more it is feared. And under these circumstances, when a man is thirty years old and has not worn out his life or his heart, with what passion he grasps a friendly word, a tender speech! …
Perhaps you will never receive anything from me again, and the friendship you have created may be like a flower perishing unknown in the depths of a wood by a stroke of lightning. Know, at least, that it was true, and sincere; you are, in a young and stainless heart, what every woman must desire to be—respected and adored. Have you not shed a perfume on my hours? Do I not owe to you one of those encouragements which make us accept hard toil, the drop of water in the desert?
If events respect me, and in spite of excursions to which my life as poet and artist condemn me, you can, madame, address your letters "Rue Cassini, No. 1, near the Observatory"—unless indeed I have had the misfortune to displease you by this candid expression of the feelings I have for you.
Accept, madame, my respectful homage.
[1] This publication of the "Scènes de la Vie privée" took place in May, 1832, nine months before Mme. Hanska's first letter reached Balzac. The above passage must therefore have been forged and interpolated here; probably to bring this letter into line with a tale in "Roman d'Amour" (pp. 55–59), which the same dates prove to be false.—TR.
Paris, end of January, 1833.
Pardon me the delay of my answer. I returned to Paris only in December last, and I found your letter in Paris awaiting me. But once here, I was sharply seized by crushing toil and violent sorrows.[1] I must be silent as to the sorrows and the toil. None but God and myself will ever know the dreadful energy a heart requires to be full of tears repressed, and yet suffice for literary labours. To spend one's soul in melancholy, and yet to occupy it ever with fictitious joys and sorrows! To write cold dramas, and keep within us a drama that burns both heart and brain! But let us leave all this. I am alone; I am now shut up at home for a long time, possibly a year. I have already endured these voluntary incarcerations in the name of science and of poverty; to-day, troubles are my jailers.
I have more than once turned my thought to you. But I must still be silent; these are follies. I have one regret; it is to have boasted to you of "Louis Lambert," the saddest of all abortions. I have just employed nearly three months in remaking that book, and it is now appearing in a little 18mo volume, of which there is a special copy for you; it will await your orders and shall be given, with the Chénier, to the person who calls for them; or they shall be sent wherever you write to me to forward them.
This work is still incomplete, though it bears this time the pompous title of "Histoire Intellectuelle de Louis Lambert." When this edition is exhausted, I will publish another "Louis Lambert" more complete.
I tell you naïvely all that you want to know about me. I am still waiting for you to speak to me with equal confidence. You are afraid of ridicule? And of whose? That of a poor child, victim yesterday and victim to-morrow of his feminine bashfulness, his shyness, his beliefs. You have asked me with distrust to give an explanation of my two handwritings; but I have as many handwritings as there are days in the year, without being on that account the least in the world versatile. This mobility comes from an imagination which can conceive all and yet remain virgin, like glass which is soiled by none of its reflections. The glass is in my brain. But my heart, my heart is known but to one woman in the world as yet—the et nunc et semper dilectæ dicatum of the dedication of "Louis Lambert." Ties eternal and ties broken! Do not blame me. You ask me how we can love, live, and lose each other while still loving. That is a mystery of life of which you know nothing as yet, and I hope you never may know it. In that sad destiny no blame can be attached except to fate; there are two unfortunates, but they are two irreproachable unfortunates. There is no fault to absolve because there is no cause to blame. I cannot add another word.
I am very curious to know if "La Femme abandonnée," "La Grenadière," the "Lettre à Nodier" (in which there are enormous typographical errors), the "Voyage à Java," and "Les Maranas" have pleased you? …
Some days after receiving this letter you will read "Une Fille d'Ève," who will be the type of the "La Femme abandonnée," taken between fifteen and twenty years of age.
At this moment I am finishing a work that is quite evangelical, and which seems to me the "Imitation of Jesus Christ" poetized. It bears an epigraph which will tell the disposition of mind I was in when writing the book: To wounded hearts, silence and shade. One must have suffered to understand that line to its full extent; and one must also have suffered as much as I have done to give birth to it in a day of mourning.
I have flung myself into work, as Empedocles into the crater, to stay there. "La Bataille" will come after "Le Médecin de campagne" (the book I have just told you of); and is there not something to shudder at when I tell you that "La Bataille" is an impossible book? In it I undertake to initiate the reader into all the horrors and all the beauties of a battle-field; my battle is Essling, Essling with all its consequences. This book requires that a man, in cold blood, seated in his chair, shall see the country, the lay of the land, the masses of men, the strategic events, the Danube, the bridges; shall behold the details and the whole of the struggle, hear the artillery, pay attention to all the movements on the chess-board; see all, and feel, in each articulation of the great body, Napoleon—whom I shall not show, or shall only allow to be seen, in the evening, crossing the Danube in a boat! Not a woman's head; cannon, horses, two armies, uniforms. On the first page the cannon roars, and never ceases until the last. You read through smoke, and, the book closed, you have seen it all intuitively; you remember the battle as if you had been present at it.
It is now three months that I have been measuring swords with that work, that ode in two volumes, which persons on all sides tell me is impossible!
I work eighteen hours a day. I have perceived the faults of style which disfigure "La Peau de Chagrin." I corrected them to make it irreproachable; but after two months' labour, the volume being reprinted, I discover another hundred faults. Such are the sorrows of a poet.
It is the same thing with "Les Chouans." I have rewritten that book entirely; but the second edition, which is coming out, has still many spots upon it.
On all sides they shout to me that I do not know how to write; and that is cruel when I have already told myself so, and have consecrated my days to new works, using my nights to perfect the old ones. Like the bears, I am now licking the "Scènes de la Vie privée" and the "Physiologie du Mariage;" after which I shall revise the "Études Philosophiques."
As all my passions, all my beliefs are defeated, as my dreams are dispersed, I am forced to create myself passions, and I choose that of art. I live in my studies. I wish to do better. I weigh my phrases and my words as a miser weighs his bits of gold. What love I thus waste! What happiness is flung to the winds! My laborious youth, my long studies will not have the sole reward I desired for them. Ever since I have breathed and known what a pure breath coming from pure lips was, I have desired the love of a young and pretty woman; yet all has fled me! A few years more and youth will be a memory! I am eligible to the Chamber under the new law which allows us to be men at thirty years of age, and certainly in a few years the recollections of youth will bring me no joys. And then, what hope that I could obtain at forty that which I have missed at twenty? She who is averse to me, being young, will she be less reluctant then? But you cannot understand these moans—you, young, solitary, living a country life, far from our Parisian world which excites the passions so violently, and where all is so great and so petty. I ought still to keep these lamentations in the depths of my heart. …
You have asked my friendship for a youth; I thought of you yesterday in fulfilling a promise of the same kind and devoting
