HONORÉ DE BALZAC (continued 13)

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.

VIII.

LETTERS DURING 1843, 1844, 1845.

Berlin, October 14, 1843.

Dear countess,[1] I arrived here this morning at six o'clock, having had for all rest twelve hours at Tilsit, from which must be deducted three hours given to the director of posts, to whom I had an introduction, and who did me so many services that I took tea with him in the evening. I arrived too late to dine there with Stieglitz, as we desired.

As long as I was on Russian soil I seemed to be still with you, and, without being exactly of a frolicking gaiety, you must have seen by my little letter from Taurogen that I had strength enough left to joke at my grief. But once on foreign soil, I can say nothing at all, except that this journey may be made to go to you, but not on quitting you. The aspect of Russian lands, without culture, without inhabitants, seemed to me natural; but the same sight seen in Prussia was horribly sad, and in keeping with the sadness that seized upon me. These barren tracts, this sterile soil, this cold desolation, this poverty, gripped and chilled me. I felt myself as much saddened as if there had been a contrast between my heart and Nature. Black grief swooped down upon me more and more heavily as physical fatigue increased. But do not pity me for taking the land journey, because these late storms must have made the navigation of the Baltic very bad.

I know how you are by the way I feel; I feel within me an immense void, which enlarges and deepens more and more, and from which nothing distracts me. So I have renounced going to Dresden; I do not feel the courage to go there. Holbein's Madonna will not be stolen between now and a year hence; the scene of the battle and the defiles of the Kulm will not change, and I shall have a reason, next May, to make the journey again with other ideas. Don't blame me for my faint-heartedness; nothing now pleases me in this journey, which did so please me in the salon of the Hotel Koutaitsof when you said, "You will go here—and there." I listened to you, I went, for it was you who told me. But now, how can I help it? far from you all is lifeless, without a soul. Next year, perhaps; but now, I have nothing but the gulf of my toil, and I go to it by the shortest way.

I slept this morning from seven o'clock till midday, a few tired, restless hours. I have breakfasted, dressed, and paid three visits: to Bresson, Redern, and Mendelssohn; and on my return I sit down to write to you, for to talk with you is the greatest, the most vital instinct of the moment.

I was interrupted by Comte Bresson, who came immediately to invite me to dinner for to-morrow, because he leaves, or rather his wife leaves, the day after; she goes before him to Madrid. As far as I can judge, he is a man of intelligence and great good sense; above all, without any species of pretension, which is rare in diplomatists, and I prize it much. He advised me to write a line to Humboldt, of whom I saw much in Paris at Gérard's and elsewhere; he will, no doubt, show me Potsdam. M. Bresson goes to Spain, and Salvandy to Turin.

I resume my dear laments, and I must tell you that the highway from Petersburg to Tilsit is only practicable at two sections: from Petersburg to Narva, and from Riga to Taurogen; so that for more than half way the road is detestable when it rains, and it had rained a great deal, alas! Imagine the jolts we made! but the vehicles are excellent; they resisted them. All that is Russian has a very tough life. A roadway is laid down across the sands of Livonia with gorse; out though the road has the gorse characteristics, it has, none the less, a disquieting aspect and a boggy style. It is a miracle to get over the road in three days and a half; and that gives a great idea of Russian stubbornness. We had eight horses, and sometimes ten, in certain places. Where the chaussée [paved road] is made it is magnificent. Ah! I shall have pleasure in going over it again! but then it will not be over gorse but flowers that I shall be jolted. Literally, one eats nothing by the way, for there is nothing to eat; but the way-stations are very handsome, and there is always excellent Russian tea. I am therefore able to honour my grief by thinness, due to the diet of the journey; if I suffered, my mental condition was such that I did not become conscious of it; the grief of quitting you quelled hunger, just as the pleasure of meeting you had already quelled sea-sickness. You are above all.

I am here at the Hôtel de Russie, which is passably good and not too dear. From Berlin I shall go to Leipzig and Frankfort-on-the-Main, by the Prussian Schnell-post; and from Frankfort to France by steamboat, or railroad all the way; which is, I think, more economical than any other way of travelling.

I have found two road companions, two sculptors, one of whom, as I told you, speaks an almost incomprehensible French, and I have just made the rounds of Berlin with him. These young men have been full of attentions to me all the way, especially from Riga, where I parted from my first companion, the Frenchman. The artist-nature is everywhere the same. These two young fellows got me out of all difficulties at inns, and I have just invited them to dinner (a rapin dinner, be it understood). It is the least I can do for such obliging lads to thank them for their good care before we part.

This sulky Berlin is not comparable to sumptuous Petersburg. In the first place, one might cut a score of mean little towns like the capital of the Brandebourg out of the great city of the vast European empire, and there would still remain enough space built upon to crush the score of extracted little Berlins without injury to its vast extent. But, at first sight, Berlin seems the more populated; for I have perceived several individuals in the streets, which is not often the case in Petersburg. However, the houses here, without being handsome, seem well built; one can see that they are not wanting in comfort inside. The public buildings, rather ugly of aspect, are of handsome freestone; and the space around them is so managed as to set them off. Very likely it is to this artfulness that Berlin owes its air of being more populous than Petersburg; I should have said more animated if it concerned any other people; but the Prussian, with his brutish heaviness, is never anything but ponderous; less beer and bad tobacco, and more French or Italian wit is needed to produce the stir of the other great capitals of Europe, or else the grand industrial and commercial ideas which have caused the great development of London; but Berlin and its inhabitants will never be otherwise than an ugly little town inhabited by ugly fat people.

However, it must be admitted, to whoso returns from Russia, Germany has an indefinable air which can only be explained by the magic word LIBERTY, manifested by free manners and customs, or, I should say, by freedom in manners and customs. The principal public buildings of Berlin are grouped about the hotel where I am, so that I could see them all in an hour. Fatigue is seizing me; I aspire to dinner: the first I have eaten since the splendours of Russia.

Till to-morrow, dear countess.

October 15.

Our dinner was composed of soup, venison, mayonnaise of fish, macaroni with cheese, a little dessert, a half-bottle of madeira, and a bottle of bordeaux. Ecco, signora! At eight o'clock I dismissed my guests and went to bed, the first bed that resembled a bed since I left Dunkerque. Before going to sleep I thought of you and of what you might be doing at eight o'clock of a Saturday evening. I imagined you were at the theatre; I saw the Michel theatre; but I did not have the cruel pleasure, as in Schnell-post or in Karéta potchtôvaïa, to think till midnight, for at midnight I was sound asleep, and in the morning I slept till eight o'clock. You have so often subdued the most imperious things in nature that you will pardon poor nature for taking its revenge for once. Exclusively tender souls have a worship for memories, and your memory, you cannot doubt it, is always in my heart and in my thought. I give myself the fête of thinking of it during that short half-dreaming moment when we feel ourselves betwixt slumber and sleep; and all the sweet impressions of the two months I have spent with you return to enchant my soul with their radiant images, so full of harmony. You see that the Virgin of Poland is the same as the Notre-Dame of France, and that if my journey is saddened by a separation such as I have now borne three times, all is otherwise well with me.

I have received from M. de Humboldt the note which encloses mine; it is, certainly, curious under present circumstances. I send it to you; and I can speak of it openly, as this letter will be carried to you by Viardot, whom I have just met, and who agrees very willingly to take it; he is one of the most honourable men I know; in whom one can put the utmost confidence; he will give it into your own hand.

October 16.

I have just dined with Madame Bresson, née de Guitaut. There was a great dinner at the Embassy on occasion of the King's fête. Except the ambassadress, everybody was old and ugly or young and hideous; the handsomest woman, if not the youngest, was the one I took into dinner; guess who,—the Duchesse de Talleyrand (ex-Dino) who was there with her son, the Duc de Valençay, who looked to be ten years older than his mother. The conversation was about people's names and little incidents happening at court within forty-eight hours. But at any rate, it explained to me Hoffmann's jests about German courts. Impossible to join Redern; I had his wife on one side of me,—the face of an heiress, and a very rich heiress to make him forget such lack of charm.

Nothing can be more wearisome than Berlin. I am consumed with ennui—ennui has entered me to the bone, and I am afraid of being ill. I write this before going to bed; it is nine o'clock; but what can one do in Berlin? For all amusement there's "Medea," translated from the German, and played literally! Yesterday they played before the court Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," also translated literally! The King of Prussia protects letters, but, as you see, they are mostly dead letters.

I leave to-morrow, and go to Leipzig by the railway to reach Mayence; after which by the same to Dresden to see the Gallery.

M. de Humboldt made me a visit of an hour this morning, charged, he said, with the compliments of the King and the Princess of Prussia. He gave me all necessary information as to how to find Tieck at Potsdam, and I shall profit by it to study the physiognomy of that great barrack of Frederick the Great, of whom de Maistre said: "He was not a great man; at the most a great Prussian."

I went out by the railway, and on getting into a carriage I found the fantastic Duchesse de Talleyrand, with her hair dressed in a mass of flowers and diamonds, like an apparition of a midsummer night's dream. She was on her way to court in full dress, to dine with the Princess of Prussia. We had also for third the Comte de Redern, a mouldy old Prussian fop, dry as a Genevese and important as a retired diplomatist. I requested the shepherdess of threescore to lay my respects at the feet of the princess.

I saw Tieck in his home; he seemed pleased with my homage. There was an old countess, his contemporary in spectacles, octogenarian perhaps, a mummy with a green eye-shade, who seemed to me a domestic divinity. I have just returned; it is half-past six o'clock, and I have eaten nothing since morning. Berlin is the city of ennui; I should die of it in a week. Poor Humboldt is dying of it; he drags about with him a nostalgia for Paris. As I start to-morrow morning by the railway, I must bid you adieu. I cannot write again until I get to Mayence.

In talking this morning with Comte Bresson, I told him I had been driven from Petersburg by the tattle of porters and ignoble gossip; that no one believed in generous and disinterested sentiments, and that I was angry with the Russian people for attacking my sacred liberty by imagining that I should do like Loëve-Weymar. M. Bresson strongly approved; and said that a Frenchman should never marry any but a French-woman; I told him I was of his opinion, and that was what I should do! I am told that if I stay here a week fêtes will be made for me. But a week means three hundred francs, and really, for Berlin, that is too dear. If I could only get away from this dreadful town by paying that sum, I don't say it would be too much; I would even add a little to be off the quicker. More than ever do I see that nothing is possible to me without you, and the more space I put between us, the more I feel the strength of the tie that holds me. I live by the past only, and I live in it only, withdrawn into the depths of my heart. Must it not be horrible suffering to be alone as I am, with the continual memory of these two months, from which my thought plucks flowers, blossom by blossom, with melancholy and religious tenderness?

October 17.

I leave you afresh this morning, for it is like a fresh leaving not to write to you in the evening what I have done during the day. I go to Leipzig, where I shall book my place in the Schnell-post for Frankfort. I shall sleep at Leipzig; the next day go to Dresden, and return, on the 20th, to take the Prussian conveyance.

The loneliness that takes the place of intimacy has all the ways of remorse—I feel a violent need of changing from place to place, stirring, going, coming; as if at the end of this physical agitation and all these useless movements I should find you. I look with tenderness at this paper which I shall carry in a moment to Viardot, thinking how your pretty fingers will hold it in that salon where the hours fled so sweetly and so rapidly. Viardot will faithfully deliver to you this packet, in which I may say that my life will be one long anguish till I see you again. From Mayence you shall have a letter which will tell you of my acts and deeds after leaving Berlin. I shall reach Passy about November 10; therefore write me on the 3rd, of your style.

Adieu; if I have failed in our agreement, if anything displeases you in this letter, be, as ever, kind and forgive me. Think of my grief, my loneliness, my sorrow, and you will be full of pity and indulgence for the poor exile.

Dresden, October 19, 1843.

I left Berlin with ennui, dear, but I have found nostalgia here. Nothing that I eat nourishes me, nothing that I see distracts me. I have seen the famous Gallery, and Raffaelle's Virgin, also Holbein's, and I said to myself, "I love my love too well!" In going through the famous treasury, I would have given all for one half-hour on the Neva. To add to my troubles I am here for two days longer than I wished to be; and this is why. From Berlin I went to Leipzig and passed the night. I had counted without the fair at Leipzig; all the seats were taken in the Schnell-post. I then asked the landlord to book my seat and keep my luggage, instead of my dragging it to Dresden and back, for they demand an infinite number of thalers for overweight of luggage. The landlord said it was doubtful if he could get me a seat for the 20th, the day I wished to start, and I have just received a letter from him saying I can have no place till the 22nd.

Yesterday, on arriving, having missed the hour for the Gallery, I walked about Dresden in all directions, and it is, I assure you, a charming city; very preferable as a residence to that mean and melancholy Berlin. It has the look of a capital; partly a Swiss, partly a German town; the environs are picturesque and all is charming. I can conceive of living in Dresden; there is a mixture of gardens and dwellings that delights the eye. As for the palace begun by Augustus the Strong, it is really a most curious masterpiece of rococo architecture. As a fantasy it is almost as fine as gothic, and as art it is exquisite. What a misfortune that so enchanting a conception is unfinished, and is left in a deplorable state. It would take, of course, millions to repair, complete, arrange, and furnish this delightful gem. There is nothing in Petersburg, still less in Prussia, nor in the whole North to compare to it. What a man was that Augustus, calling himself Elector in Poland, and King in Saxony!