Letters to Madame Hanska, born Countess Rzewuska, afterwards Madame Honoré de Balzac, 1833-1846. Honore de Balzac
write you my day. This day I have corrected the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of the "Médecin de campagne" and signed an agreement for the publication of the "Scènes de la Vie Parisienne." I wish I knew what you were doing at the moments when my mind is occupied with you.
During my absence a horse I was fond of died, and three beautiful unknown ladies came to see me. They must have thought me disdainful. I opened their letters on arriving. There was no address; all was mysterious as a bonne fortune. But I am exclusive; I write to none but you, and chance has sent my answer to those inquisitive women.
Paris, July 19-August 8, 1833.
You have not been either forgotten or less loved; but you yourself have been a little forgetful. You have not written to me how long a time you were to stay in Vienna, so that I might know if my reply would reach you there. Then you have written the name of your correspondent so illegibly that I copy it with fear that there may be some mistake.
That said, I have written you several letters which I have burned for fear of displeasing you, and I will now sum up for you in very few words my recent life.
An odious lawsuit was instituted against me by a publisher, à propos of "Le Médecin de campagne." The work was finished to-day, July 19, and will be sold by a publisher appointed by the court. As for that book, I have buried therein since I last wrote to you more than sixty nights. You will read it, you, my distant angel, and you will see how much of heart and life has been spent in that work, with which I am not yet very content.
My work has so absorbed me that I could not give you my thoughts; I am so weary, and for me life is such a desert! The only sentiment apparently true that dawns in my real life is a thousand leagues away from me. Does it not need all the power of a poet's heart to find consolation there; to say to itself amid such toil: "She will quiver with joy in seeing that her name has occupied me, that she herself was present to my thought, and that what I dwelt on as loveliest and noblest in that young girl I have named for her"? You will see in reading the book that you were in my soul as a light.
I have nothing to tell you about myself, because I have been working night and day without seeing any one. Nevertheless, a few unknown ladies have rapped at my door and have written to me. But I have not a vulgar soul, and, as la dilecta says, "If I were young and pretty I should come, and not write this." So I drop all that into the void. There is something of you in this feminine reserve. A crown of the nature of that to which I aspire is given in its entirety; it cannot be divided.
Well, still some days, some months of labour, and I shall have ended one of my tasks. I shall then take a brief repose and refresh my brain by a journey; friends have already proposed to me Germany, Austria, Moravia, Russia. Non so. I do not yet know what I shall do. You are so despotic in your orders that I am afraid to go your way; there would be a double danger there for me.
Your letters delight me; they make me love you more and more; but this life, which turns incessantly toward you, is consumed in efforts and returns to me no richer. To love one another without personal knowledge is torture.
August 1, 1833.
Twelve days' interval without being able to resume my letter! Judge my life by that. It is a perpetual combat, without relaxing. The wretches! they don't know what they destroy of poesy.
My lawsuit will be decided to-morrow. "L'Europe Littéraire" has quoted the "Story of the Emperor" told by a soldier of the Imperial Guard to peasants in a barn (one of the chief things in the "Médecin de campagne"). Bah! And here are speculators who for the last week have stolen me, printed me without my permission, and have sold over twenty thousand copies of that fragment! I could use the law with rigour, but that's unworthy of me. They neither give my name, nor that of the work; they murder me and say nothing; they rob me of my fame and my pittance—me, a poor man! You will some day read that gigantic fragment, which has made the most unfeeling weep, and which a hundred newspapers have reproduced. Friends tell me that from end to end of France there has risen a cry of admiration. What will it be for the whole work!
I send herewith a scrap of a former letter which I had not entirely burned.
Since the 19th of last month I have had nothing but troubles, anxieties, and toil. To finish this little letter, I have to take part of a night, and I think it a gentle recreation.
I leave in a week for the country so as to finish in peace the third dizain of the "Contes Drolatiques" and a great historical novel called "Privilège." Always work! You can, I think, without blushing, allow yourself to read the third dizain. It is almost pure.
I await, assuredly with anxiety, your letter relating to "Le Médecin de campagne." Write me quickly what you think of it; tell me your emotions.
Mon Dieu! I would fain recount to you a thousand thoughts; but there is a pitiless somebody who hurries and commands me. Be generous, write to me, do not scold me too much for a seeming silence; my heart speaks to you. If a spark flames up in your candle at night, consider the little gleam as a message of the thoughts of your friend. If your fire crackles, think of me who think often of you. Yes, dream true in saying to yourself that your words not only echo, but they remain in my memory; that in the most obscure corner of Paris there is a being who puts you into all his dreams, who counts you for much in his sentiments, whom you animate at times, but who, at other times is sad and calls to you, as we hope for a chance that is well-nigh impossible.
Paris, August 8, 1833.
I have received your letter from Switzerland, from Neufchâtel.
Will you not be much dissatisfied with yourself when you know that you have given me great pain at a moment when I already had much? After all that I have said to you, was not my silence significant of misfortunes? I now inclose to you the letters begun before I received this letter from Switzerland in which you give me your exact address.
I will not explain to you the troubles that overwhelm me; they are such that I thought yesterday of quitting France. Besides, the lawsuit which troubles me so much is very difficult to explain even to the judges; you will feel therefore that I cannot tell you anything about it in a letter. Mon Dieu! if you have never thought that I might have untold troubles, your heart should have told you that I did not enter your soul to leave it as you suppose me to have done, and that I did not forget you. You do not know with what strength a man who has met with nothing but toil without reward, sorrows without joy, fastens to a heart in which for the first time he finds the consolations that he needs. The fragments of letters which I now send you have been under my hand for the last three months, but for three months past I have not had a day, an hour, to write to the persons I love best. But you are far away; you know nothing of my life of toil and anguish. At any rate, I pardon you the badnesses which reveal such force in your heart for him whom you love a little.
Later, I will write you in detail; but to-day I can only send you these beginnings of letters, assuring you of my constant faith. I intend to plead my case myself, and I must study it.
Nothing can better picture to you the agitated life which I lead than these fragments of letters. I have not the power or the faculty to give myself up for an hour to any connected subject outside of my writings and my business matters. When will this end? I do not know. But I am very weary of this perpetual struggle between men and things and me.
I must bid you adieu. Write to me always, and have faith in me. During the hours of release that come to me I shall turn to you and tell you all there is of good and tender sentiments in me for you. Adieu; some day you will know how unhappy I was in writing you these few lines, and you will be surprised that I was able to write them.
Adieu; love him who loves you.
Paris, August 19, 1833.
What would I not pardon after reading your letter, my cherished angel? But you are too beloved ever to be guilty of a fault; you are a spoilt child; to you belong my most precious hours. See, I answer you alone. Mon Dieu! do not be jealous of any one. I have not been to see Madame Récamier or any one else. I do not love Madame de Girardin; and every time I go there, which is rare, I bring away with me an antipathy.[1]