Lambert.]



VI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Palaiseau 14 May, 1866

This is not a letter from Goulard. He is dead! The false Goulard
killed him by surpassing him in the real and the comic. But this
false Goulard also does not deny himself anything, the rascal!

Dear friend, I must tell you that I want to dedicate to you my novel
which is just coming out. But as every one has his own ideas on the
subject--as Goulard would say--I would like to know if you permit me
to put at the head of my title page simply: to my friend Gustave
Flaubert. I have formed the habit of putting my novels under the
patronage of a beloved name. I dedicated the last to Fromentin.

I am waiting until it is good weather to ask you to come to dine at
Palaiseau with Goulard's Sirenne, and some other Goulards of your
kind and of mine. Up to now it has been frightfully cold and it is
not worth the trouble to come to the country to catch a cold.

I have finished my novel, and you?

I kiss the two great diamonds which adorn your face.

Jorje Sens

The elder Goulard is my little Lambert, it seems to me that he is
quite literary in that way.



VII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Palaiseau, Wednesday, 16 May, 1866

Well, my dear friend, since you are going away, and as in a
fortnight, I am going to Berry for two or three months, do try to
find time to come tomorrow Thursday. You will dine with dear and
interesting Marguerite Thuillier who is also going away.

Do come to see my hermitage and Sylvester's. By leaving Paris, gare
de Sceaux, at I o'clock, you will be at my house at 2 o'clock, or by
leaving at 5, you will be there at 6, and in the evening you could
leave with my strolling players at 9 or 10. Bring the copy.
[Footnote:  This refers to Monsieur Sylveitre, which had just
appeared.] Put in it all the criticisms which occur to you. That
will be very good for me. People ought to do that for each other as
Balzac and I used to do. That doesn't make one person alter the
other; quite the contrary, for in general, one gets more determined
in one's moi, one completes it, explains it better, entirely
develops it, and that is why friendship is good, even in literature,
where the first condition of any worth is to be one's self.

If you can not come--I shall have a thousand regrets, but then I am
depending upon you Monday before dinner. Au revoir and thank you for
the fraternal permission of dedication.

G. Sand



VIII. TO GEORGE SAND
Paris, 17 or 18 May, 1866

Don't expect me at your house on Monday. I am obliged to go to
Versailles on that day. But I shall be at Magny's.

A thousand fond greetings from your

G. Flaubert



IX. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 31 July, 1866

My good dear comrade,

Will you really be in Paris these next few days as you led me to
hope? I leave here the 2nd. What good luck if I found you at dinner
on the following Monday. And besides, they are putting on a play
[Footnote: Les Don Juan de village.] by my son and me, on the 10th.
Could I possibly get along without you on that day? I shall feel
some EMOTION this time because of my dear collaborator. Be a good
friend and try to come! I embrace you with all my heart in that
hope.

The late Goulard,
G. Sand.



X. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Paris, 4 Aug., 1866

Dear friend, as I'm always out, I don't want you to come and find
the door shut and me far away. Come at six o'clock and dine with me
and my children whom I expect tomorrow. We dine at Magny's always at
6 o'clock promptly. You will give us 'a sensible pleasure' as used
to say, as would have said, alas, the unhappy Goulard. You are an
exceedingly kind brother to promise to be at Don Juan. For that I
kiss you twice more.

G. Sand

Saturday evening.



XI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

It is next THURSDAY,

I wrote you last night, and our letters must have crossed.

Yours from the heart,

G. Sand

Sunday, 5 August, 1866.



XII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Paris, Wednesday evening, 22 August, 1866

My good comrade and friend, I am going to see Alexandre at Saint-
Valery Saturday evening. I shall stay there Sunday and Monday, I
shall return Tuesday to Rouen and go to see you. Tell me how that
strikes you. I shall spend the day with you if you like, returning
to spend the night in Rouen, if I inconvenience you as you are
situated, and I shall leave Wednesday morning or evening for Paris.
A word in response at once, by telegraph if you think that your
answer would not reach me by post before Saturday at 4 o'clock.

I think that I shall be all right but I have a horrid cold. If it
grows too bad, I shall telegraph that I can not stir; but I have
hopes, I am already better.

I embrace you.

G. Sand



XIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Saint-Valery, 26 August, 1866 Monday, 1 A.M.

Dear friend, I shall be in Rouen on Tuesday at 1 o'clock, I shall
plan accordingly. Let me explore Rouen which I don't know, or show
it to me if you have the time. I embrace you. Tell your mother how
much I appreciate and am touched, by the kind little line which she
wrote to me.

G. Sand



XIV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
Paris, 31 August, 1866

First of all, embrace your good mother and your charming niece for
me. I am really touched by the kind welcome I received in your
clerical setting, where a stray animal of my species is an anomaly
that one might find constraining. Instead of that, they received me
as if I were one of the family and I saw that all that great
politeness came from the heart. Remember me to all the very kind
friends. I was truly exceedingly happy with you. And then, you, you
are a dear kind boy, big man that you are, and I love you with all
my heart. My head is full of Rouen, of monuments and queer houses.
All of that seen with you strikes me doubly. But your house, your
garden, your CITADEL, it is like a dream and it seems to me that I
am still there.

I found Paris very small yesterday, when crossing the bridges.

I want to start back again. I did not see you enough, you and your
surroundings; but I must rush off to the children, who are calling
and threatening me. I embrace you and I bless you all.

G. Sand

Paris, Friday.

On going home yesterday, I found Couture to whom I said on your
behalf that HIS portrait of me was, according to you, the best that
anyone had made. He was not a little flattered. I am going to hunt
up an especially good copy to send you.

I forgot to get three leaves from the tulip tree, you must send them
to me in a letter, it is for something cabalistic.



XV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Paris, 2 September, 1866

Send me back the lace shawl. My faithful porter will forward it to
me wherever I am. I don't know yet. If my children want to go with
me into Brittany, I shall go to fetch them, if not I shall go on
alone wherever chance leads me. In travelling, I fear only
distractions. But I take a good deal on myself and I shall end by
improving myself. You write me a good dear letter which I kiss.
Don't forget the three leaves from the tulip tree. They are asking
me at the Odeon to let them perform a fairy play: la Nuit de Noel
from the Theatre de Nohant, I don't want to, it's too small a thing.
But since they have that idea, why wouldn't they try your fairy
play? Do you want me to ask them? I have a notion that this would be
the right theatre for a thing of that type. The management, Chilly
and Duquesnel, wants to have scenery and MACHINERY and yet keep it
literary. Let us discuss this when I return here.

You still have the time to write to me. I shall not leave for three
days yet. Love to your family.

G. S.

Sunday evening

I forgot! Levy promises to send you my complete works, they are
endless. You must stick them on a shelf in a corner and dig into
them when your heart prompts you.



XVI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
Nohant, 21 September, 1866

I have just returned from a twelve days trip with my children, and
on getting home I find your two letters. That fact, added to the joy
of seeing Mademoiselle Aurore again, fresh and pretty, makes me
quite happy. And you my Benedictine, you are quite alone in your
ravishing monastery, working and never going out? That is what it
means TO HAVE ALREADY gone out too much. Monsieur craves Syrias,
deserts, dead seas, dangers and fatigues! But nevertheless he can
make Bovarys in which every little cranny of life is studied and
painted with mastery. What an odd person who can also compose the
fight between the Sphinx and the Chimaera! You are a being quite
apart, very mysterious, gentle as a lamb with it all. I have had a
great desire to question you, but a too great respect for you has
prevented me; for I know how to make light only of my own
calamities, while those which a great mind has had to undergo so as
to be in a condition to produce, seem to me like sacred things which
should not be touched roughly nor thoughtlessly.

Sainte-Beuve, who loves you all the same, claims that you are
horribly vicious. But perhaps he may see with somewhat unclean eyes,
like this learned botanist who asserts that the germander  is of
DIRTY yellow color. The observation was so false, that I could not
refrain from writing on the margin of his book: IT IS BECAUSE YOU
HAVE DIRTY EYES.

I suppose that a man of intelligence may have great curiosity.  I
have not had it, lacking the courage. I have preferred to leave my
mind incomplete, that is my affair, and every one is free to embark
either on a great ship in full sail, or on a fisherman's vessel. The
artist is an explorer whom nothing ought to stop, and who does
neither good nor ill when turning to the right or to the left. His
end justifies all.

It is for him to know after a little experience, what are the
conditions of his soul's health. As for me, I think that yours is in
a good condition of grace, since you love to work and to be alone in
spite of the rain.

Do you know that, while there has been a deluge everywhere, we have
had, except a few downpours, fine sunshine in Brittany? A horrible
wind on the shore, but how beautiful the high surf! and since the
botany of the coast carried me away, and Maurice and his wife have a
passion for shellfish, we endured it all gaily. But on the whole,
Brittany is a famous see-saw.

However, we are a little fed up with dolmens and menhirs and we have
fallen on fetes and have seen costumes which they said had been
suppressed but which the old people still wear. Well! These men of
the past are ugly with their home-spun trousers, their long hair,
their jackets with pockets under the arms, their sottish air, half
drunkard, half saint. And the Celtic relics, uncontestably curious
for the archaeologist, have naught for the artist, they are badly
set, badly composed, Carnac and Erdeven have no physiognomy. In
short, Brittany shall not have my bones! I prefer a thousand times
your rich Normandy, or, in the days when one has dramas in his HEAD,
a real country of horror and despair. There is nothing in a country
where priests rule and where Catholic vandalism has passed, razing
monuments of the ancient world and sowing the plagues of the future.

You say US a propos of the fairy play. I don't know with whom you
have written it, but I still fancy that it ought to succeed at the
Odeon under its present management. If I was acquainted with it, I
should know how to accomplish for you what one never knows how to do
for one's self, namely, to interest the directors. Anything of yours
is bound to be too original to be understood by that coarse Dumaine.
Do have a copy at your house, and next month I shall spend a day
with you in order to have you read it to me. Le Croisset is so near
to Palaiseau!--and I am in a phase of tranquil activity, in which I
should love to see your great river flow, and to keep dreaming in
your orchard, tranquil itself, quite on top of the cliff. But I am
joking, and you are working. You must forgive the abnormal
intemperance of one who has just been seeing only stones and has not
perceived even a pen for twelve days.

You are my first visit to the living on coming out from the complete
entombment of my poor Moi. Live! There is my oremus and my
benediction and I embrace you with all my heart.

G. Sand



XVII. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset, 1866

I a mysterious being, dear master, nonsense! I think that I am
sickeningly platitudinous, and I am sometimes exceedingly bored with
the bourgeois which I have under my skin. Sainte-Beuve, between
ourselves, does not know me at all, no matter what he says. I even
swear to you (by the smile of your grandchild) that I know few men
less vicious than I am. I have dreamed much and have done very
little. What deceives the superficial observer is the lack of
harmony between my sentiments and my ideas. If you want my
confession, I shall make it freely to you. The sense of the
grotesque has restrained me from an inclination towards a disorderly
life. I maintain that cynicism borders on chastity. We shall have
much to say about it to each other (if your heart prompts you) the
first time we see each other.

Here is the program that I propose to you. My house will be full and
uncomfortable for a month. But towards the end of October or the
beginning of November (after Bouilhet's play) nothing will prevent
you, I hope, from returning here with me, not for a day, as you say,
but for a week at least. You shall have "your little table and
everything necessary for writing." Is it agreed?

As for the fairy play, thanks for your kind offers of service. I
shall get hold of the thing for you (it was done in collaboration
with Bouilhet). But I think it is a trifle weak and I am torn
between the desire of gaining a few piasters and the shame of
showing such a piece of folly.

I think that you are a little severe towards Brittany, not towards
the Bretons who seem to me repulsive animals. A propos of Celtic
archaeology, I published in L'Artiste in 1858, a rather good hoax on
the shaking stones, but I have not the number here and I don't
remember the month.

I read, straight through, the 10 volumes of Histoire de ma vie, of
which I knew about two thirds but only fragmentarily. What struck me
most was the life in the convent. I have a quantity of observations
to make to you which occurred to me.



XVIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 28 September, 1866

It is agreed, dear comrade and good friend. I shall do my best to be
in Paris for the performance of your friend's play, and I shall do
my fraternal duty there as usual; after which we shall go to your
house and I shall stay there a week, but on condition that you will
not put yourself out of your room. To be an inconvenience distresses
me and I don't need so much bother in order to sleep. I sleep
everywhere, in the ashes, or under a kitchen bench, like a stable
dog. Everything shines with spotlessness at your house, so one is
comfortable everywhere. I shall pick a quarrel with your mother and
we shall laugh and joke, you and I, much and more yet. If it's good
weather, I shall make you go out walking, if it rains continually,
we shall roast our bones before the fire while telling our heart
pangs. The great river will run black or grey under the window
saying always, QUICK! QUICK! and carrying away our thoughts, and our
days, and our nights, without stopping to notice such small things.

I have packed and sent by EXPRESS a good proof of Couture's picture,
signed by the engraver, my poor friend, Manceau. It is the best that
I have and I have only just found it. I have sent with it a
photograph of a drawing by Marchal which was also like me; but one
changes from year to year. Age gives unceasingly another character
to the face of people who think and study, that is why their
portraits do not look like one another nor like them for long. I
dream so much and I live so little, that sometimes I am only three
years old. But, the next day I am three hundred, if the dream has
been sombre. Isn't it the same with you? Doesn't it seem at moments,
that you are beginning life without even knowing what it is, and at
other times don't you feel over you the weight of several thousand
centuries, of which you have a vague remembrance and a sorrowful
impression? Whence do we come and whither do we go? All is possible
since all is unknown.

Embrace your beautiful, good mother for me. I shall give myself a
treat, being with you two. Now try to find that hoax on the Celtic
stones; that would interest me very much. When you saw them, had
they opened the galgal of Lockmariaker and cleared away the ground
near Plouharnel?

Those people used to write, because there are stones covered with
hieroglyphics, and they used to work in gold very well, because very
beautifully made torques [Footnote: Gallic necklaces.] have been
found.

My children, who are, like myself, great admirers of you, send you
their compliments, and I kiss your forehead, since Sainte-Beuve
lied.

G. Sand

Have you any sun today? Here it is stifling. The country is lovely.
When will you come here?



XIX. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset, Saturday evening, ... 1866

Good, I have it, that beautiful, dear and famous face! I am going to
have a large frame made and hang it on my wall, being able to say,
as did M. de Talleyrand to Louis Philippe: "It is the greatest honor
that my house has received"; a poor phrase, for we two are worth
more than those two amiable men.

Of the two portraits, I like that of Couture's the better. As for
Marchal's he saw in you only "the good woman," but I who am an old
Romantic, find in the other, "the head of the author" who made me
dream so much in my youth.



XX. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset, Saturday evening, 1866

Your sending the package of the two portraits made me think that you
were in Paris, dear master, and I wrote you a letter which is
waiting for you at rue des Feuillantines.

I have not found my article on the dolmens. But I have my manuscript
(entire) of my trip in Brittany among my "unpublished works." We
shall have to gabble when you are here. Have courage.

I don't experience, as you do, this feeling of a life which is
beginning, the stupefaction of a newly commenced existence. It seems
to me, on the contrary, that I have always lived! And I possess
memories which go back to the Pharaohs. I see myself very clearly at
different ages of history, practising different professions and in
many sorts of fortune. My present personality is the result of my
lost personalities. I have been a boatman on the Nile, a leno in
Rome at the time of the Punic wars, then a Greek rhetorician in
Subura where I was devoured by insects. I died during the Crusade
from having eaten too many grapes on the Syrian shores, I have been
a pirate, monk, mountebank and coachman. Perhaps also even emperor
of the East?

Many things would be explained if we could know our real genealogy.
For, since the elements which make a man are limited, should not the
same combinations reproduce themselves? Thus heredity is a just
principle which has been badly applied.

There is something in that word as in many others. Each one takes it
by one end and no one understands the other. The science of
psychology will remain where it lies, that is to say in shadows and
folly, as long as it has no exact nomenclature, so long as it is
allowed to use the same expression to signify the most diverse
ideas. When they confuse categories, adieu, morale!

Don't you really think that since '89 they wander from the point?
Instead of continuing along the highroad which was broad and
beautiful, like a triumphal way, they stray off by little sidepaths
and flounder in mud holes. Perhaps it would be wise for a little
while to return to Holbach. Before admiring Proudhon, supposing one
knew Turgot? But le Chic, that modern religion, what would become of
it!

Opinions chic (or chiques): namely being pro-Catholicism (without
believing a word of it) being pro-Slavery, being pro-the House of
Austria, wearing mourning for Queen Amelie, admiring Orphee aux
Enfers, being occupied with Agricultural Fairs, talking Sport,
acting indifferent, being a fool up to the point of regretting the
treaties of 1815. That is all that is the very newest.

Oh! You think that because I pass my life trying to make harmonious
phrases, in avoiding assonances, that I too have not my little
judgments on the things of this world? Alas! Yes! and moreover I
shall burst, enraged at not expressing them.

But a truce to joking, I should finally bore you.

The Bouilhet play will open the first part of November. Then in a
month we shall see each other.

I embrace you very warmly, dear master.



XXI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croisset
Nohant, Monday evening, 1 October, 1866

Dear friend,

Your letter was forwarded to me from Paris. It isn't lost. I think
too much of them to let any be lost. You don't speak to me of the
floods, therefore I think that the Seine did not commit any follies
at your place and that the tulip tree did not get its roots wet. I
feared lest you were anxious and wondered if your bank was high
enough to protect you. Here we have nothing of that sort to be
afraid of; our streams are very wicked, but we are far from them.

You are happy in having such clear memories of other existences.
Much imagination and learning--those are your memories; but if one
does not recall anything distinct, one has a very lively feeling of
one's own renewal in eternity. I have a very amusing brother who
often used to say "at the time when I was a dog. ..." He thought
that he had become man very recently. I think that I was vegetable
or mineral. I am not always very sure of completely existing, and
sometimes I think I feel a great fatigue accumulated from having
lived too much. Anyhow, I do not know, and I could not, like you,
say, "I possess the past."

But then you believe that one does not really die, since one LIVES
AGAIN? If you dare to say that to the Smart Set, you have courage
and that is good. I have the courage which makes me pass for an
imbecile, but I don't risk anything; I am imbecile under so many
other counts.

I shall be enchanted to have your written impression of Brittany, I
did not see enough to talk about. But I sought a general impression
and that has served me for reconstructing one or two pictures which
I need. I shall read you that also, but it is still an unformed
mass.

Why did your trip remain unpublished? You are very coy. You don't
find what you do worth being described. That is a mistake. All that
issues from a master is instructive, and one should not fear to show
one's sketches and drawings. They are still far above the reader,
and so many things are brought down to his level that the poor devil
remains common. One ought to love common people more than oneself,
are they not the real unfortunates of the world? Isn't it the people
without taste and without ideals who get bored, don't enjoy anything
and are useless? One has to allow oneself to be abused, laughed at,
and misunderstood by them, that is inevitable. But don't abandon
them, and always throw them good bread, whether or not they prefer
filth; when they are sated with dirt they will eat the bread; but if
there is none, they will eat filth in secula seculorum.

I have heard you say, "I write for ten or twelve people only." One
says in conversation, many things which are the result of the
impression of the moment; but you are not alone in saying that. It
was the opinion of the Lundi or the thesis of that day. I protested
inwardly. The twelve persons for whom you write, who appreciate you,
are as good as you are or surpass you. You never had any need of
reading the eleven others to be yourself. But, one writes for all
the world, for all who need to be initiated; when one is not
understood, one is resigned and recommences. When one is understood,
one rejoices and continues. There lies the whole secret of our
persevering labors and of our love of art. What is art without the
hearts and minds on which one pours it? A sun which would not
project rays and would give life to no one.

After reflecting on it, isn't that your opinion? If you are
convinced of that, you will never know disgust and lassitude, and if
the present is sterile and ungrateful, if one loses all influence,
all hold on the public, even in serving it to the best of one's
ability, there yet remains recourse to the future, which supports
courage and effaces all the wounds of pride. A hundred times in
life, the good that one does seems not to serve any immediate use;
but it keeps up just the same the tradition of wishing well and
doing well, without which all would perish.

Is it only since '89 that people have been floundering? Didn't they
have to flounder in order to arrive at '48 when they floundered much
more, but so as to arrive at what should be? You must tell me how
you mean that and I will read Turgot to please you. I don't promise
to go as far as Holbach, ALTHOUGH HE HAS SOME GOOD POINTS, THE
RUFFIAN!

Summon me at the time of Bouilhet's play. I shall be here, working
hard, but ready to run, and loving you with all my heart. Now that I
am no longer a woman, if the good God was just, I should become a
man; I should have the physical strength and would say to you: "Come
let's go to Carthage or elsewhere." But there, one who has neither
sex nor strength, progresses towards childhood, and it is quite
otherwhere that one is renewed; WHERE? I shall know that before you
do, and, if I can, I shall come back in a dream to tell you.



XXII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 19 October

Dear friend, they write me from the Odeon that Bouilhet's play is on
the 27th. I must be in Paris the 26th. Business calls me in any
event. I shall dine at Magny's on that day, and the next, and the
day after that. Now you know where to find me, for I think that you
will come for the first performance. Yours always, with a full
heart,

G. Sand



XXIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 23 October, 1866

Dear friend, since the play is on the 29th I shall give two more
days to my children and I leave here the 28th. You have not told me
if you will dine with me and your friend on the 29th informally, at
Magny's at whatever hour you wish. Let me find a line at 97 rue des
Feuillantines, on the 28th.

Then we shall go to your house, the day you wish. My chief talk with
you will be to listen to you and to love you with all my heart. I
shall bring what I have "ON THE STOCKS." That will GIVE ME COURAGE,
as they say here, to read to you my EMBRYO. If I could only carry
the sun from Nohant. It is glorious.

I embrace and bless you.

G. Sand



XXIV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Paris, 10 November, 1866

On reaching Paris I learn sad news. Last evening, while we were
talking--and I think that we spoke of him day before yesterday--my
friend Charles Duveyrier died, a most tender heart and a most naive
spirit. He is to be buried tomorrow. He was one year older than I
am. My generation is passing bit by bit. Shall I survive it? I don't
ardently desire to, above all on these days of mourning and
farewell. It is as God wills, provided He lets me always love in
this world and in the next.

I keep a lively affection for the dead. But one loves the living
differently. I give you the part of my heart that he had. That
joined to what you have already, makes a large share. It seems to me
that it consoles me to make that gift to you. From a literary point
of view he was not a man of the first rank, one loved him for his
goodness and spontaneity. Less occupied with affairs and philosophy,
he would have had a charming talent. He left a pretty play, Michel
Perrin.

I travelled half the way alone, thinking of you and your mother at
Croisset and looking at the Seine, which thanks to you has become a
friendly GODDESS. After that I had the society of an individual with
two women, as ordinary, all of them, as the music at the pantomime
the other day. Example: "I looked, the sun left an impression like
two points in my eyes." HUSBAND: "That is called luminous points,"
and so on for an hour without stopping.

I shall do all sorts of errands for the house, for I belong to it,
do I not? I am going to sleep, quite worn out; I wept unrestrainedly
all the evening, and I embrace you so much the more, dear friend.
Love me MORE than before, because I am sad.

G. Sand

Have you a friend among the Rouen magistrates? If you have, write
him a line to watch for the NAME Amedee Despruneaux. It is a civil
case which will come up at Rouen in a few days. Tell him that this
Despruneaux is the most honest man in the world; you can answer for
him as for me. In doing this, if the thing is feasible, you will do
me a personal favor. I will do the same for any friend of yours.



XXV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
11 November, 1866

I send you my friend Despruneaux in person. If you know a judge or
two,--or if your brother could give him a word of support, do
arrange it, I kiss you three times on each eye.

G. Sand

Five minutes' interview and that's all the inconvenience. Paris,
Sunday



XXVI. TO GEORGE SAND
Monday night

You are sad, poor friend and dear master; it was you of whom I
thought on learning of Duveyrier's death. Since you loved him, I am
sorry for you. That loss is added to others. How we keep these dead
souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his
necropolis.

I am entirely UNDONE since your departure; it seems to me as if I
had not seen you for ten years. My one subject of conversation with
my mother is you, everyone here loves you. Under what star were you
born, pray, to unite in your person such diverse qualities, so
numerous and so rare?

I don't know what sort of feeling I have for you, but I have a
particular tenderness for you, and one I have never felt for anyone,
up to now. We understood each other, didn't we, that was good.

I especially missed you last evening at ten o'clock. There was a
fire at my wood-seller's. The sky was rose color and the Seine the
color of gooseberry sirup. I worked at the engine for three hours
and I came home as worn out as the Turk with the giraffe.

A newspaper in Rouen, le Nouvelliste, told of your visit to Rouen,
so that Saturday after leaving you I met several bourgeois indignant
at me for not exhibiting you. The best thing was said to me by a
former sub-prefect: "Ah! if we had known that she was here ... we
would have ... we would have ..." he hunted five minutes for the
word; "we would have smiled for her." That would have been very
little, would it not?

To "love you more" is hard for me--but I embrace you tenderly. Your
letter of this morning, so melancholy, reached the BOTTOM of my
heart. We separated at the moment when many things were on the point
of coming to our lips. All the doors between us two are not yet
open. You inspire me with a great respect and I do not dare to
question you.



XXVII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croisset
Paris, 13 November, 1866 Night from Tuesday to Wednesday

I have not yet read my play. I have still something to do over.
Nothing pressing. Bouilhet's play goes admirably well, and they told
me that my little friend Cadol's [Footnote: Edward Cadol, a dramatic
author and a friend of Maurice Sand.] play would come next. And, for
nothing in the world, do I want to step on the body of that child.
That puts me quite a distance off and does not annoy me--NOR INJURE
ME AT ALL. What style! Luckily I am not writing for Buloz.

I saw your friend last evening in the foyer at the Odeon. I shook
hands with him. He had a happy look. And then I talked with
Duquesnel about the fairy play. He wants very much to know it. You
have only to present yourself when ever you wish to busy yourself
with it. You will be received with open arms.

Mario Proth will give me tomorrow or next day the exact date on the
transformation of the journal. Tomorrow I shall go out and buy your
dear mother's shoes. Next week I am going to Palaiseau and I shall
hunt up my book on faience. If I forget anything, remind me of it.

I have been ill for two days. I am cured. Your letter does my heart
good. I shall answer all the questions quite nicely, as you have
answered mine. One is happy, don't you think so, to be able to
relate one's whole life? It is much less complicated than the
bourgeois think, and the mysteries that one can reveal to a friend
are always the contrary of what indifferent ones suppose.

I was very happy that week with you: no care, a good nesting-place a
lovely country, affectionate hearts and your beautiful and frank
face which has a somewhat paternal air. Age has nothing to do with
it. One feels in you the protection of infinite goodness, and one
evening when you called your mother "MY DAUGHTER," two tears came in
my eyes. It was hard to go away, but I hindered your work, and
then,--and then,--a malady of my old age is, not being able to keep
still. I am afraid of getting too attached and of wearying others.
The old ought to be extremely discreet. From a distance I can tell
you how much I love you without the fear of repetition. You are one
of the RARE BEINGS remaining impressionable, sincere, loving art,
not corrupted by ambition, not drunk with success. In short you will
always be twenty-five years of age because of all sorts of ideas
which have become old-fashioned according to the senile young men of
today. With them, I think it is decidedly a pose, but it is so
stupid! If it is a weakness, it is still worse. They are MEN OF
LETTERS and not MEN. Good luck to the novel! It is exquisite; but
oddly enough there is one entire side of you which does not betray
itself in what you do, something that you probably are ignorant of.
That will come later, I am sure of it.

I embrace you tenderly, and your mother too, and the charming niece!
[Footnote: Madame Caroline Commanville.] Ah! I forgot, I saw Couture
this evening; he told me that in order to be nice to you, he would
make your portrait in crayon like mine for whatever price you wish
to arrange. You see I am a good commissioner, use me.



XXVIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
16 November, 1866

Thanks, dear friend of my heart, for all the trouble that I gave you
with my Berrichon Despruneaux. They are friends from the old
country, a whole adorable family of fine people, fathers, children,
wives, nephews, all in the close circle at Nohant. He must have been
MOVED at seeing you. He looked forward to it, all personal interest
aside. And I who am not practical, forgot to tell you that the
judgment would not be given for a fortnight. That in consequence any
preceding within the next two weeks would be extremely useful. If he
gains his suit relative to the constructions at Yport, he will
settle there and I shall realize the plan formed long since of going
every year to his house; he has a delicious wife and they have loved
me a long time. You then are threatened with seeing me often
scratching at your gate in passing, giving you a kiss on the
forehead, crying courage for your labor and running on.  I am still
awaiting our information on the journal. It seems that it is a
little difficult to be exact for '42. I have asked for the most
scrupulous exactitude.

For two days I have been taking out to walk my Cascaret, [Footnote:
Francis Laur.] the little engineer of whom I told you. He has become
very good looking, the ladies lift their lorgnons at him, and it
depends only on him to attain the dignity of a negro "giraffier,"
but he loves, he is engaged, he has four years to wait, to work to
make himself a position, and he has made a vow. You would tell him
that he is stupid, I preach to him, on the contrary, my old
troubadour doctrine.

Morality aside, I don't think that the children of this day have
sufficient force to manage at the same time, science and
dissipation, cocottes and engagements. The proof is that nothing
comes from young Bohemia any longer. Good night, friend, work well,
sleep well. Walk a little for the love of God and of me. Tell your
judges who promised me a smile, to smile on my Berrichon.



XXIX. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
16 November, 1866

Don't take any further steps. Contrary to all anticipations,
Despruneaux has gained his suit during the session.

Whether you have done it or not, he is none the less grateful about
it and charges me to thank you with all his good and honest heart.

Bouilhet goes from better to better. I have just seen the directors
who are delighted.

I love you and embrace you.

Think sometimes of your old troubadour. Friday

G. Sand



XXX. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
18 November (?), 1866

I think that I shall give you pleasure and joy when I tell you that
La Conjuration d'Ambroise, thus says my porter, is announced as a
real money-maker. There was a line this evening as at Villemer, and
Magny which is also a barometer, shows fair weather.

So be content, if that keeps up, Bouilhet is a success. Sunday

G. S.



XXXI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Palaiseau, 22 November, 1866

I think that it will bring me luck to say good evening to my dear
comrade before starting to work.

I am QUITE ALONE in my little house. The gardener and his family
live in the pavilion in the garden and we are the last house at the
end of the village, quite isolated in the country, which is a
ravishing oasis. Fields, woods, appletrees as in Normandy; not a
great river with its steam whistles and infernal chain; a little
stream which runs silently under the willows; a silence ... ah! it
seems to me that I am in the depths of the virgin forest: nothing
speaks except the little jet of the spring which ceaselessly piles
up diamonds in the moonlight. The flies sleeping in the corners of
my room, awaken at the warmth of my fire. They had installed
themselves there to die, they come near the lamp, they are seized
with a mad gaiety, they buzz, they jump, they laugh, they even have
faint inclinations towards love, but it is the hour of death and
paf! in the midst of the dance, they fall stiff. It is over,
farewell to dancing!

I am sad here just the same. This absolute solitude, which has
always been vacation and recreation for me, is shared now by a dead
soul [Footnote: Alexandre Manceau, the engraver,  a friend of
Maurice Sand.] who has ended here, like a lamp which is going out,
yet which is here still. I do not consider him unhappy in the region
where he is dwelling; but the image that he has left near me, which
is nothing more than a reflection, seems to complain because of
being unable to speak to me any more.

Never mind! Sadness is not unhealthy. It prevents us from drying up.
And you dear friend, what are you doing at this hour? Grubbing also,
alone also; for your mother must be in Rouen. Tonight must be
beautiful down there too. Do you sometimes think of the "old
troubadour of the Inn clock, who still sings and will continue to
sing perfect love?" Well! yes, to be sure! You do not believe in
chastity, sir, that's your affair. But as for me, I say that SHE HAS
SOME GOOD POINTS, THE JADE!

And with this, I embrace you with all my heart, and I am going to,
if I can, make people talk who love each other in the old way.

You don't have to write to me when you don't feel like it. No real
friendship without ABSOLUTE liberty.

In Paris next week, and then again to Palaiseau, and after that to
Nohant. I saw Bouilhet at the Monday performance. I am CRAZY about
it. But some of us will applaud at Magny's. I had a cold sweat
there, I who am so steady, and I saw everything quite blue.



XXXII. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset, Tuesday

You are alone and sad down there, I am the same here.

Whence come these attacks of melancholy that overwhelm one at times?
They rise like a tide, one feels drowned, one has to flee. I lie
prostrate. I do nothing and the tide passes.

My novel is going very badly for the moment. That fact added to the
deaths of which I have heard; of Cormenin (a friend of twenty-five
years' standing), of Gavarni, and then all the rest, but that will
pass. You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head
in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find
a word. Ideas come very easily with you, incessantly, like a stream.
With me it is a tiny thread of water. Hard labor at art is necessary
for me before obtaining a waterfall. Ah! I certainly know THE
AGONIES OF STYLE.

In short I pass my life in wearing away my heart and brain, that is
the real TRUTH about your friend.

You ask him if he sometimes thinks of his "old troubadour of the
clock," most certainly! and he mourns for him. Our nocturnal talks
were very precious (there were moments when I restrained myself in
order not to KISS you like a big child).

Your ears ought to have burned last night. I dined at my brother's
with all his family. There was hardly any conversation except about
you, and every one sang your praises, unless perhaps myself, I
slandered you as much as possible, dearly beloved master.

I have reread, a propos of your last letter (and by a very natural
connection of ideas), that chapter of father Montaigne's entitled
"some lines from Virgil." What he said of chastity is precisely what
I believe. It is the effort that is fine and not the abstinence in
itself. Otherwise shouldn't one curse the flesh like the Catholics?
God knows whither that would lead. Now at the risk of repetition and
of being a Prudhomme, I insist that your young man is wrong.
[Footnote: Refers to Francis Laur.] If he is temperate at twenty
years old, he will be a cowardly roue at fifty. Everything has its
compensations. The great natures which are good, are above
everything generous and don't begrudge the giving of themselves. One
must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate
as much as possible in all his being.

That is, I think, the real human existence.



XXXIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croisset
Palaiseau, 29 November, 1866

One need not be spiritualist nor materialist, you say, but one
should be a naturalist. That is a great question.

My Cascaret, that is what I call the little engineer, will decide it
as he thinks best. He is not stupid and he will have many ideas,
deductions and emotions before realizing the prophecy that you make.
I do not catechise him without reserve, for he is stronger than I am
on many points, and it is not Catholic spiritualism that stifles
him. But the question by itself is very serious, and hovers above
our art, above us troubadours, more or less clock-bearing or
clockshaped.

Treat it in an entirely impersonal way; for what is good for one
might be quite the reverse for another. Let us ask ourselves in
making an abstract of our tendencies or of our experiences, if the
human being can receive and seek its own full physical development
without intellectual suffering. Yes, in an ideal and rational
society that would be so. But, in that in which we live and with
which we must be content, do not enjoyment and excess go hand in
hand, and can one separate them or limit them, unless one is a sage
of the first class? And if one is a sage, farewell temptation which
is the father of real joys.

The question for us artists, is to know if abstinence strengthens us
or if it exalts us too much, which state would degenerate into
weakness,--You will say, "There is time for everything and power
enough for every dissipation of strength." Then you make a
distinction and you place limits, there is no way of doing
otherwise. Nature, you think, places them herself and prevents us
from abusing her. Ah! but no, she is not wiser than we who are also
nature.

Our excesses of work, as our excesses of pleasure, kill us
certainly, and the more we are great natures, the more we pass
beyond bounds and extend the limits of our powers.

No, I have no theories. I spend my life in asking questions and in
hearing them answered in one way or another without any victoriously
conclusive reply ever being given me. I await the brilliance of a
new state of my intellect and of my organs in a new life; for, in
this one, whosoever reflects, embraces up to their last
consequences, the limits of pro and con. It is Monsieur Plato, I
think, who asked for and thought he held the bond. He had it no more
than we. However, this bond exists, since the universe subsists
without the pro and con, which constitute it, reciprocally
destroying each other. What shall one call it in material nature?
EQUILIBRIUM, that will do, and for spiritual nature? MODERATION,
relative chastity, abstinence from excess, whatever you want, but
that is translated by EQUILIBRIUM; am I wrong, my master?

Consider it, for in our novels, what our characters do or do not do,
rests only on that. Will they or will they not possess the object of
their ardent desires? Whether it is love or glory, fortune or
pleasure, ever since they existed, they have aspired to one end. If
we have a philosophy in us, they walk right according to us; if we
have not, they walk by chance, and are too much dominated by the
events which we put in the way of their legs. Imbued by our own
ideas and ruled by fatality, they do not always appear logical.
Should we put much or little of ourselves in them? Shouldn't we put
what society puts in each one of us?

For my part, I follow my old inclination, I put myself in the skin
of my good people. People scold me for it, that makes no difference.
You, I don't really know if by method or by instinct, take another
course. What you do, you succeed in; that is why I ask you if we
differ on the question of internal struggles, if the hero ought to
have any or if he ought not to know them.

You always astonish me with your painstaking work; is it a coquetry?
It does not seem labored. What I find difficult is to choose out of
the thousand combinations of scenic action which can vary
infinitely, the clear and striking situation which is not brutal nor
forced. As for style, I attach less importance to it than you do.

The wind plays my old harp as it lists. It has its HIGH NOTES, its
LOW NOTES, its heavy notes--and its faltering notes, in the end it
is all the same to me provided the emotion comes, but I can find
nothing in myself. It is THE OTHER who sings as he likes, well or
ill, and when I try to think about it, I am afraid and tell myself
that I am nothing, nothing at all. But a great wisdom saves us; we
know how to say to ourselves, "Well, even if we are absolutely
nothing but instruments, it is still a charming state and like no
other, this feeling oneself vibrate."

Now, let the wind blow a little over your strings. I think that you
take more trouble than you need, and that you ought to let THE OTHER
do it oftener. That would go just as well and with less fatigue.

The instrument might sound weak at certain moments, but the breeze
in continuing would increase its strength. You would do afterwards
what I don't do, what I should do. You would raise the tone of the
whole picture and would cut out what is too uniformly in the light.

Vale et me ama.



XXXIV. TO GEORGE SAND
Saturday morning

Don't bother yourself about the information relative to the
journals. That will occupy little space in my book and I have time
to wait. But when you have nothing else to do, jot down on paper
whatever you can recall of '48. Then you can develop it in talking.
I don't ask you for copy of course, but to collect a little of your
personal memories.

Do you know an actress at the Odeon who plays Macduff in Macbeth?
Dugueret? She would like to have the role of Nathalie in Mont-
reveche. She will be recommended to you by Girardin, Dumas and me. I
saw her yesterday in Faustine, in which she showed talent. My
opinion is that she has intelligence and that one could profit by
her.

If your little engineer has made a VOW, and if that vow does not
cost him anything, he is right to keep it; if not, it is pure folly,
between you and me. Where should liberty exist if not in passion?

Well! no, IN MY DAY we didn't take such vows and we loved! and
swaggeringly. But all participated in a great eclecticism and when
one strayed FROM LADIES it was from pride, in defiance of one's
self, and for effect. In short, we were Red Romantics, perfectly
ridiculous to be sure, but in full bloom. The little good which
remains to me comes from that epoch.



XXXV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Palaiseau, 30 November, 1866

There would be a good deal to say on all that, my comrade. My
Cascaret, that is to say, the fiance in question, keeps himself for
his fiancee. She said to him, "Let us wait till you have
accomplished certain definite work," and he works. She said to him,
"Let us keep ourselves pure for each other," and he keeps himself
pure. It is not that he is choked by Catholic spiritualism; but he
has a high ideal of love, and why counsel him to go and lose it when
his conscience and his honor depend on keeping it?

There is an equilibrium which Nature, our ruler, herself puts in our
instincts, and she sets the limit to our appetites. Great natures
are not the most robust. We are not developed in all our senses by a
very logical education. We are compressed in every way, and we
thrust out our roots and branches when and how we can. Great artists
are often weak also, and many are impotent. Some too strong in
desire are quickly exhausted. In general I think that we have too
intense joys and sorrows, we who work with our brains. The laborer
who works his land and his wife hard by day and night is not a
forceful nature. His brain is very feeble. You say to develop one's
self in every direction? Come, not all at the same time, not without
rest.

Those who brag of that, are bluffing a bit, or IF THEY DO
everything, do everything ill. If love for them is a little bread-
and-butter and art a little pot-boiler, all right; but if their
pleasure is great, verging on the infinite, and their work eager,
verging on enthusiasm, they do not alternate these as in sleeping
and waking.

As for me, I don't believe in these Don Juans who are Byrons at the
same time. Don Juan did not make poems and Byron made, so they say,
very poor love. He must have had sometimes--one can count such
emotions in one's life--a complete ecstasy of heart, mind and
senses. He knew enough about them to be one of the poets of love.
Nothing else is necessary for the instrument of our vibration. The
continual wind of little appetites breaks them.

Try some day to write a novel in which the artist (the real artist)
is the hero, you will see what great, but delicate and restrained,
vigor is in it, how he will see everything with an attentive eye,
curious and tranquil, and how his infatuations with the things he
examines and delves into, will be rare and serious. You will see
also how he fears himself, how he knows that he can not surrender
himself without exhaustion, and how a profound modesty in regard to
the treasures of his soul prevents him from scattering and wasting
them.

The artist is such a fine type to do, that I have never dared really
to do him. I do not consider myself worthy to touch that beautiful
and very complicated figure; that is aiming too high for a mere
woman. But if it could certainly tempt you some day, it would be
worth while.

Where is the model? I don't know, I have never REALLY known any one
who did not show some spot in the sunlight, I mean some side where
the artist verged on the Philistine. Perhaps you have not that spot;
you ought to paint yourself. As for me I have it. I love
classifications, I verge on the pedagogue. I love to sew and to care
for children, I verge on the servant. I am easily distracted and
verge on the idiot. And then I should not like perfection; I feel it
but I shouldn't know how to show it.

But one could give him some faults in his nature. What ones? We
shall hunt for them some day. That is not really what you are
working on now and I ought not to distract you from it.

Be less cruel to yourself. Go ahead and when the afflatus shall have
produced everything you must elevate the general tone and cut out
what ought not to come down front stage. Can't that be done? It
seems to me that it can. What you do appears so easy, so abundant!
It is a perpetual overflow, I do not understand your anguish.  Good
night, dear brother, my love to all yours. I have returned to my
solitude at Palaiseau, I love it. I leave it for Paris, Monday. I
embrace you warmly. Good luck to your work.

G. Sand



XXXVI. Monsieur Gustave Flobert at Croisset,
Rouen [The postage stamp bears the mark, Paris, 4, December, 1866]

Sir the noise that you make in literature by your distinguished
talent I also made in my day in the manner that my means permitted
me I began in 1804 under the auspices of the celebrated Madame Saqui
and bore off palms and left memories in the annals of the tight-rope
and coregrafie balancer in all countries where I have been there
appreciated by generals and other officers of the Empire by whom I
have been solicited up to an advanced age so that wives of prefects
and ministers could not have been complimented about it I have read
your distinguished works notably Madame Bovarie of which I think I
am capable of being a model to you when she breaks the chains of her
feet to go where her heart calls her. I am well preserved for my
advanced age and if you have a repugnance for an artist in
misfortune, I should be content with your ideal sentiments. You can
then count on my heart not being able to dispose of my person being
married to a man of light character who squandered my wax cabinet
wherein were all figures of celebrities, kings, emperors, ancient
and modern and celebrated crimes, which if I had had your permission
about it you would have been placed in the number I had then a place
in the railroad substation to have charge of the cabinets which the
jealousy of my rival made me lose, it is in these sentiments that I
write you if you deign to write the history of my unhappy life you
alone would be worthy of it and would see in it things of which you
would be worthy of appreciating I shall present myself at your house
in Rouen whose address I had from M. Bouilhet who knows me well
having come to see me in his youth he will tell you that I have the
phthisic still agreeably and always faithful to all who knew me
whether in the civil or in the military and in these sentiments for
life your affectionate

Victoire Potelet

called Marengo Lirondelle widow Dodin
Rue Lanion, 47, Belleville.



XXXVII. TO GEORGE SAND
Wednesday night, 5th December, 1866

Oh! how lovely the letter of Marengo the Swallow is! Seriously, I
think it a masterpiece, not a word which is not a word of genius. I
have laughed aloud many times. I thank you very dear master, you are
as good as can be.

You never tell me what you are doing. How far has the play gone?

I am not at all surprised that you don't understand my literary
agonies. I don't understand them myself. But they exist
nevertheless, and violent ones.

I don't in the least know how to set to work to write, and I begin
by expressing only the hundredth part of my ideas after infinite
gropings. Not one who seizes the first impulse, your friend, no! not
at all! Thus for entire days I have polished and re-polished a
paragraph without accomplishing anything. I feel like weeping at
times. You ought to pity me!

As for our subject under discussion (a propos of your young man),
what you write me in your last letter is so my way of thinking, that
I have not only practised it but preached it. Ask Theo. However, let
us understand one another. Artists (who are priests) risk nothing in
being chaste; on the contrary. But the bourgeois, what is the use in
it for them? Of course there must be certain ones among humanity who
stick to chastity. Happy indeed those who don't depart from it.

I don't agree with you that there is anything worth while to be done
with the character of the IDEAL ARTIST; he would be a monster. Art
is not made to paint the exceptions, and I feel an unconquerable
repugnance to putting on paper something from out of my heart. I
even think that a novelist HASN'T THE RIGHT TO EXPRESS HIS OPINION
on any subject whatsoever. Has the good God ever uttered it, his
opinion? That is why there are not a few things that choke me which
I should like to spit out, but which I swallow. Why say them, in
fact! The first comer is more interesting than Monsieur Gustave
Flaubert, because he is more GENERAL and therefore more typical.

Nevertheless, there are days when I consider myself below
imbecility. I have still a globe of goldfish and that amuses me.
They keep me company while I dine. Is it stupid to be interested in
such simple things? Adieu, it is late, I have an aching head.

I embrace you.



XXXVIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT,
at Paris December, 1866

"Not put one's heart into what one writes?" I don't understand at
all, oh! not at all! As for me, I think that one can not put
anything else into it. Can one separate one's mind from one's heart?
Is it something different? Can sensation itself limit itself? Can
existence divide itself? In short, not to give oneself entirely to
one's work, seems to me as impossible as to weep with something else
than one's eyes, and to think with something else than one's brain.

What was it you meant? You must tell me when you have the time.



XXXIX. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Paris, 8 December, 1866

You ask me what I am doing? Your old troubadour is content this
evening. He has passed the night in re-doing a second act which did
not go properly and which has turned out well, so well that my
directors are delighted, and I have good hopes of making the end
effective--it does not please me yet, but one must pull it through.
In short, I have nothing to tell you about myself which is very
interesting. When one has the patience of an ox and the wrist broken
from crushing stones well or badly, one has scarcely any unexpected
events or emotions to recount. My poor Manceau called me the ROAD-
MENDER, and there is nothing less poetic than those beings.

And you, dear friend, are you experiencing the anguish and labors of
childbirth? That is splendid and youthful. Those who want them don't
always get them!

When my daughter-in-law brings into the world dear little children,
I abandon myself to such labor in holding her in my arms that it
reacts on me, and when the infant arrives, I am sicker than she is,
and even seriously so. I think that your pains now react on me, and
I have a headache on account of them. But alas! I cannot assist at
any birth and I almost regret the time when one believed it hastened
deliverances to burn candles before an image.

I see that that rascal Bouilhet has betrayed me; he promised me to
copy the Marengo letter in a feigned hand to see if you would be
taken in by it. People have written to me seriously things like
that. How good and kind your great friend is. He is adored at the
Odeon, and this evening they told me that his play was going better
and better. I went to hear it again two or three days ago and I was
even more delighted with it than the first time.

Well, well, let's keep up our heart, whatever happens, and when you
go to rest remember that someone loves you. Affectionate regards to
your mother, brother and niece.

G. Sand



XL. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset, Saturday night

I have seen Citizen Bouilhet, who had a real ovation in his own
country. His compatriots who had absolutely ignored him up to then,
from the moment that Paris applauded him, screamed with enthusiasm.-
-He will return here Saturday next, for a banquet that they are
giving him,--80 covers, at least.

As for Marengo the Swallow, he kept your secret so well, that he
read the letter in question with an astonishment which duped me.

Poor Marengo! she is a figure! and one that you ought to put in a
book. I wonder what her memoirs would be, written in that style?--
Mine (my style) continues to give me no small annoyance. I hope,
however, in a month, to have crossed the most barren tract. But at
the moment I am lost in a desert; well, by the grace of God, so much
the worse for me! How gladly I shall abandon this sort of thing,
never to return to it to my dying day! Depicting the modern French
bourgeois is a stench in my nostrils! And then won't it be time
perhaps to enjoy oneself a bit in life, and to choose subjects
pleasant to the author?

I expressed myself badly when I said to you that "one should not
write from the heart." I meant to say: not put one's personality
into the picture. I think that great art is scientific and
impersonal. One should, by an effort of mind, put oneself into one's
characters and not create them after oneself. That is the method at
least; a method which amounts to this: try to have a great deal of
talent and even of genius if you can. How vain are all the poetic
theories and criticisms!--and the nerve of the gentlemen who compose
them sickens me. Oh! nothing restrains them, those boneheads!

Have you noticed that there is sometimes in the air a current of
common ideas? For instance, I have just read my friend Du Camp's new
novel: Forces Perdues. It is very like what I am doing, in many
ways. His book is very naive and gives an accurate idea of the men
of our generation having become real fossils to the young men of
today. The reaction of '48 opened a deep chasm between the two
Frances.

Bouilhet told me that you had been seriously ill at one of the
recent Magny's, although you do pretend to be a "woman of wood." Oh!
no you are not of wood, dear good great heart! "Beloved old
troubadour," would it not perhaps be opportune to rehabilitate him
at the Theatre Almanzor? I can see him with his toque and his guitar
and his apricot tunic howling at the black-gowned students from the
top of a rock. The talk would be fine. Now, good night; I kiss you
on both cheeks tenderly.



XLI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Paris, 7 December, 1866

Something like a week ago someone came to my house in the morning to
ask me the address of the bootmaker, my maid did not want to awaken
me, and it was not until noon that I read the letter; the bearer
said he came from the Hotel Helder on the rue Helder. I answered at
once that Simonin lived at 15 rue Richelieu, I wrote to your mother
thinking that it was she who wrote to me. I see that she did not
receive my note and I don't understand about it, but it is not my
fault.

Your old Troubadour is sick as a dog again today, but it will not
prevent him from going to Magny's this evening. He could not die in
better company; although he would prefer the edge of a ditch in the
spring.

Everything else goes well and I leave for Nohant on Saturday.  I am
trying hard to push the entomological work which Maurice is
publishing. It is very fine.

I am doing for him what I have never done for myself. I am writing
to the newspaper men.

I shall recommend Mademoiselle Bosquet to whom I can, but that
appeals to another public, and I don't stand in as well with the
literary men as I do with the scholars. But certainly Marengo the
Swallow MUST BE DONE and the apricot troubadour also. All that was
of the Cadios of the revolution who began to be or who wanted to be
something, no matter what. I am of the last comers and you others
born of us, you are between the illusions of my time and the crude
deception of the new times. It is quite natural that Du Camp should
go parallel with you in a series of observations and ideas, that
does not mean anything. There will be no resemblance.

Oh no! I have not found a title for you, it is too serious, and then
I should need to know everything. In any case I am no good today to
do anything except to draw up my epitaph. Et in Arcadia ego, you
know, I love you, dear friend brother, and bless you with all my
heart.

G. Sand
Monday.



XLII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
Paris, 9 January, 1867

Dear comrade,

Your old troubadour has been tempted to bite the dust. He is still
in Paris. He should have left the 25th of December; his trunk was
strapped; your first letter was awaiting him every day at Nohant. At
last he is all ready to leave and he goes tomorrow with his son
Alexandre [Footnote: Alexandre Dumas fils.] who is anxious to
accompany him.

It is stupid to be laid on one's back and to lose consciousness for
three days and to get up as enfeebled as if one had done something
painful and useful. It was nothing after all, except temporary
impossibility of digesting anything whatever. Cold, or weakness, or
work, I don't know. I don't think of it any longer. Sainte-Beuve is
much more disquieting, somebody have written you about it. He is
better also, but there will be serious trouble, and on account of
that, accidents to look out for. I am very saddened and anxious
about it.

I have not worked for two weeks; so my task has not progressed very
much, and as I don't know if I am going to be in shape very soon, I
have given the Odeon A VACATION. They will take me when I am ready.
I think of going a little to the south when I have seen my children.
The plants of the coast are running through my head. I am
prodigiously uninterested in anything which is not my little ideal
of peaceful work, country life, and of tender and pure friendship. I
really think that I am not going to live a long time, although I am
quite cured and well. I get this warning from the great calm,
CONTINUALLY CALMER, which exists in my formerly agitated soul. My
brain only works from synthesis to analysis, and formerly it was the
contrary. Now, what presents itself to my eyes when I awaken is the
planet; I have considerable trouble in finding again there the MOI
which interested me formerly, and which I begin to' call YOU in the
plural. It is charming, the planet, very interesting, very curious
but rather backward, and as yet somewhat unpractical; I hope to pass
into an oasis with better highways and possible to all. One needs so
much money and resources in order to travel here! and the time lost
in order to procure. these necessaries is lost to study and to
contemplation. It seems to me that there is due me something less
complicated, less civilized, more naturally luxurious, and more
easily good than this feverish halting-place. Will you come into the
land, of my dreams, if I succeed in finding the road? Ah! who can
know?

And the novel, is it getting on? Your courage has not declined?
Solitude does not weigh on you? I really think that it is not
absolute, and that somewhere there is a sweetheart who comes and
goes, or who lives near there. But there is something of the
anchorite in your life just the same, and if envy your situation. As
for me, I am too alone at Palaiseau, with a dead soul; not alone
enough at Nohant, with the children whom I love too much to belong
to myself,--and at Paris, one does not know what one is, one forgets
oneself entirely for a thousand things which are not worth any more
than oneself. I embrace you with all my heart, dear friend; remember
me to your mother, to your dear family, and write me at Nohant, that
will do me good.

The cheeses? I don't know at all, it seems to me that they spoke to
me of them, but I don't remember at all. I will tell you that from
down there.



XLIII. TO GEORGE SAND
Croisset, Saturday night

No, dear master, you are not near your end. So much the worse for
you perhaps. But you will live to be old, very old, as giants live,
since you are of that race: only you MUST rest. One thing astonishes
me and that is that you have not died twenty times over, having
thought so much, written so much and suffered so much. Do go then,
since you have the desire, to the Mediterranean. Its azure sky
quiets and invigorates. There are the Countries of Youth, such as
the Bay of Naples. Do they make one sadder sometimes? I do not know.

Life is not easy! What a complicated and extravagant affair! I know
something about that. One must have money for everything! So that
with a modest revenue and an unproductive profession one has to make
up one's mind to have but little. So I do! The habit is formed, but
the days that work does not go well are not amusing. Yes indeed! I
would love to follow you into another planet. And a propos of money,
it is that which will make our planet uninhabitable in the near
future, for it will be impossible to live here, even for the rich,
without looking after one's property; one will have to spend several
hours a day fussing over one's INCOME. Charming! I continue to fuss
over my novel, and I shall go to Paris when I reach the end of my
chapter, towards the middle of next month.

And whatever you suspect, no "lovely lady" comes to see me. Lovely
ladies have occupied my mind a good deal, but have taken up very
little of my time. Applying the term anchorite to me is perhaps a
juster comparison than you think.

I pass entire weeks without exchanging a word with a human being,
and at the end of the week it is not possible for me to recall a
single day nor any event whatsoever. I see my mother and my niece on
Sundays, and that is all. My only company consists of a band of rats
in the garret, which make an infernal racket above my head, when the
water does not roar or the wind blow. The nights are black as ink,
and a silence surrounds me comparable to that of the desert.
Sensitiveness is increased immeasurably in such a setting. I have
palpitations of the heart for nothing.

All that results from our charming profession. That is what it means
to torment the soul and the body. But perhaps this torment is our
proper lot here below?

I told you, didn't I, that I had reread Consuelo and the Comtesse de
Rudolstadt; it took me four days. We must discuss them at length,
when you are willing. Why am I in love with Siverain? Perhaps
because I am of both sexes.



XLIV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT at Croissset
Nohant, 15 January, 1867

Here I am at home, fairly strong except for several hours during the
evening. Yet, THAT WILL PASS. THE EVIL OR HE WHO ENDURES IT, my old
cure used to say, CAN NOT LAST. I received your letter this morning,
dear friend of my heart. Why do I love you more than most of the
others, even more than old and well-tried friends? I am asking, for
my condition at this hour, is that of being

THOU WHO GOEST SEEKING,
AT SUNSET,
FORTUNE! ...

Yes, intellectual fortune, LIGHT! Oh well, here it is: one gets,
being old, at the sunset of life,--which is the most beautiful hour
of tones and reflections,--a new idea of everything and of affection
above all.

In the age of power and of personality, one tests one's friends as
one tests the earth, from the point of view of reciprocity. One
feels oneself solid, one wants to find that which bears one or leads
one, solid. But, when one feels the intensity of the moi fleeing,
one loves persons and things for what they are in themselves, for
what they represent in the eyes of one's soul, and not at all for
what they add further to one's destiny. It is like the picture or
the statue which one would like to own, when one dreams at the same
time of a beautiful house of one's own in which to put it.

But one has passed through green Bohemia without gathering anything
there; one has remained poor, sentimental and troubadourish. One
knows very well that it will always be the same, and that one will
die without a hearth or a home. Then one thinks of the statue, of
the picture which one would not know what to do with and which one
would not know where to place with due honor, if one owned it. One
is content to know that they are in some temple not profaned by cold
analysis, a little far from the eye, and one loves them so much the
more. One says: I will go again to the country where they are. I
shall see again and I shall love always that which has made me love
and understand them. The contact of my personality will not have
changed them, it will not be myself that I shall love in them.

And it is thus, truly, that the ideal which one does not dream of
grasping, fixes itself in one because it remains ITSELF. That is all
the secret of the beautiful, of the only truth, of love, friendship,
of art, of enthusiasm, and of faith. Consider it, you will see.

That solitude in which you live would be delicious to me in fine
weather. In winter I find it stoical, and am forced to recall to
myself that you have not the moral need of locomotion AS A HABIT. I
used to think that was another expenditure of strength during this
season of being shut in;--well, it is very fine, but it must not
continue indefinitely; if the novel has to last longer, you must
interrupt it, or vary it with distractions. Really, my dear friend,
think of the life of the body, which gets upset and nervous when you
subdue it too much. When I was ill in Paris, I saw a physician, very
mad, but very intelligent, who said very true things on that
subject. He said that I SPIRITUALIZED myself in a disquieting
manner, and when I told him, exactly, a propos of you, that one
could abstract oneself from everything except work, and have more
rather than less strength, he answered that the danger was as great
in accumulating as in losing, and a propos of this, many excellent
things which I wish I could repeat to you.

Besides, you know them, but you never pay any attention to them.
Then this work which you abuse so in words, is a passion, and a
great one! Now, I shall tell you what you tell me. For our sake and
for the sake of your old troubadour, do SPARE yourself a little.

Consuelo, La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, what are they? Are they mine? I
don't recall a single word in them. You are reading that, you? Are
you really amused? Then I shall read them one of these days and I
shall love myself if you love me.

What is being hysterical? I have perhaps been that also, I am
perhaps; but I don't know anything about it, never having profoundly
studied the thing, and having heard of it without having studied it.
Isn't it an uneasiness, an anguish caused by the desire of an
impossible SOMETHING OR OTHER? In that case, we are all attacked by
it, by this strange illness, when we have imagination; and why
should such a malady have a sex?

And still further, there is this for those strong in anatomy: THERE
IS ONLY ONE SEX. A man and a woman are so entirely the same thing,
that one hardly understands the mass of distinctions and of subtle
reasons with which society is nourished concerning this subject. I
have observed the infancy and the development of my son and my
daughter. My son was myself, therefore much more woman, than my
daughter, who was an imperfect man.

I embrace you. Maurice and Lina who have tasted your cheese, send
you their regards, and Mademoiselle Aurore cries to you, WAIT, WAIT,
WAIT! That is all that she knows how to say while laughing like a
crazy person; for, at heart she is serious, attentive, clever with
her hands as a monkey and amusing herself better with games she
invents, than with those one suggests to her. I think that she will
have a mind of her own.

If I do not get cured here, I shall go to Cannes, where some friends
are urging me to come. But I can not yet mention it to my children.
When I am with them it is not easy to move. There is passion and
jealousy. And all my life has been like that, never my own! Pity
yourself then, you who belong to yourself!



XLV. TO GEORGE SAND
Wednesday evening

I have followed your counsel, dear master, I have EXERCISED!!! Am I
not splendid; eh?

Sunday night, at eleven o'clock, there was such lovely moonlight
along the river and on the snow that I was taken with an itch for
movement, and I walked for two hours and a half imagining all sorts
of things, pretending that I was travelling in Russia or in Norway.
When the tide came in and cracked the cakes of ice in the Seine and
the thin ice which covered the stream, it was, without any
exaggeration, superb. Then I thought of you and I missed you.

I don't like to eat alone. I have to associate the idea with someone
with the things that please me. But this someone is rare. I too
wonder why I love you. Is it because you are a great man or a
charming being? I don't know. What is certain is that I experience a
PARTICULAR sentiment for you and I cannot define it.

And a propos of this, do you think (you who are a master of
psychology), that one can love two people in the same way and that
one can experience two identical sensations about them? I don't
think so, since our individuality changes at every moment of its
existence.

You write me lovely things about "disinterested affection." That is
true, so is the opposite! We make God always in our own image. At
the bottom of all our loves and all our admirations we find
ourselves again: ourselves or something approaching us. What is the
difference if the OURSELVES is good!

My moi bores me for the moment. How this fool weighs on my shoulders
at times! He writes too slowly and is not bluffing at all when he
complains of his work. What a task! and what a devil of an idea to
have sought such a subject! You should give me a recipe for going
faster: and you complain of seeking a fortune! You! I have received
a little note from Saint-Beuve which reassures about his health, but
it is sad. He seemed to me depressed at not being able to haunt the
dells of Cyprus.  He is within the truth, or at least within his own
truth, which amounts to the same thing. I shall be like him perhaps,
when I am his age. However, I think not. Not having had the same
youth, my old age will be different.

That reminds me that I once dreamed a book on Saint Perrine.
Champfleury treated that subject badly. For I don't see that he is
comic: I should have made him atrocious and lamentable. I think that
the heart does not grow old; there are even people whose hearts grow
bigger with age. I was much drier and more bitter twenty years ago
than now. I am feminized and softened by wear, as others get harder,
and that makes me INDIGNANT. I feel that I am becoming a COW, it
takes nothing to move me; everything troubles and agitates me,
everything is to me as the north wind is to the reed.

A word from you, which I remembered, has made me reread now the Fair
Maid of Perth. It is a good story, whatever one says about it. That
fellow decidedly had an imagination.

Well, adieu. Think of me. I send you my best love.



XLVI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset
Nohant, 1867

Bah! zut! troulala! Well! well! I am not sick any more, or at least
I am only half sick. The air of the country restores me, or
patience, or THE OTHER person, the one who wants to work again and
to produce. What is my illness? Nothing. Everything is all right,
but I have something that they call anemia, an effect without a
tangible cause, a breakdown which has been threatening for several
years, and which became noticeable at Palaiseau, after my return
from Croisset. An emaciation that is too rapid to be within reason,
a pulse too slow, too feeble, an indolent or capricious stomach,
with a sensation of stifling and a fondness for inertia. I was not
able to keep a glass of water on my poor stomach for several days,
and that brought me so low that I thought I was hardly curable; but,
all is getting on, and I have even been working since yesterday.

You, dear, you go walking in the night, in the snow. That is
something which for an exceptional excursion, is rather foolish and
might indeed make you ill also. Good Heavens! It is not the moon, it
is the sun that I advise; we are not owls, OBVIOUSLY! We have just
had three spring days. I wager that you have not climbed up to my
dear orchard which is so pretty and which I love so much. If it was
only in remembrance of me, you ought to climb up every fine day at
noon. Your work would flow more abundantly afterward and you would
regain the time you lost and more too.

Then you are worrying about money? I don't know what that is, since
I have not a sou in the world. I live by my day, work as does the
proletarian; when I can no longer do my day's work, I shall be
packed up for the other world, and then I shall have no more need of
anything. But you must live. How can you live by your pen if you
always let yourself be duped and shorn? It is not I who can teach
you how to protect yourself But haven't you a friend who knows how
to act for you? Alas, yes, the world is going to the devil in that
respect; and I was talking of you, the other day, to a very dear
friend, while I was showing him the artist, a personage become so
rare, and cursing the necessity of thinking of the material side of
life. I send you the last page of his letter; you will see that you
have in him a friend whom you did not suspect, and whose name will
surprise you.

No, I shall not go to Cannes, in spite of a strong temptation!
Imagine, I received a little box filled with flowers gathered out-
doors, five or six days ago; for the package followed me to Paris
and to Palaiseau. Those flowers are adorably fresh, they smell
sweetly, they are as pretty as anything.--Ah! to go, go at once to
the country of the sun. But I have no money, and besides I have no
time. My illness has delayed me and put me off. Let us stay here. Am
I not well? If I can't go to Paris next month, won't you come to see
me here? Certainly, it is an eight hours' journey. You can not see
this ancient nook. You owe me a week, or I shall believe that I love
a big ingrate who does not pay me back.

Poor Sainte-Beuve! More unhappy than we, he who has never had any
great disappointments and who has no longer any material worries. He
bewails what is the least regrettable and the least serious in life
understood as he understood it! And then very proud, having been a
Jansenist, his heart has cooled in that direction. Perhaps the
intelligence was developed, but that does not suffice to make us
live, and does not teach us how to die. Barbes, who has expected for
a long time that a stroke would carry him off, is gentle and
smiling. It does not seem to him, and it does not seem to his
friends, that death will separate him from us. He who quite goes
away, is he who believes he ends and does not extend a hand so that
anyone can follow him or rejoin him.

And good-night, dear friend of my heart. They are ringing for the
performance. Maurice regales us this evening with marionettes. They
are very amusing, and the theatre is so pretty! A real artist's
jewel. Why aren't you here? It is horrid not to live next door to
those one loves.



XLVII. TO GEORGE SAND
Wednesday

I received yesterday your son's book. I shall start it when I have
gotten rid of less amusing readings, probably. Meanwhile, don't
thank him any the less, dear master.

First, let's talk of you; "arsenic." I am sure of it! You must drink
iron, walk, and sleep, and go to the south, no matter what it costs,
there! Otherwise the WOODEN WOMAN will break down. As for money, we
shall find it; and as for the time, take it. You won't do anything
that I advise, of course. Oh! well, you are wrong, and you hurt me.

No, I have not what you call worries about money; my revenues are
very small, but they are sure. Only, as it is your friend's habit to
anticipate them he finds himself short at times, and he grumbles "in
the silence of his closet," but not elsewhere. Unless I have
extraordinary reverses, I shall have enough to feed me and warm me
until the end of my days. My heirs are or will be rich (for it is I
who am the poor one of the family). Then, zut!

As for gaining money by my pen, that is an aspiration that I have
never had, recognizing that I was radically incapable of it.

I have to live as a small retired countryman, which is not very
amusing. But so many others who are worth more than I am not having
the land, it would be unfair for me to complain. Accusing Providence
is, moreover a mania so common, that one ought to refrain from it
through simple good taste.

Another word about money and one that shall be quite between
ourselves. I can, without being inconvenienced at all, as soon as I
am in Paris, that is to say from the 20th to the 23rd of the present
month, lend you a thousand francs, if you need them in order to go
to Cannes. I make you this proposition bluntly, as I would to
Bouilhet, or any other intimate friend. Come, don't stand on
ceremony!

Between people in society, that would not be correct, I know that,
but between troubadours many things are allowable.

You are very kind with your invitation to go to Nohant. I shall go,
for I want very much to see your house. I am annoyed not to know it
when I think of you. But I shall have to put off that pleasure till
next summer. Now I have to stay some time in Paris. Three months are
not too long for all I want to do there.

I send you back the page from the letter of your friend Barbes,
whose real biography I know very imperfectly. All I know of him is
that he is honest and heroic. Give him a hand-shake for me, to thank
him for his sympathy. Is he, BETWEEN OURSELVES, as intelligent as he
is good?

I feel the importance now, of getting men of that class to be rather
frank with me. For I am going to start studying the Revolution of
'48. You have promised me to hunt in your library at Nohant for (1)
an article of yours on faience; (2) a novel by father X---, a
Jesuit, on the Holy Virgin.

But what sternness for the father Beuve who is neither Jesuit nor
virgin! He regrets, you say, "what is the least regrettable,
understood as he understood it." Why so? Everything depends upon the
intensity that one puts on the thing.

Men always find that the most serious thing of their existence is
enjoyment.

Woman for us all is the highest point of the infinite. That is not
noble, but that is the real depth of the male. They exaggerate that
unmercifully, God be thanked, for literature and for individual
happiness also.

Oh! I have missed you so much. The tides are superb, the wind
groans, the river foams and overflows. It blows from the ocean,
which benefits one.



XLVIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Paris
Nohant, 8 February, 1867

No, I am not Catholic, but I reject monstrosities. I say that the
hideous old man who buys young girls does not make love and that
there is in it neither death nor birth, nor infinity, nor male nor
female. It is a thing against nature; for it is not desire that
drives the young girl into the arms of the ugly old man, and where
there is not liberty nor reciprocity there is an attack against holy
nature. Therefore that which he regrets is not regrettable, unless
he thinks that his little cocottes will regret his person, and I ask
you if they will regret anything else than their dirty wages? That
was the gangrene in this great and admirable mind, so lucid and so
wise on all other subjects. One pardons everything in those one
loves, when one is obliged to defend them from their enemies. But
what we say between ourselves is buried, and I can tell you that
vice has quite spoiled my old friend.

We must believe that we love one another a great deal, dear comrade,
for we both had the same thought at the same time. You offer me a
thousand francs with which to go to Cannes; you who are as hard up
as I am, and, when you wrote to me that you WERE BOTHERED about
money matters, I opened my letter again, to offer you half of what I
have, which still amounts to about two thousand francs; it is my
reserve. And then I did not dare. Why? It is quite stupid; you were
better than I, you came straight to the point. Well, I thank you for
that kind thought and I do not accept. But I would accept, be sure
of it, if I did not have other resources. Only I tell you that if
anyone ought to lend to me, it is Buloz who has bought chateaux and
lands with my novels. He would not refuse me, I know. He even offers
it to me. I shall take from him then, if I have to. But I am not in
a condition to leave, I have had a relapse these last few days. I
slept thirty-six hours together, exhausted. Now I am on my feet
again, but weak. I confess to you that I have not the energy TO WISH
TO LIVE. I don't care about it; moving from where I am comfortable,
to seek new fatigues, working like a dog to renew a dog's life, it
is a little stupid, I think, when it would be so sweet to pass away
like that, still loving, still loved, at strife with no one, not
discontent with oneself and dreaming of the wonders of other worlds-
-this assumes that the imagination is still fresh. But I don't know
why I talk to you of things considered sad, I have too much the
habit of looking at them pleasantly. I forget that they appear
afflicting to those who seem in the fulness of life. Don't let's
talk about them any longer and let spring do the work, spring which
perhaps will breathe into me the desire to take up my work again. I
shall be as docile to the interior voice that tells me to walk as to
that telling me to sit down.

It is not I who promised you a novel on the Holy Virgin. At least I
don't think so. I can not find my article on faience. Do look and
see if it was printed at the end of one of my volumes to complete
the last sheet. It was entitled Giovanni Freppa ou les Maioliques.

Oh! what luck! While writing to you it has come back to me that
there is a corner where I have not looked. I hasten there, I find
it! I find something better than my article, and I send you three
works which will make you as learned as I am. That of Passeri is
charming.

Barbes has intelligence, certainly! but he is a sugar loaf. Brain on
a lofty scale, head of an Indian, with gentle instincts, almost
impossible to find; all for metaphysical thought which becomes an
instinct and a passion that dominates everything. Add to that a
character that one can only compare to Garibaldi. A creature of
incredible sanctity and perfection. Immense worth without immediate
application in France. The setting of another age or another country
is what this hero needs. And now good-night,--O God, what a CALF I
am! I leave you the title of COW, which you give yourself in your
days of weariness. Never mind, tell me when you are to be in Paris.
It is probable that I shall have to go there for a few days for one
thing or another. We must embrace each other and then you shall come
to Nohant this summer. It is agreed, it must be!

My affectionate regards to your mother and to your lovely niece.

Please acknowledge the receipt of the three pamphlets; they would be
a loss.



XLIX. TO GEORGE SAND

Dear master,

You really ought to go to see the sun somewhere; it is foolish to be
always suffering; do travel; rest; resignation is the worst of the
virtues.

I have need of it in order to endure all the stupidities that I
hear! You can not imagine to what a degree they have reached. France
which has been sometimes taken with St. Vitus dance (as under
Charles VI), seems to me now to have a paralysis of the brain. They
are mad with fear. Fear of the Prussians, fear of the strikes, fear
of the Exposition which does not go well, fear of everything. We
have to go back to 1849 to find such a degree of imbecility.

There was at the last Magny such inane conversation that I swore to
myself never to put foot inside the place again. The only subjects
under discussion all the time were Bismarck and the Luxembourg. I
was stuffed with it! For the rest I don't find it easy to live. Far
from becoming blunted my sensibilities are sharper; a lot of
insignificant things make me suffer. Pardon this weakness, you who
are so strong and tolerant.

The novel does not go at all well. I am deep in reading the
newspapers of '48. I have had to make several (and have not yet
finished) journeys to Sevres, to Creil, etc.

Father Sainte-Beuve is preparing a discourse on free thought which
he will read at the Senate a propos of the press law. He has been
very shrewd, you know.

You tell your son Maurice that I love him very much, first because
he is your son and secundo because he is he. I find him good,
clever, cultivated, not a poseur, in short charming, and "with
talent."



L. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 4 March, 1867

Dear good friend, the friend of my heart, the old troubadour is as
well as ten thousand men--who are well, and he is gay as a finch,
because the sun shines again and copy is progressing.

He will probably go to Paris soon for the play by his son Dumas, let
us try to be there together.

Maurice is very proud to be declared COCK by an eagle. At this
moment he is having a spree with veal and wine in honor of his
firemen.

The AMERICAN [Footnote: Henry Harrisse.] in question is charming. He
has, literally speaking, a passion for you, and he writes me that
after seeing you he loves you more, that does not surprise me.

Poor Bouilhet! Give him this little note enclosed here. I share his
sorrow, I knew her.

Are you amused in Paris? Are you as sedentary there as at Croisset?

In that case I shall hardly see you unless I go to see you.

Tell me the hours when you do not receive the fair sex, and when
sexagenarian troubadours do not incommode you.

Cadio is entirely redone and rewritten up to the part I read to you,
it is less offensive.

I am not doing Montreveche. I will tell you about that. It is quite
a story. I love you and I embrace you with all my heart.

Your old George Sand

Did you receive my pamphlets on the faience? You have not
acknowledged them. They were sent to Croisset the day after I got
your last letter.



LI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
14 March, 1867

Your old troubadour is again prostrate. Every moment his guitar
threatens to be broken. And then he sleeps forty-eight hours and is
cured--but feeble, and he can not be in Paris on the 16th as he had
intended. Maurice went alone a little while ago, I shall go to join
him in five or six days.

Little Aurore consoles me for this mischance. She twitters like a
bird along with the birds who are twittering already as in full
spring time.

The anemone Sylvia which I brought from the woods into the garden
and which I had a great deal of trouble in acclimating is finally
growing thousands of white and pink stars among the blue periwinkle.
It is warm and damp. One can not break one's guitar in weather like
this. Good-bye, dear good friend.

G. Sand



LII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Friday, 22 March, 1867

Your old troubadour is here, not so badly off. He will go to dine on
Monday at Magny's, we shall agree on a day for both of us to dine
with Maurice. He is at home at five o'clock but not before Monday.

He is running around!

He embraces you.



LIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
1867 (?)

Then Wednesday, if you wish, my dear old fellow. Whom do you want to
have with us? Certainly, the dear Beuve if that is possible, and no
one if you like.

We embrace you.

G. S. Maurice Saturday evening.



LIV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 11 April, 1867

Here I am back again in my nest, and almost cured from a bad fever
which attacked me in Paris, the day before my departure.

Really your old troubadour has had ridiculous health for six months.
March and April have been such stupid months for him. It makes no
difference, however, for he is recovering again, and is seeing once
more the trees and the grass grow, it is always the same thing and
that is why it is beautiful and good. Maurice has been touched by
the friendship that you have shown him; you have seduced and
ravished him, and he is not demonstrative.

He and his wife,--who is not at all an ordinary woman,--desire
absolutely that you come to our house this year, I am charged to
tell you so very seriously and persistently if need be  And is that
hateful grip gone? Maurice wanted to go to get news of you; but on
seeing me so prostrated by the fever, he thought of nothing except
packing me up and bringing me here like a parcel. I did nothing
except sleep from Paris to Nohant and I was revived on receiving the
kisses of Aurore who knows now how to give great kisses, laughing
wildly all the while; she finds that very funny.

And the novel? Does it go on its way the same in Paris as in
Croisset? It seems to me that everywhere you lead the same
hermitlike existence. When you have the time to think of friends,
remember your old comrade and send him two lines to tell him that
you are well and that you don't forget him.



LV. TO GEORGE SAND

I am worried at not having news from you, dear master. What has
become of you? When shall I see you?

My trip to Nohant has fallen through. The reason is this: my mother
had a little stroke a week ago. There is nothing left of it, but it
might come on again. She is anxious for me, and I am going to hurry
back to Croisset. If she is doing well towards the month of August,
and I am not worried, it is not necessary to tell you that I shall
rush headlong towards your home.

As regards news, Sainte-Beuve seems to me very ill, and Bouilhet has
just been appointed librarian at Rouen.

Since the rumours of war have quieted down, people seem to me a
little less foolish. My nausea caused by the public cowardice is
decreasing.

I went twice to the Exposition; it is amazing. There are splendid
and extraordinary things there. But man is made to swallow the
infinite. One would have to know all sciences and all arts in order
to be interested in everything that one sees on the Champ de Mars.
Never mind; someone who had three entire months to himself, and went
every morning to take notes, would save himself in consequence much
reading and many journeys.

One feels oneself there very far from Paris, in a new and ugly
world, an enormous world which is perhaps the world of the future.
The first time that I lunched there, I thought all the time of
America, and I wanted to speak like a negro.



LVI. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croisset
Nohant, 9 May, 1867

Dear friend of my heart,

I am well, I am at work, I am finishing Cadio. It is warm, I am
alive, I am calm and sad, I hardly know why. In this existence so
even, so tranquil, and so gentle as I have here, I am in an element
that weakens me morally while strengthening me physically; and I
fall into melancholies of honey and roses which are none the less
melancholy. It seems to me that all those I love forget me, and that
it is justice, because I live a selfish life having nothing to do
for any one of them.

I have lived with tremendous attachments which overwhelmed me, which
exceeded my strength and which I often used to curse. And it happens
that having nothing more to carry them on with, I am bored by being
well. If the human race went on very well or very ill, one would
reattach oneself to a general interest, would live with an idea,
wise or foolish. But you see where we are now, you who storm so
fiercely against cowards. That disappears, you say? But only to
recommence! What kind of a society is it that becomes paralyzed in
the midst of its expansions, because tomorrow can bring a storm? The
thought of danger has never produced such demoralizations. Have we
declined to such an extent that it is necessary to beg us to eat,
telling us at the same time that nothing will happen to disturb our
digestion? Yes, it is silly, it is shameful. Is it the result of
prosperity, and does civilization involve this sickly and cowardly
selfishness?

My optimism has had a rude jolt of late. I worked up a joy, a
courage at the idea of seeing you here. It was like a cure that I
carefully contrived, but you are worried about your dear, old
mother, and certainly I can not protest.

Well, if, before your departure from Paris, I can finish Cadio, to
which I am bound under pain of having nothing wherewith to pay for
my tobacco and my shoes, I shall go with Maurice to embrace you. If
not, I shall hope for you about the middle of the summer. My
children, quite unhappy by this delay, beg to hope for you also, and
we hope it so much the more because it would be a good sign for the
dear mother.

Maurice has plunged again into Natural History; he wants to perfect
himself in the MICROS; I learn on the rebound. When I shall have
fixed in my head the name and the appearance of two or three
thousand imperceptible varieties, I shall be well advanced, don't
you think so? Well, these studies are veritable OCTOPUSES, which
entwine about you and which open to you I don't know what infinity.
You ask if it is the destiny of man to DRINK THE INFINITE; my
heavens, yes, don't doubt it, it is his destiny, since it is his
dream and his passion.

Inventing is absorbing also; but what fatigue afterwards! How empty
and worn out intellectually one feels, when one has scribbled for
weeks and months about that animal with two legs which has the only
right to be represented in novels! I see Maurice quite refreshed and
rejuvenated when he returns from his beasts and his pebbles, and if
I aspire to come out from my misery, it is to bury myself also in
studies, which in the speech of the Philistines, are not of any use.
Still it is worth more than to say mass and to ring the bell for the
adoration of the Creator.

Is it true what you tell me of G----? Is it possible? I can not
believe it. Is there in the atmosphere which the earth engenders
nowadays, a gas, laughing or otherwise, which suddenly seizes the
brain, and carries it on to commit extravagances, as there was under
the first revolution a maddening fluid which inspired one to commit
cruelties? We have fallen from the Hell of Dante into that of
Scarron.

Of what are you thinking, good head and good heart, in the midst of
this bacchanal? You are wrathful, oh very well, I like that better
than if you were laughing at it; but when you are calmer and when
you reflect?

Must one find some fashion of accepting the honor, the duty, and the
fatigue of living? As for me, I revert to the idea of an everlasting
journey through worlds more amusing, but it would be necessary to go
there quickly and change continually. The life that one fears so
much to lose is always too long for those who understand quickly
what they see. Everything repeats itself and goes over and over
again in it.

I assure you that there is only one pleasure: learning what one does
not know, and one happiness: loving the exceptions. Therefore I love
you and I embrace you tenderly.

Your old troubadour G. Sand

I am anxious about Sainte-Beuve. What a loss that would be! I am
content if Bouilhet is content. Is it really a good position?



LVII. TO GEORGE SAND
Paris, Friday morning

I am returning to my mother next Monday, dear master. I have little
hope of seeing you before then!

But when you are in Paris, what is to prevent you from pushing on to
Croisset where everyone, including myself, adores you? Sainte-Beuve
has finally consented to see a specialist and to be seriously
treated. And he is better anyway. His morale is improving.

Bouilhet's position gives him four thousand francs a year and
lodging. He now need not think of earning his living, which is a
real luxury.

No one talks of the war any more, they don't talk of anything.

The Exposition alone is what "everybody is thinking about," and the
cabmen exasperate the bourgeois.

They were beautiful (the bourgeois) during the strike of the
tailors. One would have said that SOCIETY was going to pieces.

Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of virtue. But I
include in the word bourgeois, the bourgeois in blouses as well the
bourgeois in coats.

It is we and we alone, that is to say the literary men, who are the
people, or to say it better: the tradition of humanity.

Yes, I am susceptible to disinterested angers and I love you all the
more for loving me for that. Stupidity and injustice make me roar,--
and I HOWL in my corner against a lot of things "that do not concern
me."

How sad it is not to live together, dear master, I admired you
before I knew you. From the day I saw your lovely and kind face, I
loved you. There you are.--And I embrace you warmly.

Your old

Gustave Flaubert

I shall have the package of pamphlets about faience sent to the rue
des Feuillantines. A good handshake to Maurice. A kiss on the four
cheeks of Mademoiselle Aurore.



LVIII. TO GEORGE SAND

I stayed thirty-six hours in Paris at the beginning of this week, in
order to be present at the Tuileries ball. Without any exaggeration,
it was splendid. Paris on the whole turns to the colossal. It is
becoming foolish and unrestrained. Perhaps we are returning to the
ancient Orient. It seems to me that idols will come out of the
earth. We are menaced with a Babylon.

Why not? The INDIVIDUAL has been so denied by democracy that he will
abase himself to a complete effacement, as under the great
theocratic despotisms.

The Tsar of Russia displeased me profoundly; I found him a rustic.
On a parallel with Monsieur Floquet who cries without any danger:
"Long live Poland!" We have chic people who have had themselves
registered at the Elysee. Oh! what a fine epoch!

My novel goes piano. The further I get on the more difficulties
arise. What a heavy cart of sandstone to drag along! And you pity
yourself for a labor that lasts six months!

I have enough more for two years, at least (OF MINE). How the devil
do you find the connection between your ideas? It is that that
delays me. Moreover this book demands tiresome researches. For
instance on Monday; I was at the Jockey Club, at the Cafe Anglais,
and at a lawyer's in turn.  Do you like Victor Hugo's preface to the
Paris-Guide? Not very much, do you? Hugo's philosophy seems to me
always vague.

I was carried away with delight, a week ago, at an encampment of
Gypsies who had established at Rouen. This is the third time that I
have seen them and always with a new pleasure.  The great thing is
that they excite the hatred of the bourgeois, although they are as
inoffensive as sheep.

I appeared very badly before the crowd because I gave them a few
sous, and I heard some fine words a la Prudhomme. That hatred
springs from something very profound and complex.  One finds it
among all orderly people.

It is the hatred that one feels for the bedouin, for the heretic,
the philosopher, the solitary, the poet; and there is a fear in that
hate. I, who am always for the minority, am exasperated by it. It is
true that many things exasperate me. On the day that I am no longer
outraged, I shall fall flat as the marionette from which one
withdraws the support of the stick.

Thus, THE STAKE that has supported me this winter, is the
indignation that I had against our great national historian, M.
Thiers, who had reached the condition of a demi-god, and the
pamphlet Trochu, and the everlasting Changarnier coming back over
the water. God be thanked that the Exposition has delivered us
momentarily from these GREAT MEN.



LIX. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croisset
Nohant, 30 May, 1867

Here you are at home, old friend of my heart, and I and Maurice must
go to embrace you. If you are still buried in work, we shall only
come and go. It is so near to Paris, that you must not hesitate to
tell us. I have finished Cadio, hurray! I have only to POLISH it a
little. It is like an illness, carrying this great affair for so
long in one's HEAD. I have been so interrupted by real illnesses
that I have had great trouble in setting to work again at it. But I
am wonderfully well since the fine weather and I am going to take a
bath of botany.

Maurice will take one of entomology. He walks three leagues with a
friend of like energy in order to hunt in a great plain for an
animal which has to be looked at with a magnifying glass. That is
happiness! That is being really infatuated. My gloom has disappeared
in making Cadio; at present I am only fifteen years old, and
everything to me appears for the best in the best possible of
worlds. That will last as long as it can. These are the intervals of
innocence in which forgetfulness of evil compensates for the
inexperience of the golden age.

How is your dear mother? She is fortunate to have you again near
her! And the novel? Good heavens! it must get on! Are you walking a
little? Are you more reasonable?

The other day, some people not at all stupid were here who spoke
highly of Madame Bovary, but with less zest of Salammbo. Lina got
into a white heat, not being willing that those wretches should make
the slightest objection to it; Maurice had to calm her, and moreover
he criticised the work very well, as an artist and as a scholar; so
well that the recalcitrants laid down their arms. I should like to
have written what he said. He speaks little and often badly; but
that time he succeeded extraordinarily well.

I shall then not say adieu, but au revoir, as soon as possible. I
love you much, much, my dear old fellow, you know it. My ideal would
be to live a long life with a good and great heart like yours. But
then, one would want never to die, and when one is really OLD, like
me, one must hold oneself ready for anything.

I embrace you tenderly, so does Maurice. Aurore is the sweetest and
the most ridiculous person. Her father makes her drink while he
says: Dominus vobiscum! then she drinks and answers: Amen! How she
is getting on! What a marvel is the development of a little child!
No one has ever written about that. Followed day by day, it would be
precious in every respect. It is one of those things that we all see
without noticing.

Adieu again; think of your old troubadour who thinks unceasingly of
you.

G. Sand



LX. TO Gustave Flaubert
Nohant, 14 June, 1867

Dear friend of my heart, I leave with my son and his wife the 20th
of the month to stay two weeks in Paris, perhaps more if the revival
of Villemer delays me longer. Therefore your dear good mother, whom
I do not want to miss, has all the time she needs to go to see her
daughters. I shall wait in Paris until you tell me if she has
returned, or rather, if I make you a real visit, you shall tell me
the time that suits you best.

My intention, for the moment, was quite simply to go to pass an hour
with you, and Lina was tempted to accompany me; I should have shown
her Rouen, and then we should have embraced you in time to return in
the evening to Paris; for the dear little one has always her ear and
her heart listening when she is away from Aurore, and her holidays
are marked by a continual uneasiness which I quite understand.
Aurore is a treasure of gentleness which absorbs us all. If it can
be arranged, we shall then go on the run to grasp your hands. If it
can not, I shall go alone later when your heart says so, and, if you
are going south, I shall put it off until everything can be arranged
without disturbing whatever may be the plans of your mother or
yourself. I am very free. So, don't disturb yourself, and arrange
your summer without bothering about me.

I have thirty-six plans also, but I don't incline to any one; what
amuses me is what seizes me and takes me off suddenly. It is with a
journey as with a novel: those who travel are those who command.
Only when one is in Paris, Rouen is not a journey, and I shall
always be ready when I am there, to respond to your call. I am a
little remorseful to take whole days from your work, I who am never
bored with loafing, and whom you could leave for whole hours under a
tree, or before two lighted logs, with the assurance that I should
find there something interesting. I know so well how to live OUTSIDE
OF MYSELF! It hasn't always been like that. I also was young and
subject to indignations. It is over!

Since I have dipped into real nature, I have found there an order, a
system, a calmness of cycles which is lacking in mankind, but which
man can, up to a certain point, assimilate when he is not too
directly at odds with the difficulties of his own life. When these
difficulties return he must endeavor to avoid them; but if he has
drunk the cup of the eternally true, he does not get too excited for
or against the ephemeral and relative truth.

But why do I say this to you? Because it comes to my pen-point; for
in considering it carefully, your state of overexcitement is
probably truer, or at least more fertile and more human than my
SENILE tranquillity. I would not like to make you as I am, even if
by a magical operation I could. I should not be interested in myself
if I had the honor to meet myself. I should say that one troubadour
is enough to manage and I should send the other to Chaillot.

A propos of gypsies, do you know that there are gypsies of the sea?
I discovered in the outskirts of Tamaris, among the furthest rocks,
great boats well sheltered, with women and children, a coast
settlement, very restricted, very tanned; fishing for food without
trading; speaking a language that the people of the country do not
understand; living only in these great boats stranded on the sand,
when the storms troubled them in their rocky coves; intermarrying,
inoffensive and sombre, timid or savage; not answering when any one
speaks to them. I don't even know what to call them. The name that I
have been told has escaped me but I could get some one to tell me
again. Naturally the country people hate them and that they have no
religion; if that is so they ought to be superior to us. I ventured
all alone among them. "Good day, sirs." Response, a slight bend of
the head. I looked at their encampment, no one moved. It seemed as
if they did not see me. I asked them if my curiosity annoyed them. A
shrug of the shoulders as if to say, "What do we care?" I spoke to a
young man who was mending the meshes in a net very cleverly; I
showed him a piece of five francs in gold. He looked the other way.
I showed him one in silver. He deigned to look at it. "Do you want
it?" He bent his head on his work. I put it near him, he did not
move. I went away, he followed me with his eyes. When he thought
that I could not see him any longer, he took the piece and went to
talk with a group. I don't know what happened. I fancy that they put
it in the common exchequer. I began botanizing at some distance
within  sight to see if they would come to ask me something or to
thank me. No one moved. I returned as if by chance towards them; the
same silence, the same indifference. An hour later, was at the top
of the cliff, and I asked the coast-guard who those people were who
spoke neither French, nor Italian, nor patois. He told me their
name, which I have not remembered.

He thought that they were Moors, left on the coast since the time of
the great invasions from Provence, and perhaps he is not mistaken.
He told me that he had seen me among them from his watch tower, and
that I was wrong, for they were a people capable of anything; but
when I asked him what harm they did he confessed to me that they had
done none. They lived by their fishing and above all on the things
cast up by the sea which they knew how to gather up before the most
alert. They were an object of perfect scorn. Why? Always the same
story. He who does not do as all the world does can only do evil.

If you go into the country, you might perhaps meet them at the end
of the Brusq. But they are birds of passage, and there are years
when they do not appear at all. I have not even seen the Paris
Guide. They owe me a copy, however; for I gave something to it
without receiving payment. It is because of that no doubt that they
have forgotten me.

To conclude, I shall be in Paris from the 20th of June to the 5th of
July. Send me a word always to 97 rue des Feuillantines. I shall
stay perhaps longer, but I don't know. I embrace you tenderly, my
splendid old fellow. Walk a little, I beg of you. I don't fear
anything for the novel; but I fear for the nervous system taking too
much the place of the muscular system. I am very well, except for
thunder bolts, when I fall on my bed for forty-eight hours and don't
want any one to speak to me. But it is rare and if I do not relent
so that they can nurse me, I get up perfectly cured.

Maurice's love. Entomology has taken possession of him this year; he
discovers marvels. Embrace your mother for me, and take good care of
her. I love you with all my heart.

G. Sand



LXI. To GUSTAVE FLATUBERT
Nohant, 24 July, 1867

Dear good friend, I spent three weeks in Paris with my children,
hoping to see you arriving or to receive a line from you which would
tell me to come and embrace you. But you were HEAD OVER HEELS and I
respect these crises of work; I know them! Here am I back again in
old Nohant, and Maurice at Nerac terminating by a compromise the
law-suit which keeps him from his inheritance. His agreeable father
stole about three hundred thousand francs from his children in order
to please his cook; happily, although Monsieur used to lead this
edifying life, I used to work and did not cut into my capital. I
have nothing, but I shall leave the daily bread assured.

They write me that Villemer goes well. Little Aurore is as pretty as
anything and does a thousand gracious tricks. My daughter Lina is
always my real daughter The OTHER is well and is beautiful, that is
all that I ask of her.

I am working again; but I am not strong. I am paying for my energy
and activity in Paris. That does not make any difference, I am not
angry against life, I love you with all my heart. I see, when I am
gloomy, your kind face, and I feel the radiant power of your
goodness. You are a charm in the Indian summer of my sweet and pure
friendships, without egoisms, and without deceptions in consequence.

Think of me sometimes, work well and call me when you are ready to
loaf. If you are not ready, never mind. If your heart told you to
come here, there would be feasting and joy in the family. I saw
Sainte-Beuve, I am content and proud of him.

Good night, friend of my heart. I embrace you as well as your
mother.

G. Sand



LXII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Paris
Nohant, 6 August, 1867

When I see how hard my old friend has to work in order to write a
novel, it discourages my facility, and I tell myself that I write
BOTCHED literature. I have finished Cadio; it has been in Buloz'
hands a long time. I am writing another thing,[Footnote:
Mademoiselle Merquem.] but I don't see it yet very clearly; what can
one do without sun and without heat? I ought to be in Paris now, to
see the Exposition again at my leisure, and to take your mother to
walk with you; but I really must work, since I have only that  to
live on. And then the children; that Aurore is a wonder. You really
must see her, perhaps I shall not see her long, If I don't think I
am destined to grow very old; I must lose no time in loving!

Yes, you are right, it is that that sustains me. This hypocritical
fit has a rough disillusionment in store for it, and one will lose
nothing by waiting. On the contrary, one will gain. You will see
that, you who are old though still quite young. You are my son's
age. You will laugh together when you see this heap of rubbish
collapse.

You must not be a Norman, you must come and see us for several days,
you will make us happy; and it will restore the blood in my veins
and the joy in my heart.

Love your old troubadour always and talk to him of Paris; a few
words when you have the time.

Outline a scene for Nohant with four or five characters, we shall
enjoy it. We embrace you and summon you.

G. Sand



LXIII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croisset
Nohant, 18 August, 1867

Where are you, my dear old fellow? If by chance you should be in
Paris, during the first few days of September, let us try to see
each other. I shall stay there three days and I shall return here.
But I do not hope to meet you there. You ought to be in some lovely
country, far from Paris and from its dust. I do not know even if my
letter will reach you. Never mind, if you can give news of yourself,
do so. I am in despair. I have lost suddenly, without even knowing
that he was ill, my poor dear, old friend, Rollinat, an angel of
goodness, of courage, of devotion. It is a heavy blow for me. If you
were here you would give me courage; but my poor children are as
overwhelmed as I am. We adored him, all the countryside adored him.

Keep well, and think sometimes of your absent friends. We embrace
you affectionately. The little one is very well, she is charming.



LXIV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Paris
Nohant, August, 1867

I bless you, my dear old fellow, for the kind thought that you had
of coming; but you were right not to travel while you were ill. Ah!
my God, I dream of nothing but illness and unhappiness: take care of
yourself, my old comrade. I shall go to see you if I can pull myself
together; for, since this new dagger-thrust, I am feeble and crushed
and I have a sort of fever. I shall write you a line from Paris. If
you are prevented, you must answer me by telegram. You know that
with me there is no need of explanation: I know every hindrance in
life and I never blame the hearts that I know.--I wish that, right
away, if you have a moment to write, you would tell me where I
should go for three days to see the coast of Normandy without
striking the neighborhood where "THE WORLD" goes. In order to go on
with my novel, I must see a countryside near the Channel, that all
the world has not talked about, and where there are real natives at
home, peasants, fisherfolk, a real village in a corner of the rocks.
If you are in the mood we will go there together. If not, don't
bother about me. I go everywhere and I am not disturbed by anything.
You told me that the population of the coasts was the best in the
country, and that there were real dyed-in-the-wool simple-hearted
men there. It would be good to see their faces, their clothes, their
houses, and their horizons. That is enough for what I want to do, I
need only accessories; I hardly want to describe; SEEING it is
enough in order not to make a false stroke. How is your mother? Have
you been able to take her to walk and to distract her a little?
Embrace her for me as I embrace you.

G. Sand

Maurice embraces you; I shall go to Paris without him: he is drawn
on the jury for the 2 September till...no one knows. It is a
tiresome task. Aurore is very cunning with her arms, she offers them
to you to kiss; her hands are marvels and they are incredibly clever
for her age.

Au revoir, then, if I can only pull myself out of the state I am now
in. Insomnia is the devil; in the daytime one makes a lot of effort
not to sadden others. At night one falls back on oneself.



LXV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croisset
Nohant, 10 September, 1867

Dear old fellow,

I am worried at not having news of you since that illness of which
you spoke. Are you well again? Yes, we shall go to see the rollers
and the beaches next month if you like, if your heart prompts you.
The novel goes on apace; but I shall besprinkle it with local color
afterwards.

While waiting, I am still here, stuck up to my chin in the river
every day, and regaining my strength entirely in this cold and shady
stream which I adore, and where I have passed so many hours of my
life reviving myself after too long sessions in company with my ink-
well. I go definitely to Paris, the 16th; the 17th at one o'clock, I
leave for Rouen and Jumieges, where my friend Madame Lebarbier de
Tinan awaits me at the house of M. Lepel-Cointet, the landowner; I
shall stay there the 18th so as to return to Paris the 19th. Will it
be inconvenient if I come to see you? I am sick with longing to do
so; but I am so absolutely forced to spend the evening of the 19th
in Paris that I do not know if I shall have the time. You must tell
me. I can get a word from you the 16th in Paris, 97 rue des
Feuillantines. I shall not be alone; I have as a travelling
companion a charming young literary woman, Juliette Lamber. If you
were lovely, lovely, you would walk to Jumieges the 19th. We would
return together so that I could be in Paris at six o'clock in the
evening at the latest. But if you are even a little bit ill still,
or are PLUNGED in ink, pretend that I have said nothing, and prepare
to see us next month. As for the WINTER walk on the Norman coast,
that gives me a cold in my back, I who plan to go to the Gulf of
Juan at that time.

I have been sick over the death of my friend Rollinat. My body is
cured, but my soul! I should have to stay a week with you to refresh
myself in your affectionate strength; for cold and purely
philosophical courage to me, is like cauterizing a wooden leg.

I embrace you and I love you (also your mother). Maurice also, what
French! One is happy to forget it, it is a tiresome thing.

Your troubadour

G. Sand



LXVI. TO GEORGE SAND

Dear master,

What, no news?

But you will answer me since I ask you a service. I read this in my
notes: "National of 1841. Bad treatments inflicted on Barbes, kicks
on his breast, dragged by the beard and hair in order to put him in
an in-pace. Consultation of lawyers signed: E. Arago, Favre,
Berryer, to complain of these abominations."

Find out from him if all that is true; I shall be obliged.



LXVII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croisset
Paris, Tuesday, 1st October, 1867

Dear friend, you shall have your information. I asked Peyrat last
evening, I am writing today to Barbes who will answer directly to
you.

Where do you think I have come from? From Normandy. A charming
opportunity took me there six days ago. I had been enchanted with
Jumieges. This time I saw Etretat, Yport, the prettiest of all the
villages, Fecamp, Saint-Valery, which I knew, and Dieppe, which
dazzled me; the environs, the chateau d'Arques, Limes, what a
country! And I went back and forth twice within two steps of
Croisset and I sent you some big kisses; always ready to return with
you to the seaside or to talk with you at your house when you are
free. If I had been alone, I should have bought an old guitar and
should have sung a ballad under your mother's window. But I could
not take a large family to you.

I am returning to Nohant and I embrace you with all my heart.

G. Sand

I think that the Bois-Dore is going well, but I don't know anything
about it. I have a way of my own of being in Paris, namely, being at
the seaside, which does not keep me informed of what is going on.
But I gathered gentians in the long grass of the immense Roman fort
of Limes where I had quite a STUNNING view of the sea. I walked out
like an old horse, but I am returning quite frisky.



LXVIII. TO GEORGE SAND

At last, at last, I have news of you, dear master, and good news,
which is doubly agreeable.

I am planning to return to my home in the country with Madame Sand,
and my mother hopes that will be the case. What do you say? For,
with all that goes on, we never see each other, confound it!

As for my moving, it is not that I lack the desire of being free to
move about. But I should be lost if I stirred before I finish my
novel. Your friend is a man of wax; everything gets imprinted on
him, is encrusted on him, penetrates him. If I should visit you, I
should think of nothing but you and yours, your house, your country,
the appearance of the people I had met, etc. I require great efforts
to gather myself together; I always tend to scatter myself. That is
why, dear adored  master, I deprive myself of going to sit down to
dream aloud in your house. But, in the summer or autumn of 1869, you
shall see what a fine commercial traveller I am, once let loose to
the open air. I am abject, I warn you.

As to news, there is a quiet once more since the Kerveguen incident
has died its beautiful death. Was it not a farce? and silly?

Sainte-Beuve is preparing a lecture on the press law. He is better,
decidedly. I dined Tuesday with Renan. He was marvellously witty and
eloquent, and artistic! as I have never seen him. Have you read his
new book? His preface causes talk. My poor Theo worries me. I do not
think him strong.



LXIX. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Paris
Nohant, 12 October, 1867

I have sent your letter to Barbes; it is fine and splendid, as you
are. I know that the worthy man will be glad of it. But as for me, I
want to throw myself out of the window; for my children are
unwilling to hear of my leaving so soon. Yes, it is horrid to have
seen your house four times without going to see you. But I am
cautious to the point of fear. To be sure the idea of summoning you
to Rouen for twenty minutes did occur to me. But you are not, as I
am, on tiptoe, all ready to start off. You live in your dressing
gown, the great enemy of liberty and activity. To force you to
dress, to go out, perhaps in the middle of an absorbing chapter, and
only to see someone who does not know how to say anything quickly,
and who, the more he is content, the stupider he is,--I did not dare
to. Here I am obliged to finish something which drags along, and
before the final touch I shall probably go to Normandy. I should
like to go by the Seine to Honfleur. It will be next month, if the
cold does not make me ill, and I shall try this time to carry you
away in passing. If not, I shall see you at least, and then I shall
go to Provence.

Ah! if I could only take you there! And if you could, if you would,
during the second week in October when you are going to be free,
come to see me here! You promised, and my children would be so happy
if you would! But you don't love us enough for that, scoundrel that
you are! You think that you have a lot of better friends: you are
very much mistaken; it is always one's best friends whom one
neglects or ignores.

Come, a little courage; you can leave Paris at a quarter past nine
in the morning, and get to Chateauroux at four, there you would find
my carriage and be here at six for dinner. It is not bad, and once
here, we all laugh together like good-natured bears; no one dresses;
there is no ceremony, and we all love one another very much. Say
yes!

I embrace you. And I too have been bored at not seeing you, FOR A
YEAR.

Your old troubadour



LXX. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croisset
Nohant, 27 October, 1867

I have just made a resume in a few pages of my impressions as a
landscape painter, gathered in Normandy: it has not much importance,
but I was able to quote three lines from Salammbo, which seemed to
me to depict the country better than all my phrases, and which had
always struck me as a stroke from a master brush. In turning over
the pages to find these lines, I naturally reread almost all, and I
remain convinced that it is  one of the most beautiful books that
have been made since they began to make books.

I am well, and I am working quickly and much, so as to live on my
INCOME this winter in the South. But what will be the delights of
Cannes and where will be the heart to engage in them? My spirits are
in mourning while thinking that at this hour people arc fighting for
the pope. Ah! ISIDORE! [Footnote: Name applied to Napoleon III.]

I have tried in vain this month to go again to see ma Normandie,
that is to say, my great, dear heart's friend. My  children have
threatened me with death if I leave them so soon.  Just at present
friends are coming. You are the only one who  does not talk of
coming on. Yet, that would be so fine! Next month I shall move
heaven and earth to find you wherever you are, and meanwhile I love
you tremendously. And you. Your work? your mother's health? I am
worried at not having news of you.

G. Sand



LXXI. TO GEORGE SAND
1st November, 1867

Dear master,

I was as much ashamed as touched, last evening, when I received your
"very nice" letter. I am a wretch not to have answered the first
one. How did that happen? For I am  usually prompt.

My work does not go very well. I hope that I shall finish my second
part in February. But in order to have it all finished in two years,
I must not budge from my arm-chair till then. That is why I am not
going to Nohant. A week of recreation means three months of revery
for me. I should do nothing but think of you, of yours in Berry, of
all that I saw. My  unfortunate spirit would navigate in strange
waters. I have so little resistance.

I do not hide the pleasure that your little word about SALAMMBO
gives me. That old book needs to be relieved from a few inversions,
there are too many repetitions of ALORS, MAIS and ET. The labor is
too evident.

As for the one I am doing, I am afraid that the idea is defective,
an irremediable fault; will such weak characters be interesting?
Great effects are reached only through simple means, through
positive passions. But I don't see simplicity anywhere in the modern
world.

A sad world! How deplorable and how lamentably grotesque are affairs
in Italy! All these orders, counter-orders of  counter-orders of the
counter-orders! The earth is a very inferior planet, decidedly.

You did not tell me if you were satisfied with the revivals at the
Odeon. When shall you go south? And where shall you go in the south?

A week from today, that is to say, from the 7th to the 10th of
November, I shall be in Paris, because I have to go  sauntering in
Auteuil in order to discover certain little nooks. What would be
nice would be for us to come back to Croisset together. You know
very well that I am very angry at you for your two last trips in
Normandy.

Then, I shall see you soon? No joking? I embrace you as I love you,
dear master, that is to say, very tenderly.

Here is a bit that I send to your dear son, a lover of this sort of
fluff:

"One evening, expected by Hortense,
Having his eyes fixed on the clock,
And feeling his heart beat with eager throbs,
Young Alfred dried up with impatience."
(Memoires de l'Academie de Saint-Quentin.)



LXXII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 5 December, 1867

Your old troubadour is no good, I admit it. He has been working like
an ox to have the money to go away with this winter to the gulf of
Juan, and at the moment of leaving he would like to stay behind. He
is worried at leaving his children and the little Aurore, but he
suffers with the cold, he fears anemia, and he thinks he is doing
his duty in going to find a land which the snow does not render
impracticable, and a sky under which one can breathe without having
dagger-thrusts in one's lungs.

So you see.

He has thought of you, probably much more than you think of him; for
he has stupid and easy work, and his thoughts run elsewhere very far
from him, and from his task, when his hand is weary of writing. As
for you, you work for truth, and you become absorbed, and you have
not heard my spirit, which more than once has TAPPED at your study
door to say to you: "It is I." Or else you have said: "It is a
spirit tapping let him go to the devil!"

Aren't you coming to Paris? I am going there between the 15th and
the 20th. I shall stay there only a few days, and then flee to
Cannes. Will you be there? God grant it! On the whole I am pretty
well; I am furious with you for not wanting to come to Nohant; I
won't reproach you for I don't know how. I have scribbled a lot; my
children are always good and kind to me in every sense of the word.
Aurore is a love.

We have RAVED politically; now we try not to think of it any more
and to have patience. We often speak of you and we love you. Your
old troubadour especially who embraces you with all his heart, and
begs to be remembered to your good mother.

G. Sand



LXXIII. TO GEORGE SAND
Wednesday night

Dear master, dear friend of the good God, "let us talk a little of
Dozenval," let us roar at M. Thiers! Can a more triumphant imbecile,
a more abject dabster, a more stercoraceous bourgeois be found! No,
nothing can give the idea of the puking with which this old
diplomatic idiot inspires me in piling up his stupidity on the dung-
hill of bourgeoisie! Is it possible to treat philosophy, religion,
peoples, liberty, the past and future, history, and natural history,
everything and more yet, with an incoherence more inept and more
childish! He seems to me as everlasting as mediocrity! He overwhelms
me!

But the fine thing is the brave national guards whom he stuffed in
1848, who are beginning to applaud him again! What infinite madness!
That proves that everything consists of temperament. Prostitutes,--
like France,--always have a weakness for old buffoons.

Furthermore, I shall try in the third part of my novel (when I reach
the reaction that followed the days of June) to insert a panegyric
about him a propos of his book: De la propriete, and I hope that he
will be pleased with me.

What form should one take to express occasionally one's opinion on
the things of this world, without the risk of passing later for an
imbecile? It is a tough problem. It seems to me that the best thing
is simply to depict the things which exasperate one. To dissect is
to take vengeance. Well! it is not he with whom I am angry, nor with
the others but with OURS.

If they had paid more attention to the education of the SUPERIOR
classes, delaying till later the agricultural meetings; in short, if
the head had been put above the stomach, should we have been likely
to be where we are now?

I have just read, this week, Buchez' Preface to his Histoire
parlementaire. Many inanities which burden us today come from that
among other things.

And now, it is not good of you to say that I do not think of "my old
Troubadour"; of whom then, do I think? perhaps of my wretched book?
but that is more difficult and less agreeable.

How long do you stay at Cannes?

After Cannes shan't you return to Paris? I shall be their towards
the end of January.

In order to finish my book in the spring of 1869, I must not give
myself a week of holiday; that is why I do not go to Nohant. It is
always the story of the Amazons. In order to draw the bow better
they crushed their breast. It is a fine method after all.

Adieu, dear master, write to me, won't you?

I embrace you tenderly.



LXXIV. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croisset
Nohant, 31 December, 1867

I don't agree with you at all that it is necessary to destroy the
breast to draw a bow. I have quite a contrary belief which I follow,
and I think that it is good for many others, probably for the
majority. I have just developed my idea on that subject in a novel
which has been sent to the Revue and will appear after About's. I
think that the artist ought to live according to his nature as much
as possible. To him who loves struggle, warfare; to him who loves
women, love; to an old fello

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