A word from you, which I remembered, has made me reread now the Fair Maid of Perth.  It is a good story, whatever one says about it.  That fellow decidedly had an imagination.

Well, adieu.  Think of me.  I send you my best love.

XLVI.  TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset Nohant, 1867

Bah! zut! troulala!  Well! well!  I am not sick any more, or at least I am only half sick.  The air of the country restores me, or patience, or the other person, the one who wants to work again and to produce.  What is my illness?  Nothing.  Everything is all right, but I have something that they call anemia, an effect without a tangible cause, a breakdown which has been threatening for several years, and which became noticeable at Palaiseau, after my return from Croisset.  An emaciation that is too rapid to be within reason, a pulse too slow, too feeble, an indolent or capricious stomach, with a sensation of stifling and a fondness for inertia.  I was not able to keep a glass of water on my poor stomach for several days, and that brought me so low that I thought I was hardly curable; but, all is getting on, and I have even been working since yesterday.

You, dear, you go walking in the night, in the snow.  That is something which for an exceptional excursion, is rather foolish and might indeed make you ill also.  Good Heavens!  It is not the moon, it is the sun that I advise; we are not owls, obviously!  We have just had three spring days.  I wager that you have not climbed up to my dear orchard which is so pretty and which I love so much.  If it was only in remembrance of me, you ought to climb up every fine day at noon.  Your work would flow more abundantly afterward and you would regain the time you lost and more too.

Then you are worrying about money?  I don’t know what that is, since I have not a sou in the world.  I live by my day, work as does the proletarian; when I can no longer do my day’s work, I shall be packed up for the other world, and then I shall have no more need of anything.  But you must live.  How can you live by your pen if you always let yourself be duped and shorn?  It is not I who can teach you how to protect yourself But haven’t you a friend who knows how to act for you?  Alas, yes, the world is going to the devil in that respect; and I was talking of you, the other day, to a very dear friend, while I was showing him the artist, a personage become so rare, and cursing the necessity of thinking of the material side of life.  I send you the last page of his letter; you will see that you have in him a friend whom you did not suspect, and whose name will surprise you.