We are expecting you, we are preparing a mid-Lent fantasy; try to take part.  Laughter is a splendid medicine.  We shall give you a costume; they tell me that you were very good as a pastry cook at Pauline’s!  If you are better, be certain it is because you have gotten out of your rut and have distracted yourself a little.  Paris is good for you, you are too much alone yonder in your lovely house.  Come and work, at our house; how perfectly easy to send on a box of books!

Send word when you are coming so that I can have a carriage at the station at Chateauroux.

CCLIII.  TO GEORGE SAND Thursday, 20 March, 1873

Dear master,

The gigantic Tourgueneff is at this moment leaving here and we have just sworn a solemn oath.  You will have us at dinner the 12th of April, Easter Eve.

It has not been a small job to get to that point, it is so difficult to succeed in anything, no matter what.

For my part nothing would prevent me from going tomorrow But our friend seems to me to enjoy very little liberty and I myself have engagements the first week in April.

I am going this evening to two costume balls!  Tell me after that that I am not young.

A thousand affectionate greetings from your old troubadour who embraces you.

Read as an example of modern fetidness, in the last number of the Vie Parisienne, the article on Marion Delorme.  It ought to be framed, if, however, anything fetid can be framed.  But nowadays people don’t look so closely.

CCLIV.  TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT Nohant, 23 March, 1873

No, that giant does not do as he likes, I have noticed that.  But he is one of the class that finds its happiness in being ruled and I can understand it, on the whole.  Provided one is in good hands,—­and he is.

Well, we are hoping still, but we are not absolutely counting on anyone but you.  You can not give me a greater pleasure than by telling me that you are going out among people, that you are getting out of a rut and distracting yourself, absolutely necessary, in these muddled days.

On the day when a little intoxication is no longer necessary for self-preservation, the world will be getting on very well.  We haven’t come to that yet.

That fetid thing is not worth the trouble of reading, I didn’t finish it, one turns away from such things, one does not spoil one’s sense of smell by breathing them.  But I do not think that the man to whom one offers that in a censer would be satisfied with it.

Do come with the swallows and bring Saint-Antoine.  It is Maurice who is going to be interested in that!  He is more of a scholar than I am, I who will appreciate, thanks to my ignorance about many things, only the poetic and great side of it.  I am sure of it, I know already that it is there.

Keep on going about, you must, and above all continue to love us as we love you.