I like your judgments on Florence and works of art much; and I would greatly like, if you will be so good to your moujik, that you should study Rome, so that when I come I may not stop to look at bagatelles, but see in my eight days all that there is of really fine, and good, and masterly, which goes to the soul. Do not say "Montriveau" to me again. Remember that I have the life of the heart and the life of the brain; that I live more by sentiments than by the caprices of the mind; that I would rather feel than express ideas; and that neither way does wrong to the other. One needs a little intellect to love.
I write you as it comes, without premeditation; for I must tell you that I am in the midst of "Les Chouans," which I am printing with extreme rapidity, _causa metalli_, to put an end to some debts. But no matter! my scribbling will surely tell you that a loving thought follows you wherever you go, and that there is at a fireside near the Observatoire a poet who takes interest in your steps, is troubled by your cough, and made uneasy by Monsieur Hanski's illness. I was already uneasy enough at receiving no letters from you. I belong to you like a moujik, and if M. Hanski gives wheat to his, you owe to me, moujik of Paulowska, a few straws of affection, here and there. You might have written to me _three times_ since Turin.
I will tell you nothing of my combats; I am occupied solely by my work and by a life which is also a work for me; not a poem, madame, but all that there is of good and beautiful upon this earth. Thus, everything here, politics, men, and things, seem to me very paltry beside what I feel in heart and brain.
I am every day more grieved to have been forced to abandon "Séraphita;" but in Rome it shall be the work of my choice. It belongs to you and it ought to be done beneath your eyes.
_Mon Dieu!_ if you are better, tell me so quickly. Throw into the post these words only: "I am," or "We are better." It is so good to see the writing, the painting, of a thought escaped from the heart of a friend! You don't know how, in the evening, when I am very weary, my castle in the air, my novel, my own, is Diodati; but a Diodati without the deceptions of your novels; a Diodati without bitterness in its dénouement. Of us two, am I indeed the younger and the one most full of illusions? There are days when I say _tiyeuilles_, laughing like a child, and those who take me for a grave man would be stupefied. Come, don't knock down my dreams, my castles. Let me believe in a cloudless sky. Since I exist I have lived by unalterable beliefs only, and you are one of those beliefs. Don't cough and look dark; may the troubles of _spleen_ never come either to you or to M. Hanski, to whom my letter is half addressed; take it only as a talk full of affection.