Status Updates From Selected Letters

Can't find the NYRB edition so starting with this instead. Enjoyable so far.

To Ivan Turgenev
Your last letter deeply touched me, dear Turgenev. Thank you for your exhortations. But alas! my sickness is incurable, I fear. Aside from my personal sorrows I am crushed by the condition of society. Yes, it is so. It may be stupid, but it is a fact. I am drowning in the general stupidity. Since 1870 I have become a patriot. As I watch my country die, I realize that I have loved it.

To Victor Hugo
All my life, Monsieur, you have been a charming obsession, a long love that had never weakened. I have read you during sinister wakes on the beaches beside the sea in the summer sun. I carried you with me to Palestine, and it was you who consoled me, ten years ago, when I was dying of ennui in the Latin Quarter. Your poetry became a part of me like my nurse's milk.

To Louise Colet
Come, come, my little mouse; stop being hurt because I speak of Shakespeare instead of about myself. It's just that he seems to me more interesting. And what should one speak about I ask if not about what exclusively preoccupies one's mind? I don't know any delight to compare
with that given me by some of the illustrious dead whose works I have read or seen.

To Louise Colet
Twelve hours ago we were still together, and at this very moment yesterday I was holding you in my arms! Do you remember? How long ago it seems! Now the night is soft and warm; I can hear the great tulip tree under my window rustling in the wind, and when I lift my eyes I see the reflection of the moon in the river. Your little slippers are in front of me as I write; I keep looking at them.

Such an ornery curmudgeon even at the tender age of 11.