Ah! dear, good master, if you only could hate!  That is what you lack, hate.  In spite of your great Sphinx eyes, you have seen the world through a golden color.  That comes from the sun in your heart; but so many shadows have arisen that now you are not recognizing things any more.  Come now!  Cry out!  Thunder!  Take your great lyre and touch the brazen string:  the monsters will flee.  Bedew us with the drops of the blood of wounded Themis.

Why do you feel “the great bonds broken?” What is broken?  Your bonds are indestructible, your sympathy can attach itself only to the Eternal.

Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times.  Man has always been like that.  Several years of quiet deceived us.  That is all.  I too, I used to believe in the amelioration of manners.  One must wipe out that mistake and think of oneself no more highly than they did in the time of Pericles or of Shakespeare, atrocious epochs in which fine things were done.  Tell me that you are lifting your head and that you are thinking of your old troubadour, who cherishes you.

CXCVI.  TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croisset Nohant, 8 September, 1871

As usual our letters have crossed; you should receive today the portraits of my little grandchildren, not pretty at this period of their growth, but with such beautiful eyes that they can never be ugly.

You see that I am as disheartened as you are and indignant, alas! without being able to hate either the human race or our poor, dear country.  But one feels too much one’s helplessness to pluck up one’s heart and spirit.  One works all the same, even if only turning napkin rings, as you say:  and, as for me, while serving the public, I think about it as little as possible.  Le Temps has done me the service of making me rummage in my waste basket.  I find there the prophecies that the conscience of each of us has inspired in him, and these little returns to the past ought to give us courage; but it is not at all so.  The lessons of experience are of no use until too late.

I think that without subvention, the Odeon will be in no condition to put on well a literary play such as Aisse, and that you should not let them murder it.  You had better wait and see what happens.  As for the Berton company, I have no news of it; it is touring the provinces, and those who compose it will not be reengaged by Chilly, who is furious with them.

The Odeon has let Reynard go, an artist of the first rank, whom Montigny had the wit to engage.  There really is no one left at the Odeon, as far as I know.  Why don’t you consider the Theatre Francais?

Where is the Princess Mathilde?  At Enghien, or in Paris, or in England?  I am sending you a note which you must enclose in the first letter that you have occasion to write to her.