What fine weather, at least with us, and we are getting ready for our Christmas festivals with the family at home.  I told Plauchut to try to carry you off; we are expecting him.  If you can’t come with him, come at least for the Christmas Eve revels and to escape from Paris on New Year’s day; it is so boring there then!

Lina charges me to say to you that you are authorized to wear your wrapper and slippers continually.  There are no ladies, no strangers.  In short you will make us very happy and you have promised for a long time.

I embrace you and I am still more angry than you at these attacks, but I am not overcome, and if I had you here we should stimulate each other so well that you would start off again at once on the other leg to write a new novel.

I embrace you.

Your old troubadour,

G. Sand

CXLI.  TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, in Paris Nohant, 17 December, 1869

Plauchut writes us that you promise to come the 24th.  Do come the 23d in the evening, so as to be rested for the night of the 24th to the 25th and join in our Christmas Eve revels.  Otherwise you will arrive from Paris tired and sleepy and our follies will not amuse you.  You are coming to the house of children, I warn you, and as you are kind and affectionate, you love children.  Did Plauchut tell you to bring a wrapper and slippers, for we do not want to sentence you to dressing up?  I add that I am counting on your bringing some manuscript.  The fairy play re-done, Saint-Antoine, whatever you have finished.  I hope indeed that you are in the mood for work.  Critics are a challenge that stimulates.

Poor Saint-Rene Taillandier is as asininely pedantic as the Revue.  Aren’t they prudish in that set?  I am in a pet with Girardin.  I know very well that I am not strong in letters; I am not sufficiently cultivated for these gentlemen; but the good public reads me and listens to me all the same.

If you did not come, we should be unhappy and you would be a big ingrate.  Do you want me to send a carriage for you to Chateauroux on the 23d at four o’clock?  I am afraid that you may be uncomfortable in that stage-coach which makes the run, and it is so easy to spare you two and a half hours of discomfort!

We embrace you full of hope.  I am working like an ox so as to have my novel finished and not to have to think of it a minute when you are here.

G. Sand

CXLII.  TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT Nohant, 19 December, 1869

So women are in it too?  Come, forget that persecution here, at a hundred thousand leagues from Parisian and literary life, or rather come be glad of it, for these great slatings are the sure proof of great worth.  Tell yourself indeed that those who have not gone through that are good for the Academy.