Gustave FLAUBERT (1821-1880). L.A.S. "G.", [Croisset] Sunday evening [January 15, 1854], to Louise Colet; 5 1/2 pages in-8. Beautiful letter on style and literature, in which Flaubert mocks Musset. He is "very pained", and apologizes for his judgment of Louise's poem La Servante, which she found "acerbic and insulting. My intention was quite different. It's true (as you write) that I was, in this work, irritated. He had irritated my nerves considerably", working "under the microscope. - What revolted me was to see so many of heaven's gifts wasted by such a moral bias". He is not "insensitive to the misfortunes of the poorer classes etc.". But there are no good intentions in literature: style is everything. And I complain that in La Servante you didn't express your ideas with facts or pictures. Above all, in a narrative, you have to be dramatic, always painting or moving, and never declaiming. But the poet in this poem declaims too often. This is my biggest criticism. I attach to it the non-gradation of the characters"... He then returns to a few "criticisms of details"... Then he talks about Alfred de Musset [one of Louise Colet's lovers]: "I have not at all forgotten Musset's conduct, and my feelings for him are far from benevolent. I only wanted to say that the punishment exceeded the outrage. It is certain that in his place I would rather receive a blow in the street than such verses at my address". Louise, "poor dear Muse", didn't take kindly to what Flaubert told her about Alphonse Karr [whom Louise had stabbed]: "Do you suppose me so boorish as to remind you of these things with hurtful intent? No! If you had always had advisers as practical and bourgeois as myself, and if you had listened to them, there are many things that happen to you that wouldn't happen to you? [...] You're always ridiculous when the laughers are against you. That's what I was hearing, and the laughers are always on the side of the strong, of fashion, of received ideas and so on. - To live in peace, you have to be on the side of neither those you laugh at nor those who laugh at you. Let's stay on the side - on the outside - but to do so, we must renounce action". And he quotes Epictetus and La Rochefoucauld... "By following these ideas, we are firm in Life and in art. Don't you feel that everything dissolves, now, through slackness, through the damp element, through tears, through chatter, through milking. Contemporary literature is drowned in women's rules. We all need to take iron to get us through the Gothic chloroses that Rousseau, Chateaubriand & Lamartine have passed on to us. This explains the success of Badinguet [Napoleon III]. He summed himself up. He did not waste his strength in small actions divergent from his goal. He was like a cannonball, heavy and rolled into a ball. Then it suddenly burst & we shook. - If Father H. [Hugo] had imitated him, he could have done in poetry what the other had done in politics, a most original thing. But no, he got carried away in shouting matches. Passion loses us all"... He brings back Hugo's letters and those of Musset, and sends back Béranger's bill and Vigny's verses... "This morning you sent me a beautiful thought: 'O humanity, how you disgust me! I see you're making progress in philosophy. I can only applaud you for it"... Correspondance (Pléiade), t.II, p.507.