VII — Letters During 1839, 1840, 1841 — Letters to Madame Hanska by Honoré de Balzac

VII Letters During 1839, 1840, 1841

Aux Jardies, February 12, 1839.

When this letter reaches you, it is probable that the fate of “L’École des Ménages” [formerly “La Première Demoiselle”] will have been decided; and while you read these words they may be representing that play, so long meditated, which perhaps may fall flat in two hours. It has taken on great proportions; there are five leading rôles and the subject is vast. It touches the painful spot of modern morals: marriage; but perhaps the personages lack certain conditions in order to become types. To my eyes, the play is precisely the bourgeois family. But it has a certain inferiority through that very thing.

I am going to-morrow to come to an understanding with the managers of the Renaissance, after many protocols exchanged between them and a friend who has undertaken to fight for my interests; the play will be mounted in twenty days. I took, to lay out my ideas and write them down for me, a poor young man of letters, named Lassailly, who has not written two lines worth preserving. I never saw such incapacity. But he has been useful to me in making the first germ, on which I can work. Nevertheless, I would have liked some one of more intelligence and wit. Théophile Gautier is coming to do the second play in five acts, and I expect much from him.

Nevertheless, dear countess, it is impossible for me to do all that I have undertaken, and all that I must do to get out of my embarrassments. Here is what I have accomplished the last month: “Béatrix, ou Les Amours Forcés,” two volumes 8vo, wholly written and corrected, which is coming out in the “Siècle;” “Un Grand homme de Province à Paris,” the end of “Illusions Perdues,” of which only the second volume remains to do, and that will be done this week. Besides which, three plays: “L’École des Ménages,” “La Gina,” and “Richard Cœur d’Éponge.”

Well, after such great labour (for I have just as much for the month of March) shall I gain my liberty, shall I owe nothing to any one, shall I have the tranquillity of soul of a man from whom no one has money to demand? I begin to feel some fatigue. Just now, on beginning to go to work, I found it impossible to take it up with my usual ardour; I thought of you; I wanted to tell you across space how often you are here, and to confide to you my little sorrows and my great works, or, if you like, my little works and my great sorrows.

March 13.

How many things have happened in my life since I wrote the last lines! In the first place, twenty days employed in correcting and rewriting my play for the people of the Renaissance theatre; who have brutally rejected it from want of money to make the first payment agreed upon. Then, the reading of it before certain of the actors and the director of the Théâtre Français who thought it magnificent, but impossible to act as it then was, because of the union of tragedy and comedy. They want it either the one or the other. Next, a reading at the house of Madame Saint-Clair, sister of Madame Delmar, in presence of three ambassadors, English, Austrian, and Sardinian, with their wives, Madame Molé, M. de Maussion, Custine, etc. Delight and criticism. After which, second and last reading at Custine’s, in presence of another wave of the great world, who all wish to see it performed. I have coldly put away my play in a box, and this morning Planche came and asked me for it, to see what it is like. He is to give me his opinion next Sunday.

So, dear, much to do, much company, much annoyance, and little result. However, let me tell you that Taylor, the collector of Spanish pictures and former Commissary for the King to the Théâtre Français, and the director Védel and Desmousseaux have taken so high an opinion of me as a dramatic writer that they have asked me to give them, as soon as possible, a play entirely comic, saying that they would have it played immediately. They are convinced that I can write for the stage.

March 16.

Planche took my play to read; he is to return it in two days, and will doubtless tell me what it is worth. Stendhal, who was present at the reading at Custine’s, writes me the little line which I enclose in this letter, and which he signs, by an inexplicable habit, Cotonet. He never signs, except officially, his real name, Henri Beyle.

I am not well in body or in mind. I feel a horrible lassitude, which, in regard to my head, is not without danger. I have no longer either force or courage. The obstacles I have been accustomed to overcome increase enormously and terrify me. Anxieties about money have become for me what the Furies were to Orestes. I am without support, enervated, without even kindly sentiments, without the faculty of feeling any, of any kind. I am a negation. Ah! these moments are terrible, especially when, for want of money, I cannot shake myself together by a journey. There are no pleasures for me; none but those of the heart. That is the only thing that intellect has not yet overrun; it is the only thing it can never displace.

Adieu; this is a letter on which I have written for two months; for two months it has lain among my papers and I take it up when I have exhausted the feuillets beneath which I place it.

April 14.

Dear, here is another month gone by. What a month! I have just received your letter. If my irregularity grieves you, yours kills me; it has made me think you did not want any more of my letters, and that you have left me like a body without a soul. I have, however, been working day and night. The endless corrections of the “Grand homme de Province” and of “Béatrix,” also articles to write, obliged me to put myself into a garret in Paris, where I am close to the printing-offices, and thus lose no time. I have not had even a fleeting moment to continue this letter; I have only slept by chance, when I dropped from fatigue. I am wholly weaned from life, and absolutely indifferent whether I live or do not live.

Here is the news. You will see M. de Custine; he goes to Russia. He will take you the manuscript of “Séraphita,”—the manuscript, you understand, not the proofs; they are too voluminous. He will see you; he is rich; he is happy in being able to travel at his ease! He will make, if necessary, a détour to see you.

I have reached a point when, in contemplating coldly my situation, I see I have now but two ways of cutting the Gordian knot. Either I must sell my work, to be made the most of by others during ten years, for one hundred and fifty thousand francs; or, if I do not succeed in recovering tranquillity by that means, I must insure my life for that sum, which is the total of my debt, and fling myself into work as into a gulf from which I know I shall never issue; for, from the weakness that assails me after my toil has passed a certain limit, I feel that a man can die from excess of it.

Planche has brought back my play. He thinks it is above what is now being done; but we are not of the same opinion as to its faults. Brought to the point of view of art, it has many.

Beyle has just published the finest book, as I think, which has appeared these fifty years. It is called “La Chartreuse de Parme.” I don’t know whether you can procure it. If Macchiavelli had written a novel, it would have been this one. Jules Sandeau has lately dragged George Sand through the mire in a book called “Marianna.” He has given himself a fine rôle, that of Henry! He! good God! You will read the book and it will horrify you, I am sure. It is anti-French, anti-gentleman. Henry ends as Jules ought to have ended (when one loves truly and is betrayed),—by death. But to live, and write this book, is awful.

Dear, do not blame my friendship. Some day you will know the life I am now leading, the burdens I am bearing. The terrace walls of Les Jardies have all rolled down. I must buy more ground, with a house on it, and I have no money. This house, my dream of tranquillity, my dear Chartreuse, needs fifteen or twenty thousand francs to settle me in it; and I don’t know if ever my days can flow here peacefully. Twelve years of toil, of pain and grief, have left me as I was the first day, with a burden as heavy and as difficult to remove. Madame de Staël said, “Fame is the brilliant mourning of happiness.”

Your project of coming to the banks of the Rhine makes my heart beat. Oh! come. But you will not come. It would be so easy for me to go to Baden and see the Rhine; the journey is neither long nor costly, and a journey is so necessary to me. The mail-cart goes to Strasburg, and from there, in two minutes, to Germany; it is only ten days and twenty louis. Oh! I don’t know if you have not warmed up my courage, and re-tempered my soul. I will not give the manuscript to M. de Custine. I will bring it to you, that and the others. If you do this, I will bring you a fine pianist for Anna; I will—I don’t know what I will not do, for those lines in your letter have warmed me,—I have returned to the idea that life is endurable.

You will find me much changed, but physically; horribly aged, with white hairs,—in short, un vieux bonhomme. “You show now that you wear your laurels,” M. de Beauchesne said to me the other day. The speech was pretty, if exaggerated. I am sure that on the other side of the Rhine I shall grow young again. When I think that as soon as this letter reaches you (which takes a month) you may be coming, and that I shall see you in June, precisely at the moment when I shall be unable to write and in need of rest!—But it is all a dream; I must return to post and letter-paper, to the power of the imagination of the heart, to memory.

Adieu; in my next letter I will tell you what happens, and how the present crisis ends for me; the matters pending between Louis-Philippe and the Chambers have complicated it.

Aux Jardies, June 2, 1839.

I received your last letter to-day when I have just missed, fortunately, breaking my leg in going to see the devastation of my grounds produced by a storm. My foot slipped; and the whole weight of the body came on the left foot which twisted under me and all the muscles about the ankle were violently wrenched, and cracked with a great noise. The amount of will I put into supporting myself gave me a pain of extreme violence in the solar plexus; I suffered there more than I did in the ankle, though that pain made me suppose I had broken my leg. The head surgeon of the hospital at Versailles came, and I shall have to stay in bed two weeks. There, dear countess! I find one compensation, namely: that all my horrible financial and literary affairs, etc., being interrupted by a superior power, I can write you to my heart’s content, for it is very long since I have been with you. Alas! I have had so much to do. Les Jardies have cost me many wakeful nights. But we won’t speak of that.

Well, as M. de Talleyrand used to say, foresee griefs and you are sure to be a prophet. No more trip to the banks of the Rhine! However, for one piece of bad news I will give you a good piece. If the Chamber of Deputies votes our law on literary property I shall doubtless have to go to Saint Petersburg, and I shall return through the Ukraine. But in any case, dear of dears, my first journey will be to you. So long as Les Jardies are not in order I cannot travel; it would be too great a folly, it would be ruin. Happily my accident has happened just as I had finished “Un Grand homme de Province à Paris.” Otherwise, I don’t know what would have become of me with my publishers.

M. de Custine is not going to Russia; only as far as Berlin. So I took your precious manuscript out of its hiding-place for nothing.

During the two days that I have been in bed a rage, a veritable rage, possesses me to see you. Every time that I am alone, that I re-enter myself, that my brain is cleared, that I am with my heart, it is always so. Your letter distressed me. It came when I was in the midst of those sweet reveries that are my elysium, and I thought your letter cold, ceremonious, religious. I hated you for two days. I hid that letter; it put me out of temper. You say in it that you are my old friend. If that is so, learn that I have loved you only since yesterday. Treat me with more coquetry. When have you received a letter without an autograph? Know, countess, that out of your eleven million friends in France and other countries there is not half a million who would have perpetuated that little attention; it shows a perennial affection which proves that my friendship is still in its spring. Were you fifty years old, my eyes would always see you in that heart’s-ease-coloured gown, looking as you did on the Crêt at Neufchâtel. You have no idea of either my heart or my character. Fy! Do not think it so easy to get rid of me.

My health has borne up under work which has amazed literary men. I am at my twelfth volume. You must read “Un Grand homme,” a book full of vigour, in which you will find those great personages of my work, as you are good enough to call them,—Florine, Nathan, Lousteau, Blondet, Finot. That which will commend the work to foreigners is its audacious painting of the inner manners and morals of Parisian journalism, which is fearful in its accuracy. I alone was in a position to tell the truth to our journalists, and fight them to the death. That book will not be forbidden in Russia.

I have at this moment under my pen “Le Curé de Village” to finish, the second episode of which, entitled “Véronique,” will appear in the “Presse.” This book will be loftier, grander, and stronger than “Le Lys dans la Vallée” and “Le Médecin de campagne;” the two known fragments of it have justified my promises.

In a life as busy as mine nothing produces much effect; I have worked as usual through the riots. But a month or so ago Planche and I said to each other, “Shots will be fired within six weeks.” And so it was.

A Russian professor from Moscow came to see me lately,—M. Chevireff; I love all that ends in eff on account of Berditchef; I am child enough to fancy it brings me nearer to you. It is thus that the words “Geneva,” “Vienna” never sound in my ears without effect. The longer I love, the more Hoffmannesque I become on that subject.

So it is all over about the Rhine! You could not believe what agitation was caused me by those two fatal lines, written perhaps unconsciously, in which you tell me that your journey is put off. It was so easy for me to go to the Rhine, even with all my business matters and the newspapers on my hands. The mail-carts go so rapidly now from Paris to the Rhine. Well, I must put this, too, with many a golden dream! The springtide will console you; nothing consoles me. I see by the date of your letter that you wrote on my fête-day, and you did not think of it! I still my complaints; for I should seem very ridiculous in both cases; but I remarked that you put fewer lines in your pages, and that you were, in point of fact, getting rid of me. Perhaps I deserve it for telling you, in one of my former letters, how little time I have to write to you, with an air as if I boasted of my fidelity. Alas! that was only a bit of childish candour, which you ought not to punish. Some day I will tell you the truth about that passage; you will be touched, and ashamed that you were ever angry with me.

Do not think that because there are four hundred leagues between us I do not know how to read the thoughts that lie beneath your sublime forehead. I can parade them before you, one by one. It suffices me to examine your letter with the attention of a Cuvier to know the exact frame of mind in which it was written; and you had, when writing this letter, something against me, no doubt. You will tell me later what it was.

My Jardies get on but slowly. The buildings are still of little importance; but all is heavy on those who have nothing. I am beginning to have trouble with my eyes, and that grieves me; I shall have to cease working at night.

Did I tell you that “Béatrix” is finished? You will see it, no doubt, in the “Revue de Saint Pétersbourg,” but bad and emasculated. It will only be good in the 8vo edition now in press. Those puritans of liberalism who manage the “Siècle” in which “Béatrix” appeared assume to have morals, and demolish the archbishop’s palace! This is the buffoonery of folly. They are afraid of the word “bosom,” and trample morality under foot! they will not allow the word volupté to be printed, but they upset social order! The wife of the director-in-chief is as scraggy as a bag of nails, and they suppressed a joke of Camille Maupin on the bones of Béatrix! I will make you laugh heartily when I tell you all the negotiations required to get into that newspaper a joke on the bitch of M. de Halga. Unfortunately for me, you will read that book mangled and expurgated.

What a pretty nest Les Jardies will be when finished! How happy one might be here! What a beautiful valley, cool as a Swiss valley. The royal park a few steps off! Paris in a quarter of an hour, and Paris a hundred leagues away! What a beautiful life if—But I begin to think like the capucin monk: we are not placed here below to take our comfort.

The Exhibition of pictures has been very fine this year. There were seven or eight masterpieces, in several styles: a superb Decamps; a magnificent Cleopatra by Delacroix; a splendid portrait by Amaury Duval; a charming Venus Anadyomene by Chassériau, a pupil of Ingres. What a misfortune to be poor when one has the heart of an artist!

The first young girl work that I do I shall dedicate to your dear Anna; but I shall await a word about that in your next letter; for I must know if it be agreeable to you that I should do this.

It seems there is to be, next autumn, a dahlia-Balzac. If you would like a cutting tell me how to send it to you. It will be, they say, a magnificent flower; in case the attempt to vary the stock succeeds.

You wish me the tranquillity of soul that you enjoy. Alas! I have passions, or, to speak more correctly, passion, too living, too palpitating, to be able to extinguish my soul. You would never imagine in what agitations I live; for me, nothing is lost or forgotten; all that affects me is of yesterday. The tree, the water, the mountain, the dress, the look, the fear, the pleasure, the danger, the emotion, even the sand, the colour of a wall, the slightest incident, all things shine in my soul, as fresh, and more extended daily. I forget all that is not within the domain of the heart; or, at least, whatever is in the domain of imagination needs to be recalled and firmly meditated. But all that belongs to my love is my life; and when I yield myself to it, it seems to me that then, alone, I live. I count those hours of delightful abandonment only; those are my hours of sunshine and of joy. But you will never imagine that; it is the poesy of the heart, heightened by an incredible power of intuition. I never pride myself on what is called talent; nor yet on my will which is held to be kindred with that of Napoleon. But I do render thanks and take pride in my heart, in the constancy of my affections. There is my wealth; there are the treasures beyond the reach of the one who coined that gold; the workman who made those ducats is far away, but the miser holds them ever in his hand. “I know you have a great and noble soul; and I know where to touch you; I will make you blush for me.” That speech is one of my ducats. For many a fool it would have been nothing; to me it rings sublime; and if I did not love like an imbecile, a collegian, a ninny, a madman, like anything you please that is most extravagant, I should have worshipped that woman as a divinity.

I don’t know whether all this will not seem to you Swedenborgian; but it belongs to my history, and I will some day explain it to you. At any rate, I will say this. Those words were said to me by a rather extraordinary woman, whom I will not name, in a fit of mistaken jealousy. Well, I assure you that a month never passes that I do not remember the look of the sky at the moment they were said, and the colour of the cloud I saw there.

Adieu. In ten days my leg will be much better; but I shall have written to you again before then. I will tell you my reveries, one by one. You will count for much in my idleness; which is for me the mother of memories.

I am glad to know that all goes well in your States. But, on the word of an honest man, I don’t understand why the count does not arrange his affairs so as to have no longer any care. When I have settled mine—and I shall then be, incontestably, a far greater financier than he—I will go and offer him my services to make something out of nothing—forgive that joke!

All gracious things to Mademoiselle Séverine, and to your dear Anna; my affectionate compliments to the Grand Marshal, and to you the most precious and sweetest offerings of my heart.

No Custine, no pearls; that is a loss to you, for the set is very fine; you would have been queen of the balls at Kiew next winter. But you will be that without the pearls.

Aux Jardies, July, 1839.

I am cured. The accident, which kept me in bed forty days without moving, has left no traces except some pain in the muscles. But your silence disquiets me much. Is anything going wrong with you? Are you travelling? All this exercises my mind, tortures me, besieges me with a thousand dragon-fancies.

I am overwhelmed with business. The disaster of my fallen walls is not yet repaired. I have been obliged to purchase land, which has ruined me. The masons must be here for another month. It is all the more impossible for me to get away because my illness has put my work into arrears, and also because I have let one of the three houses on the place to the Visconti family.1

A novel of mine is about to appear, named “Pierrette,” with which you will no doubt be pleased. “Une Princesse Parisienne” will also be out soon. “Véronique,” the second fragment of the “Curé de village,” is already out. “Les Paysans,” that is, “Qui Terre a, Guerre a,” is in process of being bought and published by the “Constitutionnel.” And finally “Le Ménage d’un Garçon” and “Le Martyr calviniste” are in the hands of the compositors of the “Siècle;” “Massimilla Doni,” appears with the true edition of “La Fille d’Ève;” “Béatrix” is nearly printed. I am now going to work on the last part of “Illusions Perdues,” finish the “Curé de village,” and do a great drama for the Porte-Saint-Martin.

There, dear, there is where we now are; and I have certainly drawn down upon me the hatred of all the men of the pen by “Un Grand homme de Province.” Growls resound in the press. But you see I continue my work intrepidly, keeping on with even steps, and tolerably insensible to calumny—like all those who have never given cause for slander.

I shall have three houses to let, each looking out on inclosed gardens; and I will only let this elegant village to extremely distinguished people. Our railway will begin to run in a few days, and I can enter a carriage from my garden; so that I am really in the heart of Paris (which I have never been before), because for eight sous and in fifteen or twenty minutes I am there. So I am enchanted with Les Jardies. When all the necessary ground is bought and the gardens planted, it will be delicious, and envied by all the world. Railways change all the conditions of life around Paris. I have still some things to remove from Chaillot; some furniture to bring out; so that various material annoyances have delayed this letter, for I can trust no one to do anything. I am alone, bachelor that I am, without servants, except a gardener and his wife. I will have nothing until my debts are paid. So I am living devilishly, without in the least caring what people think of me; for I will attain to independence and tranquillity.

I shall have, a few days hence, a delightful little story which Anna can read; I would like to dedicate it to her; you must tell me if it would be a pleasure to her, and to you, also.

Alas! the brutal indifference of the powers that be and the Chambers to literary men, who have now reached the last degree of endurance, is such that the bill on literary property remains between the two Chambers and has never been brought forward, so that our journey as the representatives of the lettered class (of which I told you, and which would have given me the chance to go and see you) will not take place. But I have not lost all hope. I shall go to Germany, to the banks of the Rhine, probably, and once there, I may be able to go and bid you good-day; if I have only a few moments to stay, at least I shall see you. This would take two months, and two months means that I must leave four or five thousand francs for payments in my absence. I must have good luck to get them! If my buildings are finished by August 15, and I can provide for all my payments, it is possible I may escape. That is why I am, just now, very busy in stuffing the newspapers with articles. But if the “Constitutionnel” decides to take “Les Paysans” I shall have to put off going till September.

We say in France, “No letters, good news.” I hope the interruption in your letters means that result; but why not have written me a single little line? It is conceivable that I who lead the triple life of literary man, debtor, and builder, and also that of a man defending himself against feuilletonists, and who now am managing, so to speak, the Société des Gens-de-lettres (one of the greatest things for the future to be done in France),—it is, I say, conceivable that my letters should be sometimes involuntarily delayed. But you, who have only to let yourself live in your Ukraine! Ah! you are very guilty; for you know the happiness given by your judgments, your ideas. “’Tis from the North our light doth come,” said Voltaire, to flatter the Empress. But I—I say it piously.

Well, I must leave you for “Pierrette.” I have just risen; it is two in the morning. I belong to the printer.

July 15.

I have not spoken to you of “L’Épicier,” “La Femme comme il faut,” “Le Rentier,” and “Le Notaire,” four figures I have done for Curmer’s “Les Français peints par eux-mêmes.” You will, no doubt, read those little sketches. I have just been giving a last touch to “Une Princesse Parisienne;” it is the greatest moral comedy that exists. It relates a mass of lies by which a woman, thirty-seven years of age, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, now become the Princesse de Cadignan, succeeds in getting herself taken for a saint, a virtuous, modest young girl by her fourteenth admirer; it is, in short, the last degree of depravity in sentiment. She is, as Madame de Girardin said, “Célimène in love.” The subject is of all lands and of all times. The masterly part of it is to have made the lies seem necessary and right, justified by love. It is one of the diamonds in the crown of your servant. Put it with the other old trinkets of my literary jewellery.

Adieu, for I am overwhelmed with work. Alas! few pleasures; all is anxiety and disappointment. My life is a strange and continual deception; I, who was manufactured expressly, as I believe, for happiness! Is that providential?

Many affectionate things to all. The autograph I send is Berryer’s.

Aux Jardies, August, 1839.

I have received your last letter, and I think there is something wonderful in our double existence: with you the deepest peace, with me the most active war; with you repose, with me incessant struggle. You could never imagine the ever up-springing torments to which I am subjected. But I don’t know why I tell you these things, for many a time you have told me they were my own fault and that I was wrong.

Les Jardies are nearly done; a few days more and I shall have finished the buildings. Only a few trifling things remain to do. But I shall not be easy till all is paid for, and that all is a fortune; thousand-franc notes are there engulfed like ships in the sea. The burden of literary production is doubled, and also complicated by the exactions of publishers who want all their books at once, whereas critics say I write too much. Then everybody wants his money at once. A terrible desire has seized me the last few days to abandon this life—not by suicide, which I shall always consider silly, but by quitting, in imitation of Molière’s Maître Jacques, my coachman’s top-coat for a cook’s jacket; that is, by making believe that my work, my Jardies, my debts, my family, my name, that all that is I is dead and buried, or as if it had never existed, and then go off to some distant country, America of the North or South, under another name, and there (taking, perhaps, another form) begin another life with happier fortunes.

September.

I am excessively agitated by a horrible affair,—the Peytel affair. I have seen that poor fellow three times. He is condemned to death. I am starting in two hours for Bourg.1

October 30.

You will perhaps have heard that, after two months of unheard-of efforts to snatch him from his doom, Peytel went, two days ago, to the scaffold, “like a Christian,” the priest said; I say, like a man who was not guilty.

You can now understand this horrible gap in my correspondence. Ah! dear, my affairs were already in a bad enough state, but this devotion of mine has cost me a crazy sum, five thousand francs at least in money, and five thousand more in non-working. Calumnies of all kinds have been my reward. Henceforth I shall, I think, see an innocent man murdered without meddling; I will do as the Spaniards do—run away when a man is stabbed.

We will talk of that, for I am going to see you; I can promise you that; I shall be, beyond a doubt, out of all condition to write for several months, in consequence of fatigue. I am now preparing the drama of “Vautrin” in five acts, at the Porte-Saint-Martin. I am finishing “Le Curé de Village;” idem “Sœur Marie des Anges;” idem “Les Paysans;” idem “Les Petites Misères de la Vie conjugale;” idem “Pierrette,” dedicated to your dear Anna; idem “La Frélore.”

When all that is done, if I do not have a brain-fever, I shall be on the Berlin road, to divert my mind, and I shall go as far as Dresden. And one does not go to see the Dresden Madonna without keeping on to see the Saint of Wierzchownia.

November 2.

I have had frightful troubles about which I cannot write you a word; it would be suffering them twice over. I was on the point of wanting food and lights and paper. I have been hunted like a hare, worse than a hare, by sheriffs. I am here, alone, at Les Jardies. My mother is much distressed. I alone am in the secret of the future. I see, within two months, events which will carry me onward in the difficult path of liberation.

I work so fast that I cannot tell you of what I am doing. You will read later a little pearl, the “Princesse Parisienne,” who is the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse at thirty-seven years of age. You have not yet received, I think, “Un Grand homme de Province à Paris,” which is not only a book but a great action, and, above all, courageous. The howls of the press continue.

But now, exhausted by so many struggles, I am going to give myself up to that delightful composition, “Sœur Marie des Anges,”—human love leading up to divine love.

“Pierrette” is one of those tender flowers of melancholy which are certain in advance of success. As the book is for Anna I will not tell you anything about it, but leave you the pleasure of surprise.

December, 1839.

You see me stupefied. I find a letter which I join to this one. I thought it posted, but, in the midst of my turmoil, it was slipped under the papers of “Pierrette.” In finishing “Pierrette” and clearing up my desk, I found it, when I thought it was in your hands! I now understand why you have not written to me. You think me dead and buried, or something.

Yesterday I received a great literary affront. “Pierrette” was refused by the “Siècle.” I can truly say it was a pearl sweated from my sufferings, for I am all suffering. There is nothing extraordinary in believing that I sent you a letter that was lying, in my desk, I forget to live.

I had presented myself for the Academy (thirty-nine visits to pay!), but to-day I have withdrawn before Victor Hugo, whose autograph on the subject I inclose. I work eighteen hours and sleep six. I eat while I work, and I believe I do not cease to work while sleeping, for there are literary difficulties on which I postpone decision till I wake, and I find them all solved when I do wake; thus my brain must work while I sleep.

I still count, as soon as I have an instant of tranquillity on going via Dresden to you.

I have had thirteen successive proofs of “Pierrette;” that is to say, it has been remade thirteen times. I did “César Birotteau” seventeen times. But as I did “Pierrette” in ten days you can imagine what the work was, and it was not the only thing I had on my hands. I have passed into the condition of a steam-engine, but an engine which, unfortunately, has a heart,—a heart which suffers, which feels at all points of a vast circumference, which everything affects, afflicts, wounds, and which never misses any pain. There is no longer consolation for me; the bitter cup is drained, i believe no more in a happy future; but I live on, pushed by the vigorous hand of duty. I stretch my sorrowing hands to you across the distance, wishing that you may always have that good and peaceful, tranquil life in which, at times, my thought, unknown to you, has gone to rest. Yes, there are hours when, sinking beneath my burden, I fancy myself arriving and living without cares, if not without griefs, in that oasis of the Ukraine.

A thousand friendly things to those about you. Believe in the eternal affection of your more than ever poor moujik.

January 20, 1840.

I hear nothing from the Ukraine. It is more than three months that I have had no letter from you, and I do not comprehend it. Have I given you pain? Have you taken ill the silences to which I have been compelled? Are you punishing me for my miseries? Are you ill? Are you at the bedside of any one of yours? I ask myself a thousand questions.

I have seen by the merest chance the Princess Constantine, at a ball given by Prince Tufiakin, the only one to which I have gone for two years. From her I heard that she had news from you, while I, nothing! That fact has caused me the most violent distress. The troubles of money are nothing but annoyances; but all that touches the heart—ah! those are the real griefs. To be thus overwhelmed on all sides, is it not enough to make life intolerable! It is already heavy enough to me who have not a single prospect on which my eyes can rest themselves. All is savage, barren, gashed with precipices. At forty years of age, after fifteen years of constant toil, one is permitted to be weary of work which gives, as its result, a doubtful fame, a real misery, superficial friendships without devotion, wasted sacrifices, growing worries, burdens more and more heavy, and no pleasure. There are those who paint my life very differently, but this is what it is. I have lost the taste of many joys; there are pleasures of which I can no longer conceive. I am frightened at a species of interior old age which has come upon me. I don’t know if I could now make those campaigns in China which so diverted M. Hanski at Geneva.

At this moment “Pierrette,” the story that belongs to your dear Anna, is appearing in the “Siècle.” They have taken out the dedication, which will be put at the end, as an envoi. The stoppage of your letters makes me fear that this may no longer be agreeable to you.

My situation is horribly precarious. The desire to pay what I owe made me condemn myself to a life of extreme misery, but it serves for nothing to live in that way. My conscience only is satisfied. At this moment I am hoping that Rothschild will aid me. If he does not, then I shall fall once more into the disasters of 1828. I shall be ruined for the second time. There is something fatal in money. But I shall recover life by writing for the stage.

This is now the 20th of January. My play “Vautrin,” which is rehearsing at the Porte-Saint-Martin, will be played on the 20th of February, and it seems that I may count on a great financial success; I wrote it for that. Still, if Rothschild does not help me, it is quite impossible that I can get over the coming month. I shall have to lose my house, furniture, and everything I have gathered to myself for the last twelve years; and even that will not relieve me. My creditors will gain nothing. I shall lose all, and owe just as much. It is horrible; but it will happen; I foresee it. To tell you my efforts, my marches and countermarches for the last three months would be to write volumes. And all the while I had to work, to get my plays accepted, to invent them, to write them. The royal indifference that pursues French literature is communicated to all about us.

I have still two works to do, print, and publish to fulfil the agreement I signed in 1838, which obliged me to give fourteen volumes. I have given birth to ten between November, 1838, and January, 1840,—fourteen months. Those I shall now finish are “Sœur Marie des Anges,” and “Le Ménage d’un Garçon.”

You have said nothing to me about “Un Grand homme de Province à Paris,” which has raised such storms around me.

I am preparing several works for the stage. May heaven grant me help and I shall be free through the profits of the stage combined with those from publishers. In three months I could earn a great sum by pledging myself for new books; and if luck would grant that publishers might think of selling me under a cheap form I should be saved.

If there is any good news of this kind you shall have it very quickly; as you shall that of the success or fall of “Vautrin.” Frédérick Lemaître, that actor who is so sympathetic to the masses and who created the part of Robert Macaire, plays Vautrin.

At this moment I am organizing another play for a man of great talent, Henri Monnier, from which I hope success. It is a piece in which Prudhomme plays the leading part.

Adieu. Miserable or fortunate, I am always the same for you; and it is because of that unchangeableness of heart that I am painfully wounded by your abandonment. I may miss writing to you, carried away as I often am by a life that resembles a torrent; but you, dear countess, why do you deprive me of the sacred bread that came to me regularly and restored my courage? Tell me. How will you explain it to me?

February, 1840.

Ah! I think you at last excessively small; and it shows me that you are of this world. Ah! you write to me no longer because my letters are rare! Well, they were rare because I often did not have the money to post them, but I would not tell you that. Yes, my distress has reached that point and beyond it. It is horrible, and sad, but it is true, as true as the Ukraine where you are. Yes, there have been days when I proudly ate a roll of bread on the boulevard. I have had the greatest sufferings: self-love, pride, hope, prospects, all have been attacked. But I shall, I hope, surmount everything, I had not one farthing, but I earned for those atrocious Lecou and Delloye seventy thousand francs in a year. The Peytel affair cost me ten thousand francs—and people said I was paid fifty thousand! That affair and my fall which kept me forty days in bed retarded everything.

Oh! I do not like your want of confidence. You think that I have a great mind, but you will not admit that I have a great heart! After nearly eight years you do not know me! My God, forgive her, for she knows not what she does!

No, I was not happy in writing “Béatrix;” you ought to have known it. Yes, Sarah is Madame Visconti; yes, Mademoiselle des Touches is George Sand; yes, Béatrix is even too much Madame d’Agoult. George Sand is at the height of felicity; she takes a little vengeance on her friend. Except for a few variations, the story is true.

Ah! I entreat you, never make comparisons between yourself and Madame de Berny. She was a woman of infinite kindness and absolute devotion; she was what she was. You are complete in your own way as she was in hers. Two grand things should never be compared. They are what they are.

“Pierrette” has appeared in the “Siècle.” The manuscript is bound for Anna. Friends and enemies proclaim the little book a masterpiece; I shall be glad if they are not mistaken. You will read it soon, as the book is being printed. People put it beside the “Recherche de l’Absolu.” I am willing. I myself wish it put beside Anna.

Alas! yes; I am always writing; I blacken much paper, though I advance but little. I am ashamed of my forced fecundity.

Your letter was no longer expected; I had lost all hope. I did not know what to imagine; I believed you ill, and I went to inquire of Princess Constantine. I should have gone to you, were it not for poverty. Oh! you do not know what you are to me; but it is an unhappy passion. Faith is not given; yours is not an absolute sentiment, and mine is. I could believe you dead, I could not suppose you forgetting. Whereas, under the pretext that I am a man, living in Paris, you imagine monstrous things. Count my volumes on your fingers and reflect. I am more in a desert in Paris than you are at Wierzchownia. I do not like to have you write to any one in the world, still less to any one in Paris, but Custine’s address is 6 rue de La Rochefoucauld. Write, Sévigné! I have obeyed as a moujik.

You have truly divined the affair of that poor Peytel; there are fatalities in life. Oh! the circumstances were more than extenuating, but impossible to prove. There are noblenesses in which men will never believe. However, it is all over. I will let you read some day what he wrote to me before going to the scaffold. I can take this matter to the feet of God and many sins will be forgiven me. He was a martyr to his honour. That which men applaud in Calderon, Shakespeare, and Lope de Vega, they guillotined at Bourg.

I, who wish to marry, who desire it, and who, perhaps, may never marry, for I wish to marry—in short, you know! But what you do not know is this: in the first place, I have the most absolute kindliness, and the will to let the being with whom I should have to walk through life be happy as she wishes to be, never to shock her, and never be stern except on one point, respect for social conventions. Love is a flower, the seed of which is brought by the wind, and flowers where it drops. It is as ridiculous to be angry with a woman because she does not love us, as to be angry with fate for not giving us black hair when we have red. In default of love, there is friendship; friendship is the secret of conjugal life. One can bear not being loved, but this must not be shown; it is losing half the fortune that remains to us, in despair at having lost the other half.

This woman squinted, she was uncouth, her nature was horrible, but the man was bent on having her; he lost his head a first time on seeing an inferior being preferred to him, and he lost it a second time for having lost it the first, in avenging himself. The woman was beneath vengeance. I would not blame a woman too much for loving a king. But if she loves Ruy Blas, it is vice that has put her there where she has lowered herself; she no longer exists, she is not worth a pistol-shot. That’s enough said about it.

“Vautrin” is being mounted, vigorously. I have a rehearsal daily. When you hold this letter in your hand, the great question will have been decided. It is almost certain that “Vautrin” will be represented the evening you hold this, for it will be between February 28 and March 5. A fortune in money and a fortune in literature are staked upon a single evening! Frédérick Lemaître answers for its success. Harel, the director, believes in it! As for me, I despaired of it ten days ago; I thought the play stupid, and I was right. I wrote it all over again, and I now think it passable. But it will always be a poor play. I have yielded to the desire to put a romantic figure on the scene, and I did wrong.

Yes, certainly, I want the view of Wierzchownia.

February 10.

T have surmounted many miseries, and if I have a success now they are all over. Imagine, therefore, what will be my agony during the evening when “Vautrin” is performed. In five hours of time it will be decided whether I pay or do not pay my debts. I have been crushed by that burden for fifteen years; it hampers the expansion of my life, it takes from my heart its natural action, it stifles my thought, it soils my existence, it embarrasses my movements, it stops my inspirations, it weighs upon my conscience, it hinders all, it has barred my career, it has broken my back, it has made me old. My God! have I paid dearly enough for my place in the sun? All that calm future, that tranquillity I need so much, all is about to be staked on a few hours, delivered over to Parisian caprices, as it is at this moment to the censor.

Oh! how I need repose! I am forty years old. Forty years of suffering; for the happiness I enjoyed beside an angel from 1823 to 1833 was the counterpoise of an equal misery, and it needed strength to bear a joy as infinite as pain. And then, how death put an end to that! and what a death!—I sigh for the promised land of a tender marriage, weary as I am of tramping this desert without water, scorching with sun and full of Bedouins. Ten years hence, and who, good God! will care for me!

To go to see you is my constant desire; but for that I cannot leave behind me either bills to pay or business, money anxieties or debts, which still amount to sixty thousand francs at least; but “Vautrin” may give them in four months!

Madame Visconti, of whom you speak to me, is one of the most amiable of women, of an infinite, exquisite kindness; a delicate and elegant beauty. She has helped me much to bear my life. She is gentle, but full of firmness, immovable and implacable in her ideas and her repugnances. She is a person to be depended on. She has not been fortunate, or rather, her fortune and that of the count are not in keeping with their splendid name; for the count is the representative of the elder branch of the legitimatized sons of the last duke, the famous Barnabo, who left none but natural children, some legitimatized, others not so. It is a friendship which consoles me under many griefs. But, unfortunately, I see her very seldom. Nothing is possible in a life so busy as mine, and when one goes to bed at six to get up at midnight. My system, my crushing obligations are all against my taking any comfort. No one can come to see a workman who is fifteen hours at his work, and I myself cannot fulfil any social duties. I see Madame Visconti once a fortnight only, which is truly a grief to me, for she and my sister are my only compassionating souls. My sister is in Paris, Madame Visconti at Versailles, and I scarcely see them. Can that be called living? You are in a desert at the farther end of Europe; I know no other women in the world; I have the honour to assure you that no one believes me overwhelmed by feminine hearts all at my orders, and that I am, as to women, miserably neglected. What a savage joke! Mon Dieu! how stupid people are! There is in it a bitter sarcasm on the hours when I sit gazing at the embers and thinking of my life with bent head and wounded heart, and tears in my eyes; for to no one more than to me would the daily happiness of nights and mornings be more fitted. I have in my soul and in my character an equable quality which would make a woman happy; I feel within me an infinite, inexhaustible tenderness,—alas! without employment. Always to dream, always to wait, to feel one’s good days pass, to see youth torn out hair by hair, to fold nothing in one’s arms, yet find one’s self accused of being a Don Juan! A gross and empty Don Juan! There are moments when I envy my poor sister Laurence lying these fifteen years in a coffin watered by our tears.

February 14.

Adieu; I close this letter, placing in it for you as much affection as in all the others put together. If “Vautrin” succeeds, the year 1840 will see me in your manor.

At this moment I am overwhelmed by work. I have in press “Pierrette,” to which I must add another story to make the required two 8vo volumes. I have a book to do for the “Presse,” and also in the press a novel in letters, which I shall call I don’t know what, for “Sœur Marie des Anges” is too long, and that is only one part of it. I must finish all this to get my liberty of coming and going, which I have never had since Geneva—no, I have never had but six weeks really to myself, and for those escapades I paid dearly enough.

I am going to finish “La Torpille” and also “Les Lecamus” for the “Siècle,” and the last part of “Illusions Perdues,” which is the end of “Un Grand homme.” And there is still the end of “Béatrix” to do, a fourth Part, the last meeting of Calyste and Béatrix. In all, six works to be done, besides two plays to be represented. What do you think of that? Do you believe I have time to idle? Alas, I have not time to think; I am swept onward by the current of labour as by a river. I have scarcely a moment to write to you, and I take that from sleep. To yield myself up to a thing of the heart is a luxury to me. How privileged are the rich! And how little they know how to enjoy their facilities! I think that money makes men dull. For the last three weeks I have hoped that Rothschild would help me to arrange my affairs; I asked him to do so. But bah! if I have to ask him twice, I prefer my poverty and toil.

Many tender things to you, dear. Present my remembrances and friendships to all about you, and my wishes for the happiness of your family. You have your wolves, I have my creditors; I wish I had no wolves to encounter but your kind.

I hear that Colonel Frankowski, who took you the cassolette, is here. Can I trust him with Anna’s “Pierrette” and your pearls? Tell me; answer this at once.

Adieu once more. Take all the flowers of sincere and faithful affection here inclosed, pure, if any ever were so.

I open my letter to beg you not to write to M. de Custine. This is imperative; you will soon understand why.

Paris, March, 1840.

I am in bed, at my sister’s house, ill since the day after the first representation of “Vautrin.” I left my bed to-day for the first time in ten days. I have been well nursed by my sister. My illness, which is nearly over, was an attack of cerebral neuralgia, caused by a draught in a railway-carriage, which, combined with the mental condition in which I was, gave me both a horrible fever, which I had, and the atrocious sufferings of neuralgia.

You know, of course, by this time, that “Vautrin” has had the misfortune to be forbidden by Louis-Philippe, who saw a caricature of his own person in the fourth act, where Frédérick Lemaître plays the part of an envoy from Mexico. Thus, I have but one representation of the play to tell you of. The misfortune of the manager of the Porte-Saint-Martin was that he was forced to let to unknown strangers a large part of the house. The other part belonged partly to my enemies, the journalists, and about a third to friends of mine and friends of the manager and of the actors. I had expected some lively opposition; but, in spite of hostile efforts, a great success in the sale of tickets was obtained. That was all I wanted for the theatre and for myself, when the prohibition came.1

Here, then, I was: Sunday, master of sixty thousand francs; Monday, with nothing. First, all my agonies of money over; next, my position more perilous than ever. Victor Hugo accompanied me to see the minister, and we there acquired the certainty that the minister himself counted for nothing in the prohibition, but Louis-Philippe for all. Throughout this affair, at the representation and at the ministry, Victor Hugo’s conduct has been that of a true friend, courageous, devoted; and when he heard I was ill he came to see me. I have been well helped by George Sand and Mme. de Girardin. Frédérick Lemaître has been sublime. But the affair of the likeness to Louis Philippe was perhaps put forward against Harel, the manager of the Porte-Saint-Martin, whose place he wanted. All this is still a mystery to me. However it be, the blow has fallen. My situation is more painful than it has ever been. Doctor Nacquart preaches vehemently a journey of six weeks. Perhaps I can go to you.

Now, this is what has happened. The newspapers have been infamous; they have said that the play was revolting in its immorality. I shall say but one thing to you about that: read it! It may not be very good, but it is eminently moral. Thereupon, the minister, to screen the royal fury, made the pretext of immorality, which was cowardly and base. One thing you may believe in, namely: terrible attacks on my part on that tottering throne. It shall not have two farthings. I will be the emulator and assistant of M. de Cormenin, and you shall see the effect of my change from a peace footing to a war footing. I will have neither truce nor armistice until I have driven——

May, 1840.

Nothing can better paint to you my life than this interruption. After six weeks’ delay I must finish a sentence left unfinished in my desk without the possibility of returning to it. The end of that sentence is: “claws of steel into their hearts.” I resume my narrative.

They came and offered me indemnities; five thousand francs to begin with. I blushed to the roots of my hair, and replied that I accepted no alms; that I had earned two hundred thousand francs’ worth of debts in doing sundry masterpieces which counted for something in the sum total of the glory of France in the nineteenth century; that I had been three months rehearsing “Vautrin,” during which time I might have earned by other work twenty-five thousand francs; that a pack of creditors were after me, but that if I could not pay them all, I did not care whether I was hunted by fifty or a hundred of them; and that my dose of courage to resist was the same. The director of the Beaux-Arts, Cavé, went away, saying that he was full of esteem and admiration for me. “This is the first time,” he said, “that I have ever been refused.” “So much the worse,” I replied.

Since I wrote you the two preceding pages my life has been that of a stag at bay. I have come and gone about Paris helped by friends. And now, without a farthing, I begin the fight once more. Frédérick Lemaître will entice other actors, and I have obtained permission to present a new play, in five acts, at one of the closed theatres; about six weeks hence we shall re-appear, and then we shall see!

Aux Jardies, May 10.

Cara, I have just received your last letter, and again I must complain of the rarity of those letters. Oh! do not let what I have written of my distresses keep you from writing to me monthly. If I do not write to you as often in my periods of trouble, do not blame my heart. I often make my prayer to Hope, turning my face toward the Ukraine. Do not punish me for my confidences, which may, which must sadden you. Alas! with what rapidity time is flying. How many white hairs are in my head, faithful to all, even to toil.

You are laughing at me, and that is not right. Madame Visconti is an Englishwoman, not an Italian; and I have no vanity in my friendships; you know that. A man as busy as I am can attend very little to trifles. Certainly, I will acknowledge that I am not without the vanity of love, and I think that when we love we ought to love in all ways, and be very happy to see la dilecta carry off the palm from others in even the smallest things,—her toilet, for instance. I should have all those weaknesses, including blazons. But this was no ground on which to twit me; look in your mirror, dress yourself very elegantly to-morrow, and vindicate me, cara.

Every one comes up to me in Paris, admiring my courage as much and even more than the rest. They thought me crushed, buried under my disaster, and hearing that I am about to deliver battle once more, both friends and enemies have been equally surprised.

Frédérick Lemaître rejected my drama of “Richard Cœur d’Éponge,” saying that paternity was a selfish sentiment which had little chance of success with the masses. Moreover, he was not pleased with the dénouement; and as one must only give him things to play that he likes to play, I have been under the necessity of finding another play. It is found at last, and I write to you in the midst of labours necessitated by “Mercadet.” “Mercadet” is the battle of a man against his creditors, and the schemes he employs to escape them. It is exclusively a comedy, and I hope this time to reach success, and also to satisfy literary requirements.

Besides doing this comedy I am at this moment finishing “Le Curé de village,” one of the works to be included in the “Scènes de la Vie de campagne,” and by no means the least of them. But it needs much labour to add a book to the “Lys dans la Vallée” and “Le Médecin de campagne.” However, I hope that “Le Curé” will surpass both; and you will think it does yourself; for the “Curé de village” is the application of Catholic repentance to civilization, just as the “Médecin de campagne” is the application of philanthropy; and the first is far more poetic and loftier. One is of man; the other is of God.

I shall do this year “Les Paysans” which has been composed these two years, and the proofs are in my hands. But hunted as I am, without any tranquillity, I cannot give myself up to my literary sympathies. I do only that which is most pressing.

“Pierrette” is not yet out. You know why. Carried along by truth, by the drama, it was necessary to speak of marriage and the results of marriage. But you will see that all is kept to the most decorous language. I don’t know when it will please the publisher to bring out the book. Wait for the Paris edition of both “Pierrette” and “Vautrin;” ask Bellizard for the third edition; that is the only good one, and it has a scene added.

I hope to publish this year a complete edition of the four Parts of the “Études de Mœurs,” and I have before me still to do the “Scènes de la Vie politique” and “Scènes de la Vie militaire;” two rather long and very difficult portions. It will take me at least six years to get to the end of them.

I have great need to-day to feel my wounds nursed and healed, to be able to live without cares at Les Jardies, and to pass my days with my work and a woman. But it seems that the history of all other men will never be other than a romance for me. Debts are a burden under which I must succumb. Since the reckoning I gave you in Geneva—do you remember?—nothing has changed; I have lived, and I have marked my place, that is all. I have sustained myself on the surface of the waves by swimming. God grant that I may not go under! but you will pray for my soul’s rest, will you not?

I leave you for “Mercadet.”

May 15.

This is the evening of my Catholic fête, and four days hence is my birthday. I have never, since I lived, seen a fête on those days; no one has ever wished me returns of them, except once, when Madame de Castries, the first year of our acquaintance, sent me the most magnificent bouquet I ever saw. Therefore I am always sad on these days. My mother cares little for me. I am so busy I have always told my sister not to keep our fêtes, and there has never been any one else to fête me. I do not count Madame de Berny, for that was a daily fête. But then, from 1822 to 1832 my life was exceptional. Chance has acted towards me as fate with those fantastic animals of the desert who have but a few rare joys in their life, and die without perpetuating themselves. This is how it was that the unicorn became a lost species, and why that sublime painter of “Chastity,” Il Pontormo, has placed a unicorn beside that beautiful emblematical figure. I will own to you in your ear, that I would rather, by far, have happiness than fame; that I would give all my works to be happy as I see certain fools being happy.

Believe, dear, that in what I said to you about not writing to the rue de La Rochefoucauld, there was a reason superior to all pettiness. That person is about to publish a book such as he published on England, and I believe it will be terrible [de Custine’s book on Russia]. I cannot tell you more; your intelligence will do the rest. I am extremely glad, knowing how things may turn, that he has not been in your regions.

The friendship of which I spoke to you, and at which you laugh apropos of my dedication, is not all I thought it. English prejudices are terrible, they take away an essential to all artists, the laisser-aller, unconstraint. In the “Lys dans la Vallée,” I explained the women of that county in a few words, as I divined it in Lady Ellenborough during the two hours I walked about her park, while that silly Prince Schonberg was making love to her, and during dinner.

Each step I take in life gives me a profound respect for the past. I cannot tell you all I feel on that subject, not here at least, but I will at Wierzchownia, where you will see me appear unexpectedly; for I look to your region as to an asylum for my sorrows on the day when they become intolerable. So I am not sure whether you ought to desire to see me, with the white staff in my hand and the wallet on my back.

I beg of you, write me at least once a month, and remember that no letter of yours has ever gone without an answer. The autograph is from Meissonier, who is reviving the Flemish school among us,—the painter of “Le Fumeur,” “Le Liseur,” and “La Partie d’échecs.”

Aux Jardies, June, 1840.

Mon Dieu! what intervals between your letters, dear! If you knew what uneasiness you give me, how often I spend hours with my elbows on the table and my chin in my hands, asking myself what has happened to you. And the visions far beyond sight! As for me, I have my excuse for the months that separate my letters: either I have suffered beyond measure, or I have worked enormously, or I have had some of those deplorable affairs of which you know nothing.

It is now twenty days that I have suffered much with a species of cholerine, or inflammation of the bowels, caused by an increase of anxieties and labour; for the one leads to the other. I have written the comedy in five acts, “Mercadet;” but Frédérick wants changes. The interests which are fighting each other over the corpse of the Porte-Saint-Martin prevent the provisional opening which the minister had granted me; so the three or four hopes which had been successively lighted are successively extinguished. In these last hopes, these last efforts, my energy has broken down, and, at this moment I am not worth an insect pinned to the card-board of a naturalist’s box. I am over-burdened with toil, obligations, business, till I no longer recognize myself, and a life so embarrassed as mine no longer interests me. This is strictly the fact. I would offer half my burden to any benevolent passer-by. If you know a woman who needs to exercise great faculties, who is tired of a monotonous life, who desires a position in which there is much to combat and to conquer, who would be enticed by the first campaign in Italy, who is thirty-six to forty years of age, and has the wherewithal to fight with, send her to me; I will occupy her.

Joking apart; I am very lonely when my brain ceases to work, or lies down to rest. There is something humiliating, in the thought that a trifling inflammation of insignificant viscera prevents the exercise of our highest powers.

I have “Le Curé de village” to finish and a crowd of other things. “Pierrette” is delayed for the preface by the publisher, I don’t know for what reason. The business of publishing books has become so bad that I believe not ten volumes will be written in the next two years. Belgium has ruined French literature. What ungenerosity in those who read us! If every one had refused the Belgian editions and insisted, as you have, on the French editions, if only two thousand persons on the continent had acted thus, we should have been saved. But Belgium has sold already some twenty to thirty thousand copies. This evil will end by force of evil. Meantime our poets starve or go mad.

June 21.

To go to see you, to go down the Rhine, to see Prussia and Saxony is in me the desire of a lover, of a nun, of a child, of a young girl, of all that is most vehement. But my interests are so threatened and I am so poor that travel is forbidden me. Oh! you do not know how much there is of longing, of repressed desires and wishes in what I now write to you, or how many times my imagination and my heart have made that journey.

Your last letter came in the midst of my cruel trouble, and I could not answer you immediately. Our two existences, one so tranquil and deep, the other so foaming and rapid, flow ever parallel; but that which afflicts me grievously is that there is no cohesion. When thought has constantly traversed space, when a thousand times it has filled the void, one feels that this is not all. Something, I know not what, is wanting, or rather, I know too well. These wings incessantly spread and folded cause suffering; it is not lassitude, it is worse. Violent desires possess me at times to quit all, to begin some other thing than this present life, like children quitting play. I would like to know if you too have these impulses of soul; I ask you to tell me because I know that you are true, and above the pettiness of vanity, which makes people drape themselves for themselves. But you will answer me by some religious turn to things celestial, or by a blasting phrase against our human nature. Yet I would not take from your religion what the eye takes from a mirror as we use it, for it is one of the greatest charms of your heart and mind. I never lay down a letter from you without believing in something divine, and I will not tell you now of the regrets that then assail me at the intolerable idea of our separation. It seems to me that all would be well with me if the divinity were near me.

I entreat you, write me every fortnight; you live in solitude, without so much to do; it would be easy for you; and when one knows that one does good to a poor being who has no one and who can thus be comforted, is not that a work of charity?

June 30.

I shall send this letter, having nothing more to tell you of my affairs, though much to add on my grief at your abandonment.

July 3.

I have your letter, number 55, and I answer its questions. Primo: I have not received the picture of Wierzchownia; no, I have received nothing, absolutely nothing. Secundo: Borget is in China. Tertio: I forgot to tell you of M. de Custine; but he was superb at the representation of “Vautrin.” He had a proscenium box and applauded vehemently; he behaved in the most superior way. If I told you not to write to the rue de La Rochefoucauld it was because in that street a book is being written which will be terrible, and I do not want you to commit the slightest imprudence. There will be anger; all the more justifiable because they have been very well received. My friendship saw danger ahead, and signalled it to you; believe me as to this.

I thank you from the bottom of my soul for your letter, but I am in despair to know that you were ill while I was blaming you for not writing. Solicitude at a distance is often injustice. Yes, I am very willing that “Les Paysans” should be for M. Hanski if I write it. I am at the end of my resignation. I believe that I shall leave France and carry my bones to Brazil, in a mad enterprise, which I choose on account of its madness. I will no longer bear the life I lead; enough of useless toil! I shall burn my letters, all my papers, leave nothing but my furniture and Les Jardies, and depart; confiding a few little things that I value to my sister’s friendship. She will be a faithful dragon to those treasures. I will give a power of attorney to some one; I will leave my works to be managed by others, and go to seek the fortune that is lacking to me here. Either I shall return rich, or no one shall ever know what becomes of me. This is a very fixed project in my mind, which I shall put into execution this winter resolutely, without mercy. My work can never pay my debt. I must look to something else. I have not more than ten years left of real energy, and if I do not profit by them I am a lost man. You are the only person who will be informed of this decision. Certain circumstances may hasten my departure. Nevertheless, however rapid may be the execution of this plan, you shall receive my farewell. A letter from Havre or Marseille will tell you all. This project has not been formed without sad hours of days and nights. Do not think that I could renounce a literary life and France without the most frightful wrenching. But poverty is implacable, and if I go farther it will become shameful, intolerable.

I know that what I write will give you infinite pain; but is it not better to tell you of it and explain my reasons, than leave you to hear it brutally from the newspapers? But first I shall try a last throw of the dice, my pen aiding; If that succeeds, I may pull through for the time being. Perhaps I might be able to go and bid you farewell; perhaps there are chances that I could rest three months with you, instead of resting three months with Madame Carraud.

Ah! dear, you don’t know what it is, after writing fifteen volumes in fifteen months, to do sixteen acts of plays—“Vautrin,” “Pamela Giraud,” “Mercadet”—uselessly; for there is no longer any hope of opening the Porte-Saint-Martin. Lawsuits, battling over a coffin, prevent that, The Français is closed three months for repairs. The Renaissance is dead. There is no theatre where Frédérick can play. I tried the Vaudeville in its new building, but the manager has no money.

You ask me for details about Victor Hugo. Victor Hugo is an extremely brilliant man; he has as much wit as poesy. He is most fascinating in conversation, a little like Humboldt, but superior, and admitting more dialogue. He is full of bourgeois ideas. He execrates Racine, and considers him a secondary man. He is crazy in that direction. There is more of good than of evil in him. Though the good is an outcome of vanity, and though all things are deeply calculated in him, he is, in the main, a charming man, besides being the great poet that he is. He has lost much of his quality, his force, and his value by the life he leads.

August, 1840.

I have attempted a last effort; I am doing, by myself alone, the “Revue Parisienne,” just as Karr does “Les Guêpes.”1 The first number has appeared. I postpone the execution of my project on Brazil. One loves France so well! I will bear up. I am going to undertake the “Scènes de la Vie militaire.” I shall begin with Montenotte, and shall, no doubt, go, in September or October, to the region about Nice, Albenga, and Savona, and examine the ground where those fine manœuvres took place.

This letter has been lying two months on my table. It has been hindered by so many matters! But at last it goes, bearing to you the testimony of an affection always on the morrow of our meeting on the Crêt, and eight years old.

A thousand tender regards and a thousand more. I am writing politics, and posing as the friend of Russia. May God bless you! The Russian alliance is much in my mind. I hate the English.

“Pierrette” is about to appear. You can let Anna read it, for all you say. There is nothing “improper” in it.

Sèvres, October 1, 1840.

Dear countess, I have this moment received your last letter. Mon Dieu! what can I say to you? All that it contains of kind, expansive, and consoling is enough to make one accept worse miseries than mine, if such existed. I have only sad things to reply to sad things.

In the first place, I had completely settled the project of going to spend the winter with you; but my lawyer opposed it with wise reasons—that do not satisfy me. Yes, I dreamed of seven or eight months’ peace and tranquillity, constant work, but without fatigue, complete forgetfulness of all my tortures of all kinds. My arrangements were made; I was to see Berlin and Dresden, and then go to you. Well, it is all put off. Your presentiment was true. All was to have taken place; I felt a joy so infinite that nothing can express it. But it would be, alas! mad and imprudent. My affairs are in too bad a state. I spike my cannon, I retreat, to return in force. I will explain all this in detail.

But, first of all, I must answer what you asked me, Which made me smile, for I thought that you did not need to ask it; you ought to have felt sure of that. Yes, I will never take any extreme resolution, in whatever way it be, without first letting you know of it. When I abandon myself, as they say, to the grace of God, I will begin by abandoning myself to the grace of your Highness, like a good moujik. You have precedence of God; for I confess to you, to my great detriment, that I love you much more than him. You will scold me, but why should I lie? I shall skip about your lands of Paulowska with you, reading to you. For a nothing I’d make myself Russian, if—But the if is too long to unravel. All is not said about my journey; they have made me abandon it—but I have not abandoned it. It depends a good deal on finance, and the outcome of political affairs, for we are furiously at war. I can’t understand why an understanding is not come to.

If you knew what it is in the midst of my agitated life to get a letter from you, especially such a letter as I have just received, oh! you would write me oftener, you would tell me fully all you do and all you think.

By this time you must have received “Vautrin” and “Pierrette.” “Pierrette” is a diamond. In another twenty days the “Curé de village” will be out, but lopped. I had not time to finish the book. It lacks precisely all that concerns the curé, the amount of a volume, which I shall write for the second edition [it was never written]. The publisher and I could not come to an understanding on this increase of volumes.

November 16, 1840.

Precisely one month and a half interval! And so many things to tell you that I can’t tell you; it would take volumes. Perhaps this fact will enlighten you: From the time you receive this letter write to me at the following address: “Monsieur de Brugnol, rue Basse, No. 19, Passy, near Paris.” I am here, in hiding for some time. Nevertheless, if, in the meantime, you have addressed me at Sèvres, I shall get the letters.

Dear countess, I had to move very hastily and hide myself here, where I am. But, as Marie Dorval says, money troubles are mere vexations; it is only in the things of the heart that grief and misery are. Though all goes badly with me, financially speaking, all goes well, for I’m going to Russia; I’m going to see you as soon as I can earn the money for the trip. I hope to leave for Berlin in February; I shall stay a month in Berlin, fifteen days in Dresden, and be with you by the middle of April.

I have taken my mother to live with me, and I cannot leave home without leaving the household provided-for for a year. It is probable that I shall stay, June and July, in Saint-Petersburg, and return to you a second time in the autumn.

During the period when this letter has lain, begun but unfinished, among my papers (which have been for the past month in boxes, mixed up with those of my whole library), I have received a letter from the banking-house of Rougemont and Löwenberg, telling me to send there for the picture you announced to me. So, be at ease on that subject, as well as on the other subjects that interest us, about which you write superfluous things.

It goes without saying that if I earn my ducats more quickly than I expect, I shall start the earlier. I begin to feel a deep execration for my dear country. You don’t know what a bear-garden it is; I should like Holland better, I think,—the most unliterary country in the world. We will talk about this, dear, before long, and there’s enough in it for more than one evening. Mon Dieu! how long it is since I have seen you! It seems to me a dream to know within myself that I am starting, going,—that every step will be bringing me nearer to you! I have recovered strength for the work I am doing at this moment, in thinking that it will give me liberty to go to Germany, and to find you at the end of my errand.

I am just now finishing “Le Curé de village;” it is a great thing, which occupies me much.

My last efforts have been poisoned by sufferings beyond the measure of those that a man can bear; but I have neither time nor strength to tell you anything about them. It must be for later. I can only send you this letter, written in the course of nearly two months—for it is now November 26; and provided it tells you my final decision, that’s enough, I think; but there are many things beneath that decision.

No longer adieu, dear, but à bientôt, for three months is soon. I shall write you once, or twice, between now and the time I take the steamer. A thousand tender regards, a thousand good hopes, and all that a long attachment brings of gracious thoughts and flowers long compressed in the depths of the soul. Many things in your last letter did me good, of which I will not speak to you; but I did not think you had so much persistence, or so much will. When you show me that the excellent advice I gave you in Geneva has been followed, I quiver all over.

All kind remembrances to those whom I know among the many who surround you, and many things to M. Hanski.

You have again harped on the “elegant empire”—-Coquette! but you make me smile rather sadly.

There is one piece of serious news with me. I have taken my mother to live with me. An increase of trouble and work. But!—

December 16, 1840.

At last I have been able to go to Rougemont and Löwenberg and obtain the picture of Wierzchownia. I brought home, myself, the box made of those northern woods, which, on being broken, exhaled such delicious, enchanting odours that they gave me a sort of nostalgia. If you burn such wood as that it must be a sensuous delight to stir your fire; more than a pleasure. The picture has been injured; all journeys, though they may form youth, hurt pictures. But, dearest of dears, the canvas is immense; we have no spaces large enough in our honeycomb cells that are called in Paris apartments. I shall put the original at Les Jardies (if I can keep that place), and I will have a reduced copy made by my dear Borget, who has just returned from China, and is working for the Salon this year; thus I can have it before my eyes in my study. I have had much pleasure in contemplating that picture; but you never told me that a river ran before your lawn, nor that you had a Louvre. It all seems very lovely, very beautiful, very fresh. The buildings are elegant; we have nothing better here. What melancholy in the background! How one divines the steppes and a country without a rise! You did well; it was a good action to send me the likeness of your dwelling; but I would also like a view of Paulowska.

Dear, it does not lessen my desire to go and see you, which I shall put into execution. I am working night and day to arrange my affairs here, and make a purse for my journey. You will see me, some fine day, landing on that charming bridge.

This is only a little line to tell you that my eyes will be forever on your windows, on the columns of your peristyle, and, while examining my ideas, I shall be walking on that lawn.

“Le Curé de village” will be out in a few days; “Les Mémoires de deux jeunes Mariées” are nearly finished. My lawyer, a man of admirable character, maintains my debt by legal process [maintient ma dette par la procédure]. I shall give two plays and a quantity of articles. I shall leave my proofs to be corrected by friends in my absence, for a dozen volumes will be re-issued during my travels.

Perhaps I shall come to you an Academician; but certainly with the satisfaction of having published “Le Curé de village,” which is one of the stones of my pediment. I shall bring that work with me. I would like to know to whom I shall address myself to avoid all annoyance at the frontier regarding my manuscripts. Do you think I ought to write to Saint Petersburg, or will a few words from Pablen, your ambassador, suffice? I should like to obtain information about this because I would then bring you my manuscripts.

When I saw your cage, it seemed to me it was mine, and I ought to be living in it. You have made me very happy, and you must have had a presentiment of my pleasure when you asked me so often if the picture had arrived.

Yesterday, December 15, one hundred thousand persons were in the Champs Élysées. A thing happened that would make one believe that natural effects had intentions: at the moment when the body of Napoleon entered the Invalides, a rainbow formed above that building. Victor Hugo has written a sublime poem, an ode, on the return of the Emperor. From Havre to Pecq both banks of the Seine were black with people, and all those populations knelt as the boat passed them. It was more grand than the Roman Triumphs, he was recognizable in his coffin; the flesh was white; the hand speaking. He is the man of prestige to the last; and Paris is the city of miracles. In five days one hundred and twenty statues were made, seven or eight of them very fine, also one hundred triumphal columns, urns twenty feet high, and tiers of seats for a hundred thousand spectators. The Invalides was draped in violet velvet powdered with bees. My upholsterer said to me, to explain the thing: “Monsieur, in such cases, all the world upholsters.”1

Well, adieu. I work, and every hour lost delays my journey. I send you to-day the most precious of autographs, for Frédérick Lemaître never writes a line; he is as great as Talma.

All tender and gracious homage. My regards and remembrances to those about you. You ought by this time to have “Pierrette” complete.

March, 1841.

Dear countess; I have received your dear letter number 57, dated December 20, 1840, and if I reply rather late it is that I have been so busy.

I cannot leave till I have settled my affairs in a manner to have a truce, and I have still many things to do for that: three volumes to write and a comedy; but patience! some day I shall take my flight. Do not fear; when I start, I will write to you from each town in Germany, where I make any stay.

“Le Curé de village” has appeared. It is a book that has cost me much time; you will see that when you read it. It is not yet finished, nor perfected.

I work immensely, and I have scarcely the time to write to you. Last month I wrote a novel for the newspaper “Le Commerce,” entitled “Une Ténébreuse Affaire,” and the beginning of a book called “Les Deux Frères,” for the “Presse.” I have also “Les Lecamus” in the “Siècle,” which is a study on Catherine de’ Medici, in the style of the “Secret des Ruggieri.” At this moment I am doing a novel for “Le Messager,” and finishing for my publisher “Les Mémoires de deux jeunes Mariées.” That is a good deal of work, all that!—without counting nonsense like “Les Peines de cœur d’une chatte Anglaise,” and a “Note” to the Chamber of Deputies on literary property, etc. So, to win a moment of liberty I work like a poor wretch; but I look at the promised land: that balcony, the corner of the house, the study for work!

Before I have Les Jardies painted for you I must know if that cottage remains to me, if I shall not be despoiled of it.

When I start, I shall take care to avoid being stopped at the custom-house, by taking nothing or almost nothing with me, and fortifying myself with introductions; be easy in mind about that. I think I shall be able to start in May, and reach you in June or July.

My traveller, Borget, is working for fame on his landscapes; but I am very much afraid he has not genius, and we have so many talents that one more will not be remarked.

You do not tell me anything of all that interests me most,—your health, your person, yourself; and that is very wrong. Is it to make me come and see for myself? I don’t need that. You know well that I am kept here by my obligations, which are enormous, and the weight of which will end by dragging me under.

I am grieved to know that months must pass before you receive “Le Curé de village,” for that is one of the books which I should like you to read as soon as it is finished. A copy has gone to Henri de France with these words: “Homage of a faithful subject.” You will read a certain passage in favour of Charles X., which will prevent the book from obtaining the Montyon prize.

They tell me there is a cousin of yours here, but he has not looked me up any more than your brother did. George Sand, whom I go to see quite often, could have told him where to find me. This cousin seems to me a simpleton, who swallows a quantity of nonsense about me, if I may judge by what I am told of him. You must admit, dear, that your brother has been wilfully mistaken; for George Sand and I continue pretty good friends, and I see her about once every month. I lead a very retired life on account of my work, but I am not unfindable to my friends.

March 15.

I have just returned from George Sand, who has never seen or known Comte Adam Rzewuski. I stirred her up and questioned her with much pertinacity; and as for the last three years she has had Chopin for friend, that illustrious Pole, who remembers Léonce and his brother [cousins of Madame Hanska], would certainly have known your dear Adam. Besides which, Grzymala, the lover of Mme. Z..., and Gurowski and all the Poles who cram her rooms would surely know that Adam was Adam Rzewuski. Do not show that you know this, for men are terrible in a matter of self-love, and you would make him my enemy. George Sand did not leave Paris at all last year. She lives at number 16 rue Pigalle, at the end of a garden, and over the stables and coach-house which belong to the house on the street. She has a dining-room in which the furniture is carved oak. Her little salon is café-au-lait coloured, and the salon in which she receives has many superb Chinese vases full of flowers. There is always a jardinière full of flowers. The furniture is green; there is a side table covered with curiosities; also pictures by Delacroix, and her own portrait by Calamatta. Question your brother, and ascertain if he saw these things, which are striking and quite impossible not to see. The piano is magnificent and upright, in rosewood. Chopin is always there. She smokes cigarettes, and never anything else. She rises at four o’clock; at four Chopin has finished giving his lessons. You reach her rooms by what is called a miller’s staircase, steep and straight. Her bedroom is brown; her bed two mattresses on the floor, in the Turkish fashion. Ecco, contessa. She has the pretty, tiny little hands of a child. And finally, the portrait of the lover of Mme. Z... as a Polish castellan, three-quarter length, hangs in the dining-room, and nothing would more strike a stranger’s eye. If your brother can bring himself out of that, you will know the truth. But let yourself be fooled—Oh! travellers!

If you only knew how many Balzacs there are at the different carnival balls in Paris. What adventures I shoulder! This year I have cheated everybody, for I have not set foot in any of them.

I hasten to send you this scrap of a letter, to acknowledge yours, and assure you that my desire to start increases. What your brother is right about is the incredible influence of the atmosphere of Paris; literally, one drinks ideas. At all times, all hours, there is something new; whoso sets foot on the boulevard is lost; he must amuse himself.

March 25.

Your cousin, or M. Hanski’s cousin, is named Gericht or Geritch. I don’t know who they all are who call themselves your cousins, but this I know, you have no more cruel enemies; they loudly exclaim at my friendship for you, and make much noise about it; while I am living in my corner and have not uttered your name ten times. When an exiled princess said to me, “We all know you love Poland, M. de Balzac,” I answered, “It would be difficult not to love your country.”

But I am very silly to be irritated by such things! The world is the world. Some of your “cousins” say such things as this, accepting all the calumnies they hear about me: “Ah! if my cousin knew what M. de Balzac has done!” They cannot know that I write you my life very nearly as it passes. However, this has wounded me deeply, and will, no doubt, cause you pain. There is another cousin of yours here, I am told. This M. Gericht is very proud of our illustrious friendship, but the other cousin is much grieved by it. So be it! Is it not enough to make one hate that smoke called fashion or fame, whichever you like?

I tell you these silly trifles because I have just been thrashed by them; and every time I go out I am wounded by something of the kind, which, however, does not concern you, and therefore I bear it better than what touches you.

That silly Princess R... came here, and does not distinguish between Vienna and Paris; she has, perhaps, the same bonhomie, but Paris is not bonhomme. There are, as your brother told you, ideas in the very air, and an animation which is not to be seen in any other people or any other capital. Imagine what a city is in which superiorities of all kinds are collected.

I made George Sand repeat to me that she had never seen a Pole or a Russian of your brother’s name. I spent, two days ago, a charming evening with Lamartine, Hugo, Madame d’Agoult, Gautier, and Karr at Madame de Girardin’s. I have not laughed so much since our days in Geneva.1

Adieu, dear; à bientôt. I shall start for Germany, in all probability, in May, and I hope, after so much toil, to have well earned seeing you and saying, Sempre medesimo.

Passy, June 1, 1841.

This night, dear countess, I have seen you in a dream, in a manner most accurate, most precise, and I renew the fable of “Les Deux Amis.” I write to you instantly. I was frightened by seeing you so distinctly; then I woke, went to sleep again, and read a good, long letter from you. You were not changed; and I was in ecstasies at seeing you thus. You were both far and near; I did not even have the pleasure of pressing your hand.

Did this come from my speaking of you to a Russian lady the evening before, at the house of the daughter of the late Prince Koslowski,—a Mademoiselle Crewuzki, who was in Vienna when we were there, and who tried to prove to me that you were not beautiful (she is hideous)? Or is it that a letter from you is on its way to me? The same thing happened to Madame de Berny; whenever I wrote to her, she dreamed of the letter. That thought overcame me just now, at my desk, before beginning to write to you.

Alas! dear, no journey; at any rate, not for another year at least. So many events have happened that I know not how to relate them all. I sum them up.

When I wrote to you, “I am coming,” I doubted the possibility of living in France amid the dreadful struggles which consumed my life; and I had the idea of going to you in Petersburg and renouncing France. But a last effort has drawn me out of the claws of the publisher to whom I owed a hundred thousand francs. By working day and night, and pledging myself for six months to the labours of a literary Hercules, I have paid him that money.

I do not owe more than one hundred and fifty thousand; and though age is advancing on me, and work becomes each day more toilsome, I conceive the hope of ending this horrible debt in eighteen months by putting myself in a situation which my lawyer wishes me to hold, in order not to be sued and not to pay more costs. “Les Jardies” will be sold to a locum tenens, and when my debts are paid I shall recover it. On the other hand, my mother has ruined herself for my brother Henry, who is now in the colonies, and she lives with me. Besides which, I have almost my majority for the Academy. All these things made me renounce the project of going to Russia, and I have signed an agreement to do ten new volumes the coming year. I have also to write articles promised to the “Presse” and the “Siècle.” And finally, cara, I have signed a bargain for a complete edition of my works, to be managed by a great publishing house, printed with the utmost luxury, and sold at a low price.

All these things, so great, so important to me, have been settled since my last letter. But I have not worked, published, and attended to affairs with impunity.

Do not be vexed with me. For two months I literally have not had time to write or do anything but what I have done. Les Jardies were seized, a creditor was about to have them sold; I had to get fifty thousand francs in a month, and I did get them. I had to publish my books and articles, and attend to business without money—absolutely without money. It was raining incessantly; I went on foot from Passy to do my business, tramping all day and writing all night. Primo: I did not go mad. Secundo: I fell ill. I had to travel. As soon as the result was obtained I was seized with an inflammation of the blood which threatened to attack the brain. I went to Touraine for two weeks; but on my return Dr. Nacquart condemned me to a bath of three hours a day, to drink four pints of water, and take no food, inasmuch as my blood was coagulating. I am just out of this barbarous but heroic treatment, with complexion clear, refreshed, and ready for new struggles.

That is the summing up of my history; for if I had to go into details it would take volumes.

Dear, I have not received from you the least little word since your number 57, dated December 29. Oh! how wrong that is, when you are loved as you are by me, when you alone are in this heart with poverty and toil—two incorruptible guardians. Why have you abandoned me thus when you are my only thought, the end and the bond of so much work, when, ever since I have had Wierzchownia before me in painting, I have found nothing in my fields of thought that I did not seek on the waters of your river, beneath your windows, among your roses and on your carpets of green grass? Oh! has remorse never touched your heart? Has no thought ever come to you in a sparkle from your candle at night, saying, “He thinks of you!” M. Hanski himself, has he never said to you, “Why don’t you write to that poor fellow?”

Has nothing pleaded for the poor unhappy one, the sufferer, the night-watchman, the maker of books and articles, the pretended poet—for me, in short, for the traveller to Neufchâtel, Geneva, and Vienna, who is not present before you now because the journey costs money, and money and publishing are two irreconcilable terms.

Yes! six months without writing to me! I have always had good reasons for my silence; but you have none for yours; you ought to write me three times against my once, and it is I who write twice to your once! Ingrato cuore!

My excuses are these: I have published “Le Curé de village” (still incomplete). I have done three quarters of “Les Mémoires de deux jeunes Mariées.” I have published “Une Ténébreuse Affaire.” “Les Lecamus,” “Les Deux Frères” and I am about to publish “Les Paysans;” I have done many useless works for a living; what I call useless because they are outside of my real works, and therefore, except for the money earned, lost time. And finally, between now and a month hence, my Work will be published in parts under the title of La Comédie Humaine, and I must correct at least three times five hundred feuilles of compact type!

Ah! dear, the woman beloved, a little bread in a corner, tranquillity, moderate work—that is my hope. I know it is enormous in one respect, but it is humble for the rest. Why is it not granted? God wills it not; but I cannot see his reasons.

Dear, here are my present hopes and my programme. I am about to write a book for the prix Montyon, which will pay a third of my debt. Another third will be paid by the theatre; the last third by my usual work. You will come to Baden and I shall see you there, for I could absent myself one month; but two or three, no, not under present circumstances.

My sister still wants to marry me. She has among her friends a goddaughter of Louis-Philippe, daughter of that Bonnard who brought up the King of the French. I laughed so that my sister was speechless. “In the first place,” I said to her, “I will not marry any woman under thirty-six, preferably forty, inasmuch as I am forty-two.”

Apropos of that, I expected a letter, from you May 16, Saint Honoré’s day, or the 20th, my birthday, and I had palpitations for nothing at post-time. Ingrato cuore! But you are loved quand même. During these six months there have been moments when I fancied you were coming.

So Gurowski elopes with an Infanta and marries her! Oh! how much better to be a fool like Gurowski than an intrepid traveller like me.

If you only knew what I would give to have a child. No, there are moments when the fear of waking up old, ill, incapable of inspiring any sentiment (and that is beginning) seizes me, and I almost go mad. I go and walk alone in some solitary place, cursing life and our execrable country—and yet the only one where it is possible to live.

I have here, before my eyes, your last letter of December 29, alas! You were looking at a ray of sunshine thawing your windows; you saw the past in that, and the future! Would to heaven that ray would come to me. I await it with impatience—that ray, your letter, which shines upon me from time to time. Six months’ silence, a winter of the heart! What has happened to you during all that time? Have you been ill? Are you suffering? What? The mind and heart wander dolorously through all the zones of supposition, doubt, anxiety.

If I were less ruined, less bound to give all my money to my lawyer, I should go to see you, because I am ordered to go away for a time; but I am only allowed five hundred francs’ worth of liberty.

Well, adieu, dear; or rather, à bientôt. In spite of my promises, always baffled by fate and misfortune, believe that the only thing I desire is to go and see you. I will not talk of it any more. I will try for it. Perhaps the very force of work may exact a longer rest than fifteen days spent in Touraine by the combined commands of lawyer and doctor. When I shall have finished bringing out the books which I must still do for Souverain (that is, five volumes), I shall, no doubt, find a moment. Do not be vexed with me for postponing this, to me, great happiness; I had to do so for my interests. I had to rescue the hundred thousand francs Les Jardies cost, and persevere in that great and noble task—of paying debts. You owe me to my own despair, and now I have begun to hope again. Hope is, above all to me, a virtue; it is a duty, not done without many tears shed secretly, which you do not see. God owes me a great compensation, and among those he does send me I count the pure benedictions your sweet hand wafts me with the adieus of your dear letters.

A thousand wishes for the happiness of your dear Anna. My affectionate compliments to all those I know about you, and my friendship to the Count. I have not forgotten him among my dedications; he will find his in the beautiful complete edition I am now preparing.

As for you, dear Elect Lady, the most adored among all my friendships, preferred even to my natural affections, you who are before the sister, and whom I shall ever hold in affection, I do not bid you farewell; I offer you afresh all that is yours—but one cannot give one’s self twice.

June 30, 1841.

Dear countess, I cannot understand your silence. It is many days now that I have looked for your answer. I have written to you twice since I received your last letter, and I am a prey to the keenest anxiety. These fears and uncertainties seize me in the midst of my work; I interrupt it to ask myself where you are, and what you are doing. Perhaps you have been elsewhere than at Wierzchownia; perhaps you have only lately returned there. In short, I torment myself strangely, and I have, in my laborious life, amid all my thoughts, one thought which masters the rest and puts among them an anxiety that is truly dreadful, for it attacks the sentiment by which I live.

I have succinctly related to you the business I have done, and how I have drawn myself out of certain bad troubles. The physical and moral fatigue which labours of all kinds caused me, made me make a little journey of two weeks into Bretagne in April and a few days in May. I returned ill, and spent the rest of the month in taking baths of three hours to quell the inflammation that threatened me and in following a debilitating regimen. No more work, not the slightest strength, and I continued till the beginning of the present month in the agreeable condition of an oyster. At last, Dr. Nacquart being satisfied, I began to write again, and I have done “Ursule Mirouët,” one of the privileged books, which you will read, and I am now going to work on a book for the prix Montyon.

To relate to you my life, dear, is only to enumerate my labours, and what labours! The edition of La Comédie Humaine (that is the title of the complete work, the fragments of which have, until now, composed the works I have published) will take two years to bring out; it contains five hundred folios of compact type. These I must read three times! It is as if I had fifteen hundred folios [24,000 pages] of compact type to read! And my regular work must not be allowed to suffer. My publishers have decided to add to each Part a vignette. This general revision of my works, their classification, the completion of the divers portions of the edifice, give me an increase of work which I alone know, and it is crushing.

Dear, this is what I shall have written this year: 1. “Le Curé de village;” 2. “Une Ténébreuse Affaire;” 3. “Le Martyr calviniste;” 4. “Le Ménage d’un Garçon;” 5. “Ursule Mirouët;” 6. The book for the prix Montyon. And besides those ten volumes I shall have written the amount of two volumes in little detached articles; and I must also, for my living, write two novels that are rather indispensable to the part of my works which is to be first published, namely: “Scènes de la Vie privée,” which is to have twenty books.1 That will make eighteen volumes in all. Judge, therefore, of what I shall have done. I have lived in ink, proofs, and literary difficulties to solve. I have slept little. I have, I think, ended, like Mithridates, in being impervious to coffee.

If my lawyer puts me, as to my affairs, in a tranquil state, I could travel in September and October. I could go as far as the Ukraine for a few days. But that depends entirely on my work; for all that the publisher pays goes to my lawyer to settle my affairs, and for my living I have only what the newspapers give me. So you can judge the difficulty of working for two masters, two necessities.

I shall wait a few days before sending this letter, hoping that you will have written to me. Since the last two pages were written I have been present at Victor Hugo’s reception [at the Academy], where the poet deserted his colours and the Elder Branch, and tried to justify the Convention. His speech has caused extreme pain to his friends. He tried to caress parties; but that which might pass in shadow and privacy never goes well in public. This great poet, this fine maker of imagery, received his spurs, from whom?—Salvandy! The assemblage was brilliant; but the two orators were both bad. Praises were given to France, which I thought ridiculous. Let our pens be the masters of the world of intellect, I desire it; but that we should say it of ourselves, without contradictors, in our own Academy, is bad taste, and it disgusts me.

I am worried about my affairs. I am forced to await the conclusion of my lawyer’s principal arrangement, which is to sell Les Jardies. The sale takes place July 15th.

July 15.

Les Jardies were sold this morning for seventeen thousand five hundred francs, having cost me a hundred thousand! Here I am, without house, hearth, or home. A few days hence I shall begin to fulfil my last pen obligations; there are but six volumes still to do, and then, having neither house, nor furniture, nor prosecution to fear, I can travel! But still I am separated from that travel by six volumes, and the reprinting of La Comédie Humaine, which would appear during my journey. It seems hardly likely I could do the six volumes and four of the reprints between now and October 15; however, I shall try.

No letter from you; my anxiety has reached the highest point. I begin to yield myself to the most absurd ideas. I shall consult a somnambulist to know if you are ill. A few days ago I had my fortune told with cards by a very famous wizard. I had never seen one of those singular phenomena. The man told me, after consulting his cards, things of incredible accuracy, with particulars about my past life; and he explained to me his prognostics for the future. This man, without education, and extremely common, uses choice expressions the moment he is with his cards. The man and the cards is another being to the man without the cards. He told me—not knowing me from Adam—me, who did not myself know at two o’clock that I should consult him at three, that my life until to-day had been one continued series of struggles, in which I had always been victorious. He also told me that I should soon be married; which was my great curiosity.

July 16.

Ought I to send this letter? Ought I to wait longer? You have left two letters from me without an answer; this will be the third. In the midst of my toil, under which I bend, but do not break, this is a continual anxiety which distresses me.

I have always the intention to pass part of the coming winter with you; but all depends on the reprinting of my works, which becomes problematical in spite of the fifteen thousand francs already paid me for it. The affair seems to be heavy and difficult, and I live in conferences with my lawyer and the three publishers, who want so many guarantees that I believe I shall begin all over again the troubles of the agreement I have just bought out, at a cost of one hundred thousand francs.

You are very courageous if you have done all you said in your last letter, and you must now see that I was right when I spoke to you of the value that a woman ought to have in her own house—which is a wholly French idea. For pity’s sake, dear, send me a line the moment you receive this letter, which I shall send off to-day. I have great need to know how you are, what you are doing, whether you or any of yours are ill; for surely nothing but illness could thus interrupt all news between us. Remember that the corner of earth where Wierzchownia is interests me more than all the other lands of the world put together.

I begin to weary extremely of my continual toil. It is now nearly five years that I have not ceased to work; the wizard who told me I should soon have my tranquillity must have lied.

Adieu, dear; all tender regards and remembrances across the spaces which I too, sooner or later, will cross; with what pleasure none but myself can know! But, for pity’s sake, a word, a letter. I await it with an impatience that so much delay has made a soul-sickness. The wizard told me that within six weeks I should receive a letter which would change all my life; and in the live combinations of cards which he made, that fact reappeared in all of them. I will relate to you some day that séance and make you laugh heartily.

Adieu, sempre medesimo.

Paris, September, 1841.

Dear countess, it is now nearly ten months since I have received any letters from you; and this is the fifth letter I have written without receiving any reply. I am more than anxious; I know not what to think.

This time, I have good news to tell you. Primo: I have at length paid off the debt which crushed my life and my efforts. The hundred thousand francs due to those with whom I made that fatal treaty of 1836 are paid. Secundo: Les Jardies are sold to a friend who will keep them for me. Tertio: no one can any longer harass me; my debts are fixed at a certain figure. I spend nothing, and, if I keep my health and force, they will all be paid in eighteen months. Quarto: three firms of publishers, Dubochet, Furne, and Hetzel and Paulin, unite to undertake the publication of all my works, a great number, with engravings, to be sold cheaply. La Comédie Humaine is at last to arise, beautiful, well corrected, and almost complete. My works will be purchasable; for as they are now, no one knows where to buy them, or has the money to do so; they have hitherto cost three hundred francs, whereas now they will cost eighty and be well printed. This is an affair which alone might pay my debts. But I do not count upon it; I rely only on my pen and new works.

During this year I have written thirty thousand lines for the newspapers. In 1842 I shall write forty thousand. I have, besides, a comedy in five acts for the Théâtre-Français, not counting “Mercadet,” which is always on the stocks. I have written this year, in all, sixteen volumes. But in the spring, if my play is played, I shall go to Germany and to you; for between now and then you will have told me why you have punished me and deprived me of my bread. I could not travel now; I must prepare enough volumes of my complete works, so that this new publication might not suffer by my absence. I have to fill up my frame-work. Many things are still lacking in the “Scènes de province” and “Scènes Parisiennes.” As for the “Scènes de la Vie politique, militaire, and campagne,” two-thirds are still wanting, and I must finish them all in seven years, under pain of never doing La Comédie Humaine,—which is the title of my history of society painted in action.

In the midst of all this business and toil, and I may say, renascent pains, the grief that your silence causes is the greatest of all; each day more poignant; and I no longer seek for the reasons of your silence. I await them.

As soon as, through the devotion of Gavault (my lawyer, the solicitor of the city of Paris), I saw that there was still a means to remain in France and pull myself through my difficulties, and that I could respond to his advances of money by pecuniary profits, I redoubled in courage and I sacrificed the journey I was to have made to you. But I told you so, instantly, in a letter telling you all my hopes. This year, the better has made long strides. I shall attain to—death perhaps, but my last glance shall see the Romans fly!

How shall I explain to you that amid these triple battles I feel a cold place in my heart; that I can no longer complain, or write to you; I can only suffer! How many explanations have I given to your silence, all either wounding or irritating! This letter leaves in September; you will receive it in October or November. I cannot, therefore, receive a reply to it before January. That will be four or five months more of uncertainty and fears, amid the most terrible, most active, most occupied life that there is in the world—for I move a world, and you do not know what a Prometheus afoot, acting, with an unseen vulture within his heart, is. I have moments when I cannot invent reasons for your silence; I have reviewed them all and have found each more bitter than the others.

This year I have worked through two hundred nights, and I must begin another in the same way to conquer my liberty. Ah! they may well make a goddess of her!

The address “M. de Brugnol, rue Basse No. 19, Passy, department of the Seine,” is always the direct and right address.

Paris, September 30, 1841.

Dear countess, I have just received the letter you have sent me under cover to Souverain, and I am amazed beyond measure. First of all, have the charity to answer by return of mail the following questions:—

1. Did you address the letters which have been returned to you to M. de Brugnol, rue Basse No. 19; Passy; or were they directed to Sèvres?

2. At what dates ought they to have reached me?

Your answer is of great importance to my tranquillity; for I must discover through what causes your letters have not been delivered to me.

Nothing ever made such an impression on me as your little letter sent through my publisher. I have more than suffered, I have been ill from it. I have had a species of congestion of the head, which was, apparently, the result of it. The letter you will have received a few days before you receive this will paint to you my anxieties. When putting it myself into the post, I spoke to the postmaster, telling him that I had put four letters into his office to which I had had no answer; and that never had my correspondence, lasting eight or nine years, been thus interrupted; that I did not know whether my letters were received, and I feared this might be on account of some error in the prepayment of mine. He answered that if there had been an error it was his affair and would not affect the delivery of the letters. But if I had not received this letter through Souverain, or your answer to my last in the needed time (two and a half months), I should have started, dear, even if so rash a journey had stopped the species of prosperity which Gavault, the lawyer, is introducing into my affairs. Imagine, therefore, what a revulsion there was in my mind on reading your letter so full of melancholy, of deep sadness, which shows me that some evil trick has been played, to repress which I have need of an answer to the above questions.

Dear, and very dear, you must know that my activity the past year has been cruel; I can only use that word. I have made an agreement to write forty thousand lines in the newspapers from October, 1841, to October, 1842; and if I obtain two francs and a half a line, all my indebtedness will be cleared off, or nearly so, and I shall have won an independence I have never had since I existed. I shall owe not a sou nor a line to any one in the world. It is to that result that I have immolated my dearest affections, and renounced that journey I had planned. But it is impossible that after the coming winter I shall not need some violent and long diversion, and in April I will go to Germany, and beyond it, to you.

The sorrowful eloquence of your dear letter of a wounded heart made me weep; my heart was wrung as I read, at its close, your assurances of old affection, when in me all was the same as ever while you were blaming me. These flashes of joy on learning that all our pain came from neither you nor myself, and that amid this disaster, which has darkened eight months of our life, we each had the same confidence in the other—though you were saddened and I impatient, almost unjust—were needed to send some balm into my heart. Must I again tell you that you and my sister are the sole deities of my heart. It was, dear, extreme misfortune which made me give you that hope of my visit. But I have been stronger against excessive work than I expected. After ten months of labour, to have written “Ursule Mirouët” in twenty days is one of those things which printers and witnesses of that remarkable effort will not believe. It has nothing analogous to it but “César Birotteau.”

Well! God owed me the joy, mingled with tears, that your letter brought me; without it I might not have been able to do another like effort this month, when I must give a rival to “Le Médecin de campagne.” To win the Montyon prize for 1842, I am now writing “Les Frères de la Consolation.” They talk of giving me the cross, for which I care very little; it is not at forty years of age that it can give pleasure; but I could not refuse Villemain.

“Les Mémoires de deux jeunes Mariées” will be out in a few days. In another month I shall finish, in the “Presse,” my story of “La Rabouilleuse,” the first part of which appeared under the title of “Les Deux Frères.”

I have great need to see Germany thoroughly in order to be able to write the “Scènes de la Vie militaire;” and I shall go straight to Dresden to view the battle-field.

The affair of the publication of my great work, under the title of La Comédie Humaine in which all my compositions will be classed and definitively corrected, is about to begin. In order to travel, I must leave four volumes ready with my publishers, four compact volumes. The whole will be in twenty-eight volumes at four francs, with illustrations.

Doesn’t your head swim in reading me? Now you see where the travail of my nights goes. And by the end of December I shall finish a comedy called “Les Rubriques de Quinola.” Do you feel what there is under all this? There is you! Your friend must be a giant, a truly great man; and it is with the greatest of men that I set up a rivalry. I hope that when we meet again you will find the Honoré of Geneva much taller, that you will not be so old as you say you are, and that after so much time spent apart from each other we may have, both of us, a second youth. Don’t calumniate yourself, dear.

Borget, who has returned from China after making the tour of the world, will reduce the Wierzchownia landscape and make a pretty picture of it. Alas! it is still unframed in my study; you will not believe my poverty till it is all over and I tell you about it. I suffer less on that account than I have done, without as yet being at ease; I must still be earning the bread of the morrow; but Gavault maintains with firmness the plan formed for my release from debt and my freedom.

I no longer have Les Jardies, and I do not live under my own name; consequently no more prosecutions and costs. I am in reality as if I owed nothing; I am asked for nothing, and all my earnings are accumulating in Gavault’s hands without loss, until they reach the total of my debt; and I live on three hundred francs a month at Passy. There, dear. Ten more novels and two plays, if they succeed, will buy me back Les Jardies and liberty. When once I reach that point, I shall think of making myself a fortune equal to that I have earned to pay my debts, and that will give me an income of twenty thousand francs a year!

After the sensation of grief your letter gave me came the unspeakable pleasure of knowing you still my friend, though pained; but why not have taken, dear, the following course on the return of the first letter? What had you done with your wits? Has the heart no wits? At any rate, put this into your beautiful head, behind that splendid forehead: direct always to “M. de Balzac, Paris, poste restante.” Even a husband cannot obtain the letters for his wife; the post gives them only to her without her husband; it writes to the person to whom they are addressed to come and fetch them; and as the post is always informed of my whereabouts, a letter poste restante will always reach me.

I cannot write to you, dear, oftener than once a month; but I will never fail in that, unless from illness, or too hard labour. By the end of October I may be able to send you, through Bellizard, the original edition, fifty copies only being printed, of “Les Frères de la Consolation.”

January 5, 1842.

I have this instant received, dear angel, your letter sealed with black [telling him of the death of M. Hanski, on November 10, 1841], and, after reading it, I could not perhaps wish to have received any other from you, in spite of the sad things you tell me about yourself and your health. As for me, dear, adored one, although this event makes me attain to that which I have ardently desired for nearly ten years, I can, before you and God, do myself this justice, that I have never had in my heart any other thing than complete submission, and that I have not, in my most cruel moments, stained my soul with evil wishes. No one can prevent certain involuntary transports. Often I have said to myself, “How light my life would be with her!” No one can keep his faith, his heart, his inner being without hope. Those two motive powers, of which the Church makes virtues, have sustained me in my struggle.

But I conceive the regrets that you express to me; they seem to me natural and true; especially after a protection that has never failed you since that letter at Vienna. I am, however, joyful to know that I can write to you with open heart to tell you all those things on which I have kept silence, and disperse the melancholy complaints you have founded on misconceptions, so difficult to explain at a distance. I know you too well, or I think I know you too well, to doubt you for one moment; and I have often suffered, very cruelly suffered, that you have doubted me, because, since Neufchâtel, you are my life. Let me say this to you plainly, after having so often proved it to you. The miseries of my struggle and of my terrible work would have worn-out the greatest and strongest men; and often my sister has desired to put an end to them, God knows how; I always thought the remedy worse than the disease. It is therefore you alone who have supported me till now; yet I have never counted on more than we saw—that day at Les Chênes, you remember?—of that old couple Sismonde de Sismondi, Philemon and Baucis, which so touched us. Nothing in me has changed.

I have redoubled in work to go and see you this year, and I have succeeded. Since I last wrote to you I have not slept more than two hours of a night, and I have written, above my promised books and articles, two plays in live acts, one with a prologue, which begin their rehearsal to-morrow at the Odéon. I hoped by working for some months longer like the last eighteen months to pay my crushing debts and save Les Jardies. This constant labour has, especially during the last five years, parted me wholly from society. To-day I want my patent of eligibility, for Lamartine has a rotten-borough for me, and to be one of the coming legislature is a future for us.

To conceive of this in the thick of the battle, is it not loving well to have such courage, such boldness, when, your letters becoming so rare, I was tortured, week by week, with the desire to go to you and learn the reason of your silence?—for the few words, almost illegible, which ended your letters were always to me fresh beams of hope. “Be patient,” you said to me; “you are loved as much as you love. Do not change, for others change not.”

We have both been courageous, one as much as the other; why, therefore, should we not be happy to-day? Do you think it was for myself that I have been so persistent in magnifying my name? Oh! I am perhaps very unjust, but such injustice comes from the violence of my heart. I would have liked two words for me in your letter, but I sought them in vain; two words for him who, since the scene you live in is before his eyes, has not passed, while working, ten minutes without looking at it; I have there sought all, ever since it came to me, that we each have asked in the silence of our spirits. I have not been able to part with it to let Borget make his copy. The certainty of knowing you free has made me gentle, or I should have been more angry, were you not mourning.

O my beloved angel, be prudent and take care of yourself; take care of your precious health. I shall not work much before my departure. I start for Germany March 20th, and I will not cross Saxony without your permission; but I cannot any longer have so many leagues between us. I have already signified to my publishers that they must at once print enough Parts to have no need of me until after September.

I have carefully buried my joy, just as I hid my griefs and my memories, in the depths of my heart. But I will tell it to you. I remained, all stupefied, for twenty-four hours, locked in my study, not willing that any one should speak to me. When I came out I was hot in the midst of intense sudden cold. Let me tell you of a little superstition, a little circumstance which has made a great impression upon me. On November 1 I lost one of the two shirt buttons Madame de Berny had given me, which I wore one day, and yours the next day. After losing it, I could only wear yours; and this little chance matter troubled me to a point you will imagine when I tell you that my mother and all about me noticed it. I said to myself, “There is in it some warning from heaven!” I love you so, and it has cost me so horribly to keep silence about it since Vienna, that I value the solitude of my study at Passy, where no one penetrates, and where I can be with you.

Ah! dear, you have put so many things into your letter that I do not start at once. I await your answer here; you will then have had time to reflect how difficult it is for me to remain in Paris when for six years I have longed to see you. Oh! write me that your existence shall be wholly mine, that we shall now be happy, without any possible cloud. Will you ever know how much strength it has needed to write to you thus, without saying a word to paint to you the ardour of this unique love, preserved as my one treasure, my only hope! Oh! how many times, under my most bitter disappointments, in struggles, in griefs, I have turned to the North,—to me the Orient, peace, happiness!

To speak now of business, I have made a great step. On the 5th or 7th of February they play at the Odéon “L’École des Grands Hommes,” an immense comedy on the struggle of a man of genius with his epoch. The scene is in 1560, in Spain. It relates to the man who sailed a steamboat in the port of Barcelona, let her sink to the bottom, and disappeared. If I have a success, I start; if I fail, I must write four volumes to get the money for my journey. But I have still another play at the Vaudeville.

My complete works are being rapidly printed, and will be issued during my journey.

If I have two successes, I shall leave the money to buy back Les Jardies, and pay off some lesser creditors, and I am sure, in two years, to complete my liberation. Only I must have enough to buy back the house for my mother, to whom I owe the sum of forty thousand francs.

Gavault, my lawyer, is satisfied. Every one believes in a great success for “Les Ressources de Quinola,” the false title of my play. I keep the one I have just told you for the last moment.

The “Mémoires de deux jeunes Mariées,” published in the “Presse,” has had the greatest success. But the finest work this year is “Ursule Mirouët.”

I send this little line, written in haste. I will write you more in detail within three or four days. I am worn-out with work, and I am still up all night, for there is much to be done to the play. I have three acts to add to the second play, and my newspaper articles on my shoulders.

As for your letters, dear, adored one, be without anxiety. If I die suddenly there is nothing to fear. They are in a box like the one you have; and above them is a notice, which my sister knows of, to put them all into the fire without looking at them, and I am sure of my sister. But why this uneasiness now? Why? I ask myself that question in terrible anxiety. You must be more ill than you have told me. You did not fill the last page in your letter! You have put so much uneasiness around that which makes me happy that I know not what to think. Alas! do you not feel, my cherished angel, my flower of heaven, that all you wish of me shall be done as you wish? Do I not love you even more for you than for myself?

I entreat you, on receiving my letter, write me two words only, to let me know if I can write to you with open heart (for I am still hampered by what you say to me), and how you are; I need to know nothing more than that. You, all is you, dearest; I am only uneasy about your health. Take care of yourself; you owe this to me.

Adieu, my dear and beautiful life that I love so well, and to whom I now can tell it. Sempre medesimo.

Note.—The “Lettres à l’Étrangère” end here. The letters that follow are those to Madame Hanska, given in Balzac’s Correspondence, vol. xxiv. of the Édition Définitive of his works. No letters have, so far, been published between the one dated above, January 5, 1842, and the one that here follows, dated October 14, 1843, written after a visit paid by Balzac to Madame Hanska in St. Petersburg.

So far as can now be ascertained, the history of their relationship from this date is as follows: Madame Hanska would not, or could not, consent to marry Balzac after Monsieur Hanski’s death for the following reasons: 1. Her duty to her daughter, to whom she was left guardian, with the care, conjointly with the child’s uncle, of enormous estates in the Ukraine. 2. Russian law, which required relinquishment of property on marriage with a foreigner. 3. The difficulty of obtaining the Emperor’s consent to such marriage.

The first difficulty was removed by the marriage of her daughter Anna, in 1846, to Count Georges Mniszech, the owner of vast estates in Volhynia; and in September of that year Balzac was summoned to meet Madame Hanska at Wiesbaden, at or about which time it is said that she pledged herself definitively to marry him.

Meantime, he had met her at several places, and had travelled with her in Germany, Holland, and Italy, as will be seen by the following letters. In the summer of 1845 Madame Hanska paid a visit to Paris with her daughter; but in secrecy to avoid the displeasure of the Russian government. During this visit Balzac took her to Tours, Vendôme, and the valley of the Cher, to show her the places of his childhood. The visit to Vendôme is recorded in a letter written after his death to M. Armand Baschet by M. Mareschal-Duplessis, director of the College, who was also director when Balzac was a pupil there. M. Mareschal mentions that he was accompanied by a lady; but he mistakes Madame Hanska’s nationality and calls her an Englishwoman; or she may herself have conveyed that idea for the sake of her incognito, which was all-important to her.

In October of the same year (1845) Balzac accompanied Madame Hanska to Naples for a few days only; but he met her in Rome in March, 1846, and stayed there a month. His visit to Wiesbaden, mentioned above, took place in October, 1846. In December Balzac went to Dresden, returning some weeks later with Madame Hanska, who remained in Paris till April, 1847, when she returned to Wierzchownia. Balzac left Paris in September, 1847, and paid his first and long desired visit to Wierzchownia, arriving about the first of October. He stayed there until February, 1848, when he returned to Paris, leaving it again early in September for Wierzchownia; where he lived until one month after his marriage to Madame Hanska, which took place March 15, 1850. He returned to Paris with his wife May 20, and died three months later, August 19, 1850.—TR.

Notes

1 Count Émile Guidoboni-Visconti, to whom Balzac had rendered a service in settling a question of family inheritance. Madame Visconti was an Englishwoman, and to her “Béatrix” is dedicated under her Christian name, Sarah.—TR.

1 This curious episode in Balzac’s life, in which Gavarni took a leading part, seems to have been a piece of generous and imaginative folly. But with M. Zola’s late action in mind, the reflection suggests itself that if we knew all the circumstances of the case (now passed into oblivion) we might find that Balzac and Gavarni had cause to think themselves right. A brief outline of the affair is given in the Appendix. Balzac’s argument of the case will be found in the Édition Définitive, vol. xxii.; Polémique Judiciare, pp. 579-625.—TR.

1 Frédérick Lemaître, with or without satirical intention, dressed himself as a Mexican general in a way to resemble Louis Philippe, especially by wearing a wig rising to a point, giving his head the famous pear shape for which that of Louis-Philippe was ridiculed.—TR.

1 Three numbers alone appeared: July 25, August 25, September 25. Some of his best criticism, that on Cooper and Stendhal, was in it; also the tale of “Z. Marcas,” etc. The first number begins thus: “We have always thought that nothing was more interesting, comic, and dramatic than the comedy of government.” See Édition Définitive, vol. xxiii., pp. 567-785.—TR.

1 This relates to the return of Napoleon’s body from Saint Helena. The translator of this volume was present. The Champs Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde were lined with those statues, between which were the urns, filled with burning incense. As the catafalque (all gold, and draped with violet gauze) paused beneath the Arch, the populace fell on their knees, believing that Napoleon would rise from the dead. The remnant of the Old Guard followed him on foot. The weather was so terribly cold that fifteen hundred persons were said to have died of it; three hundred of them English.—-TR.

1 See Lamartine’s portrait of Balzac at Mme. de Girardin’s; Memoir to this edition, pp. 123-125.—TR.

1 For complete bibliographical lists of Balzac’s Works of all kinds, with dates of publication, etc., see Memoir to this translated edition, pp. 351-369.—TR.

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