Adieu, madame; I place all my obeisances at your feet.
Thursday, Friday, and yesterday it was impossible for me to write to you. The case does not start till to-morrow, Monday, so that you will hardly get it before Thursday or Friday. Tell me what you think of Anna's cross. We have been governed by the pebbles, which prevent anything pretty being made of them. The _cotignac_ made everybody send me to the deuce. They wrote me from Orléans that I must wait till the fresh was made, which was better than the old, and that I should have it in four or five days. So, not wishing it to fail you as announced, I rushed to all the dealers in eatables, who one and all told me they never sold two boxes of that marmalade a year, and so had given up keeping it. But at Corcelet's I found a last box; he told me there was no one but him in Paris who kept that _article_, and that he would have some fresh _cotignac_ soon. I took the box; and you will not have the fresh till my arrival, _cara_.
As for Rossini, I want him to write me a nice letter, and he has just invited me to dine with his mistress, who happens to be that beautiful Judith, the former mistress of Horace Vernet and of Eugène Sue, you know. He has promised me a note about music, etc. He is very obliging; we have chased each other for two days. No one has an idea with what tenacity one must will a thing in Paris to have it. The smaller a thing is, the less one obtains it.
I have now obtained an excellent concession from Gosselin. I shall not do the "Privilège" at Geneva. I shall do two volumes of the "Contes Philosophiques" there, which will not oblige me to make researches; and this leaves me free to go and come without the dreadful paraphernalia of a library. I am afraid I cannot leave here before the 20th, my poor angel. Money is a terrible thing! I must pay four thousand francs indemnities to get peace; and here I am forced to begin all over again to raise money on publishers' notes, and I have ten thousand francs to pay the last of December, besides three thousand to my mother. It is enough to make one lose one's head. And when I think that to compose, to work, one needs great calmness, to forget all!
If I have started on the 25th I shall be lucky. Of one hundred _feuilles_ wanted to-day, Sunday, I have only eight of one volume and four of another printed, eleven set up of one and five of the other. I am expecting the _fabricators_ this morning to inform them of my ultimatum. Why! in sixteen hours of work--and what work?--I do in one hour what the cleverest workmen in a printing-office cannot do in a day. I shall never succeed!