I have to live as a small retired countryman, which is not very amusing.  But so many others who are worth more than I am not having the land, it would be unfair for me to complain.  Accusing Providence is, moreover a mania so common, that one ought to refrain from it through simple good taste.

Another word about money and one that shall be quite between ourselves.  I can, without being inconvenienced at all, as soon as I am in Paris, that is to say from the 20th to the 23rd of the present month, lend you a thousand francs, if you need them in order to go to Cannes.  I make you this proposition bluntly, as I would to Bouilhet, or any other intimate friend.  Come, don’t stand on ceremony!

Between people in society, that would not be correct, I know that, but between troubadours many things are allowable.

You are very kind with your invitation to go to Nohant.  I shall go, for I want very much to see your house.  I am annoyed not to know it when I think of you.  But I shall have to put off that pleasure till next summer.  Now I have to stay some time in Paris.  Three months are not too long for all I want to do there.

I send you back the page from the letter of your friend Barbes, whose real biography I know very imperfectly.  All I know of him is that he is honest and heroic.  Give him a hand-shake for me, to thank him for his sympathy.  Is he, between ourselves, as intelligent as he is good?

I feel the importance now, of getting men of that class to be rather frank with me.  For I am going to start studying the Revolution of ’48.  You have promised me to hunt in your library at Nohant for (1) an article of yours on faience; (2) a novel by father X—–­, a Jesuit, on the Holy Virgin.

But what sternness for the father Beuve who is neither Jesuit nor virgin!  He regrets, you say, “what is the least regrettable, understood as he understood it.”  Why so?  Everything depends upon the intensity that one puts on the thing.

Men always find that the most serious thing of their existence is enjoyment.

Woman for us all is the highest point of the infinite.  That is not noble, but that is the real depth of the male.  They exaggerate that unmercifully, God be thanked, for literature and for individual happiness also.

Oh!  I have missed you so much.  The tides are superb, the wind groans, the river foams and overflows.  It blows from the ocean, which benefits one.

XLVIII.  TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Paris Nohant, 8 February, 1867