Touraine
appears to me like a _pate de foie gras_, in which one plunges up to
the chin; and its wine is delicious. Instead of intoxicating, it makes
you piggy and happy. . . . Just fancy, I have been on the most poetic
trip possible in France--from here to the heart of Brittany by water,
passing between the most ravishing scenery in the world. I felt my
thoughts go with the stream, which, near the sea, becomes immense. Oh,
to lead the life of a Mohican, to run about the rocks, to swim in the
sea, to breathe in the fresh air and sun! Oh, I have realized the
savage! Oh, I have excellently understood the corsair, the adventurer
--their lives of opposition; and I reflected: 'Life is courage, good
rifles, the art of steering in the open ocean, and the hatred of man
--of the Englishman, for example.' (Here Balzac is of his time.) Coming
back hither, the ex-corsair has turned dealer in ideas. Just imagine,
now, a man so vagabond beginning on an article entitled, _Treatise of
Fashionable Life_, and making an octavo volume of it, which the _Mode_
is going to print, and some publisher reprint. . . . Egad! At the
present moment literature is a vile trade. It leads to nothing, and I
itch to go a-wandering and risk my existence in some living
drama.
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