Don’t worry any more about your old troubadour (who is becoming a silly animal, frankly), but I hope to recover.  I have gone through, several times, melancholy periods, and I have come out all right.  Everything wears out, boredom with the rest.

I expressed myself badly:  I did not mean that I scorned “the feminine sentiment.”  But that woman, materially speaking, had never been one of my habits, which is quite different.  I have loved more than anyone, a presumptuous phrase which means “quite like others,” and perhaps even more than average person.  Every affection is known to me, “the storms of the heart” have “poured out their rain” on me.  And then chance, force of circumstances, causes solitude to increase little by little around me, and now I am alone, absolutely alone.

I have not sufficient income to take unto myself a wife, nor even to live in Paris for six months of the year:  so it is impossible for me to change my way of living.

Do you mean to say that I did not tell you that Saint-Antoine had been finished since last June?  What I am dreaming of just now, is something of greater scope, which will aim to be comic.  It would take too long to explain to you with a pen.  We shall talk of it when we meet.

Adieu, dear good, adorable master, yours with his best affection,

Your old friend.

Always as indignant as Saint Polycarp.

Do you know, in all history, including that of the Botocudos, anything more imbecile than the Right of the National Assembly?  These gentlemen who do not want the simple and frivolous word Republic, who find Thiers too advanced!!!  O profoundness! problem, revery!

CCXLII.  TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT Nohant, 27 November, 1872

Maurice is quite happy and very proud of the letter you wrote him; there is no one who could give him as much pleasure and whose encouragement counts more with him.  I thank you too, for my part; for I agree with him.

What! you have finished Saint-Antoine?  Well, should I find a publisher, since you are not doing so?  You cannot keep it in your portfolio.  You don’t like Levy, but there are others; say the word, and I will act as if it were for myself.

You promise me to get well later, but in the mean time you don’t want to do anything to jolt yourself.  Come, then, to read Saint-Antoine to me, and we will talk of publishing it.  What is coming here from Croisset, for a man?  If you won’t come when we are gay and having a holiday, come while it is quiet an I am alone.  All the family embraces you.

Your old troubadour

G. Sand

CCXLIII.  TO GEORGE SAND

Dear master,

Here it is a night and a day that I have spent with you.  I had finished Nanon at four o’clock in the morning, and Francia at three o’clock in the afternoon.  All of it is still dancing around in my head.  I am going to try to gather my ideas together to talk about these excellent books to you.  They have done me good.  So thank you, dear, good master.  Yes, they were like a great whiff of air, and, after having been moved, I feel refreshed.