I was in Versailles on Thursday.  The excesses of the Right inspire fear.  The vote about the Orleans is a concession made to it, so as not to irritate it, and so as to have the time to prepare against it.

I except from the general folly, Renan who, on the contrary, seemed to me very philosophical, and the good Soulie who charged me to give you a thousand affectionate messages.

I have collected a mass of horrible and unpublished details which I spare you.

My little trip to Paris has troubled me extremely, and I am going to have a hard time in getting down to work again.  What do you think of my friend Maury, who kept the tricolor over the Archives all during the Commune?  I think few men are capable of such pluck.

When history clears up the burning of Paris, it will find several elements among which are, without any doubt:  (1) the Prussians, and (2) the people of Badinguet; they have no longer any written proof against the Empire, and Haussman is going to present himself boldly to the elections of Paris.

Have you read, among the documents found in the Tuileries last September, a plot of a novel by Isidore?  What a scenario!

CXC.  To Gustave flaubert, at Paris [footnote:  Evidently an answer to a lost letter.] Nohant, 23 July, 1871

No, I am not ill, my dear old troubadour, in spite of the sorrow which is the daily bread of France; I have an iron constitution and an exceptional old age, abnormal even, for my strength increases at the age when it ought to diminish.  The day that I resolutely buried my youth, I grew twenty years younger.  You will tell me that the bark undergoes none the less the ravages of time.  I don’t care for that, the heart of the tree is very good and the sap still runs as in the old apple trees in my garden, which bear fruit all the better the more gnarly they are.  Thank you for having worried over the illness which the papers have bestowed upon me.  Maurice thanks you also and embraces you.  He is still mingling with his scientific, literary, and agricultural studies, beautiful marionette shows.  He thinks of you every time and says that he would like to have you here to note his progress, for he continually improves.

In what condition are we, according to your opinion?

In Rouen, you no longer have any Prussians at your back, that’s something, and one would say that the bourgeois Republic wants to impose itself.  It will be foolish.  You foretold that, and I don’t doubt it; but after the inevitable rule of the Philistines, life will extend and spread on all sides.  The filth of the Commune shows us dangers which were not sufficiently foreseen and which enforce a new political life on everybody, carrying on one’s affairs oneself and forcing the charming proletariat created by the Empire to know what is possible and what is not.  Education does not teach honesty and disinterestedness overnight.  The vote is immediate education.  They have appointed Raoul Rigault and company.  They know how much people like that cost now by the yard; let them go on and they will die of hunger.  There is no other way to make them understand in a short time.