Alas, my dearest, I have not the time to finish this letter. The publisher of "Séraphita" is here. He wants it by new year's day. Nevertheless, I shall be on Sunday near you.
Adieu, my love; à bientôt, but that bientôt will not be till Sunday, 15th, for I have inquired, and the diligence starts only every other day, and takes three days and a half to get there. I have a world of things to tell you, but I can only send you my love, the sweetest and most violent of loves, the most constant, the most persistent, across space. O my beloved angel, do you speak to me again of our promise? Say nothing more to me about it. It is saintly and sacred like our mutual life.
Adieu, my angel. I cannot say to you "Calm yourself,"—I, who am so unhappy at these delays. You must suffer, for I suffer.
Geneva, December 25th, 1833.
I shall tell you all in a moment, my beloved, my idolatry. I fell in getting into the carriage, and then my valet fell ill. But we will not talk of that. In an instant I shall tell you more in a look than in a thousand pages. Do I love you! Why, I am near you! I would it had been a thousand times more difficult and that I should have suffered more. But here is one good month, perhaps two, won.
Not one, but millions of caresses. I am so happy I can write no more. À bientôt.
Yes, my room is very good, and the ring is like you, my love, delicious and exquisite.[1]
[1] At the end of this year, as this vitiated portion of the correspondence draws to a close, I shall venture to make a few comments on it.
Very early in life Balzac formed for himself a theory of woman and of love. See Memoir, p. 261. When I wrote that Memoir I was not aware of the character of these letters. I now see from certain of them (those from the time he received Mme. Hanska's first letter till he met her at Neufchâtel) that he kept that ideal before him up to his 34th year, making, apparently, various attempts to realize it, which failed (if we except one lifelong affection) until he met with Mme. Hanska. No one, I think, can read those letters, without recognizing that they are the expression of an ideal hope, in a soul striving to escape from the awful (it was nothing less than awful) struggle between its genius and its circumstances into the calmer heaven for which all his life he had longed. They are imaginative, rash to folly, but they are in keeping with his nature, his headlong need of expansion, and the elsewhere recorded desires of his spirit. That mind must be a worldly one, I think, that cannot see the truth about this man, clinging, through the turmoil of his life and of his nature, to his "star," and dying of exhaustion at the last. But what shall we think of the men who have not only shut their eyes to the purity of this story, the strongest testimony to which is in this very volume, but have used it to cast upon this man and this woman the glamour of "voluptuousness"?
Enough has been told in the Preface to prove: (1) deception; (2) the forgery of one passage; (3) the falsification of dates. Coupling those facts with the literary impossibility that Balzac ever wrote a portion of the letters just given, we are justified in believing that a certain number of the letters that here follow are forgeries.