Your very devoted
Gustave Flaubert
Beginning with the middle of next week, about Wednesday or Thursday, I shall be at Croisset.
Sat.u.r.day morning, 3d June, 1876.
CCCXVI. To MAURICE SAND Croisset, Sunday, 24 June, 1876
You had prepared me, my dear Maurice, I wanted to write to you, but I was waiting till you were a little freer, more alone. Thank you for your kind thought.
Yes, we understood each other, yonder! (And if I did not remain longer, it is because my comrades dragged me away.) It seemed to me that I was burying my mother the second time. Poor, dear, great woman! What genius and what heart! But she lacked nothing, it is not she whom we must pity.
What is to become of you? Shall you stay in Nohant? That good old house must seem horribly empty to you! But you, at least, are not alone! You have a wife...a rare one! and two exquisite children.
While I was with you, I had, over and above my grief, two desires: to run off with Aurore and to kill M. Marx.[Footnote: A reporter for le Figaro.] There you have the truth, it is unnecessary to make you see the psychology of the thing. I received yesterday a very sympathetic letter from good Tourgueneff. He too loved her. But then, who did not love her? If you had seen in Paris the anguish of Martine![Footnote: George Sand"s maid.] That was distressing.
Plauchut is still in Nohant, I suppose. Tell him that I love him because I saw him shed so many tears.
And let yours flow, my dear friend, do all that is necessary not to console yourself,--which would, moreover, be impossible. Never mind!
In a short time you will feel a great joy in the idea alone that you were a good son and that she knew it absolutely. She used to talk of you as of a blessing.
And when you shall have rejoined her, when the great-grand-children of the grandchildren of your two little girls shall have joined her, and when for a long time there shall have been no question of the things and the people that surround us,--in several centuries,-- hearts like ours will palpitate through hers! People will read her books, that is to say that they will think according to her ideas and they will love with her love. But all that does not give her back to you, does it? With what then can we sustain ourselves if pride desert us, and what man more than you should have pride in his mother!
Now dear friend, adieu! When shall we meet now? How I should feel the need of talking of her, insatiably!
Embrace Madam Maurice for me, as I did on the stairway at Nohant, and your little girls.
Yours, from the depths of my heart,
Your Gustave Flaubert
CCCXVII. To MAURICE SAND Croisset, Tuesday, 3rd October, 1876
Thank you for your kind remembrance, my dear friend. Neither do I forget, and I dream of your poor, dear mamma in a sadness that does not disappear. Her death has left a great emptiness for me. After you, your wife and the good Plauchut, I am perhaps the one who misses her most! I need her.
I pity you the annoyances that your sister causes you. I too have gone through that! It is so easy moreover to be good! Besides that causes less evil. When shall we meet? I want so much to see you, first just to see you--and second to talk of her.
When your business is finished, why not come to Paris for some time?
Solitude is bad under certain conditions. One should not become intoxicated with one"s grief, however much attraction one finds in doing so.
You ask me what I am doing. This is it: this year I have written two stories, and I am going to begin another so as to make the three into one volume that I want to publish in the spring. After that I hope to resume the big novel that I laid aside a year ago after my financial disaster. Matters are improving in that direction, and I shall not be forced to change anything in my way of living. If I have been able to start at work again, I owe it partly to the good counsel of your mother. She had found the best way to bring me back to respect myself.
In order to get the quicker at work, I shall stay here till New Year"s Day,--perhaps later than that. Do try to put off your visit to Paris.
Embrace your dear little girls warmly for me, my respects to Madam Maurice, and-sincerely yours, ex imo.
Gustave Flaubert
CCCXVIII. To MAURICE SAND Saint-Gratien par Sannois, 20th August, 1877
Thank you for your kind remembrance, my dear Maurice. Next winter you will be in Pa.s.sy, I hope,--and from time to time we can have a good chat. I even count on seeing myself at your table by the side of your friends whose "idol" I am.
You speak to me of your dear and ill.u.s.trious mamma! Next to you I do not think that any one could think of her more often than I do! How I miss her! How I need her!
I had begun un coeur simple solely on account of her, only to please her. She died while I was in the midst of this work. Thus it is with our dreams.
I still continue not to find diversion in existence. In order to forget the weight of it, I work as frantically as possible.
What sustains me is the indignation that the Imbecility of the Bourgeois affords me! Summed up at present by the large party of law and order, it reaches a dizzy height!
Has there been anything in history more inept than the 16th of May?
Where is there an idiot comparable to the Bayard of modern times?
I have been in Paris, or rather at Saint-Gratien, for three days.
Day after tomorrow I leave the princess, and in a fortnight I shall make a little trip to Lower Normandy for the sake of literature.
When we meet I shall talk a long time with you, if you are interested, about the terrible book that I am in the process of concocting. I shall have enough work in it to take me three or four years. Not less!
Don"t leave me so long without news. Give a long look for me at the little corner of the holy ground!...My regards to your dear wife, embrace the dear little girls and sincerely yours, my good Maurice,
Your old friend
Gustave Flaubert
CCCXIX. To MAURICE SAND Tuesday morning, April, 1880
My dear Maurice,
No! Erase Cruchard and Polycarp and replace those words by what you like.
The Public ought not to have all of us,--let us reserve something for ourselves. That seems to me more decent (quod decet). You do not speak of a COMPLETE EDITION? Ah! your poor dear mamma! How often I think of her! And what need I have of her! There is not a day when I do not say: "If she were there, I should ask her advice."
I shall be at Croisset till the 8th or the 10th of May. So, my old fellow, when you wish to come there, you will be welcome. I embrace you all from the oldest to the youngest.
Cruchard for you,
Polycarp for the human race,
Gustave Flaubert for Literature