Letters to Madame Hanska

II Letters During 1834

Geneva, January, 1834.

Madame,—I do not know if I had the honour to tell you yesterday that I might, perhaps, not have the pleasure of dining with you to-day. I should be in despair if you could think I did not attach an extreme value to that favour by making you wait for me in vain. Your cousin has engaged me for Thursday next; I have accepted so as not to seem absurd in my seclusion. I hope you will see nothing “French” in this sentiment.

I hope this continual rain has not made you sad, and I beg you to present my most distinguished sentiments to M. Hanski, and accept my most affectionate homage and obedience.

De Balzac.

Geneva, January, 1834.

Madame,—Here is the first part of your cotignacian poems. But you will presently see a man in despair. I do not like to bring you the Chénier, and yet I hesitate to send it back. Of all that I ordered, nothing has been done. Binding execrably ugly, covering silly. One should be there one’s self to have things done. If you accept it you must remember only the good intentions with which I took charge of your book; that is the only way to give it value.

I have been into town; I made myself joyous; I thought I had found something that would give you pleasure. I have deranged myself. If you permit it, I will compensate my annoyance by coming to see you earlier.

A thousand graceful homages.

Honoré

I considered the cotignac so precious I would not delay your gastronomic joys.

Geneva, January, 1834.

Madame,—Will you exchange colonial products? Here is a little of my coffee. My sister writes that I shall have more to-morrow; therefore, take this. You shall have your coffee-pot to-morrow. Will you give me a little tea for my breakfast? I want strictly a little.

Have you passed a good night? Are you well? Have you had good dreams? I hope your health is good, so that we can go and take a walk [nous promener, bromener]. The treasury?... Furth!

To Her Majesty Rzewuskienne, Mme. Hanska.

Geneva, January, 1834.

Very dear sovereign, sacred Majesty, sublime queen of Paulowska and circumjacent regions, autocrat of hearts, rose of Occident, star of the North, etc., etc., etc., fairy of tiyeuilles.1

Your Grace wished for my coffee-pot, and I entreat your Serene Highness to do me the honour to accept one that is prettier and more complete; and then to tell me, to fling me from your eminent throne a word full of happiness, amber, and flowers, to let me know if I am to be at Your sublime door in an hour, with a carriage, to go to Coppet.

I lay my homage at the feet of your Majesty, and entreat you to believe in the honesty of your humble moujik, Honoreski.

Geneva, January, 1834.

Never did an invalid less merit that name. He is ready to go to walk, to fetch his proofs, and when his business is finished, which will be in about a quarter of an hour, he will go and propose to Madame la doctrice to profit by this beautiful day to take an air-bath on the Crêt of Geneva, along the iron railings; unless the laziness of the Hanski household concurs with that of the poor literary moujik who lays at your feet, madame, his strings of imaginary pearls, the treasure of his heroes, his fanciful Alhambra, where he has carved, everywhere, not the sacred name of God, but a human name that is sacred in other ways. But all this immense property may not be worth, in reality, the four games won yesterday.

Geneva, January, 1834.

I have slept like a dormouse, I feel like a charm, I love you like a madcap, I hope that you are well, and I send you a thousand tendernesses.

Geneva, January, 1834.

If I must come this evening, and dress myself because you have your charaders, permit me to come a little earlier. There is a dinner here; they are singing and making such a noise while I write that it is enough to drive the devil away. Ecco. I can calculate. Wednesday I shall be encandollé [dinner with M. de Candolle]. Thursday is taken. To-morrow I work without intermission, for I shall have proofs. So, out of five days, when one has but one in prospect, it is no flattery to add a few hours. Yes? Very good.

Allow me to return your “Marquis” by a good “Maréchale.”

Geneva, January, 1834.

Willingly, but you will bring me back to your house, will you not?—for I can’t get accustomed to be two steps away from you, doing nothing, without better employing my time.

If you go into the town I will ask you to be so kind—No, I will go myself.

Geneva, January, 1834.

Madame,—To a man who considers happy moments as the most profitable moments of existence, it is permitted to wish not to lose any part of the sums he amasses. It is only in the matter of joy that I wish to be Grandet.

If I take this morning the time that you would give me, from three to ten o’clock, would you refuse me? No? Good. If you love me?—yes—you will be visible at twelve or one o’clock.

Forgive my avarice; I possess as yet nothing but the happiness which heaven bestows. Of that I may be avaricious, since I have nothing else. To you, a thousand affectionate respects, and my obeisances to the honourable Maréchal of the Ukraine and noble circumjacent regions.

Geneva, January, 1834.

I cannot come because I am more unwell than I expected to be, and going out might do me harm. If you would have the kindness to send me back a little orgeat you would do me a real service, for I don’t know what to drink, and I have a consuming thirst.

I have spent my day very sadly, trying to work, and finding myself incapable of it. So, I think I shall go to bed in a few hours.

A thousand thanks, and present my respects to the Grand Maréchal.

Geneva, January, 1834.

Madame,—If it were not that I get impatient and suffer at losing so much time, both for that which gives me pleasure and also for my work, I should be this morning well, and like a man who has had a fever. I don’t know whether I had better go out or keep my room; but I frankly own that here, alone, I worry horribly.

A thousand thanks for your good care, and forgive me that, yesterday, I was more surprised than grateful at your visit, which touched me deeply after you had left. I don’t know if you know that there are things that get stronger as they get older.

A thousand thanks and grateful regards to M. Hanski. How stupid I am to have made you anxious for so slight a matter; but how happy I am to know that you have as much friendship for me as I for you.

Geneva, January, 1834.

My love, this morning I am perfectly well. I was embarrassed yesterday because there were for you, under the things you moved about, two letters I send with this.

Mon Dieu! my love, I am afraid that step of yours (your visit to my room) may be ill taken, and that you exposed the two letters. For other reasons, Mon Dieu! certainly, I wanted to see you here! I have such need to cure my cold that if I go out it cannot be till this evening.

I am up; I could not stay in bed longer, I am too uncomfortable. I must talk or have something to do. Inaction kills me. Yesterday, I spent a horrible evening thinking of what I had to do. I am this morning like a man who has had a fever.

A thousand tender caresses. Mon Dieu! how I suffer when I don’t see you. I have a thousand things to tell you.

Geneva, January, 1834.

What have I done that last evening should end thus, my dear, beloved Eve? Do you forget that you are my last hope in life? I don’t speak of love, or human sentiments, you are more than all that to me. Why do you trample under your feet all the hopes of our life in a word? You doubt one who loves you freely with delights; to whom to feel you is delirious happiness, who loves you in æternum, and you do not doubt...!

O my love! you play very lightly with a life you chose to have, and which, moreover, has been given to you with an entire devotion which I should have given you if you had not demanded it. I like better that you did wish for it.

I love you with too much constancy that such disputes should not be mortal to me. Mon Dieu! I have told you the secrets of my life, and you ought, in return for such unlimited confidence, to spare him who lives in you the torture of such doubts. You hold me by the hand, and the day you withdraw that adored hand you alone will know the reason of what becomes of me.

My beloved Eve, I commit extravagance on extravagance. It is impossible to think of anything but you. It is not a desire, though I have fully the right to desire pleasure more keenly than other men, and this desire renders me stupefied at times; no, it is a need to breathe your air, to see you, and yesterday you gave me eternal memories of beauty.

If I had no sacred pecuniary obligations (and I commit the folly of forgetting them sometimes), we would not think of the rue Cassini. No. Yesterday at Diodati I said to myself: “Why should I quit my Eve; why not follow her everywhere?” I wish it, myself. I accept all sufferings when I see you; and you, you wounded me yesterday.

But you do not love as I do; you do not know what love is; I, for my sorrow, have known its delights, and I see that from Neufchâtel to my death I can reach the end desired through my whole youth, and concentrate my life and my affections on a single heart!

Dearest, dearest, I am too unhappy from the things of life not to make it a cruelty in her I love and idolize to cause me a shadow of grief. I would like better the most horrible of agonies to causing you pain.

Must I come and seek a kiss?

Geneva, January, 1834.

Your doubts do me harm. You are more powerful than all. Angel of my life, why should I not follow you everywhere? Because of poverty. Mon Dieu, you have nothing to fear. From the day on which I told you that I loved you, nothing has altered this delicious life; it is my only life. Do not dishonour it by suspicions; do not trouble our pleasures. There was no one before you in my heart; you will fill it forever. Why do you arm yourself with thoughts of my former life? Do not punish me for my beautiful confidence. I wish you to know all my past, because all my future is yours. Break your heart! Sacrifice you to anything whatever! Why, you don’t know me! I am ashamed to bring you sufferings. I am ashamed not to be able to give you a life in harmony with the life of the heart. I suffer unheard-of woes, which you efface by your presence.

Pardon, my love, for what you call my coquetries. Pardon a Parisian for a simple Parisian talk; but what you will shall be done. I will go to see no one. Two visits of a quarter of an hour will end all. Perish a thousand times the society of Geneva rather than see you sad for a quarter of an hour’s conversation. It would be ridiculous (for others) that I should occupy myself with you only. I was bound to respect you, and in order to talk to you so much it was necessary that I should talk with Madame P... Besides, what trifles! Before the Ocean of which you talk, are you going to concern yourself about a miserable spider? Mon Dieu! you don’t know what it is to love infinitely.

What I wrote you this morning is of a nature to show you how false are your fears. I never ceased to look at you while talking to Madame P...

Ah! dearest, my dear wife, my Eva, I would willingly sell my talent for two thousand ducats! I would follow you like a shadow. Do you wish to go back to Wierzchownia? I will follow you and stay there all my life. But we must have pretexts, and, unfortunate that I am, I cannot leave Paris without satisfying editors and creditors.

I have received two letters; one from that good Borget, the other from my sister. Troubles upon troubles. To have at all moments the sight of paradise and the sufferings of hell,—is that living?

Geneva, January, 1834.

My love, my only life, my only thought, oh! your letter! it is written forever on my heart.

Listen, celestial angel, for you are not of this earth. I will reply to you on these things once for all. Fame, vanity, self-love, literature, they are scarcely clouds upon our sky. You trample all that twenty times a day beneath your feet, which I kiss twenty times.

Oh, my angel, see me at your knees as I tell you this: if I have had the most fugitive of reputations it has come when I did not want it. I was drunk for it till I was twenty-two. I wanted it as a pharos to attract to me an angel. I had nothing with which to please; I blamed myself. An angel came; I let myself suffer in her bosom, hiding from her my desires for a young and beautiful woman. She saw those desires and said to me: “When she comes I will be your mother, I will have the love of a mother, the devotion of a mother.”1

Then one day the misery of my life grew greater. The toils of night and day began. She who had offered me, on her knees, her fortune, which I had taken, which I was returning at the peril of my life, she watched, she corrected, she refined, as I refined, corrected, watched. Then all my desires were extinguished in work. It was no longer a question of fame, but of money. I owed, and I had nothing.

Three years I worked without relaxation, having drawn a brass circle around me from 1828 to 1831. I abhor Madame de C[astries], for she broke that life without giving me another,—I do not say a comparable one, but without giving me what she promised. There is not the shadow of wounded vanity, oh! but disgust and contempt.

You alone have made me know the vanities of fame. When I saw you at Neufchâtel I wanted to be something. In you then begins, more splendid than I dreamed it, that dreamed life.

Oh! my Eve, you alone in my life to come!—Alas! like Louis Lambert I wish that I could give you my past. Thus, nothing that is success, fame, Parisian distractions, moves me. There is but one power that makes me accept my present life: Toil. It calms the exactions of my fiery temperament. It is because I fear myself that I am chaste.

As for this seclusion that you want, hey! I want it as much as you. It is not being a fop to tell you that since Neufchâtel three ravishing women have come to the rue Cassini, and that I did not even cast a man’s glance on seeing them.

My Eve, I love you better than you love me, for I am alone in the secret of what I lose, and you know nothing of love but the sentiments of love. Besides, I love you better, for I have more reasons to love you. If I were free I would live near you, happy to be the steward of your fortune and the artisan of your wealth, as Madame Carraud’s brother is for Madame d’Argout. I have a security of love, a plenitude of devotion, which you will only know with time. It needs time to fathom the infinite. To suffer the whole of life with you, taking a few rare moments of happiness, yes! To have a lifetime in two years, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years, and die, yes! Never to speak to a woman, to refuse myself to all, to live in you, oh, angel! but that is my thought at all hours. The... which I told you about Madame P... was because she had vexed you, and before your suffering I became besotted, as you before mine.

Mon Dieu! if we lived together, if I had twenty ducats a month, to you should belong my poems. I would write books, and read them to you, and we would burn them in our fire. My adored minette, I weep sometimes in thinking that I sell my ideas, that people read me! Ah! you do not know what I could be if, free for one evening, I could speak to you, see you, caress you by my thoughts and by myself. Oh! you would then know that your thoughts of purity, of exclusive tenderness are mine. Angel of my life, I live in you, for you, by you. Only, if I am mistaken, tell me so without anger. There is never any false or bad intention in me. I obey my heart in all that is sentiment. I have never known what a calculation is. If I mistake, it is in good faith.

My love, let us never separate. In six months I shall be free. Well, then, no power on earth can disunite us. La dilecta was forty-six when I was twenty-two. Why talk about your forty years? We have thirty years before us. Do you think that at sixty-four a man betrays thirty years’ affection?

What! you think that the opera, the salons, fame can distract me from you? Then you don’t know how I love you. I shall be more angry at that than you at Madame P... No, believe me, I love you as a woman loves and as a man loves. In my life to come there is nothing but you and work. My dear gift, my dear star, my sweet spirit, let yourself be caressed by hope, and say to yourself that I am not amorous or passionate; all that passes. I love you, I adore you in æternum. I believe in you as I do in myself. Mon Dieu! I would like to know words which could infuse into you my soul and my thought, which could tell you that you are in my heart, in my blood, in my brain, in my thought,—in short, the life of my life; that each beating of my heart gives birth to a desire full of thee. Oh! you do not know what are three years of chastity, which spring at every moment to the heart and make it bound, to the head and make it palpitate. If I were not sober and did not work, this purity would drive me mad. I alone am in the secret of the terrible emotions which the emanations from your dear person give me. It is an unspeakable delirium which, by turns, freezes my nature by the omnipotence of desire, and makes me burn. I resist follies like those of the young seigneur cut down by the Elector.

We have, both of us, our sufferings; do not let us dispute that. Let us love each other, and do not refuse me that which makes all accepted. In other respects, in all things, angel, I am submissive to you as to God. Take my life, ask me to die, order me all things, except not to love you, not to desire you, not to possess you. Outside of that all is possible to me in your name.

Geneva, January, 1834.

If you only knew the superstitions you give me! When I work I put the talisman on my finger; I put it on the first finger of the left hand, with which I hold my paper, so that your thought clasps me. You are there, with me. Now, in seeking from the air for words and ideas, I ask them of that delicious ring; in it I have found the whole of “Séraphita.”

Love celestial, what things I have to say to you, for which one needs the sacred hours during which the heart feels the need of baring itself. The adorable pleasures of love are the only means of arriving at that union, that fusion of souls. Dear, with what joy I see the fortunes of my heart and the fate of my soul secured to me. Yes, I will love you alone and solely through my life. You have all that pleases me. You exhale, for me, the most intoxicating perfume a woman can have; that alone is a treasure of love.

I love you with a fanaticism that does not exclude the quietude of a love without possible storms. Yes, say to yourself well that I breathe by the air you breathe, that I can never have any other thought than you. You are the end of all for me. You shall be the young dilecta—already I call you the pre dilecta.

Do not murmur at this alliance of the two sentiments. I should like to think I loved you in her, and that the noble qualities which touched me and made me better than I was were all in you.

I love you, my angel of earth, as they loved in the middle ages, with the most complete fidelity, and my love will always be grand, without stain; I am proud of my love. It is the principle of a new life. Hence, the new courage that I feel under my last adversities. I would be greater, be something glorious, so that the crown to place upon your head should be the most leafy, the most flowery of all those that great men have nobly won!

Never, therefore, have fear or distrust; there are no abysses in heaven! A thousand kisses full of caresses; a thousand caresses full of kisses! Mon Dieu! shall I never be able to make you see how I love you, you, my Eve!

À bientôt; a thousand kisses will be in my first look.

Geneva, January, 1834.

My loved love, with a single caress you have returned me to life. Oh! my dearest, I have not been able to either sleep or work. Lost in the remembrance of that evening, I have said to you a world of tendernesses. Oh! you have that divine soul to which one remains attached during a lifetime. My soul, you have, through love, the delicious language of love which makes all griefs and annoyances fly away on wings. Loved angel, do not obscure with any doubt the inspirations of love of which your dear caress is but the interpreter. Do not think you can ever enter into comparison with any one, no matter who. But, my loved darling, my flower of heaven, do you not understand, you, all charm and all truth, that a poor poet can be struck at finding the same heart, at being loved beyond his hopes? My adored wife, yes, it was for you that the heart of the most delicate and sweetest woman that ever was brought me up. I shall be permitted to say to her: “You wished to be twenty years old to love me better and give me even the pleasures of vanity. Well, I have met with what you wished me.” She will be joyous for us. Dear eternal idol, my beautiful and holy religion, I know how the memories of another love must wound a proud and delicate love. But not to speak of it to you would be to deprive you of nameless fêtes of the soul, and joys of love. There are such identities of tenderness and soul that I am proud for you, and I know not if it is you I loved in her. Then, an ungovernable jealousy has so habituated me to think with open heart, and say all to her in whom I live, that I could never hide from you a thought. No, you are my own heart.

Yes, to you all is permitted. I shall tell you naïvely all that I think that is fine, and all that I think that is bad. You are an I, handsomer, prettier.

My love has neither exaltation, nor more, nor less, nor anything that is terrestrial. Oh! my dear Eve, it is the love of the angel always at the same degree of force, of exaltation. To feel, to touch your hand of love, that hand of soft, proud sentiments,—do you understand me, my angel, tender, kind, passionate,—that hand, polished and relaxed of love, that is a happiness as great as your caress of honey and of fire.

This is what I wished to say to my timid angel, who thought that all caresses were not solidaire. One, the lightest as the most passionate, comprises all. In that you see to the bottom of my soul. A kiss on your cherished lips,—those virgin lips that have no souvenirs yet (which makes you in my eyes as pure as the purest young girl),—a kiss will be a talisman for the desires of love, when it contains all the caresses of love. Our poor kiss, still disinherited of all our joys, only goes to your heart, and I would that it enwrapped all your person. You would see that possession augments, enlarges love. You would know your Honoré, your husband; and you would know that he loves you more daily.

My dearest Eva, never doubt me, but doubt yourself less. I have told you that there is in you, in your letters, in your love, in its expression, a something I know not what that is more than in other letters and expressions that I thought inimitable. But you are twenty-eight years old,—that is the grand secret. But, dear treasure, you have the most celestial soul that I know, and you have intoxicating beauties. Mon Dieu! how shall I tell you that I am drunk at the faintest scent of you, and that had I possessed you a thousand times you would see me more intoxicated still, because there would be hope and memory where now there is only hope.

Do you remember the bird that has but one flower? That is the history of my heart and my love. Oh! dear celestial flower, dear embalming perfumes, dear fresh colours, my beautiful stalk, do not bend, guard me always. At each advance of a love which goes and ever will go on increasing, I feel in my heart foyers of tenderness and adoration. Oh! I want to be sure of you as I am of myself. I feel at each respiration that I have in my heart a constancy that nothing can alter.

I wept on the road to Diodati, when, after having promised me all the caresses that you have granted me, a woman was able, with a single word, to cut the woof she seemed to have taken such pleasure in weaving. Judge if I adore you, you who perceive nothing of these odious manœuvres, who deliver yourself up with candour and happiness to love, and who speaks thus to all my natures.

There is my confession made. I think that you have all the noblenesses of the heart, for, adored angel, one should respect the weakness and even the crimes of a woman, and if I hide nothing from your heart, it is that it ought always to be mine. So I send you my sister’s chatter and the letter of Madame de C[astries] on condition that you burn all, my angel. I know you so true, so great; ah! I would not hesitate to read you the letter of the dilecta if you wish it, for you are really myself. I would not hide from you the shadow of a thought, and you ought, at all hours, to enter my heart, as into the palace you have chosen to spread your treasures in, to adorn it, and find pleasure in it. All should there be yours.

If Madame C...’s letter displeases you, say so frankly, my love. I will write to her that my affections are placed in a heart too jealous for me to be permitted to correspond with a woman who has her reputation for beauty, for charm, and that I act frankly in telling her so. I wish to write this letter from myself. I would like well that you should tell it to me.

As for my money troubles, do not be uneasy about them. It is the basis of my life, till the end of July, love, which makes everything easy to me to bear.

Pardon me for having made known to you yesterday’s trouble. Oh, dear, always beautiful flower, I am ashamed to have made you know the extent of your mission, but you are an inexhaustible treasury of affection, of love, of tenderness, and I shall always find in you more consolations than I have troubles. You have put into my thoughts and all my hours a light, a gleam, which makes me endure all.

I wake up happy to love you; I go to bed happy to be loved. It is the life of angels; and my despair comes from feeling in it the discord which my want of fortune and of liberty puts between the desires of my heart, the impulses of my nature, and the works which keep me in an ignoble cabin like the moujiks of Paulowska. If I were only at Paulowska! I would that you were I for a moment to know how you are loved. Then I would be sure that seeing so much love, so much devotion, such great security of sentiment, you would never have a doubt, and you would love in æternum a heart that loves you thus.

A thousand kisses, and may each have in itself a thousand caresses to you like that of yesterday to me.

Geneva, January, 1834.

Dear soul of my soul, I entreat you, attach yourself solely—your cares, your thoughts, your memory—to what will be in my life a constant thought. Let the piece of malachite become by you alone an inkstand. I will explain the shape. It should be cut six-sided; the sides should be about the dimensions of the sides of your card-basket, except that they ought to end, at the top, squarely, as at the base; they should go up, enlarging from the base to the top, and, to decide, logically, the conditions of the stand, the pot for the ink (hollowed out in the malachite) must have at its surface a diameter equal to this line [drawn]. The cover, shaped like a marchepain, must be round, and sunk in the pot; it should be simple, and end in a silver-gilt knob. Let the stand have a handle, fastened on by simple buttons, and this handle, of bronzed silver-gilt, should be like that of your card-basket. Have engraved upon it our motto: Adoremus in æternum, between the date of your first letter and that of Neufchâtel.

The inkstand should be mounted on a pedestal, also of six sides, suitably projecting; and on each side, at the junction of the pedestal and the stand, there should be, in art-term, a moulding of silver-gilt, which is simply a round cordon, which must harmonize with the proportions of the inkstand. Then I think that at the top of the sides this moulding should be repeated. In the middle of each side of the pedestal put a star; then, in small letters, in the middle of each large side, these words: Exaudit,—Vox,—Angeli, separated by stars (which makes “Eva”).

If you want to be magnificent you will add a paper-knife of a single piece of malachite and a powder-pot, the shape of which I will explain to you.

Not to displease that person I will give him Décamp’s drawing which you can get back, and I will ask him, in exchange, for a piece of malachite for my alarm-clock.

Here is Susette. I can only say that this will make me renounce the pleasure of making you pick up on the shores of the lake the pebbles I intended to have made into an alarm-clock. I went, yesterday, to see if we could walk along the shore. I wanted to connect you with these souvenirs, to make you see that one can thus enlarge life and the world, and have the right to surround you with my thought through a thousand things, as I would like to surround myself with yours. Thus sentiment moulds material objects and gives them a soul and a voice.

What! bébête, did you not guess that the dedication was a surprise which I wished to give you? You are, for longer than you think, the thought of my thought.

Yes, I shall try to come to-night at nine.

Geneva, January 19, 1834.

My loved angel, I am almost mad for you, as one is mad. I cannot put two ideas together that you do not come between them. I can think of nothing but you. In spite of myself my imagination brings me back to you. I hold you, I press you, I kiss you, I caress you; and a thousand caresses, the most amorous, lay hold upon me.

As to my heart, you will always be there, willingly; I feel you there deliciously. But, mon Dieu! what will become of me if you have taken away my mind. Oh! it is a monomania that frightens me. I rise every moment, saying to myself, “Come, I’ll go there!” Then I sit down again, recalled by a sense of my obligations. It is a dreadful struggle. It is not life. I have never been like this. You have consumed the whole of me. I feel stupefied and happy when I let myself go to thinking of you. I roll in a delicious revery, where I live a thousand years in a moment.

What a horrible situation. Crowned with love, feeling love in all my pores, living only for love, and to find oneself consumed by grief and caught in a thousand spider’s-webs.

Oh! my dearest Eva, you don’t know. I have picked up your card; it is there, before me, and I speak to it as if you were there. I saw you yesterday, beautiful, so admirably beautiful. Yesterday, all the evening, I said to myself, “She is mine!” Oh! the angels are not as happy in Paradise as I was yesterday.

Geneva, February, 1834.

Madame,—Bautte [chief clock-maker in Geneva] is a great seigneur who is bored by small matters; and as you deign to attach some importance to the chain of your slave, I send you the worthy Liodet, who will understand better what is wanted, and will put more good-will into doing it. I have told him to put a link to join the two little chains.

Accept a thousand compliments, and the respectful homage of your moujik,

Honoré.

Geneva, February, 1834.

The Sire de Balzac is very well indeed, madame, and will be, in a few moments, at your fireside for a chat; he is too avaricious of the few moments that remain to him to spend in Geneva, and if he had not had some letters to answer, he would have gone there already this morning. A thousand affectionate compliments to M. Hanski, and to you a thousand homages full of friendship.

Paris, Wednesday, February 12, 1834.

I prefer saying nothing more than that. I love you with increasing intoxication, with a devotion that difficulties increase, to telling you imperfectly my history for the last three days. Sunday I will post a complete journal. I have not a minute to myself. Everything hurries me at once, and time presses. But, adored angel, you will divine me.

The dilecta [Madame de Berny] is better, but the future seems bad to me. I wait still before despairing.

Mon Dieu! may my thoughts of love echo in your ears and cradle you.

Paris, Thursday, February 13, 1834.

Madame,—I arrived much fatigued, but I found troubles at home, of which you can conceive the keenness. Madame de Berny is ill, and seriously ill,—more ill than she is aware of. I see in her face a fatal change. I hide my anxiety from her; it is boundless. Until my own doctor or a somnambulist reassure me, I shall not feel easy about that life which you know to be so precious.

I have delayed a day in writing to you, because on Wednesday morning I had to rush to the rue d’Enfer, and when I could write to you there was no longer time; the public offices closed earlier on account of Ash-Wednesday.

The sight of that face so gracious, aged in a month by twenty years, and horribly contracted, has greatly increased the grief I felt. Even if the health is restored, and I hope it, it will be always painful to me to see the sad change to old age. I can say this only to you. It seems as if nature had avenged herself suddenly, in a moment, for the long protestation made against her and time. I hope most ardently that the life may be saved; but I recognized symptoms that I saw with horror in my father before the irreparable loss. So, I have sorrow upon sorrow.1 Now, after confiding to you these distresses, I can, madame, give you some consoling news. The publisher has understood my delay, and is not angry with me. I have, certainly, to work enormously, but, at least, I shall not have the annoyance of being blamed. As for M. Gosselin, that is only a loss of money. So, you who felt such affectionate fears lest the prolongation of my stay would prove a burden may be reassured. I shall have had complete joy, and no remorse; and now that there is no remorse, I should like a little. It is so sweet to bear something for those whose friendship is precious to us. I can tell you from afar, with less trembling in my voice and redness in my eyes, that the forty-four days I spent in Geneva have been one of the sweetest halts that I have made in my life of a literary foot-soldier. That rest was necessary for me, and you have made it into a joy. It was a sleep with the sweetest dreams,—dreams which will be realities. True friendship, sweet, kind, noble and good sentiments are so rare in life that there must mingle a little gratitude in the return we owe, and I feel as much gratitude as friendship.

I shall forget nothing of our affectionate little agreements: neither the album, nor the coffee, nor anything. To-day I can only tell you that I arrived without any hindrance, except great fatigue. The cold was keen. Saturday morning I crossed the Jura on foot through the snow, and on reaching the stone where two years ago I sat down to look at the wonderful spectacle of France and Switzerland separated by a brook, which is the Lake of Geneva, and a ditch, which is the valley between the Mont Blanc and the Jura, I had a moment of joy mingled with sadness. Two years ago I wept over lost illusions [refers to his rupture with Mme. de Castries], and to-day I had to regret the sweetest things that have ever come to me, outside of family feelings,—hours of friendship, the value of which a poor writer from necessity must feel more keenly than others, because there is in him a great poet for all that is emotion of the heart.

Yes, I am proud of my personal feelings, but it is a great grief to know the joys of friendship to their full extent, and lose them, even momentarily.

To-day I replunge into work, and it is crushing. I have promised that the second Part of the “Études de Mœurs” shall appear February 25th. That is only ten days for completing you know how much. My punctuality must excuse the delays. You see that in writing I am as indiscreet as when I went to see you.

Well, adieu, madame; believe that I am not “French” in the matter of memory, and that I know all that I leave of good and true beyond the Jura. In the hours when I am worn-out I shall think of our evenings; and the word patience, written in the depths of my life, will make me think of our games. You know all that I would say to the Grand Maréchal of the Ukraine, and I am certain that my words will be more graceful from your lips than from my pen. Tell Anna that her horse sends her his remembrances and kisses her forehead. A thousand affectionate compliments to Mademoiselle Séverine; inform Mademoiselle Borel that I have not broken my neck, and keep, I entreat you, madame, at your feet, my most sincere and most affectionate homage; your noble beauty assures you of sincerity, and as to the affection, I wish I could prove it to you in some way that would not involve misfortune.

“Do not forget to-morrow,” was one of your recommendations when I told you that I did not believe in morrows; but now I do believe in them, for, by chance, I have a future, and my publisher has proved it to me. He is jubilant at the sale of “Eugénie Grandet,” and said to me solemnly, “It sells like bread.” I tell this to you who think you see cakes in it, while most people expect to see me faire brioches of it [fiasco]. Excuse this studio jest, you who like artists.

Devotion and friendship.

Paris, February 15, 1834, eleven o’clock.

My darling Eva, to you belongs this part of my night. Since Wednesday morning of this week I have been like a balloon; but as I went and came, and bustled through this Paris, I walked along, exciting myself with one fixed idea,—the idea of being forever near to you.

My dear idol, I have never had so much courage in my life; or rather, I have a new life. I read your name in me, I see you; everything seems easy to me to attain to seeing you again. I am afraid of nothing. My tears, my regrets, my sadness of love,—all that falls upon my heart at the moment when I get into bed. Then, alone with myself, I am all grief not to be at the “Arc,” not to have seen my darling, and I go over in memory the smallest details of those days when, for all grief, I had that of being waked three hours too soon, hours that separated my rising from the moment when I set out to go to you.

The next day I work with an ardour of enthusiasm. What shall I tell you of these four days? I had to see two editors (they came) and the printer, to finish my proofs, to nurse Mme. de Berny, who is better,—but what a change! she is still a little feeble, incapable of correcting my proofs. Everything will suffer for that, but what does it matter? I want to see that life out of danger.

I felt there how I loved you. A horrible sensation told me that I could not bear any danger to you. All that recalled my terror at the time of your nervous attack. Oh, mon Dieu! to see you seriously ill, you, who sum up and hold all my affections in your heart, my life in your life,—why! I should die, not of your death, but of your sufferings. No, you do not know what you are to me. Near you, I feel too much to tell you egotistical thoughts; here I talk to you all day long. You are woven into my thought. I find no word but that to express my situation. As soon as I found myself in Paris I thought of the means of going to see you for a single day in Geneva.

Here I find violent family troubles. To-day I have had my brother-in-law and my mother to dinner. That tells you that from five o’clock to half-past ten I have been given up to them. Yesterday I had to dine with my sister, my mother, and my brother-in-law; then I was forced to give them from four to eleven o’clock. Those poor heads are distracted. I must have courage, ideas, energy, economy for all of them.

The morning of this Friday I set myself to learn all that has happened here. I had to go out early, to see the doctor, negotiate a payment for to-day, 15th, and consult him. So you see the employment of to-day and yesterday. Thursday was taken up by the publishers, a little sleep and a bath, also by Madame de Berny, to whom I wished at any rate to read “Ne touchez pas à la hache.” Wednesday, the day after my arrival, I wrote you in the evening, I ran about all the morning, set my affairs in order, attended to a thousand little things,—which I don’t particularize, as they are all mere necessary nothings,—made up my accounts, wrote, etc. After this avalanche of small things here I am, not much rested, rather less anxious about the dilecta, before a pile of proofs and enormous debts for the end of the month. Madame D... has urgent need of half her money by the end of February. It is now the 15th, the month is a short one, I must finish my two volumes; I must finish “Ne touchez pas” and write “La Femme aux yeux rouges.”

My adored, my darling minette, I tell you things that are terrifying, but do not be alarmed. Vienna is traced out before me; all will be well. Your desire to see me, your love, all you hovers above me. I believe in you only; I want new successes, new fame, new courage; I will in short, that you shall be a thousand times prouder of your husband of love than of your lover. Yes, dear celestial Eva, I am melancholy because I am here and you are down there, but I have no more discouragements, no more depressions. When I raise my eyes I see something better than God, I see a sure happiness, a tried happiness. Oh! you do not know, my treasure, my dear life, what such sweet certainty is to my soul. You don’t know what you did with your infernal jesting, you remember? You tried upon a most loving heart a weapon you did not know was loaded. A moment more, and I was lost. My eternal love could be placed on you alone; I see it, I know it now, for now I desire you more than ever. My dearest soul, I have for myself all the efforts that I make to meet you again; I materialize my hope. But, my beautiful myself, you, what are you doing? Ah! my beautiful, saintly creature, I know it is not on him of Paris that the burden is heaviest; it is our Geneva love, it is you who, bearing all our happiness, feel most our pains, our sorrows. Neither do I ever look at us two without a smile full of hope, but also slightly tainted with sadness. Oh! my idolized angel, you in whom all my future resides, all my happiness, and for whom I desire all the fine glories that make a happy woman, you whom I love with all the ardour of a young sentiment, of a first and a last love in one, yes, know it well, no sufferings, ideas, joys, which can agitate your soul fail to come and agitate mine.1

At this moment when I write to you, having left all to plunge into your heart, to come nearer to you, no, I feel space no longer; we are near one to the other; I see you, and one of my senses is intoxicated by the memory of one of those little voluptuous moments which made me so happy! I am very proud of you. I cry out to myself that I love you! You see, a poet’s love has a little madness in it. None but artists are worthy of women, because they are somewhat women too. Oh! what need I have always to hear myself told that I am loved, to hear you repeat it! You, you are all. You will know only when you hear my voice how ardently I tell you that you are the only well-beloved, the only wife. Now I shall rush there more amorously than the two preceding times. You know why, my dear, naïve wife? Because I know you better, because I know all there is of divine and girlish in your dear, celestial character, because—. No, I never dreamed so ambitiously the perfections that are agreeable to me because I know that I can love ever. Going to Neufchâtel I wanted to love you; returning from Geneva it is impossible not to love you!

Who will ever know what the road to Ferney is at the spot where, having to leave on the morrow, I stood still at the sight of your dear, saddened face. Mon Dieu! if I tried to tell you all the thoughts there are in my soul, the voluptuous pleasures which my heart contains and desires, I should never cease writing, and, unfortunately, the word “Vienna” is there. I am cruel to both of us in the name of a continued happiness; yes, one year passed together will prove to you that you can be better loved each day, and I aspire to September...

My dearest, I have many griefs; this flaming happiness is surrounded by briars, thorns, stones. I cannot speak to you of family troubles; they are endless. You will know them from one word, you who feel through a sister what, in another order of things, I feel through my mother. My mother has committed, with good intentions, follies that bring a person into disrepute. Here am I, I, so busy, forced to undertake the education of my mother, hold her in check, make a child of her.2 Dear angel, what a sad thing to think that if the world has accumulated obstacles in my life, my family have done worse in being of no use to me, and secretly hampering me. One day or other the world counts us as a victor to have beaten it. But family griefs are between us and God.

I told Borget that September would see me in Vienna, and a whole year in the Ukraine and the Crimea, and you know I wrote him that he could meet you in Italy. I send you a scrap of a letter from that excellent friend; it will please you; you will see in it that nobility of soul, that beauty of sentiment, that make us love him. What rush of love he has to those who love his friend! But do not go and love him too much, Madame. He will take to you your chain, the sketches of my apartment, and your seal, if it is done, without knowing what he hands to you. So tell me the day you will be in Venice; he will go there. He is my Thaddeus, you see. What he does for me, I should do for him. One is never jealous of fine sentiments. As much as death entered cold into your husband’s heart when you spoke of a coquetry to Séverine, so much should I go joyously to accomplish in your name a service to your Thaddeus.

From to-day, Sunday, I shall write to you every day a word, on a little diary. Yes, the Würtemberg Coquebin shall alone touch the manuscript of “Séraphita,” which will be coarsely bound in the gray cloth which slipped so easily on the floors. Am I not a little of a woman, hey, minette? Have I not found a pretty use for what you wanted destroyed, and a souvenir? Nothing can be more precious, or simpler. Book of celestial love, clothed in love and in joys terrestrial as complete as it is possible to have here below. Yes, angel, complete, full! Yes, my ambitious one, you fill all my life! Yes, we can be happy every day, feeling every day new joys.

Mon Dieu! Friday at dinner I saw in my sister’s home one of those scenes which prove that inspired love, that jealous love, that nothing in Paris can resist continued poverty. Oh! dear angel, what a terrible reaction in my heart, thinking of the little home in the rue Cassini. How I swore to myself then, with that iron will, never to expose the flowers of my life to be in the brown pot in which were the pinks of Ida’s mother,—you know, in “Ferragus.” No, no, I never could have that experience, for never shall I forget the 14th of February, 1834, any more than the 26th of January; there is a lesson in it for me. Yes, I want too much; there exists in my being an invincible need to love you always better, that I may never expose my love to any misunderstanding. Oh, my heart, my soul, my life, with what joy I recognize at every step that I love you as you dream of being loved. The most indifferent things enter into this circumference.

No, your young girl’s chain shall remain pure. I would like to employ it. It is too pretty for a man. That is why I wanted your head by Grosclaude. What a delicious border I could have made of it, and what a delicious thought to surround you, you, my dear wife, with all the superstitions of your childhood which I adore. Your childhood was mine. We are brothers and sisters through the sorrows of childhood.

There is one of your smiles of happiness, a ravishing little contraction, a paleness that takes you at the moment of joy, which returns to stab me with intoxicating memories. Oh! you do not know with what depth you correspond to the caprices, the loves, the pleasures, the poesies, the sentiments of my nature!

Come, adieu. Think, my beloved, that at every instant of the day a thought of love surrounds you; that a light more brilliant and secret gilds your atmosphere; that my thought is all about you; that my interior eyes see you; that a constant desire caresses you; that I work in your name and for you. Take good care of yourself; and remember that the only serious order that is given to you by him who loves you and whom you have told me you wished to obey is to walk a great deal whatever the weather may be. You must. Ah! the doctor laughed at my fears. Nevertheless, there are baths to be taken, and some precautions, “fruits of my excessive labour,” he said. “So long as you lead your chaste, monkish life and work your twelve hours a day, take every morning an infusion of wild pansy.” Isn’t his prescription droll?

You know all the caressing desires that I send you. Well, I hope that every Wednesday you will know how to draw my letter from the claws of the post. From now till the end of the month I shall work only my twelve hours, sleep seven, and spread out the five others in rest, reading, baths, and the bustle of life. Your Bengali is wise. Well, a thousand flowers of the soul. All reflection made, I shall send your ostensible letter by Borget.

Paris, February 17—February 23, 1834.

No letter to-day, my dearest Eve. Mon Dieu! are you ill? What tortures one has at such a distance! If you are ill, and they have taken your letters! A thousand thoughts enter my brain and make me desperate.

To-day I work much, but get on little. To-morrow I am forced to go and dine with M. de Margonne, the lord of Saché. Nevertheless, I get up at half-past one in the morning and go to bed at half-past six. My habits of work are resumed and the fatigues of toil; but I bear them well. I find unheard-of difficulties in doing well what I have to do at this moment. At every instant of the day my thought flies to you. I have mortal fears of being less loved. I adore you with such complete abandonment! I have such need of knowing myself loved! I can be happy only when I receive a letter from you, not every day, but every two days. Your letters refresh my soul; they cast into it celestial balm.

You cannot doubt me; I work night and day, and every line brings me nearer to you. But you, my beloved angel, what are you doing? You are idle; you still see a little company. Mon Dieu! what ties are between us! They will not break, say! You do not know how much I am attached to you by all the things that you thought would detach me. There is not only ungovernable love, passions, happiness, pleasures, there is also, from me to you, I know not what profound esteem of moral qualities. Your mind will always please me; your soul is strong; you are fully the wife I desire for mine. I go over deliciously within me those forty-five days, and everything proves to me that I am right in my love. Yes, I can love you always; always hold out to you a hand full of true affection and receive you in a heart that is always full of you. I like to speak to you of your superiority because it is real. Every sound your soul gives out is grand, strong, and true. I am very happy through you in thinking that you have all the qualities which perpetuate attachment in life.

My dear flower of love, I wrote in my last letter that I wished you to walk; but I wish more, I also wish you to give up coffee au lait and tea. I wish you to obey me, and I desire that you shall only eat dark meats. Above all, that you bring yourself gradually to using cold water when you dress. Will you not do all that when it is asked of you in the name of love? Do not depart in any way from that regimen. As for walking, begin by short walks and increase every day till you can do six miles on foot. Take your walk fasting, getting up, and coming back to breakfast on a little meat, but dark and always roasted. If you love me you will manage yourself in this way with a constancy that nothing hinders. Then your beauty will remain the same; you will get slightly thinner, your health will be good, and you will prevent many illnesses. Oh! I implore you, follow this regimen, and when you are near the sea take sea-baths. You do not know how I love you.

Tuesday, 18.

Still no letter; what anguish! I have just returned from Madame de C[astries], whom I do not want for an enemy when my book comes out, and the best means of obtaining a defender against the faubourg Saint-Germain is to make her approve of the work in advance; and she greatly approved of it. I carried to Madame Appony Madame Potoçka’s letter. The ambassadress [of Austria] was at her toilet; I did not see her, and, on the whole, I am content; I do not want to be disturbed, I wish to go nowhere, and the singular idea has come to me of shaving my head like a monk so as to be unable to go out of the house. I have to go to a ball Saturday at Dablin’s; he has done me services, and I am forced to have some gratitude.

Do you know there is some question of my taking my mother, sister, and brother-in-law to live here? I await a family council upon it. I see many inconveniences; the lessening of my liberty, though nothing would prevent my going to the Ukraine and Vienna and absenting myself two years. But, for the last two days, my reason tells me to refuse this union; and yet it is the only means to prevent my mother from committing follies. What vexations and impediments! I have worked little to-day and have rushed about much.

Wednesday, 19.

Furious work. The “Duchesse de Langeais” costs me more than I can tell you. In my opinion it is colossal in work, but it will be little appreciated by the crowd. My publisher refuses me any money for my month’s bills; here I am constrained to a thousand annoying efforts, and shall I succeed? he is right; he represents Madame Bêchet, and tells me he can’t ask her to pay in advance; the new Part must absolutely be brought out. So I send you a thousand tendernesses. Here, reading this line, you must think that the heart of your lover was full of love, that he had need to write to you a thousand gracious things, but that he must be silent and work! Till to-morrow.

Thursday, 20, five o’clock.

My mother, sister, and brother-in-law are coming to dinner to talk over affairs. I have worked since one hour after midnight till three hours after midday without leaving off. Now, angel of mine, decidedly you will shudder, you will palpitate, when you read the “Duchesse de Langeais,” for it is the greatest thing in women that I have so far done. No woman of this Faubourg resembles her.

You have a thousand thoughts of love, a thousand caresses, a thousand prettinesses. I think of you and your pleasure when I hear my name uttered gloriously everywhere. I wish to become great for a sentiment greater still.

Till to-morrow. A kiss to the wife, a little pigeonnerie to Eve. A thousand souls for you in my soul.

Friday, 21.

I have your letter, the second letter written to your dearest one. Mon Dieu! how I love you! The thousand desires, the hopes of happiness which fired my heart at each turn of the wheel as I went to Neufchâtel, the certain delights that I went to find in Geneva and which made you sublime, ravishing, in short a wife, forever mine,—well, I have felt all those divers emotions once more, augmented by dear joys, by the adorable security of an angel in his sky.

Oh! my love, what rapid wings have borne me near to you! Yes, my thought has kissed your magnificent forehead, my heart has been in your heart, my thought in your beautiful hair, and my mouth—I dare not say, but certainly it breathed love and kissed you with unheard-of ardour. Oh! dear Eve, dear treasure of happiness, dear, noble soul, dear light, dear world, my only happiness, how shall I tell you fully that I felt there that I loved you in æternum? I ought to have read that letter on my knees before your portrait! What courage you communicate to me!

Eh bien, I am glad at what you inform me of. To have it so, it must be the fruit of conscientious thought. Oh! dear darling, I want that this other you, this other we, well, I wish he may have all that can flatter the vanities of a mother, that he may be tall, that he have your forehead, my energy, that he be handsome and noble, a great heart and a fine soul. For all that, wisdom! At Vienna, my love, at Vienna, we will try. What delights in chastity, in fame, in work that has an object. Fidelity, fame, toil, all that for a woman, one only, for her whose love shines already upon me for all my life. Yes, Eva, Eva of love, my beautiful and noble mistress, my pretty, naïve servant, my great sovereign, my fairy, my flower, yes, you light all things! Persist in your projects; be a woman as superior in your conduct as you are in your plans. Be as strong in your house as you are in your love.

Oh! your letters, they ravish me, they stir me; oh! you make me dote upon you! What a soul, what a heart, what a dear mind! You crown my ambitions, and yesterday I was saying to Mme. de B... that you were—you, the unknown of Geneva and Neufchâtel—the realization of the ambitious programme I had made of a woman.

Ah! my love, it is something, after the triumph that all women desire to obtain over the senses and the heart of their lovers, to obtain also the complete and entire assurance that they are admired from afar, that we can always esteem them, cherish them, take pleasure beside them. Such as you have seen me near you, such I shall ever be. To you all my smiles, to you the flowers of heart and love, inexhaustible in their bloom. To you the candour and freshness of my sentiments, to you all. To you, who understand the mind, the gaiety, the melancholy, the grandeur, the transports of the ever diverse love of a poet! Oh! I stop, kissing your eyes.

To-morrow I rush, about; I have tiresome business matters; but this is the last time. I shall finish at one blow the difficulty about the “Physiologie du Mariage,” and by the end of March I shall not owe a sou to Madame Delannoy. After? Well, I shall resume work to accomplish the rest. I tell you nothing of these tramps, but they take much time, weary me, exhaust me, and my love, as much as necessity, cries to me every morning, “March!”

My love, my Eve, night and day I go to sleep and wake in your heart, in your thought. To suffer, to work for you, these are pleasures. Till to-morrow.

Saturday, 22.

I have just received your ostensible letter and have answered it. I spoke stupidly of your chain, but I have not the heart to throw the letter into the fire and write it over again. I am tired. To-night I must go to a ball; I, at a ball! But, my love, I must. It is at the house of the only friend who has ever gallantly served me. I will send you the pattern of a chain, that of Vaucanson; have it made solid, and Liodet can send it to me and draw on me for the cost. Tell me if bronze-gilt things can enter Russia. I have had an admirable three-branched candelabrum made here, and I should like to send you one; also an inkstand and an alarm-clock (a very useful thing to a woman), in short, all that I use here to be the same with you. If I had been richer do you think I would not have substituted to you a chain like yours and taken yours, in order that you might say to yourself while playing with it, “He plays with that chain!” But I can make such joys for ourselves later. Answer me about the bronze, because I want you to have that masterpiece before your eyes. Think, what happiness to see as you write to me, Exsultat vitam angelorum, which I shall see in writing to you. Oh! I am greedy, hungry for such things, which put two lovers unceasingly in each other’s hearts! I shall have your room at Wierzchownia made just like mine here. I want you to have the same carpet.

Oh! I adore you. Just now I wept on thinking of the floor of your house in Geneva. How lucky to have the strength not to cough! These tears have told me that I shall be at Vienna, September 10, and that I shall press you, happy one, on this heart that is all yours.

Bébête, in ten years you will be thirty-seven and I forty-five, and, at that age we can love, marry, and adore each other for a lifetime. Come, my noble companion, my dear Eve, never any doubts,—you have promised me. Love with confidence. Séraphita is we two. Let us spread our wings with the same movement, and love in the same way. I adore you, looking neither before nor behind. You are the present, all my happiness at every moment.

Do not be jealous of Madame P...’s letter; that woman must be for us. I have flattered her, and I want her to think that you are disdained. All that I read you in the “Duchesse de Langeais” has been changed. You will read a new book.

Dear angel, no, we will never quit the sphere of happiness where you have made me a happiness so complete. Love me always, you will see me always happy; oh, my life, oh, my beautiful life! Here, I no longer know what an annoyance is in seeing my whole life ardent with one sole love. Tell me what you are doing. Your visit to Genthod delighted me. Never let any woman bite you without biting her deeper. They will fear you and esteem you.

Thanks for the violet; but an end of white ribbon would please me better; it has no longer any smell. I send you a violet from my garden.

Sunday, 23.

Adieu, soul of my soul; will this letter tell you how you are loved? Will it tell it to you really? No; never really. Il faut mes coups de bec là où est l’amour.

I hope to finish my volume this week. You will receive it in Geneva. I will attend to your orders, and do blindly what you tell me. But write names legibly in all business.

Would you believe that two young men dined with me yesterday and told me that several men, two of them friends of theirs, said they were I at the [masked] ball at the Opera, and obtained the favours of well-bred women while I was at Geneva, and that I have been thus calumniated. There are women who boast they have been mine, and that they come to me, to me, who see only la dilecta, who receive nobody, who want to live in your heart! I learned that last night.

Well, adieu my love; no, not adieu, but à bientôt, at Vienna, cara mia, my treasure. I have to work horribly, still; seven or eight proofs to a sheet. Ah! you will never know what the volume you will soon read has cost.

I hope to be in funds for my payments; I hope that on March 25th the third Part will appear. So, all goes well. I lose five hundred francs more by Gosselin, but pooh! The violet will tell you a thousand things of love. The Würtemberg Coquebin will bind “Séraphita” marvellously with the gray cloth; do you understand, treasure?

I go to-day at three o’clock to Madame Appony. Perhaps I shall wish to go to Madame Potoçka of Paris. I will speak to you of that.

Paris, March 2, 1834.

My salvation! For my salvation! No, let me believe that between the two persons of whom you are thinking and me, you have not hesitated, you have condemned me. At least, there is in that all the grandeur of true love.

I was working night and day to go to you. Now I shall certainly work as much, for it is not possible for me to take the slightest resolution till my mother is physically happy. I have still a year to suffer.

Let us say no more of me. So you have been cruelly agitated? A sentiment which gives such remorse was feeble, and it is my heart that was blamed!—I, to whom adoremus in æternum meant something!

Fate is about to take from me a true affection, and to-day I lose all my beliefs in happiness, without anything being able to disengage me from myself. Ah! you have not known me! All those who have suffered forgive, you know. I shall stay as I am; I cannot change. You said yourself: “The Jules women love faithfully, in spite of desertion.” Am I therefore not a man? Is this another test? It costs me more than life; it costs me my courage.

I cannot oppose to this blow either disdain, contempt, or any of the egotistical sentiments that console. I remain in my stupor, without understanding. Ah! I knew not that I was writing for myself: To wounded hearts, silence and, shade.

Mon Dieu! my book is finished; I am not rich enough to destroy it, but I lay it at your knees, begging you not to read it: Eve should not open a book in which is the “Duchesse de Langeais.” You might, though certain of the entire devotion of him who writes to you, be wounded, as one is pricked by bushes. I shall always weep at being unable to suppress it.

I cannot bid you adieu; I shall never quit you more, and, from this day, I shall not allow myself even the sight of a woman. But you have not told me all! I have been odiously calumniated. You have given ear to impostors. There is room for many blows in a heart like mine; you cannot kill it easily. It is eternally yours, without division.

I tell you nothing of what is in my soul; I have neither strength nor ideas. I suffer through you. So long as it is from your hand, why should I complain? Ah! you shall see that I know how to love. Our hearts will always understand each other.

Paris, March 9, 1834.

My angel returns to me; ah! I will hide my anguish from you, my griefs, my terrible resolutions of a week in which all things have come together to rend my heart. You, Monday; Tuesday. I quarrelled, perhaps to fight, with Émile de Girardin,—that was happiness. There’s a society I shall never see again and never want to see. My enemies are setting about a rumour of my liaison with a Russian princess; they name Madame P... I have seen since my return only Madame Appony, Madame de C..., Madame de G..., and, for one hour, Madame de la B... That rumour can come only from Geneva, and not from me, who have never opened my mouth about my journey. Here I am, on bad terms with Madame de C[astries] on account of the “Duchesse de Langeais”—so much the better. But all this happens at once. So, no solitude shall ever be more complete than mine.

I have but an hour in which to answer you. Oh! my love, I swear to you I wrote to Madame P... only to prevent the road to Russia being closed to me. It would be poor cleverness to have it said here, in Paris, that I am starting for Russia. That is the way to have passports refused to me when I ask for them. I have not seen Zaluzki. Is it he who talks? Mon Dieu! I, in my hole, to be subjected to such griefs. Read the “Duchesse de Langeais.” You will read it with delight. As true as that I love and adore you, I never said more than two sentences to Madame Bossi, and I never looked at her.

You desire, oh, my angel, that I shall not again be coquettish except with men. But between now and Vienna there is only toil and solitude. Give me the means to send you my book, and your coffee, in which will be your hair-chain. Therefore, undo the parcel yourself.

Never give yourself such anxieties again; yesterday, Saturday, without la dilecta, I should have killed myself. Oh! I entreat you, if you wish that I should esteem you and adore you to the end of our days, do not change; be solely mine. I, do you see? have none but you. The superhuman efforts that I make are the greatest proofs of love a man can give. Oh, dear, adored one, my Eve, my Eva, to give his life, what is that? Nothing. Each time that I saw you I gave it without regret. I sacrificed all to you. But to rise every day at midnight to plunge into a crater of work, and to do it with one name upon my lips, one image in my heart, one woman before me!—strength and constancy; I live only by the sentiment of grandeur which a mysterious love conveys to me. This is loving. Oh! be my true Beatrice, a Beatrice who gives herself, but remains an angel, a light! All that your jealousy can demand, all that your caprice can exact shall be done with joy. Except the dilecta, who corrects my proofs and who, I swear to you, is a mother, no woman shall hear me, shall see me.

My mother and sister have decided. They will live together, and not come to me. I am still free.

Oh, my love, my love, dear and adored, forgive me my answer to your letter; but to sacrifice a love like mine to a child, to a husband, to reject it for any interest whatever; that kills me. Oh, my angel, to think that you are a fancy, after all that you said to me, after all that you exacted, all that I accomplished,—it is enough to die of it! I am proudly a poet; I live by the heart, by sentiments only, and I have but one sentiment. My dilecta, at sixty years of age, is no longer anything but a mother; she is all my family, as you are all my heart, all my future! I have to work hard; the “Duchesse” will appear on the 15th; she excites all Paris already. Mon Dieu! a thousand kisses; may each be worth a thousand. Oh, my angel, I hope I may not again have to tell you that to betray me in the name of any one whatever is to put me to death. I kiss you with transport. The Bengali is virtuous. He is dead under his toil.

Put Ave on the inkstand. The “Contes Drolatiques” will tell you why.

I have said nothing. I had a thousand effusions of the soul; I am forced to keep them back. This letter must go to the post at one o’clock. I received yours at midday.

Paris, March 11, 1834.

My flower, my one sole love, I have just received the letter you wrote me after having received the letter of badnesses. Oh! what happiness to be able to write to you once more so that you can leave Geneva without a regret! Since the letter in which you return to me, you cannot imagine how beautiful, grand, sumptuous, has been the fête in my heart at the recovery of your cherished heart. What joy, what intoxication of thought, what forgetfulness of pain, or rather how sweet its memory is, since it tells me how much you are loved, adored, as you wish to be. Oh! if you had seen all that, never a suspicion, nor a doubting word, nor a written phrase would dishonour the purity, the blue immensity of this love that dyes all my soul, fills all my life, is become the foundation of all my thoughts.

For the last two days I am drunk with happiness, glad, joyous, dancing, when I have a moment, jumping like a child. Oh, dear talisman of happiness, darling Eva, minette, wife, sister, family, light, all! I live alone in delights; I have said a sincere farewell to the world, to all. Mon Dieu! forgive what you call my coquetries; I kneel at your beloved knees, dimpled, loved, kissed, caressed; I lay my head against you, I ask pardon, I will be solitary, a worker, I will walk with none but Madame de B..., I will work without ceasing. Oh! blessed be the Salève, if the Salève gives me my happy Eve! Ah! dearest, I adore you, don’t you see? I have no other life, no other future.

I received yesterday a letter from Madame P... I shall not answer it, to end the correspondence. Besides, I can write only to you. My time is taken up in a frightful manner. For the last ten days I have not varied it; to bed at six o’clock, rising at midnight. I shall do this till April 20. After which I shall take two weeks’ liberty to rest. My book will appear on the 16th, the day of your departure from Geneva. You will find it addressed to you, bureau restant, at the coach office in Genoa.

I wrote you in great haste on Sunday. Incredible tales are being told about me. While I am sitting up all night they say an Englishwoman has eloped with me. It is no longer a Russian princess; it is an Englishwoman. Oh! my dear treasure, I implore you, never let your dear celestial forehead be clouded by the effect of a “they say,” for you will hear it gravely said that I am crazy, and a thousand absurdities. Write to me and expect an answer. I never keep you waiting. Your dear writing overcomes me; it shines in my eyes like the sun. I feel you, I breathe you when I see it.

You will travel surrounded by the thoughts of love; I accompany you in idea, I never leave you. At each correction made, at each page written, I cry, “Vienna!” That is my word of joy, my exclamation of happiness. Why do you speak of God? There are not two religions, and you are mine. If you totter, I shall believe in nothing. Oh! my love, you have given me yourself; you will never withdraw it. One alone cannot break that which belongs to two. You are all nobleness, be all constancy. I shall be that without effort, with joy; I love you like my breath, and in æternum; oh, yes, for all my life.

I cannot tell you the sufferings of my week of passion, of my desire to go and end my days at your house in Neufchâtel. I told Borget to come at once. I withdrew “Séraphita” from the printers, and meant to send you a sole copy (without the manuscript), bound with your gifts of love. In short, a thousand follies, a thousand tempests agitated my heart cruelly. Oh! I am much of a child! It is a crime to torment a love so true, so pure, so unutterable! Oh! how angry I was with you! I cursed your analyzing forehead, on which I place a thousand kisses of love. Oh! my good treasure, make me no more bitterness. In writing a few sweet things to Madame P... I had in view to stand well with the dear ambassadress, because, through her, I shall have Pozzo di Borgo, and I do not want any hindrance to my year in the Ukraine, the first complete happiness of my life. So, if your cousin shows you my letter triumphantly, play the disdained, I entreat you. To see the Ukraine, eighteen good months! and no money interests to hamper me! I can even die for you without wronging any one. Listen, my love; this is the secret of my nights: that I may be happy without a thought to tarnish my joy! After that, I can die happy, if I have lived one year beside you. Every hour would be the most beautiful poem of love. At every hour I should be happy with the happiness of a child, a schoolboy, who believes with delight in the love of a woman. If heaven marries us some day, at whatever moment of my life it be, it will be the union of two souls in one. You are a dear, loved spirit. You please me in all ways, and you are, far-off or near, the superior woman, the mistress always desired, each of us sustaining the other. It is so sweet to a man to find that the mind, the heart, the soul, the understanding of the woman who pours out to him his pleasures, is not narrow.

Oh! dearest, all is in you. I believe in you, I love you, and as I have known you better I have found a thousand reasons for eternal attachment in esteem and in the thousand things of your heart and mind. There is no evil possible for me when I think of the life that you can make me by your love. In writing this, which you will read in that room of love before quitting it, I wish to cast upon this paper which you will hold all my soul, all the tangible qualities of a being who is yours forever; never withdraw from me the heart I have pressed, the adorable charms of that cherished soul—yourself in short.

Adieu, soul of my soul, my faith, strength, courage, love—all the great sentiments that make a great man, and a happy life. Adieu; à bientôt, and sooner than you think, dearest.

Yes, I will love you better than any woman was ever loved, and our “Chêne” will be better than that you picture to me. Coquette, indeed! You know well that my heart will rest in yours without other clouds to our love than those you make.

Come, Auguste, carry this to the general post-office.1

Paris, March 30—April 3, 1834.

I have not written to you sooner, madame, because I presumed that you would not be in Florence before the 1st of April. I have sent to the address of MM. Borri & Co. a little package containing your copy of the second part of the “Études de Mœurs au XIXe Siècle,” and I have added the Prologue of the third dizain of the “Contes Drolatiques” for M. Hanski, inasmuch as there is something in it about a famous inkstand, and things that will make him laugh; for I do not insult you with my Prologue, pay attention to that. It is to M. Hanski, and not to you, that this proof belongs.

You will see at the end of the “Duchesse de Langeais” that I have preserved a remembrance of the Pré-l’Évêque by dating the work from that revolutionary and military spot where we saw such warlike intentions. The third dizain is also dated from the Eaux Vives, and the Hôtel de l’Arc.

I have many things to tell you, but little time to myself. My third Part is in the press, and I ought to make up for time lost. Nevertheless, Madame Bêchet is a very good person.

Forgive the want of order in my letter, but I will tell you the events that have happened to me as they come into my memory.

In the first place, I have said adieu to that mole-hill of Gay, Émile de Girardin and Company. I seized the first opportunity, and it was so favorable that I broke off, point-blank. A disagreeable affair came near following; but my susceptibility as man of the pen was calmed by a college friend, ex-captain in the ex-Royal Guard, who advised me. It all ended with a piquant speech replying to a jest.

Another thing I must tell you is that I have recently quarrelled also with the Fitz-James. And here I am, as much alone as the woman most ambitious of love could desire, if any woman could wish for a man whom excessive work is withering more and more. It is two months to-day that I have been working eighteen hours a day.

The “Médecin de campagne” will be completely sold off in a few days. I am in all the fuss and worries of getting out a new edition of that book, which I want to sell at thirty sous, in order to popularize it.

Thursday, April 3.

From March 30, the day on which I began to write to you, until this evening, I have been lying on my pallet unable to write, read, or work, or do anything at all. A prostration of all my forces made me very anxious; but to-day I am quite well, and I am going for a week to the Pavilion in the forest of Fontainebleau. I have ordered all my letters to be kept in Paris. I want change of air, and to work at one thing only; for I have just suffered very much, but, thank God, it is all over. I resume my letter.

I invited your cousin Bernard... to dinner, with Zaluski, and Mickiewicz, your dearest poet, whose face pleased me much. Bernard is very handsome and was very witty.

I entreat you, madame, to send me word, by return of post, if you will still be in Florence May 10th, how much time you stay in Rome, when you arrive, and when you will leave; because when my third Part is done I shall have twenty days to myself. I want to use them in travelling and doing nothing, and I shall accompany Auguste Borget to Florence. We shall leave May 1st and it takes only eight days from Paris to Florence.

Do not blame me too much for the unpunctuality of my correspondence. In the extreme desire for Liberty which possesses me, I don’t consult human forces, I work exorbitantly. I have at this moment in press: two volumes of my third Part of the “Études de Mœurs,” two volumes of “Les Chouans,” and the third dizain; then, in a week from now, two volumes for Gosselin. It is enough to terrify one. But there are two magic words which make me able to do all: liberty on the 1st of September; Vienna on that day; and I shall not regret my nights or my tortures, for pen-receipts will tally with expenses.

Mon Dieu! what a charming project,—to be in Florence May 10, and back in Paris for the 20th! To see Florence with you! Write me quickly; for after these terrible toils through the month of April I must have twenty days’ rest, and I know nothing more delightful than to see an Italian city while accompanying a friend.

I think of you very often, and I much regret Geneva, where I worked so much, all the while amusing myself. Except for a few worries, my affairs are going well. Some flatterers say that my fame is increasing, but I know nothing of that, for I live in my chimney-corner, working for citizen rights in the Ukraine. Your poor “Séraphita” is laid aside. What is promised must be done before all else. You yourself, without knowing it, tell me to work. I keep before me the bon à tirer [order to print] which you gave for one sheet in Geneva, and it seems to me a perpetual counsel. Do you know, it is rather melancholy to think of you only with regrets. You do not know that for twelve or fifteen years, Neufchâtel and Geneva are the two sole periods when I have been permitted, by what grace of heaven I know not, to look neither forward nor back; to live beneath the sky without thinking of griefs, or business, or poverty; you have been to me something beneficent. There is more gratitude in my remembrance than you know. And now that I have been nailed to an insatiable table for two months, and shall be for another month, leaving it only to sleep, I cannot think without emotion of the walks to Sacconex, to Coppet, and of your house, and my hunger which made us leave the garden where we were sitting under the willows and you discovered that good smell in the Indian chestnut, macerated in water. There are none of those tranquil pleasures in Paris. But I am not in Paris now.

Here I am alone, much alone. I have parted from society, and have returned to my former fruitful solitude. Before all things else, I must finish a book, and the “Études de Mœurs” ought to be finished this year. My liberty will be to go and come and remain where I please to go and remain. Nevertheless, I do not know a more agreeable trip than to Florence to see you for five days, and hear you for one single evening say “tiyeuilles” or “Iodet.” That, I think, would restore my courage for another three months.

Perhaps I shall bring M. Hanski the third dizain to laugh away his “blue devils;” at any rate, he must be very ill if he resists my wild joy. It is two months since I laughed; one more will make three; but then he shall die of laughing. Tell him that as Geneva was so base in the matter of the poor Poles, I will never speak well of Geneva again. Are you comfortable in Italy? How did you cross the mountains? I follow you in thought. Have you thought of your poor, humble moujik and his blonde capricieuse at Aix? You ought to have thought of him at Aiguebelles, where the servants at the inn are so gracious, and at Turin, where he wished to go. Thank you, madame, if you think a little of him who thinks much of you.

I have not seen Grosclaude. Our Exhibition is detestable. There are five to ten fine pictures in three thousand five hundred canvases.

How is your dear Anna? You will tell me, won’t you, how your little caravan rolls on? M. Bernard... came yesterday to make me compliments on the “Duchesse de Langeais,” and was very gracious.

Mon Dieu! you will forgive me—me, a poor hermit toiler—for talking to you so much of myself, because I am calling for your egotism in reply; to talk to me solely of yourself would be doing well by me. I can tell you only two things: I work constantly, I pay, I think of my friends. I have in my heart a happy corner, and that ought to suffice to make a noble life. My “blue devils” have no time to rise to the surface.

Do you still intend to play Grandet at Wierzchownia? for in that case I shall await thirty invitations before going there, to save provisions. Do you want anything in Paris? I hope that you and M. Hanski will not employ any other correspondent than me. But Borget and I will arrive laden with cotignac, peach preserves, and Angoulême and Strasburg pâtés. You ought to give me a commission; you don’t know what pleasure it is to me to busy myself for something a friend asks of me, how it brightens my life. A fancy—that’s myself only; but the fancy of another, whom I love, is a double fancy.

Spachmann [binder] has done your album, and I am beginning to collect the autographs. It will take long, but you shall have it, with patience. I begin with the oldest. Pigault-Lebrun is eighty-five years old; he shall begin it.

Adieu, madame, I would like to keep on writing to you always, just as when I was by your fireside I did not want to go away. But I must bid you adieu—no, not adieu, but au revoir. I shall await with great impatience your answer, to know if you will be in Florence May 10. Do be there! The shorter the journey, the longer time I shall have to see you; I have twenty days to myself, no more. The twenty-first I must resume the yoke of misery.

Madame de G[irardin] has made many efforts to get me back again, but your obstinate moujik—he would not be moujik if he did not say “nie”—has said nay as elegantly as he could, for he is a little civilized, your devoted moujik.1

Honoré De Balzac.

You know that all I wish to say to those about you; my regards, my respects, will have more value by passing through your lips.

Frapesle, near Issoudun, April 10, 1834.

Madame,—Since I had the pleasure of writing to you I have been very ill. My night work, my excesses, have been paid for. I fell into a state of prostration which did not allow me to read or write or even to listen to a sustained discussion. My bodily weakness equalled the intellectual weakness. I could not move. What has frightened me most is that for the last two years these attacks of debility have increased. At first, after a month of toil, I would feel one or two hours’ weakness; then five hours, then a whole day. Since then the weakness has become excessive, lasting two days, three days. This time it came near death; but for the last ten days I am convalescent.1 The doctor ordered me change of air, absolute repose, no occupation, and nourishing food. So I am here for ten days in Berry, at Issoudun, with Madame Carraud.

To-day, April 10th, I am better; I can write to you and tell you of my little death-struggle, my despair, for, feeling no force, no thought within me, I wept like a child. But to-day I recover courage; passato, pericolo, gabbato il santo. I shall laugh at the doctor who said to me:—

“You will die like Bichat, like Béclard, like all those who abuse by their brain the human forces; and what is so extraordinary in this is that you—you the most energetic forbidder of emotion, you the apostle who preach the absence of thought, you who pretend that life goes off in the passions and by the action of the brain more than by bodily motions,—you will be dead for having neglected the formulas you formulated!”

From all this has resulted, madame, a good and beautiful project of opposing to each month of toil a full month of amusement. So, from the 10th or 12th of May, I shall take twenty days in which to go and see you for two or three days wherever you are in Italy. If you are willing to see Saint Peter’s at Rome in June, we will see Rome together. Then, after admiring Rome for five days, I will come back and take up my yoke. Next, having spent July and August on new pensums, I will go to see Germany, and salute you once more in Vienna, for I don’t know anything sweeter than to give a purpose of friendship to a journey of pure amusement, to go in search of two or three gentle evenings, and make you laugh, and chase away the “blue devils.”

You have not written to me; do you know that there is ingratitude in you? it is you who have a “French” heart. What! not the smallest little line! Nothing from Genoa, nothing from Florence. You received, I hope, in Florence, my third Part, and the third dizain to make M. Hanski laugh.

Just now I am completing the third Part, and doing a master-work,—“César Birotteau,”—the brother of him whom you know, victim like his brother, but victim of Parisian civilization, whereas his brother is the victim of a single man. It is another “Médecin de campagne,” but in Paris; it is Socrates stupid, drinking, in shadow and drop by drop, his hemlock; an angel trodden underfoot, an honest man misjudged. Ah! it is a great picture; it will be grander, more vast than anything I have yet done. I want, if you forget me, that my name should be cast to you by Fame, as a reproach.

Do you know, madame, that you are very seriously in my prayers of night and morning,—you and all those you care for? You do not truly know the heart which chance has made you meet. A desire to boast possesses me—but no; time will be to you a too constant, too noble eulogy on me. I do not wish to add to it.

As soon as “Birotteau” is printed, the third Part out, the dizain in the light, I shall rush joyously to Italy to seek your approbation as a sweet reward. Maître Borget cannot come with me; you will see him, no doubt, in Venice; but the artist moves slowly, he sips all, whereas I am forced to go like the wind and return like a vapour. Borget is here, and returns with me to Paris, April 20.

Poor Madame Carraud is very unwell, and is causing alarm to her friends. She confided to me the secret of her sufferings. She is perhaps pregnant, and another child would be her death. She has hardly strength to live.

I beg of you, write me in detail about your travelling life, that I may know all your joys and even your disappointments. I have so much admired the splendid face of Mickiewicz; what a noble head! Write me what you think of the “Duchesse de Langeais.” Kiss Anna on the forehead for me, her poor horse. Present my regards to M. Hanski; how does Italy suit him? My respects to Mademoiselle Séverine. To you, madame, my most affectionate thoughts.

I must bid you adieu for to-day, because work calls me. In ten days, after “Birotteau” is done, I will write you a long letter and make up arrears. I will tell you my past troubles, my sufferings laid to rest, and my sensations, inasmuch as you deign to take an interest in your poor literary moujik. Your beautiful Séraphita is very mournful; she has folded her wings and awaits the hour to be yours. I will not have a single rival thought disturb that thought you have adopted. Perhaps I will bring her to Rome that she may be done, little by little, under your eyes. Each day enlarges the picture and magnifies it.

I have not had time to answer Madame Jeroslas...; she cannot be pleased with me; truly it is not possible for me to write except to you and the persons who are nearest to my heart. One has but three friends in the world, and if one is not exclusive for them, what good is it to love? When I have an instant to myself I am too tired to write; but I think; I carry my thoughts back to Geneva, I utter, mechanically, “tiyeuilles,” and I illusion myself. Then a proof arrives, and I return to my sad condition of workman, of manual labour.

Well, adieu. Be happy; see the beautiful scenery, the fine pictures, the masterpieces, the galleries, and say to yourself if some gnat hums, or the fire sparkles, or a flame darts up, it is a friend’s thought coming from my heart, from my soul toward you; and that I, too,—I would like my share in those beautiful enjoyments of art, but that I am here in my galley, having nought to offer you except a thought—but a constant thought.

I wrote you on the day I felt recovered; therefore have no fear if you take an interest in my health. I have no more weakness except in the eyes.

Paris, April 28, 1834.

Madame,—I have just received your good letter of the 20th, written in Florence; and you know by this time that it is impossible for me to go there. You must have received my little line from Issoudun, in which I asked you with great cries for Saint Peter’s in Rome. For that trip I can answer. At that time all my affairs will be arranged. But Madame Bêchet needs me and my Parts, otherwise she will be compromised.

I hope you have not mingled anything personal in your reflections on: “it was only a poem” [conclusion of the “Duchesse de Langeais”]. You feel, of course, that a Thirteener must have been a man of iron. You would not accuse an author of thinking all he writes?

If painters, poets, artists were sharers in all they represent, they would die at twenty-five. No, my duchess is not my Fornarina. When I have her—but I have a Fornarina—I shall never paint her. Her adorable spirit may animate my soul, her heart may be in my heart, her life in my life, but paint her, show her to the public!—I would sooner die of hunger, for I should die of shame.

I am very glad that you do not yet know me fully; because now you may, perhaps, love me better some day. Mon Dieu! what you tell me of your health and that of Monsieur Hanski made me bound in my chair. Madame, in the name of the sentiment, the sincere affection I bear you, I implore you when you or Monsieur Hanski or your Anna are ill, write to me. Don’t laugh at what I am going to say to you. Recent facts at Issoudun proved to me that I possess a great magnetic power, and that either by a somnambulist, or by myself, I can cure those who are dear to me. Therefore, have recourse to me. I will leave everything to go to you. I will devote myself with the pious warmth of true devotion to the care that illness needs, and I can give you undeniable proofs of that singular power. Therefore, put me in the way of knowing how you are. Don’t deceive me, and don’t laugh at this.

Your romances afflict me. Why have such dark suppositions? Mon Dieu! as for me, when I dream, I dream of happiness only.

Yesterday, some one told me the secret of my journeys was discovered, and that I had been to join Queen Hortense. I laughed much at that.

You make me weep with rage when I read what you say of Florence. Shall I ever meet with all that again? Oh! make me very supplicating to M. Hanski for the eight days I can be in Rome. See! it is possible. Saint Peter’s day is the 23rd of June. I can leave Paris on the 12th for Lyon, and reach Marseille the l5th, whence a steamboat takes you in forty-eight hours to Civita Vecchia. I could stay eight or ten days in Rome without doing any harm to my affairs; for all, doctors and somnambulists, are unanimous in beseeching me to balance a month’s work by a month’s amusement. Now there is nothing that takes me so out of my work as music and travel—in Paris no interest excites my soul; I live in a desert; I am, as it were, in a convent; the heart is moved by nothing. Rome would be a grand and beautiful distraction if I were there alone, but with you for cicerone what would it be! And this is not said from gallantry, à la “charming Frenchman.” No, it is said from heart to heart, to the woman of the North, to the barbarian!

I have broken with everybody; I was tired of grimaces. I have but two unalterable friendships here which are true, and to which I at times confide. Then, I have work into which I fling myself daily.

This letter will still reach you in Florence. It will tell you feebly my regrets, which are boundless. This heavy material life, which I so largely escaped in Geneva, oppresses me here. I thirst for my liberty, for freedom, and if you knew what prodigies of will, what creating persistence is needed to secure no more than my twenty-four days in June and July, you would say, like one of my friends who has perceived a little of the intellectual working of my furnace (and you know more than a mere acquaintance), that Napoleon never showed as much will, or as much courage.

What you have written me about Montriveau [in the “Duchesse de Langeais”] worries me, for you are a little epigrammatic, and it would be a great grief to me to be ill judged or misunderstood by you. You are the second person to whom I have shown my mind in its truth. I like to let no one penetrate it, because if they do, what is there to give to those we love? You did not mean to wound me, did you?

I like your judgments on Florence and works of art much; and I would greatly like, if you will be so good to your moujik, that you should study Rome, so that when I come I may not stop to look at bagatelles, but see in my eight days all that there is of really fine, and good, and masterly, which goes to the soul. Do not say “Montriveau” to me again. Remember that I have the life of the heart and the life of the brain; that I live more by sentiments than by the caprices of the mind; that I would rather feel than express ideas; and that neither way does wrong to the other. One needs a little intellect to love.

I write you as it comes, without premeditation; for I must tell you that I am in the midst of “Les Chouans,” which I am printing with extreme rapidity, causa metalli, to put an end to some debts. But no matter! my scribbling will surely tell you that a loving thought follows you wherever you go, and that there is at a fireside near the Observatoire a poet who takes interest in your steps, is troubled by your cough, and made uneasy by Monsieur Hanski’s illness. I was already uneasy enough at receiving no letters from you. I belong to you like a moujik, and if M. Hanski gives wheat to his, you owe to me, moujik of Paulowska, a few straws of affection, here and there. You might have written to me three times since Turin.

I will tell you nothing of my combats; I am occupied solely by my work and by a life which is also a work for me; not a poem, madame, but all that there is of good and beautiful upon this earth. Thus, everything here, politics, men, and things, seem to me very paltry beside what I feel in heart and brain.

I am every day more grieved to have been forced to abandon “Séraphita;” but in Rome it shall be the work of my choice. It belongs to you and it ought to be done beneath your eyes.

Mon Dieu! if you are better, tell me so quickly. Throw into the post these words only: “I am,” or “We are better.” It is so good to see the writing, the painting, of a thought escaped from the heart of a friend! You don’t know how, in the evening, when I am very weary, my castle in the air, my novel, my own, is Diodati; but a Diodati without the deceptions of your novels; a Diodati without bitterness in its dénouement. Of us two, am I indeed the younger and the one most full of illusions? There are days when I say tiyeuilles, laughing like a child, and those who take me for a grave man would be stupefied. Come, don’t knock down my dreams, my castles. Let me believe in a cloudless sky. Since I exist I have lived by unalterable beliefs only, and you are one of those beliefs. Don’t cough and look dark; may the troubles of spleen never come either to you or to M. Hanski, to whom my letter is half addressed; take it only as a talk full of affection.

Our Exhibition has nothing regrettable. M. Hanski would not have bought much there; but if I were rich I should like to send you one picture, an Algiers interior, which seems to me excellent. Borget is preparing for his journey; you will see him in Venice perhaps, for he moves slowly.

I beg of you, madame, tell me whether, according to this new arrangement, we can meet in Rome; for I begin to perceive that I am writing to you to know that. You would be very good if you would torment M. Hanski in order to obtain it. In the first place, if you torment him you will amuse him; you will substitute for his blue devils real annoyances; next, you will create a little conjugal drama, in which you will be victorious; and it is so good to triumph, especially over a husband.

Well, once more adieu. To all those who are near you give the remembrances of a poor workman in letters, who subscribes himself your affectionate, your wholly devoted servant and friend,

Honoré De Balzac.

I am reading over your letter to see if I have forgotten anything. No; I have answered all, and only omitted to tell you one thing, because it is too daily: it is that I press, across space, the pretty hand you hold out to me so graciously, and wish a thousand pleasures to your caravan.

À bientôt in Rome; for work, alas! will make me consume the time with terrifying rapidity. Adieu, I cannot quit my pen any better than I could quit your house in Geneva.

You chose to laugh, à la Française, at my “beautiful marquise, whose fine eyes make me die of love.” I will play the Frenchman and tell you to turn that speech round, except as to the beauty of the eyes. Fie! it is not nice to be always showing me the rock on which my vanity was wrecked. Come, admit that you have not been frank, or it will be the ground of a quarrel in Rome—if one could quarrel with you on meeting again.

Paris, May 10, 1834.

I have this moment received, madame, your letter of April 30. Alas! I have buried my hopes of the Rome trip. It always costs me horribly to renounce an illusion; all my illusions seem to be one and inseparable.

I have but a moment to answer you, for in order that you may get this letter before you leave Florence, on the 20th, it must be posted to-day, and it is now twelve o’clock. You do not tell me where you are going. Is it to Milan? What will be your address? How long shall you stay? I could see you there if I went with Borget. But at any rate, in September, at Vienna. That is more reasonable.

Mon Dieu! yes, the advice you give is impossible to follow. With the certainty of risk, I risk myself. There are no thanks worthy of the kindness you show in speaking to me so frankly of what I do; and you will not know, except in course of years, how grateful I am for this frankness. Do not be afraid; go on, blaming boldly.

You tell me to go to Gérard’s; have I the time? Time melts in my fingers. To bring to an end my crushing liabilities I have undertaken a tragedy, in prose, called, “Don Philippe et Don Carlos.” It is the old subject of Don Carlos already treated by Schiller. All must march abreast; the little literature of copper coins, the puerilities, the studies of manners and morals, and the great thoughts that are not understood,—“Louis Lambert,” “Séraphita,” “César Birotteau,” etc.

My life is always the same. I rise to work, I sleep little. Sometimes I let myself go to gentle reveries. Since I last wrote to you, I have had but one recreation; I heard Beethoven’s symphony in C minor at the Conservatoire. Ah! how I regretted you. I was alone in a stall—I alone! It was suffering without expression. There exists in me a need of expansion which toil beguiles, but which the first emotion brings to the surface like a gush of tears. Yes, I am alone, deplorably alone. To find happiness I need the evening hour, silence, not work, but solitude and my inmost thoughts.

Write me quickly where I shall send you “Les Chouans,” which will appear on the 15th, five days hence. Florence will certainly see me; you have been happy there. I shall go and pick up your thoughts in seeing those beautiful places, those noble works. I am only jealous of the illustrious dead: Beethoven, Michel Angelo, Raffaelle, Poussin, Milton,—all that was ever grand, noble, and solitary stirs me.

All is not said about me yet; I am only at the little details of a great work. When a man has undertaken what I have to do,—ah! madame, permit me to confide this to your heart,—it is impossible to fall into the petty and base intrigues of this world; sentiments ought to be as great as the works desire to be great. My ambition is even stronger on the side of sentiments than it is for a fame which, after all, shines only upon graves! So, I live alone, more alone than ever; nothing drags me from my contemplations: to love and to think, to act and to meditate. To develop all one’s strength on two great things,—work and the richest emotions of the soul,—what can one ask more than that? A drop of friendship, a little sunshine; to press a hand by which we can support ourselves.

Your advice upon my writings proves to me that on one point you have crowned my ambition. I would that I could send into your soul by this paper the emotions of pleasure your letter has caused me. But that is difficult.

So I cannot see you again until Vienna! Till then I shall not listen again to the only person who has made me hear a language completely poetical and largely generous. I must stop, for you will take truth for flattery. What a hindrance is writing; how often one look has more meaning than all words. Well, you will divine whatever I think that is good, and all that time prevents me from saying. You wall tell yourself that it is impossible for a solitary man—a man often crushed by work and lost in Paris—not to think, every day, of persons who love him truly; you will know that I am occupied with you, and am gathering for you those autographs.

Mon Dieu! what a number of things to tell you! How the Academy wanted to give the Montyon prize to the “Médecin de campagne,” and what I did to avoid being put in the competition,—as many applications and proceedings were needed as the other competitors made to obtain the prize. And about my tragedy, and my other works in hand! But it is very difficult not to forget one’s self in thinking of you.

If you go to Milan, if you stay some time, if I can go and say bonjour to you for a few days, tell me; for from the 20th to the 30th of June I should be very glad of an object for a trip, and I know none that would give me such keen happiness. I will inquire about Bartolini; but I see plainly you do not know our sculptors. In the Exhibition there was a statue of Modesty which might crush the antique; in sculpture we have great talents that are real. You like Bartolini, so I will like him, and I will make Gérard like him. But you think no longer of Grosclaude; do you know that your admirations have something which might alarm any other heart than a sincerely friendly one?

You have shown such exquisite feeling for my poor “Chouans” that, to make it less unworthy of you and me, I have delivered myself up to patient toil such as my printer alone has an idea of. You will re-read the book in Milan, no doubt. The third Part of the “Études de Mœurs” will not be ready before the first days of June. I should much like to have Susette take them to you from the author, who would then solicit an audience and recover from the fatigues of the journey through the hope of seeing you.

Alas! I have such business on hand that the devil and his horns could not get away. But I am a three-horned demon, of the race, rather degenerated, of Napoleon.

A thousand gracious thoughts and memories. Find here all that you can wish in a heart full of gratitude and devotion.

What! will you really be in Vienna in July? So soon! These distances placed between us seem to me like farewells. But I shall go to Germany in September. I shall arrive rich with some successes; which please me now only because you take an interest in them; you make them more essential to me for this reason.

Well, here is the hour. I do not know where to write to you, but I shall write all the same, and when your new box comes I will send it to you. There is no lake at Vienna, therefore give me the hope of seeing the Lago Maggiore with you. At Vienna I shall do my reconnoitring on the Danube, in order to paint the battle of Wagram, and the fight at Essling, which are to be my work during the coming winter in the Ukraine, if you will have me. But I must also see the countries through which Prince Eugène marched from Italy across the Tyrol.

Adieu, adieu, you whom one does not like to leave. You know as well as I all that I think, and you must be kind enough to give expression to my sentiments to your travelling companions. Oh! how I wish I could have seen with you the city of flowers!

Paris, June 3rd—June 21, 1834.

I have this moment received, madame, the last letter you did me the honour to write to me from Florence; I hope, therefore, that this one will find you in Milan in time to prevent false hopes, as you are so kind as to interest yourself in my excellent Borget. He is still at Issoudun, and will take Italy by way of the Tyrol, beginning by both banks of the Rhine; therefore he will have no chance of meeting you. I am sorry. His is one of those fine souls one needs to know in order to judge of man and have some ideas of the future.

I myself renounce with sorrow the pleasure I had planned, of bidding you good-day in Milan. You put such grace and urgency into your inquiries as to my situation that I cannot help speaking of it to you after summing it up for myself. I still owe six thousand ducats [sixty to eighty thousand francs]; this will be comprehensible to you if turned into your currency. Between now and the last of October, I must pay off two thousand. The remaining four thousand are owing to my mother. But until the end of October I have five hundred ducats to pay monthly; and since my return from Geneva my pen and my courage have sufficed until now to pay that sum. If by the end of September I am free, I shall have done marvels. But until then neither truce nor rest. My tranquil, joyous winter must be won at this cost. The doctor thinks well of the Baden waters. This is my situation.

For the last two months I have worked night and day at the work you honour with your preference. You have had much influence on my determination relating to that work [“Les Chouans”]. In the desire to make it worthy of your friendship I have re-made it. It is not yet perfect, because, absorbed in the faults of the ensemble, I have let pass faults of detail and several mistakes. But, such as it is, it may now bear my name and you can avow your charitable protection. It has needed a courage no one will give me credit for; but the secret of my perseverance and my love for this work has been in my desire to be agreeable to you, and to deserve one of those approbations which intoxicate me with pleasure, and to hear from your lips, when I have shaken off the enormous weight of my troubles, that the work pleases you. I shall send it to Florence to M. Borri, requesting him to forward it to you in Milan; and I shall also send it to Trieste, so that this poor first flower may be certain to receive your friendly glances. I have been delighted with it, and I have let myself be persuaded that you are right in liking it. I have tried to justify your preference. Marie de Verneuil is much finer, and the work has been well cleaned up; but, as the printer said to me: “It is not forbidden to put butter on spinach,”—a saying worthy of Charlet.

Great news! Pichot is dismissed from the “Revue de Paris;” I return there with several pecuniary advantages, which will help me to get free. “Séraphita” serves me to re-enter with great éclat. The work has surprised Parisians. When the last number appears I shall add a letter of envoi to you, in which you will find the dedication, which I shall try to make worthy of you, simple and grand. It was not put in the beginning because I did not wish to dedicate to you a book not finished.

Here is a whole long month that I have worked to pure loss on my third Part. I am dissatisfied, vexed with what I do. Nevertheless, you will find it at Trieste. I must make a composition in the style of “Eugénie Grandet,” to sustain this Part [of the Études de Mœurs].

My affairs are, at this moment, complicated by a transaction I have proposed to M. Gosselin, to annul our contracts, which will require six thousand francs in cash paid to him, for which he will return my agreements. That point obtained, I shall have no engagements except with Madame Bêchet; and by three months of great labour I could, by the end of September, take the road to Germany, poor, but without anxieties, carrying my tragedy to do, and idleness to enjoy near you. If you knew what cares, debates, labours were necessary to reach this result! But what happiness to recover liberty, what pleasure to do what one likes!

Spachmann is no longer Coquebin. By my efforts, and those of my sister, he has just married a young and pretty girl who will have some fortune. She brings him five hundred ducats, which make him rich, and she has four thousand more in expectation. Mademoiselle Borel was quite wrong; here’s a happy man made. I thought of you in marrying this poor binder, about whom we laughed and talked at your fireside in Geneva.

The greatest sorrows have overwhelmed Madame de Berny. She is far from me, at Nemours, where she is dying of her troubles. I cannot write you about them; they are things that can only be spoken of ear to ear. But I am all the more alone, deplorably alone,—as much alone, that is, as I can be, for treasures are in my thought during the hours of repose and calmness which I take with delight. All is hope for me, because all is belief.

If you knew how much there is of you in each rewritten phrase of the “Chouans”! You will only know it when I can tell you in the chimney-corner at Vienna, in some hour of calm and silence when the heart has neither secrets nor veils.

The correction of the second edition of “Le Médecin de campagne” draws to a close, and I am half-way on with the third dizain,—so that I now am driving abreast nine volumes. My life is sober, silent, self-contained. Nevertheless, a lady has crossed the straits and written me a beautiful letter in English, to which I have answered that I only understand French, and that I respect ladies too much to give it out for translation. The affair stopped there. I received a letter from Madame Jeroslas..., delightful in style and quite surprising. I have not yet replied.

Those are all the events of my life since I wrote you last.

“Philippe le Réservé” is put aside. Nevertheless, the literary world is very curious about my play. In reply to what you deign to write me about it, I must tell you that Carlos was so deeply in love with the Queen that there is sufficient proof that the child of which she died pregnant (“treated for dropsy, for God took pity on the throne of Spain, and blinded the doctors,” says the sensitive Mariano) was the Infant’s. So in my play the Queen is guilty, according to received ideas. Carlos idem; Philippe II. and Carlos are fooled by Don John of Austria. I conform to history and follow it step by step. However, according to all appearance, this work will be done under your eye, for it is the only thing that can be done while travelling, and you shall then judge of the political depths of that awful tragedy. It needs a lead well guarded by ropes to gauge it! Two of my friends are ardently rummaging historical manuscripts that I may miss nothing. I want to obtain even the plans of the palace and the rules of etiquette of the Spanish court under Philippe II.

MM. Berryer and Fitz-James wish to have me nominated for deputy, but they will fail. The matter will be decided within a month, and you will know it, no doubt, at Trieste. If I were nominated I should have myself ordered to Baths, for the portfolio of prime minister would not induce me to renounce the dear use I mean to make of the first moment of liberty I have ever won in my life.

The farther I go on, the higher is the ideal I form of true happiness. For me, a happy day is more than worlds. When I want to give myself a magnificent fête I shut my eyes and lie down on a sofa, and absorb myself in remembering the silly things I said to you with my pa’ole d’ôneû panachée,1 beside the Lake of Geneva, and I go over again that good day at Diodati, which effaced a thousand pangs I had felt there a year before. You have made me know the difference between a true affection and a simulated affection, and for a heart as childlike as mine there is cause there for eternal gratitude.

Yesterday I went to see my mother and found her much changed, very ill and quite resigned. I have been sad ever since. In settling and clearing up our accounts a fortnight ago she fretted greatly about what would happen to me if she died, and that constant foresight pained me. Yesterday I was far more sad. She is very good to me. She has sent for me, but to-day I cannot go because I am expecting an arbitrator to whom I must explain the Gosselin affair. But to-morrow I shall go quickly. I have now only fifteen days in which to do a volume which is impatiently demanded, and never did I have less warmth of imagination.

June 20.

You are at Milan. I am not there! This letter, begun seventeen days ago, has remained unfinished by force of circumstances. In the first place, the return of my brother from the West Indies with a wife (was it necessary to go five thousand miles to find a wife like that?); then annoyances, vexations without number, besides work. The publisher of “Les Chouans” has not paid me. Here I am, with notes falling due. Then, M. Gosselin demands ten thousand francs, nearly a thousand ducats, to break our contract; I am trying to find them. But the greatest misfortune is this: after much trouble I had succeeded in finding a subject for my third Part; but after doing half a volume I flung it into the box of embryos, and have begun anew with a grand, noble, magnificent subject, which will give you, I hope, both honour and pleasure. According to my ideas, and according to my critics, it is above everything else. But I have had to make up for time lost. Ah! madame, what hours of despair and terrible insomnia between the 3rd and the 20th of June. There must have been sympathy!

Believe in me, I entreat you. Whether you go to Vienna or to Wierzchownia, my winter is destined to you. I want to flee Paris; I want absolutely to dig out in silence my Philippe II. You will see me arrive with the rapidity, the fidelity of a swallow.

I shall go, in July, to Nemours to write, away from Paris, which is intolerable in summer, my fourth and fifth Parts of the “Études de Mœurs.” If I can end them in September I shall make untold efforts to get the last printed by the beginning of November. Perhaps you will still be in Vienna the first fifteen days of that month. I would like to know your itinerary, for I shall take, as soon as I can, fifteen days’ liberty, and shall go, naturally, to the country you are in.

I send to-day, to Trieste, the “Chouans” for you, and the second edition of the “Médecin de campagne” for Monsieur Hanski, as you have yours. I will send my third Part later, for I am very impatient to have your opinion about this new production. When “Séraphita” is finished I will bring her to you, bound by the husband of the pretty girl of Versailles. You will see he had not the heart to continue Coquebin to do that savage binding of cloth and satin. But if I could know how long you stay at Trieste, I could leave here July 10th and be at Trieste the 16th, see you for three days, and get back again. I have a thousand things to bring you; the cotignac, the perfumes, and tutti quanti.

I shall end this letter by saying: à bientôt. The hope of crossing many countries to find you at the end of the journey gives me courage. I work, now, twenty consecutive hours. Well, I must bid you adieu, saying, as gracefully as I can, that you are less a memory to me than a heart-thought, and that you would be very unkind to fling in my face forever that I am a Frenchman. Remember, madame, that I am a Coquebin who does not marry, or at least only marries with the Muses. I have been alarmed by reading in Hoffmann (article on Vows) a severe judgment on Polish women; still, I had, to tell the truth, a pleasurable evening in thinking that the article was true for you in all that was flattering, and false in all that was cruel.

Our poor Sismondi has been roughly demolished (the word is true) in the “Revue de Paris” of last Sunday. His “Histoire des Français” has been rased, destroyed—from garret to cellar.

Poor Madame de Castries is going away, dying, and so dying that I blame myself for not having been there for a month, for those infamous Parisians have deserted her because she suffers. What a sad sentiment is that of pity. Therefore!—Ah!

Friday, 21.

I have been for several days sad and distressed. I did not tell you this yesterday. The post hour went by, and I kept this letter. Yes, I have failed in hope, I who live only by hope, that noble virtue of the Christian life. “Le Médecin de campagne” reappears to-morrow. What will be its fate?

I have been very happy this morning; you could never, perhaps, guess why. I should have to paint to you the state of a poor solitary who stays in his cell, rue Cassini, and whose only rejoicing is in a tiny winged insect which comes from time to time. The poor little gleam was late in coming, and I was horribly afraid, saying to myself: “Where is she? Is anything amiss with her? She has been eaten up!” At last the pretty little creature came. Once more I saw my bête à bon dieu, iridescent, a little mournful; but I put it on my paper and asked it, as if it were a person: “Have you come from Italy? How are my friends?”

You will take me for a lunatic—no, for I have heart and intellect, and only trespass through excess, not want, of sensibility. That is how a man who wrote the “Treize” can weep with joy on again beholding the scales of his little insect.

Well, adieu. I wish that you might have the same quiverings. That is only saying that one is still young, that the heart beats strong, that life is beautiful, that one feels, one loves, and that all the riches of the earth are less than one hour of sensuous joy such as I had with my little insect. And, also, do you know how much of joy, amber, flowers, grace of the countries it flies through, that little creature can bring back? See all that poesy can invent about a bête à bon dieu, and what lunatics are hermits and dreamers!

Well, adieu; be happy on your journey; see all those fine countries well. As for me, I am furious at being nailed to this little mahogany table, which has been so long the witness of my thoughts, sorrows, miseries, distresses, joys—of all! Thus I will never give it except to ——. But I will not tell you all my secrets to-day.

To-day I am gay. I have been so sad nearly all this month! There are my beautiful blue flowers in the barren fields between the Observatoire and my window drooping their heads. It is hot. Nevertheless, if I want to see you this winter I must mind neither weariness, nor heat, nor weakness.

Would you believe that the second edition of the “Physiologie du Mariage” does not appear, that those men will not pay me, and that I shall have another lawsuit on my hands? Mon Dieu! What have I done to those fellows!

Kiss Anna on the forehead. Oh! how I wish I were her horse again. Offer my regards to M. Hanski. Put all that is most flowery in French courtesy at the feet of your two companions, and keep for yourself, madame, whatever you will of my heart.

Paris, July 1, 1834.

Ah! madame, nature is avenging herself for my disdain of her laws; in spite of my too monastic life my hair is falling out by handfuls, it is whitening to the eye! the absolute inaction of my body is making me fat beyond measure. Sometimes I remain twenty-five hours seated. No, you won’t recognize me any more! The moments of despair and melancholy are more frequent. Griefs of all sorts are not lacking to me.

I wrote three half-volumes before finding anything suitable for the third Part of the “Études de Mœurs.” It will at last appear on the 20th of this month. (Be satisfied, it is not I who am elected deputy.)

You will tell me, will you not? where I am to send my third Part. Do not deprive me of the happiness of being read by you, which is one of my rewards. I still have three months’ arduous labour before me; shall I finish before October? I don’t know. I am like the bird flying above the face of the waters and finding no rock on which to rest its feet. I should be unjust if I did not say that the flowery island where I could repose is in sight of my piercing eyes; but it is far, far-off.

I should like to write to you only good news; but, although arranged, my compromise with M. Gosselin is not yet signed. I must find a thousand ducats, and in our book business nothing is so scarce; for books are not francs—and not always français!

I laugh, but I am profoundly sad. “La Recherche de l’Absolu” will certainly extend the limits of my reputation; but these are victories that cost too dear. One more, and I shall be seriously ill. “Séraphita” has cost me many hairs. I must find exaltations that do not come at the cost of life. But that work which belongs to you ought to be my finest.

Tell me to what Baths you are going, for it is possible if—if—if—that I may myself bring you various little things, such as a faultless new edition of the “Médecin de campagne,” my third Part, and the manuscript of “Séraphita,” which will be finished in August. Yes, stay at some place where I can go till September l5th.

If I compromise with Gosselin, I can free myself only by alienating an edition of the “Études Philosophiques.” That will be work added to work. In the total solitude in which I live, sighing after a poesy which is lacking to me and which you know, I plunge into music. I have taken a seat in a box at the Opera, where I go for two hours every other day. Music to me is memories. To hear music is to love those we love, better. It is thinking with joys of the senses of our inward joys; it is living beneath eyes whose fire we love; it is listening to the beloved voice. So Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, from half-past seven to ten o’clock, I love with delight. My thought travels.

Well, I must say au revoir; as soon as my compromise is made I will write to you about it in detail. Never find fault with my devoted friendship; it is independent of time and space. I think of you nearly all day, and is not that natural? The only happy moments I have known for a year, moments when there was neither work nor the worries of material life, were enjoyed near you; I think of you and of your wandering colony as one thinks of happiness, and since I left you I have lived only the burning life of unfortunate artists.

Was M. Hanski gratified by my attention? You shall have, madame, an edition for yourself; an edition which I shall try to make ravishing, and in which there will be a secret coquetry. Ah! if I had had your features I would have pleased myself in having them engraved as La Fosseuse. But though I have memory enough for myself, I should not have enough for a painter.

Day before yesterday, I had a visit from Wolff, the pianist from Geneva. I could have thrown the house out of windows for joy. Was it not he who asked me: “Who is that admirable lady?” So the poor lad found me very cordial, very splendidly hospitable. To see him was to fancy myself back in Pré-l’Évêque, ten steps from your house, and breathing the Genevese air.

I hope to be able to write you more at length a few days hence. I reserve to myself the right to write my tragedy at Wierzchownia. I have amused myself like a boy in naming a Pole M. de Wierzchownia, and bringing him on the scene in the “Recherche de l’Absolu.” That was a longing I could not resist, and I beg your pardon and that of M. Hanski for the great liberty. You couldn’t believe how that printed name fascinates me.

What a good winter to be far from the annoyances of Paris, absorbed in a tragedy, struggling with a tragedy, laughing every evening with you and making the master laugh, for whom I’ll invent “Contes Drolatiques” expressly for him! If I have to get to you through driving snow-storms I shall come! And after that, I’ll go to the Emperor Nicholas himself to obtain permission for you to come to Paris and see the fiasco of my play!

Adieu, you who are seeing every day new countries, while I can see but one! I hope Anna is well, and that M. Hanski has none of his black dragons, that Mademoiselle Borel smiles, that Susette sings, that Mademoiselle Séverine still retains her graceful indifference, and you, madame, that vigorous constitution which is a principle of living joys; but also of pains; my desire is that God shall take all sorrow from your cup. Do not forget to tell me where you will stay after Trieste.

I send you a thousand flowers of the soul and of affection.

Paris, July 13, 1834.

It is now a long time, madame, since I beheld your pretty writing, and my solitude seems to me deeper, my toil more heavy. I gaze with a gloomy air at that box in which you sent me jujubes, which now holds my wafers.

Are you in Venice? Are you at Trieste? Are you travelling? Are you resting? You see, I think of you, and I do not want to waste all the reveries into which I plunge, so I send you one. Oh! I am so bored in Paris! Never did its atmosphere so weigh upon me. I breathe in fancy the air you breathe with an enthusiastic jealousy! It is, they say, so light, it would suit my lungs so well. Mon Dieu! work is crushing me, and for all hippogriff I have only that jujube-box and Anna’s dog-inkstand, poor little dear!

I am writing at this moment a fine work, the “Recherche de l’Absolu;” I tell you nothing about it; I want you to read it without bias, and with all the freshness of ignorance of its subject. Where will you be then?

My business affairs are cursed. Nothing comes to a conclusion. That ambulating roast-beef, into whom God has thrown all the thoughts that make for silliness, called Gosselin, stops us by petty things. Next Tuesday we may end the matter, perhaps; I will immediately write to you. Put on one side thirty-seven thousand francs to pay, and on the other side twenty-eight francs’ worth of paper, a bottle of ink, and a few quill-pens I have just bought, and you will have an idea of my position, assets, and debts. To reach an equilibrium, I need iron health, not talent, but luck in my talent. Six volumes more for the said Bêchet to publish, and twenty-five 12mos for the first edition of the “Études Philosophiques”! After all that is done, I shall have a few crowns left and “liberty on the mountain.” When I say on the mountain, I mean plain, for the Ukraine is, you say, a flat country.

There are my affairs, madame. As for sentiments, they are, by reason of restraint, a thousand times more violent than you ever knew them since you have consented to be my confidant. But that person would be very content if she knew all that I hide from her, for it is very difficult to express sentiments that lie at the bottom of one’s heart. They need, not only a tête-à-tête, but a heart-to-heart. Mingle with this fury of work a furia d’amore and a fury of business and a few good memories which come to me when I listen to good music—trying not to hear the Duke of Brunswick, who germanizes in my box sometimes; for this dethroned prince, being no longer a lion, makes himself a tiger with us. (You will not catch that poor joke if I did not tell you that our box is called the tiger box. Forgive the digression, but I know how you like to know all the little details of Parisian life.) So now you have an exact view of the meagre existence your moujik lives; he is, for the rest, as virtuous as a young girl. The “Recherche de l’Absolu” will tell you that; “Séraphita” better still.

Truly, I am writing with a gay pen, and I am sad; but my sadness is so great that I am afraid to send you the expression of it. I would sell my fame and all my literary baggage (if I had no debts) for the pebbles on the road to Ferney. If you would buy my books in bulk I would write them for you little by little, or tell them to you in the chimney-corner. Make M. Hanski buy a principality, for I should not like to be jester to any but a prince; self-loves should be conciliated. You could give me such pretty caps and bells! As for salary, I would take it in the laughs that would come from your lips. But you would be expected to give me eulogies and lodgings, cakes and bells. No Barkschy; I make conditions. But a fool would have to hide his heart. Well, well, you would not want me. Mon Dieu! how often in my life I have envied Prince Lutin! [Puck.]

I wish you all enjoyments of your journey. I must now go and finish a “Conte Drolatique” while you are getting into the carriage and saying, perhaps: “I did not think that this Frenchman whom I accused of levity on our way to the lake of Bienne was so sincere when he told me he was capable of attachment.” Ah! madame, poor men have only a heart, and they give it; I am a poor man, a manual labourer who works in phrases as others carry a hod.

If I were free, I should bathe to-night in the Adriatic, and then go and tell you some joyous tale, review the ducal houses in the “Almanach de Gotha,” or play patience. You made me adore patience—and I live by patience. But I drudge, I suffer much.

Paris, July 15, 1834.

I wish you to find this letter on your arrival in Vienna. Day before yesterday I posted a letter to you in Trieste, and ten minutes later your good long letter from Trieste came. Ah! that, indeed, is writing! That is making some one happy! Boor Alphonse Royer, who wrote “Venezia la bella,” did not tell me in two volumes what you have told me about Venice in two pages. I said to a friend who came in just as I was putting your letter into the pretty box I have had made to hold them,—for to me your letters are beings, fairies which bring me a thousand delights; I am dainty for my fairy-letters,—-I said to him: “We are ninnies, we who think we can write. We ought to kiss the slippers of certain women, the side where the slippers touch the ground, for within, none but the angels are worthy of that!”

Thanks for your letter; how many things I want to answer and must put off to another day, not wishing to speak now, except of things I have much at heart.

You have not understood me about “Séraphita.” I declare to you that I have more jealousy of heart than you accuse me of; for if, after promising me a testimonial of friendship, you were to forget it, I should suffer in all that is most sensitive in heart and soul and body. Therefore, I wanted to avoid the same suffering to you by explaining that the envoi would be in the last article, to make my happiness the more transcendant. That last chapter, the “Transfiguration,” is to me what, in its own degree, the picture was to Raffaelle. Leave me the right to put your name upon my picture at the moment when the almost gigantic conception of that work is about to be comprehended. But, after reading your letter, I think there was conceit in my thinking you would suffer. Basta! I will say no more about it.

The second number of “Séraphita” has been, for three weeks, in the printing-office, and I have worked ten hours a day upon it. I will send you the whole of it to Vienna, addressed to M. Sina. It will all be out by the end of September.

Another quarrel. I would rather be happy in a corner than be Washington in France, seeing that we have dozens of Washingtons in every street. That means that I would rather be at Wierzchownia in January than sputtering politics in the tribune of the Palais-Bourbon. This is by way of answer to your sublime retrocessa, when you wish to efface yourself behind France. As for me, I efface France beneath your sublime forehead. France, madame, is never short of great orators, great ministers, and great men in everything.

Well, the Gosselin affair is signed; I am quit to-day of that nightmare of foolishness. The illustrious Werdet (who slightly resembles the illustrious Gaudissart) buys from me the first edition of the “Études Philosophiques,”—twenty-five 12mo volumes,—in five Parts, each of five volumes, to appear, month by month, August, September, October, November. You see that to carry this through, and do three Parts of the “Études de Mœurs,” still due to Madame Bêchet, requires Vesuvius in the brain, a torso of iron, good pens, quantities of ink, not the slightest blue devil, and a constant desire to see, in January, Strasburg, Cologne, Vienna, Brody, etc., and to fight with snow-drifts. I do not mention that bagatelle called health, nor that other bagatelle called talent.

Now you know the programme of my life, and if I had a lady of my thoughts you must own she would be much to be pitied, unhappy woman! Fortunately, she is, very sadly, the lady of my thoughts only; and I know she is very joyful to find me hindered.

For all this fine work M. Werdet is to give me fifteen thousand francs, and whatever of glorification I can catch above the bargain. This, joined to the rest of the “Études de Mœurs,” will free me entirely, and leave me with a few crowns, which are in this low world, the wings on which we fly o’er distances.

Do you know why I am so gay that there is gaiety in my grumblings? It is that I have seen once more the pretty little scribble of your writing; that I know you to be, except for the sufferings of travel, perfectly well, and Anna too.

Adieu, a thousand tender feelings of the heart. Ah! be reassured. Madame de C... insists that she has never loved any one but M. de M..., and that she loves him still, that Artemisia of Ephesus. This evening I say good-bye, at Liszt’s, to Wolff, that young face from Geneva—where I was so young!

When you write to me from Vienna, tell me, I entreat you, how long you stay. Something tells me that I shall see Vienna with you; that means that I shall like Vienna. You must tell me what the Germans think of “Séraphita.” You will receive, in Vienna, the third Part of the “Études de Mœurs,” which leaves here, addressed to M. Sina (mon Dieu! how I do like that name!), about the end of this month. So you will have it during the first ten days of August.

A thousand tender regards.

Paris, July 30, 1834.

Oh! my angel, my love, my life, my happiness, my strength, my treasure, my beloved, what horrible restraint! what joy to write to you heart to heart! what shame to me if you do not find these lines at the time and place! I have been into the country for six days to finish something in a hurry.

Ohimé, I cannot start for the Baths of Baden before August 10; but I will go like the wind; it is impossible to tell you more, for to be able to go there needs giant efforts. But I love you with superhuman force.

So from the 10th to the 15th I shall be on the road. I shall have only three or four days to myself, but I bring you that drop of my ardent life with a happiness which the infinite of heaven can alone explain.

Mon Dieu! what hours full of you, of which you have only presentiments! How I have followed you everywhere! How I have, at all hours, desired you! Yes, my cherished Eve, my celestial flower, my beautiful life, stay at the Baths till September. If it takes eight days to get there, and I leave here August 15th, I shall only arrive on the 23rd, and I must be here for the first days in September. All depends on my work and my payments. The desire to be free, to be yours, has made me undertake things beyond my strength. But my love is so great; it sustains me.

Your “Séraphita” is beautiful, grand, and you will enjoy that work in three months. I need three months for the last chapter; but perhaps I will finish it near you. You warmed up my heart for the first; you ought to hear the last song!

Oh! dear, dearest adored one, tell yourself well that the love you have inspired in me is the infinite. Have neither fear nor jealousy. Nothing can destroy the charm under which I wish to live. Yes, there have been many melancholies, many sadnesses: I was a displanted tree. To see you in August restores to me happiness and courage.

Now, to come to Baden I must bring out in the “Revue de Paris” “Le Cabinet des Antiques,” of which you know the beginning. To work to go to see you, oh, what enjoyment! There is no work, there is joy in every line.

Did you receive the “Chouans” at Trieste? But you cannot answer me. You will receive this August 8 in Vienna, and the 10th I shall start. What are Neufchâtel and Geneva in comparison with Baden? Were there six months of desires, of repressed love, of works written in your name, oh, my life, my thought? One must be strong to sustain a joy so long awaited. Oh, yes, be alone!

It is impossible to write you a long letter; it would take a day more, as I only arrived this morning, and I feared that Marie de Verneuil might not find it and be vexed with him who adores her as an angel loves God. To be separated from you by only eighteen days; it is all, and it is nothing. Your little letter has made me crazy. It will be a great imprudence to go to Baden, for I have a thousand ducats to pay in September, but to see you one day, to kiss that idolized forehead, to smell that loved hair, which I wear about my neck, to take that hand so full of kindness and love, to see you! that is worth all glories, all fortunes. If it were not upon us, upon a longer time of separation that this folly falls, it would not be a folly, it would be quite simple.

Dear angel, do you know what happiness there is for me in these eighteen days, and the journey, mon Dieu! I adore you night and morning, I send you all the thoughts of my soul, I surround you with my heart,—do you feel nothing? And my sufferings in not going to Florence, in short, I will tell you all.

Dear angel, be happy if the most ardent love, the most infinite that man can feel, is the life you have desired to have, give, receive.

À bientôt, then. Oh! what a word! Three or four days of happiness will make the months of absence more supportable. Oh! my treasure, what an abyss for me is tenderness. You are the principle of this frightful courage. Will you love my white hairs? Every one is astonished that any one can produce what I produce, and says that I shall die. No; three days near you is to recover life and strength for a thousand years!

Adieu; a thousand kisses. I have held this bit of vinca between my lips while writing. To thee, my white minette, and soon. A thousand tender caresses, and in each a thousand more!1

From M. Hanski to M. Honoré De Balzac.

Vienna, August 3, 1834.

I have just received, monsieur, the copy of the “Médecin de campagne,”—that one of your works which I like best; the real merit of which I could wish were felt and recognized at its just value. I allowed myself, some time ago, to write to you fully on the impression this book made upon me; therefore I will not return to it, but simply beg you to receive my thanks for so precious a souvenir of your good friendship. My wife has told you, no doubt, of the way I was taken in by the “Moniteur.” But explain to us who your legitimist homonym is who is made deputy from Villefranche? We thought there was for France, as for us, only one M. de Balzac; and, in that conviction, I was preparing a long letter of congratulation. In it I spoke of a certain cause [he means that of the Duchesse de Berry, then imprisoned at Blaye], of which, knowing your generous heart, I hoped to see you the champion. But, at the sweetest moment of these illusory dreams, my wife brought me your letter, and told me that you were not a deputy. Disappointed, I cursed the fatality that presides over the things of this world; I consigned my fine epistle to the flames, and the blue devils returned in troops to assail me.

But adieu, monsieur; my wife is, no doubt, writing you a long gossip. More at this time would bore you. I therefore end, assuring you of all my friendship.

Venceslas Hanski.

To Madame Hanska.

Paris, August 1—August 4, 1834.

I have received your letter, written from Vienna, madame. You have probably received two from me, addressed to J. Collioud, with the “Chouans” and the “Médecin de campagne.” Distances are so little calculable. I believe that up to the present time I have had such true sympathies that my inspirations have always been like those of my friends. I have forgotten nothing,—neither Marie de Verneuil, nor your “Chouans,” nor M. Hanski, who will have his “Médecin de campagne.”

I am a little chagrined. The imbeciles of Paris declare me crazy in view of the second number of “Séraphita,” whereas the elevated minds are secretly jealous of it. I am worn out with work. Too much is too much. For three days past I have been seized by unconquerable sleep, which shows the last degree of cerebral weariness. I dare not tell you what an effort I am making now to write to you. I have a plumophobia, an inkophobia, which amount to suffering. However, I hope to finish my third Part by August 15. It will have cost me much. And for that reason I am afraid of some heaviness in the style and in the conception. You must judge.

The “Cabinet des Antiques” will appear in the “Revue de Paris,” between the second number of “Séraphita” and the last, for the “Revue” makes the sacrifice of holding the latter back till I can finish it. You know the beginning of the “Cabinet des Antiques.” It made one of our good evenings in Geneva.

Let M. Hanski console himself; I shall be deputy in 1839, and then I can better, being free of all care and all worries, act so as to render my country some service, if I am worth anything. Between now and then I expect to be able to rule in European questions by means of a political publication. We will talk about that.

I have had many troubles. My brother made a bad marriage in the Indies, and the poor boy has neither spirit, energy, nor talent. Men of will are rare!

I shall go to see you in Vienna if I can get twenty days to myself; a pretty watch given at the right moment to Madame Bêchet may win me a month’s freedom. I am going to overwhelm her with gifts to get peace.

I have many troubles, many worries. The kind M. Hanski would not have his black butterflies if he were in my place. My second line of operations is now to be drawn out. I shall have the first Part of the “Études Philosophiques” printed within ten days. It will appear at the same time as the third Part of the “Études de Mœurs.” There is but God and I, and the third person, who is never named, who are in the secret of these works which affright literature. I have sixty thousand volumes this year in the commerce of publishers, and I shall have earned seventy thousand francs. Hence, hatreds. But, alas! of those seventy thousand francs nothing will remain to me but the happiness of being free of all debt after being ruined by it.

You are very fortunate, madame, to be able to take the Danube baths; but write me soon if they are removing those frightful nervous headaches which frightened me so much. Do not suffer. Preserve your health. When you walk, do not wear those little shoes that let in water, as they did the day we went to Ferney.

Do you know I feel a little vexed with you that you can think that a man who has my faith and my will can change, after all I have written to you. In the matter of money alone I do not do all I would; but in whatever belongs to the heart, to the feelings, in all that is the man you can have few reproaches to make to me.

Write me, very legibly, your addresses in Vienna and Baden, for I find it impossible to make out the name of the hotel where you are now.

I am to see, some day soon, an illustrious Pole, Wronsky, great mathematician, great mystic, great mechanician, but whose conduct has irregularities which the law calls swindling; though, if closely viewed, they are seen to be the effects of dreadful poverty and a genius so superior that one can hardly blame him. He has, they say, one of the most powerful intellects in Europe.

Monday, 4.

I have been forced to interrupt my letter for a day and a half; I have not had two minutes to myself to collect my thoughts. There has been a deluge of hurried proofs and corrections; ouf! I beg you to recall me to the memory of all who compose your caravan.

Our Paris is very flat, very sad. MM. Thiers and Rigny have, they say, lost five millions at the Bourse, in consequence of the invasion that Don Carlos has made all alone. Every one talks war here, but no one believes in it. The king has dismissed Soult in order to remain at peace.

Adieu. I hope, madame, that you will amuse yourself at the Baths, and gain health; but you must walk a little. My life is so monotonous that I can tell you little of myself that is worth telling. One thought and work, that is the life of your moujik. You—you are seeing countries, you have the movement of travel which occupies and diverts. Ah! if I could travel, I would go to Moravia.

Adieu. If you hear anything in the air, if a pebble rolls at your feet, if a light sparkles, tell yourself that my spirit and my heart are frolicking in Germany. Wholly yours,

Honoré.

Paris, August 11, 1834.

Thank you, madame, for your good and amiable letter of the 3rd of this month. The envelope delighted me with its hieroglyphics, in which you have put such religious ideas.

I have many answers to give you. But a thousand million wafts of incense for your ideas on “Philippe le Discret.” You share my sentiments on Schiller and my ideas of what I ought to do.

Oh! spend the winter in Vienna? I shall be there, yes—You have the books? Good.

No, I see no one, neither man nor woman. My tigers bore me; they have neither claws nor brains. Besides, I seldom go to the Opera now.

How sweet your letter is! with what happiness I have read it! that description of your house, the flowers, the garden, your life so well arranged, even the blue devils on the watch for M. Hanski. Thank you for all the details you give me.

At the moment when I was reading the religious part of your letter, that where the good thoughts went to my heart, my Carmelite nuns, who had opened the windows of their chapel on account of the heat, began to sing a hymn which crossed our little street and my courtyard. I was strangely moved. Your writing gleamed in my eyes and softly entered my heart, more living than ever. This is not poesy, but one of those realities that are rare in life.

“La Recherche de l’Absolu” kills me. It is an immense subject; the finest book I can do, say some. Alas! I shall not be through with it before the 20th of this month, in nine days. After that, I spread my wings and take a three weeks’ furlough, for my head cannot sustain another idea. On the 21st I shout: “Vive l’Almanach de Gotha!” God grant that ten days later I present to you myself the “Absolu.” I will not tell you anything about it. That’s an author’s coquetry, which you will pardon when you lay down the book.

My life, it is fifteen hours’ toil, proofs, author’s anxieties, phrases to polish; but, there’s a distant gleam, a hope which lights me.

At last, France is beginning to bestir itself about my books. Fame will come too late; I prefer happiness. I want to be something great to increase the enjoyments of the person loved. I can only say that to you. You understand me and you will not be jealous of that thought.

Madame de Castries is dying; the paralysis has attacked the other leg. Her beauty is no more; she is blighted. Oh! I pity her. She suffers horribly and inspires pity only. She is the only person I go to see, and then for one hour every week. It is more than I really can do, but that hour is compelled by the sight of that slow death. She lives with a cataplasm of Burgundy pitch from the nape of the neck to the loins. I give you these details because you ask for them.

So, constant labour, sundry griefs, the condition of Madame de Berny, who, on her side, droops her head like a flower when its calyx is heavy with rain. She cannot bear up under her last sorrows. Never did a woman have more to endure. Will she come safely out of these crises? I weep tears of blood in thinking that she is necessarily in the country, while I am necessarily in Paris. Great sorrows are preparing for me. That gentle spirit, that dear creature who put me in her heart, like the child she most loved, is perishing, while our affection (that of her eldest son, and mine) can do nothing to allay her wounds? Oh! madame, if death takes this light from my life, be good and generous, receive me. I could think only of going to weep near you. You are the only person (Borget and Madame Carraud excepted) in whom I have found the true and sanctifying friendship. In case she dies, France would be horrible to me. Borget is away; Madame Carraud has not, in herself, the feminine softness that one needs. Hers is an antique rectitude, a reasoning friendship which has its angles. You feel, you!

Yes, I am overwhelmed by this sorrow which approaches; and that divine soul prepares me for it, so to speak, in the few lines she is able to write to me. Yes, I have only your heart into which I can shed the tears that are in my eyes while writing this in Paris.1 I am horribly alone; no one knows the secrets of my heart. I suffer, and before others I smile. Neither my sister nor my mother comprehend me.

These are sad pages. I have some hope. Mme. de Berny has such a rich constitution; but her age makes me tremble; a heart so young in a body that is nearly sixty, that is, indeed, a violent contrast. She has dreadful inflammations between the heart and lungs. My hand, when I magnetize her, increases the inflammation. We were obliged, therefore, to renounce that means of cure; for, as I wrote you, I was able to spend ten days with her the last of July. Oh! be well yourself! you and yours! Let me not tremble for the only beings who are dear to me, for all, at once!

I needed your letter this morning, for this morning I received a letter from a mutual friend of Madame Bêchet and me, telling me of her commercial distresses. If my book is not ready to appear she wants compensation for the delay; the “Absolu” ought to have been finished in two months! That irritated me. I was weeping with rage—for he does weep, this tiger; he cries out, this eagle!—when your letter came. It fell into my heart like dew. I blessed you. I clasped you like a friend. You serened me, you refreshed my soul. Be happy. Shall I ever cause you a like joy? No, I shall always be your debtor in this way.

I have had other griefs. My Boileau [M. Charles Lemesle], my hypercritic, my friend, who judges and corrects me without appeal, has found a good many blunders in the first two 12mo volumes of the “Médecin de campagne.” That makes me desperate. However, we will take them out. The work shall, some day, be perfect. I was ill for two days after he showed me those blunders. They are real. We are washing up between us “La Peau de Chagrin.” There must be no faults left on that edition. Add to all this money anxieties, which will not leave me tranquil till January, 1835, and there you have all the secrets of my life. There is one about which I do not speak to you. That one is the very spring of my life; it is my azure heaven, my hope, my courage, my strength, my star; it is all that one cannot tell, but it is that which you will divine. It is the oleander, the rose-bay tree, a lovely form adored beneath it, the twilight hour, a revery!

Adieu; I return to my furrow, my plough, my goad, and I shout to my oxen, “Hue!” I am just now writing the death of Madame Claës. I write to you between that scene of sorrow entitled the Death of a Mother, and the chapter entitled, Devotions of Youth. Remember this. Remember that between these two chapters your greeting, your letter, full of friendship, came to give me back a little courage and drive away a thousand gloomy phantoms. There you were, shining like a star.

The happy husband, no longer coquebin Spachmann, will bind the manuscript which you must put with that of “Eugénie Grandet.” As for that of the “Duchesse de Langeais,” it has been dispersed, I don’t know how. I am very careless about my manuscripts. You had to set a value upon them which made me proud, in order to make me keep them for you. So with those of “Séraphita,” I am like a mother defending her young.

Do you know what courage there is in calling one’s self legitimist? That party is very abject. The three parties that divide France have all descended into the mud. Oh! my poor country! I am humiliated, unhappy at all this. We shall rise out of it, I hope.

I send you no commonplaces. To tell you that I keep in reserve a thousand sincere and gentle, tender feelings would be nothing; a feeble portion, indeed, of a friendship which makes me conceive of the infinite. May the Danube make you strong and give you health; I love the Danube better than I love the Seine.

I have seen Prince Puckler Muskau here, and he seemed to me a little Mephistophelean, sprinkled with Voltaireanism. He told me that I was much appreciated in Berlin, and that if I went there—Ha! ha! bravi! brava!—But what I like in foreign lands is the good nonsense that I shall talk in the chimney-corner of 73 Landstrasse.

Adieu; distribute my friendship, regards, and remembrances to those about you as you will.

Paris, August 20, 1834.

Yesterday I had an inflammation of the brain, in consequence of my too hard work; but, by the merest chance, I was with my mother, who had a phial of balm tranquil, and bathed my head with it. I suffered horribly for nine or ten hours. I am better to-day. The doctor wants me to travel for two months. My unfortunate affairs allow me only twenty days. I have still ten days’ work on the “Recherche de l’Absolu,” which has, like “Louis Lambert,” two years ago, very nearly carried me off. But on the 1st or 2nd of September I shall be on my way to see Vienna. Impossible to give myself a more agreeable object for a journey. So, between the 7th and 10th, I shall have the pleasure, you will let me say happiness, of seeing you.

No, I have had no more letters from your cousin. Something that I do not know must have made her quarrel with me.

I think as you do on Lamennais’ work, “Les Paroles d’un Croyant.” I nearly got myself devoured for saying that from a literary point of view the form was mere silliness, and that Volney and Byron had already employed it, and that as to doctrines, they were all taken from the Saint-Simonians. Really, those kings on a slimy, evil-smelling rock are only fit for children.

Adieu; you will be indulgent to a poor artist who rattles on with the intention of having no thought, of being very boyish, and desires only to let himself go to the one affection that never wearies: friendship and the sweetest things of the heart. Thank M. Hanski in advance for his good little letter. At this moment I have no strength to write more than what I do here. That strength is what in the eighteenth century they would have called “force of sentiment.”

I am so glad to know that you are well lodged and pleased with your house.

Paris, August 25, 1834.

I may have alarmed you, madame, but Madame de Berny is better. She is not recovered, however. No, she remains in a condition of cruel weakness.

Two days ago I wrote that I should start for Germany; but that was folly, for it takes ten or twelve days to get to Vienna, as much to return, and I have but twenty to dispose of. No, it is not possible in the situation in which I am. “La Recherche de l’Absolu” consumes so much time that I find myself in arrears in all my deliveries of copy, consequently in all my payments.

On another hand, I cannot go without leaving the end of “Séraphita” for the “Revue de Paris,” and how can I determine the time it will take me to finish that work, angelical to some, diabolical to me?

All this worries me; I cannot have my liberty till the month of November, and then will you still be in Vienna? Yes. But I shall have only a month to myself, and the question will still be the same. I see how it is; I must wait till “Philippe II. is done.”

I have the weakness and the species of physical melancholy that comes from abuse of toil. The life of Paris no longer suits me; and while I feel in my heart a veritable childhood, all that is exterior is aging. I begin to understand Metternichism in whatever is not the sole and only sentiment by which I live.

A book has just appeared, very fine for certain souls, often ill-written, feeble, cowardly, diffuse, which all the world has proscribed, but which I have read courageously, and in which there are fine things. It is “Volupté” by Sainte-Beuve. Whoso has not had his Madame de Couaën is not worthy to live. There are in that dangerous friendship with a married woman beside whom the soul crouches, rises, abases itself, is undecided, never resolving on audacity, desiring the wrong, not committing it, all the delicious emotions of early youth. In this book there are fine sentences, fine pages, but nothing. It is the nothing that I like, the nothing that permits me to mingle myself with it. Yes, the first woman that one meets with the illusions of youth is something holy and sacred. Unfortunately, there is not in this book the enticing joyousness, the liberty, the imprudence which characterize passions in France. The book is puritanical. Madame de Couaën is not sufficiently a woman, and the danger does not exist. But I regard the book as very treacherously dangerous. There are so many precautions taken to represent the passion as weak that we suspect it of being immense; the rarity of the pleasures renders them infinite in their short and slight apparitions. The book has made me make a great reflection. Woman has a duel with man: if she does not triumph, she dies; if she is not right, she dies; if she is not happy, she dies. It is appalling.

I have real need of seeing Vienna. I must explore the fields of Wagram and Essling before next June. I specially want engravings which show the uniforms of the German army, and I must go in search of them. Have the kindness to tell me merely if such things exist.

To-day, 25th, it is almost twelve days since I have received any letters from you. I live in such isolation that I count upon and look eagerly for the pleasures that come into my desert. Alas! Madame de Berny’s illness has cast me into horrible thoughts. That angelic creature who, since 1821, has shed the fragrance of heaven into my life is transformed; she is turning to ice. Tears, griefs, and I can do nothing. One daughter become insane, another daughter dead, a third dying, what blows!—And a wound more violent still, of which nothing can be told. And at last, after thirty years of patience and devotion, she is forced to separate from her husband under pain of dying if she remains with him. All this in a short space of time. This is what I suffer through the heart that created me.

Then, in Berry, Madame Carraud’s life is in peril through her pregnancy. Borget is in Italy. My mother is in despair about my brother’s marriage; she has aged twenty years in twenty days. I am hemmed in by enormous, obligatory work, and by money cares, also by two little lawsuits which I have brought to solve the last difficulties of my literary life.

For all this one needs, as my doctor says, a skull of iron. Unhappily, the heart may burst the skull. I counted on the trip to Vienna as the traveller counts on the oasis in the desert; but the impossibility of it faces me. I must be in Paris from the 20th to the 30th of September. I have then to pay five hundred ducats, and when one digs the soil with a pen gold is rare. However, labour will suffice. I shall be free in a few months, if the abuse of study does not kill me. I begin to fear it.

Tuesday, 26.

To-day I have finished “La Recherche de l’Absolu.” Heaven grant that the work be good and beautiful. I cannot judge of it; I am too weary with toil, too exhausted by the fatigues of conception. I see only the reverse side of the canvas. Everything in it is pure. Conjugal love is here a sublime passion. The love of the young girl is fresh. It is the Home, at its source. You will read it. You will also read “Souffrances inconnues,” which have cost me four months’ labour. They are forty pages of which I could not write but two sentences a day. It is a horrible cry, without brilliancy of style, without pretensions to drama. There are too many thoughts in it, and too much drama to show on the outside. It is enough to make you shudder, and it is all true. Never have I been so stirred by any work. It is more than “La Grenadière,” more than “La Femme abandonnée.”

At the present moment I am making the final corrections of style on the “Peau de Chagrin.” I reprint it and remove the last blemishes. Oh! my sixteen hours a day are well employed! I go to the Opera only once a week now.

Day before yesterday Madame Sand, or Dudevant, just returned from Italy, met me in the foyer of the Opera, and we took two or three turns together. I was to breakfast with her the next day, but I could not go. To-day I have had Sandeau to breakfast, who told me that the day after that woman abandoned him he took such a quantity of acetate of morphia that his stomach rejected it, and threw it up without there having been the slightest absorption. I was sorry I had not received the confidences of Madame George Sand. He regretted it too,—-Jules Sandeau. The poor lad is very unhappy at this moment. I have advised him to come and take Borget’s room, and share with me until he can make himself an existence with his plays. That is what has most struck me the last few days.

Well, I must bid you adieu, and this adieu, in place of the au revoir bientôt on which I had counted, saddens me to a point I cannot express. Remember me to all about you. I shall write next to M. Hanski to thank him for his letter, and explain to him that the present parliament will be, for the next five years, insignificant. All the European questions in connection with France are postponed till 1839.

A thousand constant regards.

From H. De Balzac to M. Hanski.

Paris, September 16, 1834.

Monsieur,—I should be in despair if you would not undertake my defence towards Madame Hanska, though I feel, indeed, that even if she would deign to forget two letters which she has the right to think more than improper, the friendship she would then have the goodness to give me would never be like that with which she honoured me before my culpability. Nothing restores a broken tie, the join shows always; an indelible distrust remains.

But permit me to explain to you, the only person to whom I can speak of this, the mistake which gave rise to what I shall always regard in my life as a misfortune. But consider for a moment the boyish, laughing nature that I have, and on which I would not now intrench myself if I had not made you know it; it is because I have been with you as I am with myself, with the person I love best, that I justify myself.

Together with this hearty boyishness there is pride. From any other I would rather receive a sword-thrust, were it even mortal, than lower myself to explain what I have done. But to mend the chain, to-day broken, of an affection that was dear to me, I don’t know what I would not do.

Madame Hanska is, indeed, the purest nature, the most childlike, the gravest, the gayest, the best educated, the most saintly and the most philosophical that I know, and I have been won to her by all that I love best. I have told her the secret of my affections, so that I could always be with her as I wished.

One evening, in jest, she said to me that she would like to know what a love-letter was. This was said wholly without meaning, for at the moment it referred to a letter I had been writing that morning to a lady whom I will not name. But I said, laughing: “A letter from Montauran to Marie de Verneuii?” and we joked about it.

Being at Trieste, Madame Hanska wrote me: “Have you forgotten Marie de Verneuii?” (I saw she referred to the “Chouans,” for which she was impatient) and I wrote those two unfortunate letters to Vienna, supposing that she remembered our joke, and replying to her that she would find Marie de Verneuii in Vienna.

You could never believe how shocked I was at my folly when she answered me coldly on account of the first, when I knew there was a second; and when I received the three lines that she wrote me, of which, perhaps, you are ignorant, I was truly in despair.

For myself, monsieur, I would give you satisfaction; it is very indifferent to me to be or not to be (from man to man); but I should be, for the rest of my days, the most unhappy man in the world if this childish folly harmed, in any way, Madame Hanska; and that is what makes me write to you thus.

Therefore, on my part there was neither vanity nor presumption, nor anything whatever that is contemptible. I wrote (admitting myself to blame) things that were unintelligible to Madame Hanska. I am here in a situation of dependence that excludes all evil interpretation; besides which, Madame Hanska’s negligence is a very noble proof of my folly and her sanctity. That is what consoles me.

I earnestly desire, monsieur, that these explanations, so natural, should reach you; for though Madame Hanska has forbidden me to write to her, and said that she was leaving for Petersburg, I imagine that you will still be in Vienna to receive this letter, or that M. Sina will send it to you.

Tell her from me, monsieur, how profoundly humiliated I am—not to be grossly mistaken, for I never thought to do more than continue the jokes we made on the shores of the lake of Geneva when we talked of the Incroyables, but—to have caused her the slightest grief. She is so good, so completely innocent, that she will pardon me perhaps for what I shall never pardon myself. I am becoming once more truly a moujik.

As for you, monsieur, if I had to justify myself to you, you will understand that I should not do it. Mon Dieu! I was so seriously occupied that I lost precious moments in writing those two letters I now desire to annihilate.

If friendship, even if lost, still has its rights, would you have the kindness to present to Madame Hanska, from me, the third Part of the “Études de Mœurs,” which I finished yesterday, and which will appear Thursday, September 18? You will find the manuscripts and the volumes with M. Sina, to whom I addressed them.

If Madame Hanska, or you, monsieur, do not think this proper, I beg you to burn the manuscripts and the volumes. I should not like that what I destined for Madame Hanska at a time when she thought me worthy of her friendship should exist and go into other hands.

“Séraphita,” which belongs to her also, will be finished in the “Revue de Paris,” September 25. I dare not send it to her without knowing whether she would accept it. I shall await your answer, and silence will be one. As “Séraphita” will be immediately published in a volume, I shall, if she is merciful, make her the humble dedication of this work by putting her arms and name on the first leaf, with these simple words: “This page is dedicated to Madame H... by the author;” and she shall receive, at any place you indicate, the volume and the manuscript.

However it be, and even if Madame Hanska offers me a generous and complete pardon, I feel that I shall always have I know not what in my soul to embarrass me. So, though I have made to this precious friendship the greatest of sacrifices in writing the present letter—for it contains things humiliating to me, and which cost me dear—I am destined, no doubt, never to see you again, and I may therefore express to you my keen regrets. I have not so many affections round me that I can lose one without tears. I was never so young, so truly “nineteen years old,” as I was with her. But I shall have the consolation to grow, to do better, to become something so powerful, so nobly illustrious, that some day she can say of me: “No, there was no wicked intention, and nothing small in his error.”

In whatever situation we may hold to each other when you receive this letter, permit me to thank you for the kind things you have said to me about my false election and the “Médecin de campagne.” Yes, if I ever enter the tribune, and seize power, the thing you speak of would crown my desires and be, in my political life, the object of my ambition. I can say this without flattery, inasmuch as it was a fixed determination before I ever knew you. I consider the primary cause a shame to France of the eighteenth century as much as to that of the nineteenth.

I have much work to do, monsieur; and I am overwhelmed by it. I did not expect this additional grief, for which I can only blame myself. Express to Madame Hanska all my sorrow, and, though she may reject them, I send her my respects, mingled with repentance and the assurance of my obedience. But perhaps she has punished me already by one of those forgettings from which there is no return, and will not even remember what occasioned my error.

Adieu, monsieur; accept my sentiments and my regrets. De Balzac.

In case you are no longer in Vienna, I have notified M. Sina of the parcel.

To Madame Hanska.

Paris, October 18, 1834.

Madame,—I went to spend a fortnight at Saché, in Touraine. After the “Absolu” Dr. Nacquart thought me so debilitated that, not wishing (as he said in his flattering way) that I should die on the last step of the ladder, he ordered me my native air, and told me to write nothing, read nothing, do nothing, and think nothing—if I could, he said, laughing.

I went to Touraine, but I worked there. My mother came here and took charge of my letters. On arriving this morning I found a heap of them, but I sought for one only. I recognized the Vienna postmark and your handwriting, which brought me, no doubt, a pardon that I accept without any misplaced pride. Had I the wings and freedom of a bird you would see me in Vienna before this letter, and I should have brought you the most radiantly happy face in the world. But here I can only send you, on the wings of the soul, a respectful effusion. In my joy I saw three Vienna postmarks, just as Pitt, drunk, saw two orators in the tribune, while Sheridan saw none at all.

I resume my correspondence according to the orders of your Beauty (capital B, as for Highness, Grace, Holiness, Excellency, Majesty, for Beauty is all that); but what can I tell you that is good? I am gay in my distress, gay because my thoughts can fly, rainbow-hued and fearless, to you; but I am, in reality, fatigued and overwhelmed with work and obstacles. Do you really care much to know about this life of a bloody crater? How can I send to you, so fresh, so pure, the tale of so many sorrows? Do you know, can you know, what sufferings a publisher can cause us by launching badly into the world a book which has cost us a hundred nights, like “La Recherche de l’Absolu.” Two members of the Academy of Sciences taught me chemistry that the book might be truly scientific. They made me correct my proofs for the tenth or twelfth time. I had to read Berzelius, toil to be right as to science, and toil to maintain style so as not to bore with chemistry the cold French reader by making a book in which the interest is based on chemistry,—in point of fact, there are not eight pages in all of science in the four hundred pages of the book.

Well, these gigantic labours which, done within a given time, have worn out twenty printers, who call me a “slayer of men,” because when I sit up ten nights they sit up five—well, these lion toils are compromised! The “Absolu,” ten times greater, in my opinion, than “Eugénie Grandet,” will go without success, and my twelve volumes will not be exhausted (as I am in making them); my freedom is delayed! Do you understand my wrath? I hoped to finish “Séraphita” in Touraine; but I have worn myself out, like Sisyphus, in useless efforts. It is not every day that we can go to heaven.

I began in Touraine a great work,—“Le Père Goriot.” You will see it in the coming numbers of the “Revue de Paris.” I put in tiyeuilles, laughing like a maniac; but not in the mouth of a young woman, no; in that of a horrible old one. I would not allow you to have a rival.

I come back here; I have my two last lawsuits to compound, my first part of the “Études Philosophiques” to launch; happily Werdet is an intelligent man and most devoted; but he has very little money. I must, under pain of seeing him fail, do “César Birotteau” by December 15; besides which, Madame Bêchet must have her fourth Part of the “Études de Mœurs” by the 1st to the 15th of November.

My pecuniary obligations are coming due, and my payments are made with difficulty. Besides which I have taken J. Sandeau to live with me; I must furnish for him, and pilot him through the literary ocean, poor shipwrecked fellow, full of heart. In short, one ought to be ten men, have relays of brains, never sleep, be always blest with inspiration, and refuse all distractions.

It is now three months since I last saw Madame de Berny; judge of my life by that feature of it. Ah! if I were loved, my mistress might sleep in peace; there is no place in my life—-I won’t say for an infidelity, but—for a thought. It wouldn’t be a merit; I am even ashamed of myself. I should have to do six hundred leagues on foot, go to Wierzchownia on a pilgrimage, to present myself in youthful shape, for I am so fat that the newspapers joke me, the wretches! That is France, la belle France; they laugh at ills produced by toil; they laugh at my “abdomen.” So be it! they have nothing else to say. They cannot find in me either baseness or cowardice, or anything of what dishonours them; and, as Philippon of “La Caricature” said to me: “Be happy; all who do not live by writing admire your character as much as your works.” I grasped his hand well that day. He gave me back my strength.

You know by the announcement of the fourth Part, that I am busy with the second volume of the “Scènes de la Vie privée,” but what you did not know of is “Le Père Goriot,” a master work! the painting of a sentiment so great that nothing can exhaust it, neither rebuffs, nor wounds, nor injustice; a man who is father, as a saint, a martyr is Christian. As for “César Birotteau,” I have told you about him.

Yes, I inhaled a little of the autumn in Touraine; I played plant and oyster, and when the skies were clear I thought it was an omen, and that a dove was coming from Vienna with a green leaflet in her beak.

I am now in my winter condition, in my study, with the Chartreuse gown you know of, working for the future. As for my joys, they are innocent,—the refurnishing of my bedroom, a cane that has made all Paris gabble, a divine opera-glass which my chemists have had made for me by the optician of the Observatoire; besides which, gold buttons on my blue coat; buttons chiselled by fairy hands,—for the man who carries, in the nineteenth century, a cane worthy of Louis XIV. cannot keep upon his coat ignoble pinchbeck buttons. It is these little innocent crotchets that make me pass for a millionaire. I have created the sect of Canophilists in the fashionable world, and they take me for a frivolous man. It is very amusing.

It is a month now since I have set foot at the Opera. I have, I think, a box at the Bouffons. Is not that, you will say to me, very comfortable poverty? But remember that music, chased gold canes, buttons, and opera-glasses, are my sole amusements. No, you will not blame them.

Shall I send you the corrected “Peau de Chagrin”? Yes. Ten days hence that Baron Sina, who fills my mind on account of his name, will receive, addressed to him, a package containing five 12mo volumes, in the style of the four of “Le Médecin de campagne,” which Maître Werdet calls pretty little volumes. They are frightful; but this edition is an edition intended to fix, definitively, the type of the grand general edition of the work which, under the title of “Études Sociales,” will include all these fragments, shafts, columns, capitals, bas-reliefs, walls, cupolas, in short, the building, which will be ugly or beautiful, which will win me the plaudite cives or the gemoniæ. Be tranquil; in that day, when the illustrated edition comes, we shall find asses on whose skin to print you a unique copy, enriched with designs. That shall be the votive offering of the pardoned one. Well, forget my fault, but I shall never forget it myself.

Do not fear, madame, that Zulma-Dudevant will ever see me attached to her chariot.... I only speak of this because more celebrity is fastened on that woman than she deserves; which is preparing for her a bad autumn.

Madame de Berny does not like “Volupté;” she condemns the book as full of rhetoric and empty of feeling. She was revolted by the passage where the lover of Madame de Couaën goes into evil places, and thinks that character ignoble. She has made me come down from my judgment; but there are, nevertheless, fine pages, flowers in a desert.

“Jacques,” Madame Sand’s last novel, is advice given to husbands who inconvenience their wives to kill themselves in order to leave them free. The book is not dangerous. You could write ten times better if you made a novel in letters. This one is empty and false from end to end. An artless young girl leaves, after six months of marriage, a superior man for a popinjay; a man of importance, passionate and loving, for a dandy, without any reason, physiological or moral. Then, there is a love for mules, as in “Lélia” for unfruitful beings; which is strange in a woman who is a mother, and who loves a good deal in the German way, instinctively. All these authors roam the void, astride of a hollow; there is no truth there. I prefer ogres, Tom Thumb, and the Sleeping Beauty.

M. de G... has made a decent little failure. Those who have wounded me never prosper; isn’t that singular? Decidedly, fate wills that I shall not see Madame de Castries. Each time that I rustle against her gown some misfortune happens to me. The last time, I went to Lormois, the residence of the Duc de Maillé, to see her, I came back on foot (to get thin). Between Lonjumeau and Antony, a sharp point inside my boot pushed up and wounded my foot. It was half-past eleven at night,—an hour at which a road is not furrowed with vehicles. I was just about to go to bed in a ditch, like a robber, when the cabriolet of one of my friends came by, empty. The groom picked me up and took me home. I believe in fate. It is in their harshness that we judge women. This one showed me a dry heart. As Eugène Sue says, the viscera were tinder; they would have stopped the blood instead of making it circulate. Pardon me; this is the remains of the nail in my boot.

Fancy, I am going to give myself the pleasure of seeing myself acted. I have imagined a buffoonery that I want to enjoy: “Prudhomme, bigamist.” Prudhomme is miserly; keeps his wife very short; she does the household work and is a servant disguised by the title of wife. She has never been to an Opera ball. Her neighbour wants to take her, and being informed of the conjugal habits of Joseph Prudhomme, she assists the wife in making a lay figure resembling Madame Prudhomme, which the women put in the bed, and go off to the masked ball. Prudhomme comes home, says his monologues, questions his wife, who is asleep, and finally goes to bed. At five o’clock the wife returns; he wakes, and finds himself with two wives. You can never imagine the fun our actors will make of that sketch; but I swear to you that, if it takes, Parisians will come and see it a hundred times. God grant it! It will only cost me a morning, and may perhaps be worth fifteen thousand francs. It is the best of buffoonery! But all depends on so many things. Some one must lend me a name; the theatres are sinks of vice, and my foot is virgin of stain. Perhaps the first and last representation will be in this letter. Better one fine page not paid for than a hundred thousand francs for a worthless farce. I have never separated fame from poverty,—poverty with canes, buttons, and opera-glasses, be it understood, and a fame easy to carry. That will be my lot.

Have I hid my real griefs? have I chattered gaily enough? Would you believe that I suffer,—that this morning I took up life with difficulty, I rebelled against my solitude, I wanted to roam the world, to see what the Landstrasse was, to put my fingers in the Danube, to listen to the Viennese stupidities—in short, to do anything but write pages; to be living instead of turning pale over phrases?

I await, with impatience, till your white hand writes a few lines in compensation of my toil; for to him who counts suffrages and estimates them, yours are worth millions. I await, as Bugeaud said, “my peck;” then I shall start off, joyous once more, on a new course across the fields of thought. Who will unfasten my bridle and take off my bit; who will give me my freedom; when shall I begin to write “Philippe le Discret,” to work at my ease—to-day, a scene; to-morrow, nothing,—and date my work Wierzchownia?

Do you know what a doublion is? It is the key of the fields,—it is freedom! Come, come! another day, my sadness! to-day the moujik is all gaiety at having kissed the hand of his lady, as in church they kiss the golden pax the priest holds out. I am well of opinion of those who love Musset; yes, he is a poet to put above Lamartine and V. Hugo; but this is not yet the gospel.

I place on you the care of thanking M. Hanski for his last letter. But I am sorry in my joy. I wish it had been any other cause than the dear little Anna’s illness that detained you in Vienna. Kiss her for me, on the forehead, if that proud infant suffers it. And finally, remember me to all about you.

You cannot have the bound “Séraphita” until New Year’s day. I would like to know if I may send Anna a little souvenir without fear of the inquisitive nose and hands of the German custom-house.

Adieu; I have given you my hours of sleep so as not to rob Werdet, or Madame Bêchet; a thousand respectful affections, and deign to accept my profound obedience.

Sunday, 19th, three in the morning.

I have not slept; I had not read all my letters. My last two difficulties are arrangeable. Two thorns less in my foot.

I have read over my scribblings. I am afraid you cannot read them; what shall I do? Have I told you all? Oh! no. There are many things that are never told.

My mother is very proud of the “Absolu;” my sister writes that she wept with joy in reading it and in saying to herself that I was her brother. Madame de Berny finds some spots upon it. She does not like that Claës should turn out his daughter; she thinks that forced. Madame de Castries writes me that she wept over it. I am sorry for the distance between Paris and Vienna. I would have liked to have your opinion first.

Ah! I may go to England for a few days (in all, ten, to go and return). My brother-in-law has just invented something wonderful, he says, relating to railroads, which might be sold for a good little million to the English. I shall try.

Did I speak to you of Prince Puckler-Muskau, and of my dinner with him at the house of a species of German monster who calls herself the widow of Benjamin Constant, but has all the air of being a good woman? Well, if I did not speak of it it will be the subject of a conversation when I am on the estates of your Beauteousness.

On my way to England I shall stop one week at Ham. The illustrious Peyronnet has expected me there for six months, and the trip has always been delayed. The Duc de Fitz-James writes to invite me to Normandy; refused.

Mon Dieu! forty letters read; it is a sort of drunkenness. Among them are two unknown ladies. One modestly asks me to make her portrait and write her life. She has green eyes and she is a widow—that’s the physical and the moral of her. The other sends me execrable verses. At last I understand the cachets of Voltaire. They were not vanity; they were simply to avoid any but the letters of friends. This is what it is to have—I, a poor devil—neither Ferney, nor two hundred thousand francs income, nor one hundred francs for postage.

Sandeau will be lodged like a prince. He can’t believe in his luck. I embark him on a career of masterpieces by a thousand crowns of debt, which we hypothecate on a bottle of ink. Poor lad! He does not know what duty is. He is free. I chain him. I am sorry for it. He is at this moment loved. A pretty young woman casts upon his wounds the balm of her smiles.

Re-adieu.

Paris. October 6, 1834.

I have been for the last few days so busy in settling Sandeau and furnishing him with everything, for he is a child, that I have not been able to write to you; and now I shall have to do so by fits and starts, according to the order of my ideas and not that of logic.

Ah! in the first place, can you conceive that they are finding fault with me for the name Marguerite in the “Recherche de l’Absolu.” It is a Flemish name, and that is all there is to say about it. I must be very irreproachable when they have to find fault with me for that!

Next Saturday I give a dinner to the Tigers of my opera-box, and I am preparing sumptuosities out of all reason. I shall have Rossini and Olympe, his cara donna [afterwards his wife], who will preside. Next Nodier; then five tigers, Sandeau, and a certain Victor Bohain (a man of great political talent, unjustly smirched), the most exquisite wines of Europe, the rarest flowers, the best cheer; in short, I intend to distinguish myself.

I don’t know who told me that your bitter-sweet cousin expected me in Geneva! Mon Dieu! how queer! If I wanted to be gallant I should tell you that I would not cross the Jura in winter for any one in the world after having had the Maison Mirabaud [Mme. Hanska’s house] for joy during that stay in Geneva. Well, believe it.

I have worked much at “Père Goriot,” which will be in the “Revue de Paris” for November. My first part of the “Études Philosophiques,” the pieces of which have been corrected with excessive severity, will appear in a few days. I shall then busy myself with the “Mémoires d’une jeune Mariée,” a delightful composition, and with “César Birotteau,” which is taking immense proportions. Also Emmanuel Arago and Sandeau are going to do a great work in five acts, in which I have a third,—a fine subject, which will pay Sandeau’s debts and mine; a drama, entitled “Les Courtisans.” It will go first to the Porte-Saint-Martin; but it will certainly get to the Français. It is magnificent! (I am a little like Perrette and her jug of milk.) If we win the stage, and our anonymous society, under the title of E. J. San-Drago (Sand-Arago), is successful, I shall be free all the sooner, and Sandeau, trained by me to keep house, will allow me to travel. It is impossible that a man who destines himself to politics should not see Europe, not judge fundamentally of manners, morals, and interests. The struggle between France and other countries will always be decided by the North. I must know the North at any cost, and, as M. de Margonne says, one has to be young to travel. Therefore, my liberty! oh, how I long for it!

I shall go to Ham about November 5, and, perhaps, from there to England; but I shall return for the 15th in Paris. My life is varied only by ideas; physically, it is monotonous. I speak confidentially with no one but Madame de Berny or with you. I find that one should communicate but little with petty minds; one leaves one’s wool there, as on bushes. I am vowed to great sentiments, unique, lofty, unalterable, exclusive, and it is an odd contrast with my apparent levity. I assure you it would take at least five or six years to know to what point solitude has made me susceptible, and of how many sacrifices I am capable without ostentation. What of sentiments, feelings, I have made visible in my work is but the faint shadow of the light that is in me. Up to the present time one woman only, Madame de Berny, has really known what I am, because she has seen my smile, always otherwise expressive, never cease.1 In twelve years I have had neither anger nor impatience. The heaven of my heart has always been blue. Any other attitude is, to my thinking, impotence. Strength should be a unit; and after having for seven years measured myself with misfortune and vanquished it, and risen, to gain literary royalty, every night with a will more determined than that of the night before, I have, I think, the right to call myself strong. Thus inconstancy, infidelity are incomprehensibilities for me. Nothing wearies me; neither waiting nor happiness. My friendship is of the race of the granites; all will wear-out before the feeling I have conceived. Madame de Berny is sixty years old; her griefs have changed and withered her. My affection has redoubled. I say it without pride, because I see no merit in it. It is my nature; which God has made oblivious of evil, while ceaselessly in presence of the good. A being who loves me always makes me quiver. Noble sentiments are so fruitful; why should we go in search of bad ones? God made me to smell the fragrance of flowers, not the fetor of mud. And why too, should I entangle myself in meannesses? All within me tends toward what is great. I choke in the plains, I live on the mountains! And then, I have undertaken so much! We have reached the era of intelligence. Material monarchs, brutal forces are passing away. There are worlds intellectual, in which Pizarro, Cortez, Columbus must appear. There will be sovereigns in the kingdom of thought. With this ambition no baseness, no pettiness is possible. Nothing wastes time like petty things; and so, I need something very great to fill my mind outside of this circle where I find the infinite. There is but one thing—to the infinite, the infinite—an immense love. If I have it, should I go in search of a Parisian woman, a Madame de ——? (Some one told me yesterday that she wished a scandal; that her husband left her free, but her vanity is such—I believe it—that she wants to be talked about.) I have such a horror of the women of Paris that I camp upon my work from six in the morning till six at night. At half-past six my hired coupé comes for me, and takes me one day to the Opera, another to the Italians, and I go to bed at midnight. Thus I have not a minute to give to any one. I receive visitors while I dine; I talk of our plans for the plays during dinner. I correspond with no one but you, Madame de Berny, my sister, and my mother. All other letters wait till Sunday, when I open them, and all that are not on business are handed over to Sandeau, who offers me his hand as secretary.

So doing, I shall end by extinguishing this fire of debt and accomplishing my promised work. Without it, no salvation, no liberty. The deuce! you will get the proof of what I now have the pleasure of writing to you, and of my firmness, when you see my books; for a man can’t coquet and amuse himself, and bring out such publications. Toil and the Muse; that means that the toiling Muse is virtuous,—she is a virgin. It is deplorable that in this nineteenth century we are obliged to go to the images of Greek mythology; but I have never been so struck as I am now by the powerful truth of those myths.

Do not think that what I have been writing is a round-about way of telling you that, whatever be your age and face, my affection for you would be the same. I should not take circuitous ways to tell you a thing it would give me pleasure to express if I did not think you had enough perspicacity to have felt it, divined it. No; I was examining myself in good faith without any intention of showing myself off. I wish to be so great by intellect and fame that you can feel proud of my true friendship. Each of my works, which I want to make more and more extended, better thought, better written, will be a flattery for you, a flower, a bouquet that I shall send you! Distance alone admits of flowers of rhetoric.

My brother-in-law has just discovered a process which, in his opinion, solves on railways the problem of inclined planes, and will save great costs in construction and traction. It is possible to sell this invention to the English; here he has taken out a patent, and the English purchaser can take out an export patent. My brother-in-law does not want to go to London, and I am going to attempt this affair in the interests of my sister. That is the history of my journey to London.

We are not satisfied with our brother in Normandy. His wife is pregnant. He has complicated, still further, the difficulties of his life, poor creature. My mother is not well; I wish I could see her in good health to enjoy what I am preparing for her. But, good God! she has had many trials. To-day she turns to me, and heartily; she seems to recognize, without admitting it, the great wrong of her slight affection for my sister and me; she is punished in the child of her choice in a dreadful way. Henry is nothing, and will be nothing. He has spoiled the future his brother-in-law or I might have made for him by his marriage. All this is horribly sad.

Yesterday I re-read your letters. As I was putting them away, pressing them together to arrange them better, they exhaled a fragrance, I know not what, of grandeur and distinction that could not be mistaken. Those who talk of your forehead are not in error. But what is surprising in your letters is a turn of phrase, all your own, which issues from your heart as your glance from your eyes; it is our language written as Fénelon wrote it. You must have read Fénelon a great deal, or else you have in your soul his harmonious thought. When these letters come I read them first like a man in a hurry to talk with you; I do not really taste them till the second reading, which happens capriciously. When some thought saddens me I have recourse to you. I bring out the little box in which is my elixir, and I live again in your Italian journey. I see Diodati; I stretch myself on that good sofa of the Maison Mirabaud I turn the leaves of the “Gotha,” that pretty “Gotha;” and then, after an hour or two, all is serene. I find something cool within me. My soul has rested on a friendly soul. No one is in my secret. It is something like the prayer of the mystic, from which he rises radiant. Will you think me very poetic? But it is true.

My Sandeau has brought out a book which is already sold. It is “Madame de Sommerville.” Read it, this first book of a young man. Hold out your hand to him; do not be severe. Keep your severities for me; they are my privilege. Madame de Berny pays me no more compliments. From her, criticisms. Criticisms are sweet when made by a friendly hand; we believe them; they sadden because they are, no doubt, true, but they do not rend.

Well, adieu. You ought to be reading my last letter at the moment I am writing this. If you wrote to me so that I should receive your letters on Sundays, I would answer on Mondays. We should gain by not crossing each other.

I shall send, without letter of advice, to Sina’s address, the first part of the “Études Philosophiques.” You know all that; but let me believe that you take an interest in these enormous corrections à la Buffon (he corrected immensely), which ought to make my work, when completed (“Études Sociales,” about which I told you), a monument in our fine language.2 I believe that in 1838 the three parts of this gigantic work will be, if not wholly finished, at least built up, so that a judgment can be formed of the mass.

The “Études de Mœurs” will represent all social effects, without a single situation in life, physiognomy, character of man or woman, manner of living, profession, social zone, French region, or anything whatever of childhood, maturity, old age, politics, justice, or war, having been forgotten.

That done, the history of the human heart traced thread by thread, the social history given in all its parts, there is the base. The facts will not be imaginary; they will be what is happening everywhere.

Then, the second structure is the “Études Philosophiques;” for after the effects will come the causes. I shall have painted in the “Études de Mœurs” sentiments and their action, life and its deportment. In the “Études Philosophiques” I shall tell why the sentiments, on what the life; what is the line, what are the conditions beyond which neither society nor man exist; and, after having surveyed society in order to describe it, I shall survey it again in order to judge it. So, in the “Études de Mœurs” individualities are typified; in the “Études Philosophiques” types are individualized. Thus I shall have given life everywhere: to the type by individualizing it, to the individual by typifying him. I shall have given thought to the fragment; I shall have given to thought the life of the individual.

Then, after effects and causes, will come the “Études Analytiques,” of which the “Physiologie du Mariage” is a part; for after effects and causes we must search for principles. Manners and morals [mœurs] are the play; causes are the coulisses and the machinery. Principles are the maker. But in proportion as the work winds spirally up to the heights of thought, it draws itself in and condenses. Though twenty-four volumes are required for the “Études de Mœurs,” only fifteen are needed for the “Études Philosophiques,” and only nine for the “Études Analytiques.” Thus man, society, humanity will be described, judged, analyzed, without repetitions, and in a work which will be like an “Arabian Nights” of the West.

When all is done, my Madeleine scraped, my pediment carved, my last touches given, I shall have been right, or I shall have been wrong. But, after having made the poesy, the demonstration of a whole system, I shall make the science of it in an Essay on Human Forces [“Essai sur les Forces Humaines”]. And, on the cellar-walls of this palace I, child and jester, shall have drawn the immense arabesque of the “Contes Drolatiques.”

Do you think, madame, that I have much time to lose at the feet of a Parisian woman? No; I had to choose. Well, I have now shown you my real mistress; I have removed her veils. There is the work, there is the gulf, there is the crater, there is the matter, there is the woman, there is she who takes my nights, my days, who puts a price on this very letter, taken from hours of study—but taken with delight. Ah! I entreat you, never attribute to me anything petty, low, or mean,—you, who are able to measure the spread of my wings!

Well, re-adieu. Recall the carver, the founder, the sculptor, the goldsmith, the galley-slave, the artist, the thinker, the poet, the—whatever you will, to the memory of those about you who love him, and think of the power of a lonely affection, that of a palm-tree in the desert, a palm-tree that rises to the skies for refreshment, if you would know the part that you have in it. Some day, when I have finished all, we will laugh heartily over it. To-day one must work!

Paris, November 22—December 1, 1834.

Mon Dieu! I have to bear the burden of my own giddiness. I have not been to London; my brother-in-law changed his mind. You think me in England and you have not written. I am here without knowing what has become of you, or what you are doing. A thousand anxieties have seized me the last few days. Are you ill? Is M. Hanski ill? Is Anna? In short, I am making dragons for myself about you. I expected a letter, and the letter not coming I began to search out why. The why is your belief in my departure.

I have no good things to tell you. I am mortally sad. In spite of the consolations of work and the forced activities of poverty, there is a void in my life that weighs upon me. In moments of depression I am solitary. Madame de Berny still suffers cruelly, and she remains in the country. I have been to see her for a few days. Those few days are all I have been able to give her for five months. You can judge by that what my life has been,—a desert to cross. Shall I reach the happy land where streams and verdure and the gazelles are?

My poor mother is extremely ill. I expect her here to-morrow; consultations as to her health are necessary. My brother’s household is more and more disheartening, and toward the close of every year business affairs are generally difficult. You see that all conspires to sadden me.

We have, Sandeau and I, begun a great comedy: “La Grande Mademoiselle,” history of Lauzun, his marriage, and, for culmination, “Marie, pull off my boots.” But with a subject of this kind we may fail before a public blasé with horrors. Whatever is merely witty seems pale. However!

I was writing this when your letter came, and I will answer it point by point. You know my character very little if you think that I ever abandon a sentiment, or an idea, or a friend. No, no, madame; it takes many wounds, many blows of the axe to cut down what is in my heart. Borget is in Italy; Borget is roving, painting, and does not write to me. I have had news of him only indirectly; nevertheless, he is always fresh in my thoughts, though we have known each other for several years.

I am not infatuated about Sandeau; but I held out a pole to a poor swimmer who was going under. Where you are right is in believing firmly that I will let no one penetrate to the depths of my heart. For that, the “Open, Sesame” that you have uttered is necessary. Few persons know those sacramental words. I should be the most unhappy man in the world if the secrets of my soul were known. Conjectures, however, are not lacking. But I have too great a powder of jesting to allow of anything I wish to hide becoming known. In France, we are obliged to veil depths by levity; without it we should be ruined here.

Your letter re-animates me a little, much, extremely. You have put a balm into my heart, like the Fosseuse. I will send you, immediately, the five volumes of the “Études Philosophiques,” my “Lettre à la littérature,” and “Le Père Goriot” in manuscript; together with the two numbers of the “Revue de Paris” in which it will appear.

“César Birotteau” is getting on, and the “Mémoires d’une jeune Mariée” are on the ways. I work now twenty hours daily. Luxury will never prevent me from realizing my project of solitude at Wierzchownia, for I see plainly, on one hand, the impossibility of being here in presence of the literary discussions about me which are beginning to arise violently, and the need of preparing, far from pin-pricks, two great bludgeon blows,—the tragedy of “Philippe II.” and “L’Histoire de la succession du Marquis de Carabas,” in which the political question will be plainly decided in favour of the power of absolute monarchy. But without this reason I should still have the keenest desire for travel; and even without this cause, again, there is a greater reason than all others, which would make me surmount every obstacle. Do you know it? Will you have it? Do you care for it? Well, I know nothing sweeter, more endearing, grander, more delightful than your friendship. To go in search of it, to enjoy it for eight days, one could well travel eight hundred leagues and not mind the labour of the journey.

No, no, the tigers will not pervert me. Alas! they are too stupid. I am compromised. I must give up my box on account of that neighbourhood. It is a stable of tigers!

I saw at the Opera, in a box near mine, Delphine P..., poor thing! withered, changed, faded, mistress of M. de F... Mon Dieu! what a skeleton! What a wearied and wearying air! with a species of dead-leaf skin! No, that woman is not a woman! She looks like a corpse about to fall into putrefaction. On the other hand, behind our box is that of the Comtesse Comar, or Komar, or Komarck, for it was Zaluski who told me the name, and I don’t know the spelling of it; never did I see a more amiable, more seductive old woman. She is Madame Jeroslas... plus heart and frankness. She had two pretty creatures with her. Zaluski is to present me. You don’t know how I like to be with persons of your country. A name in ka or ki goes to my heart.

Oh! if you are kind, if you love me (I wish I could say that gracefully and irresistibly, as you say it), you will never leave me fifteen days without a letter. Whether you be in Vienna or at Wierzchownia, you do not know how sweet a true friendship is to the heart of a poor toiler who lives in the midst of Paris like a labourer in the Swedish mines. I have cut loose from everything. I have no duty to fulfil to society. I have a horror of false friends and grimaces. I am alone, like a rock in mid-ocean. My perpetual labour is not to the taste of any one. My poor sister Laure is angry at not seeing me. I want to triumph over the remainder of the distresses that envelop me; and I have not been strong, constant, and courageous for five years to fail in the sixth.

Should I get a month to myself at the beginning of the year, you will not be displeased if I bring my New Year’s gifts to the pretty little Anna myself, inasmuch as the Custom-house is so malicious? I shall have the pleasure of going five hundred leagues to dine with you. But so much work must be done to attain this result that I only speak of it as one of those impossibilities that spur me to work and redouble my courage; something results from it. The “Recherche de l’Absolu” was only written through a hope of this kind. The compromise with Gosselin took the profits of that arduous labour. Oh! you do not know me. In your letters there are complaints, doubts, and polite accusations that dishearten me.

“Le Père Goriot” is a fine work, but monstrously sad. To make it complete, it was necessary to show the moral sink-hole of Paris; and it has the effect of a disgusting sore.

Wednesday, 26.

I must tell you that yesterday (my letter has been interrupted) I copied out your portrait of Mademoiselle Céleste, and I said to two uncompromising judges: “Here is a sketch I have just flung on paper. I wanted to paint a woman under given circumstances, and launch her into life through such and such an event.”

What do you think they said?—“Read that portrait again.” After which they said:—

“That is your masterpiece. You have never before had that laisser-aller of a writer which shows the hidden strength.”

“Ha, ha!” I answered, striking my head; “that comes from the forehead of an analyst.”

I kneel at your feet for this violation; but I left out all that was personal. Beat me, scold me, but I could not refuse myself the enjoyment of this praise; and I tasted the greatest of pleasures,—that of secretly hearing a person praised who is unknown and to whom one bears a deep affection. It is enjoyment twice over.

I am convinced of the immense superiority of your mind, and I am confounded to find in you such feminine graces, together with the force of mind which Madame Dudevant has and Madame de Staël once had; and I say this very loud, that you may not make yourself small behind that tall steeple you have so often boasted of to me. The opinion that I express upon you is a matured opinion. I am here, far from the prestige of your presence. I go over in my mind, impartially, your sayings, your opinions, your studies, and I write you these lines with a sort of joy, because Madame Carraud and Madame de Berny have made other women seem very small to me; and because, in the matter of grace, amenity, and the science hidden under the frivolity of smiles, I am a great connoisseur, having lovingly inhaled those flowers of womanhood, and what I say of you is conscientious and true. Besides, you are too grande dame to be proud of it. What you should be proud of is your kindness, and those qualities which are acquired only by the practice of Christian virtues, at which I never jest now.

Forgive me the disconnectedness of my letters, the incompleteness of my sentences. I write to you at night before I begin to work. My letters are like a prayer made to a good genius.

Go to the Prater with M. Hanski! Mon Dieu! you trample the world underfoot, and you do not set in the light that which is good!

Ah! I must tell you that literature, seeing my cane, my chiselled buttons, has decided that I am the Benjamin of an old English woman, Lady Anelsy (I write the name badly), whom I met at Madame d’Abrantès, and who has a box at the Opera, near mine (she separates me from Madame Delphine P...), and to whom I bow. I have answered friends (friends who are tigers in the guise of doves) that, not being able to bear the features of the old lady in my heart, I have had them carved on the knob of my cane. You have no idea what a fuss my movable property creates. I have much more success through that than through my works. That is Paris!

My dinner? Why, it made an excitement. Rossini declared he had never seen, eaten, or drunk anything better among sovereigns. It sparkled with wit. The beautiful Olympe was graceful, sensible, and perfect. Lautour-Mézeray was the wittiest of men; he extinguished the cross-fire of Rossini, Nodier, and Malitourne by an amazing artillery vigour. The master of the feast was the humble lighter who put the match to each sun in this array of fireworks. Ecco.

I told you that “La Recherche de l’Absolu” would astonish you; well, you will be as little prepared for “Père Goriot.” After that will come the glorious end of “Séraphita.” Never will imagination have been in so many different spheres. I do not speak of the perfumer Birotteau, or of the “Mémoires d’une jeune Mariée;” those will be supporting the battle with fresh troops.

Do you know for whom is this success? Well, I want you to hear my name gloriously, respectfully pronounced. I want to give you the sweetest enjoyments of friendship; I want to have you say to yourself: “He laughed like a boy at Geneva, and he made campaigns into China!” For you think he is a moralist, a toiler, a cynic, a—I don’t know what. But he is a child who loves pebbles, and talks nonsense, and does it; who reads “Gotha,” plays patience, and makes M. Hanski laugh.

Geneva is to me like a memory of childhood. There I quitted my chain; there I laughed without saying to myself, “To-morrow!” I shall always remember having tried to dance a galop down the long salon at Diodati, where Byron got drunk. And the country about la Bellotte! I must not think too much about all that; I should go to Vienna! I have such superstition, such veneration for persons with whom I can be myself. How has that come about among us? I don’t know, but so it is. I can talk of my griefs, my joys, before you and Monsieur Hanski; here I am myself only with my sister and Madame de Berny,—probably because you resemble the latter, and are very much my sister. At this moment I would fain tell you, honourably, all graceful and sweet things, and send you, gathered one by one in the fields of friendship, the prettiest flowers,—those you like best; for I wish never again to lie for one moment under your displeasure.

If you ordain it, Lucullus will retreat into the skin of Diogenes in order not again to read these words: “Your goings-on as Lucullus will retard your freedom.”

I dine to-day with one of those who took Algiers, the commissary-general Denniée, who for the last three years is in love with an admired creature (rather a fool), Mademoiselle Amigo, of the Italian Opera. There, came Rossini, in dishabille and not sarcastic. Yesterday, at the first representation of “Erani,” Olympe said to me, motioning to Rossini:—

“You cannot imagine how beautiful and sublime the soul of that being is; how kind he is, and to what point he is kind. To reserve his heart and its treasures for her he loves, he wraps himself in sarcasm to the eyes of others; he makes himself prickly.”

I took Rossini’s hand and pressed it joyfully.

Mio maestro,” I said to him; “then we can understand each other.”

“What, you too!” he said, smiling.

I lowered my head; then I showed him all that brilliant Paris which was present, and said:—

“To cast one’s diamonds and pearls into that mud—”

And at that moment my eyes fell upon “Delmar’s” box.

Monday, December 1.

My letter has remained for eight days on, in, and underneath “Le Père Goriot.” I have had a thousand money worries, but I am getting out of them. Never have I been so powerful to get through this business by my firm will. Another few months, and I am saved.

Within a few days a little joy has come to me. After much pressing, and receiving no for an answer for the last three years, they have consented to sell me “La Grenadière.” So I shall have a retreat for study, and the furniture, books, and arrangements I should make will remain mine. I could live there six months, incognito, without seeing any one. So here I am, very happy—so far as a material thing can give happiness.

You have been proud of “Père Goriot.” My friends declare that it is comparable to nothing, and is above all my other compositions.

Do you know that I am uneasy on what your last letter said relating to depth of heart, to which no man could ever attain. Those few words make me think you do not know me well, and it grieves me, because you cannot love me as well as I might be loved if I were known better. Mon Dieu! I am the object of a thousand calumnies, each more ignoble than the others, and I pay no more attention to them than he who is above the Jura listens to Pictet. Is that a merit? But a word from you puts alarm into my brain, into my heart.

Well, adieu. It is now eight days that I have been conversing with you. I will write a little more regularly in future. The doctors have obtained that I shall change my way of life. I am going to bed at midnight to rise at six in the morning, and work from then till three in the afternoon. I shall have from three to five for my pleasures, and I will write you each day a little line. After which I am ordered to go and amuse myself for six hours till midnight.

Mon Dieu! I have the same difficulty in quitting my pen that I had in quitting the Maison Mirabaud when the master forced me to go by going to bed himself. A thousand prettinesses to Anna, my friendly regards to M. Hanski, if you don’t keep them all for yourself.

Paris, December 15, 1834.

Oh! how long it is since I have seen your writing! Have I fallen again into disgrace? Are you displeased with my long letters written at intervals? I can only give you—offer you a day here and there; it is a day of respite in the midst of my long combat. It is the moment when I, poor dove without a branch, rest my feet beside the living spring, the source where she dips her thirsty beak into the pure waters of affection.

Yes, all is enlarging—the circus and the athlete. To face all, I must imitate the French soldier during the first campaigns in Italy: never recoil before impossibilities, and find in victory the courage to beat back the morrow’s enemy.

Last week I took in all but ten hours’ sleep. So that yesterday and to-day I have been like a poor foundered horse on his side,—in my bed, not able to do anything, or hear anything. The fact is, the first number of “Père Goriot” made eighty-three pages in the “Revue de Paris,” equivalent to half an octavo volume. I had to correct the proofs of those eighty-three pages three times in six days. If it is any glory, I alone could make that tremendous effort. But none the less must my other works be carried on.

Forgive me, therefore, the irregularity of my correspondence. To-day one flood, to-morrow another flood sweeps me along. I bruise myself against one rock, I recover, and am thrown upon a reef. These are struggles that no one can appreciate. No one knows what it is to change ink into gold!

I have begun to tremble. I am afraid that fatigue, lassitude, impotence may overtake me before I have erected my building. I need, from time to time, good little words said out of France, some great distractions, and the greatest come from the heart, do they not?

However, “Père Goriot” is an unheard-of success; there is but one voice: “Eugénie Grandet,” the “Absolu,” are surpassed. I am, so far, at the first number only, and the second is beyond that. Tiyeuilles has made people laugh. I return you that success.

But you, what has become of you? No letters! nothing! A few days more, and I hope my work will be rewarded by reaching your ear like a reproach. I did believe you would periodically cast me a smile, a letter, a gracious dew of words written to refresh the brow, the heart, the soul, the will of your moujik. Which of us can dispose of our time? You. Who writes oftenest? I. I have most affection, that is natural; you are the most lovable, and I have more reasons to bear you friendship than you have to grant it to me. There is but one thing that pleads for me; misfortune, misery, toil; and as you have all the compassions of woman and of angel, you should think of me a little oftener than you do. In that, I am right. Write to me every week, and do not be vexed with me if I can only answer you twice a month. This torrential life is my excuse. Once I am freed, and you shall judge of me. Yes, forgive much to him who loves and toils much. Reckon to me as something nights without sleep, days without pleasures, without distractions. Madame Mitgislas... invited me, but I did not accept; I have neither the time nor the wish to do so. Society gives so little and wants so much! and I am so ill at ease in it! I am so embarrassed on receiving silly compliments, and true sounds of the heart are so rare!

Since I wrote to you there has been nothing but work in my life, slashed with a few little good debauches of music. We have had “Moïse” and “Semiramide” mounted and executed as those operas have never been before, and every time that either is given I go. It is my only pleasure. I do not meddle in politics. I say, like some grammarian, I don’t know who, “Whatever happens, I have six thousand verbs conjugated.” I bring daily, like an ant, a chip to my pile. There are days when the memory of the Île Saint-Pierre gives me frenzies; I thirst for a journey, I writhe in my chains. Then, the next day, I think that I have fifty ducats to pay at the end of the month, and I set to work again!

Will you like me with long hair? Everybody here says I look ridiculous. I persist. My hair has not been cut since my sweet Geneva. In order that you may know what I mean by “my sweet Geneva,” you ought to see Chariot’s caricature on “my sweet Falaise”: a conscript on Mount Blanc, not seeing an apple-tree, calls it “Land of evil!”

At this moment I am working at two things: “La Fleur du Poix,” and “Melmoth réconcilié.” Then I have also to do the counterpart of “Louis Lambert,” “Ecce Homo,” and the end of the “Enfant Maudit,” besides that of “Séraphita” (which belongs to you), and that of “Le Père Goriot,” which will end the year 1834, just as the end of “Séraphita” began it.

You understand that all my time is fully employed, nights and days; for, besides these things, I have proofs of my reprints which are always going on. Sandeau is horrified. He says that fame can never pay for such toil, and that he would rather die than undertake it. He has no other feeling for me than the pity we give to sick people.

I shall see you, no doubt, in Vienna. I have very solidly determined within myself to go there in March, so as to be able to make a reconnoissance of the battlefields of Wagram and Essling. I shall start after the carnival.

Did I tell you that I am to have the Grenadière?

Mon Dieu! I return to your silence; you do not know how uneasy I am about you, your little one, and M. Hanski. It would not cost you much just to say: “We are all well, and we think of you.”

Well, I must say adieu, send you a thousand gracious thoughts, and beg you to offer my respects to M. Hanski, keeping my homage at your feet.

Notes

1 Bromener and tiyeuilles (tilleuls lindens), make fun of her pronunciation.—TR.

1 Madame de Berny is meant, and the invention of this letter is infamous. See letter to Madame Carraud in Appendix, written at the same time as this spurious letter.—TR

1 Madame de Berny was the friend of his parents, and twenty-four years older than himself. When the family lived at Villeparisis the de Bernys lived near them in a hired house, their own estate being at Saint-Firmin. Madame de Berny recognized Balzac’s genius in his early youth, when parents and friends denied it. For a time, while at Villeparisis, he taught her son with his own brother Henry. When Balzac’s father opposed his literary career, it was she who, with Mme. Surville and her husband, induced the old man to advance him part of his inheritance for the printing-office, and later another portion to avoid bankruptcy. When the crisis came, in 1828, and his father would do no more for him, Madame de Berny lent him money from time to time to meet his load of business debts. The total amount lent by her, at five per cent interest, was 45,000 francs, the last 6,000 of which he paid in full in 1836. Madame de Berny had cruel trials of her own. Two of her children were insane, one idolized son and two daughters died before her in the prime of their youth. The illness here mentioned was one form of heart disease, from which she rallied for a time, but died in July, 1836, in the sixty-first year of her age. Of Balzac’s grief at this event his sister says: “My brother was then (1836) overwhelmed by a great heart-sorrow... the death of a person very dear to him.... I have never read anything so eloquent as his expression of that grief.”
Writing, himself, to a friend at that time, he says: “She whom I have lost was more than a mother, more than a friend, more than any creature can be to another creature. I can explain her only by divinity. She sustained me during great storms by words, by actions, by devotion. If I live, it was through her. She was all to me; and though for the last two years illness and lapse of time had separated us, yet we were visible to each other from a distance. She re-acted upon me. She was, as it were, my moral sun. Madame de Mortsauf in the Lys is a pale expression of her noble qualities; it is but a distant reflection of her, for I have a horror of prostituting my own emotions.”—TR.

1 This ridiculous stuff is carefully translated word for word. The reader must make what he can of it. It is ludicrous to suppose that Balzac ever wrote those vapourings of a shop-boy to his female kind.—TR.

2 His whole correspondence, and all that we know and can gather of his life go to prove that he never could have written this. His family then consisted of his mother and Mme. Surville. His affection for M. and Mme. Surville appears in every part of his life. His mother seems to have been at times irritating, and very injudicious with him, but not in the way suggested. At one period he intrusted her with all his affairs, and she was his business agent. He shows in his life and writings a strong respect for the Family bond, and his last letter to his mother is signed “Ton fils soumis”—“Your submissive son.”—TR.

1 This is the last but one of these spurious letters. There is one other which plainly belongs to this series, but it has been placed at a later date for a purpose which will appear farther on.—TR.

1 Delphine de Girardin made many attempts to recover him, and did so, finally. In spite of his estrangement from her house she was always loyal to him; and during the time of his quarrel with her husband she wrote many kind things of him in “La Presse.”—TR.

1 This letter in the French volume is dated April 10, which is, of course, wrong, or else the previous letter is misdated.—TR.

1 Fashionable speech of the “Incroyables.”—TR.

1 This is the last of these odious and ridiculous letters. It belongs properly to the series which ended March 11, 1834. In my opinion it has been concocted and placed under this date to convey the idea that it is one of the letters which Balzac mentions in his letter to M. Hanski of September 16 (see p. 199); and, furthermore, this is done with the intention of convincing the reader that the whole series of forged letters (which are plainly identical in character with this letter) were written by Balzac.
Putting aside, for a moment, the proofs of deception which I have produced, I must say in conclusion that I think no one of literary judgment will believe that the author of the “Comédie Humaine” wrote these spurious letters.
From this date the letters go on in Balzac’s characteristic manner,—expansive, impulsive, boyish at times, and too full, certainly, of his debts and his troubles; but with it all is the strong underflow of a great and dauntless soul allied to things pure and noble. The story is tragic; and not the least tragic part of it is the wicked present attempt of degenerate men to degrade a hero.
I here place a letter of the same date from Monsieur Hanski to Balzac, which will serve to show the sort of man he was, and how he regarded his own and his wife’s friendship for Balzac.
I now leave the whole subject to the judgment of the reader.—TR.

1 Compare this with the shameful letter supposed to have been written about her to Mme. Hanska, Jan. 1834. See p. 112.—TR.

1 Probably misprinted in the French; but I leave it verbatim as it is given.—TR.

2 He changed the title to “La Comédie Humaine,” which is indeed a monument, and his monument.—TR.