Everybody laughed, and Monsieur Hanska ordered the waiter to bring in bottles of the juice of the grape, and all went as merry as a marriage-bell.
Five days of paradise, and the Hanskas went one way and Balzac went another. He was up before daylight the morning they were to go, pacing the Faubourg in the hope of catching just one more look at the object of his passion. But his quest was in vain—he took the diligence back to Paris, and duly arrived, tired and sore in body, but with a heart for work. Madame Hanska understood him—was that not enough?
After that first meeting in Switzerland, every event in Balzac's life had Madame Hanska in mind. The feminine intellect was an absolute necessity to him. After a hard day's work, he eased down to earth by writing to "The Stranger" a letter, playful, pathetic, philosophical: just an outpouring of the heart of a tired man—letters like those Swift wrote to Stella. He called it "resting my head in your lap."
It is quite possible that there is a little picturesque exaggeration in these letters, and that Balzac was not quite so lonely all the time as he was when he wrote to her. He compares her with the women he meets, always to her advantage, of course, and in his letters he constantly uses extracts from her letters, with phrases and peculiar words which she had discovered for him. For instance, in one place he calls a publisher a "rosbif ambulant," which phrase Madame Hanska had applied to a certain Englishman she once met in Saint Petersburg.
The letters of Madame Hanska to Balzac were given to the flames by his own hand a few years before his death, "being too sacred for the world"; but his letters to her have been preserved and published, except such parts as were too intimate for the public to appreciate properly.
The "Droll Stories" were written and published just before Balzac met Madame Hanska. He was much troubled as to what she would think of them, and tried for a time to keep the book out of her hands. Finally, however, he decided on a grandstand play. He had one of the books sumptuously bound, and this volume he inscribed to Monsieur Hanska and sent it with a message to the effect that it was a book for men only, and it was written merely as a study of certain phases of human nature, and to show the progress of the French language.
Of course, a book written for men only is bound to be read by every woman who can place her pretty hands upon it. And so the "Droll Stories" were carefully read by Madame, and the explanation accepted that they were merely a study in antique French, and illustrated one chapter in "The Human Comedy." As for Monsieur Hanska, he, being not quite so scientific as his gifted wife, read the stories for a different reason, and enjoyed them so much that they served him as a mine from which he lifted his original stuff.
The conception of "The Human Comedy," or a series of books that would run the entire gamut of human experience and picture every possible phase of human emotion, was the idea of Madame Hanska. In the year Eighteen Hundred Thirty-two she had written him: "No writer who has ever lived has possessed so wide a sympathy as you. Some picture courts and kings; others reveal to us beggars, peasants and those who struggle for bread; still others give charming views of children; while all men and women in love write love-stories; but you know every possible condition that can come to a human soul, and so you seem the only person who ever has written or could write the complete 'Human Comedy' in which every type of man, woman or child who ever lived shall have his part."
No wonder Balzac loved Madame Hanska—what writer would not love a woman who could place him on such a pedestal! Every writer has moments when he doubts his power, and so this assurance from Some One seems a necessity to one who is to do a great and sustained work. Balzac, he of the child-mind, needed the constant assurance that he was going forward in the right direction.