Honoré de Balzac

“ Adieu; I must return to "Eugénie Grandet," who is going on well. I have still all Monday and a part of Tuesday.
Adieu, my angel of light; adieu, dear treasure; do not ill-treat me. I have a heart as sensitive as that of a woman can be, and I love you better or worse, for I rest without fear on your dear heart, and kiss your two eyes—all!
Adieu; à demain.
Paris, Wednesday, October 23, 1833.
To you, my love, to you a thousand tendernesses. Yesterday I was running about all day and was so tired that I permitted myself to sleep the night through, so that I made my idol only a mental prayer. ”

“ My love has neither exaltation, nor more, nor less, nor anything that is terrestrial. Oh! my dear Eve, it is the love of the angel always at the same degree of force, of exaltation. To feel, to touch your hand of love, that hand of soft, proud sentiments,—do you understand me, my angel, tender, kind, passionate,—that hand, polished and relaxed of love, that is a happiness as great as your caress of honey and of fire.
This is what I wished to say to my timid angel, who thought that all caresses were not solidaire. One, the lightest as the most passionate, comprises all. ”

“ Since I left Vienna all my sufferings, of all kinds, of all natures, have redoubled. Sighs sent through space, sufferings endured in secret, sufferings unperceived! My God! I who have never done ill, how many times have I said to myself, "One year of Diodati, and the lake!" How often have I thought, "Why not be dead on such a day, at such an hour?" Who is in the secret of so many inward storms, of so much passion lost in secret? Why are the fine years going, pursuing hope, which escapes, leaving nought behind but an indefatigable ardour of re-hoping? ”

“ Mon Dieu, I would not say to you wicked sophisms; I hate corruption as much as violation; I would not owe a woman to seduction, nor even to the power of good. The sentiment which crowns me with joy, which delights me, is the free and pure sentiment which yields neither to the grace of evil nor to the attraction of good; an involuntary sentiment, roused by intuitive perception and justified by happiness. You gave me all that; I lived in a clear heaven, and now you have flung me into the sorrows of doubt. To love, my angel, is to have nothing in the heart but the person loved. ”

“ Paris, Sunday, December 1, 1833, eleven o'clock.
My angel, I have just read your letter. Oh! I long to fall at your knees, my Eve, my dear wife! Never have a second of melancholy thought. Oh! you do not know me! As long as I live I will be your darling, I will respect in myself the heart you have chosen; I no longer belong to myself. There are no follies, no sacrifices; no, no, never! Oh! do not be thus, never talk to me of laudanum. I flung aside the proofs of "Eugénie Grandet" and sprang up as if to go to you. ”

“ Give the most gracious expression of my sentiments and remembrances to Monsieur Hanski, kiss Mademoiselle Anna in my name, and accept for yourself my respectful homage. Will you believe me, and not laugh at me if I tell you that, often, I see again your beautiful head in that landscape of the Île Sainte-Pierre, when, in the middle of my nights, weary with toil, I gaze into my fire without seeing it, and turn my mind to the most agreeable memories of my life? There are so few pure moments, free of all arrière-pensées, naïve as our own childhood, in this life. ”

“ There was never in the world an affection like it; space has no part in it; I have felt my heart beat violently when I read your account of the throbbing of yours. And that page in which you say such gracious truths about my deep, unalterable, infinite attachment to you leaves me with moist eyes. No, such a letter makes all acceptable, burdens, griefs, all miseries! Yes, dear, distant yet present star, rely on me as you would on yourself; neither I nor my devotion will fail you more than the life in your body. At my age, dear fraternal soul, what I say of life may be believed ”

“ My work has so absorbed me that I could not give you my thoughts; I am so weary, and for me life is such a desert! The only sentiment apparently true that dawns in my real life is a thousand leagues away from me. Does it not need all the power of a poet's heart to find consolation there; to say to itself amid such toil: "She will quiver with joy in seeing that her name has occupied me, that she herself was present to my thought, and that what I dwelt on as loveliest and noblest in that young girl I have named for her"? ”

“ You could never imagine the treasures of revery which glorify certain hours; there are some which fill my eyes with tears. My inward eyes behold those angular bronzes against which I struck my knees as I wound my way through your blue salon, and the little chair in which you reposed your dreamy thoughts! What power and happiness there is in these returns to a past which thus we see again. Such moments are more than life; for the whole of life is in this one hour withdrawn from real existence to the profit of these memories which flood my soul in torrents. ”

“ Already the hundred louis of Mademoiselle Eugénie Grandet have gone off in smoke. I must bear it all patiently, as Monsieur Hanski's sheep let themselves be sheared.
My rich love, what can I tell you to soothe your heart? That my tenderness, the certainty of your affection, the beautiful secret life you make me dwarfs everything and I laugh at my troubles—there are no longer any troubles for me. Oh! I love you, my Eva! love you as you wish to be loved, without limit. I like to say that to myself; imagine therefore the happiness with which I repeat it. ”

“ No, if I cannot have my beautiful dreamed-of life, I want nothing. Yesterday, all the treasures of furniture which I have collected were so many bits of wood and crockery to me! Poverty, were I alone, has attractions for me. I want nothing, except in relation to the secret object of my life; that object is the supreme motive of all my prayers, my steps, my efforts, my ideas, my toils, of the fame I seek to acquire, in short of my future and of all that I am. For thirteen years this aspiration has been the principle of my blood—for ideas and sentiments work through the blood. ”

“ There is one of your smiles of happiness, a ravishing little contraction, a paleness that takes you at the moment of joy, which returns to stab me with intoxicating memories. Oh! you do not know with what depth you correspond to the caprices, the loves, the pleasures, the poesies, the sentiments of my nature!
Come, adieu. Think, my beloved, that at every instant of the day a thought of love surrounds you; that a light more brilliant and secret gilds your atmosphere; that my thought is all about you; that my interior eyes see you; that a constant desire caresses you ”

“ Do you think that at sixty-four a man betrays thirty years' affection?
What! you think that the opera, the salons, fame can distract me from you? Then you don't know how I love you. I shall be more angry at that than you at Madame P... No, believe me, I love you as a woman loves and as a man loves. In my life to come there is nothing but you and work. My dear gift, my dear star, my sweet spirit, let yourself be caressed by hope, and say to yourself that I am not amorous or passionate; all that passes. I love you, I adore you in æternum. I believe in you as I do in myself. Mon Dieu! ”

“ The void it leaves might be filled by a present friendship, but afar, in spite of your letters, grief assails me at all hours, especially when at work. That other soul which counselled me, which saw all, which was always the point of departure of so many things, is lacking to me. I begin to despair of any happy future. Between that soul, absent for evermore, and the hopes to which I cling in some sweet hours, there is, believe me, an abyss above which I bend incessantly, and often the vertigo of misfortune mounts to my head. ”

“ Going to Neufchâtel I wanted to love you; returning from Geneva it is impossible not to love you!
Who will ever know what the road to Ferney is at the spot where, having to leave on the morrow, I stood still at the sight of your dear, saddened face. Mon Dieu! if I tried to tell you all the thoughts there are in my soul, the voluptuous pleasures which my heart contains and desires, I should never cease writing, and, unfortunately, the word "Vienna" is there. I am cruel to both of us in the name of a continued happiness ”

“ Dear fraternal soul, you are the saintly and noble and devoted being to whom a man confides his life and happiness with ample security. You are the pharos, the light-giving star, the sicura richezza, senza brama. I have understood you, even to your sadnesses, which I love. Among all the reasons which I find to love you—and to love you with that flame of youth which was the only happy moment of my past life—there is not one against my loving, respecting, admiring you. With you no mental satiety can exist: in that I say to you a great thing; I say the thing that makes happiness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I acknowledge that nothing surprises me more than to see you so troubled about things that you cannot change, you, whom I have always seen so submissive to the divine will, you, who have always walked straight before you without looking to one side or to the other, and still less behind you, where the past like a corpse is buried. Why not let yourself be led by the hand of God through the world and through life as you have done hitherto, advancing towards the future with that serenity, that calmness, that confidence, which a faith like yours should inspire? ”

“ I have not regretted a single word, and each time that my pen was drawn through one of them never was heart of man more deeply stirred. I thought I saw that grand and sublime woman, that angel of friendship, before me, smiling as she smiled to me when I used a strength so rare,—the strength to cut one's own limb off and feel neither pain nor regret in correcting, in conquering one's self. ”

“ Three or four days of happiness will make the months of absence more supportable. Oh! my treasure, what an abyss for me is tenderness. You are the principle of this frightful courage. Will you love my white hairs? Every one is astonished that any one can produce what I produce, and says that I shall die. No; three days near you is to recover life and strength for a thousand years!
Adieu; a thousand kisses. I have held this bit of vinca between my lips while writing. To thee, my white minette, and soon. A thousand tender caresses, and in each a thousand more! ”

“ What a noble life: love and thought! But what a misfortune to be in the embarrassments of poverty to the last moment! How dearly nature sells us happiness! I must go through another six months of toil, privation, struggle, to be completely happy. But how many things may happen in six months! My beautiful hidden life consoles me for all. You would shudder if I told you all my agonies, which, like Napoleon on a battlefield, I forget. ”

“ There comes a moment for the madness of hope; and I have reached it. I have so strained my life to this end that I feel all within me cracking. I would I did not think, and did not feel. Oh, how can I tell you of the hours I have sat, during these twenty days, leaning on my elbow, and looking at the salon in Petersburg and at Wierzchownia, those two poles of my thought, of which the south pole was before me in its frame. Hope and reality, the past, the future, jostled one another in a medley of memories that gave me a vertigo. ”

“ My soul, you have, through love, the delicious language of love which makes all griefs and annoyances fly away on wings. Loved angel, do not obscure with any doubt the inspirations of love of which your dear caress is but the interpreter. Do not think you can ever enter into comparison with any one, no matter who. But, my loved darling, my flower of heaven, do you not understand, you, all charm and all truth, that a poor poet can be struck at finding the same heart, at being loved beyond his hopes? ”

“ Mon Dieu! my jeweller is in the country; I have confidence in him only. Anna's cross will be delayed. That annoys me more than my own troubles at the end of the month. Your quince marmalade is on its way to Paris.
My dear treasure, I have no news to give you; I go nowhere, and see no one. You will find nothing but yourself in my letters, an inexhaustible love. Be prudent, my dear diamond. Oh! tell me that you will love me always, because, don't you see, Eva, I love you for all my life. ”

“ I weep tears of blood in thinking that she is necessarily in the country, while I am necessarily in Paris. Great sorrows are preparing for me. That gentle spirit, that dear creature who put me in her heart, like the child she most loved, is perishing, while our affection (that of her eldest son, and mine) can do nothing to allay her wounds? Oh! madame, if death takes this light from my life, be good and generous, receive me. I could think only of going to weep near you. You are the only person (Borget and Madame Carraud excepted) in whom I have found the true and sanctifying friendship. ”