Cannes, January 3, 1867.

I received your letter with great remorse. For a long time I have wanted to write to you, but, in the first place, an uncertainty as to your abode is a great vexation. You are always on the wing, and no one knows where to catch you. In the second place, you have never replied to a long letter, written with great care, which I sent to you. Moreover, you can not imagine how the time passes in a place like this, where it never rains, and where the principal thing to do is to warm one’s self in the sun, or to paint trees and rocks.

I brought with me books for work, but as yet I have done nothing but read and take notes from a history of Peter the Great, about which I should like some day to write an article for the Journal des Savants. The great man was a downright savage, who used to get horribly tipsy, and committed an error against good taste, concerning which I found you very severe when you used to study Greek literature. For all that, he was without question a man in advance of his age. I should like to say all this some day to persons as full of prejudice as yourself.

As for the story about which I told you, I have said that I would read it to you when I have the pleasure of seeing you once more. I am not thinking of having it published. As there is in this work nothing favourable to the temporal power of the Pope, I suspect that it might not meet with a cordial reception. Are you not touched and humiliated by the profound stupidity of the present time? Everything that is said both for and against the temporal power is so silly and absurd, that I blush for my century....

Another thing that enrages me is the manner in which the proposition for the reorganization of the army has been received. All well-born young persons are dying of terror at the thought of being called upon at a moment’s notice to fight for their country, and say that these vulgar occupations should be left to the Prussians. Try to imagine what will remain of the French nation if she should come to lose her military courage!

I am reading the novel of my friend Madame de Boigne.[36] It is pitiful. She is a woman of much intelligence, who lays bare her own defects, and criticises them with excessive bitterness, but who still persists in them. She passed more than thirty years without saying a word to me of this novel, and in her will she ordered its publication. It was as great a surprise to me as if I had learned that you had just published a treatise on geometry.

Although the subject is not an agreeable one, I must tell you something of my health. I am becoming more and more short-breathed. Sometimes I feel as robust as a Turk. I take long walks, and it seems to me that I am as well as when we used to tramp through our woods together. The sun goes down, my chest becomes inflated, I suffocate and the slightest exertion is very painful. The singular thing is, that I am no worse. I am even better in a horizontal position than when standing or sitting.

Good-bye, dear friend. I wish you health and prosperity.