I was very short-sighted in soliciting this letter, in which you have begun to unfold the elegant fabric of your thoughts. A man can easily become enamored with a mysterious unknown who combines such fearlessness with such originality, so much imagination with so much feeling. Who would not wish to know you after reading your first confidence? It requires a strong effort on my part to retain my senses in thinking of you, for you combine all that can trouble the head or the heart of man. I therefore make the most of the little self-possession you have left me to offer you my humble remonstrances.
Do you really believe, mademoiselle, that letters, more or less true in relation to the life of the writers, more or less insincere,--for those which we write to each other are the expressions of the moment at which we pen them, and not of the general tenor of our lives,--do you believe, I say, that beautiful as they may be, they can at all replace the representation that we could make of ourselves to each other by the revelations of daily intercourse? Man is dual. There is a life invisible, that of the heart, to which letters may suffice; and there is a life material, to which more importance is, alas, attached than you are aware of at your age. These two existences must, however, be made to harmonize in the ideal which you cherish; and this, I may remark in passing, is very rare.
The pure, spontaneous, disinterested homage of a solitary soul which is both educated and chaste, is one of those celestial flowers whose color and fragrance console for every grief, for every wound, for every betrayal which makes up the life of a literary man; and I thank you with an impulse equal to your own.
But after this poetical exchange of my griefs for the pearls of your charity, what next? what do you expect? I have neither the genius nor the splendid position of Lord Byron; above all, I have not the halo of his fictitious damnation and his false social woes. But what could you have hoped from him in like circumstances? His friendship? Well, he who ought to have felt only pride was eaten up by vanity of every kind,--sickly, irritable vanity which discouraged friendship. I, a thousand-fold more insignificant than he, may I not have discordances of character, and make friendship a burden heavy indeed to bear? In exchange for your reveries, what will you gain? The dissatisfaction of a life which will not be wholly yours. The compact is madness. Let me tell you why. In the first place, your projected poem is a plagiarism. A young German girl, who was not, like you, semi-German, but altogether so, adored Goethe with the rash intoxication of girlhood. She made him her friend, her religion, her god, knowing at the same time that he was married.
Madame Goethe, a worthy German woman, lent herself to this worship with a sly good-nature which did not cure Bettina. But what was the end of it all? The young ecstatic married a man who was younger and handsomer than Goethe. Now, between ourselves, let us admit that a young girl who should make herself the handmaid of a man of genius, his equal through comprehension, and should piously worship him till death, like one of those divine figures sketched by the masters on the shutters of their mystic shrines, and who, when Germany lost him, should have retired to some solitude away from men, like the friend of Lord Bolingbroke,--let us admit, I
say, that the young girl would have lived forever, inlaid in the glory of the poet as Mary Magdalene in the cross and triumph of our Lord. If that is sublime, what say you to the reverse of the picture? As I am neither Goethe nor Lord Byron, the colossi of poetry and egotism, but simply the author of a few esteemed verses, I cannot expect the honors of a cult. Neither am I
disposed to be a martyr. I have ambition, and I have a heart; I am still young and I have my career to make. See me for what I am.
The bounty of the king and the protection of his ministers give me sufficient means of living. I have the outward bearing of a very ordinary man. I go to the soirees in Paris like any other empty-
headed fop; and if I drive, the wheels of my carriage do not roll on the solid ground, absolutely indispensable in these days, of property invested in the funds. But if I am not rich, neither do I
have the reliefs and consolations of life in a garret, the toil uncomprehended, the fame in penury, which belong to men who are worth far more than I,--D'Arthez, for instance.
Ah! what prosaic conclusions will your young enthusiasm find to these enchanting visions. Let us stop here. If I have had the happiness of seeming to you a terrestrial paragon, you have been to me a thing of light and a beacon, like those stars that shine for a moment and disappear. May nothing ever tarnish this episode of our lives. Were we to continue it I might love you; I might conceive one of those mad passions which rend all obstacles, which light fires in the heart whose violence is greater than their duration. And suppose I succeeded in pleasing you? we should end our tale in the common vulgar way,--marriage, a household, children, Belise and Henriette Chrysale together!--could it be?
Therefore, adieu.
