The individual named George Sand is well:  he is enjoying the marvelous winter which reigns in Berry, gathering flowers, noting interesting botanical anomalies, making dresses and mantles for his daughter-in-law, costumes for the marionettes, cutting out scenery, dressing dolls, reading music, but above all spending hours with the little Aurore who is a marvelous child.  There is not a more tranquil or a happier individual in his domestic life than this old troubadour retired from business, who sings from time to time his little song to the moon, without caring much whether he sings well or ill, provided he sings the motif that runs in his head, and who, the rest of the time, idles deliciously.  It has not always been as nice as this.  He had the folly to be young; but as he did no evil nor knew evil passions, nor lived for vanity, he is happy enough to be peaceful and to amuse himself with everything.

This pale character has the great pleasure of loving you with all his heart, and of not passing a day without thinking of the other old troubadour, confined in his solitude of a frenzied artist, disdainful of all the pleasures of this world, enemy of the magnifying glass and of its attractions.  We are, I think, the two most different workers that exist; but since we like each other that way, it is all right.  The reason each of us thinks of the other at the same hour, is because each of us has a need of his opposite; we complete ourselves, in identifying ourselves at times with what is not ourselves.

I told you, I think, that I had written a play on returning from Paris.  They liked it; but I don’t want them to play it in the spring, and the end of the winter is filled up, unless the play they are rehearsing fails.  As I do not know how to wish my colleagues ill luck, I am in no hurry and my manuscript is on the shelf.  I have the time.  I am writing my little annual novel, when I have one or two hours a day to get to work on it; I am not sorry to be prevented from thinking of it.  That develops it.  Always before going to sleep, I have an agreeable quarter of an hour to continue it in my head; there you have it.

I know nothing, nothing at all of the Sainte-Beuve incident.  I get a dozen newspapers, whose wrappers I respect to such an extent that without Lina, who tells me the chief news from time to time, I would not know if Isidore were still among us.

Sainte-Beuve is very high tempered, and, as regards opinions, so perfectly skeptical, that I should never be astonished at anything he did, in one sense or the other.  He was not always like that, at least not so much so.  I have known him to be more credulous and more republican than I was then.  He was thin and pale, and gentle; how people change!  His talent, his knowledge, his mind have increased enormously, but I used to like his character better.  Just the same, there is still much good in him.  There is still love and reverence for letters—­and he will be the last of the critics.  Criticism rightly so-called, will disappear.  Perhaps there is no longer any reason for its existence.  What do you think about it?