Читать книгу Letters to Madame Hanska, born Countess Rzewuska, afterwards Madame Honoré de Balzac, 1833-1846 - Honoré de Balzac - Страница 5

To Madame Hanska.

Paris, January, 1833.

Madame—I entreat you to completely separate the author from the man, and to believe in the sincerity of the sentiments which I have vaguely expressed in the correspondence you have obliged me to hold with you. In spite of the perpetual caution which some friends give me against certain letters like those which I have had the honour to receive from you, I have been keenly touched by a tone that levity cannot counterfeit. If you will deign to excuse the folly of a young heart and a wholly virgin imagination, I will own that you have been to me the object of the sweetest dreams; in spite of my hard work I have found myself more than once galloping through space to hover above the unknown country where you, also unknown, live alone of your race. I have taken pleasure in comprehending you among the remains almost always unfortunate of a dispersed people, a people scattered thinly over the earth, exiled perhaps from heaven, but of whom each being has language and sentiments to him peculiar and unlike those of other men—delicacy, choiceness of soul, chasteness of feeling, tenderness of heart, purer, sweeter, gentler than in the best of other created beings. There is something saintly in even their enthusiasms, and calm in their ardour. These poor exiles have all, in their voices, their words, their ideas, something, I know not what, which distinguishes them from others, which serves to bind them to one another in spite of distance, lands, and language; a word, a phrase, the very sentiment exhaled in a look are like a rallying call which they obey; and, compatriots of a hidden land whose charms are reproduced in their memories, they recognize and love one another in the name of that country toward which they stretch their arms. Poesy, music, and religion are their three divinities, their favourite loves; and all these passions awake in their hearts sensations that are equally powerful.

I have clothed you with all these ideas. I have held out to you my hand, fraternally, from afar, without conceit, without affectation, but with a confidence that is almost domestic, with sincerity; and could you have seen my glance you would have recognized within it both the gratitude of a lover and the religions of the heart—the pure tenderness that binds the son to a mother, the brother to a sister, the respect of a young man for woman, and the delightful hopes of a long and fervent friendship.

'T was an episode wholly romantic; but who will dare to blame the romantic? It is only frigid souls who cannot conceive all there is of vast in the emotions to which the unknown gives full scope. The less we are restrained by reality, the higher is the flight of the soul. I have therefore let myself gently float upon my reveries, and they are ravishing. So, if a star darts from your candle, if your ear should catch a distant murmur, if you see figures in the fire, if something sparkles or speaks beside you, near you, believe that my spirit is wandering among your panels.

Amid the battle I am fighting, amid my heavy toil, my endless studies, in this agitated Paris, where politics and literature absorb some sixteen or eighteen hours of the twenty-four, to me, an unfortunate man, widely different from the author that people imagine, come charming hours which I owe to you. So, in order to thank you, I dedicated to you the fourth volume of the "Scènes de la Vie privée," putting your seal at the head of the last "Scene," which I was writing at the moment when I received your first letter. But a person who is a mother for me, and whose caprices and even jealousy I am bound to respect, exacted that this silent testimony of secret sentiments should be suppressed. I have the sincerity to avow to you both the dedication and its destruction, because I believe you have a soul sufficiently lofty not to desire a homage which would cause grief to a person as noble and grand as she whose child I am, for she preserved me in the midst of griefs and shipwreck where in my youth I nearly perished. I live by the heart only, and she made me live! I have saved the only copy of that dedication for which I was blamed as if it were a horrible coquetry; keep it, madame, as a souvenir and by way of thanks. When you read the book say to yourself that in concluding it and revising it I thought of you and of the compositions which you have preferred to all the others. Perhaps what I am doing is wrong; but the purity of my intentions must absolve me.[1]

Lay the things that shock you in my works, madame, to the account of that necessity which forces us to strike powerfully a blasé public. Having undertaken, rashly no doubt, to represent the whole of literature by the whole of my works; wishing to erect a monument more durable from the mass and the amassing of materials than from the beauty of the edifice, I am obliged to represent everything, that I may not be accused of want of power. But if you knew me personally, if my solitary life, my days of study, privation, and toil were told to you, you would lay aside some of your accusations and perceive more than one antithesis between the man and his writings. Certainly there are some works in which I like to be myself; but you can guess them; they are those in which the heart speaks out. My fate is to paint the happiness that others feel; to desire it in perfection, but never to meet it. None but those who suffer can paint joy, because we express better that which we conceive than that we have experienced.

See to what this confidence has drawn me! But, thinking of all the countries that lie between us, I dare not be brief. Besides, events are so gloomy around my friends and myself! Civilization is threatened; arts, sciences, and progress are threatened. I myself, the organ of a vanquished party representing all noble and religious ideas, I am already the object of lively hatred. The more that is hoped from my voice, the more it is feared. And under these circumstances, when a man is thirty years old and has not worn out his life or his heart, with what passion he grasps a friendly word, a tender speech! …

Perhaps you will never receive anything from me again, and the friendship you have created may be like a flower perishing unknown in the depths of a wood by a stroke of lightning. Know, at least, that it was true, and sincere; you are, in a young and stainless heart, what every woman must desire to be—respected and adored. Have you not shed a perfume on my hours? Do I not owe to you one of those encouragements which make us accept hard toil, the drop of water in the desert?

If events respect me, and in spite of excursions to which my life as poet and artist condemn me, you can, madame, address your letters "Rue Cassini, No. 1, near the Observatory"—unless indeed I have had the misfortune to displease you by this candid expression of the feelings I have for you.

Accept, madame, my respectful homage.

[1] This publication of the "Scènes de la Vie privée" took place in May, 1832, nine months before Mme. Hanska's first letter reached Balzac. The above passage must therefore have been forged and interpolated here; probably to bring this letter into line with a tale in "Roman d'Amour" (pp. 55–59), which the same dates prove to be false.—TR.

Paris, end of January, 1833.

Pardon me the delay of my answer. I returned to Paris only in December last, and I found your letter in Paris awaiting me. But once here, I was sharply seized by crushing toil and violent sorrows.[1] I must be silent as to the sorrows and the toil. None but God and myself will ever know the dreadful energy a heart requires to be full of tears repressed, and yet suffice for literary labours. To spend one's soul in melancholy, and yet to occupy it ever with fictitious joys and sorrows! To write cold dramas, and keep within us a drama that burns both heart and brain! But let us leave all this. I am alone; I am now shut up at home for a long time, possibly a year. I have already endured these voluntary incarcerations in the name of science and of poverty; to-day, troubles are my jailers.

I have more than once turned my thought to you. But I must still be silent; these are follies. I have one regret; it is to have boasted to you of "Louis Lambert," the saddest of all abortions. I have just employed nearly three months in remaking that book, and it is now appearing in a little 18mo volume, of which there is a special copy for you; it will await your orders and shall be given, with the Chénier, to the person who calls for them; or they shall be sent wherever you write to me to forward them.

This work is still incomplete, though it bears this time the pompous title of "Histoire Intellectuelle de Louis Lambert." When this edition is exhausted, I will publish another "Louis Lambert" more complete.

I tell you naïvely all that you want to know about me. I am still waiting for you to speak to me with equal confidence. You are afraid of ridicule? And of whose? That of a poor child, victim yesterday and victim to-morrow of his feminine bashfulness, his shyness, his beliefs. You have asked me with distrust to give an explanation of my two handwritings; but I have as many handwritings as there are days in the year, without being on that account the least in the world versatile. This mobility comes from an imagination which can conceive all and yet remain virgin, like glass which is soiled by none of its reflections. The glass is in my brain. But my heart, my heart is known but to one woman in the world as yet—the et nunc et semper dilectæ dicatum of the dedication of "Louis Lambert." Ties eternal and ties broken! Do not blame me. You ask me how we can love, live, and lose each other while still loving. That is a mystery of life of which you know nothing as yet, and I hope you never may know it. In that sad destiny no blame can be attached except to fate; there are two unfortunates, but they are two irreproachable unfortunates. There is no fault to absolve because there is no cause to blame. I cannot add another word.

I am very curious to know if "La Femme abandonnée," "La Grenadière," the "Lettre à Nodier" (in which there are enormous typographical errors), the "Voyage à Java," and "Les Maranas" have pleased you? …

Some days after receiving this letter you will read "Une Fille d'Ève," who will be the type of the "La Femme abandonnée," taken between fifteen and twenty years of age.

At this moment I am finishing a work that is quite evangelical, and which seems to me the "Imitation of Jesus Christ" poetized. It bears an epigraph which will tell the disposition of mind I was in when writing the book: To wounded hearts, silence and shade. One must have suffered to understand that line to its full extent; and one must also have suffered as much as I have done to give birth to it in a day of mourning.

I have flung myself into work, as Empedocles into the crater, to stay there. "La Bataille" will come after "Le Médecin de campagne" (the book I have just told you of); and is there not something to shudder at when I tell you that "La Bataille" is an impossible book? In it I undertake to initiate the reader into all the horrors and all the beauties of a battle-field; my battle is Essling, Essling with all its consequences. This book requires that a man, in cold blood, seated in his chair, shall see the country, the lay of the land, the masses of men, the strategic events, the Danube, the bridges; shall behold the details and the whole of the struggle, hear the artillery, pay attention to all the movements on the chess-board; see all, and feel, in each articulation of the great body, Napoleon—whom I shall not show, or shall only allow to be seen, in the evening, crossing the Danube in a boat! Not a woman's head; cannon, horses, two armies, uniforms. On the first page the cannon roars, and never ceases until the last. You read through smoke, and, the book closed, you have seen it all intuitively; you remember the battle as if you had been present at it.

It is now three months that I have been measuring swords with that work, that ode in two volumes, which persons on all sides tell me is impossible!

I work eighteen hours a day. I have perceived the faults of style which disfigure "La Peau de Chagrin." I corrected them to make it irreproachable; but after two months' labour, the volume being reprinted, I discover another hundred faults. Such are the sorrows of a poet.

It is the same thing with "Les Chouans." I have rewritten that book entirely; but the second edition, which is coming out, has still many spots upon it.

On all sides they shout to me that I do not know how to write; and that is cruel when I have already told myself so, and have consecrated my days to new works, using my nights to perfect the old ones. Like the bears, I am now licking the "Scènes de la Vie privée" and the "Physiologie du Mariage;" after which I shall revise the "Études Philosophiques."

As all my passions, all my beliefs are defeated, as my dreams are dispersed, I am forced to create myself passions, and I choose that of art. I live in my studies. I wish to do better. I weigh my phrases and my words as a miser weighs his bits of gold. What love I thus waste! What happiness is flung to the winds! My laborious youth, my long studies will not have the sole reward I desired for them. Ever since I have breathed and known what a pure breath coming from pure lips was, I have desired the love of a young and pretty woman; yet all has fled me! A few years more and youth will be a memory! I am eligible to the Chamber under the new law which allows us to be men at thirty years of age, and certainly in a few years the recollections of youth will bring me no joys. And then, what hope that I could obtain at forty that which I have missed at twenty? She who is averse to me, being young, will she be less reluctant then? But you cannot understand these moans—you, young, solitary, living a country life, far from our Parisian world which excites the passions so violently, and where all is so great and so petty. I ought still to keep these lamentations in the depths of my heart. …

You have asked my friendship for a youth; I thought of you yesterday in fulfilling a promise of the same kind and devoting myself to a young man whom I hope to embark upon a fine and noble life. You are right; there is a moment in the life of young men when a friendly heart can be very precious. In the park of Versailles is a statue of "Achilles between Vice and Virtue," which seems to me a great work, and I have always thought, when looking at it, of that critical moment in human life. Yes, a young man needs a courageous voice to draw him to the life of manhood while allowing him to gather the flowers of passion that bloom along the wayside.

You will not laugh at me, you, who have written to me so noble a page and lines so melancholy, in which I have believed. You are one of those ideal figures to whom I give the right to come at times and nebulously pose amid my flowers, who smile to me between two camellias, waving aside a rosy heather, and to whom I speak.

You fear the dissipations of the winter for me? Alas! all that I know of the impressions I can produce, comes to me in a few letters from kind souls which set me glowing. I never leave my study, filled with books; I am alone, and I listen and wish to listen to no one. I have such pain in uprooting from my heart my hopes! They must be torn out, one by one, root by root, like flax. To renounce Woman!—my sole terrestrial religion!

You wish to know if I ever met Fedora; if she is true. A woman of cold Russia, the Princess Bagration, is supposed in Paris to be the model of her. I have reached the seventieth woman who has the coolness to recognize herself in that character. They are all of ripe age. Even Madame Récamier is willing to fedorize herself. Not a word of all that is true. I made Fedora out of two women whom I have known without ever being intimate with them. Observation sufficed me, and a few confidences.

There are also some kind souls who will have it that I have courted the handsomest of Parisian courtesans and have hid, like Raphael, behind her curtains. These are calumnies. I have met a Fedora; but that one I shall not paint; besides, the "La Peau de chagrin" was published before I knew her.

I must bid you adieu, and what an adieu! This letter may be a month on its way; you will hold it in your hands, but I may never see you—you whom I caress as an illusion, who are in my dreams like a hope, and who have so graciously embodied my reveries. You do not know what it is to people the solitude of a poet with a gentle figure, the form of which attracts by the very vagueness which the indefinite lends it. A solitary, ardent heart takes eagerly to a chimera when it is real! How many times I have travelled the road that separates us! what delightful romances! and what postal charges do I not spend at my fireside!

Adieu, then; I have given you a whole night, a night which belonged to my legitimate wife, the "Revue de Paris," that crabbed spouse. Consequently the "Théorie de la Démarche," which I owed to her must be postponed till the month of March, and no one will know why; you and I alone are in the secret. The article was there before me—a science to elucidate; it was arduous, I was afraid of it. Your letter slipped into my memory, and suddenly I put my feet to the embers, forgot myself in my arm-chair—and adieu "La Démarche;" behold me galloping towards Poland, and re-reading your letters (I have but three)—and now I answer them. I defy you to read two months hence the "Théorie de la Démarche" without smiling at every sentence; because beneath those senseless foolish phrases there are a thousand thoughts of you.

Adieu. I have so little time that you must absolve me. There are but three persons whose letters I answer. This sounds a little like French conceit, and yet it is really most delicate in the way of modesty. More than that, I meant to tell you that you are almost alone in my heart, grandparents excepted.

Adieu. If my rose-tree were not out of bloom I would send you a petal. If you were less fairy-like, less capricious, less mysterious, I would say "write to me often."

P.S. The black seal was an accident. I was not at home, and the friend with whom I was staying at Angoulême was in mourning.