I am not speaking here of personal passion, but of love of race, of the widening sentiment of self-love, of the horror of the isolated moi.  And that ideal of justice of which you speak, I have never seen it apart from love, since the first law on which the existence of a natural society depends, is that we shall serve each other mutually, like the bees and the ants.  This concurrence of all to the same end, we have agreed to call instinct among beasts, and it does not matter, but among men, the instinct is love; he who withdraws himself from love, withdraws himself from truth, from justice.

I have experienced revolutions, and I have seen the principal actors near to; I have seen the depth of their souls, I should say the bottom of their bag:  No principles! and no real intelligence, no force, nor endurance.  Nothing but means and a personal end.  Only one had principles, not all of them good, but in comparison with their integrity, he counted his personality for nothing:  Barbes.

Among artists and literary men, I have found no depth.  You are the only one with whom I have been able to exchange other ideas than those of the profession.  I don’t know if you were at Magny’s one day when I said to them that they were all gentlemen.  They said that one should not write for ignoramuses.  They spurned me because I wanted to write only for them, as they are the only ones who need anything.  The masters are provided for, are rich, satisfied.  Imbeciles lack everything, I am sorry for them.  Loving and pitying are not to be separated.  And there you have the uncomplicated mechanism of my thought.

I have the passion for goodness and not at all for prejudiced sentimentality.  I spit with all my might upon him who pretends to hold my principles and acts contrary to them.  I do not pity the incendiary and the assassin who fall under the hand of the law; I do pity profoundly the class which a brutal, degenerate life without upward trend and without aid, brings to the point of producing such monsters.  I pity humanity, I wish it were good, because I cannot separate myself from it; because it is myself; because the evil it does strikes me to the heart; because its shame makes me blush; because its crimes gnaw at my vitals, because I cannot understand paradise in heaven nor on earth for myself alone.

You ought to understand me, you who are goodness from head to foot.

Are you still in Paris?  It has been such fine weather that I have been tempted to go there to embrace you, but I don’t dare to spend the money, however little it may be, when there is so much poverty.  I am miserly because I know that I am extravagant when I forget, and I continually forget.  And then I have so much to do!...I don’t know anything and I don’t learn anything, for I am always forced to learn it over again.  I do very much need, however, to see you again, for a little bit; it is a part of myself which I miss.