If I do not get cured here, I shall go to Cannes, where some friends are urging me to come.  But I can not yet mention it to my children.  When I am with them it is not easy to move.  There is passion and jealousy.  And all my life has been like that, never my own!  Pity yourself then, you who belong to yourself!

XLV.  TO GEORGE SAND Wednesday evening

I have followed your counsel, dear master, I have exercised!!!  Am I not splendid; eh?

Sunday night, at eleven o’clock, there was such lovely moonlight along the river and on the snow that I was taken with an itch for movement, and I walked for two hours and a half imagining all sorts of things, pretending that I was travelling in Russia or in Norway.  When the tide came in and cracked the cakes of ice in the Seine and the thin ice which covered the stream, it was, without any exaggeration, superb.  Then I thought of you and I missed you.

I don’t like to eat alone.  I have to associate the idea with someone with the things that please me.  But this someone is rare.  I too wonder why I love you.  Is it because you are a great man or a charming being?  I don’t know.  What is certain is that I experience a particular sentiment for you and I cannot define it.

And a propos of this, do you think (you who are a master of psychology), that one can love two people in the same way and that one can experience two identical sensations about them?  I don’t think so, since our individuality changes at every moment of its existence.

You write me lovely things about “disinterested affection.”  That is true, so is the opposite!  We make God always in our own image.  At the bottom of all our loves and all our admirations we find ourselves again:  ourselves or something approaching us.  What is the difference if the ourselves is good!

My moi bores me for the moment.  How this fool weighs on my shoulders at times!  He writes too slowly and is not bluffing at all when he complains of his work.  What a task! and what a devil of an idea to have sought such a subject!  You should give me a recipe for going faster:  and you complain of seeking a fortune!  You!  I have received a little note from Saint-Beuve which reassures about his health, but it is sad.  He seemed to me depressed at not being able to haunt the dells of Cyprus.  He is within the truth, or at least within his own truth, which amounts to the same thing.  I shall be like him perhaps, when I am his age.  However, I think not.  Not having had the same youth, my old age will be different.

That reminds me that I once dreamed a book on Saint Perrine.  Champfleury treated that subject badly.  For I don’t see that he is comic:  I should have made him atrocious and lamentable.  I think that the heart does not grow old; there are even people whose hearts grow bigger with age.  I was much drier and more bitter twenty years ago than now.  I am feminized and softened by wear, as others get harder, and that makes me indignant.  I feel that I am becoming a cow, it takes nothing to move me; everything troubles and agitates me, everything is to me as the north wind is to the reed.