Some one must have rewritten the letter. Some one has garbled it. There can be no question about this; the fact is there. It is not necessary for the vindication of Balzac's honour to inquire who did it; but it is plain that it was done.
It is therefore legitimate to suppose that the hand which garbled parts of the letter added the slanderous language of the first part.
Three years ago, in 1896, when "Roman d'Amour" first appeared, I added to the new edition of my "Memoir of Balzac" an appendix entitled "A Vindication of Balzac." It goes into more details connected with this slander than I can suitably put into this Preface, and I respectfully ask my readers to read it in the Memoir.
Now, to me who have lived in Balzac's mind for the last fifteen years as closely, perhaps, as any one now living, it is plain that the same hand that garbled the letter of October, 1833, has been at work on some of the letters in the present volume.
The simple story of these letters is as follows: In February, 1833, Balzac received a letter, posted in Russia, from a lady who signed herself "l'Étrangère" ["Foreigner">[. This letter is not known to exist; nor is there any authentic knowledge of its contents; but it began a correspondence between its writer and Balzac which ended in their marriage in 1850. It does not appear at what date Madame Hanska gave her name; it must have been quite early in the correspondence, although he never knew it exactly until the day he met her in September, 1833, at Neufchâtel.
The first reply from Balzac which is given is the first letter in the present volume, misdated January, 1833, a month before l'Étrangère's first letter was written; but it is plainly not the first reply he had made to her.
Eleven letters from Balzac follow the first, ending on the day (September 26, 1833) when he met Madame Hanska for the first time at Neufchâtel.
These twelve letters to an unknown woman are romantic; they are the letters of a poet, creating for himself an ideal love, and letting his imagination bear him along unchecked. From our colder point of view they seem, here and there, a little foolish, as addressed to a total stranger, but the impression conveyed of his own being, his nature, the troubles of his life and heart, is affecting and full of dignity. They are, moreover, the letters of a gentleman to a woman he respects. Owing to their false dates and to a forgery in the first letter (done undoubtedly to bring them into line with "Roman d'Amour"), they are open to suspicion; but Balzac's characteristics are in them, and I believe them to be, in spite of some interpolations, genuine.
But from the time that he meets Madame Hanska at Neufchâtel, a date which corresponds precisely with the garbled letter in "Roman d'Amour," the tone of the correspondence changes. For six months (from October to March) it becomes out of keeping with the respect which the foregoing letters, and the letters of all the rest of his life show that he felt for her. More especially is this true of the letters of January, February, and March. They are not in Balzac's style of writing; they present ideas that were not his, expressed in a manner that was not his; they contradict the impression given by all the other letters of his life; they contradict the letters of romantic ideal love that precede them; they contradict what every friend who knew Balzac closely has said of him; they contradict the known facts of the history of himself and Madame Hanska; they are, moreover, disloyal to friendship in a manner that Balzac's whole conduct in life, as evidenced in his correspondence, shows to have been impossible.
To bring the question home to ourselves—which of us, after reflection and comparison, can suppose that the paltry, immature, contemptibly vulgar stuff of the letters here designated as spurious ever came from the brain of the man who thought and wrote the "Comédie Humaine"?