[XVII]
BALZAC
In his history of France Michelet dates a new epoch in the intellectual life of that country from the period when coffee came into general use as a beverage. This is pushing an idea to the extreme; but there would be no exaggeration in asserting that in Voltaire's style we can trace an inspiration of coffee, just as we can trace an inspiration of wine in the style of earlier authors. Balzac's method of working obliged him to refresh himself during his long, fatiguing nights of labour with an injurious quantity of coffee. It has been aptly said: "He lived on 50,000 cups of coffee and died of 50,000 cups of coffee."
One is conscious in his works of his ceaseless toil and of his nervous excitement, but it is probable that if he had worked more calmly he would not have communicated the same life to them. While we are reading his pages we feel the confused tumult of the great capital, its furious competition, its fever of work and pleasure, the sleepless whirr of the great loom. All these hearths and lamps and furnaces have lent some of their fire to his books. He was in his native element when he had work before him and behind him and round him—when, like a sailor in mid-ocean who sees nothing but sea, he saw nothing but work as far as his sight could reach.
During the last seventeen years of his life his labours were interrupted and enlivened by intellectual intercourse with a lady who lived at a great distance from Paris, to whom he wrote almost every day. We have an account of this friendship, only slightly disguised, in Albert Savarus.
In February 1832 a young Polish Countess, Madame Evelina Hanska, then aged twenty-six or twenty-eight, wrote an anonymous letter to Balzac, in which she thanked him for his writings and tried to persuade him to look on things from a more spiritual point of view. This led to a correspondence between them. Madame Hanska, a gifted, highly educated woman, belonged by birth to the famous Rzewuski family; the eminent Polish author, Henri Rzewuski, was her brother. Her husband was a rich old man, an invalid, with a peculiar temper. They lived a very lonely life on their estate in Little Russia, and literature and Balzac were her only interests.
Balzac and she had first met at Neuchatel in Switzerland early in 1833, but on this occasion they were only for a few minutes alone together; in December of the same year, however, they spent six weeks together at Geneva, and, before they parted, agreed that they would marry whenever Countess Hanska became a widow. Henceforward they met almost every year, in Switzerland or Austria; and they carried on a constant correspondence. There is not the slightest doubt that Balzac was devotedly attached to Countess Hanska, although his devotion to her did not prevent his having numerous liaisons with other women. She was his guiding star, and he felt impelled to communicate all his thoughts and all the events of his life to her.
She undoubtedly loved him in return, with a love which was partly real passion, partly satisfied vanity; but Balzac's letters to her show that she never ceased tormenting him with her passionate jealousy. He had begun to cool when a meeting in Vienna in 1835, arranged by Countess Hanska, fanned the sinking fire of his passion into a blaze again. After this a number of years passed without their seeing each other. In 1841 Madame Hanska in her turn manifested a certain coldness, born of suspicion; and after Count Hanska's death, which happened in November of that year, she does not seem to have shown much inclination to marry Balzac. But the agreement remained in force, and Balzac's one wish was to marry the woman he loved. She held back. They did not meet till 1843 (in St. Petersburg). In 1845 they met in Paris, in 1847 at her home at Vierzchovnia; and there Balzac spent part of 1848 and the whole of 1849. But it was not till 1850, when his health was already undermined, that Madame Hanska consented to marry him. A fatal affection of the heart, the consequence of years of over-exertion, had declared itself before the wedding took place at Berditsjev in March 1850. Three months from that date Balzac was dead. He had furnished a beautiful house in Paris for himself. His friends were reminded of the Turkish proverb: "When the house is ready, Death enters."
Short as was the married life of the couple, it was long enough for Balzac to discover how mistaken had been his estimate of the woman he had worshipped and treated as a higher being for years. She seems to have been in reality a very heartless creature, with an ill-regulated mind; and her youthful passion for the great author had entirely evaporated. In Victor Hugo's book, Choses Vues, he tells how in June 1850, hearing disquieting reports of Balzac's condition, he went to inquire after him. The door was opened by a maid-servant, who said: "Monsieur is dying. Madame has gone to her own room." Hugo went up to Balzac's bedroom, and found an old woman, a nurse, and a man-servant standing by the bed. The old woman was Balzac's mother. His wife was not with him in his last moments.