Avallon, August 14, 1843.
I expected to be in Lyons the 10th, and am not within sixty leagues of that place. I shall not have any news from you until I reach Autun. If you want to be kind you will write to me again at Lyons.
VÉzelay pleases me more and more. The view from there is superb, and besides it is sometimes a pleasure to be alone. As a usual thing I find myself rather dreary company, but when I am depressed, with no good reason for being so, and when this depression has in it no vestige of anger, it is then that I enjoy complete solitude. This was my mood during the last few days of my stay at VÉzelay. I took long walks, or lay down on the edge of a natural terrace, which a poet might well call a precipice, and there I philosophised on the Ego, and on Providence, on the hypothesis that there be a Providence. I thought of you also, which was more agreeable than thinking of myself. But even the thought of you was not the most cheerful, because no sooner did it come to me than it occurred to my mind how happy I should be to see you here in this obscure corner of the world. And then—and then, it all ended with this other disheartening thought, that you were far, far away, that it was not easy to see you, and not even certain that you would care to see me.
My presence at VÉzelay greatly mystified the population. Whenever I sketched, especially in a well-lighted room, large groups of people would assemble around me, and every one had some conjecture as to my occupation. This distinction proved a great bore, and I should like to have had a janissary beside me to keep back the curious. Here I have become once more one of the multitude. I came to visit an old uncle whom I scarcely knew, and with whom I am obliged to stay two days. To entertain me, he has taken me to see several mutilated heads found in the excavations made nearby. I am not fond of relatives. You are compelled to be on familiar terms with people you have never seen, simply because they happen to be descended from the same grandfather that you have. My uncle, however, is a most worthy man, not especially provincial, and if we had two ideas in common I might even find him agreeable.
The women here are as homely as the women in Paris; and they have, moreover, ankles big as stumps. At Nevers the women had extremely pretty eyes. They wear no national costumes. Besides our moral perfections, we have the advantage of being the most stunted and the ugliest people of Europe.
I send you an owl’s feather which I found in a gap of the Abbot’s Church of the Madeleine at VÉzelay. The former owner of the feather and I found ourselves for a moment face to face, each one equally startled by our unexpected encounter. The owl was less brave than I, and flew away. She had a formidable beak, and eyes that were terrifying, besides two feathers shaped like horns. I am sending this feather to you that you may admire its softness, and also because I have read somewhere in a book of magic that when one gives a woman an owl’s feather, and she places it under her pillow, she dreams of him. Will you tell me your dream? Good-bye.
