Your letter grieves me, for you make me responsible for Liszt's letter. _Mon Dieu!_ how is it that with such a splendid forehead you can think little things. I do not understand why, knowing my aversion for George Sand, you make me out her friend.
You have not given me your address at Ischl. I send this to Sina. Pray let me know how long you stay there, that I may send you a package of books. "Louis Lambert" is finished. I have also finished a volume for Madame Bêchet, and in eight days more I shall have only two to finish. Werdet will also get his two Parts of the "Études Philosophiques" within twenty days. I go on by the grace of God; when I fall--well, I shall have fallen; but one must fight and grow greater.
You tell me to write to the Countess Loulou.[1] But how can I? Explain to her yourself my involuntary tardiness. I can't attend to my own affairs, I do not go out, I only write pages. In all conscience, I cannot seek for the impossible. No one here would accept the small salary the prince offers and _three hundred_ francs for the journey! A reader who _knows how to read_ is not an ordinary man, and yet the prince denies him a seat at his table. A man of intelligence can earn more here than three hundred francs a month by literature, and to read _well_ is literature. I do not undertake the impossible. Every one, even those who die of hunger, laugh in my face. Leave Paris for Vienna for such pay as that! They had rather die of hunger in Paris, with hopes, than live without cares elsewhere. I will write to the princess and to the countess when I can, but I must provide for the defence of all points attacked, and I am firing from the three batteries of the Revues and my "Études."
Tell the countess that the novel by Madame de Girardin, "The Marquis de Pontanges," is worth reading. It is the only one in six months.
Adieu; I will write when I have done something, and obtained results which will put your soul at rest about my works and my vigils. These strivings of a man with his thought, ink, and paper, have nothing very poetic about them. It is silence; it is obscurity. Lassitude, efforts, tension, headaches, weariness, all go on between the four walls of that rose-and-white boudoir which you know by its description in the "Fille aux yeux d'or." And I have nothing to console me but that distant affection,--which is angry with me at Ischl for a few words written foolishly while I was in Vienna,--and the prospect of going to seek harshness at Wierzchownia, when I shall be, in six or seven months, dying as a result of my efforts! I ought to say, like some general, I don't know who, "A few more such victories and we are beaten."