Oh! what luck!  While writing to you it has come back to me that there is a corner where I have not looked.  I hasten there, I find it!  I find something better than my article, and I send you three works which will make you as learned as I am.  That of Passeri is charming.

Barbes has intelligence, certainly! but he is a sugar loaf.  Brain on a lofty scale, head of an Indian, with gentle instincts, almost impossible to find; all for metaphysical thought which becomes an instinct and a passion that dominates everything.  Add to that a character that one can only compare to Garibaldi.  A creature of incredible sanctity and perfection.  Immense worth without immediate application in France.  The setting of another age or another country is what this hero needs.  And now good-night,—­O God, what a calf I am!  I leave you the title of cow, which you give yourself in your days of weariness.  Never mind, tell me when you are to be in Paris.  It is probable that I shall have to go there for a few days for one thing or another.  We must embrace each other and then you shall come to Nohant this summer.  It is agreed, it must be!

My affectionate regards to your mother and to your lovely niece.

Please acknowledge the receipt of the three pamphlets; they would be a loss.

XLIX.  TO GEORGE SAND

Dear master,

You really ought to go to see the sun somewhere; it is foolish to be always suffering; do travel; rest; resignation is the worst of the virtues.

I have need of it in order to endure all the stupidities that I hear!  You can not imagine to what a degree they have reached.  France which has been sometimes taken with St. Vitus dance (as under Charles VI), seems to me now to have a paralysis of the brain.  They are mad with fear.  Fear of the Prussians, fear of the strikes, fear of the Exposition which does not go well, fear of everything.  We have to go back to 1849 to find such a degree of imbecility.

There was at the last Magny such inane conversation that I swore to myself never to put foot inside the place again.  The only subjects under discussion all the time were Bismarck and the Luxembourg.  I was stuffed with it!  For the rest I don’t find it easy to live.  Far from becoming blunted my sensibilities are sharper; a lot of insignificant things make me suffer.  Pardon this weakness, you who are so strong and tolerant.

The novel does not go at all well.  I am deep in reading the newspapers of ’48.  I have had to make several (and have not yet finished) journeys to Sevres, to Creil, etc.

Father Sainte-Beuve is preparing a discourse on free thought which he will read at the Senate a propos of the press law.  He has been very shrewd, you know.

You tell your son Maurice that I love him very much, first because he is your son and secundo because he is he.  I find him good, clever, cultivated, not a poseur, in short charming, and “with talent.”