Excerpt: ... Aside from you and Tourgueneff, I don't know a living being to whom to pour out my soul about those things which I have most at heart; and you live far away from me, both of you However, I continue to write. I have resolved to start at my Saint- Antoine tomorrow or the day after. But to begin a protracted effort I need a certain lightness which I lack just now. I hope, however, that this extravagant work is going to get hold of me. Oh how I would like not to think any more of my poor Moi, of my miserable carcass It is getting on very well, my carcass. I sleep tremendously "The coffer is good," as the bourgeois say. I have read lately some amazing theological things, which I have intermingled with a little of Plutarch and Spinoza. I have nothing more to say to you. Poor Edmond de Goncourt is in Champagne at his relatives'. He has promised to come here the end of this month. I don't think that the hope of seeing his brother again in a better world consoles him for having lost him in this one. One juggles with empty words on this question of immortality, for the question is to know if the moi persists. The affirmative seems to me a presumption of our pride, a protest of our weakness against the eternal order. Has death perhaps no more secrets to reveal to us than life has? What a year of evil I feel as if I were lost in the desert, and I assure you, dear master, that I am brave, however, and that I am making prodigious efforts to be stoical. But my poor brain is enfeebled at moments. I need only one thing (and that is not given me), it is to have some kind of enthusiasm Your last letter but one was very sad. You also, heroic being, you feel worn out What then will become of us I have just reread the conversations between Goethe and Eckermann. There was a man, that Goethe But then he had everything on his side, that man. CLXIX. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at Croissset Nohant, 29 June, 1870 Our letters are always crossing, and I have now the feeling...