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 more that is hoped from my voice, the 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