My preface to the Dernieres Chansons has aroused in Madame Colet a pindaric fury.  I have received an anonymous letter from her, in verse, in which she represents me as a charlatan who beats the drum on the tomb of his friend, a vulgar wretch who debases himself before criticism, after having “flattered Caesar”!  “Sad example of the passions,” as Prudhomme would say.

A propos of Caesar, I can not believe, no matter what they say, in his near return.  In spite of my pessimism, we have not come to that!  However, if one consulted the God called Universal Suffrage, who knows?...Ah! we are very low, very low!

I saw Ruy Blas badly played except for Sarah.  Melingue is a sleep-walking drain-man, and the others are as tiresome.  As Victor Hugo had complained in a friendly way that I had not paid him a call, I thought I ought to do so and I found him ...charming!  I repeat the word, not at all “the great man,” not at all a pontiff!  This discovery greatly surprised me and did me worlds of good.  For I have the bump of veneration and I like to love what I admire.  That is a personal allusion to you, dear, kind master.

I have met Madame Viardot whom I found a very curious temperament.  It was Tourgueneff who took me to her house.

CCXVII.  To Gustave flaubert, at Croissset Nohant, from the 28 to the 29 February 1872.  Night of Wednesday to Thursday, three o’clock in the morning.

Ah! my dear old friend, what a dreadful twelve days I have spent!  Maurice has been very ill.  Continually these terrible sore throats, which in the beginning seem nothing, but which are complicated with abscesses and tend to become membranous.  He has not been in danger, but always in danger of danger, and he has had cruel suffering, loss of voice, he could not swallow; every anguish attached to the violent sore throat that you know well, since you have just had one.  With him, this trouble continually tends to get worse, and his mucous membrane has been so often the seat of the same illness that it lacks energy to react.  With that, little or no fever, almost always on his feet, and the moral depression of a man used to continual exercise of body and mind, whom the mind and body forbids to exercise.  We have looked after him so well that he is now, I think, out of the woods, although, this morning, I was afraid again and sent for Doctor Favre, our usual savior.

Throughout the day I have been talking to him, to distract him, about your researches on monsters; he had his papers brought so as to hunt among them for what might be useful you; but he has found only the pure fantasies of his own invention.  I found them so original and so funny that I have encouraged him to send them to you.  They will be of no use to you except to make you burst out laughing in your hours recreation.

I hope that we are going to come to life again without new relapses.  He is the soul and the life of the house.  When he is depressed we are dead; mother, wife, and children.  Aurore says that she would like to be very ill in her father’s place We love each other passionately, we five, and the sacrosanct literature as you call it, is only secondary in my life.  I have always loved some one more than it and my family more than that some one.