LXXII.  TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT Nohant, 5 December, 1867

Your old troubadour is no good, I admit it.  He has been working like an ox to have the money to go away with this winter to the gulf of Juan, and at the moment of leaving he would like to stay behind.  He is worried at leaving his children and the little Aurore, but he suffers with the cold, he fears anemia, and he thinks he is doing his duty in going to find a land which the snow does not render impracticable, and a sky under which one can breathe without having dagger-thrusts in one’s lungs.

So you see.

He has thought of you, probably much more than you think of him; for he has stupid and easy work, and his thoughts run elsewhere very far from him, and from his task, when his hand is weary of writing.  As for you, you work for truth, and you become absorbed, and you have not heard my spirit, which more than once has tapped at your study door to say to you:  “It is I.”  Or else you have said:  “It is a spirit tapping let him go to the devil!”

Aren’t you coming to Paris?  I am going there between the 15th and the 20th.  I shall stay there only a few days, and then flee to Cannes.  Will you be there?  God grant it!  On the whole I am pretty well; I am furious with you for not wanting to come to Nohant; I won’t reproach you for I don’t know how.  I have scribbled a lot; my children are always good and kind to me in every sense of the word.  Aurore is a love.

We have raved politically; now we try not to think of it any more and to have patience.  We often speak of you and we love you.  Your old troubadour especially who embraces you with all his heart, and begs to be remembered to your good mother.

G. Sand

LXXIII.  TO GEORGE SAND Wednesday night

Dear master, dear friend of the good God, “let us talk a little of Dozenval,” let us roar at M. Thiers!  Can a more triumphant imbecile, a more abject dabster, a more stercoraceous bourgeois be found!  No, nothing can give the idea of the puking with which this old diplomatic idiot inspires me in piling up his stupidity on the dung-hill of bourgeoisie!  Is it possible to treat philosophy, religion, peoples, liberty, the past and future, history, and natural history, everything and more yet, with an incoherence more inept and more childish!  He seems to me as everlasting as mediocrity!  He overwhelms me!

But the fine thing is the brave national guards whom he stuffed in 1848, who are beginning to applaud him again!  What infinite madness!  That proves that everything consists of temperament.  Prostitutes,—­ like France,—­always have a weakness for old buffoons.

Furthermore, I shall try in the third part of my novel (when I reach the reaction that followed the days of June) to insert a panegyric about him a propos of his book:  De la propriete, and I hope that he will be pleased with me.