CLXVI. TO GEORGE SAND Sunday, 26 June, 1870

You forget your troubadour who has just buried another friend! From the seven that we used to be at the beginning of the dinners at Magny’s, we are only three now! I am gorged with coffins like an old cemetery! I am having enough of them, frankly.

And in the midst of all that I keep on working! I finished yesterday, such as it is, the article on my poor Bouilhet. I am going to see if there is not some way of reviving one of his comedies in prose. After that I shall set to work on Saint-Antoine.

And you, dear master, what is happening to you and all your family? My niece is in the Pyrenees, and I am living alone with my mother, who is becoming deafer and deafer, so that my existence lacks diversion absolutely. I should like to go to sleep on a warm beach. But for that I lack time and money. So I must push on my scratches and grub as hard as possible.

I shall go to Paris at the beginning of August. Then I shall spend all the month of October there for the rehearsals of Aisse. My vacation will be confined to a week spent in Dieppe towards the end of August. There are my plans.

It was distressing, the funeral of Jules Goncourt. Theo wept buckets full.