I have had another grief. A little Savoyard, whom T call Anchises [Grain-de-mil], who was zeal, discretion, honesty, intelligence personified,--my little groom, to whom I was singularly attached,--died at the Hôtel-Dieu on the twenty-first day after an operation performed by M. Roux, Dupuytren's successor, and done with great success,--the removal of a large tumour on the knee. The-putrid reaction of so large a wound set in violently. I am grieved. He decided on the operation, which became necessary in my absence, in order that I might find him cured and relieved of an infirmity which would in the end have carried him off. Poor child! all those who knew him regret him; he pleased every one.
After a few more words to you I must go and put myself to finishing "l'Enfant Maudit." I am in a suitable frame of mind to do that work of melancholy. Now that I have returned to my life of eighteen hours' daily toil I shall write you a species of journal every day, and send you the whole weekly. This is written Sunday, June 28, twenty-four days after leaving you, and fifteen days since I last wrote to you. But these fifteen days have been fatally full of griefs, occupations, and difficulties of all sorts; such things cannot be told. It would need volumes to explain what is done and thought in an hour. You have it in bulk. Werdet has been to London to see about our counterfeits and translations.
It was midnight when I finished. I said adieu to you in my heart and went to bed. I should like to change something in my way of life. I should like to get up at four in the morning, and go to bed at nine in the evening. I would then sleep seven hours and work fifteen. It is difficult to change, for my hours are so inverted.
Here Auguste comes in and tells me that all the arrangements I had made for my payments to-morrow, 30th, are overturned by a discounter who sends me back, not accepting it, a note of Spachmann's for one thousand francs. So I must dress and rush out. Conceive of such a life! I was about to begin, in peace, a work of melancholy, and here's a bombshell fallen into my study! But it is not a despatch I have to write, and I can't say, like Charles XII., "What has a bombshell to do with L'Enfant Maudit?" Adieu, for to-day.