Letters to Madame Hanska, born Countess Rzewuska, afterwards Madame Honoré de Balzac, 1833-1846

by Honoré de Balzac

I had but nineteen days before me; I could not go to the Ukraine and return. Talma's letter was given to me in Gérard's salon. What trifles you lay hold of! Perhaps you will not even remember what you have written to me on this subject when you receive this letter. Am I to send you that of Mademoiselle Mars? Will you not think that she has been paid? If you ever go to Italy and pass through Turin, I wish you may see Madame la Marquise de Saint-Thomas. You would know then what the autographs of Silvio Pellico and Nota cost.

You told me that your sister Caroline was the most dangerous of women; and in your letter she is an angel, and you tell me she is about to do what I call signal folly; for I have not forgotten what you wrote to me about the colonel. She will be very unhappy.

I am cast down, but not without courage; what Boulanger has painted, and what I am pleased with, is the persistence à la Coligny, à la Peter the Great, which is the basis of my character,—the intrepid faith in the future.

Must I renounce the Italian Opera, the only pleasure that I have in Paris, because I have no other seat than in a box where there is also a charming and gracious woman [Countess Guidoboni-Visconti]? I was in a box among men who were an injury to me, and brought me into disrepute. I had to go elsewhere, and, in all conscience, I was not willing for Olympe's box. But let us drop the subject.

The feeling of abandonment and of the solitude in which I am stings me. There is nothing selfish in me; but I need to tell my thoughts, my efforts, my feelings to a being who is not myself; otherwise I have no strength. I should wish for no crown if there were no feet at which to lay that which men may put upon my head. What a long and sad farewell I have said to my lost years, engulfed beyond return! they gave me neither complete happiness nor complete misery; they kept me living, frozen on one side, scorched on the other! To be no longer held to life by aught but the sentiment of duty!

I entered the garret where I am with the conviction that I should die exhausted with my work. I thought that I should bear it better than I do. It is now a month that I have risen at midnight and gone to bed at six; I have compelled myself to the least amount of food that will keep me alive, so as not to drive the fatigue of digestion to the brain. Well, not only do I feel weaknesses that I cannot describe, but so much life communicated to the brain has brought strange troubles. Sometimes I lose the sense of vertically, which is in the cerebellum. Even in bed my head seems to fall to right or left, and when I rise I am impelled by an enormous weight that is in my head. I understand how Pascal's absolute continence and his immense labour led him to see an abyss around him, so that he could not do without two chairs, one on each side of him.

I have not abandoned the rue Cassini without pain. To-day, I do not know if I shall save some parts of my furniture to which I am attached, or have my library. I have made, in advance, every sacrifice of lesser pleasures and memories that I may keep the little joy of knowing that these things are still mine. They would be trifles indeed to quench the thirst of creditors, but they would slake mine during my march across the desert, through the sands. Two years of toil would pay my debt in full; but it is impossible that I should not succumb under two years of such a life. Besides which, piracy is killing us. The farther we go, the less my books sell. Have the newspapers influenced the sale of the "Lys"? I do not know; but what I do know is that out of two thousand copies Werdet sold only twelve hundred, while Belgium has sold three thousand! I have the certainty, from that fact, that my works do not find purchasers in France. Consequently, the success of sales that might save me is still distant.

I am here with Auguste, whom I have kept. Can I still keep him? As yet I know not.

To let you know how far my courage goes, I must tell you that "Le Secret des Ruggieri" was written in a single night. Think of that when you read it. "La Vieille Fille" was written in three nights. "La Perle brisée," which ends at last the "Enfant Maudit," was written in a single night. It is my Brienne, my Champaubert, my Montmirail, my campaign of France! But it was the same with "La Messe de l'Athée" and "Facino Cane." I wrote the first fifty feuillets of the "Illusions Perdues" in three days at Saché.