Ten Novels And Their Authors (17 page)

To this letter he replied: ‘I think you’d better come to Paris and have an hour’s talk with me.’

His biographer says that since genius has its rights, the conduct of Balzac should not be judged by ordinary standards. That is a matter of opinion. I think it better to admit that he was selfish, unscrupulous and dishonest. The best excuse one can make for his financial shiftiness is that with his buoyant, optimistic temper he was always firmly convinced that he was going to make vast sums out of his writings (for the time he made a great deal) and fabulous amounts out of the speculations which one after another tempted his ardent imagination. But, whenever he actually engaged in one, the result was to leave him still more heavily in debt. He could never have been the writer he was if he had been sober, practical and thrifty. He was a show-off; he adored luxury, and he could not help spending money. He worked like a dog to fulfil his obligations, but, unfortunately, before ever he paid off his more pressing debts he had contracted new ones. There is one curious fact worth mentioning. It was only under the pressure of debt that he could bring himself to write. Then he would work till he was pale and worn out, and in these circumstances he wrote some of his best novels; but when by some miracle he was not in harrowing straits, when the brokers left him in peace, when editors and publishers were not bringing actions, his invention seemed to fail him and he could not bring himself to put pen to paper. He claimed to the end of his life that it was his mother who had ruined him; that was a shocking thing to say; for, it was he who had ruined her.

(3)

Balzac’s literary success brought him, as success does, many new friends; and his immense vitality, his radiant good humour, his charm, made him a welcome guest in all but the most exclusive
salons
. One great lady to be attracted by his celebrity was the Marquise de Castries, the daughter of the Duc de Maillé and niece of the Duc de Fitz-James, a direct descendant of James the Second. She wrote to him under an assumed name, he answered, and she wrote again disclosing her identity. He called upon her; he pleased, and presently he went to see her every day. She was pale, blonde, flower-like. He fell in love with her; but though she allowed him to kiss her aristocratic hands, she resisted his further advances. He scented himself, he put on new yellow gloves every day: it availed him nothing. He grew impatient and irritable, and began to suspect that she was playing with him. The fact is plain that she wanted an admirer and not a lover. It was doubtless flattering to have a clever young man, already famous, at her feet, but she had no intention of becoming his mistress. The crisis came at Geneva, where, with her uncle, Fitz-James, as a chaperon, she and Balzac were staying on their way to Italy. No one knows exactly what happened. Balzac and the Marquise went for an excursion, and he returned in tears. It may be supposed that he made summary demands on her, which she rejected in a manner that deeply mortified him. Pained and angry, feeling himself abominably used, he went back to Paris. But be was not a novelist for nothing; every experience, even the most humiliating, was grist to his mill; and Madame de Castries was to serve in future as a model for the heartless flirt of high rank.

While still laying fruitless siege to her, Balzac had received a fan-letter from Odessa signed
L’Étrangère
. A second, similarly signed, arrived after the break. He put an advertisement in the only French paper allowed to
enter Russia: ‘M. de B has received the communication sent to him; he has only this day been able by this paper to acknowledge it and regrets that he does not know where to send his reply.’ The writer was Eveline Hanska, a Polish lady of noble birth and great wealth. She was thirty-two, and married, but her husband was in the fifties. She had had five children by him, but only one, a girl, was living. She saw Balzac’s advertisement, and so arranged that she might receive his letters if he wrote to her in care of a bookseller at Odessa. A correspondence ensued.

Thus began what Balzac was wont to call the great passion of his life.

The letters soon grew intimate. In the high-flown manner of the time, Balzac so laid bare his heart as to arouse the lady’s pity and sympathy. She was romantic, and bored with the monotony of life in the great château in the Ukraine in the middle of fifty thousand acres of dull country. She admired the author, she was interested in the man. When they had been exchanging letters for a couple of years, Madame Hanska, with her elderly husband, who was in poor health, her daughter, a governess and a retinue of servants, went to Neufchâtel in Switzerland; and there, on her invitation, Balzac went too. There is a pleasant, but too fanciful, account of how they met. Balzac was walking in the public gardens when he saw a lady seated on a bench reading a book. She dropped her handkerchief, and on politely picking it up he noticed that the book was one of his. He spoke. It was the woman he had come to see. She was then a handsome creature, of somewhat opulent charms; her eyes were fine, though with ever so slight a cast, her hair was beautiful and her mouth ravishing. She may have been a trifle taken aback at the first sight of this short, fat, red-faced man, like a butcher to look at, who had written her such lyrical and passionate letters; but if she was, the brilliance of his gold-flecked eyes, his exuberant vitality, his animation,
the rare goodness of his heart, made her forget the shock, and in the five days he spent at Neufchâtel he became her lover. He was obliged to return to Paris, and they parted with the arrangement that they should meet again early in the winter at Geneva. He arrived for Christmas and passed six weeks there, during which, in the intervals of making love to Madame Hanska, he wrote
La Duchesse de Langeais
, in which he revenged himself on Madame de Castries for the affront she had made him suffer. He left Geneva with Madame Hanska’s promise to marry him when her spouse, whose health had not improved, left her a widow. Soon after getting back to Paris, however, Balzac met the Countess Guidoboni-Visconti and was immediately fascinated by her. She was an Englishwoman, an ash-blonde, and, notwithstanding her nationality, voluptuous; and notoriously unfaithful to her easygoing Italian husband. It was not long before she became Balzac’s mistress. But the romantics of those days conducted their love affairs in a blaze of publicity, and soon Eveline Hanska, then living in Vienna, heard what had happened. She wrote Balzac a letter full of bitter reproaches, and announced that she was about to return to the Ukraine. It was an appalling blow. He had been counting on marrying her on the death of her ailing lord, an event which he persuaded himself could not be long delayed, and being put in possession of her vast fortune. He borrowed two thousand francs and hurried off to Vienna to make his peace. He travelled as the Marquis de Balzac, with his bogus coat of arms on the luggage, and a valet; this added to the expense of the journey since, as a man of title, it was beneath his dignity to haggle with hotel-keepers and he had to give tips suitable to the rank he had assumed. He arrived penniless. Fortunately, Eveline was generous; but she did not forbear to heap more reproaches on him, and he had to lie his head off to allay her suspicions. Three weeks later she left for the Ukraine, and they did not meet again for eight years.

Balzac went back to Paris and resumed his relations with the Countess Guidoboni. For her sake, he indulged in extravagance greater than ever. He was arrested for debt, and she paid the sum necessary to save him from going to prison. Thenceforward, from time to time she came to his rescue when his financial situation was desperate. In 1836 to his real grief Madame de Berny, his first mistress, died; and he said of her that she was the only woman he had ever loved: others have said that she was the only woman who had ever loved him. In the same year the blonde Countess informed him that she was with child by him. When it was born, her husband, a tolerant man, remarked: ‘Well, I knew Madame wanted a dark child. So she’s got what she wanted.’ Of his other affairs, I will mention only one, with a widow called Hélène de Valette, because it began, as had those with Madame de Castries and Eveline Hanska, with a fan-letter. It is odd that three of his five chief love affairs should have so started. It may be that that is why they were unsatisfactory. When a woman is attracted to a man by his fame, she is too much concerned with the credit she may get through the connection with him to be capable of that blessed something of disinterestedness that genuine love evokes. She is a thwarted exhibitionist who snatches at a chance to gratify her instinct. The affair with Hélène de Valette lasted four or five years. Oddly enough, Balzac broke off his relations with her because he discovered that she was not so highly connected as she had led him to believe. He had borrowed a large sum from her, and after his death she tried, seemingly in vain, to get it back from his widow.

Meanwhile, he continued to correspond with Eveline Hanska. His early letters left no doubt about the nature of their relations, and two of them, which Eveline had left carelessly in a book, were read by her husband. Balzac, apprised of this embarrassing occurrence, wrote to M. Hanski and told him that they were merely a joke; Eveline
had taunted him with the fact that he could not write a love letter, and he had written those two to show how well he could. The explanation was thin, but M. Hanski apparently accepted it. After that, Balzac’s letters were sufficiently discreet, and it was only indirectly, expecting her to read between the lines, that he was able to assure Eveline that he loved her as passionately as ever and longed for the day when they could be united for the rest of their lives. The suggestion is plausible that during an absence of eight years, in which time, besides passing flutters, he had had two serious affairs, one with the Countess Guidoboni, the other with Hélène de Valette, his love for Eveline Hanska was somewhat less ardent than he pretended. Balzac was a novelist, and it is natural enough that, when he sat down to write a letter to her, he should have thrown himself into his character of the love-lorn swain as easily as when, wanting to give an example of Lucien de Rubempré’s literary gift, he threw himself into the character of a brilliant young journalist and wrote an admirable article. I have little doubt that when he wrote a love letter to Eveline he felt exactly what he eloquently said. She had promised to marry him on her husband’s death, and his future security depended on her keeping her word; no one can blame him if in his letters he forced the note a little. For eight interminable years Monsieur Hanski had enjoyed moderate health. He died suddenly. The moment Balzac had been so long awaiting arrived, and at last his dream was to come true. At last he was going to be rich. At last he was to be free of his petty bourgeois debts.

But the letter in which Eveline told him of her husband’s death was followed by another, in which she told him that she would not marry him. She could not forgive him his infidelities, his extravagance, his debts. He was reduced to despair. She had told him in Vienna that she did not expect him to be physically faithful so long as she had his heart. Well, that she had always had. He was
outraged by her injustice. He came to the conclusion that he could only win her back by seeing her, and so, after a good deal of correspondence, notwithstanding her marked reluctance, he made the journey to St. Petersburg, where she then was to settle her husband’s affairs. His calculations proved correct; both were fat and middle-aged; he was forty-three and she was forty-two; but it looked as though, such was his charm, such his vitality and the power of his genius, when with him she could refuse him nothing. They became lovers again, and again she promised to marry him. It was seven years before she kept her word. Why she hesitated so long has puzzled the biographers, but surely the reasons are not far to seek. She was a great lady, proud of her noble lineage, as proud as Prince Andrew in
War and Peace
was of his, and it is likely enough that she saw a great difference between being the mistress of a celebrated author and the wife of a vulgar upstart. Her family did all they could to persuade her not to contract such an unsuitable alliance. She had a marriageable daughter, whom it was her duty to settle in accordance with her rank and circumstances; Balzac was a notorious spendthrift; she may well have feared that he would play ducks and drakes with her fortune. He was always wanting money from her. He did not dip into her purse, he plunged both hands into it. She was rich, and herself extravagant, but it is very different to fling your money about for your own pleasure and to have someone else fling it about for his.

The strange thing is not that Eveline Hanska waited so long to marry Balzac, but that she married him at all. They saw one another from time to time, and as a result of one of these meetings she became pregnant. Balzac was enchanted. He thought he had won her at last and begged her to marry him at once; but she, unwilling to have her hand forced, wrote to tell him that after her confinement she intended to go back to the Ukraine to economise and would marry him later. The child was born dead. This
was in 1845 or 1846. She married Balzac in 1850. He had spent the winter in the Ukraine, and the ceremony took place there. Why did she at last consent? She didn’t want to marry him. She never had. She was a devout woman and at one time had seriously thought of entering a convent: perhaps her confessor urged her to regularise her unconventional situation. During the winter Balzac’s prolonged and arduous labour, his abuse of strong coffee, had at length shattered his vigorous constitution, and his health failed. Heart and lungs were affected. It was evident that he had not long to live. Perhaps Eveline was moved to pity for a dying man, who, notwithstanding his infidelities, had loved her so long. Her brother Adam Rzewuski wrote to beg her not to marry Balzac, and her reply is quoted by Pierre Descaves in
Les Cent Jours de M. de Balzac
: ‘No, no, no … I owe something to the man who has suffered so much by me and for me, whose inspiration and whose joy I have been. He is ill; his days are numbered! … He has been betrayed so often; I shall remain faithful to him, in spite of everything and notwithstanding everything, faithful to the ideal that he has made of me, and if, as the doctors say, he must soon die, let it be at least with his hand in mine, and with the image of me in his heart, and may his last glance be fixed on me, on the woman he has loved so much, and who has loved him so sincerely and so truly.’ The letter is moving, and I don’t see why we should doubt its sincerity.