MihaElla > Recent Status Updates

Women's brains are so queer!I'm very tired in mine or rather it is very low for the moment!However hard I work,it doesn't go!Everything irritates me & hurts me;& since I restrain myself before people,I give way from time to time to floods of tears when it seems to me as if I should burst.At last,I'm experiencing an entirely new sensation:the approach of old age.The shadow invades me,as Victor Hugo would say.

You think that I am as sweet as a lamb! Undeceived yourself, & act as if Aisse had never existed;& above all no sensitiveness? That would offend me. Between simple friends,one needs manners & politenesses; but between you & me,that would not seem at all suitable; we do not owe each other anything at all except to love each other.

I have worked like a beast of burden.I need too to see some blue,but the blue of the sea will do,& you would like the blue of the artistic & literary firmament over our heads.Bah! that doesn't exist.Everything is prose,flat prose in the environment in which mankind has settled itself. It is only in isolating oneself a little that one can find in oneself the normal being again.

It appears that you're studying the boor (pignouf). As for me, I avoid him. I know him too well. I love the Berrichon peasant who is not,who never is,a boor,even when he is of no great account. The word pignouf has its depths; it was created exclusively for the bourgeois, wasn't it? 90 out of a 100 provincial middle-class women are boorish (pignouf lardes) to a high degree, even with pretty faces that ought...

To get drunk with ink is more worth while than to get drunk with brandy.The muse,cross-grained as she is,gives less trouble than a woman.I cannot harmonize the one with the other.I must choose.My choice was made a long time ago.There remains the matter of the senses.They have always been my servants.Even at the time of my earliest youth,I did exactly as I wanted with them.I have reached my 50 yr,& its not their ardor

As for my frenzy for work, I will compare it to an attack of herpes. I scratch myself while I cry. It is both a pleasure & a torture at the same time. & I am doing nothing that I want to! For one does not choose one's subjects, they force themselves on one. Shall I ever find mine? Will an idea fall from Heaven suitable to my temperament? Can I write a book to which I shall give myself heart & soul?

I don't know anything that goes on & I read nothing, except a little of the French Revolution, after my meals, to aid digestion. I have lost my former good habit of reading every day in Latin. Therefore I don't know a word of it anymore! I shall polish it up again when I am freed from my odious bourgeois, & I am nowhere near it.

Its not good of you to say that I do not think of 'my old Troubadour'; of whom then, do I think? perhaps of my wretched book? but that is more difficult & less agreeable. In order to finish my book in the spring of 1869, I must not give myself a week of holiday. It is always the story of the Amazons. In order to draw the bow better they crushed their breast. It is a fine method after all.

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 & future,history,& natural history,everything & more yet,with an incoherence more inept & more childish!

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

You ask if it is the destiny of man to DRINK THE INFINITE; my heavens, yes, don't doubt it, it is his destiny, since it is his dream & his passion.
Inventing is absorbing also; but what fatigue afterwards! How empty & worn out intellectually one feels, when one has scribbled for weeks & months about that animal with two legs which has the only right to be represented in novels!

A blue vapour rose in Felicite' room. She opened her nostrils & inhaled with a mystic sensuousness; then she closed her lids. Her lips smiled. The beats of her heart grew fainter & fainter, & vaguer, like a fountain giving out, like an echo dying away;- & when she exhaled her last breath, she thought she saw in the half-opened heavens a gigantic parrot hovering above her head.

They held conversations together,Loulou repeating the 3 phrases of his repertory over & over,Felicite replying by words that had no greater meaning,but in which she poured out her feelings.In her isolation,the parrot was almost a son,a love.He climbed upon her fingers,pecked at her lips,clung to her shawl,& when she rocked her head to &fro like a nurse,the big wings of her cap &the wings of the bird flapped in unison

Years passed, all alike and marked by no other events than the return of the great church holidays: Easter, Assumption, All Saints' Day. Household happenings constituted the only data to which in later years they often referred. Thus, in 1825, workmen painted the vestibule; in 1827, a portion of the roof almost killed a man by falling into the yard...

Ordinarily, they rested in a field facing the ocean...the sea glittered brightly in the sun & was as smooth as a mirror, & so calm that they could scarcely distinguish its murmur; sparrows chirped joyfully & the immense canopy of heaven spread over it all. The sleepy waves lapping the sand unfurled themselves along the shore that extended as far as the eye could see...

this place of perdition spread its fantastic reputation over the whole arrondissement. Allusions were made to it in a circumlocutory style: "The place know of - a certain street- below the Bridges". It made the farmers' wives of the district tremble for their husbands, & the ladies grow apprehensive as to their servants' virtue; & it was, of course, the secret obsession of all the young lads.

He read her pages of poetry, into which he threw his whole soul in order to move her & excite her admiration. She would interrupt him with a disparaging remark or a practical observation; & their conversation would relapse incessantly into the eternal question of Love! They wondered what caused it, whether women felt it better than men, & what were the differences between thm on that point.

Frederic always waited for her when they were going out; she was a very long time fastening the two ribbons of her bonnet around her chin;& she smiled at herself in the wardrobe mirror. Then she would tuck her arm in his,&, making him look at himself in the glass beside her:
'We look well like this, the two of us side by side! Ah! My poor darling, I could eat you!'
He was now her chattel, her property. She wore on...

Royal residences have about them a peculiar kind of melancholy,due,no doubt,to their dimensions being far too large for the limited number of their occupants,so the silence which one is surprised to find in them after so many fanfares,to the immobility of their richness,which attests by its age the transitory character of dynasties,the eternal wretchedness of all things-& this exhalation of the centuries, enervating

In a refinement of hatred,in order the better to insult Madame Arnoux in his own soul,he took Rosanette to the hotel, in the room he had prepared for the other. About 1 o’clock she was awakened by distant rumbling sounds;& she saw him sobbing with his head buried in the pillow.
‘Whatever is the matter with you, my love?’
‘It’s excess of happiness, said Frederic. I’d been wanting you for too long!’

I think that the heart does not grow old;there are even people whose hearts grow bigger with age.I was much drier & more bitter 20 yrs ago than now.I am feminized & softened by wear,as others get harder,& that makes me INDIGNANT.I feel that I am becoming a COW,it takes nothing to move me; everything troubles & agitates me,everything is to me as the north wind is to the reed

*HA! Poor F. I am becoming his antithesis

What is being hysterical? I have perhaps been that also,I am perhaps;but I don't know anything about it,never having profoundly studied the thing, & having heard of it without having studied it. Isn't it an uneasiness, an anguish caused by the desire of an impossible SOMETHING OR OTHER? In that case, we are all attacked by it, by this strange illness, when we have imagination; & why should such a malady have a sex?

"Not put one's heart into what one writes?" I don't understand at all, oh! not at all!
As for me, I think that one can not put anything else into it. Can one separate one's mind from one's heart? Is it something different? Can sensation itself limit itself? Can existence divide itself? In short, not to give oneself entirely to one's work, seems to me as impossible as to weep with something else than one's eyes, &..

She made no effort whatever to excite his love, lost in that listlessness which is characteristic of intense happiness. She wore a brown silk dressing-gown, which united the indolence of her attitudes & her grave physiognomy. Besides, she had just reached the autumnal period of womanhood, in which reflection is combined with tenderness, in which the beginning of maturity colours the face with a more intense flame..

'Her daughter's capricious disposition had made it necessary to send the girl to a convent...'

*** My word! What a cruel gone times...

If your little engineer has made a VOW, & if that vow does not cost him anything, he is right to keep it; if not, it is pure folly, between you & me. Where should liberty exist if not in passion?
Well! no, IN MY DAY we didn't take such vows & we loved! & swaggeringly. But all participated in a great eclecticism & when one strayed FROM LADIES it was from pride, in defiance of one's self, & for effect. In short...

for 2 days I have been taking out to walk my Cascaret,the little engineer of whom I told you. He has become very good looking, the ladies lift their lorgnons at him,& it depends only on him to attain the dignity of a negro "giraffier", but he loves, he is engaged, he has four yrs to wait, to work to make himself a position, & he has made a vow. You would tell him that he is stupid, I preach to him, on the contrary...

What is there for me to do in the world? Other men strive for riches, celebrity, power! But I have no profession; you are my exclusive occupation, my whole wealth, the object, the centre of my existence & of my thoughts. I can no more live without you than without the air of heaven! Do you not feel the aspiration of my soul ascending towards yours, & that they must intermingle, & that I'm dying on your account?

But I tell you again I am not (to be married)! Can you believe that I, with my intellectual requirements, my habits, am going to bury myself in the provinces in order to play cards, look after masons, & walk about in wooden shoes? What object, pray, cold I have for taking such a step? You've been told that she was rich, haven't you? Ah! what do I care about money? Could I, after yearning long for that which is...

Now that I am no longer a woman, if the good God was just, I should become a man; I should have the physical strength & would say to you:"Come let's go to Carthage or elsewhere". But there, one who has neither sex nor strength, progresses towards childhood, & it is quite otherwhere that one is renewed. WHERE? I shall know that before you do, &, if I can, I shall come back in a dream to tell you.