Adieu, dearest sister. If your husband has arrived, tell him the "Aventures d'une idée [heureuse]" are on the ways, and he will perhaps read them at Montglat, for I will send you the paper in which they appear if you stay till the end of the month.
The affair of the "Études de Mœurs" is going on well. Thirty-three thousand francs of author's rights will just stop all the big holes. I shall [then] only have to undertake the repayment to my mother, and after that, faith! I shall be at my ease. I hope to repay you the remaining thousand francs at the end of the month; but if my mother wants all her interests [at once] I shall be obliged to put you off [till] the first fortnight in November.
Well, adieu, my dear sister. If you have any heart, you will answer me. What the devil are you doing at Montglat? However, you are free; this is not a reproach, it is curiosity. Between brother and sister it is pardonable. Much tenderness. You won't say again that I don't write to you.
Apropos, the pain in my side continues; but I have such fear of leeches, cataplasms, and to be tied down in a way that I can't finish what I have undertaken, that I put everything off. If it gets too bad we will see about it, I and the doctor, or magnetism.
Addio, addio. A thousand kind things. Correct carefully the "Médecin [de Campagne]," or rather tell me all the places that seem to you bad, and put the great pots into the little pots; that is to say, if a thing can be said in one line instead of two, try to make the sentence.
Adieu, sister. [Honoré.]
[1] Monsieur Hanski hired the house in Neufchâtel early in the spring of 1833 and took his family there in May. Balzac was not invited, or, at any rate, did not go there till September 25th.
Now there are three points here to be noticed and studied:—
1. The letters all state the purpose for which they were written. The versions of 1856 and 1876 give the same purpose. That given in "Roman d'Amour" is totally different.
2. The "Roman d'Amour" letter claims to be the complete text [texte complet]. How comes it, therefore, to have such variations from the original letter published by the sister who received it, and republished authoritatively in the Édition Définitive?
3. These variations are not merely omissions or additions of passages; they are the total reconstruction of many, and very characteristic, sentences.
Some one must have rewritten the letter. Some one has garbled it. There can be no question about this; the fact is there. It is not necessary for the vindication of Balzac's honour to inquire who did it; but it is plain that it was done.
It is therefore legitimate to suppose that the hand which garbled parts of the letter added the slanderous language of the first part.
Three years ago, in 1896, when "Roman d'Amour" first appeared, I added to the new edition of my "Memoir of Balzac" an appendix entitled "A Vindication of Balzac." It goes into more details connected with this slander than I can suitably put into this Preface, and I respectfully ask my readers to read it in the Memoir.
Now, to me who have lived in Balzac's mind for the last fifteen years as closely, perhaps, as any one now living, it is plain that the same hand that garbled the letter of October, 1833, has been at work on some of the letters in the present volume.
The simple story of these letters is as follows: In February, 1833, Balzac received a letter, posted in Russia, from a lady who signed herself "l'Étrangère" ["Foreigner"]. This letter is not known to exist; nor is there any authentic knowledge of its contents; but it began a correspondence between its writer and Balzac which ended in their marriage in 1850. It does not appear at what date Madame Hanska gave her name; it must have been quite early in the correspondence, although he never knew it exactly until the day he met her in September, 1833, at Neufchâtel.
The first reply from Balzac which is given is the first letter in the present volume, misdated January, 1833, a month before l'Étrangère's first letter was written; but it is plainly not the first reply he had made to her.
Eleven letters from Balzac follow the first, ending on the day (September 26, 1833) when he met Madame Hanska for the first time at Neufchâtel.
These twelve letters to an unknown woman are romantic; they are the letters of a poet, creating for himself an ideal love, and letting his imagination bear him along unchecked. From our colder point of view they seem, here and there, a little foolish, as addressed to a total stranger, but the impression conveyed of his own being, his nature, the troubles of his life and heart, is affecting and full of dignity. They are, moreover, the letters of a gentleman to a woman he respects. Owing to their false dates and to a forgery in the first letter (done undoubtedly to bring them into line with "Roman d'Amour"), they are open to suspicion; but Balzac's characteristics are in them, and I believe them to be, in spite of some interpolations, genuine.
But from the time that he meets Madame Hanska at Neufchâtel, a date which corresponds precisely with the garbled letter in "Roman d'Amour," the tone of the correspondence changes. For six months (from October to March) it becomes out of keeping with the respect which the foregoing letters, and the letters of all the rest of his life show that he felt for her. More especially is this true of the letters of January, February, and March. They are not in Balzac's style of writing; they present ideas that were not his, expressed in a manner that was not his; they contradict the impression given by all the other letters of his life; they contradict the letters of romantic ideal love that precede them; they contradict what every friend who knew Balzac closely has said of him; they contradict the known facts of the history of himself and Madame Hanska; they are, moreover, disloyal to friendship in a manner that Balzac's whole conduct in life, as evidenced in his correspondence, shows to have been impossible.
To bring the question home to ourselves—which of us, after reflection and comparison, can suppose that the paltry, immature, contemptibly vulgar stuff of the letters here designated as spurious ever came from the brain of the man who thought and wrote the "Comédie Humaine"?
There is such a thing as true literary judgment—as unerring as the science that sees a mammoth in a bone. To that judgment, if to no other, this question may be left. The letters are here in this volume, and the reader can judge them for himself. In my opinion they have been garbled in various places; expressions, passages, and many whole letters have been interpolated, with the vulgarity of the hand that garbled the letter in "Roman d'Amour," for the purpose of supporting the slander suggested in that book.
This 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