Yours, from the depths of my heart,

Your Gustave Flaubert

CCCXVII.  To MAURICE SAND Croisset, Tuesday, 3rd October, 1876

Thank you for your kind remembrance, my dear friend.  Neither do I forget, and I dream of your poor, dear mamma in a sadness that does not disappear.  Her death has left a great emptiness for me.  After you, your wife and the good Plauchut, I am perhaps the one who misses her most!  I need her.

I pity you the annoyances that your sister causes you.  I too have gone through that!  It is so easy moreover to be good!  Besides that causes less evil.  When shall we meet?  I want so much to see you, first just to see you—­and second to talk of her.

When your business is finished, why not come to Paris for some time?  Solitude is bad under certain conditions.  One should not become intoxicated with one’s grief, however much attraction one finds in doing so.

You ask me what I am doing.  This is it:  this year I have written two stories, and I am going to begin another so as to make the three into one volume that I want to publish in the spring.  After that I hope to resume the big novel that I laid aside a year ago after my financial disaster.  Matters are improving in that direction, and I shall not be forced to change anything in my way of living.  If I have been able to start at work again, I owe it partly to the good counsel of your mother.  She had found the best way to bring me back to respect myself.

In order to get the quicker at work, I shall stay here till New Year’s Day,—­perhaps later than that.  Do try to put off your visit to Paris.

Embrace your dear little girls warmly for me, my respects to Madam Maurice, and-sincerely yours, ex imo.

Gustave Flaubert

CCCXVIII.  To MAURICE SAND Saint-Gratien par Sannois, 20th August, 1877

Thank you for your kind remembrance, my dear Maurice.  Next winter you will be in Passy, I hope,—­and from time to time we can have a good chat.  I even count on seeing myself at your table by the side of your friends whose “idol” I am.

You speak to me of your dear and illustrious mamma!  Next to you I do not think that any one could think of her more often than I do!  How I miss her!  How I need her!

I had begun un coeur simple solely on account of her, only to please her.  She died while I was in the midst of this work.  Thus it is with our dreams.

I still continue not to find diversion in existence.  In order to forget the weight of it, I work as frantically as possible.

What sustains me is the indignation that the Imbecility of the Bourgeois affords me!  Summed up at present by the large party of law and order, it reaches a dizzy height!

Has there been anything in history more inept than the 16th of May?  Where is there an idiot comparable to the Bayard of modern times?