Letter from Saint Petersburg

Monsieur le Chevalier,

I am writing to you after fourteen months in which I have stopped all correspondence. Meanwhile the Neva, which flows in front of me, seems to have swept me even farther away. Behind the taffeta curtains I catch the scent of Kamchatka.

My fury and intransigence—as you well know—coexist always with a native cheer that, beneath the yoke of vain and constant sorrow, is now almost gone. In the evening I am taken by carriage, almost by force, to those same women who used to charm me—and I feel my head overburdened, tired, flattened beneath the enormous weight of nothingness. I now talk almost entirely to myself, even though such incivility repels me. But I have to do something: so I close myself up and read, with a rapture that makes me shudder, often into the night, when I surprise myself by railing aloud at beings now dead and yet horridly alive. And this lugubrious practice emerges in my spirit, interferes with all my thoughts and turns them into venom. The most recent of my pleasures, several months ago, was to visit the remains of a mammoth found inside a block of ice, at the mouth of the Lena. Although white bears had partially devoured it, I was able to cherish this indisputable witness of the Flood, this promise of the Fire that pains us and moves us to pity in our anticipation. The ear was still covered with fur. I held my nose close to that flesh five or six times. Never has the most sensual of men inhaled the most exquisite Eastern scent with the sweet pleasure that I felt from the fetid odor of putrefied antediluvian flesh. Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus—What has been believed always, everywhere, by all: in front of that carcass I still sensed the sweet dogma gently resonating, which is the emerald spindle around which my every feeling is spun. Then I went back to talking with the cupboards. In front of the ineffable ridiculousness of modern philosophy, I feel my convictions are like that mammoth intact in its mountain of ice. Like him I let myself be torn apart by the white bears of my solitary days. Tell me just this, mon Chevalier: what is the talk, now, in Paris?

Your

Senator from St. Petersburg

Sainte-Beuve: how the bon mot became the fin mot, and the fin mot proved to be so bitter that, out of decency, people generally avoided saying it and confused it with too many other mots. Otherwise the laborious march of life might draw to a halt in desperate paralysis: “There has to be some degree of illusion in the progress of life: when you are too familiar with the fin mot, nature removes you from the stage, for the drama would be prevented from going ahead.”⁷⁵⁴

“Start off every so often with some thoughts, to get them passed: ‘We read in Lichtenberg, in Meister, or in Mencius.’ ”⁷⁵⁵ Sainte-Beuve’s concern to “get them passed,” introducing into his articles those thoughts, those tiny phrases that are his own, but without attributing them to himself, so as not to make them too apparent.