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 cla.s.sifications, 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
x.x.xVI. 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.
x.x.xVII. 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 chast.i.ty. 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 G.o.d 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.
x.x.xVIII. 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.
x.x.xIX. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT Paris, 8 December, 1866
You ask me what I am doing? Your old troubadour is content this evening. He has pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sist 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, Sat.u.r.day 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 G.o.d, 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 Sat.u.r.day. 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.