Your old

Gustave Flaubert

I shall have the package of pamphlets about faience sent to the rue des Feuillantines.  A good handshake to Maurice.  A kiss on the four cheeks of Mademoiselle Aurore.

LVIII.  TO GEORGE SAND

I stayed thirty-six hours in Paris at the beginning of this week, in order to be present at the Tuileries ball.  Without any exaggeration, it was splendid.  Paris on the whole turns to the colossal.  It is becoming foolish and unrestrained.  Perhaps we are returning to the ancient Orient.  It seems to me that idols will come out of the earth.  We are menaced with a Babylon.

Why not?  The individual has been so denied by democracy that he will abase himself to a complete effacement, as under the great theocratic despotisms.

The Tsar of Russia displeased me profoundly; I found him a rustic.  On a parallel with Monsieur Floquet who cries without any danger:  “Long live Poland!” We have chic people who have had themselves registered at the Elysee.  Oh! what a fine epoch!

My novel goes piano.  The further I get on the more difficulties arise.  What a heavy cart of sandstone to drag along!  And you pity yourself for a labor that lasts six months!

I have enough more for two years, at least (of mine).  How the devil do you find the connection between your ideas?  It is that that delays me.  Moreover this book demands tiresome researches.  For instance on Monday; I was at the Jockey Club, at the Cafe Anglais, and at a lawyer’s in turn.  Do you like Victor Hugo’s preface to the Paris-Guide?  Not very much, do you?  Hugo’s philosophy seems to me always vague.

I was carried away with delight, a week ago, at an encampment of Gypsies who had established at Rouen.  This is the third time that I have seen them and always with a new pleasure.  The great thing is that they excite the hatred of the bourgeois, although they are as inoffensive as sheep.

I appeared very badly before the crowd because I gave them a few sous, and I heard some fine words a la Prudhomme.  That hatred springs from something very profound and complex.  One finds it among all orderly people.

It is the hatred that one feels for the bedouin, for the heretic, the philosopher, the solitary, the poet; and there is a fear in that hate.  I, who am always for the minority, am exasperated by it.  It is true that many things exasperate me.  On the day that I am no longer outraged, I shall fall flat as the marionette from which one withdraws the support of the stick.

Thus, the stake that has supported me this winter, is the indignation that I had against our great national historian, M. Thiers, who had reached the condition of a demi-god, and the pamphlet Trochu, and the everlasting Changarnier coming back over the water.  God be thanked that the Exposition has delivered us momentarily from these great men.