When will a new Christ come to purge our temple and drive out the money changers with a scourge! * * * * * I returned to my treadmill--journalism--once more, and oh! the horror of it! The misery of writing to order an article on nothing in particular--or on things that, as far as I was concerned, simply did not exist since they excited in me no feeling of any description whatsoever. Long ago I remember spending three days over a critique without being able to write one word. I cannot remember the subject but I well remember my torments. I strode up and down, my brain on fire; I gazed at the setting sun, the neighbouring gardens, the heights of Montmartre--my thoughts a thousand miles away. Then, as I turned and saw that confounded white paper without a line on it, I flew into the wildest rage. My unoffending guitar leant against the wall. I kicked it to bits; my pistols stared at me from the wall with big round eyes. I gazed back, then, tearing my hair, burst into burning tears. That soothed me somewhat, I turned those staring pistols face to the wall and picked up my poor guitar which gave forth a plaintive wail. Then my six-year-old boy, with whom I had unjustly found fault, tapped at the door. As I did not answer he cried: “Father, is you friends?” “Yes, yes, my boy, I is friends!” and I flew to let him in. I took him on my knee and laid his fair head on my shoulder; we dropped asleep together and my article was forgotten. Next morning I managed to write something. That is fifteen years ago and my martyrdom still lasts! It is not that I mind work. I can grind at rehearsals for hours at a time; can spend my nights in correcting proofs; can and will do anything and everything that pertains to my work as a musician. But to eternally pamphleteer for a living! It is cruel! _To_ HUMBERT FERRAND. “_3rd October 1844._--I read in the _Débats_ of your splendid agricultural success and can imagine how much work and perseverance it involves. You are a kind of Robinson Crusoe in your island,[20] and when the sun shines I long to be with you, to breathe the spicy air, to follow you from field to field, to listen with you to the sweet silence of your lonely groves--our affection is so sure, so whole-hearted, so perfect! “Yet when dull days come and mists rise, the fever of Paris seizes me once more and I feel that here only is life possible. But can you believe that a strange sort of torpid resignation with regard to things musical has taken possession of me? It is as well, for this indifference saves my strength for the time when a passionate struggle may become necessary.