Part 24

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

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

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

CHAILLOT, October, 1835.

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

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

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

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 Come, be queen of Wierzchownia; do not be an unpublished Benassis at Paulowska.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

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

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

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

CHAILLOT, November 22, 1835.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, 22.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAILLOT, November 25, 1835.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAILLOT, December 18, 1835.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Footnote 1: The publication of "Le Lys dans la Vallée" in Russia. See "Memoir of Balzac," pp. 160, 161, 231-237.--TR.]

[Footnote 2: All his political interests and occupations were excluded from his letters to Russia, in fear of the censorship.--TR.]