What was it you meant?  You must tell me when you have the time.

XXXIX.  TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT Paris, 8 December, 1866

You ask me what I am doing?  Your old troubadour is content this evening.  He has passed the night in re-doing a second act which did not go properly and which has turned out well, so well that my directors are delighted, and I have good hopes of making the end effective—­it does not please me yet, but one must pull it through.  In short, I have nothing to tell you about myself which is very interesting.  When one has the patience of an ox and the wrist broken from crushing stones well or badly, one has scarcely any unexpected events or emotions to recount.  My poor Manceau called me the road-Mender, and there is nothing less poetic than those beings.

And you, dear friend, are you experiencing the anguish and labors of childbirth?  That is splendid and youthful.  Those who want them don’t always get them!

When my daughter-in-law brings into the world dear little children, I abandon myself to such labor in holding her in my arms that it reacts on me, and when the infant arrives, I am sicker than she is, and even seriously so.  I think that your pains now react on me, and I have a headache on account of them.  But alas!  I cannot assist at any birth and I almost regret the time when one believed it hastened deliverances to burn candles before an image.

I see that that rascal Bouilhet has betrayed me; he promised me to copy the Marengo letter in a feigned hand to see if you would be taken in by it.  People have written to me seriously things like that.  How good and kind your great friend is.  He is adored at the Odeon, and this evening they told me that his play was going better and better.  I went to hear it again two or three days ago and I was even more delighted with it than the first time.

Well, well, let’s keep up our heart, whatever happens, and when you go to rest remember that someone loves you.  Affectionate regards to your mother, brother and niece.

G. Sand

XL.  TO GEORGE SAND Croisset, Saturday night

I have seen Citizen Bouilhet, who had a real ovation in his own country.  His compatriots who had absolutely ignored him up to then, from the moment that Paris applauded him, screamed with enthusiasm.- -He will return here Saturday next, for a banquet that they are giving him,—­80 covers, at least.

As for Marengo the Swallow, he kept your secret so well, that he read the letter in question with an astonishment which duped me.

Poor Marengo! she is a figure! and one that you ought to put in a book.  I wonder what her memoirs would be, written in that style?—­ Mine (my style) continues to give me no small annoyance.  I hope, however, in a month, to have crossed the most barren tract.  But at the moment I am lost in a desert; well, by the grace of God, so much the worse for me!  How gladly I shall abandon this sort of thing, never to return to it to my dying day!  Depicting the modern French bourgeois is a stench in my nostrils!  And then won’t it be time perhaps to enjoy oneself a bit in life, and to choose subjects pleasant to the author?