[October 1914?]
Madame,
It is always a very great pleasure for me to receive a letter from you. The latest was particularly sweet for me in these terrible times in which one trembles for all those one loves, and I do not mean by that only those one knows. It is however permitted without being too selfish to have exceptional worries, and the fate of my brother who is operating in the line of fire, has had his hospital bombed, the shells falling even on the operating table so that he has been obliged to take his wounded down into the cellars, is particularly close to my heart. Happily he has been completely safe up to now and has been mentioned in the army’s ordre du jour.11 I hope that you too have good news of your family. As for me I will imminently be going before the military service review board. I don’t know if I will be taken or not. I had wanted to write you last summer to hear your news. But even well before the War I was overwhelmed with worries. First, I was more or less completely ruined, which I found extremely painful. But shortly afterward my poor secretary was drowned by falling from an airplane into the sea.12 And the immense sorrow I felt, and that still endures, has prevented me from thinking about material troubles, very small next to an emotional trial. You knew him perhaps by sight because he lived in my home with his wife. But what you could not know is the superior intelligence which was to his, and extremely spontaneous since he had had no schooling, having been until then a simple mechanic. Never did I better understand the profoundness of the saying “The Spirit bloweth where it listeth.”13 The part of your letter in which you spoke of Clary is not that part which gave me the least pleasure, pleasure mingled with pain since you tell me he is still unwell.14 He is a truly rare person, I have a very profound affection for him; I think he does not believe it because for reasons which involve on my part more delicacy than he supposes, I have not expressed it to him. But there is no one whose company I have found sweeter. I never see him and I think constantly of him. I do not know if he has received my book, I sent it to him when it appeared (this is not a reproach for the fact that he has not written to me, he is unwell and excused for everything). But I do not know if the address was correct. And my memory is so fatigued by my drugs that I cannot even manage to specify whether that book did not come back to me, or if it is a hallucination of memory. In any case what I am sure of, is that I sent it. Often I would like to write for very selfish reasons. [Word missing] to speak of his health. I’m afraid [of] failing to mention a regimen [. . .] that would perhaps very quickly restore [his] health. I have known people who [. . .] spoiled their lives, always prey [to] attacks of rheumatism until the day [when some] astonishingly simple prescriptions [. . .] rigorously observed relieved them and made them regret the time they had lost.15 I would like to know if before treating himself, Clary saw, even once, a great “diagnostician.” For example Doctor Faisans.16 I know Clary to be very withdrawn, very reserved, and it is this that has stopped me from speaking to him about that. But since you speak to me about his health, you will give me great pleasure if you tell him that it concerns me very much. I hope that your own is completely good Madame. The Doctor was good enough to leave his card one day at Cabourg. Would you have the extreme goodness to tell him that starting on that day I tried to go find him at Deauville Trouville. But automobiles could not go out after 6 o’clock. And I could not manage to leave early enough. One day I succeeded, but on that day it was impossible to find an automobile. If I had not had the plan to go see him postponed day after day, I would have written to him right [end of the letter is missing]