I need not ask you to preserve the utmost secrecy about my present confidence.  Discretion is a virtue which you practise, to my knowledge, in too signal a manner to need any exhorting thereto from me.  But I am wrong, dear friend, in making these unkind allusions to the past, for at this moment I am, more perhaps than you know, the obliged party.  Partly out of interest in me, but more because of the general aversion your brother-in-law’s extreme haughtiness inspires, the democratic party has flocked to my door to make inquiries about my wound, and the talk and excitement about this duel have served me well; there is no doubt that my candidacy has gained much ground.  Therefore, I say, a truce to your gratitude; do you not see how much I owe to you?

X

DORLANGE TO MARIE-GASTON

Paris, April, 1839.

Dear Friend,—­For better or for worse, I continue my candidacy without a constituency to elect me.  This surprises my friends and worries me, for it is only a few weeks now to the general election; and if it happens that all this mysterious “preparation” comes to nought, a pretty figure I shall cut in the caricatures of Monsieur Bixiou, of whose malicious remarks on the subject you lately wrote me.

One thing reassures me:  it does not seem likely that any one would have sown two hundred and fifty thousand francs in my electoral furrow without feeling pretty sure of gathering a harvest.  Perhaps, to take a cheerful view of the matter, this very slowness may be considered as showing great confidence of success.

However that may be, I am kept by this long delay in a state of inaction which weighs upon me.  Astride as it were of two existences, —­one in which I have not set foot, the other in which my foot still lingers,—­I have no heart to undertake real work; I am like a traveller who, having arrived before the hour when the diligence starts, does not know what to do with his person nor how to spend his time.  You will not complain, I think, that I turn this enforced far niente to the profit of our correspondence; and now that I am thus at leisure, I shall take up two points in your last letter which did not seem to me of sufficient importance to pay much attention to at the time:  I refer to your warning that my parliamentary pretensions did not meet the approval of Monsieur Bixiou; and to your suggestion that I might expose myself to falling in love with Madame de l’Estorade—­if I were not in love with her already.  Let us discuss, in the first instance, Monsieur Bixiou’s grand disapprobation—­just as we used to talk in the olden time of the grand treachery of Monsieur de Mirabeau.