Aug 182011
 

Charles,

My dear love for you is strained to the point where the viol of my affections is becoming the cat-scratch of a weary fiddle in an alley. Please tell me the names and addresses of all the men you owe money to–a fact which only you can know! You bemoan your affairs with the eloquence and despair of a modern Job, but when help arrives from the skies in the improbable shape of a purse, you spurn its disbursement and claim–falsely!–that you will ‘take care of this small distress myself.’ As if it were a pimple, and not a series of improvident debts that could land you in jail! You owe, not 2000 francs as you pretend, but closer to 4000. You send me that list of expenses you had very carefully and obligingly kept since our last set-to on the ‘execrable subject,’ as you call it. Do not spend all of your of inheritance before it is disbursed to you! You will find yourself in circumstances that you, with your delicate and languishing nature, will not abide.

Enclosed is cash for your immediate needs. But, I won’t send over the whole of your debts in cash to you directly, as you proposed once, because I fear you will simply spend it all on whores and opium. Or, as you might say, ‘to improve a single line in the, thus far, wierdly managed sonnet of my existence.’

There you go again! Trying, as you put it, to find a rhyme for God, whom you then decide to give the pet name of ‘the orange.’

Alphonse

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