Let us grant that the epistles at present contained more gossip than ever, so that the recipient of them had her share of amusement. She was wonderfully well kept up in Paris happenings in society, including the stage and art galleries. She learnt that Madame d'Agoult—Daniel Stern[*]—had become Emile de Girardin's mistress, on losing Liszt, who had fallen into the toils of the Princess de Belgiojoso, the latter lady achieving her conquest after luring in succession Lord Normanby from his wife, Mignet from Madame Aubernon, and Alfred de Musset from George Sand. Going to see Victor Hugo's Burgraves, he reported that it was nothing to speak of as history, altogether poor as invention, but nevertheless poetic, with a poetry that carried away the spectator. It was Titian painting on a mud wall. He chiefly remarked the absence of feeling, which, in Victor Hugo, was more and more noticeable. The author of the Burgraves lacked the true. As he did not publish these opinions, he was able to go on dining with the poet and to praise the beauty of his fourteen-year-old daughter. On George Sand's Consuelo he pronounced a severer judgment still, calling it the emptiest, most improbable, most childish thing conceivable—boredom in sixteen parts. And yet he had conceived certain improbable plots himself.
[*] Her literary pseudonym
Like Charles Lamb, who left his office earlier in the afternoon to make up for arriving late in the morning, he counterbalanced these heavy-handed slatings of his friends by extolling his own performance past and present. Being engaged in revising the Chouans for a fresh edition, he was struck by qualities in it that he had hitherto held too lightly. It was all Scott and all Fenimore Cooper, he said, with a fire and wit, into the bargain, that neither of these writers ever possessed. The passion in it was sublime! Its landscapes and scenes of war were depicted with a perfection and happiness that surprised him. As a piece of self-praise there is probably nothing surpassing this in the annals of literature. In a competition, Balzac's blasts of vanity would beat the Archangel Michael's last trump for loudness.
Horace Vernet, he asserted, would never be a great painter. He was a colourist; he knew how to design and compose, had technical skill, and, now and again, found sentiment, but did not understand how to combine these talents in his pictures. He was clever, but had no genius. His alter ego was Delaroche, to whom he gave his daughter in marriage. Of the other painters, Boulanger, Delacroix, Ingres, Decamps, Jules Dupre were his favourites—true artists, he deemed them. At the Salon he saw hardly anything to please him besides a canvas by Meissonier and Cogniet's Tintoretto painting his Dead Daughter. He would have liked to see Boulanger's Death of Messalina, but the Salon Committee had refused it.
In music his preferences were as eclectic as in pictures. Liszt, whom he thought ridiculous as a man, he considered superb as a musician —the Paganini of the piano, yet inferior to Chopin, since he had not the genius of composition. And, in singing, Rubini was his idol —Rubini who triumphed in the role of Othello, giving the suspicion air in a manner no one could equal. It intoxicated him to hear this tenor with Tamburini, Lablache, and Madame Grisi; while Nourrit's song, Ce Rameau qui donne la Puissance et l'Immortalite in Robert le Diable made his flesh creep. It yielded a glimpse of life with all its dreams satisfied.
Originally intending to start for St. Petersburg early in June, Balzac was not able to leave Paris until a month later. As usual, filthy lucre had to do with his tarrying. In spite of a loan of 11,500 francs from lawyer Gavault—his guardian, the novelist called him—who for the privilege of the great man's friendship had been endeavouring during the two years past to introduce a little order into his affairs, he had not available cash enough for a trip so far, and stayed on, hoping to finish his David Sechard,* which was running as a serial in the Etat, and his Esther,[*] appearing similarly in the Parisien. June he spent at Lagny, where his manuscripts were being printed, in order to correct the proofs and get his money. But the Etat ceased issue while he was there; and the Parisien, being in parlous condition, refused likewise to pay up, so that he had to go off with a thinner-lined pocket than he had expected. Otherwise, he was in a fitting state of grace to meet his fair tyrant, whose envelope lectures had brought him into fear of her and at least outward obedience.
[*] Part of the Lost Illusions.
The torrents of coffee by the aid of which he had forced his last pen-work through, had been reduced to minimum doses; the occasional mustard foot-baths that cured his cerebral inflammations were replaced by entire ablutions every other day; he liked hot baths well enough; but, in the spells of composition, they were often indefinitely adjourned, so that this season of purification had its raison d'etre. And now, with his gaze turned to the east, he wondered how long he was going to remain there. His reply to a person who asked him to pledge himself for some novels on his return reads much as though he were counting on an offer to fix his residence in the empire of the czars. "I don't know whether I shall come back," he said. "France bores me. I am infatuated with Russia. I am in love with absolute power. I am going to see if it is as fine as I believe it to be. De Maistre stayed a long time at St. Petersburg. Perhaps I shall stay also." This he naturally repeated to Madame Hanska. Not that it was new to her. A similar hint had been given in January, when he capped his declaration, "I abhor the English; I execrate the Austrians; the Italians are nothing," with "I would sooner be a Russian than any other subject." The comic side of this fury is that Madame Hanska was a Pole, her late husband too; and neither she nor her family were reconciled to the Russian yoke. To make his renunciation more complete, he humbly spoke his dread she might turn from him with the "get away" said to a dog. No! She had no intention of dismissing him. His outpourings of devotion caressed her woman's pride, even if she did not accept them as gospel truth. And however tedious she found his vamping song of sixpence, his sittings in the parlour counting out his mirage-money, she put up with them in consideration of her privilege.
Sailing from Havre in the Devonshire, an English boat, Balzac arrived at St. Petersburg towards the end of July. He lodged in a private house not far from Eve's Koutaizoff mansion; but passed the three months of his sojourn almost entirely in her society. It was the first opportunity he had had of getting to know her intimately, their previous meetings being surrounded with too many restrictions to allow of familiar intercourse. No detailed record has come down to us of these days of tete-a-tete existence. All we learn from subsequent allusions is that, together with a good deal of billing and cooing, more sustained on the novelist's side, there were some lovers' tiffs, followed by reconciliations. Apparently the friction was mainly caused by Eve's evasiveness on the subject of their marriage.
It would seem as though there were an attack on her aloofness in the long criticism he sent her from his lodgings on Madame d'Arnim's Bellina, a French translation of which had been published not long before he left Paris. After some general remarks on the circumstance of a girl's fancying herself in love with a great man living at a distance, he waxed wroth over what he styled Bellina's head-love, and over head-love in general. To this monster, Merimee, in his Double Mistake, had given a thrust but a thrust that made it bleed only. The cleverer Madame d'Arnim had poisoned it with opium. "In order for the literary expression of love to become a work of art and to be sublime," he continued, "the love that depicts should itself be complete; it should occur in its triple form, head, heart, and body; should be a love at once sensual and divine, manifested with wit and poetry. Who says love says suffering; suffering from separation; suffering from disagreement. Love in itself is a sublime and pathetic drama. When happy, it is silent. Now, the cause of the tedium of Madame d'Arnim's book," he added, "is easily discoverable by a soul that loves. Goethe did not love Bellina. Put a big stone in Goethe's place—the Sphinx no power has ever been able to wrest from its desert sand—and Bellina's letters are understandable. Unlike Pygmalion's fable, the more Bellina writes, the more petrified Goethe becomes, the more glacial his letters. True, if Bellina had perceived that her sheets were falling upon granite, and if she had abandoned herself to rage or despair, she would have composed a poem. But, as she did not love Goethe, as Goethe was a pretext for her letters, she went on with her girl's journal; and we have read some (not intended for print) much more charming, not in units, but in tens."