Alphonse de LAMARTINE (1790-1869). L.A.S. "Alph",...

Alphonse de LAMARTINE (1790-1869). L.A.S. "Alph", January 21, 1849, to his "dear angel" [his niece Valentine de CESSIAT]; 4 pages in-8 (small ink stain on last page).
Very beautiful and tender letter to his beloved niece, about his work as a writer.
"I have neither night nor day for a minute. I have been ill with rheumatism. I have 26 volumes in trade, the House, the Council of State, 100 letters a day, the eyes worn, the hand weary, but the heart for you full, young, old, tender, ardent, compassionate, loving, seeing, regretting, hoping, admiring, blessing, cherishing, invoking as when I was Raphael and a thousand million times more. Yes, the soul is immaterial and infinite like God himself. I feel it with evidence when I think of you. I am your father and yet also your brother, your past and yet also your present, your present and yet also your future. I see you being born, growing, embellishing, flowering, fructifying, and yet I also see you after me living, charming, loving, remembering, aging and coming to join me in the abode of eternal youth, and yet I am an aging uncle, feeling myself growing old, withering, weakening; you are incomparable nieces in every kind of physical and moral satisfaction, hearts and souls of predilection for nature, and I love you as if I had created you. He evokes the immense success of Raphael and Confidences... ". One cries everywhere universally that never has the language burned so much, that it is written with a coal on the skin of the heart. [...] In my eyes, it is only a pale, extinguished memory. But I said it in the preface: what is most divine in the soul of man never leaves it; to write is to profane. The Confidences also have an incredible success, from top to bottom, from the prince to the doorman, priests, peasants, women, schoolboys, eighty thousand copies are sold every day. [...] You are going to read Graziella which is very Greek and Neapolitan. [...] I will write another one, much more superior at the end of my sensitive life and even purer and more diamond than Graziella! Then I will write only hymns for God. But I will always put in them the names that I have loved the most! [...] The prodigious success of universal astonishment of all that I am publishing at the moment is a guarantee of the success of the enterprise. Paris and France, in all classes, except the middle, return to me with passion. I am followed in the street like a ray, and not like a man. I refuse to do anything, I remain in my modest and laborious isolation with God and your thoughts"....
A l.a.s. from his wife Marianne Eliza, March 15, 1845, to the baroness of Gazan is attached.