Sainte-Beuve, who loves you all the same, claims that you are horribly vicious.  But perhaps he may see with somewhat unclean eyes, like this learned botanist who asserts that the germander is of dirty yellow color.  The observation was so false, that I could not refrain from writing on the margin of his book:  It is because you have dirty eyes.

I suppose that a man of intelligence may have great curiosity.  I have not had it, lacking the courage.  I have preferred to leave my mind incomplete, that is my affair, and every one is free to embark either on a great ship in full sail, or on a fisherman’s vessel.  The artist is an explorer whom nothing ought to stop, and who does neither good nor ill when turning to the right or to the left.  His end justifies all.

It is for him to know after a little experience, what are the conditions of his soul’s health.  As for me, I think that yours is in a good condition of grace, since you love to work and to be alone in spite of the rain.

Do you know that, while there has been a deluge everywhere, we have had, except a few downpours, fine sunshine in Brittany?  A horrible wind on the shore, but how beautiful the high surf! and since the botany of the coast carried me away, and Maurice and his wife have a passion for shellfish, we endured it all gaily.  But on the whole, Brittany is a famous see-saw.

However, we are a little fed up with dolmens and menhirs and we have fallen on fetes and have seen costumes which they said had been suppressed but which the old people still wear.  Well!  These men of the past are ugly with their home-spun trousers, their long hair, their jackets with pockets under the arms, their sottish air, half drunkard, half saint.  And the Celtic relics, uncontestably curious for the archaeologist, have naught for the artist, they are badly set, badly composed, Carnac and Erdeven have no physiognomy.  In short, Brittany shall not have my bones!  I prefer a thousand times your rich Normandy, or, in the days when one has dramas in his head, a real country of horror and despair.  There is nothing in a country where priests rule and where Catholic vandalism has passed, razing monuments of the ancient world and sowing the plagues of the future.

You say us a propos of the fairy play.  I don’t know with whom you have written it, but I still fancy that it ought to succeed at the Odeon under its present management.  If I was acquainted with it, I should know how to accomplish for you what one never knows how to do for one’s self, namely, to interest the directors.  Anything of yours is bound to be too original to be understood by that coarse Dumaine.  Do have a copy at your house, and next month I shall spend a day with you in order to have you read it to me.  Le Croisset is so near to Palaiseau!—­and I am in a phase of tranquil activity, in which I should love to see your great river flow, and to keep dreaming in your orchard, tranquil itself, quite on top of the cliff.  But I am joking, and you are working.  You must forgive the abnormal intemperance of one who has just been seeing only stones and has not perceived even a pen for twelve days.