Alfred de MUSSET (1810-1857). L.A. with drawing,...

Alfred de MUSSET (1810-1857). L.A. with drawing, Monday [25 November 1842, to Caroline Jaubert]; 7 pages in-8.
Long letter to his "godmother" about his love affairs, with a caricature of Pauline and Louis Viardot.
"I must love you terribly to forgive you for guessing me & for coming to tell me exactly what I think. You must at least agree that we are sometimes better than you, for I have never seen or heard that a woman has forgiven in such a case, much less surrendered - and I forgive and surrender. See how good a Prince I am; and you dare to call me a grumpy Prince!
I confess, then, that the real intention of doing the tale I told you about did not exist in my mind, and even that it is impossible. The thing is perhaps feasible otherwise by taking it in jest, without too marked details, & by turning the thing in a favorable way. That will be for another time. In any case, it is a bit strong that a person of your size does not want to be afraid when a gentleman of my stature is angry. Per Bacco! I put my rifle in aim, & a warbler starts laughing at me! I forgive you, but you will pay for it.
As for my verses [Sur une morte, published in the Revue des Deux Mondes of October 1, 1842], I don't know whether I should regret them or not. It is, as you said, only a portrait of circumstance. Nobody here recognized it. Some thought they saw, as always, poor Mrs. Sd [Sand]. I ask you a little about what now? And isn't it Bonnaire [...] who tells me that my verses should be written, do you know where? - on Rachel's tomb. - But," I said, "you think I've been thinking about her. - I don't say that," he answered with the air of a Misanthrope, "but after all... - The good public is very mean but I believe it to be even more stupid, I replied with gentleness and modesty"...
Then he challenges the comparison made by Mrs. Jaubert: "Lady Byron had her husband's secretary broken and had an inquiry made to have him locked up as a madman. Mary Chaworth said an insult to him about his lame foot, it is true, a rather ignoble thing, and treated him gently enough. But Marie Chaworth loved another. It's all there. In the days of my most enraged passions, I never thought of resenting a woman who told me she loved another. I can even boast in such cases that I have shown courage and resignation. This is not a great glory, it is my way of feeling. As for a woman who would have simply told me that she didn't love me at all, I would have said nothing at all, but I didn't expose myself to it.
But I have letters from Uranie [Princess Belgiojoso] in which she says to me: "I thought my friendship could be good for you" [...] I held her hand and kissed it for a whole minute and she let me. I repeated to her a hundred times that I was not looking for a good fortune with her, that my self-esteem had nothing to do with it, that I only asked her for a word of friendship to be happy for a whole day. She believed it and she saw it, and she kept me at her place for eight days, affecting at every moment to avoid the occasion to speak to me, treating me like a stranger. She could have had only three reasons for this; either she was defying herself, and I don't believe it; or she made me suffer for pleasure, knowing that she ran no risk in making me quiet; or she was acting coldly with pride and indifference, which I believe. Now this is wicked and hateful. I have more than fifteen letters from her in which she talks to me about friendship. Does friendship consist in giving one's arm to go to the table? What a joke! [...] she lured me to her out of idleness to amuse herself with me and to make me play the role of a patito, pure and simple. You know how it is. I didn't want to, and so she mistreated me. As for me, I really believed in this false pretence of friendship which was only a comedy, a pure pass-tems and which stopped as soon as she saw me come back and give in. That's what hurt me. She had no right, first of all, to treat me that way, and secondly, she was wrong about me in a hurtful way in trying to do so. This is the truth, and I will only forget it with sorrow, to keep in any case a nasty impression"...
After this "long explanation", he justifies himself: "I am still horribly bored, in spite of everything, and I have to chatter when I feel that I am talking to whoever can and will hear me"...
He does not know if he will be able to hear Pauline [Viardot]. He asked for a stall... " That dear Pauline! I don't love her at all anymore, but at all, at all, at all, as Sister Marceline used to say"... Follows a pen drawing of a dressing room marked "bathtub at home", in which Louis Viardot is standing with his long nose, and Pauline Viardot with