My mother and my brother give me other anxieties of so cruel and disastrous a kind that I do not speak to you of them, for they are not of a nature to be written. One must have much faith in the future to live thus,--to take up, every morning, one's heavy burden. My friends have all limited means, and cannot relieve my financial situation, which twenty-five thousand francs would render endurable, were they only lent to me for six months. I must still march on to the last moment in triple distresses,--those of my family, those of my work, those of my finances. I don't speak of calumnies or of the wretches who throw sticks between my legs when I run. That is nothing. That which would kill an artist I scarcely consider an annoyance.
I have of late been twenty-six hours in my study without leaving it. I get the air at that window which commands all Paris, which I will some day command.
I have received your last letter written from your desolate land. I reckon that by this time you have reached Wierzchownia, reviewed your wheat-fields, resumed your habits, and that you can surely write to me twice a month. Following your custom, you have given me your address very imperfectly, and that of the Chanoinesse with a perfection quite hieroglyphic. Write and tell her that for me it is as impossible to write to her as it would be to take the moon in my teeth. Society people, the rich, the idle, imagine nothing of the busy lives of artists and poor men. It is humorous to a degree. Especially do they believe in our ingratitude, our forgetfulness; they never view us as toiling night and day. To explain myself wholly, think of those seventeen volumes manufactured by me without help; compute that that makes three hundred _feuilles_ [4800 octavo pages], each read more than ten times, and that makes three thousand [48,000], besides the conception and the writing; and also that beyond the will to do I must have _du bonheur_ [the luck of inspiration].
So, whatever they tell you of me, laugh at it, and think of this, the proof of which exists. One of my bitterest literary enemies says of me: "Talent, genius, his incredible power of will, I can understand, I can believe it; _but where, and how, does he manufacture_ TIME?"