Translations:CP 03988/76/en

I have only just received your letter and I am much obliged. I see that mine was the result of an error. I thought you were the director of the Débats, or editor-in-chief and so I thought you could have had an article written. But never, even when I thought that was the case, did it enter my mind to ask you to exert your influence over M. de Pierrefeu, in one way or another. I have too much respect for freedom of thought for that, and if you had the power to do so, I would have been sorry had you used it. Simply put, my concern was that you commissioned the article from someone hostile rather than favourable, especially after the misunderstandings in the press arising from an illness that prevented me from receiving journalists, my publishers not receiving them well, which upset them, and the absurd idea that it was a "political" cost complicated everything. Naturally, I haven’t corrected anything that concerns my age, my financial situation, or political opinions, etc. Alas, you are no more the literary critic of the Débats than its director. But your sympathy is more precious to me than the articles you would have written about me in the first case, or in the second case, to have had written about me. To put all this to rest, if you were to get the chance to speak to M. de Pierrefeu, you could tell him that the last chapter of my novel, having been written before the first, and all the writing having been done and dusted, he won’t have to wait for my death as he suggests to see À la Recherche du Temps Perdu finished (I recognise that this loathsome title may betray the strict structure of the book). Its composition is so rigid that M. Francis Jammes, having urged me to remove from Du Côté de chez Swann a scene that shocked him, I was on the verge of giving in to his request, this scene being in fact irrelevant to the first volume. But I realised that if I removed it, the third and fourth volumes would be destroyed since it’s the recollection of this scene which, in inspiring the jealousy of the narrator, (he who says “I” and who is not necessarily me) brought on what one would call in the the theatre, “peripeteia”. I refuse, then, Les Débats not having mentioned la Vie Heureuse, any rectification. I will send you my article on Flaubert once it’s published, not so that you can talk about it, since you don’t have the position at Les Débats that I thought you had, but so, in case you’re kind enough to read it, you see that I pay more attention to matters of grammar than has been suggested. Besides, what artist has not been told that he could not draw? What musician has not been told that he could not harmonise?