Through the ‘usual channels of information’--I mean, of course, the
daily papers--many readers have become aware of the recent publication,
in the _Revue de Paris_, of a series of Balzac’s letters. But few
have understood their importance. Their interest for the student is
great, for in a revelation of their author, that is impressive and
almost final, they confirm to the full the view of Balzac which those
of us have taken (I took it myself in my little _Life_ of him in the
‘Great Writers’ Series) who have perceived that by his temperament and
inclination, as well as by his power, he is divided widely from those
more sordid and limited realists at whose head it was erewhile the
fashion to place him. Romance, it has been claimed--often by friend and
foe alike--Romance was Victor Hugo’s, Materialism was Balzac’s. And now
Balzac is found--and one has a right to be surprised, not of course at
the kind, but only at the degree of the manifestation--he is found
in mature years to be in his own conduct more simply and absolutely
romantic than the most visionary or most warm-hearted schoolgirl. He
works himself into a genuine and indescribably enthusiastic, but always
respectful, attachment to a young married woman whom he has never
seen, who inquires of him about his stories, who sends him _Thomas à
Kempis_ (which he translates later into the _Médecin de Campagne_:
‘c’est l’Evangile en action’), who writes to him confidentially for a
year or two before she meets him, who later receives him as her guest
in Russian Poland, and whom he marries at last, in 1850, only several
years after the death of her husband.
The facts that have been mentioned latest have been known since about
the time of the publication of the now familiar couple of volumes of
Balzac’s _Correspondence_. It is the earlier and most interesting part
of the story that is new. The report had previously been current that
Balzac had for the first time been made aware of Madame de Hanska’s
existence when he was staying at, or passing through, Neuchâtel,
in September 1833. She announced, so it was said, her wish to be
introduced to him on hearing that he was at the hotel; and this last
autumn (such is the vanity of human effort upon matters after all not
profoundly important), I established the fact, in concert with the
present proprietor of the Hôtel Belle Vue at Neuchâtel, that the old
but not yet disused Hôtel du Faucon must have been the hostelry in
which this memorable meeting took place. The ‘Faucon,’ which had been
built just in the middle of the little town but a few years before
the date of Balzac’s visit, was then the inn at which a traveller
of any importance was sure to descend--neither the ‘Belle Vue’ nor
the ‘Lac’ existed at that period. Let us take courage, however--our
trouble was not so useless as I had for a moment imagined it. The
actual meeting-place of two friends, two ‘lovers’ (in Walt Whitman’s
sense, at all events), is in the end at least as interesting as the
meeting-place of two strangers, who were to warm towards each other
only in future years. They met, then, we may fairly presume, at the
Faucon at Neuchâtel, but met after a correspondence by turns polite and
chivalrous, intimate and ardent.
It was no unusual thing for Balzac--the historian, above all things,
of men’s ambitions and of women’s hearts--to receive, together with
the compliments, the confessions of the fair. In our own age--an
age perhaps more enamoured of physical prowess and presence than
of intellectual or spiritual achievement--I have not heard that the
novelist or the successful writer of the short story is in constant
receipt of the confidences and eulogiums of women. These, I am
informed, when bestowed liberally on the stranger, are directed,
nowadays, in chief to the _jeune premier_ with a rapid action and a
well-made coat. But it was otherwise two generations ago; and Balzac,
sometimes complaining of the embarrassment, sometimes, on the other
hand, with not a little of honest pride in the circumstances that
caused it, avows himself endowed with the functions of a confessor. In
the two volumes of the well-known _Correspondence_ I have referred to
before, and in such other writings as have hitherto been accessible, it
is chiefly question of a certain anonymous ‘Louise,’ whom he never saw,
to whom he said many pretty things on writing-paper, and to whom he
was once minded to dedicate one of his stories. As a rule, I believe,
he left unanswered the letters of the stranger--felt, perhaps, that it
was enough that they should have been received, and, if they contained
anything that was noteworthy, registered, very likely, in the book of
his memory for possible employment in fiction. But now it is made clear
abundantly, that in the case of Evelina de Hanska, not only was there
correspondence, intimate if scarcely voluminous, before any personal
meeting, but likewise that by means of it such a tie was created, such
a mutual fascination formed, as could hardly with ease be broken. And
yet, what if when they met in the flesh there had been--as after all
there might have been--disillusionment! What if Evelina de Hanska had
proved as distasteful to Monsieur de Balzac as Anne of Cleves to the
experienced Henry!
He was in the best of all possible moods, however, to be impressed with
Madame de Hanska, during the period of their earliest correspondence;
for unquestionably he was wounded, unquestionably he was sore. Among
the friendships--verging sometimes on love-affairs--which Balzac
formed with women, two were at this moment in the crisis of their
fate. Many years before the existence of Madame de Hanska became known
to him, Balzac had been friend, trustful dependant, would-be lover,
probably--it is difficult to express the relationship--of a certain
Madame de Berny. She was a little older than he was, and she helped him
in money troubles when he was young enough to be able to accept her
assistance without shame, and she knew the world at a time when, if I
may proffer the phrase, he joined the inextinguishable simplicity of
the artist to the more prosaic simplicity of the inexperienced.
At Madame de Berny’s house in the Oise, Balzac had written his brief
and restrained masterpiece, _Le Curé de Tours_. Her difficult virtue,
and all her other qualities and characteristics, made, confessedly,
much of the interest of _Le Lys dans la Vallée_. That relationship of
theirs--into which, as I consider, a morbid element, an exaggerated
sentimentality, did at one time to some extent enter--was only wholly
broken by Madame de Berny’s death. For two years at least she was the
victim of a mortal illness. The illness began, and the depression
caused by it in Balzac began, about 1833.
But during the year 1832, Balzac, whose feeling towards Madame de
Berny--‘an angel at my side’--must with long years have somewhat
changed its character--during the year 1832 Balzac had passed through
an experience the end of which he speaks of, long afterwards, as ‘_un
des plus grands chagrins de ma vie_.’ And that was his experience
with the young Madame de Castries--the Duchesse de Castries she
became, in due time, some years later--a light of Parisian Society,
fully as fascinating in the quietude of Aix-les-Bains as amidst the
distractions of all the _salons_ of the capital. It is not from the
letters that Balzac wrote to her--not, at all events, from any that
have been published--that we know or can surmise how irresistible for
Balzac was her personal magnetism. It is rather from certain amongst
the letters sent by him to his life-long friend, his sister’s school
friend, Madame Zulma Carraud of Angoulême, that we are informed of the
effect of Madame de Castries’ dealings with him. She was at one time
a delight, then a disillusionment, and then (and, as it seems to me,
ever afterwards) a painful yet attractive memory. The rupture--never a
quarrel avowed to the outsider; never indeed a rupture that was quite
complete, or that was in any way explicable save under the supposition
that the lady of the _belle chevelure venitienne_ had a blonde’s
inconstancy and a Scottish caution--the rupture, such as it was,
occurred in the autumn of 1832, when Balzac, who was to have gone over
into Italy with the lady and her brother, parted from her at Geneva,
and consoled himself (let me be permitted to hope) as best he could, by
buying, at that famous dealer’s on the Quai des Bergues,[1] a little of
the ‘Carl Théodore’ (Frankenthal) porcelain that his soul loved. The
‘collector,’ I am informed, is heartless--but he has his compensations.
[1] Since moved to the Corratorie.
The second of the just published letters addressed to Madame de Hanska
contains sentences which are meaningless, if it is not to Madame de
Castries that they refer. ‘Only Heaven and I can ever understand the
frightful energy with which a heart must be endowed, if, being full
of tears that are repressed, it must suffice still for the labours of
writing.’ Again--and this time why should I translate?--the cry of a
moment: ‘_Toutes mes passions, toutes mes croyances, sont trompées._’
And he tells his correspondent that Madame Recamier at least never
sat, as was supposed, for Feodora.[2] ‘I met a Feodora once, but her
I shall never paint; besides, the _Peau de Chagrin_ was written long
before I met her.’[3] Yet again, ‘I made Feodora out of two women whom
I knew, but not intimately. Observation was enough for me--with a few
confidences to boot.’
[2] Feodora, the evil genius, one may say, of the _Peau de
Chagrin_.
[3] If this was Madame de Castries, the intention did not
always hold good, since more than touches of that charmer
there are supposed to be in the _Duchesse de Langeais_.
What Balzac seems to have been struck with, from the first, in Evelina
de Hanska, was her sincerity and oneness of purpose, the truth of
her devotion to his work, and a certain similarity, an immediate
sympathy, between his nature and hers. Much of his work, as he avows,
has been done to strike the public--to provide the public with that
without which it could scarcely accord him the attention he asked. But
‘certainly there are books in which I have loved to be myself; and you
will know well which they are, for they are those in which my heart has
spoken.’ When at length the two came together, at Neuchâtel in 1833--as
in Vienna, and in Russian Poland itself, in later years--there was
nothing, it seems, in either to diminish the interest or to break the
spell. And the fascination continued. I have for my own part a little
theory that the sympathy of the woman, her deep interest in his work,
her participation in it (_Séraphita_ and some kindred labour, whatever
be its defects, would never have existed but for that influence of
this mystic Northerner), gave the attachment, as far as Balzac was
concerned, something of the features of an attachment of consolation.
His early adoration, as I hold, his boyish passion, was for Madame de
Berny. And, in maturer years, his ideal, his very dream of beauty and
of charm, was Madame de Castries--Madame de Castries set, so to put it,
in the best of her backgrounds: Madame de Castries at Aix-les-Bains.
Never, I think, in Balzac’s life was that experience, or the force of
it, equalled. But in Evelina de Hanska, whether as friend or wife, he
discovered and obtained a steady rest--a rest the more assured, it may
be, because she entertained for him feelings of a deeper devotion than
any that were extended by that admirable and almost lifelong comrade,
his friend, his sister’s friend, the blameless and the wise Madame
Zulma Carraud.
An idealist, anyhow, Balzac was at the beginning; an idealist he
remained to the end. The ‘_amitiés d’épiderme_,’ as he excellently
called them, attracted him but little. In my short book about him,
in the ‘Great Writers’ Series, I tried to show that what he sought
for and obtained was the intimacy of the heart. Gautier knew this.
And one-sided indeed must be those people--whether the word of their
choice is intended for blame or for praise--who, judging either by life
or work, think that Balzac is properly described as ‘materialist’ or
‘realist,’ alone or chiefly. The Real, which is not always the hideous,
he was strong enough to face; yet Romance was essential to him. It is
time, now, that the sentimental and _soi-disant_ Romantic began to
understand that in Balzac there were depths of feeling and of poetry
to which they could never approach; and time also that those tiresome
disciples of mere ugliness in literary theme and literary treatment,
who account him their yet insufficient master, were informed, roundly,
that whatever the lessons he may half-incidentally have taught them,
nothing of Balzac’s greatness can ever fairly be claimed as supporting
or justifying the narrow limitations of their sordid sect and creed.
(_The Bookman_, March 1894.)