Part 8

The secret of it is that I was, last winter, full of admiration for Madame Vigano; I idolize her singing; she knows that, and I am a Kreizler to her. I went to bed at two o'clock after returning on foot through the deserted, silent streets of the Luxembourg quarter, admiring the blue sky and the effects of moon and vapour on the Luxembourg, the Pantheon, Saint-Sulpice, the Val-de-Grâce, the Observatoire, and the boulevards, drowned in torrents of thought and carrying two thousand francs upon me--though I had forgotten them; my valet found them. That night of love had plunged me in ecstasy; you were in the heavens! they spoke of love; I walked, listening whether from those stars your cherished voice would fall, sweet and harmonious, to my ears, and vibrate in my heart; and, my idol, my flower, my life, I embroidered a few arabesques on the evil stuff of my days of anguish and toil.

To-day, Thursday, here I am back again in my study, correcting proofs, recovering from my trips into the material world, resuming my chimeras, my love; and in forty-eight hours the charms of midnight rising, going to bed at six in the evening, frugality, and bodily inaction will be resumed.

We have had, for the last week, an actual summer; the finest weather ever created. Paris is superb. Love of my life, a thousand kisses are committed to the airs for you; a thousand thoughts of happiness are shed during my rushing about, and I know not what disdain in seeing men. They have not, as I have, an immense love in their hearts, a throne before which I prostrate myself without servility, the figure of a madonna, a beautiful brow of love which I kiss at all hours, an Eve who gilds all my dreams, who lights my life.

Adieu, my constant thought, _à demain_. I may not be so talkative; to-morrow comes toil.

Friday.

I have worked all day at two proofs which have taken me twenty hours; then I must, I think, find something to complete my second volume of "Scènes de la Vie de province" because to make a fine book the printers so compress my manuscript that another Scene is wanted of forty or fifty pages. Nothing to-day, therefore, to her who has all my heart; nothing but a thousand kisses, and my dear evening thoughts when I go to sleep thinking of you.

To-morrow, pretty Eve.

Saturday.

Certainly, my love, you will not act comedy. I have not spoken to you of that. I have just re-read your last letter. It is a prostitution to exhibit one's self in that way; to speak words of love. Oh! be sacredly mine! If I should tell you to what a point my delicacy goes, you would think me worthy of an angel like yourself. I love you in me. I wish to live far away from you, like the flower in the seed, and to let my sentiments blossom for you alone.

To-day I have laboriously invented the "Cabinet des Antiques;" you will read that some day. I wrote seventeen of the _feuillets_ at once. I am very tired. I am going to dress to dine with my publisher, where I shall meet Béranger. I shall get home late; I have still some business to settle.

My cherished love, as soon as the first part appears and the second is printed I shall fly to Geneva and stay there a good three weeks. I shall go to the Hôtel de la Couronne, in the gloomy chamber I occupied [in 1832]. I quiver twenty times a day at the idea of seeing you. I meant to speak to you of Madame de C[astries], but I have not the time. Twenty-five days hence I will tell you by word of mouth. In two words, your Honoré, my Eva, grew angered by the coldness which simulated friendship. I said what I thought; the reply was that I ought not to see again a woman to whom I could say such cruel things. I asked a thousand pardons for the "great liberty," and we continue on a very cold footing.

I have read Hoffmann through; he is beneath his reputation; there is something of it, but not much. He writes well of music; he does not understand love, or woman; he does not cause fear; it is impossible to cause it with physical things.

One kiss and I go.

Sunday.

Up at eight o'clock; I came in last night at eleven. Here are my hours upset for four days. Frightful loss! I awaited the old gentleman on whose behalf I implored Delphine. He did not come. It is eleven o'clock,--no letter from Geneva. What anxiety! O my love, I entreat you, try to send me letters on regular days; spare the sensibility of a child's heart. You know how virgin my love is. Strong as my love is, it is delicate, oh! my darling. I love you as you wish to be loved, solely. In my solitude a mere nothing troubles me. My blood is stirred by a syllable.

I have just come from my garden; I have gathered one of the last violets in bloom there; as I walked I addressed to you a hymn of love; take it, on this violet; take the kisses placed upon the rose-leaf. The rose is kisses, the violet is thoughts. My work and you, that is the world to me. Beyond that, nothing. I avoid all that is not my Eva, my thoughts. Dear flower of heaven, my fairy, you have touched all here with your wand; here, through you, all is beautiful. However embarrassed life may be, it is smooth, it is even. Above my head I see fine skies.

Well, to-morrow, I shall have a letter. Adieu, my cherished soul! Thank you a thousand times for your kind letters; do not spare them. I would like to be always writing to you; but, poor unfortunate, I am obliged to think sometimes of the gold I draw from my inkstand. You are my heart; what can I give you?

PARIS, Wednesday, November 6, 1833.

The agonies you have gone through, my Eve, I have very cruelly felt, for your letter arrived only to-day. I cannot describe all the horrible chimeras which tortured me from time to time; for the delay of one of your letters puts everything in doubt between you and me; the delay of one of mine does not imply so many evils to fear.

As to the last page of your letter, endeavour to forget it. I pardon it, and I suffer at your distress. To be unjust and ill-natured! You remind me of the man who thought his dog mad and killed him, and then perceived that he was warning him not to lose his forgotten treasure.

You speak of death. There is something more dreadful, and that is pain; and I have just endured one of which I will not speak to you. As to my relations with the person you speak of, I never had any that were very tender; I have none now. I answered a very unimportant letter, and, apropos of a sentence, I explained myself; that was all. There are relations of politeness due to women of a certain rank whom one has known; but a visit to Madame Récamier is not, I suppose, _relations_, when one goes to see her once in three months.

_Mon Dieu!_ the man who seems to be justifying himself has just been stabbed to the heart. He smiles to you, my Eve, and this man does not sleep--he, rather a sleepy man--more than five hours and a half. He works seventeen hours, to be able to stay a week in your sight; I sell years of my life to go and see you. This is not a reproach. But you may say to me, you, that perhaps I love the pages I write _from necessity_ better than my love. But with you I am not proud, I am not humble. I am, I try to be, you. You have suffered; I suffer,--you wished to make me suffer. You will regret it. Try that it may not happen again; you will break the heart that loves you, as a child breaks a toy to look inside of it. Poor Eva! So we do not know each other? Oh, yes, we do, don't we?

_Mon Dieu!_ to punish me for my confidence! for the joy that I feel more and more in solitude! I don't know where my mother is; it is two months that no one has any news of her. No letters from my brother. My sister is in the country, guarded by duennas fastened on her by her husband, and he is travelling. So I have no one to tell you about. The _dilecta_ is with her son at Chaumont, with the devil. I am myself in a torrent of proofs, corrections, copies, works. And it is at the moment when I expected to plunge into all my joys that, after your first pages, I find the pompous praise of ..., _mon Dieu!_ and my accusation and condemnation, which will bleed long in a heart like mine.

I am sad and melancholy, wounded, weeping, and awaiting the serenity that never comes full and complete. If you wished that, if you wished to pour upon my life as much pain as I have toil (impossible now), Eva, you have succeeded. As to anger, no; reproaches? what good are they? Either you are in despair at having pained me, or you are content to have done so. I do not doubt you. I would like to console you; but you have cruelly abused the distance that separates us, the poverty that prevents my taking a post-chaise, the engagements of honour which forbid me to leave Paris before the 25th or 26th of this month. You have been a woman; I thought you an angel. I may love you the better for it; you bring yourself nearer to me. I will smile to you without ceasing. Ever since I knew the Indian maxim, "Never strike, even with a flower, a woman with a hundred faults," I have made that the rule of my conduct. But it does not prevent me from feeling to the heart, more violently than those who kill their mistresses feel, insults, and suspicions of evil. I, so exclusive, tainted with commonness! made petty enough to be lowered to vengeance! What! that love so pure, you stain it with suspicion, with blame, with doubt! God himself cannot efface what has been; he may oppose the future, but not the past!

I cannot write more; I rave; my ideas are confused. After twelve hours of toil I wanted a little rest, and to-day I must rest in suffering. Oh! my only love, what grief to look on what I write to you, to weigh my words, and not say all that is without evasion, because I am without reproach. Oh! I suffer. I have not a passing passion, but a one sole love!

November, 10, 1833.

I posted a letter last night, not expecting to be able to write again; I suffered too much. My neuralgia attacked me. That is a secret between me and my doctor; he made me take some pills, and I am better this morning. But, can I help it? your letter burns my heart. I will go to Geneva, I will pass my winter there. At least you shall not have the right to emit suspicions. You shall see my life of toil, and you will perceive the barbarity there is in arming yourself with my confidence in opening my heart to you. I, who want to think in you! I, who detach myself from everything to be more wholly yours!

Deceive you! But, as you say yourself, that would be too easy. Besides, is that my character? Love is to me all confidence. I believe in you as in myself. What you say of that compatriot [Madame de Castries is meant] makes me surfer, but I do not doubt it. I shall not speak to you of the cause of your imprecation, "Go to the feet of your marquise" [_Va aux pieds de ta marquise_], except verbally.[1]

I have five important affairs to terminate, but I shall sacrifice all to be on the 25th in Geneva, at that inn of the Pré-l'Évêque. But we shall see each other very little. I must go to bed at six in the evening, to rise at midnight. But from midday till four o'clock every day I can be with you. For that I must do things here that seem impossible; I shall attempt them. If they cause me a thousand troubles I shall go to Geneva, and forget everything there to see but one thing, the one heart, the one woman by whom I live.

I would give my life that that horrible page had not been written. To reproach me for my very devotion! Do you believe that I would not leave all, and go with you to the depths of some retreat? You arm yourself with the phrase in which I sacrifice (the word meant nothing, there is no sacrifice) to you all!

Why have you flung suffering into what was so sweet? You have made me give to grief the time that belonged to the toil which facilitates my means of going to you sooner.

I await, with an impatience beyond words, a letter, a line; you have completely upset me. No, you do not know the childlike heart, the poet's heart, that you have bruised. I am a man to suffer, then!

Adieu. Did I tell you the story of that man who wrote drinking-songs in order to bury an adored mistress? To work with a heart in mourning is my fate till your next letter comes. You owe me your life for this fatal week. Oh! my angel, mine belongs to you. Break, strike, but love me still. I adore you as ever; but have mercy on the innocent. I do not know if you have formed an idea of what I have to do. I must finish with the printing of four volumes before I can start, I must compound with five difficulties, pay eight thousand francs; and the four volumes make one hundred _feuilles_, or one hundred times sixteen pages, to be revised each three or four times, without counting the manuscripts.

Well, I will lose sleep, I will risk all, but you will see me near you on the 20th at latest.

To-morrow I shall write openly to Madame Hanska to announce my parcel.

May I put here a kiss full of tears? Will it be taken with love? Make no more storms without cause in what is so pure.

It is midday. That you may get this in time, I send it to the general post-office.

[Footnote 1: This whole presentation of Madame Hanska justifies, and even demands, a few words here. Judging her by the genuine letters in this volume,--which are, so far as I know, our only means of judging her at all at this distance of time,--she was a woman of principle, dignity, intelligence, and good-breeding; with a strong sense of duty, and a certain deliberateness of nature, shown in the fact that it was eight years after M. Hanski's death before she consented to marry Balzac. Her love for him was plainly much less than his for her; but she was proud of his devotion, and always unwilling to lose it. That a woman of her position and character ever wrote to Balzac those words, "_Va aux pieds de ta marquise_," is an impossibility. There are certain things that a woman of breeding cannot do or say; though some who do not know what such women are do not perceive this.

Writing a few weeks later than the above letter (from Geneva in January, 1834) to his intimate friend, Madame Carraud, Balzac bears the following little testimony to Madame Hanska's feeling to his friend: "I hope you know what the security of friendship is, and that you will not say to me again, 'Bear me in memory,' when some one here [Madame Hanska] says to me, 'I am happy in knowing that you inspire such friendships; that justifies mine for you.'" (Éd. Déf. vol. xxiv, p. 192). This is the woman whose memory a few men are now endeavouring to smirch.--TR.]

PARIS, Thursday, November 12, 1833.

It is six o'clock; I am going to bed, much fatigued by certain errands [_courses_] made for pressing affairs; for I have hope, at the cost of three thousand francs in money, of compromising on the litigious affair which causes me the most anxiety. On returning home I found your letter sent Friday, with that kind page which effaces all my pain.

O my adored angel, as long as you do not fully know the bloom of sensitiveness which constant toil and almost perpetual seclusion have left in my heart, you will not understand the ravages that a word, a doubt, a suspicion can cause. In walking this morning through Paris I said to myself that commercially the most simple contract could not be broken without attainting probity; but have you not broken, without hearing me, a promise that bound us forever?

This is the last time that I shall speak to you of that letter except when, in Geneva, I shall explain to you what gave rise to it. Fear nothing; I have finished all my visits, and shall not go again to Gérard's. I refuse all invitations, I hibernate completely, and the woman most ambitious of love could find nothing to blame in me.

But alas! all that I have been able to do has been to take one more hour from sleep. I must sleep five hours. My doctor, whom I saw this morning, and who knows me since I was ten years old (a friend of the house), is always fearful on seeing how I work. He threatens me with an inflammation of the integuments of my cerebral nerves:--

"Yes, doctor," I told him, "if I committed excess upon excess; but for three years I have been as chaste as a young girl, I never drink either wine or liquors, my food is weighed, and the return of my neuralgia comes less from work than from grief."

He shrugged his shoulders and said, looking at me:--

"Your talent costs dear! It is true; a man doesn't have a flaming look like yours if he addicts himself to women."

There, my love, is a very authentic certificate of my sobriety. The doctor is alarmed at my work. "Eugénie Grandet" makes a thick volume. I keep the manuscript for you. There are pages written, in the midst of anguish. They belong to you, as all of me does.

My dear love, listen; you must content yourself with having only a few sentences, a line perhaps, per day, if you wish to see me in November at Geneva. Apropos, write me openly in reply to my open letter, to come to the inn on the Pré-l'Évêque, and give me its name. I shall come for a month, and write "Privilège" there. I shall have to bring a whole library.

My love, _à bientôt_. Nevertheless, I have a thousand obstructions. The printers, and there are three printing-offices busy with these four volumes, well, they do not get on. I, from midnight to midday, I compose; that is to say, I am twelve hours in my arm-chair writing, improvising, in the full meaning of that term. Then, from midday to four o'clock I correct my proofs. At five I dine, at half-past five I am in bed, and am wakened at midnight.

Thank you for your kind page; you have removed my suffering; oh! my good, my treasure, never doubt me. Never a thought or a word in contradiction of what I have said to you with intoxication can trouble the words and thoughts that are for you. Oh! make humble reparations to Madame P... Bulwer, the novelist, is not in Parliament; he has a brother who is in Parliament, and the name has led even our journalists into error. I made the same mistake that you did, but I have verified the matter carefully. Bulwer is now in Paris,--the novelist, I mean. He came yesterday to the Observatoire, but I have not seen him yet.

You make me like Grosclaude [an artist]. What I want is the picture he makes for you, and a copy equal to the original. I shall put it before me in my study, and when I am in search of words, corrections, I shall see what you are looking at.

There is a sublime scene (to my mind, and I am rewarded for having it) in "Eugénie Grandet," who offers her fortune to her cousin. The cousin makes an answer; what I said to you on that subject was more graceful. But to mingle a single word that I have said to my Eve in what others will read!--ah! I would rather fling "Eugénie Grandet," into the fire. Oh, my love! I cannot find veils enough to veil it from everyone. Oh! you will only know in ten years that I love you, and how _well_ I love you.

My dear _gentille_, when I take this paper and speak to you I let myself flow into pleasure; I could write to you all night. I am obliged to mark a certain hour at my waking; when it rings I ought to stop, and it rang long ago.

Till to-morrow.

Wednesday.

After the 22nd, including the 22nd, do not post any more letters; I shall not receive them. Oh! I would like to intoxicate myself so as not to think during the journey. Three days to be saying to myself, "I am going to see her!" Ah! you know what that is, don't you? It is dying of impatience, of pleasure! I have just sent you the licensed letter, and I am now going to do up the parcel and arrange the box. I have returned the remainder of the pebbles; I had not the right to lose what Anna picked up; and I would not compromise Mademoiselle Hanska by keeping them.

Oh! let me laugh after weeping. I shall soon see you. I bring you the most sublime masterpiece of poesy, an epistle of Madame Desbordes-Valmore, the original of which I have; I reserve it for you. To-morrow, Thursday, I hope to be delivered of "Eugénie Grandet." The manuscript will be finished. I must immediately finish "Ne touchez pas à la hache."

I do not know how it is that you can go and put yourself so often into the midst of that atmosphere of Genevese pedantry. But also I know there is nothing so agreeable as to be in the midst of society with a great thought, oh! my beautiful angel, my Eva, my treasures, of which the world is ignorant.

Nothing could be more false than what that traveller told you about Madame C... You understand, my love, that the ambitious manner in which I now present myself in society must engender a thousand calumnies, a thousand absurd versions. To give you an example: I have a glass I value, a saucer, out of which my aunt, an angel of grace and goodness who died in the flower of her age, drank for the last time; and my grandmother, who loved me, kept it on her fireplace for ten years. Well, my lawyer heard some man in a literary reading-room say that my life was attached to a talisman, a glass, a saucer; and my talent also. There are things of love and pride and nobleness in certain lives which others would rather calumniate than comprehend.

Latouche has said a frightful thing of hatred to one of my friends. He met him on the quay; they spoke of me,--Latouche with immense praises (in spite of our separation). "What pleases me about him," he said, "is that I begin to believe he will bury them all."

_Mon Dieu!_ how I love your dear letters; not those in which you scold, but those in which you tell me minutely what happens to you. Oh! tell me all; let me read in your soul as I would like to make you read in mine. Tell me the praises that your adorable beauty receives, and if any one looks at your hair, your pretty throat, your little hands, tell me his name. You are my most precious fame. We have, they say, stars in heaven; you, you are my star come down,--the light in which I live, the light toward which I go.

How is it that you speak to me of what I write. It is what I think and do not say that is beautiful, it is my love for you, its _cortège_ of ideas, it is all that I fain would say to you, in your ear, with no more atmosphere between us.

I do not like "Marie Tudor;" from the analyses in the newspapers, it seems to me nasty. I have no time to go and see the play. I have no time to live. I shall live only in Geneva. And what work I must do even there! There, as here, I shall have to go to bed at six o'clock and get up at midnight. But from midday to five o'clock, O love! what strength I shall get from your glances. What pleasure to read to you, chapter by chapter, the "Privilège" or other tales, my cherished love!

Do not think that there is the least pride, the least false delicacy in my refusal of what you know of, the golden drop you have put angelically aside. Who knows if some day it might not stanch the blood of a wound? and from you alone in the world I could accept it. I know you would receive all from me. But no; reserve all for things that I might perhaps accept from you, in order to surround myself with you, and think of you in all things. My love is greater than my thought.

Find here a thousand kisses and caresses of flame. I would like to clasp you in my soul.

PARIS, Wednesday, November 13, 1833.

MADAME,--I think that the house of Hanski will not refuse the slight souvenirs which the house of Balzac preserves of a gracious and most joyous hospitality. I have the honour to address you, _bureau restant_ at Geneva, a little case forwarded by the Messageries of the rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. You have no doubt been accusing the frivolity and carelessness of the "Frenchman" (forgetting that I am a Gaul, nothing but a Gaul), and have never thought of all the difficulties of Parisian life, which have, however, procured me the pleasure of busying myself long for you and Anna. The delay comes from the fact that I wanted to keep all my promises. Permit me to have some vanity in my persistence.