Agree with me, and let us see the Museum once more together. If I bore you, that will be the end of it, and I shall not take you there again; if not, what prevents our meeting from time to time? Unless you give me some intelligible reason, I shall persist in believing that which seems to vex you so much. I should have written to you immediately, but I had mislaid your letter, which I wished to read again. I turned my desk topsy-turvy, and set it in order, which is no trifling matter. Finally, after burning several reams of old papers, which had seemed destined to collect dust on my desk, I concluded that your letter had vanished by some sort of witchcraft. I found it awhile ago in my Xenophon, where it had hidden itself, I don’t know how; and I have read it again with admiration. Assuredly you feel very little of that veneration of which you sometimes speak, else you would not say so many _sinrazones_; but I will forgive you, if you will let me see you soon, for you are much more agreeable when you talk to me than when you write. I am distressingly ill, and cough hard enough to rend rocks apart, yet I am going Monday evening to hear Mademoiselle Rachel recite from _Phèdre_ before five or six great men. She will believe that my cough is an intrigue against her. Write to me soon. I am horribly blue, and you would be doing an act of charity to say something kind, as you do occasionally. XXXIV _December, 1842._ It is some time since I have felt like writing to you. My nights are passed writing prose for posterity to read. This is because I have been dissatisfied both with you and with myself, which is most extraordinary. I find myself to-day in a more indulgent frame of mind. This evening I heard Madame Persiani, which has reconciled me with human nature. If I were King Saul I should put her in the place of David. I am told that M. de Pongerville, the Academician, is going to die. This grieves me, because I shall not take his place, and I should prefer that he wait until my time were come. This Pongerville made a metrical translation of a Latin poet named Lucretius, who died at the age of forty-three from the effect of a love-potion which he took to make himself beloved or lovable. But previous to this he had composed a long poem on _The Nature of Things_, a poem atheistic, impious, abominable, and so forth. M. de Pongerville’s health troubles me more than it should, and, besides, I shall be obliged to start out at ten o’clock day after to-morrow for the vexatious fatigues of New Year’s Day. Why is it a matter of course that everybody on this day should either go visiting or else feel it necessary to raise Cain? I have still other grievances, which would make you laugh, so I shall not tell them to you.