let us have the honor of having done our stated task, it is our duty; for we have evident duties only toward ourselves and our equals.  What we destroy in ourselves, we destroy in them.  Our abasement lowers them, our falls drag them down; we owe it to them to remain erect so that they shall not fall.  The desire for an early death, as that for a long life, is therefore a weakness, and I do not want you to admit any longer that it is a right.  I thought that had it once; I believed, however, what I believe today; but I lacked strength, and like you I said:  “I cannot help it.”  I lied to myself.  One can help everything.  One has the strength that one thinks one has not, when one desires ardently to gravitate, to mount a step each day, to say to oneself:  “The Flaubert of tomorrow must be superior to the one of yesterday, and the one of day after tomorrow more steady and more lucid still.”

When you feel you are on the ladder, you will mount very quickly.  You are about to enter gradually upon the happiest and most favorable time of life:  old age.  It is then that art reveals itself in its sweetness; as long as one is young, it manifests itself with anguish.  You prefer a well-turned phrase to all metaphysics.  I also, I love to see condensed into a few words what elsewhere fills volumes; but these volumes, one must have understood them completely (either to admit them or to reject them) in order to find the sublime resume which becomes literary art in its fullest expression; that is why one should not scorn the efforts of the human mind to arrive at the truth.

I tell you that, because you have excessive prejudices as to words.  In truth, you read, you dig, you work much more than I and a crowd of others do.  You have acquired learning that I shall never attain.  Therefore you are a hundred times richer than all of us; you are a rich man, and you complain like a poor man.  Be charitable to a beggar who has his mattress full of gold, but who wants to be nourished only on well-turned phrases and choice words.  But brute, ransack your own mattress and eat your gold.  Nourish yourself with the ideas and feelings accumulated in your head and your heart; the words and the phrases, the form to which you attach so much importance, will issue by itself from your digestion.  You consider it as an end, it is only an effect.  Happy manifestations proceed only from an emotion, and an emotion proceeds only from a conviction.  One is not moved at all by the things that one does not believe with all one’s heart.

I do not say that you do not believe:  on the contrary, all your life of affection, of protection, and of charming and simple goodness, proves that you are the most convinced individual in the world.  But, as soon as you handle literature, you want, I don’t know why, to be another man, one who should disappear, one who destroys himself, who does not exist!  What an absurd mania! what a false rule of good taste!  Our work is worth only what we are worth.