is, necessarily, opinion and judgment only; but a very remarkable circumstance appears in this volume, which should be studied and judged by readers thoroughly informed about Balzac, his nature, his character, and his writings.
September 16, 1834, Balzac writes to Monsieur Hanski, asking him to explain to Madame Hanska how he came to write to her two love-letters; these letters are not given. He asks her pardon, he is grieved, he is mortified (and justly so); but the letter is characteristic of a man who was honest and brave; the defence rings true. Monsieur Hanski must have thought so, for he accepted the commission and so performed it that Balzac's next letter to Madame Hanska thanks her for her pardon, and is written in a tone of boyish glee which was eminently characteristic of him, and could not have been counterfeited.
From this time there is not a trace of embarrassment in his letters; he does not feel himself withheld from expressing his ardent but respectful feelings for Madame Hanska; he assures her, again and again, of her influence upon his life, and he sends friendly messages to Monsieur Hanski, which are returned in an evidently kind and cordial way.
To the translation of the "Lettres à l'Étrangère" I have added that of all the letters to Madame Hanska during the rest of Balzac's life which are contained in the volume of Correspondence in the Édition Définitive. The "Lettres à l'Étrangère"—those, I mean, that are genuine—ought, if published at all, to have been shortened. They were written to give vent to the emotions of a heart and soul under violent pressure; perhaps no letters exist that ever came so hot from the inner being; they lay bare a soul that little dreamed of this exposure, for the man who wrote them never read them over. For this reason, this lack of editing, the reader will surely find them too monotonous in their one long cry; and yet, without them, the world would not have known a tragedy too great for tears, nor the true history of a hero.
I should not have consented to translate these letters unless I had been allowed by my publishers to preface them with these remarks, and give my name and what weight my long, close intercourse with Balzac may possess in his just defence.
Katharine P. Wormeley.
The Säter,
Thorn Mountain.
LETTERS.
I.
LETTERS DURING 1833.
To Madame Hanska.
Paris, January, 1833.
Madame—I entreat you to completely separate the author from the man, and to believe in the sincerity of the sentiments which I have vaguely expressed in the correspondence you have obliged me to hold with you. In spite of the perpetual caution which some friends give me against certain letters like those which I have had the honour to receive from you, I have been keenly touched by a tone that levity cannot counterfeit. If you will deign to excuse the folly of a young heart and a wholly virgin imagination, I will own that you have been to me the object of the sweetest dreams; in spite of my hard work I have found myself more than once galloping through space to hover above the unknown country where you, also unknown, live alone of your race. I have taken pleasure in comprehending you among the remains almost always unfortunate of a dispersed people, a people scattered thinly over the earth, exiled perhaps from heaven, but of whom each being has language and sentiments to him peculiar and unlike those of other men—delicacy, choiceness of soul, chasteness of feeling, tenderness of heart, purer, sweeter, gentler than in the best of other created beings. There is something saintly in even their enthusiasms, and calm in their ardour. These poor exiles have all, in their voices, their words, their ideas, something, I know not what, which distinguishes them from others, which serves to bind them to one another in spite of distance, lands, and language; a word, a phrase, the very sentiment exhaled in a look are like a rallying call which they obey; and, compatriots of a hidden land whose charms are reproduced in their memories, they recognize and love one another in the name of that country toward which they stretch their arms. Poesy, music, and religion are their three divinities, their favourite loves; and all these passions awake in their hearts sensations that are equally powerful.
I have clothed you with all these ideas. I have held out to you my hand, fraternally, from afar, without conceit, without affectation, but with a confidence that is almost domestic, with sincerity; and could you have seen my glance you would have recognized within it both the gratitude of a lover and the religions of the heart—the pure tenderness that binds the son to a mother, the brother to a sister, the respect of a young man for woman, and the delightful hopes of a long and fervent friendship.
'T was an episode wholly romantic; but who will dare to blame the romantic? It is only frigid souls who cannot conceive all there is of vast in the emotions to which the unknown gives full scope. The less we are restrained by reality, the higher is the flight of the soul. I have therefore let myself gently float upon my reveries, and they are ravishing. So, if a star darts from your candle, if your ear should catch a distant murmur, if you see figures in the fire, if something sparkles or speaks beside you, near you, believe that my spirit is wandering among your panels.
Amid the battle I am fighting, amid my heavy toil, my endless studies, in this agitated Paris, where politics and literature absorb some sixteen or eighteen hours of the twenty-four, to me, an unfortunate man, widely different from the author that people imagine, come charming hours which I owe to you. So, in order to thank you, I dedicated to you the fourth volume of the "Scènes de la Vie privée," putting your seal at the head of the last "Scene," which I was writing at the moment when I received your first letter. But a person who is a mother for me, and whose caprices and even jealousy I am bound to respect, exacted that this silent testimony of secret sentiments should be suppressed. I have the sincerity to avow to you both the dedication and its destruction, because I believe you have a soul sufficiently lofty not to desire a homage which would cause grief to a person as noble and grand as she whose child I am, for she preserved me in the midst of griefs and shipwreck where in my youth I nearly perished. I live by the heart only, and she made me live! I have saved the only copy of that dedication for which I was blamed as if it were a horrible coquetry; keep it, madame, as a souvenir and by way of thanks. When you read the book say to yourself that in concluding it and revising it I thought of you and of the compositions which you have preferred to all the others. Perhaps what I am doing is wrong; but the purity of my intentions must absolve me.[1]
Lay the things that shock you in my works, madame, to the account of that necessity which forces us to strike powerfully a blasé public. Having undertaken, rashly no doubt, to represent the whole of literature by the whole of my works; wishing to erect a monument more durable from the mass and the amassing of materials than from the beauty of the edifice, I am obliged to represent everything, that I may not be accused of want of power. But if you knew me personally, if my solitary life, my days of study, privation, and toil were told to you, you would lay aside some of your accusations and perceive more than one antithesis between the man and his writings. Certainly there are some works in which I like to be myself; but you can guess them; they are those in which the heart speaks out. My fate is to paint the happiness that others feel; to desire it in perfection, but never to meet it. None but those who suffer can paint joy, because we express better that which we conceive than that we have experienced.
See to what this confidence has drawn me! But, thinking of all the countries that lie between us, I dare not be brief. Besides, events are so gloomy around my friends and myself! Civilization is threatened; arts, sciences, and progress are threatened. I myself, the organ of a vanquished party representing all noble and religious ideas, I am already the object of lively hatred. The
