Letters to Madame Hanska, born Countess Rzewuska, afterwards Madame Honoré de Balzac, 1833-1846. Honore de Balzac
I shall be free. Well, then, no power on earth can disunite us. La dilecta was forty-six when I was twenty-two. Why talk about your forty years? We have thirty years before us. Do you think that at sixty-four a man betrays thirty years' affection?
What! you think that the opera, the salons, fame can distract me from you? Then you don't know how I love you. I shall be more angry at that than you at Madame P … No, believe me, I love you as a woman loves and as a man loves. In my life to come there is nothing but you and work. My dear gift, my dear star, my sweet spirit, let yourself be caressed by hope, and say to yourself that I am not amorous or passionate; all that passes. I love you, I adore you in æternum. I believe in you as I do in myself. Mon Dieu! I would like to know words which could infuse into you my soul and my thought, which could tell you that you are in my heart, in my blood, in my brain, in my thought—in short, the life of my life; that each beating of my heart gives birth to a desire full of thee. Oh! you do not know what are three years of chastity, which spring at every moment to the heart and make it bound, to the head and make it palpitate. If I were not sober and did not work, this purity would drive me mad. I alone am in the secret of the terrible emotions which the emanations from your dear person give me. It is an unspeakable delirium which, by turns, freezes my nature by the omnipotence of desire, and makes me burn. I resist follies like those of the young seigneur cut down by the Elector.
We have, both of us, our sufferings; do not let us dispute that. Let us love each other, and do not refuse me that which makes all accepted. In other respects, in all things, angel, I am submissive to you as to God. Take my life, ask me to die, order me all things, except not to love you, not to desire you, not to possess you. Outside of that all is possible to me in your name.
[1] Madame de Berny is meant, and the invention of this letter is infamous. See letter to Madame Carraud in Appendix, written at the same time as this spurious letter.—TR
Geneva, January, 1834.
If you only knew the superstitions you give me! When I work I put the talisman on my finger; I put it on the first finger of the left hand, with which I hold my paper, so that your thought clasps me. You are there, with me. Now, in seeking from the air for words and ideas, I ask them of that delicious ring; in it I have found the whole of "Séraphita."
Love celestial, what things I have to say to you, for which one needs the sacred hours during which the heart feels the need of baring itself. The adorable pleasures of love are the only means of arriving at that union, that fusion of souls. Dear, with what joy I see the fortunes of my heart and the fate of my soul secured to me. Yes, I will love you alone and solely through my life. You have all that pleases me. You exhale, for me, the most intoxicating perfume a woman can have; that alone is a treasure of love.
I love you with a fanaticism that does not exclude the quietude of a love without possible storms. Yes, say to yourself well that I breathe by the air you breathe, that I can never have any other thought than you. You are the end of all for me. You shall be the young dilecta—already I call you the pre dilecta.
Do not murmur at this alliance of the two sentiments. I should like to think I loved you in her, and that the noble qualities which touched me and made me better than I was were all in you.
I love you, my angel of earth, as they loved in the middle ages, with the most complete fidelity, and my love will always be grand, without stain; I am proud of my love. It is the principle of a new life. Hence, the new courage that I feel under my last adversities. I would be greater, be something glorious, so that the crown to place upon your head should be the most leafy, the most flowery of all those that great men have nobly won!
Never, therefore, have fear or distrust; there are no abysses in heaven! A thousand kisses full of caresses; a thousand caresses full of kisses! Mon Dieu! shall I never be able to make you see how I love you, you, my Eve!
À bientôt; a thousand kisses will be in my first look.
Geneva, January, 1834.
My loved love, with a single caress you have returned me to life. Oh! my dearest, I have not been able to either sleep or work. Lost in the remembrance of that evening, I have said to you a world of tendernesses. Oh! you have that divine soul to which one remains attached during a lifetime. My soul, you have, through love, the delicious language of love which makes all griefs and annoyances fly away on wings. Loved angel, do not obscure with any doubt the inspirations of love of which your dear caress is but the interpreter. Do not think you can ever enter into comparison with any one, no matter who. But, my loved darling, my flower of heaven, do you not understand, you, all charm and all truth, that a poor poet can be struck at finding the same heart, at being loved beyond his hopes? My adored wife, yes, it was for you that the heart of the most delicate and sweetest woman that ever was brought me up. I shall be permitted to say to her: "You wished to be twenty years old to love me better and give me even the pleasures of vanity. Well, I have met with what you wished me." She will be joyous for us. Dear eternal idol, my beautiful and holy religion, I know how the memories of another love must wound a proud and delicate love. But not to speak of it to you would be to deprive you of nameless fêtes of the soul, and joys of love. There are such identities of tenderness and soul that I am proud for you, and I know not if it is you I loved in her. Then, an ungovernable jealousy has so habituated me to think with open heart, and say all to her in whom I live, that I could never hide from you a thought. No, you are my own heart.
Yes, to you all is permitted. I shall tell you naïvely all that I think that is fine, and all that I think that is bad. You are an I, handsomer, prettier.
My love has neither exaltation, nor more, nor less, nor anything that is terrestrial. Oh! my dear Eve, it is the love of the angel always at the same degree of force, of exaltation. To feel, to touch your hand of love, that hand of soft, proud sentiments—do you understand me, my angel, tender, kind, passionate—that hand, polished and relaxed of love, that is a happiness as great as your caress of honey and of fire.
This is what I wished to say to my timid angel, who thought that all caresses were not solidaire. One, the lightest as the most passionate, comprises all. In that you see to the bottom of my soul. A kiss on your cherished lips—those virgin lips that have no souvenirs yet (which makes you in my eyes as pure as the purest young girl)—a kiss will be a talisman for the desires of love, when it contains all the caresses of love. Our poor kiss, still disinherited of all our joys, only goes to your heart, and I would that it enwrapped all your person. You would see that possession augments, enlarges love. You would know your Honoré, your husband; and you would know that he loves you more daily.
My dearest Eva, never doubt me, but doubt yourself less. I have told you that there is in you, in your letters, in your love, in its expression, a something I know not what that is more than in other letters and expressions that I thought inimitable. But you are twenty-eight years old—that is the grand secret. But, dear treasure, you have the most celestial soul that I know, and you have intoxicating beauties. Mon Dieu! how shall I tell you that I am drunk at the faintest scent of you, and that had I possessed you a thousand times you would see me more intoxicated still, because there would be hope and memory where now there is only hope.
Do you remember the bird that has but one flower? That is the history of my heart and my love. Oh! dear celestial flower, dear embalming perfumes, dear fresh colours, my beautiful stalk, do not bend, guard me always. At each advance of a love which goes and ever will go on increasing, I feel in my heart foyers of tenderness and adoration. Oh! I want to be sure of you as I am of myself. I feel at each respiration that I have in my heart a constancy that nothing can alter.
I wept on the road to Diodati, when, after having promised me all the caresses that you have granted me, a woman was able, with a single word, to cut the woof she seemed to have taken such pleasure in weaving. Judge if I adore you, you who perceive nothing of these odious manœuvres, who deliver yourself up with candour and happiness to love, and who speaks thus to all my natures.
There is my confession made. I think that you have all the noblenesses of the heart, for, adored