Your sending the package of the two portraits made me think that you were in Paris, dear master, and I wrote you a letter which is waiting for you at rue des Feuillantines.

I have not found my article on the dolmens.  But I have my manuscript (entire) of my trip in Brittany among my “unpublished works.”  We shall have to gabble when you are here.  Have courage.

I don’t experience, as you do, this feeling of a life which is beginning, the stupefaction of a newly commenced existence.  It seems to me, on the contrary, that I have always lived!  And I possess memories which go back to the Pharaohs.  I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practising different professions and in many sorts of fortune.  My present personality is the result of my lost personalities.  I have been a boatman on the Nile, a leno in Rome at the time of the Punic wars, then a Greek rhetorician in Subura where I was devoured by insects.  I died during the Crusade from having eaten too many grapes on the Syrian shores, I have been a pirate, monk, mountebank and coachman.  Perhaps also even emperor of the East?

Many things would be explained if we could know our real genealogy.  For, since the elements which make a man are limited, should not the same combinations reproduce themselves?  Thus heredity is a just principle which has been badly applied.

There is something in that word as in many others.  Each one takes it by one end and no one understands the other.  The science of psychology will remain where it lies, that is to say in shadows and folly, as long as it has no exact nomenclature, so long as it is allowed to use the same expression to signify the most diverse ideas.  When they confuse categories, adieu, morale!

Don’t you really think that since ’89 they wander from the point?  Instead of continuing along the highroad which was broad and beautiful, like a triumphal way, they stray off by little sidepaths and flounder in mud holes.  Perhaps it would be wise for a little while to return to Holbach.  Before admiring Proudhon, supposing one knew Turgot?  But le Chic, that modern religion, what would become of it!

Opinions chic (or chiques):  namely being pro-Catholicism (without believing a word of it) being pro-Slavery, being pro-the House of Austria, wearing mourning for Queen Amelie, admiring Orphee aux Enfers, being occupied with Agricultural Fairs, talking Sport, acting indifferent, being a fool up to the point of regretting the treaties of 1815.  That is all that is the very newest.

Oh!  You think that because I pass my life trying to make harmonious phrases, in avoiding assonances, that I too have not my little judgments on the things of this world?  Alas!  Yes! and moreover I shall burst, enraged at not expressing them.

But a truce to joking, I should finally bore you.

The Bouilhet play will open the first part of November.  Then in a month we shall see each other.