You were pleased with my two novels?  I am repaid, I think that they are satisfactory, and the silence which has invaded my life (it must be said that I have sought it) is full of a good voice that talks to me and is sufficient to me.  I have not mounted as high as you in my ambition.  You want to write for the ages.  As for me, I think that in fifty years, I shall be absolutely forgotten and perhaps unkindly ignored.  Such is the law of things that are not of first rank, and I have never thought myself in the first rank.  My idea has been rather to act upon my contemporaries, even if only on a few, and to share with them my ideal of sweetness and poetry.  I have attained this end up to a certain point; I have at least done my best towards it, I do still, and my reward is to approach it continually a little nearer.

That is enough for myself, but, as for you, your aim is greater, I see that clearly, and success is further off.  Then you ought to put yourself more in accord with yourself, by being still calmer and more content than I am.  Your momentary angers are good.  They are the result of a generous temperament, and, as they are neither malicious nor hateful, I like them, but your sadness, your weeks of spleen, I do not understand them, and I reproach you for them.  I have believed, I do still, that there is such a thing as too great isolation, too great detachment from the bonds of life.  You have powerful reasons to answer me with, so powerful that they ought to give you the victory.

Search your heart, think it over, and answer me, even if only to dispel the fears that I have often on your account; I don’t want you to exhaust yourself.  You are fifty years old, my son is the same or nearly.  He is in the prime of his strength, in his best development, you are too, if you don’t heat the oven of your ideas too hot.  Why do you say often that you wish you were dead?  Don’t you believe then in your own work?  Do let yourself be influenced then by this or that temporary thing?  It is possible, we are not gods, and something in us, something weak and unimportant sometimes, disturbs our theodicy.  But the victory every day becomes easier, when one is sure of loving logic and truth.  It gets to the point even of forestalling, of overcoming in advance, the subject of ill humor, of contempt or of discouragement.

All that seems easy to me, when it is a question of self control:  the subjects of great sadness are elsewhere, in the spectacle of the history that is unrolling around us; that eternal struggle of barbarity against civilization is a great bitterness for those who have cast off the element of barbarity and find themselves in advance of their epoch.  But, in that great sorrow, in these secret angers, there is a great stimulant which rightly raises us up, by inspiring in us the need of reaction.  Without that, I confess, for my part, that I would abandon everything.