What do I say about it, dear master?  Should one excite or repress the sensitiveness of children?  It seems to me that one should not have any set rule about it.  It is according as they have a tendency to too much or too little.  Moreover, the basis isn’t changed.  There are tender natures and hard natures, irremediably so.  And then the same sight, the same lesson can produce opposite effects.  Could anything have hardened me more than having been brought up in a hospital and having played, as a child, in a dissecting amphitheatre?  But no one is more sensitive than I am to physical suffering.  It is true that I am the son of an extremely humane man, sensitive in the true meaning of the word.  The sight of a suffering dog made tears come to his eyes.  He did his surgical operations none the less well, and he invented some dreadful ones.

“Show little ones only the sweet and the good of life until the time when reason can help them to accept or to fight the bad.”  Such is not my opinion.  For then something terrible, an infinite disenchantment is bound to be produced in their hearts.  And then, how could reason form itself, if it does not apply itself (or if one does not apply it daily) to distinguish good from evil?  Life ought to be a continual education; one must learn everything—­from talking to dying.

You tell me very true things about the unconsciousness of children.  He who could read clearly in these little brains would grasp in them the roots of the human race, the origin of the gods, the sap which produces actions later on, etc.  A negro who talks to his idol, and a child who talks to her doll seem to me close together.

The child and the savage (the primitive) do not distinguish the real from the fantastic.  I remember very clearly that at five or six years of age I wanted to “send my heart” to a little girl with whom I was in love (I mean my material heart).  I could see it in the middle of straw, in a basket, an oyster basket.

But no one has been so far as you in these analyses.  There are some infinitely profound pages about it in the Histoire de ma vie.  What I say is true, since minds quite opposite to yours have been amazed at them.  For instance, the Goncourts.

The good Tourgueneff ought to be in Paris at the end of March.  What would be fine, would be for us all three to dine together.

I am thinking again of Sainte-Beuve.  Without doubt one can get along without thirty thousand francs a year.  But there is something easier yet:  that is, when one has them, not to launch into abuse, every week, in the papers.  Why doesn’t he write books, since he is rich and has talent?

I am just now reading Don Quichotte again.  What a tremendous old book!  Is there any more beautiful?

CVIII.  TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT Nohant, 7 March, 1869

Still alone with my grandchildren; my nephews and friends come to spend two out of every three days with me, but I miss Maurice and Lina.  Poor Calamatta is at the last gasp.