GÉRICAULT Théodore (1791-1824). Lot n° 100

L.A., [August ? 1822, to Mme TROUILLARD]; 3 pages in-4. Struggle with his mistress, who is staying by the sea. "The dispatches have reached me at last, they are not all equally kind, but as I had supposed many inequalities in your mood this did not surprise me, it is the effect no doubt of your indisposition and as I am ill myself I know perfectly well how to sympathise with the jokes of others. I carefully avoid saying insults and I will urge you to do the same because sooner or later one feels regret, it is not only for myself that I promise to give you this advice, I had understood you well, but for others whom it might surprise [...]. If you hated me less I would still tell you some good and useful truths as a result of my ordinary benevolence, but I no longer feel the strength to do so since I am certain that, without being profitable to you, your ingenious mind would turn them against me. I can be wicked, I must even be wicked since you have guessed it, but what I have never done nor wanted to do is to desolate and humiliate without reason a person like you who has never done me any harm and of whom I have no reason to complain, and who, having sought me as something precious, has seen the illusion vanish too quickly. So I shall be eternally sorry that I could not realize the pleasant images you had composed of me. What is the meaning of all this, you will tell me, for I know you well, the poor dear angel is a monster, and he would have a bad grace to want to joke today, and yet what has he done? Declaring to my face that from this moment on everything is over for good, when all I asked for was a few days to regain my sanity and the calm of which you deprived me for a few poor days in the country and I came back fresher and more devoted, that is the great crime, for my letter smacked of disorder and resignation to misfortune"... And yet Cécile reproaches him for having called her perfidious: "It is a proof of the empire you have over people to make them see what you want [...] and I have proved enough, I think, to Cécile that her phisionomy was nothing but obliging and amiable and that... this is going to be misinterpreted again, really I can't say anything, proven enough! And how does one prove, well, I haven't proved anything, only that it is easy, by the welcome, by the air, by the manners, by the tone, by... well there are a thousand ways, to prove without... precisely... to prove do you know music? I would write down for you a grazzioso which would not be love and which would make you understand first of all that I have no love for anyone and the thought of ever feeling it makes me shiver... Can you imagine? Gods a passion! And when neither of us understands the other"...