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

by Honoré de Balzac

October 15.

I receive to-day your answer to my last letter. Never before did it happen to me to receive a reply to one letter while I was writing another. This phenomenon takes place now at the end of five years, during which time I have written to you once a fortnight at least. To tell you all the whys and wherefores belongs to the domain of talk, not to that of epistolary conversation.

Cara, you are more than ever bent on converting me. Your letter is that of a grave and serious abbess and an omnipotent, omni-scavante, gracious and witty Countess Hanska. I kneel at your feet, dear and beautiful sister-Massillon, to tell you here that the sorrow of my life is a long prayer, that my soul is very white, not because I do not sin, but because I have no time to sin, which makes it perhaps all the blacker in your eyes. But you know that I have in the shrine of my heart a madonna who sanctifies all. What have I said or done to you that should bring me all this Christian advice? I work so hard that I have not always time to sleep or, more alarming symptom, to write to you. A man so unfortunate is either the most guilty or the most innocent of men on earth; and in either case there's nothing to be done. Would you know what that means? I am weary of the life thus allotted to me, and, were it not for my duties, I would take another. I must have received many blows, be very tired of my fate, to abandon myself to chance, as I do to-day, with a character as strongly tempered as mine.

You have reticences about my affections which grieve me all the more because I cannot reply to them (the reticences), and you ask me superfluous questions about my health. Why have you not divined, with that grand perspicacious forehead of yours and your other attributes, that the unhappy are always robust in health? They can pass through seas, conflagrations, battles, bivouacs, and fresh plaster; they are always sound and well! Yes, I am perfectly well, without aches or pains, in my young house. Have no uneasiness as to that. Beyond a great and general fatigue after my excesses of work during the last fortnight, I am well, and if white hairs did not abound I should think I were the younger by ten years.

Mon Dieu! how I suffer when, in reading your letter, I see that you have suffered from my silence, and that you have taken to heart my anxieties and the agonies of my poor life. Do you know it? do you feel it? No—never see me, as you say, joyous and tranquil! When I write to you joyously all is at its worst, and I am trying to conceal how ill that is. When things are going ill with me if I do not write to you, it is because—No, I cannot write it to you; I will talk of it to you some day, and then you will regret having written to me some words that are sweet and cruel both in relation to my delayed letters. There are things that you will never divine. Do not fear that anything can change or diminish an attachment like mine. You think me light-minded, giddy; it makes me laugh. Believe, once for all, that he in whom you have been good enough to recognize some depth of thought, has depth in his heart, and that while he displays such courage in the battle he is fighting, there is just as great constancy in his affections. But you are ignorant of the claims of each day; the dreadful difficulties on which I spend myself. If you knew what wiles were necessary—like those of the "Mariage de Figaro"—to make that hosier pay four thousand francs for the thoughts and maxims of Napoleon; if you realized that my publishers will not give me money; that I am trying to break up that agreement; that to break it I must pay them fifty thousand francs; and that after believing that my life was secured and tranquil it is now more in peril than ever, you would not treat as folly my enterprise in Sardinia! Oh! I entreat you, do not advise or blame those who feel themselves sunk in deep waters and are struggling to the surface. Never will the rich comprehend the unfortunate. One must have been one's self without friends, without resources, without food, without money, to know to its depths what misfortune is. I have the knowledge of all that; and I no longer complain that I am the victim of a poor unfortunate man who, for food, sells a jest of mine that I may have said on the boulevard, but which, when published, forms a horrible attack upon me. I complain no longer of calumnies and insults; those poor unfortunates live upon them, and though I would rather die than live so, I have not the courage to blame them, for I know what it is to suffer.

However rare my letters are, they are the only ones that I write to-day (except those on business); and what quarrels and ill-will I have brought upon myself by not answering letters! You cannot know what a literary life busy as mine is must be. Whatever they tell you, or however my silence may appear to you, know this: that I work day and night; that the phenomenon of my production is doubled, trebled; that I have brought myself to correct a volume in a single night, and to write one in three days. The world is foolish. It thinks that a book is spoken. This grieves me only from you; I laugh with pity at others.

I have done eight works since the month of last November. Cara, each of those eight works would have foundered for a year the strongest of the French writers, who barely do half a volume a year. Among those eight I do not mention the book of love, of which I have told you something, which is there, on my table, beneath your letter; I have about twenty-five feuilles of that written. Neither do I speak of five "Contes Drolatiques" written within two months.

Mon Dieu! I have not one soul to understand me; I have never had but one. Poor, dear Madame de Berny came to see me daily in those days when she thought that I should perish beneath my burden. What would she say now if she saw it tenfold heavier? Yes, I work tenfold harder in 1838 than I did in 1828, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833. In those days I believed in fortune; to-day I believe in misery. There are men who want me to sell myself to the present order of things. I would rather die! I must have my freedom of speech.

When you speak to me of fatal death, such as that of your cousin, I call it happy death, for I do not believe we are placed here below for happiness. Withold was right; I pity his mother much; but he is happy, believe it.

You asked me when I shall calm that French fury which carried me to Italy, to Sardinia. Is not that asking me when I shall be imbecile? Do you expect a man who can write in five nights "Qui Terre a, Guerre a" or "César Birotteau" to measure his steps like a capitalist who takes his dog to walk on the boulevard, reads the "Constitutionnel," comes home to dinner, and plays billiards in the evening? I will allow you here five seconds to laugh at the most charming person in the world, who, to my thinking, is Madame Eve. Nothing remains now but to blame la furia which will take me to see certain Northern people in their steppe. Know, beautiful great lady, that if I abandoned myself to Providence, as you propose to me, Providence would already have put me in prison for debt; and I don't see that there is anything providential in a sojourn at Clichy. What would the plants that creep out of caves in search of the sun say if they heard a pretty dove asking them why they climbed that fissure to the air? You curse our civilization; I await you in Paris! But I would also like to know who are the impertinent people who write to you about me; and who think there is a sun for me elsewhere than in the North.