Part 23

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

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

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

Monday, 29.

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

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

Tuesday, 30.

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

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

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

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

July 1st.

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

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

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

CHAILLOT, July 18, 1835.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PARIS, August 11, 1835.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is impossible for me to speak to you in letters of Fieschi and his machine. The wise men in politics, and I myself, who am not without a certain gift of second-sight, believe that it is neither the Republic nor Carlism which is the author of the attempt. _Fieschi has told nothing_; of that you may be sure. He will probably never speak. Lisfranc, the surgeon, who is taking care of him in prison, told this to my sister whom he is attending. He has had much money given him. Perhaps he himself does not know _who_ made him act.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PARIS, August 24, 1835.

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

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

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

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

Monday, 24.

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

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

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

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

Adieu; remember me to all about you.

CHAILLOT, October 11, 1835.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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