MihaElla > Recent Status Updates

“I have just read Dickens's Pickwick. Do you know that? There are superb passages in it; but what defective composition! All English writers are the same; Walter Scott excepted, all lack a plot. That is unendurable for us Latins.”

** absolutely charming - the same eternal refrain
But I loved Walter Scott, too 😁

“Doctor Lambron, the physician of this place, attributes my nervous tendencies to the excessive use of tobacco. To be agreeable I am going to smoke less; but I doubt very much if my virtue will cure me!”

What a fine summer!The grain is seven feet high, the wheat fields are sheets of flowers.I go on foot to the stream,I jump,all boiling hot,into the icy water.The doctor says that is madness.I let him talk;I am curing myself while his patients look after themselves & croak.I’m like the grass of the fields:water & sun,that is all I need.

I realized, during the last two weeks, that my poor dear, good mother was the being that I have loved the most! It is as if someone had torn out a part of my vitals.

Shall I have the strength to live absolutely alone in solitude? I doubt it,am growing old.I think I shall give up my Paris lodging.Nothing calls me to Paris any longer.All my friends are dead,& the last one, poor Theo, is not for long,I fear.Ah! it is hard to grow a new skin at fifty years of age!

** what about life expectancy..

If only I do not make a failure also of Saint-Antoine.I am going to start working on it again in a week,when I have finished with Kant and Hegel.These two great men are helping to stupefy me,& when I leave them I fall with eagerness upon my old and thrice great Spinoza.What genius, how fine a work the Ethics is!

No! literature is not what I love most in the world, I explained myself badly (in my last letter). I spoke to you of distractions and of nothing more. I am not such a pedant as to prefer phrases to living beings. The further I go the more my sensibility is exasperated. But the basis is solid and the thing goes on.

As Victor Hugo had complained in a friendly way that I had not paid him a call,I thought I ought to do so and I found him …charming! I repeat the word, not at all "the great man," not at all a pontiff! This discovery greatly surprised me and did me worlds of good. For I have the bump of veneration and I like to love what I admire

I am reading in the evening,Kant's Critique de la raison pure,& am freshening up my Spinoza.During the day I amuse by looking over bestiaries of the middle ages;looking up in the "authorities" all the most baroque animals.I’m in the midst of fantastic monsters.When I have exhausted the material I’ll go to the Museum to muse before real monsters,& then the researches for the good Saint-Antoine will be finished.

“Ah! if one did not have the little sanctuary, the interior little shrine, where, without saying anything to anyone, one takes refuge to contemplate and to dream the beautiful and the true, one would have to say: "What is the use?”

I spent a fine day with Tourgueneff to whom I read the 115 pages of Saint- Antoine that are finished.What a listener!What a critic!He dazzled me by the depth & the clearness of his judgment.Ah! if all those who attempt to judge books had been able to hear,what a lesson!Nothing escapes him.At the end of a passage of a 100 lines,he remembers a weak epithet!he gave me 2-3 suggestions of exquisite detail

“You are a troubadour all the same, and if I had to write to you PUBLICLY the character would be what it ought to be. But our real discussions ought to remain between ourselves, like caresses between lovers, and even sweeter, since friendship also has its mysteries without the storms of personality.”

“Come, let me suffer! That is worth more than viewing INJUSTICE WITH A SERENE COUNTENANCE, as Shakespeare says. When I have drained my cup of bitterness, I shall feel better. I am a woman, I have affections, sympathies, and wrath. I shall never be a sage, nor a scholar.”

“No, no, people do not isolate themselves, the ties of blood are not broken, people do not curse or scorn their kind. Humanity is not a vain word. Our life is composed of love, and not to love is to cease to live.”

“have you not been young then? Ah! We are entirely different, for I have never ceased to be young, if being young is always loving.”

I lose myself as much as I can in antiquity.Just now I am making all the gods talk in a state of agony.The subtitle of my book could be The Height of Insanity. And the printing of it withdraws further and further into my mind.Why publish?Who pray is bothering about art nowadays?I make literature for myself as a bourgeois turns napkin rings in his garret.How can I make people listen to me?

“But what do you think of Mademoiselle Papevoine, the incendiary, who, in the midst of a barricade, submitted to the assaults of eighteen citizens! That surpasses the end of l'Education sentimentale where they limit themselves to offering flowers.”

PS: Manners mindfulness 😂

the years passed over me & over my contemporaries could not be lost to reason & experience: & now I awaken from a dream to find a generation divided between idiocy & delirium tremens! Everything is possible.I’ll make a great effort,& perhaps I’ll become just & patient again;but today I cannot. I’m as troubled,& I don't dare to talk,nor to think,nor to write,I have such a fear of touching the wounds open in soul.

I who have had so much patience with my species & who have so long looked on the bright side,now see nothing but darkness.I judge others by myself.I had improved my real character,had extinguished useless & dangerous enthusiasms,had sowed grass & flowers that grew well on my volcanoes,& I imagined that all the world could become enlightened,could correct itself, or restrain itself..

The immense disgust which my contemporaries give me throws me back on the past,& I’m working on my good Saint-Antoine with all my might.I came to Paris only for it,is impossible to get in Rouen the books that I need now;I’m lost in the religions of Persia.I’m trying to get a clear idea of the God Horn,& it isn't easy.I studied Buddhism,on which I already had many notes.I did a little Buddha..

I'm not like the bourgeois; I consider that after the invasion there are no more misfortunes. The war with Prussia gave me the effect of a great upheaval of nature,one of those cataclysms that happen every 6000 yrs; while the insurrection in Paris is, to my eyes, a very clear & almost simple thing.
What retrogressions! What savages! How they resemble the people of the League & the men in armor! Poor France, who will

Some days ago I went with Dumas to Brussels from where I thought to go direct to Paris.But "the new Athens" seems to me to surpass Dahomey in ferocity & imbecility.Has the end come to the HUMBUGS? Will they have finished with hollow metaphysics & conventional ideas? All the evil comes from our gigantic ignorance.What ought to be studied is believed without discussion. Instead of investigating, people make assertions.

11 March 1871
When shall we meet? Paris does not seem amusing to me. Ah! into what sort of a world are we going to enter! Paganism, Christianity, idiotism, there are the three great evolutions of humanity! It is sad to find ourselves at the beginning of the third.

One juggles with empty words on this question of immorality, for the question is to know if the 'moi' persists. The affirmative seems to me a presumption of our pride, a protest of our weakness against the eternal order. Has death perhaps no more secrets to reveal to us than life has?
I am brave, however, & making prodigious efforts to be stoical. I need only one thing, it is to have some kind of enthusiasm!

What troubles me is the terrible solitude in which I live. I have no longer anyone, I mean anyone with whom to converse, "who is interested today in eloquence & style". Aside from you & Tourgueneff, I don't know a living being to whom to pour out my soul about those things which I have most at heart; & you live far away from me, both of you!

What an age! Every one is dying, everything is dying, & the earth is dying also, eaten up by the sun & the wind. I don't know where I get the courage to keep on living in the midst of these ruins. Let us love each other to the end. You write me very little, I am worried about you.

Aside from a little Spinoza & Plutarch, I have read nothing since my return, as I am quite occupied by my present work. It is a task that will take me up to the end of July. I am in a hurry to be through with it, so as to abandon myself to the extravagances of the good Saint-Antoine, but I am afraid of not being SUFFICIENTLY IN THE MOOD.

As for ladies, "my little locality" furnishes none of them, and then,- even so! I have never been able to put Venus an Apollo in the same coop. It is one or the other, being a man of excess, a gentleman entirely given over to what he does.
I repeat to myself the phrase of Goethe: "Go forward beyond the tombs", & I hope to get used to the emptiness, but nothing more.

**I feel a sudden drop of glycemia...on the ice!

I would not ask anything better than to cast myself on some new affection.But how?Almost all my old friends are married officials,thinking of their little business the entire year,of the hung during vacation,& of the whist after dinner.I don't know one of them who would be capable of passing an afternoon with me reading a poet.They have their business; I,I have none.Observe I'm in the same social position I was @ 18

I feel no longer the need of writing, for I used to write especially for one person alone,who is no more. That is the truth!& yet I shall continue to write.But I have no more liking for it, the fascination is gone. There are so few people who like what I like,who are anxious about what I'm interested in! Do you know in this Paris, which is so large,one SINGLE house where they talk about literature?