Part 17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PARIS, August 20, 1834.

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

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

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

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

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

PARIS, August 25, 1834.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, 26.

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

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

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

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

A thousand constant regards.

FROM H. DE BALZAC TO M. HANSKI.

PARIS, September 16, 1834.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adieu, monsieur; accept my sentiments and my regrets. DE BALZAC.

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

To MADAME HANSKA.

PARIS, October 18, 1834.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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