Alphonse de LAMARTINE. L.A.S., March 1829, [to Victor Hugo]; 4 pages in-8. Very beautiful letter to Victor Hugo, on poetry and politics. He has not received his last volumes [Les Orientales, and the reprint of the Odes et Ballades], and asks Hugo to send them to him: "I am starving for them. I thank you for your poetic consolations. I need it; I am too discouraged to print anything for a long time. I have only mediocre material to offer; and if green wood is treated so badly, what will it be of dry wood? I write very little and almost nothing for the present time. If I live I will leave a poem after me; the ridiculous will respect the stone of a tomb, it would wither my white hair. But it is very doubtful that I will live enough to finish it. I need 15 years! In the meantime it is possible, as you say, that we become deputies: too bad for us, too good for our constituents. I believe that we think well. We want order and we value freedom, we respect what is respectable from the past, we hope for what is desirable from the future. We know above all that Politics is an experimental science where the principles are judged well only by the consequences, with that we will be you and me on the same benches, friends of the relligion of conscience and not of the relligion of police, of the Monarchy of reason and not of the monarchy of prejudices, of the freedom of Plato and not of the freedom of Marius. But who knows if they will send you and me there? There is such an imperial chamberlain, daubed with conventional phrases and flattering the rabble at the expense of common sense, who will often have better chances than we do. Don't rely so much on the election. It is often blind. Look at the academies. Are you fighting the critics? Do you mean that the critics are fighting against you? They will soon, like Mr. Arnault, present a brief to the King to defend any verse or idea that cannot enter the head of Mrs. Campenon or Parseval. At this point where will we be? Never mind all this noise. It is the foam of the wave that you crack as you go along. But what matters is to listen to your real friends, those you value yourself. If they tell you that you are going too fast, that you are going the wrong way, that contradiction irritates you, that paradox tempts you, then listen to them. I will write you my sincere opinion when I have read it. You are one of the few minds worthy of the truth because they can use it. To the others indulgence or complacent flattery is necessary, it cannot harm them and it consoles them. Farewell my dear friend. Rest. Travel. Leave Paris. Come to see us with all the family in July near Dijon. We will philosophize, politicize, poetize at our ease"...