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TO M. GUSTAVE DE BEAUMONT. - Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, vol. 2 [1861]

Edition used:

Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated from the French by the translator of Napoleon’s Correspondence with King Joseph. With large Additions. In Two Volumes (London: Macamillan, 1861). 2 vols.

Part of: Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, 2 vols.

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TO M. GUSTAVE DE BEAUMONT.

I returned home with delight, but I am not yet sufficiently at ease to work well and to enjoy it. My mind is anxious and agitated. Why, I cannot tell. The best cause that I can assign is, that I am still myself. This self I do not care for, but I cannot change. Among secondary causes the state of my health stands foremost. I am not ill, I am not in pain, but I feel a physical depression (occasioned, I think, by the spring), the immediate effect of which is mental dejection. Body and mind, however, have been better within the last two days. I think, too, that the slow progress of my work, the extension of my inquiries, to which I cannot set precise limits, and the difficulty of satisfying myself as I go on, contribute to my moral uneasiness. It might end at once, if I could find some new road to my object. But I am icebound. . . . .

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I am glad to hear of your farming. I like you to be so employed; still I should like you to do something besides. But one must judge one’s friends according to their feelings, not one’s own. We have always been very intimate, and very unlike. Your mind must be calm and tranquil before it can work. If I had enjoyed tranquillity and calm, I doubt whether I should ever have worked. It costs me so much, that if I were tolerably comfortable in inactivity, I should continue there. It has always been because my mind was uncomfortable at home that it sallied abroad to obtain, at any sacrifice, the relief of hard intellectual work. This is the case now.

I have no child to enjoy the little noise that my name may make. I do not believe that in such times as these the slightest influence can be obtained by such writings as mine, or even by any writings, except by the bad novels, which try to make us still more immoral and ill-conditioned than we are. Yet I rise at five, and sit for six hours before my paper, and often leave it still white. Sometimes I find what I am looking for, but find it painfully and imperfectly; sometimes I am in despair at not finding it at all. I leave work discontented with myself, and therefore with everything else. Why do I make these efforts? To escape from mental disquiet: while you cannot work unless you are already perfectly at ease.