Letters to Madame Hanska

III Letters During 1835

Paris, January 4, 1835.

I have had the happiness to receive two letters from you within a few days of each other, while you have doubtless received both mine. I return to mes moutons by asserting that you can write to me regularly, and that it is not permissible in you to deprive me of my sun.

Bah! I have not seen either K... or T... again. Why do you scold me? Don’t take my magic-lantern views for realities.

All is much changed since my last letter. Alas! I had the ambition to be near you on the 20th of January, and I began to work eighteen hours a day. I stood it for fifteen days, from my last letter till December 31; then I risked an insomnia; and I am now waking from a sleep of seventeen hours, taken at intervals, which has saved me. What has the public gained? “Le Père Goriot,” on which these stupid Parisians dote. “Père Goriot” is put above everything else.

I wait till I have finished “Séraphita” to send it at the same time as the manuscript of “Séraphita,” in its binding of cloth and silk as you wished, simple and mysterious as the book itself; also the manuscript of “Le Père Goriot” with the printed book, the first Part of the “Études Philosophiques,” and the fourth of the “Études de Mœurs.”

My works are beginning to be better paid. “Père Goriot” has brought me seven thousand francs, and as it will go into the “Études de Mœurs” in a few months, I may say that it will bring me a thousand ducats. Oh! I am very deeply humiliated to be so cruelly fastened to the glebe of my debts, to be able to do nothing, never to have the free disposal of myself. These are bitter tears, shed day and night in silence; they are sorrows inexpressible, for the power of my desires must be known, to comprehend that of my regrets.

So you fatigue yourself by going into society,—you, flower of solitude, and so beauteous in worldly inexperience! Your letter brought the whole social life of Vienna into this study where I work without ceasing. I became a worldling with you.

Alas! I am threatened with a grief that will spread over all my life. I went for two days to see Madame de Berny, who is eighteen leagues from here. I was witness of a terrible attack. I can no longer doubt it, she has aneurism of the heart. That life, so precious, is lost. At any moment death may take from me an angel who has watched over me for fourteen years; she, too, a flower of solitude, whom the world has never touched, and who has been my star. My work is not done without tears. The attentions due to her cast uncertainty upon any time of which I could dispose, though she herself unites with the doctor in advising me some strong diversions. She pushes friendship so far as to hide her sufferings from me; she tries to seem well for me. You will understand that I have not drawn Claës to do as he did. Great God! what changes in her have been wrought in two months! I am overwhelmed. To feel one’s self well-nigh mad with grief, and yet to be condemned to toil! To lose that grand and noble part of my life and to know you so far away from me is enough to make one throw one’s self into the Seine! The future of my mother which rests upon me, and that hope which shines afar, so far! are like two branches to which I cling. Therefore your scolds about the K.s and the P.s and my dissipations make me smile sadly. Nevertheless, I have put your letter next to my heart, with that profound sense of egotism which makes us clasp the last friend who is left to us. You will be, if this person is taken from me, the only and sole person who has opened my heart. You alone will know the Sesame, for the feeling of Madame Carraud of Issoudun is in some sort the double of that of my sister.

You will never know with what power of cohesion I have recourse to the memories of that young friendship, while weeping to-day over a feeling which death is about to destroy, leaving all its ties behind it in me.

The reading of the second number of “Père Goriot” gave Madame de Berny such pleasure that she had an attack of the heart. So I, who did not suspect the gravity of the harm, was the innocent cause of suffering.

I began a letter quite gaily, after having received yours of the 12th; but I threw it into the fire. Its gaiety hurt me. You will forgive me, will you not, for that chastity of feeling?—.you, so like to her! you in whom I find so many of the ideas, graces, noblenesses, which have made me name that person: my conscience.

Between this sorrow and the distant light I love, what are men, the world, society! There is nothing possible but the constant work into which I throw myself—work, my saviour, which will give me liberty, and return to me my wings. I quivered on reading your reasoning: “No letters; he is coming.” That idea naturally came to you; I have too often been tortured by it. I am seized with periodic furies to leave all behind me, to escape, to spring into a carriage! Then the chains clang down; I see the thickness of my dungeon. If I come to you it will be as a surprise, for I can no longer make decisions on that subject. I must finish for Madame Bêchet the fifth Part of the “Études de Mœurs,” finish the second part of the “Études Philosophiques” for Werdet, finish “Séraphita,” and provide the necessary money to pay all here in my absence, and I have not a single friend of whom I can ask a farthing; it has all to be drawn from my inkstand. There is my Potosi; but to work it I must do without sleep and lose my health. Poverty is a horrible thing. It makes us blame our own heart; it denaturalizes all things. In my case it is necessary that talent or power of writing be as punctual to time as the falling due of my notes. I must not be ill, or suffering, or ill-disposed for work. I must be, like the scales of the Mint, of iron and steel, and coining always! Yet I exist only by the heart. And so I suffer! Oh! I suffer, as much as any creature can suffer who is all independence, feeling, open to happiness, but clogged and groaning under the iron weight of the chain with which necessity crushes him!

At this time last year I was without my chain, far from my worries, near you. What a looking back to the past! Then I did not think about being able to release myself, I was thoughtless about my debts. To-day I believe in my liberation; I have nearly reached it. Six months more of sacrifices and I am saved, I become myself, I am free! I shall go and eat with you the first bit of bread that belongs to me, that will not be steeped in tears and ink and toil.

I do not want to sadden you, I only want to tell you that if I am oppressed I feel as keenly the happiness there is in being able to tell of it. But you neglect me as if you were nothing to me; you write me seldom. Why will you not give me, to me alone, one day in the week for a letter. Suppose I were in Vienna and went to see you every Sunday, I, poor workman, you would give me that day. Well, I declare to you that if I am not in Vienna in the body I can be there in thought. Write me therefore on that day. I shall then have a letter every week when this rolling of letters is once established. I will answer you. You have not written me a single letter to which I have not instantly replied.

I offer you no special New Year’s wishes. Those wishes I make daily for you and yours.

I shall send by diligence to-day the first Part of the “Études Philosophiques” so that you may not wait but may always keep the run of my work. You will easily guess that the Introduction has cost me as much as it has M. Félix Davin, whom I had to teach and recorrect until he had suitably expressed my thought.

I do not know if the “Revue de Paris” reaches Vienna. You will have seen in it a “Letter” of mine to the French authors of our century, in which I expose our ills. If you have not seen it, tell me, and I will send you a copy.

The end of “Séraphita” is a work of great difficulty. The Germans have sent translators to Paris to get it hot.

Adieu; do not leave me again without letters, or I shall think myself abandoned for society, which returns you nothing. To whom do you think I should repeat your judgment on M. Anatole de Th...? You always think that I go and come and belong in the world of idlers. That is an opinion rooted in your mind; and because you are going and coming yourself you want me to be your accomplice in that grand conspiracy of ennui.

All your judgments on Vienna have been confirmed by Alphonse Royer, who stayed there. Thanks to you, I know Vienna by heart; but as long as you are there nothing could disgust me with it, were it a hundred times more stupid and more gluttonous. Ah! they still have reserved sofas, but they reserve nothing in their hearts.

Paris, January 16, 1835.

In spite of constant work and the greatest efforts of concentrated will, I have not been able to finish what I ought to do in order to have the power to leave to-day, to profit by this mild weather (which reminds me of the winter of Geneva), and reach Vienna on the 26th. Everything is against it. The “Revue de Paris” would not double its number so that “Père Goriot” could be finished. I have still my “Cent Contes Drolatiques” on my hands, the purchase of them being delayed for a few days. I have not failed about anything, but men have failed me. If I finish all by the middle of February I shall count myself lucky, and have about a month during which the journey will be to me the sweetest of necessities.

I have, however, sacrificed everything, even writing to you, to that object.

You will receive, by diligence, the manuscript of “Père Goriot” and the two numbers printed in the “Revue.” Here, every one, friends and enemies, agree in saying that this composition is superior to all else that I have done. I know nothing about it. I am always on the wrong side of my tapestry. But you will tell me your opinion.

Now I have to finish “L’Enfant Maudit” and “Séraphita,” which will appear during the first ten days in February. Next, to finish “La Fille aux yeux d’or,” and do “Sœur Marie des Anges.” The latter is a female “Louis Lambert” [it was never written]. You will read it. It is one of my least bad ideas. The abysses of the cloister are revealed; a noble heart of woman, a lofty imagination, ardent, all that is grandest, belittled by monastic practices; and the most intense divine love so killed that Sœur Marie is brought to no longer comprehend God, the love and adoration of whom have brought her there. Then I have to do “La Fleur des Pois” and the counterpart of “Louis Lambert,” entitled “Ecce Homo.”

I am much fatigued, much tormented, much worried, especially about money. That wire, which pulls one back at every moment from on high into this heap of mud, is intolerable; it saws my neck.

I have dined with Madame Delphine P..., but I left nothing there of my sentiments. A pretty little creature was present, a Princess Galitzin, and I made her laugh by telling her there was a silly, stupid creature at Genthod who did her great wrong by synonymy. I thought Madame Delphine neither affectionate, nor kind, nor grande dame. I made a rapid turn to you and burned incense before you, recalling to mind certain of those perfections about which you will not let me speak to you. A few intonations in M. Mitgislas...’s voice, vaguely reminded me of yours and made my heart beat.

How cold society is! I came home joyfully to my hermitage, of which you will find a drawing some day at Wierzchownia; for did you not tell me that you had subscribed to “Les Maisons de personnages célèbres”? Well, I am in it; which does not prove that I am a personage or celebrated, when you see what silly folk are there made famous.

A year without seeing you! How many times the desire has seized me to drop everything, to laugh at publishers, and flee away! Then I said to myself that though you might be glad to see me, you might, perhaps, blame me also, and that what makes us worthy of esteem and grand, ought never to make us less friends, you and me. Reassure me, tell me that you do not love me less because I have not been able to find a month in a year. The proof of my seclusion is in what I have done, which astonishes even publishers. Yet there are people who still say, “He brings nothing out.”

But all this labour will seem nothing, so long as it gives me liberty, independence. When I think that I still need seventy thousand francs for that, and to get them I must spread six bottles of ink on twenty-four reams of paper, it makes me shudder. They offered me yesterday twelve thousand francs for the “Mémoires d’une jeune Mariée.” But I prefer the four thousand of the “Revue de Paris” and the four thousand for a thousand copies bought by a publisher, to putting the three thousand copies on the public market. I tell you my little affairs.

Madame de Berny is better. She declares that the worst symptoms have ceased, but I am going there to assure myself of the truth of what may be a divine lie, of which I know her capable. To help me bear my burden she would fain take from me all anxieties and dry my tears. Oh! she is a noble angel! There is none but you to continue her to me. So, all these days, during my grief, my eyes, my hopes turn ever to you with a force that might make me believe you have heard me.

Oh! leave me, to me so far away from you, the sad privilege of telling you how sweet and good and precious your friendship is to me. What proud courage it gives me here against many a snare, what a principle of laborious constancy it has put into my life! But I lack a collar on which is printed, “Moujik de Paulowska.”

Well, adieu; think a little of him who always thinks of you, of a Frenchman who has the heart of which you are all so boastful across the Danube, who never forgets you, who will bring you from here his white hairs and his big monk’s face subdued by a cloister regimen,—a poor solitary, who pines for the talks, and would like to cast at your feet a thousand glorious crowns to serve you as floor, as pillow!

Well, re-adieu. Kiss Anna’s forehead for me; remember me to all about you and those I had the pleasure to know. They seem to me so happy in being near you. Remind M. Hanski of his lively guest, who has now laid up a fine stock of hearty laughs, for he has been sad enough this long time. Write me always a little. I don’t know how it is I have not had a line these ten days. Does society absorb you? Alas! your moujik has been himself un poco into that market of false smiles and charming toilets; he has made his début at Madame Appony’s,—for the house of Balzac must live on good terms with the house of Austria,—and your moujik had some success. He was examined with the curiosity felt for animals from distant regions. There were presentations on presentations, which bored him so that he went to collogue in a corner with Russians and Poles. But their names are so difficult to pronounce that he cannot tell you anything about them, further than that one was a very ugly dame, friend of Madame Hahn, and a Countess Schouwalof, sister of Madame Jeroslas... Is that right? The moujik will go every two weeks, if his lady permits him.

Among the autographs sent, have I included one from Bra, who is one of our present sculptors? He is a curious man in this, that he was led to mysticism by the death of his wife, and for two months he went to evoke her from her grave. He told me that he saw her every evening. He has now remarried. Here is a saying of Stendhal: “We feel ourselves the intimate friend of a woman when we look at her portrait in miniature; we are so near to her! But oil-painting casts us off to a great distance.” What shall we say of sculpture?

Paris, January 26, 1835.

To-day I have finished “Le Père Goriot.”

I leave to-morrow for a week, to work beside my dear invalid. She is better, she says, but I shall not really know anything until I have been with her a week.

On my return, I hope that “Père Goriot” will be reprinted. “Séraphita” will come to you later. But perhaps I shall bring you these things myself, accompanying the pomade, Anna’s ring-case, and all the other things with which you have deigned to commission me. I have accepted too much of the sweets of hospitality that you should hesitate to use me as you please.

Yes, I have the possibility of resting for a month from March 2 to April 2. I must; and besides, my money affairs are becoming less hard. I shall have won this month of freedom by five months’ exorbitant labour. But, if I have been sad, troubled, without heart-pleasure, at least my efforts have all succeeded. “Le Père Goriot” is a bewildering success; the most bitter enemies have bent the knee; I have triumphed over all, friends as well as enemies. When “Séraphita” has spread her glorious wings, when the “Mémoires d’une jeune Mariée” has shown the last lineaments of the human heart, when “Les Vendéens” has snatched a palm from Walter Scott, then, then I shall be content in being near you; you will not then have a friend without some value. As to the man himself, you will never find him anything but good, and a child.

I will not speak to you of the sadness mingled with joy that took possession of me this morning. To be at once so far off and so near! What is a year? This one has been long, agonizing within the soul, short through work. If gleams of a promised land did not shine as through a twilight, I think that my courage would abandon me at the last effort. It needs my sober, patient, equable, monkish life to resist it all. A woman is much in our life when she is Beatrice and Laura, and better still. If I had not had a star to see when I closed my eyes, I should have succumbed.

I have been, out of curiosity, to the Opera masked ball for the first time in my life. I was with my sister, who had committed the imprudence of going there against her husband’s wishes. Knowing this, I went to fetch her and bring her home without giving her time to go round the hall. As I was leaving, and waiting for the carriage, a very elegant gentleman with a mask on his arm stopped me, and putting himself between me and the door whispered that the masked lady he had on his arm wished to speak to me. I rebuffed the mask; I think a woman has little dignity to come down to such trickery, and I said to the gentleman:—

“You know the laws of a masquerade; I obey the mask you see here, I am bound to do so.”

The masked woman then said, in French mangled by an English tongue:—

“Oh! Monsieur de Balzac!”

But in such a lamentable accent that I was struck by it. Then she turned to my sister, who was laughing heartily, and said:—

“Well, then, between you and me, madame.”

My sister told me afterwards that this mask was neither well dressed nor well shod.

There’s my adventure, the sole and only one I shall probably ever have at a masked ball; for I have never before gone to one, and, doubtless, shall never go to another. I do not see what good they are. If two people love each other, the ball is useless. If they go in search of what are called bonnes fortunes I think them very bad, and I ask myself if it isn’t rather Jeroslas, that is to say, Jesuitical (this between ourselves), to satisfy, under a mask, a passion we will not own.

If I can leave on the first days of March, the sovereign of Paulowska will have had letters enough from me to let her know it. God grant that for one month more I may not be ill or ill-inspired! I shall make my preparations joyously. Be kind enough to write me a line in answer to the following: I should like, in order to go quickly and without care, to have no luggage. If I clear in the custom-house here for Vienna, to the address of Baron Sina, my personal effects, books, manuscripts, etc., will they be opened in Vienna without my presence? Will they get there without being opened on the way? Can I, without fear, put in all the things I want for my own use? And finally, how many days does it take for packages to go from Paris to Vienna? I would like to travel without stopping, and have only my own person to fling from one carriage to another till I get there.

Adieu; forty days are almost nothing to me now, and I tell myself that forty days hence I shall be in the mail-cart for Strasburg. I shall see Vienna, the Danube, the fields of Wagram, the island of Lobau; I don’t say anything about the Landstrasse. As a faithful moujik I know nothing that is grander than those who inhabit it.

Do you still go into society? But of us two, the one who is busiest and the least rich in time is the one who writes oftenest. I growl, like a poor neglected dog, but to whom it suffices to say, “Here, Milord!” to make him happy.

Paris, February 10, 1835.

Though I have scarcely time to write, I cannot be silent about the pleasure I felt yesterday at a fête given by Madame Appony, when Prince Esterhazy, having asked to see me, began to talk of a certain Madame Hanska, née Rzewuska, whose mind, graces, and knowledge had astonished him, and who had given him the desire to see me. With what joy I said before seven or eight women, who all have pretensions, that I had never met in my life but two women who could match you for learning without pedantry, womanly charm, and lofty sentiments—I will not tell you all I said; I should seem to be begging a favourable glance from the sovereign of Paulowska. But all the women made faces, especially when the prince agreed with me about your beauty, and told how everybody knew that your wit did not make you spiteful, for you were graciously kind. I could have hugged that good little prince!

Well, a few days more, and I shall have the pleasure of seeing you.

I have just returned from Nemours. Alas! Madame de Berny is no better. The malady makes frightful progress, and I cannot express to you how that soul of my life was grand, and noble, and touching in those days measured by illness, and with what fervour she desires that another should be to me what she has been. She knows the inward spring and nobility that the habit of carrying all things to an idol gives me. My God is on earth. I have judged myself hourly by her. I say to myself in everything, “What would she think of this?” and this reflection corroborates my conscience, and prevents me from doing anything petty.

However violent attacks and calumnies may be, I march higher up. I answer nothing. Oh! madame, there was a memory, and a sense of horrible pain which rent me during the ten days I rested after “Père Goriot.” I will tell you that that work was done in forty days; in those forty days I did not sleep eighty hours. But I must triumph.

I am going once more to risk, as the doctor says, my “intelligential life” in order to finish the second delivery to Werdet, the fourth to Madame Bêchet, and “Séraphita.” As soon as that is done, I shall buy La Grenadière, and, the deeds signed, I shall fly to Vienna, see the battle-field of Essling, and from there, something of the Landstrasse, where you are. I shall come in search of a little praise—if you think that my year of toil deserves any; and you know that the words that escape you are put where I put those of la dilecta. Though she is ill, her children will stay with her during my absence, and she could not have me then, so I make this journey without remorse. Besides, she knows it is necessary, as diversion, for the weariness of my head.

So, unless I am ill between now and the 20th of March, which is not probable, I shall work with the sweet interest of going, my work accomplished, toward that Vienna where all my troubles will be forgotten. The atmosphere of Paris kills me; I smell toil, debt, enemies! I need an oasis. On the other hand, “Le Père Goriot” has created an excitement; there never was such eagerness to read a book; the booksellers advertise it in advance. It is true that it is grandiose. But you will judge.

As for the “Lettre aux Écrivains,” alas! I cannot look at it without pain, for la dilecta thought it so fine, so majestic, so varied, that she had palpitations of the heart which injured her, and I don’t like those pages any more.

You know that one of the qualities of the bengali is illimitable fidelity. Poor bird of Asia, without his rose, without his peri, mute, sad, but very loving, the desire seizes me to write his story. I have begun it in the “Voyage à Java.”

Adieu; this scrap of a letter is scribbled on a pile of proofs that would frighten even a proof-reader. A thousand homages, and kindly present my obeisances to M. Hanski. I return to my work with fury, and I wish you the realization of all the wishes you make. Find here the expression of the most sincere and most respectful of attachments.

Paris, March 1, 1835.

I have received, madame, the letter in which you announce to me your departure for your lonely Wierzchownia. I shall therefore not see you in Vienna. I shall delay my trip to Essling and Wagram till the end of the summer, so that when I go, I can push on to the Ukraine.

Well, you will be accompanied by the sincerest prayers for your happiness and for that of those about you. As for me, after a few days’ diversion, necessitated by lassitude, I have just returned to the deepest seclusion, in order to finish up my two agreements with Madame Bêchet and Werdet, and to grow, to enlarge myself, to raise my name to the height of the esteem you give to it, that you be not proud in vain of having granted me a few days of gracious friendship; my pride, mine, will ever be legitimate enough. I tell you once more, with a sort of religious emotion, that you are, together with her of whom I have so often spoken, the most beauteous soul, the noblest heart, the most attractive person that I have seen in this world, the most superior mind and the best instructed. Let me tell you this that I think, at the moment when you are about to put as great a distance of time between us as there is already.

I have been measuring the amount of work that remains for me to do; it will take six months to finish it. For six months, therefore, I shall try to rise higher, to send you fine works, the flowers of my brain,—the only flowers that can cross that great distance unwithered,—which will reach you, like those I have sent already, in their coarse germ and their first dress. Accept them always as a proof of my respect and admiration, as a proof of that constancy that you yourself advise, as the pledge of a pure and holy friendship, and as a testimony in favour of calumniated France, accused of levity, but where are still to be found chivalrous souls, lofty, strong, who do not treat lightly true affections. You have given me the desire to raise, to improve myself; let me be grateful in my own way.

On returning to my retreat, I found Grosclaude on the threshold. He asked me to let him make my portrait, full length, in my working-dress. He told me that in case he did it, you and Monsieur Hanski had asked for a copy. You will not refuse the person painted when you already possess the first impulsion of his thought in manuscript. I am so happy in this friendship of which you and M. Hanski do not reject the proofs. We are so far off! Let me approach you as materially as I can. You will say yes, will you not?

I have just broken all the threads by which Lilliput-Paris held me garoted; I have made myself a secret retreat, where I shall live six months [rue des Batailles, Chaillot]. I was seized with profound emotion on entering it; for it is here that my last battle will be fought, here that I must grasp the sceptre. If I succumb! If I should not succeed! If (in spite of a regimen prescribed by doctors who have traced me a manner of living so that I may struggle without danger through my work), if I fall ill! A crowd of such thoughts seized me, inspired by the gravity of the things I am undertaking. At last, in the early morning, I went to the window, and I saw, shining above my head, the star of that delicious hour. I had confidence, I was joyful as a child, after being feeble as a child; I went back to my table, crying out the “Ha, ha!” of the horse of Scripture. Then I determined to begin by writing you these lines. Bring me luck, you and the star, will you? The second thing I have to do is the end of “Séraphita,” an immense work, that I have meditated for three or four months, and which rises ever higher. I have now only to write it. You know it belongs to you.

You ought, at this moment when I am writing, to have read “Le Père Goriot.” How shall I send you my manuscripts when you are in Russia? You must tell me. As for the books, it will be equally difficult. You must give me your instructions. Mine to you are that you shall be well in health, that M. Hanski be gay, have no black butterflies, that his enterprises shall prosper, that Anna shall jump and laugh and grow without accidents; and that all about you be well and happy.

At the beginning of the autumn, therefore, if it please God, and if I have fruitfully worked, you will see a pilgrim arriving and ringing at your castle gate, asking for a few days’ hospitality, who would fain repay you by laying at your feet the laurels won in the literary tournament—as if glory could ever be anything else than a grain of incense on the altar of friendship! One word is worth more than these puffs of wind; and that word of gratitude I shall ever say to you.

The inclosed autograph is that of a friend of mine who may become something some day; there is one remarkable thing about him which will recommend him to your heraldicomaniacal favour; he is descended from Jeanne d’Arc, through her brother Gautier. His name is Edouard Gautier d’Arc, Baron du Lys, and he bears the arms of France, supported by a woman, on his shield. Is not that one of the finest things in the present day? Well, of a man whom we ought to make peer of France with a fine entailed estate, we have made a consul at Valentia! He has ambition.

Paris, March 11, 1835.

I have just received your good letter of the 3rd instant. It has given me pleasure and pain. Pleasure, you are better; pain, you have been ill. You see, I had the time to go to Vienna, and now I cannot. I shall go and see you at Wierzchownia for after taking measures for “La Bataille” at Wagram, I shall not think anything of a few hundred more leagues to say good-day to you.

You are always so good you will let me take you for confessor, tell you all, be confiding, and have in you a soul?

You will find inclosed the dedication of “Séraphita.” Have the kindness to answer me by return courier, that I may know if you approve it. In a thing of this kind there must be no point left to object to; dedications cannot be corrected. “Séraphita” will be finished by the first Sunday in April, therefore you have time to throw a “yes” into the post on receiving this letter. Your silence will mean disapproval. The “Revue de Paris” is horribly anxious to get this end; it has received complaints without number.

When the number is out I will send it to you through Sina; but I own that I do not like to risk the manuscript. What shall I do, therefore? You will receive the fourth Part of the “Études de Mœurs,” the second edition of “Goriot,” “Melmoth réconcilié,” the manuscripts of “La Fille aux yeux d’or,” and the “Duchesse de Langeais,” and, perhaps, that of “Séraphita;” perhaps also the second Part of the “Études Philosophiques.”

What shall I tell you about all this? The finishing of “Séraphita” kills me, crushes me. I have fever every day. Never did so grand a conception rise before any man. None but myself can know what I put into it; I put my life into it! When you receive this letter the work will have been cast.

There never was a success equal to that of “Goriot.” This stupid Paris, which neglected the “Absolu,” has just bought twelve hundred copies of the first edition of “Goriot” [in book form], before its announcement. Two other editions are in press. I will send you the second.

Here I am, with piles of gold, compared to my late situation; for I still have seven thousand ducats to pay [70,000 frs.], but in three months “Goriot” gives one thousand ducats. During the last three months I have regularly paid off four thousand ducats a month with the product of my pen!1

Besides “Séraphita,” I am finishing “L’Enfant Maudit,” remaking “Louis Lambert,” and completing “La Fille aux yeux d’or.” I have finished a rather important work, entitled, “Melmoth réconcilié,” and I am preparing a great and beautiful work, called “Le Lys dans la Vallée,” the figure of a charming woman, full of heart and having a sulky husband, but virtuous. This will be, under a form purely human, terrestrial perfection, just as “Séraphita” will be celestial perfection. The “Lys dans la Vallée” is the last picture in the “Études de Mœurs,” just as “Séraphita” will be the last picture in the “Études Philosophiques.” Then, the third dizain.

You will have received the letter in which I tell you of my seclusion. It is deep. No one comes here. No, no more Lormois. Why do you trouble yourself about things I pay no heed to? I have renounced pleasures. No more Opera, no more Bouffons, no more anything; solitude and work. Séraphita! There, will be my great stroke; there, I shall receive the cold mockery of Parisians, but there, too, I shall strike to the heart of all privileged beings. In it is a treatise on prayer, headed “The Path to God,” in which are the last words of the angel, which will surely give desire to live by the soul. These mystical ideas have filled me. I am the artist-believer. Pygmalion and his statue are no longer a fable to me. “Goriot” could be done every day; “Séraphita” but once in a lifetime.

So, then, since my last letter I have had no events in my material life, but many in the life of my heart, because my heart is involved in this majestic occupation.

I have to do the “Mémoires d’une jeune Mariée,” a work in filagree, which will be a wonder to the little women who find the pinions of “Séraphita” incomprehensible.

No, I cannot buy La Grenadière as yet; I need seven or eight thousand francs for that, which I don’t possess. Though my cane with its ebullition of turquoises has made me notorious as a new Aboulcasem, I have nothing but debts. When I am free of those, I will see about getting the money for La Grenadière.

If I were in Vienna, I would make you laugh; oh, yes! I don’t laugh now except with those who love me. Judge, therefore, how precious our friendship has become to me. Other laughs are compromising. I am taken seriously; so much so that Dantan has caricatured me. Would you like to see it? I will send it with the volumes I have for you. I have never lost any time in transmitting to you those of my poor works that you have the goodness to like.

My sobriety and regularity of life can alone save me under the ardent work I have to complete to win that liberty so longed-for. It is now twenty days that I have risen at midnight and gone to bed at six o’clock. I shall persevere until I am delivered from the Bêchet contract, and the fourth Part is given to Werdet.

I hope I can send the box to you April 17. I shall address it, in any case, to Baron Sina.

Madame Delphine P... was at the Opera Sunday, and gave birth to a child Monday.

I thank you for your glimpses of Viennese society. What I have learned about Germans in their relations elsewhere confirms what you say of them. Your story of General H... comes up periodically. There has been something like it in all countries, but I thank you for having told it to me. The circumstances give it novelty.

I respect your wishes in sending you the manuscript of “Goriot” in its dirty condition. It bears the trace of many worries and much fatigue.

Madame de Berny is a little better, but alas! this is only obtained by digitalis. I hope I may still keep that light of my life, that conscience so pure, that tenderness so delicate.

Madame Carraud is safely confined of a son.

I saw Borget this morning, returned from Italy, and I have your letter; so this has been a good day.

Well, I must say adieu; but remember that while writing a book that bears your name, I do not quit you.

The Emperor of Russia has prohibited “Goriot;” probably on account of Vautrin.

There is pleasure in breaking all one’s bonds to society; one has no remorse; society does not cling to you, and one can only pity those who cling to it. I am happy. I can march on in solitude, led by a beautiful and noble thought.

I am sorry you have not seen the satirical preface I put to “Goriot;” you shall have it later. I won’t make a package of that only.

I have a hundred thousand things to say, but when I begin to talk with you I seem to see you; I forget my ideas. However, I intend to begin a journal-letter, and put in every day some of my ideas.

At this moment I am a little drunk with work; my hand is tired; the heart is full, but the head is empty; you will get neither mind nor gaiety, but all that affection has of truest, all that memory has of freshest, and the tenderest gratitude.

You ask me what becomes of Madame de Nucingen. She will be, and so will her husband, a most comic dramatic personage in “Une Vue du Monde” long advertised by the “Revue de Paris.” It is called “La Faillite de M. de Nucingen.” But I need time for all these conceptions, and especially for their execution; above all when (as for Séraphita) I work often a year or two in thought before taking a pen. Adoremus in æternum means for me, “Toil ever.”

You speak of the stage. The stage might bring me in two hundred thousand francs a year. I know, beyond a doubt, that I could make my fortune there in a short time; but you forget that I have not six months to myself, not one month; and if I had I should not write a play, I should go and see you. Six months of my time represent forty thousand francs; and I must have that money in hand before I can do either “La Grande Mademoiselle” or “Philippe le Discret.” Where the devil am I to get it? Out of my ink-pot. There is no Leo X. in these days. Work is the artist’s bank.

If you knew the annoyances that Madame Bêchet’s business embarrassments cause me. She cannot pay unless my numbers appear. So, when I am inspired for “Séraphita,” when I listen to the music of angels, when I am sick with ecstasy, I must come down to corrections, I must finish that stupidity “La Fille aux yeux d’or,” etc. It is horrible suffering. I would like to do the comedy of “La Grande Mademoiselle,” but no! I must work for Werdet, who is ripping himself open to give me the money for my payments, my livelihood. Honesty has made a galley of my study. That is something you ought to know well. I have not a minute to myself, and I never take any distraction except when my brain comes down like a foundered horse.

You know all that my heart contains of affection and good wishes for yours. Affectionate compliments to M. Hanski, and take all you will for yourself of my most devoted feelings.

Grosclaude is coming to make my full-length portrait. I have never dared to ask for a sketch of yours.

This is the dedication:—

“Madame,—Here is the work you asked of me; and to you I dedicate it, happy in being able thus to prove the respectful and constant affection which you permit me to feel for you. But read it as some bad transcript of a hymn dreamed from my childhood; the fervent rhythm of which, heard on the summits of the azure mountains, and its prophetic poesy, revealed here and there at times in Nature, it is impossible to present in human language.

“If I have risked being accused of impotence in thus attempting a sacred book which demands the light of Orient beneath the translucent veil of our noble language, was it not you who urged me to the effort, by saying that the most imperfect drawing of that figure would still be something that would please you? Here, then, it is, that something. I could wish that this book were read by none but minds preserved, like yours, from worldly pettiness by solitude; such as they alone know how to complete this poem; to them it may be, perhaps, a stepping-stone, or else a rough and humble flag on which to kneel and pray within the temple!

“I am, with respect, your devoted servant.”

Paris, March 30, 1835.

Do not be vexed with me for the irregularity of my letters. I am overwhelmed with work, and I feel the necessity of getting through with it if I want my dear liberty. Madame Bêchet has become singularly ill-natured and will hurt my interests much. In paying me, she charges me with corrections which amount on the twelve volumes to three thousand francs, and also for my copies, which will cost me fifteen hundred more. Thus four thousand five hundred francs less, and my discounts, diminish by six thousand the thirty-three thousand. She could not lose a great fortune more clumsily, for Werdet estimates at five hundred thousand francs the profits to be made out of the next edition of the “Études de Mœurs.”

I find Werdet the active, intelligent, and devoted editor that I want. I have still six months before I can be rid of Madame Bêchet; for I have three volumes more to do, and it is impossible to count on less than two months to each volume. Thus you see I am held here till September. Between now and then I ought to give Werdet three Parts of the “Études Philosophiques,” and do much work for the Revues. For the last twenty days I have worked steadily twelve hours a day on “Séraphita.” The world is ignorant of this immense toil; it only sees, and should only see, results. But I have had to master the whole of mysticism to formulate it. “Séraphita” is a consuming work for those who believe. Unhappily, in this sad Paris the Angel may chance to furnish the subject for a ballet. I shall meet with sarcasm, but I will not go into society. I will stay here tranquilly and do “La Fleur des Poix,” “L’Enfant Maudit,” “Sœur Marie des Anges,” and “Les Mémoires d’une jeune Mariée.”

What has tired me horribly the last few days is the reprinting of “Louis Lambert,” which I have tried to bring to a point of perfection that would leave me in peace as to that work; and Lambert’s thoughts when he was at Villenoix remained to be done. I had put, as it were, a hat on that place to keep it, or the cover on a dish at a meal. However, it is all done now; it is a new formula for humanity, which is the tie that binds “Louis Lambert” to “Séraphita.”

Next, I have twenty days’ work in remaking the “Comtesse à deux Maris” [“Colonel Chabert”]. I think it detestable, wanting in taste and truth; and I have had the courage to begin it all over again on the press. It was in that way I did my last work on the “Chouans.” At this rate my hair turns frightfully white. No, you will never recognize me.

Madame de Berny is rather better,—much better, she says. But she still has sudden attacks which show that the cause is there. I have wept much over her; I have prepared myself for a grief which will act upon my whole life. In May I shall go and spend a month with her.

I need seven or eight thousand francs to buy the Grenadière, and I cannot yet put my hand on that sum. If I finish “La Fleur des Poix” in April and go to Touraine in May, I may possibly return with the sacred title of land-owner. On the 20th of May (my birthday) or the 16th of May (my fête-day) we shall baptize my brother’s child. I am godfather, with my niece Sophie as godmother. I always swore I would never be godfather to any child; but my brother is so unfortunate it is impossible to refuse. I should like to complete the fête by buying the Grenadière. It would be a first sign of prosperity.

I will put into my parcel of April 17th the two caricatures of me in plaster by Dantan, who has caricatured all the great men. The chief point of mine is the famous cane bubbling with turquoise on a chased gold knob, which has had more success in France than all my works. As for me, he has caricatured my stoutness. I look like Louis XVIII. These two caricatures have had such success that I have not as yet been able to get them. It is true that I go out little, and sit at my work for twenty hours. You can’t imagine what success this jewelled cane has had; it threatens to become European. Borget, who has returned from Italy, and who did not say he was my friend, told me he heard of it in Naples and Rome. All the dandies in Paris are jealous, and the little journals have been supplied with items for six months. Excuse me for telling you this, but it seems to me it is biographical; and if they tell you on your travels that I have a fairy-cane, which summons horses, erects palaces, and spits diamonds, do not be surprised, but laugh as I do. Never did the tail of Alcibiades’ dog wag harder. But I have three or four other tails of the same kind for the Parisians.

Our exhibition of paintings is quite fine this year. There are seven or eight leading masterpieces. Grosclaude’s picture is much liked. He is honourably hung in the large Salon. But they think he has only colour and drawing, and lacks soul and composition. Gérard, however, thinks he is really a man of talent. He told him so sincerely; and repeated the same to me, adding that there was nothing for a man like him to do but to produce; he calls this a good and fine picture. There is much good luck for him in appearing without disadvantage in the large Salon, where there are ten or twelve splendid pictures. There is a landscape by Brascassat in which is a bull, which could be bought for six thousand francs, and may be worth a hundred thousand. It is, like Pagnest’s “Portrait,” the despair of artists. Brascassat is, like Pagnest, a poor young consumptive. He is a shepherd, taken, like Foyatier the sculptor, from his flocks, and, if he lives, he will be a great painter. Our nineteenth century will be great. We cannot doubt it. There is a deluge of talent here.

I regretted you much. I should have liked to see you in Paris this winter. The Exhibition, and the Italian opera have offered an unheard-of combination: Lablache, Tamburini, Rubini. Then Beethoven, executed at the Conservatoire as he is nowhere else. Besides which, Paris is being cleaned and completed, thanks to Louis-Philippe’s trowel. But there’s a hundred years’ work still to do at the Louvre. When I pass along the quay of the Tuileries, my artist-heart bleeds to see the stones placed by Catherine de’ Medici, corroded by the sun before being carved—and this for three hundred years.

Adieu! it is two in the morning. Here is an hour and a half stolen from “Séraphita.” She groans, she calls; I must finish her, for the “Revue de Paris” groans too; it has advanced me nineteen hundred francs, and “Séraphita” must settle the account.

Adieu! imagine how I think of you in finishing the work that is yours. It is time it appeared. Literature here has decided that I shall never finish that work; they say it is impossible.

Graceful things to Anna, my respects to Mademoiselle Séverine, my regards to M. Hanski; and to you nothing, for all is yours. It would be giving you a bit of your own property to send you anything, and I have, in this low world, too few friendships to diminish the truest of them all.

Paris, May 1, 1835.

Madame,—I greeted M. le Prince de Schonberg as I never did any one, for he came from you. “Séraphita” exacts more work. I had hoped to send you the manuscript by the prince, but it cannot be finished before my fête-day, May 16, and the prince starts to-day or to-morrow. I cannot even profit by his journey to write you in detail about my life and occupations. I have perhaps presumed too far upon my strength in supposing I could do so many things in so little time. I shall be lucky indeed if I can get off and divert myself in September. But nothing shall hinder me when my obligations have been met.

When I have finished with Madame Bêchet and Werdet, yes, then I shall have six months before me. On that day I shall owe nothing to any one, for the approaching reissue of the “Études de Mœurs” enlarged by what will be added to them, will release me of all, even my debt to my mother. Wealth will come both for her and for me, in 1837, when my works will be issued as the “Études Sociales.” There is my future sketched out. There is my hope and my toil.

If sometimes the grief of not possessing the happiness that I dream saddens and consumes me, the hope of one day seeing my mother happy through me, and my fortune built up, all by myself, without help, sustains me. But what are the hopes of material life compared to the disappointment of the prayers of the heart? And so, now that I advance toward the graver life, and doubt at times of affections, finding myself so changed by toil, there come moments of cruel melancholy and gray hours. Then the weather clears; the azure sky we saw upon the Alps comes back; Diodati, that image of a happy life, reappears, like a star for a moment clouded, and I laugh—as you know I can laugh. I tell myself that so much work will have its recompense, and that I shall some day have, like Lord Byron, my Diodati, and I sing in my bad voice: “Diodati! Diodati!”

What grief for me to delay that glorious apparition of “Séraphita.” I tremble lest you should have left Vienna before the prince arrives there. But if so, Sina will forward all.

Be happy on your journey; may no untoward event distress you; return to your penates, and I, under my pressure here, I see that dwelling as an object... [The letter is unfinished.]

Paris, May 3, 1835.

I have this instant received yours of April 24. I have written you by the Prince de Schonberg, who was to carry to you all that remains of the manuscript of the “Duchesse de Langeais,” of which part was lost in the printing-office, the part I cared for most, that which I did in Geneva beside you, laughing and explaining to you proof corrections.

How many things I have to answer in your last letter. But before doing so I must tell you something that is the best of all answers. You do not leave till May 15th; well, don’t leave till the 25th. I have my passports, and you will receive my farewells. I cannot let you plunge back into your desert until I have pressed your hand. I will not commit to any one the manuscript of “Séraphita.” I shall bring it to you myself. I want ten days more to print the rest. The 16th, my fête-day, I shall start for Vienna; I can get there in ten days; I shall be there on the 25th or 26th. If I can arrive sooner, I shall be there sooner. Wait for me; give credit for ten days to a friend. I shall stay four days in Vienna, see Essling and Wagram, and return.

I cannot tell you more, for I must spend the days and nights in getting all things in order here, and in finishing the books begun. “Séraphita” must have eight days and nights for herself alone.

I say nothing to M. Hanski, as I shall see you all so soon. I am joyous as a child at the escapade. Quit my galley and see new lands! Well, well, à bientôt. I send my things to Sina. Ask him, if they arrive before me, to wait till I come before opening my trunk at the custom-house. It is proper that you should see the cane for which you blame me, and I confide it to the customs.

Addio. Kiss Anna on the forehead for her horse.

Vienna, May, 1835.

Can you lend me your valet de place again this morning?—for I still have not obtained one.

I think you have not read “Obermann;” I send it to you; but I shall want it in two or three days. It is one of the finest books of the period.

A thousand heart compliments.

Vienna, May, 1835.

My cold is precisely the same. It is nothing at all. I have just received a letter from M. Hammer. I think he is annoyed, for he uses towards me that wealth of civility which is often the irony of great souls.

Did you know that the French are very coustumiers to the fact of bartering Austrian uniforms against victories, but that this ruins young empires?

I shall stay in town only the time necessary to fulfil your Majesty’s orders.

I entreat you don’t worry about me. People are never ill when they are happy. I do nothing; I let myself go to the happiness of living, and that is so rare with me that when it is so I don’t know what could hurt me.

A thousand heart assurances.

Vienna, May, 1835.

The heat has so prostrated me that I don’t know what will become of me; but as for the illness itself, it has ceased. A thousand thanks for your kindness.

I shall rush with the celerity of your valet, who is a veritable kid, and this is difficult for a Mar [Balzac’s nickname among his friends was Dom Mar] whose paunch is worthy of all the illustrious paunches your cousin used to laugh at.

I have dreamed ta, I have dreamed ti, I have dreamed tchef, and of his casalba. I have come to breathe in the Walter-garten, and I send you “Lauzun” to convince you of the reality of the comedy that could be made of his amours with Mademoiselle, for I think you do not know the book.

Vienna, May, 1835.

You know, madame, that if anything can equal the respectful attachment that I feel for you it is the will that I am forced to display to keep within the limits that my work imposes on my pleasures.

Here, as in Paris, my life must be completely inharmonious with the life of society. To get my twelve hours of work, I must go to bed at nine o’clock in order to rise at three; and this truly monastic rule, to which I am compelled, dominates everything. I have yielded something of my stern observance to you, by giving myself three hours’ more freedom here than in Paris, where I go to bed at six; but that is all I can do.

However sweet and gracious are the invitations, and however flattering the eagerness of which I feel the full value, I am obliged to be the enemy of my dearest pleasures. You know that the persons who love me, and who have every right to be exacting, conform to my ways of going nowhere; and treat me as a spoilt child.

These explanations have a conceited aspect which I dislike, and which would make me ridiculous if you did not constrain me to give my true reasons.

So, I count upon your precious friendship to explain them, and save me from their accompanying dangers. You have long known that I am a soldier on a battlefield, swept onward, without other liberty than that of fighting the enemy and all the difficulties of my position.

You will give—will you not?—what value you can to my regrets, and I shall thus have another obligation to add to the hundred thousand I already owe you. But you are so noble there is no fear in being indebted to you.

Yes, I am altogether better. I have recovered from the fatigues of the journey, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your dear and delicate attentions. A thousand affectionate compliments to M. Hanski. As for you, I should have to express too many things, and, as you see, paper is lacking. Here begin the things of the heart.

Vienna, May, 1835.

It is impossible for me to work if I have to go out, and I never work merely for an hour or two. You arranged so well that I did not go to bed till one o’clock. Consequently, I did not rise till eight; so from nine till one I have only time to pay you a visit in order to put the visit to the prince between two good things which may weaken the diplomatic influence.

I want to go and see the Prater in the morning, in its solitude. If you will, it would be very gracious; for by not beginning on the “Lys dans la Vallée” till to-morrow I must then work fourteen hours to make up for time lost. I have sworn to myself to do that work in Vienna, or else—throw myself into the Danube.

So, in twenty minutes I shall be with you to ask counsel. As for the seductions of the prince, he caught me once, but I have too much pride to be caught again; I should pass for a ninny.

A thousand heart-felt regards.

Vienna, May, 1835.

I am incapable of writing the nothings that I see come naturally to very intelligent persons; I simply put down just what comes into my head; and what came into my head was one of the things that I have at heart. Excuse me to the countess, and assure her that this is the second time I have failed over an album, and that not having the habit—and even having a horror—of them, I hope she will be indulgent to me.

Though I am not dirty, I am decidedly stupid, for I don’t understand a word of what you do me the honour to say about Madame Sophie. I entreat you, have pity on my mental infirmities, and, when you make romances, put them on the level of my intellectual faculties. This may seem impertinent—it is only artless.

I have still another hour to work, and then I will come. I am busy with planning rather than writing, and I can see you while thinking; which is not the same as thinking of other things than you while seeing you.

A thousand gracious and humble thoughts before your August Despotism.

Vienna, May, 1835.

I cannot wait till one o’clock to know if you are better, whether your hoarseness and oppression have lessened, whether the foot-bath was efficacious—in short, whether all is well. Have the charity to send me a word on these important matters—for it is important to subjects to know how their princes are.

Affectionate compliments, and accept my obeisances

Vienna, June, 1835.

You know well, my dear beloved, that my soul is not narrow enough to distinguish what is yours from what is mine. All is ours—heart, soul, body, sentiments, all, from the least word to the slightest look; from life to death. But do not ruin us, for I should send you back a hundred Austrians for your one, and you would cry out at the folly.

My Eve, adored, I have never been so happy, I have never suffered so much. A heart more ardent than the imagination is vivid is a fatal gift when complete happiness does not quench the daily thirst. I knew what I came to seek of sufferings, and I have found them. In Paris, those sufferings seemed to me the greatest of pleasures, and I was not mistaken. The two parts are equal.

For this you had to be more lovely, and nothing is truer. Yesterday you were enough to render mad. If I did not know that we are bound forever, I should die of grief. Therefore, never abandon me; it would be murder. Never destroy the confidence which is our sole complete possession in this love so pure. Have no jealousies, which never have foundation. You know how faithful the unhappy are; feelings are all their treasure, their fortune, and we cannot be more unhappy than we are here.

Nothing can detach me from you; you are my life, my happiness, all my hopes. I believe in life only with you. What can you fear? My toil proves to you my love; it was preferring the present to the future to come here now; it was the folly of impassioned love, for by it I postponed for many months, that I might enjoy this moment, the days when you think we shall be free—more free, for free, oh! I dare not think of that. God must will it! I love you so much, and all things unite us so truly that it must be; but when?

A thousand kisses; for I have a thirst those little sudden pleasures but increase. We have not an hour, nor a minute. And these obstacles fan such ardour that, believe me, I do right to hasten my departure.

I press you on all sides to my heart, where you are held but mentally. Would that I held you there living!1

Munich, June 7, 1835.

I arrived here in Munich at eleven o’clock last night; but I might have come in thirty-six hours instead of forty-eight if it had not been for three bad postilions, whom no human power could make go, and who, each of them, lost me three hours apiece. I slept seven hours, and have just waked to keep the promise I made of writing you a line. Then, at ten o’clock, after seeing the exterior of the public buildings, I shall start again with the same celerity.

I have nothing romantic to tell you of the journey, always sad on leaving kind friends. I had no other adventure than two horses accustomed to fetch sand, who nearly flung me into a quarry, the postilion being unable to prevent them from keeping to their habits. I jumped out in time, and began, like the horses, to go back to Vienna; but it was proved to the horses, by the whip, that they had to go to Hohenlinden, and to me, by necessity, that I had to go to Paris. The postilion was afraid I should scold him. But he did not know that the horses and I were equally faithful to our habits in spite of duty. I made many sad reflections on the manner in which horses and men have no liberty, on the various curbs that are put upon them, on the blows of fate, and the lashing of whips. But I spare you all that. You will tell me that my sadness is too humorous to be believed; whereas, in me, great disappointed affections turn always to a sort of rage, which I express by expending it on some one, as I did Thursday evening at Prince R...’s, where, because I could not do what I wished, I talked magnetism.

In heaven’s name, don’t forget, I entreat you, to explain to M. Vatischef how it happened that he received neither my card nor my visit; you do not know how much I care about fuelling the duties of politeness punctually.

Though I did not like your valet de place, he was useful to me on several occasions. I gave money to all, except to him, and he was not there. Do me the kindness to give him a ducat for me. I will return it in my next letter. One should be neither unjust nor forgetful. Otherwise, nothing is ever great.

I should have liked to go through Munich without stopping; but you asked me to write you a line from here, and so I have stopped. I don’t like to stop in this way. The noise and motion of the carriage, the business of paying, and of making the postilions get on, all divert and excite me. But to stop is to think; and there are but sad thoughts on leaving you.

Don’t you recognize me, the man of debts, in my leaving two behind me for you to pay—Koller and the valet de place? Ask M. Hanski to tell the carriage-maker not to take me for a swindler, and to give me credit till my return, an epoch at which I will order a carriage. You see I mean to return soon.

Well, adieu until Paris; there, I will give you my news. Meanwhile accept a thousand tender thanks.

Paris, June 12, 1835.

I arrived on the 11th, at two in the morning. So, deducting the time I stayed in Munich, I did the journey in five days. But I am sure now that it can be done in four, and that I can go in eleven days to Wierzchownia.

I arrived horribly tired, brown as a negro, and only able to fling myself on a bed and sleep. I write to you this evening, according to promise.

You will receive from M. de la Rochefoucauld (to whom I beg you to write a line) by the first embassy opportunity,—that of Austria, if M. le Comte Maurice Esterhazy is a good fellow, and will do me this service,—a parcel containing, first, “Le Père Goriot,” third edition, in the first volume of which you will find a pen-holder worthy of you, and in the second volume a paper-knife to thank you for the one you gave me; second, a copy of the “Livre des Conteurs,” in which is “Melmoth réconcilié.”

I will attend to your pearls at the earliest moment.

I find my affairs in horrible disorder. Werdet had paid the bill of exchange, but he had not been able to pay my notes falling due on the 15th and the 31st of May, so that my sister, to whom such affairs are not familiar, being terrified, took—not my diamonds, but—my silver-ware and pawned it. So now I must work night and day to repair the stupidities they have done me.

I have therefore three or four months at “hard labour,” during which I must ask you to have indulgence for me. I can’t write to you as often as I would like. I must produce, one after another, “Le Lys,” “Les Mémoires d’une jeune Mariée,” the Part for Werdet, and that for Madame Bêchet. They are all complaining of me horribly. But feel no remorse; I shall never regret the journey, however short it was, nor, above all, the time, brief as it was, society left us to ourselves.

I am not pleased with Munich. There are too many frescos, and too many bad frescos. Those of the upper ceiling of the Pinakothek, and those of the lower halls of the Kœnigsbaugh(?), are alone of value. All the rest is not above the level of our café decorations in Paris.

Adieu, for to-day. Kiss Anna’s pretty little knuckles for me, offer my regards to M. Hanski, and recall me to the memory of all about you.

You will find the ducat for Jean, the valet de place, in the first volume of “Père Goriot.”

Chaillot [rue des Batailles], July 1, 1835.

What I send you will decidedly be subjected to the chances that politics may have of sending a courier to M. de la Rochefoucauld; for the lucky attaché was married and gone before I knew it.

Since I last wrote you time has elapsed; but that time was taken up by enormous troubles, such as whiten or thin the hair. The person who is with my mother writes me, confidentially, that it is a question of saving her life or her reason, for that if she does not die, grief may make her crazy. My brother, incapable in every way, reduced to the deepest distress, talks of blowing out his brains, instead of trying to do something for himself. My sister is in a state that grows worse; her illness had made frightful advances. All this is killing my mother.

So, in four days there is added to the difficulties created by my journey, my financial crisis and delayed work, that of two existences to guide and providentially manage!

It is a gloomy evening. I am seated at my window; I have gazed through space at the lands I have just quitted, and where I went to seek, near you, youth, rest, strength—to refresh both heart and head, to forget the hell of Paris; and sitting here, a few tears fall. I measure the extent of the abyss; I weigh the burden; I seek in the depths of my heart the corner where lies the principle of my power; and I resign myself. Of these great scenes, the secret lies between God and ourselves. My God!—If you could see me you would know why I was so sad in leaving you, you would comprehend the meaning of what I said when I cried out with apparent gaiety: “I go to plunge back into the vat and renew my miseries.”

By what sweet destiny is it that for two years past I owe to you the only calm and peaceful intervals in my life?

Now, I have begun to raise a barrier, not to be surmounted, between my mother and her children, between her and the world of self-interests that come roaring round her. I have secured to her the peace and calmness of her retreat. Next, I have formed a plan of liquidation for my brother, and another plan to provide for two years for his family subsistence. In fifteen days all this will be settled. Then in the course of those two years I shall be able to find him a position.

If you will think for a moment that small interests are more complicated and more difficult to handle than great ones, you will divine the goings and comings, the difficulties, the conferences of all this. I had my own financial crisis to overcome. The continual calumnies in the newspapers piling lampoons upon me—that I had absconded, that I was in Sainte-Pélagie—found credence in the stupid part of Paris; and that belief has paralyzed the resources of credit that I had. But, at the hour of my present writing I have vanquished all for myself as well as for my mother and for my brother. Still a day or so, and I shall be astride of the prettiest winged courser I ever mounted in the fields of the classic valley; and I shall fire away in both Revues in July and August, while my two Parts—of the “Études de Mœurs” and the “Études Philosophiques”—will appear simultaneously. The purely pecuniary damage done by my journey will be repaired. Then I shall work deliciously once more, thinking that my reward will be the journey to Wierzchownia without a care.

It was under these circumstances that I busied myself about your paper-knife and your pen-holder; I thought those trifles would be the dearer to you, and that M. Hanski would suffer friendship to impinge upon his rights. So, into the midst of my troubles a sweet thought glided when I went to Lecointe, the jeweller. Oh! preserve me, very pure and very bright, that affection which, you see, is a source of consolation amid the tortures of life.

I presume your long silence comes from your journey to Ischl. Nevertheless, I had news of you yesterday. It was not good. From the 27th to the 28th you were ill, harassed. You saw Madame de Lucchesi-Palli [Duchesse de Berry]. A somnambulist whom I had put to sleep told me that. She must have told the truth, for she spoke of certain annoyances which you feel, and of which she could know nothing except from you. The last experiments that I have made here in Paris since my return decide me to always have somnambulists at hand. This one told me that you wrote to Paris (or intended to write to Paris) for information about me. But she saw this so confusedly that it proved nothing clearly. She thought your heart was larger than it ought to be, and advised me earnestly to tell you to avoid painful emotions and live calmly; but she said there was no danger. Your heart is, like your forehead, an organ largely developed. I was much moved when she said to me with that solemn expression of somnambulists: “These are persons very much attached to you, who love you very truly.”

What an imposing and awful power! To know what is passing in the soul of others at a great distance! To know what they do! I will try to give you a proof of this. Tell M. Hanski to write me a letter, calculate the day I shall receive it, and then remember all he says, and does, and thinks on that day, so that he may know whether I, in Paris, have seen Ischl. It will be the finest of our experiments. A month hence I shall have several somnambulists. It is one means not to be cheated by anyone. I have nothing of Anna’s, so I cannot know anything about her. If you are curious to consult, send me a little piece of linen or cotton, which you must put on her stomach during the night, and which she must put herself (without any one touching it) into a paper which she must put inside your letter.

I have to-day resumed my great labours. Madame de Castries seems satisfied with what I did for her; but I did well to put my relations with her on the footing of social politeness. If you have read, or if you should read “Léone Léoni,” you must know that Madame Dudevant has been far beneath d’U..., the husband of the Wallachian. I have heard strange things about that household, but I cannot write them; they go beyond the limits of a letter. I will keep them for an evening at Wierzchownia. Good God! what a life!

Yesterday the most horrible thing happened to me. You know, or you don’t know, that waiting in expectation is dreadful torture to me. Sandeau went to the rue Cassini, and there heard that a package had come by post from Vienna, and, the postage being thirty-six francs, Rose had refused to take it in, not having the money. My head gave way. I felt that no one but you could be sending to me from Vienna. I sent Auguste off in a cabriolet, told him where to get the money, and to bring me the package, living or dead. Auguste was gone four hours. I was four hours in hell, inventing dramas. What do you suppose he brought? That copy of “Père Goriot,” which I asked you to give to any one who might like it, and it was returned to me from Vienna!—by the post! They may refuse me entrance to paradise, “Philippe le Discret” may be a failure—such would be mere misfortunes, but this! I did as the possessor of slippers did in the Arabian Nights,—I burned that copy lest it might cause me some other misfortune.

I have had another grief. A little Savoyard, whom T call Anchises [Grain-de-mil], who was zeal, discretion, honesty, intelligence personified,—my little groom, to whom I was singularly attached,—died at the Hôtel-Dieu on the twenty-first day after an operation performed by M. Roux, Dupuytren’s successor, and done with great success,—the removal of a large tumour on the knee. The-putrid reaction of so large a wound set in violently. I am grieved. He decided on the operation, which became necessary in my absence, in order that I might find him cured and relieved of an infirmity which would in the end have carried him off. Poor child! all those who knew him regret him; he pleased every one.

After a few more words to you I must go and put myself to finishing “l’Enfant Maudit.” I am in a suitable frame of mind to do that work of melancholy. Now that I have returned to my life of eighteen hours’ daily toil I shall write you a species of journal every day, and send you the whole weekly. This is written Sunday, June 28, twenty-four days after leaving you, and fifteen days since I last wrote to you. But these fifteen days have been fatally full of griefs, occupations, and difficulties of all sorts; such things cannot be told. It would need volumes to explain what is done and thought in an hour. You have it in bulk. Werdet has been to London to see about our counterfeits and translations.

Monday, 29.

It was midnight when I finished. I said adieu to you in my heart and went to bed. I should like to change something in my way of life. I should like to get up at four in the morning, and go to bed at nine in the evening. I would then sleep seven hours and work fifteen. It is difficult to change, for my hours are so inverted.

Here Auguste comes in and tells me that all the arrangements I had made for my payments to-morrow, 30th, are overturned by a discounter who sends me back, not accepting it, a note of Spachmann’s for one thousand francs. So I must dress and rush out. Conceive of such a life! I was about to begin, in peace, a work of melancholy, and here’s a bombshell fallen into my study! But it is not a despatch I have to write, and I can’t say, like Charles XII., “What has a bombshell to do with L’Enfant Maudit?” Adieu, for to-day.

Tuesday, 30.

I got to bed late, but I managed my affair and shall have the money, less a few ducats, to-day.

In my tramps I went to see a somnambulist; she told me you were on the road to Ischl, thus contradicting the other, who said you had seen Madame Lucchesi-Palli. But I know how this happened. It would take too long to explain it to you. I have, unfortunately, too little time to myself to study these effects according to my new ideas, and to classify my observations. The difficulty of getting subjects, the necessities imposed on a magnetizer, all interfere with what I would like to do. Here, as in the case of writing a play, one must have time and quiet; now time and quiet are for me the two causes of fortune, and fortune is that which stops me in all things. Recapitulation made: I must have a year of toil and much luck in that toil to be entirely free and liberated.

Well, adieu; I have before me one whole month of tranquillity, for I have nothing to pay before July 31.

Mon Dieu! how I wish I had two good somnambulists! I should know every morning how you are, what you are doing; and this small satisfaction joined to my constant work would keep me happy.

July 1st.

Yesterday I had to rush about to complete the payments, which was only done this morning. These 30ths of a month bring strange commotions!

To-night I am very sad. The east wind blows, I have no strength. I have not yet recovered my power of work; I have neither inspiration nor anything fructifying. Nevertheless, the necessity is great. I shall take to coffee again. When one has no illusions as to fame and looks for one’s reward elsewhere, it is very grievous to be alone with one’s work.

A thousand tender affections. Write me often, for your writing is a talisman. You know what belongs to all those about you. Don’t walk too much, only a little. At Ischl the air suffices. Besides, a carriage in any case suits you best; I have observed that; so the great doctor says: “No more walking.”

Chaillot, July 18, 1835.

I have no time to write to you. Calumny has ruined my credit. Men who would never have thought of coming to ask for money and everybody else have swooped down upon me. My omnipotent pen must coin money; and yet nothing must be sacrificed to necessity at the expense of art. Do you know what I am doing? I am working twenty-four hours running. Then I sleep five hours; which gives me twenty-one hours and a half to work per day.

Your letter grieves me, for you make me responsible for Liszt’s letter. Mon Dieu! how is it that with such a splendid forehead you can think little things. I do not understand why, knowing my aversion for George Sand, you make me out her friend.

You have not given me your address at Ischl. I send this to Sina. Pray let me know how long you stay there, that I may send you a package of books. “Louis Lambert” is finished. I have also finished a volume for Madame Bêchet, and in eight days more I shall have only two to finish. Werdet will also get his two Parts of the “Études Philosophiques” within twenty days. I go on by the grace of God; when I fall—well, I shall have fallen; but one must fight and grow greater.

You tell me to write to the Countess Loulou.1 But how can I? Explain to her yourself my involuntary tardiness. I can’t attend to my own affairs, I do not go out, I only write pages. In all conscience, I cannot seek for the impossible. No one here would accept the small salary the prince offers and three hundred francs for the journey! A reader who knows how to read is not an ordinary man, and yet the prince denies him a seat at his table. A man of intelligence can earn more here than three hundred francs a month by literature, and to read well is literature. I do not undertake the impossible. Every one, even those who die of hunger, laugh in my face. Leave Paris for Vienna for such pay as that! They had rather die of hunger in Paris, with hopes, than live without cares elsewhere. I will write to the princess and to the countess when I can, but I must provide for the defence of all points attacked, and I am firing from the three batteries of the Revues and my “Études.”

Tell the countess that the novel by Madame de Girardin, “The Marquis de Pontanges,” is worth reading. It is the only one in six months.

Adieu; I will write when I have done something, and obtained results which will put your soul at rest about my works and my vigils. These strivings of a man with his thought, ink, and paper, have nothing very poetic about them. It is silence; it is obscurity. Lassitude, efforts, tension, headaches, weariness, all go on between the four walls of that rose-and-white boudoir which you know by its description in the “Fille aux yeux d’or.” And I have nothing to console me but that distant affection,—which is angry with me at Ischl for a few words written foolishly while I was in Vienna,—and the prospect of going to seek harshness at Wierzchownia, when I shall be, in six or seven months, dying as a result of my efforts! I ought to say, like some general, I don’t know who, “A few more such victories and we are beaten.”

Adieu; I kiss Anna on the forehead, and send you and M. Hanski a thousand assurances of affection. Think of me as much as I think of you; that will content me. But from you no letter since June 26, and here it is July 18. You are punishing me.

Paris, August 11, 1835.

I have just returned from Berry, where I went to see Madame Carraud, who had something to say to me, and I find on my return your last letter, the one in which you speak of the visit you paid to Madame [the Duchesse de Berry] at the moment when our newspapers were representing her as inventing the infernal machine of Fieschi and awaiting its success at Aix, where she conferred about it with Berryer! Try to govern a people who, for twenty-four hours and over two hundred square leagues, can be made to believe such things as that!

You complain very amiably of the rarity of my letters, but you know I write as often as I can. I work now twenty hours a day. Can I endure it? I do not know.

I do not understand why you did not receive my parcel. The Austrian embassy took it under their protection, and it is addressed to M. de la Rochefoucauld. Inquire for it, I beg of you.

I am surprised at your enthusiasm for Lherminier. It is plain that you have not read his other works. They have prevented me from reading “Au delà du Rhin,” the fragments of which published in the “Revue des Deux Mondes” did not seem to me very strong. Do not confound Lherminier and Capefigue with the roses and lilies. Leave them among the thistles, which are dear, for more reasons than one, to their Excellencies. You will oblige me to read “Au delà du Rhin;” but I fear—in spite of your fine forehead.

I did not “chant marvels” to you about Madame de Girardin’s book. It is better than what she has so far done; it is not a very remarkable work, but it is literature, and not dogmatic politics.

Mon Dieu! have I not already written to you that the two somnambulists forbid you to walk? Why, then, do you walk?

Your letter saddens me; it seems cold and indifferent, as if the ice on which thrones rest had invaded you. I like it better when you quarrel with me, find fault with me. If you do not stay long in Vienna, how shall I send you the manuscripts of “Séraphita,” and the “Lys dans la Vallée”? The end of “Séraphita” will not appear in the “Revue de Paris” till the third, or perhaps fourth Sunday in October. If you leave, give me some certain address at Brody; you will there find the precious package.

Mon Dieu! I need an almost exaggerated tenderness on the part of my friends, for I assure you that a cruel conviction is laying hold of me: I do not hope to bear up under such heavy toil. One may indeed be broken down by violent efforts in art, sciences, and letters, and in this increase of labor which has come upon me, driven as I am by necessity, nothing sustains me. Work, always work; nights of flame succeeding nights of flame, days of meditation to days of meditation, execution to conception, conception to execution. Little money in comparison with what I need, immensity of money in relation to the thing done. If each of my books were paid like those of Walter Scott, I could bring myself safely out of this. But, although well paid, I do not come out of it. I shall have earned twelve thousand francs in August. The “Lys” has brought me eight thousand,—half from the “Revue des deux Mondes,” half from the publishers. The article in the “Conservateur” will receive three thousand francs. I shall have finished “Séraphita,” begun the “Mémoires d’une jeune Mariée,” and finished the last Part for Madame Bêchet. I don’t know that brain, pen, and hand have ever done such a feat of strength. And there exists a dear person, sacredly beloved, who complains that the correspondence languishes, although I answer scrupulously all her letters.

It is impossible for me to speak to you in letters of Fieschi and his machine. The wise men in politics, and I myself, who am not without a certain gift of second-sight, believe that it is neither the Republic nor Carlism which is the author of the attempt. Fieschi has told nothing; of that you may be sure. He will probably never speak. Lisfranc, the surgeon, who is taking care of him in prison, told this to my sister whom he is attending. He has had much money given him. Perhaps he himself does not know who made him act.

I am on the eve of beginning a political existence. I am cowardly enough to wish to hold back in order not to risk my journey to Wierzchownia. The two Revues form a large party, for the “Revue des Deux Mondes” has fifteen hundred subscribers, five hundred being in Europe; it becomes, therefore, a power. They unite in me, take me as head, for I have vanquished many men and things by my Bedouck! They support me. I shall make two other newspapers. That will give us four, and we are to-day in treaty for a fifth! We think of calling ourselves the party of the Intelligentials, a name which lends itself but little to ridicule, and will constitute a party to which many will feel flattered to belong. To be head of this in France, that is worth thinking of. For a long time these principal lines of our work have been discussed between me and a man powerful by his will, who organized four years ago and directed the “Revue des Deux Mondes” [Charles Rabou]. We have had several conferences. The two newspapers, the two Revues enable us to skim the cream of the salons, to assimilate them, to unite the seriously able intellects; and nothing can resist this amicable league of a press which will have nothing blind, nothing disorganized about it.

You see that as I advance in my own work I act on another and parallel line, important and broader; in a word, I shall not stop short in politics any more than in literature. Time presses, events are complicating. I should have been stopped for want of a hundred thousand francs; but I think I am about to write a drama, under the name of my future secretary, to procure them. I must be done with this money question which strangles me.

You see that, in spite of your coldness, I keep you informed of the great operations of your devoted moujik. But if the law passes, the new law which requires that political articles be signed, I shall have to renounce a great deal in order to go to Paulowska. In short, we cannot have intellect for nothing!

To speak to you of my every-day affairs would be to tell you of too many great miseries. I have always an infinite number of errands, goings and comings to pay my notes and meet my engagements, without ever being able to end them. In Paris everything involves a frightful loss of time, and time is the great material of which life is made.

So, when I am bending over my paper in the light of my candles in the salon of the “Fille aux yeux d’or,” or lying, weary, on the sofa, I am breathless with pecuniary difficulties, sleeping little, eating little, seeing no one,—in short, like a republican general making a campaign without bread, without shoes. Solitude, however, pleases me much. I hate society. I must finish what I have begun, and whatever turns me from it is bad, especially when it is wearisome.

You ask me, I think, about Madame de C... She has taken the thing, as I told you, tragically, and now distrusts the M... family. Beneath all this, on both sides there is something inexplicable, and I have no desire to look for the key of mysteries which do not concern me. I am with Madame de C... on the proper terms of politeness and as you yourself would wish me to be.

Do not make any comparison between the affection which you inspire, and that which you grant; for in that, those who love you have the advantage. Never believe that I cease to think of you, for even though I be occupied as I am now, it is impossible that in hours of fatigue and despair, hours when our energy relaxes, and we sit with pendent arms and sunken head, body weary and mind distressed, the wings of memory should not bear us back to moments when we refreshed our soul beneath green shades, to her who smiled to us, who has nothing in her heart that is not sincere, who is to us a spirit, who reanimates us, and renews, so to speak, by distractions of the soul, those powers to which others give the name of talent. You are all these things to me, you know it; therefore never jest about my feelings; I fear lest there mingle in it too much of gratitude.

Adieu. At Wierzchownia! I must cross Europe to show you an aging face, but a heart that is ever deplorably young, which beats at a word, at a line ill-written, an address, a perfume, as though it were not thirty-six years old.

I hope when you are regularly settled in your Wierzchownia, that you will write me the journal of your daily life and be to me more faithfully a friend, so that we shall be as if we had seen ourselves yesterday when I arrive. A thousand kind things to M. Hanski. Write me whether the parcel is lost or you received it. I am afraid it went to Ischl after you had left. Also write me by return of courier, inclosing in your letter a seal in red wax of your arms, which are to be engraved on the title-page of “Séraphita,” in the edition of the “Études philosophiques” and “Le Livre Mystique.” Isn’t it a piece of gallantry to sound the heraldic chord which you have within you, I know not where, for it is not in your heart? Kiss Anna on the forehead for me. All tender sentiments, and recall me to the recollection of the Viennese, to whom I owe memories.

Paris, August 24, 1835.

My letters are becoming short, you say, and you no longer know whom I see. I see no one; I work so continually that I have not a moment for writing. But I do have moments of lassitude for thinking. Some day you will be astonished at what I have been able to do, and yet write to a friend at all.

Listen: to settle this point, reflect on this: Walter Scott wrote two novels a year, and was thought to have luck in his labour; he astonished England. This year I shall have produced: (1) “Le Père Goriot;” (2) “Le Lys dans la Vallée;” (3) “Les Mémoires d’une jeune Mariée;” (4) “César Birotteau.” I have done three Parts of the “Études de Mœurs” for Madame Bêchet; and three Parts of the “Études Philosophiques” for Werdet. And, finally, I shall have finished the third dizain, and “Séraphita.” But then, shall I be living, or in my sound mind in 1836? I doubt it. Sometimes I think that my brain is inflaming. I shall die on the breach of intellect.

These efforts have not yet saved me from my financial crisis. This fearful production of books, involving as it does such masses of proofs, has not sufficed to liquidate me. I must come to the stage; the returns of which are enormous compared to those we get from books. The intellectual battle-fields are more fatiguing to work than the fields where men die or the fields where they sow their corn; know this. France drinks brains, as once she cut off noble heads.

Yes, I can only write you a few pages, and soon I may only send you despairing ones; for courage is beginning to desert me. I am weary of this struggle without rest, of this constant production without productive success. A fine thing truly to excite moral sympathies when a mother and a brother are needing bread! A fine thing to hear silly compliments on works that are written with one’s blood and do not sell, while M. Paul de Kock sells three thousand copies of his, and the “Magasin Pittoresque” sixty thousand! We shall see each other again if I triumph, but I doubt success!

Monday, 24.

Forgive me for having uttered that cry of pain, and do not be too much alarmed by it. But if I perish, carried off by excess of toil, it must not surprise you. The end of “Séraphita” cannot appear in the “Revue de Paris” before September. The corrections, the efforts are crushing. Already there have been one hundred and sixty hours’ work on the first proof; and I don’t know what the others will cost.

If you are kind you will write me oftener. It seems as though the air were fresher about me, my brain cooler, as if I were in an oasis, when I have read your letters. They make me think I am at some wayside haven. Fifteen days had passed without one when I received the last from Ischl. I am well advanced in corrections of the “Lys dans la Vallée.” It will appear in the “Revue des Deux Mondes” while you are travelling. I think I have not done a finer work as painting of an interior. I have rewritten and finished “Gobseck.” In “La Fleur des Pois” I have swung round upon myself. Hitherto, I have painted the misfortunes of wives; it is time to show also the sorrows of husbands.

Here is something singular: it is that I was composing this work while you were thinking of its leading idea, and during the time it took your letter in which you spoke of the sufferings that fall upon men to reach me! Is it not enough to make one believe that space does not exist and that we had talked together?

Adieu, I have no more time to write. But, as I told you, I have time to think, and I think of you in all my hours of recreation. I must earn money to go to the Ukraine, for in order to travel tranquilly I cannot owe anything here.

Adieu; remember me to all about you.

Chaillot, October 11, 1835.

Do not be surprised at my silence; it is easily explained by the abundant work I have done. For the last forty days I have risen at midnight and gone to bed at six o’clock. Between those periods there has been nothing but work, ardent, passionate work,—the desperate struggle of battle-fields.

Do me the favour not to believe that the friendship you grant me is the common friendship of women; consider quand même to be the noblest of mottoes. Yes, I shall not perish; yes, I shall triumph!

But you ought to have received two letters through Sina, one of which carried to you the dedication. By the first of next March I shall owe nothing to any one. And thus will end this horrible battle between misfortune and me. My wealth will be my pen and my liberty.

Yesterday, returning along the quays on foot, meditating the corrections of “Séraphita,” I saw, in a carriage that went by rapidly, Madame Kisseleff. Imagine my astonishment! She was returning no doubt from Bellevue, the residence of the Austrian embassy.

Another piece of news. By getting up at midnight and going to bed at six o’clock for forty days I am beginning to get thin during my eighteen hours’ vigil and toil. I wish the “Lys” and “Séraphita” and the new “Louis Lambert” to be the culminating points of my literary life so far.

We are reprinting the “Médecin de campagne.” I am having a travelling-carriage built; and I think of buying a house, so that when you come to Paris I can offer you a whole one to yourself, in thanks for the hospitality you promise me at Wierzchownia. M. de Custine is in Paris, faithless man!

Will you permit me to have a watch made for you in Geneva? I will bring it to you with the manuscripts that belong to you. I will thus repair the disaster of your journey; you are too far from Geneva to do it yourself.

Take care of yourself. Play Grandet and Benassis. I will be your critic when I come, as you are mine on my works.

Oh! I entreat you, have confidence in me. Do not be vexed with me for anything, neither the brevity, nor the careless scribbling of my letters. I must work on,—nothing can be allowed to wait; and I have always around me three or four volumes in proofs to read; and besides this, financial matters. In truth, I do not live; but, in my most weary hours, I can rest my head upon the mantel-piece and lose myself in dreams, like a woman.

A thousand kind memories to all, and to you all the friendships. I expect to hear from you on “Le Lys dans la Vallée.” I worked long over that book. I wanted to use the language of Massillon, and that instrument is heavy to wield.

Ardent wishes for all that is dear to you; my friendship to the Grand Marshal.

Chaillot, October, 1835.

I have received your letter from Brody, and thank you from the bottom of my heart. The more you forbid me to go to Wierzchownia, under pretext of too great fatigue, the quicker I shall go. But be easy; I cannot breathe the air of liberty, or feel myself free of chains, before April, May, or June. But I shall surely go and do “Philippe II.” and “Marie Touchet” at Wierzchownia tranquilly; or a few good works which will give me my financial independence,—the three francs a day that the dethroned Napoleon wanted.

Yes, Madame Kisseleff is in Paris. Happy Monsieur E...! I am out of society; until my liberation I see no one, and I work as I told you. You will not read till you reach Wierzchownia “Le Livre Mystique,” which is composed of my new “Louis Lambert” and “Séraphita.” The Emperor Nicholas will not forbid those books.

I should like to be able to buy the house of which I spoke to you. It would be a good investment, and I should be forced to be economical.

I am getting a bad opinion of your firmness. In proportion as you approach your caret patria your sublime resolutions as to government vanish, and you are becoming once more the great lady, creole and indolent. Come, be queen of Wierzchownia; do not be an unpublished Benassis at Paulowska. Be, rather, an intellectual growth, develop that fine forehead where shines the most luminous of divine lights.

I wish to reach Wierzchownia by travelling through Germany,—that country worthy of the renown against which we lie so much. From now to seven months hence I shall have accomplished great works. “César Birotteau” will have been followed by many others. But the “Lys”! If the “Lys” is not a female breviary, I am nothing. The virtue in it is sublime, and not wearying. To be dramatic with virtue, to be ardent and use the language and style of Massillon,—let me tell you, that is a problem, to solve which, in the first number, cost three hundred hours of corrections, four hundred francs to the “Revue” and to me a trouble in my liver. Dr. Nacquart put me into a bath for three hours a day, on ten pounds of grapes, and wanted me not to work; but I do work all night.

Madame de Berny is much better; she has borne a last shock, the illness of a beloved son whose brother has gone to bring him home from Belgium. I was there to lessen her sorrows. She told me she could say but one word about my “Lys”: that it was indeed the Lily of the Valley. From her lips that is great praise; she is very hard to satisfy. The first number is finished and I have two others; at twenty days apiece, that makes forty days. Sainte-Beuve worked four years at “Volupté.” Compare that!

I send you many heartfelt wishes, and beg you to recall me to the memory of all. Your paper-knife broke in my hand; it almost cut me; I felt grieved about it. Besides which, I don’t know where the little pencil-case of Geneva has hid itself; I am grieved about that also; but it may be found in some pocket. I am so full of ideas and work that here is distraction beginning. But the heart has none, only the head.

Chaillot, November 22, 1835.

Do not be surprised at the number of days since I have written to you. This interruption is due to the sharpness of the conflict, the necessity of a work that takes days and nights. I am in fear of succumbing. Also, events have become very serious in my family. Something had to be done about my brother,—get him off to India, or induce him to go.

You, so little concerned about money, you will never know, until I relate them to you by the fireside in your steppe, the difficulties there are in paying ten thousand francs a month, without other resource than one’s pen. Still, I have almost the hope of arriving, if not free, at least with honour safe and no misfortune, at December 31.

You will comprehend nothing of these two months until you see the frightful labour on “Séraphita” and the “Lys” bound in green and placed upon your bookshelves. Then you will ask yourself, seeing that mass of proofs and corrections, if there were years in those months, days in those hours.

Madame Bêchet has paid us our thirty-three thousand francs; and we are offered forty-five thousand for the thirteen following volumes, which will complete, in twenty-five volumes, the first edition of the “Études de Mœurs.” That is how our affairs stand now. We owe thirty-five thousand francs, and we possess, in expectation, fifty thousand. There’s the account of our household. The sole point now is, not to die of fatigue on the day when the burden becomes endurable!

To-morrow, Sunday, 22, the first number of the “Lys dans la Vallée” appears in the “Revue de Paris.” But learn from one fact the nature of my struggle and my daily combats. Since my return from Vienna the “Revue de Paris” made immense sacrifices for “Séraphita.” After six months of toil and money spent, “Séraphita,” finished, was to have appeared to-morrow. Suddenly the director told me it was incomprehensible, and that he preferred not to publish it on account of the long interruption which had occurred between the first numbers and the end, with a hundred other reasons which I spare you. I at once proposed to pay him his costs and take back my article. Accepted. I rushed to Werdet, and told him about it. He rushed to Buloz with the money; and the wrath of publisher and author is such that “Séraphita” has gone from one printing-press to the other and that the “Livre Mystique,” will appear on Saturday, 28th. The literature of the periodical press will seize upon the singular anecdote of this refusal; it will make such an uproar, inasmuch as the editor of the “Revue” is not liked, that Werdet feels sure of selling “Séraphita” in a single day.1 There is a copy on Chinese paper for you, besides the collection of manuscripts and proofs. But such displays of force require prodigious efforts: they are like the campaigns of Italy.

You understand that in a literary campaign like mine society is impossible. Therefore I have openly renounced it. I go nowhere, I answer no letter and no invitation. I only allow myself the Italian opera once a fortnight. Thursday last I saw Madame Kisseleff there. Alas! how little effect her beauty made! If you only knew how everything becomes belittled in Paris! In spite of her protecting passion for Poggi, she understands what I tried to tell her in Vienna, and Poggi now gives her the impression of a full stop in the Encyclopædia after hearing Rubini.

I cannot tell you the memories that assailed me when I found myself beside some one from Vienna, a friend of yours, and listening to the “Somnambula” which recalled to me two of our evenings. The Princess Schonberg was there also. I paid a visit of politeness to her; and I shall also go and see Madame Kisseleff once.

So, my life is a strange monotony, and your letters are so rare that I have no longer the regular event that varied it,—your letters, that always came of a Monday. I have no longer my good Monday. I can only tell you about my work and my payments,—a chant as monotonous as that of the waves of ocean surging upon a granite rock.

I am going to dine in town to get you an autograph of Sir Sidney Smith, the hero of Saint-Jean-d’Acre. I will also send you one of Alphonse Karr.

Sunday, 22.

I beg of you to number your letters, beginning with the year 1836, as I do myself with this one; so that we may mutually know if our letters reach us safely; and when we want special answers to any question, the mention of the number will settle everything.

I have had, and I still have, violent griefs on the side of Nemours. Madame de Berny was decidedly better; her dreadful palpitations were relieved. There were hopes of saving her. Suddenly, the only son who resembles her, a young man handsome as the day, tender and spiritual like herself, like her full of noble sentiments, fell ill, and ill of a cold which amounts to an affection of the lungs. The only child out of nine with whom she can sympathize! Of the nine, only four remain; and her youngest daughter has become hysterically insane, without any hope of cure. That blow nearly killed her. I was correcting the “Lys” beside her; but my affection was powerless even to temper this last blow. Her son (twenty-three years old) was in Belgium, where he was directing an establishment of great importance. His brother Alexandre went to fetch him, and he arrived a month ago, in a deplorable condition. This mother, without strength, almost expiring, sits up at night to nurse Armand. She has nurses and doctors. She implores me not to come and not to write to her. You know how at moments, when all within us is tension, the slightest shock, whether it comes from tried affection or from clumsiness, breaks us down. What a situation! So that I have a double anxiety in that direction, where I live so much.

My mother and my brother give me other anxieties of so cruel and disastrous a kind that I do not speak to you of them, for they are not of a nature to be written. One must have much faith in the future to live thus,—to take up, every morning, one’s heavy burden. My friends have all limited means, and cannot relieve my financial situation, which twenty-five thousand francs would render endurable, were they only lent to me for six months. I must still march on to the last moment in triple distresses,—those of my family, those of my work, those of my finances. I don’t speak of calumnies or of the wretches who throw sticks between my legs when I run. That is nothing. That which would kill an artist I scarcely consider an annoyance.

I have of late been twenty-six hours in my study without leaving it. I get the air at that window which commands all Paris, which I will some day command.

I have received your last letter written from your desolate land. I reckon that by this time you have reached Wierzchownia, reviewed your wheat-fields, resumed your habits, and that you can surely write to me twice a month. Following your custom, you have given me your address very imperfectly, and that of the Chanoinesse with a perfection quite hieroglyphic. Write and tell her that for me it is as impossible to write to her as it would be to take the moon in my teeth. Society people, the rich, the idle, imagine nothing of the busy lives of artists and poor men. It is humorous to a degree. Especially do they believe in our ingratitude, our forgetfulness; they never view us as toiling night and day. To explain myself wholly, think of those seventeen volumes manufactured by me without help; compute that that makes three hundred feuilles [4800 octavo pages], each read more than ten times, and that makes three thousand [48,000], besides the conception and the writing; and also that beyond the will to do I must have du bonheur [the luck of inspiration].

So, whatever they tell you of me, laugh at it, and think of this, the proof of which exists. One of my bitterest literary enemies says of me: “Talent, genius, his incredible power of will, I can understand, I can believe it; but where, and how, does he manufacture Time?”

Ah! madame, I have brought myself, I, such a sleeper, to do without sleep; I sleep only four hours; and I, so eager, so much a child, I have resolved my whole life into dreams of hope. I live by suffering, work, and hope only. My fortune will be made by three months spent at Wierzchownia without care, without anxieties, in writing two fine plays.

By the singular will of Providence your friendship is joined to the three halts I have made during the last three years. Neufchâtel, Geneva, Vienna, have been to me three oases. There, I thought of nothing; I renewed my strength. You will see me arrive dying at Wierzchownia, and I shall leave it living.

Adieu; my friendly regards to the Benassis of Wierzchownia. My compliments to the three young ladies. A kiss on Anna’s forehead. Be without anxiety as to the manner in which I shall make the journey. I shall come alone, without anything to contest at the custom-house, without books, without papers,—only linen and clothes. I will write you, in advance, the names of the books I shall need, to see if you have them in your library; that is the only tax I shall place upon you. I shall not bring a score of heavy books. I have all my intellectual riches in my head, and all my treasures in my heart. You must have indulgence for my one coat, my poet’s wardrobe. I shall go light as an arrow, rapid as an arrow, but heavy with hopes, with pleasures to take in that chimney-corner by which you entice me.

Chaillot, November 25, 1835.

If “Séraphita” is not for sale on Saturday there will be no winter for me in Russia; Werdet is ruined if “Séraphita,” that is to say, “Le Livre Mystique,” is not a great success, and if the second and third Parts of the “Études Philosophiques” do not appear in December and January. I lose six thousand francs with Madame Bêchet if her last Part does not appear in February. Keep the above before your eyes so that you may not blame me. I must fulfil my engagements or I die, killed at last by grief. To write a letter is impossible. People who lead a fixed life, by whom the want of money is never felt, are unable to judge of the lives of those who work night and day, and have to beg for the money they earn.

I had forty thousand francs to pay after my return from Vienna, and before this coming December. Therefore judge what efforts and resources I needed to make head against that without credit; so that what you say to me in the letter I received to-day seems to me very singular. You do not know the bitterness of the epigram which your fear has made upon a poor artist, in hiding on account of the National Guard, who for five months has gone to bed at six o’clock (with rare exceptions) to rise at midnight, and who is working superhumanly to earn a few months’ freedom in order to go and see you. To ask me for letters under these circumstances is as if you had been a Frenchman and asked some colonel to write to you during the retreat from Moscow—with this difference, that the warmth of my soul can never lessen, and triumph will take the place of defeat.

Mon Dieu! I can’t foresee any peace under three months, unless through fortunate events that are impossible: exhausted editions that would give me money, or falling ill myself. Then I would write to you. But would you not rather have my silence, which tells you I am working fruitfully, and bringing nearer the happy day of my freedom? Have I made you too great in counting on your intelligent friendship to divine these things?

Here comes Werdet with ten feuilles, one hundred and sixty pages, to correct! I have, since I wrote letter No. 1, now on its way, quarrelled with the Revues, for the same causes that I quarrelled with Pichot; you know them.

Well, adieu. I have lived a few minutes with you in the pretty home of your sister, for you are indeed a good painter.

Though I am not ill, I am horribly fatigued,—more than I have ever been. I have not been able to go and breathe my native air of Touraine, which would revive me.

A thousand caressing things. Never doubt your poor future guest again.

P. S. I have lost in a diligence my Geneva pencil-case with the Ave. I did not have the luck that you had with your watch. I have not recovered it.

Chaillot, December 18, 1835.

I receive to-day the letter in which you tell me you have read the first number of the “Lys.” When you receive this letter you will doubtless have read the second. (Shameful cheatery has sold them to Bellizard, and I shall prosecute such thefts; that is, if I have the courage to protest against a fraud which hastens the enjoyment that you say you take in my things.)1 You will understand better the three hundred hours. I leave the enervating corrections of the third number to write to you.

You are right in your philological criticisms. I perceive my faults every day, and correct them. You will find, some day, a great difference between the acknowledged work and all preceding editions.

Imagine my happiness! Thomassy [a collaborator of Augustin Thierry] came to embrace me after reading “Séraphita.” He told me that he regarded the “Livre Mystique” as one of the masterpieces of the French language, and that he saw no fault to find with it.

There must be some faults still in “La Grenadière;” but these last stains upon the white robe shall be removed by the soap of patience and the wash-board of courage, which love of art for art’s sake gives. It is useless to tell you what the “Lys” has cost me. I have now spent fifteen days on the third number, and I need eight more.

A dreadful misfortune has happened to me. The fire in the rue du Pot-de-Fer destroyed the hundred and sixty first pages, printed at my cost, of the third dizain of the “Contes Drolatiques,” and five hundred volumes, which cost me four francs each, of the first and second dizains. Not only do I lose an actual amount of three thousand five hundred francs in money and interest, but I also lose an agreement for six thousand francs, on which I counted to pay my expenses at the end of the year, which is now broken, because I have nothing to give Werdet and an associate in this affair who bought the three dizains.

I must face this misfortune, which comes at the moment when hope was no longer a vain word, when gleams of blue were lighting up my heaven, beside the lovely form so rarely seen there. Well! I have always shown an iron front to trouble; there’s nought but happiness which breaks me down—for I ill know how to bear it. Madame de Berny has kept silence since this fatal event. That is another trouble. And my journey to Wierzchownia recedes.

You have no idea of our civilization; the trouble it is to do business; what distances, what visits wasted on moneyed people; their caprices, which make the promise of one day withdrawn the next! My life is a torrent. I sleep only five hours. To go and see you would be a rest, no matter how fatiguing a rapid journey might be.

I have few events to tell you. I have dined once with Madame Kisseleff; and once at the Austrian embassy, and I went to a rout at the latter place. One must keep up relations there. I have seen Princess Schonberg. But I do no more than is necessary.

I am to have two secretaries, two young men who espouse the hopes of my political life, which, alas! is dawning. I am embarrassed how to tell you when, how, and why, because you have forbidden the subject;2 but you will guess all when I tell you that five days ago I bought a political newspaper. These young men are: (1) The Comte de Belloy, friend of Sandeau, nephew of the cardinal; twenty-four years old, face happy, wit abundant, conduct bad, poverty dreadful, talent and future rich, confidence and devotion entire, nobility immemorial. (2) A Comte de Gramont, one of whose ancestors went security for a Duc de Bourgogne. He does not belong to the family of the Ducs de Grammont. I know him less than I do de Belloy. These are my two aides-de-camp.

You will be surprised to see Sandeau excluded. But Sandeau is not, like these gentlemen, legitimist; he does not share my opinions. That says all. I have done everything to convert him to the doctrines of absolute power, he is as silly as a propagandist.

You see that here is a second mine; a second cause for arduous work. You see also that Bedouck is not a talisman without force in me. But it needs much money, and still more talent. I don’t know where to get the money.

You are very right to economize; and I do not understand why you do not beat M. Hanski into sending away forty out of his eighty workmen. Shickler and all our great seigneurs here do not employ more than forty.

Reserve your sublime analytical thoughts to act like your neighbour, the Countess Branicka. Money can do everything to vanquish material obstacles. Be miserly by juxtaposition; miserly with an object.

My brother-in-law is negotiating the purchase of my house. I desire it extremely. It fulfils all the conditions that you require in a dwelling. How I wish that you could so arrange your affairs that you might be in it three years hence, without M. Hanski having one anxiety. Is not M. Mitgislas P... happy as a king? He has all the wealth that he wants, and possesses enough in the public funds to bring down the stock by a sale! Nothing is easier to administer and collect than such revenues, nothing harder than literary revenues, although they are so simple that nothing is simpler!

“If you love me” (Anna’s style) you will make me a pretty little daily journal, not a periodical one; so that every eight days I shall receive your letter, and mine will cross yours. Can you do less for a man who writes only to you in all the world?

As for my present life, I have returned to the rue des Batailles. I go to bed at seven and get up at two; between those two periods see me in the boudoir of the “Fille aux yeux d’or,” seated at a table and working without other distraction than to go to my window and contemplate that Paris which I will some day subjugate. And here I am for three months, until my house is bought, and my new arrangements for lodging and living made.3

I imagine that Anna is well, that you flourish in la cara patria, that M. Hanski is busy, that Mesdemoiselles Séverine and Denise are at their best, that Mademoiselle Borel has restored her good graces to the author of “Séraphita,” and prays God for him after praying for you and Anna, that all goes well, even Pierre, that the confectioner makes you delicious things, and, in short, that nothing is lacking in your Eden but a poor foreigner who glides there in thought. At night, when the fire crackles or a spark darts from a candle, say to yourself, “’Tis he!” Think, then, that a too ardent memory has crossed the spaces and fallen on your table like an aërolite detached from a distant sphere.

Farewell again. I would that I could say à bientôt. When you begin the third number of the “Lys” you will know that if the first pages are bad it is because you have taken the time necessary to make them good, and that nothing is sweeter to me than to abandon for you my author’s vanity and the public.

Notes

1 Ducat: gold coin, value from ten to twelve francs, according to country (Littré).—TR.

1 This letter in itself shows the falseness of those which purport to have been written in January, February, and March. It is that of a man true to himself in one of the greatest struggles of humanity; for, it must be remembered, such trials were not negative in a man of Balzac’s nature.—TR.

1 Countess Louise Turheim, chanoinesse, whose brother-in-law, Prince Rasumofski, had asked Balzac to send him a reader from Paris.

1 Werdet gives a long account of this affair (“Portrait intime de Balzac” pp. 147-169). On it, he bases a bitter complaint against Balzac of unfairly and to his, Werdet’s, injury, delaying the publication fifteen months; which charge falls to the ground under the above evidence that M. Buloz returned “Séraphita,” November 21, 1835 (not 1834 as Werdet says), and Werdet published the book two weeks later, December 2, 1835, on which day every copy was sold, and two hundred and fifty were promised. The second edition was published December 28, 1835.—TR.

1 The publication of “Le Lys dans la Vallée” in Russia. See “Memoir of Balzac,” pp. 160, 161, 231-237.—TR.

2 All his political interests and occupations were excluded from his letters to Russia, in fear of the censorship.—TR.

3 It seems, at first sight, rather astonishing that a man so deeply in debt should talk of buying property. But in a letter to his sister respecting his building of “Les Jardies,” he says it is as an investment for his mother, who was one of his creditors. The same statement is made by Théophile Gautier in his record of Balzac. From this point of view, a purchase of real estate was safety, not extravagance.—TR. ⁂