However, as I am an optimist just the same, I look at the good side of things and people; but the truth is that everything is bad and everything is good in this world.

Poor Thuillier has not sparkling health; but she hopes to carry the burden of the work once more.  She needs to earn her living, she is cruelly poor.  I told you in my lost letter that Sylvanie [Footnote:  Madame Arnould-Plessy.] had been several days at Nohant.  She is more beautiful than ever and quite well again after a terrible illness.

Would you believe that I have not seen Sainte-Beuve?  That I have had only the time here to sleep a little, and to eat in a hurry?  It is just that.  I have not heard anyone whatsoever talked about outside of the theatre and of the players.  I have had mad desires to abandon everything and to go to surprise you for a couple of hours; but I have not been a day without being kept at forced labor.

I shall return here the end of the month, and when they play Cadio, I shall beg you to spend twenty-four hours here for me.  Will you do it?  Yes, you are too good a troubadour to refuse me.  I embrace you with all my heart, and your mother too.  I am happy that she is well.

G. Sand

XC.  TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT Nohant, 18 September, 1868

It will be, I think, the 8th or 10th of October.  The management announces it for the 26th of September.  But that seems impossible to everyone.  Nothing is ready; I shall be advised, I shall advise you.  I have come to spend the days of respite that my very conscientious and very devoted collaborator allows me.  I am taking up again a novel on the theatre, the first part of which I had left on my desk, and I plunge every day in a little icy torrent which tumbles me about and makes me sleep like a top.  How comfortable one is here with these two little children who laugh and chatter from morning till night like birds, and how foolish it is to go to compose and to put on made up things when the reality is so easy and so fine!  But one gets accustomed to regarding all that as a military order, and goes to the front without asking oneself if it means wounds or death.  Do you think that that bothers me?  No, I assure you; but it does not amuse me either.  I go straight ahead, stupid as a cabbage and patient as a Berrichon.  Nothing is interesting in my life except other people.  Seeing you soon in Paris will be more of a pleasure than my business will be an annoyance to me.  Your novel interests me more than all mine.  Impersonality, a sort of idiocy which is peculiar to me, is making a noticeable progress.  If I were not well, I should think that it was a malady.  If my old heart did not become each day more loving, I should think it was egotism; in short, I don’t know what it is, and there you are.  I have had trouble recently.  I told you of it in the letter which you did not receive.  A person