the caricatures of Monsieur Bixiou, of whose malicious
remarks on the subject you lately wrote me.

One thing reassures me: it does not seem likely that any one would
have sown two hundred and fifty thousand francs in my electoral furrow
without feeling pretty sure of gathering a harvest. Perhaps, to take
a cheerful view of the matter, this very slowness may be considered as
showing great confidence of success.

However that may be, I am kept by this long delay in a state of inaction
which weighs upon me. Astride as it were of two existences,--one in
which I have not set foot, the other in which my foot still lingers,--I
have no heart to undertake real work; I am like a traveller who, having
arrived before the hour when the diligence starts, does not know what to
do with his person nor how to spend his time. You will not complain,
I think, that I turn this enforced _far niente_ to the profit of our
correspondence; and now that I am thus at leisure, I shall take up
two points in your last letter which did not seem to me of sufficient
importance to pay much attention to at the time: I refer to your warning
that my parliamentary pretensions did not meet the approval of Monsieur
Bixiou; and to your suggestion that I might expose myself to falling in
love with Madame de l'Estorade--if I were not in love with her
already. Let us discuss, in the first instance, Monsieur Bixiou's grand
disapprobation--just as we used to talk in the olden time of the grand
treachery of Monsieur de Mirabeau.

I'll describe that man to you in a single word. Envy. In Monsieur Bixiou
there is, unquestionably, the makings of a great artist; but in the
economy of his existence the belly has annihilated the heart and the
head, and he is now and forever under the dominion of sensual appetites;
he is riveted to the condition of a _caricaturist_,--that is to say, to
the condition of a man who from day to day discounts himself in petty
products, regular galley-slave pot-boilers, which, to be sure, give him
a lively living, but in themselves are worthless and have no future.
With talents misused and now impotent, he has in his mind, as he has
on his face, that everlasting and despairing _grin_ which human thought
instinctively attributes to fallen angels. Just as the Spirit of
darkness attacks, in preference, great saints because they recall to him
most bitterly the angelic nature from which he has fallen, so Monsieur
Bixiou delights to slaver the talents