About the year 1835, he became acquainted with the Countess Hanska, a Polish lady, of great beauty and immense wealth, whose husband was an invalid. It has been stated—on what authority it has been difficult to discover—that when she accidentally met the author of the “Comédie Humaine” her emotion was so great that she lost consciousness. The better opinion, however, would be that a correspondence, begun on her side after the publication of the “Médecin de Campagne,” a work which she greatly admired, was continued for a number of years before they finally met. Balzac paid several visits to her Polish estates, and it is probable that she frequently came to Paris. After her husband’s death marriage was naturally thought of, but for the time being there were many obstacles: Balzac’s pecuniary position was most unfortunate, while she, as a Russian subject, was not in a position to marry off-hand.
The winter of 1848, as well as the spring of the following year, Balzac passed at Vierzschovnia, with Madame Hanska and her children. He was wretchedly ill, and the physicians had forbidden any kind of mental labor. Incessant work and the abuse of coffee had seriously undermined his constitution and shattered his nerves of steel, but the day to which he had looked with such constant expectation had at last arrived: his debts were not only paid, but the revenues from the sale of his books were magnificent.
For some little time he had been preparing in the Rue Fortunée—now Rue Balzac—a superb residence. His taste in furniture and works of art found ample expression there. For one set of Florentine workmanship the king of Holland himself was in treaty, while his art gallery was the same as is described in “Le Cousin Pons.”
While he was in Poland his mother was his general agent, and he wrote to her the most minute directions of everything appertaining to the house, its fixtures and decorations; and finally, on the 17th March, 1850, he wrote from Vierzschovnia as follows:—
“Three days ago I married the only woman whom I have loved, whom I love more than ever, and whom I shall love until death. I believe that this union is the recompense that God has held in reserve for me through so many adversities, years of work, and difficulties suffered and overcome. My youth was unhappy and my spring was flowerless, but I shall have the most brilliant summer and the sweetest of autumns.”
Balzac had now fulfilled his two immense desires: he was celebrated, he was beloved. His own income combined with that which remained to his wife—she had, at his instance, made over the greater portion of her fortune to her children—sufficed for the realization of his most extravagant dreams. “I shall live to be eighty,” he said. “I will terminate the ‘Comédie Humaine’ and write dozens of dramas. I will have two children,—not more; two look well on the front seat of a landau.” It was all too beautiful; nothing remained but death, and five months after his marriage, on the 20th of August, 1850, after thirty years of ceaseless toil, at the very moment when the world was his, Balzac, as a finishing touch to his own “Études Philosophiques,” died suddenly of disease of the heart.
At his grave in Père-Lachaise is a simple monument, bearing for epitaph that “single name which tells all and makes the passer dream;” and here, at the very spot where Rastignac, after the burial of Père Goriot, hurled his supreme defiance at Paris, Victor Hugo delivered the funeral oration.
“Alas!” he said, “this powerful and tireless worker, this philosopher, this thinker and poet, whose existence was filled with more labors than days, passed among us that life of struggles and combats common in all time to all great men. To-day, at last, he is at peace: he has taken leave of contests and hatreds, and enters now both glory and the tomb. Hereafter he will shine above all the clouds about us, high among the stars of our country.”
| [20] | H. de Balzac, by Eugène de Mirecourt. H. de Balzac, by Armand Bashet. Balzac en Pantoufles, by Léon Gozlan. |