No More Learning

It has been said of Feuillet that he was a sort of "domesticated
Musset. " At any rate, he was far less sensitive than Musset, and George
Sand was about seventeen years his senior. They parted after a short
time, she going her way as a writer of novels that were very different
from her earlier ones, while Feuillet grew more and more cynical and
even stern, as he lashed the abnormal, neuropathic men and women about
him.

The last great emotional crisis in George Sand's life was that which
centers around her relations with Frederic Chopin. Chopin was the
greatest genius who ever loved her. It is rather odd that he loved her.
She had known him for two years, and had not seriously thought of him,
though there is a story that when she first met him she kissed him
before he had even been presented to her. She waited two years, and in
those two years she had three lovers. Then at last she once more met
Chopin, when he was in a state of melancholy, because a Polish girl had
proved unfaithful to him.

It was the psychological moment; for this other woman, who was a
devourer of hearts, found him at a piano, improvising a lamentation.
George Sand stood beside him, listening. When he finished and looked up
at her, their eyes met. She bent down without a word and kissed him on
the lips.

What was she like when he saw her then? Grenier has described her in
these words:

She was short and stout, but her face attracted all my attention, the
eyes especially. They were wonderful eyes--a little too close together,
it may be, large, with full eyelids, and black, very black, but by no
means lustrous; they reminded me of unpolished marble, or rather of
velvet, and this gave a strange, dull, even cold expression to her
countenance. Her fine eyebrows and these great placid eyes gave her an
air of strength and dignity which was not borne out by the lower part of
her face. Her nose was rather thick and not over shapely. Her mouth was
also rather coarse, and her chin small. She spoke with great simplicity,
and her manners were very quiet.

Such as she was, she attached herself to Chopin for eight years. At
first they traveled together very quietly to Majorca; and there, just as
Musset had fallen ill at Venice, Chopin became feverish and an invalid.
"Chopin coughs most gracefully," George Sand wrote of him, and again:

Chopin is the most inconstant of men. There is nothing permanent about
him but his cough.

It is not surprising if her nerves sometimes gave way. Acting as sick
nurse, writing herself with rheumatic fingers, robbed by every one about
her, and viewed with suspicion by the peasants because she did not go
to church, she may be perhaps excused for her sharp words when, in fact,
her deeds were kind.

Afterward, with Chopin, she returned to Paris, and the two lived openly
together for seven years longer. An immense literature has grown around
the subject of their relations. To this literature George Sand herself
contributed very largely. Chopin never wrote a word; but what he failed
to do, his friends and pupils did unsparingly.

Probably the truth is somewhat as one might expect. During the first
period of fascination, George Sand was to Chopin what she had been to
Sandeau and to Musset; and with her strange and subtle ways, she had
undermined his health. But afterward that sort of love died out, and was
succeeded by something like friendship. At any rate, this woman showed,
as she had shown to others, a vast maternal kindness. She writes to him
finally as "your old woman," and she does wonders in the way of nursing
and care.

But in 1847 came a break between the two. Whatever the mystery of it may
be, it turns upon what Chopin said of Sand:

"I have never cursed any one, but now I am so weary of life that I am
near cursing her. Yet she suffers, too, and more, because she grows
older as she grows more wicked. "

In 1848, Chopin gave his last concert in Paris, and in 1849 he died.
According to some, he was the victim of a Messalina. According to
others, it was only "Messalina" that had kept him alive so long.

However, with his death came a change in the nature of George Sand.
Emotionally, she was an extinct volcano. Intellectually, she was at
her very best. She no longer tore passions into tatters, but wrote
naturally, simply, stories of country life and tales for children.
In one of her books she has given an enduring picture of the
Franco-Prussian War. There are many rather pleasant descriptions of her
then, living at Nohant, where she made a curious figure, bustling about
in ill-fitting costumes, and smoking interminable cigarettes.

She had lived much, and she had drunk deep of life, when she died in
1876. One might believe her to have been only a woman of perpetual
liaisons. Externally she was this, and yet what did Balzac, that great
master of human psychology, write of her in the intimacy of a private
correspondence?

She is a female bachelor. She is an artist. She is generous. She is
devoted. She is chaste. Her dominant characteristics are those of a man,
and therefore, she is not to be regarded as a woman. She is an excellent
mother, adored by her children. Morally, she is like a lad of twenty;
for in her heart of hearts, she is more than chaste--she is a prude. It
is only in externals that she comports herself as a Bohemian. All her
follies are titles to glory in the eyes of those whose souls are noble.

A curious verdict this! Her love-life seems almost that of neither man
nor woman, but of an animal. Yet whether she was in reality responsible
for what she did, when we consider her strange heredity, her wretched
marriage, the disillusions of her early life--who shall sit in judgment
on her, since who knows all?





THE MYSTERY OF CHARLES DICKENS


Perhaps no public man in the English-speaking world, in the last
century, was so widely and intimately known as Charles Dickens. From
his eighteenth year, when he won his first success in journalism, down
through his series of brilliant triumphs in fiction, he was more and
more a conspicuous figure, living in the blaze of an intense publicity.
He met every one and knew every one, and was the companion of every
kind of man and woman. He loved to frequent the "caves of harmony" which
Thackeray has immortalized, and he was a member of all the best Bohemian
clubs of London. Actors, authors, good fellows generally, were his
intimate friends, and his acquaintance extended far beyond into the
homes of merchants and lawyers and the mansions of the proudest nobles.
Indeed, he seemed to be almost a universal friend.

One remembers, for instance, how he was called in to arbitrate between
Thackeray and George Augustus Sala, who had quarreled. One remembers how
Lord Byron's daughter, Lady Lovelace, when upon her sick-bed, used to
send for Dickens because there was something in his genial, sympathetic
manner that soothed her. Crushing pieces of ice between her teeth in
agony, she would speak to him and he would answer her in his rich, manly
tones until she was comforted and felt able to endure more hours of pain
without complaint.

Dickens was a jovial soul. His books fairly steam with Christmas cheer
and hot punch and the savor of plum puddings, very much as do his
letters to his intimate friends. Everybody knew Dickens. He could
not dine in public without attracting attention. When he left the
dining-room, his admirers would descend upon his table and carry off
egg-shells, orange-peels, and other things that remained behind, so that
they might have memorials of this much-loved writer. Those who knew him
only by sight would often stop him in the streets and ask the
privilege of shaking hands with him; so different was he from--let us
say--Tennyson, who was as great an Englishman in his way as Dickens, but
who kept himself aloof and saw few strangers.

It is hard to associate anything like mystery with Dickens, though
he was fond of mystery as an intellectual diversion, and his last
unfinished novel was The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Moreover, no one
admired more than he those complex plots which Wilkie Collins used
to weave under the influence of laudanum. But as for his own life, it
seemed so normal, so free from anything approaching mystery, that we can
scarcely believe it to have been tinged with darker colors than those
which appeared upon the surface.

A part of this mystery is plain enough. The other part is still
obscure--or of such a character that one does not care to bring it
wholly to the light. It had to do with his various relations with women.

The world at large thinks that it knows this chapter in the life of
Dickens, and that it refers wholly to his unfortunate disagreement with
his wife. To be sure, this is a chapter that is writ large in all of his
biographies, and yet it is nowhere correctly told. His chosen biographer
was John Forster, whose Life of Charles Dickens, in three volumes,
must remain a standard work; but even Forster--we may assume through
tact--has not set down all that he could, although he gives a clue.

As is well known, Dickens married Miss Catherine Hogarth when he
was only twenty-four. He had just published his Sketches by Boz, the
copyright of which he sold for one hundred pounds, and was beginning the
Pickwick Papers. About this time his publisher brought N. P. Willis
down to Furnival's Inn to see the man whom Willis called "a young
paragraphist for the Morning Chronicle. " Willis thus sketches Dickens
and his surroundings:

In the most crowded part of Holborn, within a door or two of the Bull
and Mouth Inn, we pulled up at the entrance of a large building used
for lawyers' chambers. I followed by a long flight of stairs to an upper
story, and was ushered into an uncarpeted and bleak-looking room, with
a deal table, two or three chairs and a few books, a small boy and Mr.
Dickens for the contents.

I was only struck at first with one thing--and I made a memorandum of
it that evening as the strongest instance I had seen of English
obsequiousness to employers--the degree to which the poor author was
overpowered with the honor of his publisher's visit! I remember saying
to myself, as I sat down on a rickety chair:

"My good fellow, if you were in America with that fine face and
your ready quill, you would have no need to be condescended to by a
publisher. "

Dickens was dressed very much as he has since described Dick Swiveller,
minus the swell look. His hair was cropped close to his head, his
clothes scant, though jauntily cut, and, after changing a ragged
office-coat for a shabby blue, he stood by the door, collarless and
buttoned up, the very personification of a close sailer to the wind.

Before this interview with Willis, which Dickens always repudiated, he
had become something of a celebrity among the newspaper men with whom he
worked as a stenographer. As every one knows, he had had a hard time in
his early years, working in a blacking-shop, and feeling too keenly the
ignominious position of which a less sensitive boy would probably have
thought nothing. Then he became a shorthand reporter, and was busy at
his work, so that he had little time for amusements.

It has been generally supposed that no love-affair entered his life
until he met Catherine Hogarth, whom he married soon after making her
acquaintance. People who are eager at ferreting out unimportant facts
about important men had unanimously come to the conclusion that up to
the age of twenty Dickens was entirely fancy-free. It was left to an
American to disclose the fact that this was not the case, but that even
in his teens he had been captivated by a girl of about his own age.

Inasmuch as the only reproach that was ever made against Dickens was
based upon his love-affairs, let us go back and trace them from this
early one to the very last, which must yet for some years, at least,
remain a mystery.

Everything that is known about his first affair is contained in a book
very beautifully printed, but inaccessible to most readers. Some years
ago Mr. William K. Bixby, of St. Louis, found in London a collector of
curios. This man had in his stock a number of letters which had passed
between a Miss Maria Beadnell and Charles Dickens when the two were
about nineteen and a second package of letters representing a later
acquaintance, about 1855, at which time Miss Beadnell had been married
for a long time to a Mr. Henry Louis Winter, of 12 Artillery Place,
London.

The copyright laws of Great Britain would not allow Mr. Bixby to publish
the letters in that country, and he did not care to give them to the
public here. Therefore, he presented them to the Bibliophile Society,
with the understanding that four hundred and ninety-three copies, with
the Bibliophile book-plate, were to be printed and distributed among
the members of the society. A few additional copies were struck off,
but these did not bear the Bibliophile book-plate. Only two copies are
available for other readers, and to peruse these it is necessary to
visit the Congressional Library in Washington, where they were placed on
July 24, 1908.

These letters form two series--the first written to Miss Beadnell in
or about 1829, and the second written to Mrs. Winter, formerly Miss
Beadnell, in 1855.

The book also contains an introduction by Henry H. Harper, who sets
forth some theories which the facts, in my opinion, do not support;
and there are a number of interesting portraits, especially one of Miss
Beadnell in 1829--a lovely girl with dark curls. Another shows her in
1855, when she writes of herself as "old and fat"--thereby doing herself
a great deal of injustice; for although she had lost her youthful
beauty, she was a very presentable woman of middle age, but one who
would not be particularly noticed in any company.

Summing up briefly these different letters, it may be said that in
the first set Dickens wrote to the lady ardently, but by no means
passionately. From what he says it is plain enough that she did not
respond to his feeling, and that presently she left London and went to
Paris, for her family was well-to-do, while Dickens was living from hand
to mouth.

In the second set of letters, written long afterward, Mrs. Winter seems
to have "set her cap" at the now famous author; but at that time he was
courted by every one, and had long ago forgotten the lady who had so
easily dismissed him in his younger days. In 1855, Mrs. Winter seems to
have reproached him for not having been more constant in the past; but
he replied:

You answered me coldly and reproachfully, and so I went my way.

Mr. Harper, in his introduction, tries very hard to prove that in
writing David Copperfield Dickens drew the character of Dora from Miss
Beadnell. It is a dangerous thing to say from whom any character in
a novel is drawn. An author takes whatever suits his purpose in
circumstance and fancy, and blends them all into one consistent whole,
which is not to be identified with any individual. There is little
reason to think that the most intimate friends of Dickens and of his
family were mistaken through all the years when they were certain that
the boy husband and the girl wife of David Copperfield were suggested by
any one save Dickens himself and Catherine Hogarth.

Why should he have gone back to a mere passing fancy, to a girl who
did not care for him, and who had no influence on his life, instead
of picturing, as David's first wife, one whom he deeply loved, whom he
married, who was the mother of his children, and who made a great part
of his career, even that part which was inwardly half tragic and wholly
mournful?

Miss Beadnell may have been the original of Flora in Little Dorrit,
though even this is doubtful. The character was at the time ascribed
to a Miss Anna Maria Leigh, whom Dickens sometimes flirted with and
sometimes caricatured.

When Dickens came to know George Hogarth, who was one of his
colleagues on the staff of the Morning Chronicle, he met Hogarth's
daughters--Catherine, Georgina, and Mary--and at once fell ardently in
love with Catherine, the eldest and prettiest of the three. He himself
was almost girlish, with his fair complexion and light, wavy hair, so
that the famous sketch by Maclise has a remarkable charm; yet nobody
could really say with truth that any one of the three girls was
beautiful. Georgina Hogarth, however, was sweet-tempered and of a
motherly disposition. It may be that in a fashion she loved Dickens
all her life, as she remained with him after he parted from her sister,
taking the utmost care of his children, and looking out with unselfish
fidelity for his many needs.

It was Mary, however, the youngest of the Hogarths, who lived with the
Dickenses during the first twelvemonth of their married life. To Dickens
she was like a favorite sister, and when she died very suddenly, in her
eighteenth year, her loss was a great shock to him.

It was believed for a long time--in fact, until their separation--that
Dickens and his wife were extremely happy in their home life. His
writings glorified all that was domestic, and paid many tender tributes
to the joys of family affection. When the separation came the whole
world was shocked. And yet rather early in Dickens's married life there
was more or less infelicity. In his Retrospections of an Active Life,
Mr. John Bigelow writes a few sentences which are interesting for their
frankness, and which give us certain hints:

Mrs. Dickens was not a handsome woman, though stout, hearty, and
matronly; there was something a little doubtful about her eye, and
I thought her endowed with a temper that might be very violent when
roused, though not easily rousable. Mrs. Caulfield told me that a
Miss Teman--I think that is the name--was the source of the difficulty
between Mrs. Dickens and her husband. She played in private theatricals
with Dickens, and he sent her a portrait in a brooch, which met with
an accident requiring it to be sent to the jeweler's to be mended. The
jeweler, noticing Mr. Dickens's initials, sent it to his house. Mrs.
Dickens's sister, who had always been in love with him and was jealous
of Miss Teman, told Mrs. Dickens of the brooch, and she mounted her
husband with comb and brush. This, no doubt, was Mrs. Dickens's version,
in the main.

A few evenings later I saw Miss Teman at the Haymarket Theatre, playing
with Buckstone and Mr. and Mrs. Charles Mathews. She seemed rather a
small cause for such a serious result--passably pretty, and not much of
an actress.

Here in one passage we have an intimation that Mrs. Dickens had a
temper that was easily roused, that Dickens himself was interested in
an actress, and that Miss Hogarth "had always been in love with him, and
was jealous of Miss Teman. "

Some years before this time, however, there had been growing in the mind
of Dickens a certain formless discontent--something to which he could
not give a name, yet which, cast over him the shadow of disappointment.
He expressed the same feeling in David Copperfield, when he spoke of
David's life with Dora. It seemed to come from the fact that he had
grown to be a man, while his wife had still remained a child.

A passage or two may be quoted from the novel, so that we may set them
beside passages in Dickens's own life, which we know to have referred to
his own wife, and not to any such nebulous person as Mrs. Winter.

The shadow I have mentioned that was not to be between us any more,
but was to rest wholly on my heart--how did that fall? The old unhappy
feeling pervaded my life. It was deepened, if it were changed at all;
but it was as undefined as ever, and addressed me like a strain of
sorrowful music faintly heard in the night. I loved my wife dearly; but
the happiness I had vaguely anticipated, once, was not the happiness I
enjoyed, AND THERE WAS ALWAYS SOMETHING WANTING.

What I missed I still regarded as something that had been a dream of
my youthful fancy; that was incapable of realization; that I was now
discovering to be so, with some natural pain, as all men did. But that
it would have been better for me if my wife could have helped me more,
and shared the many thoughts in which I had no partner, and that this
might have been I knew.

What I am describing slumbered and half awoke and slept again in the
innermost recesses of my mind. There was no evidence of it to me; I knew
of no influence it had in anything I said or did. I bore the weight of
all our little cares and all my projects.

"There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and
purpose. " These words I remembered. I had endeavored to adapt Dora to
myself, and found it impracticable. It remained for me to adapt myself
to Dora; to share with her what I could, and be happy; to bear on my own
shoulders what I must, and be still happy.

Thus wrote Dickens in his fictitious character, and of his fictitious
wife. Let us see how he wrote and how he acted in his own person, and of
his real wife.

As early as 1856, he showed a curious and restless activity, as of one
who was trying to rid himself of unpleasant thoughts. Mr. Forster
says that he began to feel a strain upon his invention, a certain
disquietude, and a necessity for jotting down memoranda in note-books,
so as to assist his memory and his imagination. He began to long
for solitude. He would take long, aimless rambles into the country,
returning at no particular time or season. He once wrote to Forster:

I have had dreadful thoughts of getting away somewhere altogether by
myself. If I could have managed it, I think I might have gone to the
Pyrenees for six months. I have visions of living for half a year or so
in all sorts of inaccessible places, and of opening a new book therein.
A floating idea of going up above the snow-line, and living in some
astonishing convent, hovers over me.

What do these cryptic utterances mean? At first, both in his novel and
in his letters, they are obscure; but before long, in each, they become
very definite. In 1856, we find these sentences among his letters:

The old days--the old days! Shall I ever, I wonder, get the frame of
mind back as it used to be then?
Something of it, perhaps, but never
quite as it used to be.

I find that the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big
one.

His next letter draws the veil and shows plainly what he means:

Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help
for it. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that
I make her so, too--and much more so. We are strangely ill-assorted for
the bond that exists between us.

Then he goes on to say that she would have been a thousand times happier
if she had been married to another man. He speaks of "incompatibility,"
and a "difference of temperaments. " In fact, it is the same old story
with which we have become so familiar, and which is both as old as the
hills and as new as this morning's newspaper.

Naturally, also, things grow worse, rather than better. Dickens comes to
speak half jocularly of "the plunge," and calculates as to what effect
it will have on his public readings. He kept back the announcement of
"the plunge" until after he had given several readings; then, on April
29, 1858, Mrs. Dickens left his home. His eldest son went to live with
the mother, but the rest of the children remained with their father,
while his daughter Mary nominally presided over the house. In the
background, however, Georgina Hogarth, who seemed all through her life
to have cared for Dickens more than for her sister, remained as a sort
of guide and guardian for his children.

This arrangement was a private matter, and should not have been brought
to public attention; but it was impossible to suppress all gossip about
so prominent a man. Much of the gossip was exaggerated; and when it came
to the notice of Dickens it stung him so severely as to lead him into
issuing a public justification of his course. He published a
statement in Household Words, which led to many other letters in other
periodicals, and finally a long one from him, which was printed in the
New York Tribune, addressed to his friend Mr. Arthur Smith.

Dickens afterward declared that he had written this letter as a strictly
personal and private one, in order to correct false rumors and scandals.
Mr. Smith naturally thought that the statement was intended for
publication, but Dickens always spoke of it as "the violated letter. "

By his allusions to a difference of temperament and to incompatibility,
Dickens no doubt meant that his wife had ceased to be to him the same
companion that she had been in days gone by. As in so many cases, she
had not changed, while he had. He had grown out of the sphere in which
he had been born, "associated with blacking-boys and quilt-printers,"
and had become one of the great men of his time, whose genius was
universally admired.

Mr. Bigelow saw Mrs. Dickens as she really was--a commonplace woman
endowed with the temper of a vixen, and disposed to outbursts of actual
violence when her jealousy was roused.

It was impossible that the two could have remained together, when in
intellect and sympathy they were so far apart. There is nothing strange
about their separation, except the exceedingly bad taste with which
Dickens made it a public affair. It is safe to assume that he felt the
need of a different mate; and that he found one is evident enough from
the hints and bits of innuendo that are found in the writings of his
contemporaries.

He became a pleasure-lover; but more than that, he needed one who could
understand his moods and match them, one who could please his tastes,
and one who could give him that admiration which he felt to be his due;
for he was always anxious to be praised, and his letters are full of
anecdotes relating to his love of praise.

One does not wish to follow out these clues too closely. It is certain
that neither Miss Beadnell as a girl nor Mrs. Winter as a matron made
any serious appeal to him. The actresses who have been often mentioned
in connection with his name were, for the most part, mere passing
favorites. The woman who in life was Dora made him feel the same
incompleteness that he has described in his best-known book. The
companion to whom he clung in his later years was neither a light-minded
creature like Miss Beadnell, nor an undeveloped, high-tempered woman
like the one he married, nor a mere domestic, friendly creature like
Georgina Hogarth.

Ought we to venture upon a quest which shall solve this mystery in the
life of Charles Dickens! In his last will and testament, drawn up and
signed by him about a year before his death, the first paragraph reads
as follows:

I, Charles Dickens, of Gadshill Place, Higham, in the county of Kent,
hereby revoke all my former wills and codicils and declare this to be my
last will and testament. I give the sum of one thousand pounds, free
of legacy duty, to Miss Ellen Lawless Ternan, late of Houghton Place,
Ampthill Square, in the county of Middlesex.

In connection with this, read Mr. John Bigelow's careless jottings made
some fifteen years before. Remember the Miss "Teman," about whose name
he was not quite certain; the Hogarth sisters' dislike of her; and the
mysterious figure in the background of the novelist's later life. Then
consider the first bequest in his will, which leaves a substantial
sum to one who was neither a relative nor a subordinate, but--may we
assume--more than an ordinary friend?





HONORE DE BALZAC AND EVELINA HANSKA


I remember once, when editing an elaborate work on literature, that the
publisher called me into his private office. After the door was closed,
he spoke in tones of suppressed emotion.

"Why is it," said he, "that you have such a lack of proportion? In the
selection you have made I find that only two pages are given to George
P. Morris, while you haven't given E. P. Roe any space at all! Yet, look
here--you've blocked out fifty pages for Balzac, who was nothing but an
immoral Frenchman! "

I adjusted this difficulty, somehow or other--I do not just remember
how--and began to think that, after all, this publisher's view of things
was probably that of the English and American public. It is strange that
so many biographies and so many appreciations of the greatest novelist
who ever lived should still have left him, in the eyes of the reading
public, little more than "an immoral Frenchman. "

"In Balzac," said Taine, "there was a money-broker, an archeologist, an
architect, an upholsterer, a tailor, an old-clothes dealer, a journeyman
apprentice, a physician, and a notary. " Balzac was also a mystic, a
supernaturalist, and, above all, a consummate artist. No one who is all
these things in high measure, and who has raised himself by his genius
above his countrymen, deserves the censure of my former publisher.

Still less is Balzac to be dismissed as "immoral," for his life was one
of singular self-sacrifice in spite of much temptation. His face was
strongly sensual, his look and bearing denoted almost savage power; he
led a free life in a country which allowed much freedom; and yet
his story is almost mystic in its fineness of thought, and in its
detachment, which was often that of another world.

Balzac was born in 1799, at Tours, with all the traits of the people
of his native province--fond of eating and drinking, and with plenty of
humor. His father was fairly well off. Of four children, our Balzac was
the eldest. The third was his sister Laure, who throughout his life was
the most intimate friend he had, and to whom we owe his rescue from much
scandalous and untrue gossip. From her we learn that their father was a
combination of Montaigne, Rabelais, and "Uncle Toby. "

Young Balzac went to a clerical school at seven, and stayed there for
seven years. Then he was brought home, apparently much prostrated,
although the good fathers could find nothing physically amiss with him,
and nothing in his studies to account for his agitation. No one ever did
discover just what was the matter, for he seemed well enough in the
next few years, basking on the riverside, watching the activities of
his native town, and thoroughly studying the rustic types that he was
afterward to make familiar to the world. In fact, in Louis Lambert he
has set before us a picture of his own boyish life, very much as Dickens
did of his in David Copperfield.

For some reason, when these years were over, the boy began to have what
is so often known as "a call"--a sort of instinct that he was to attain
renown. Unfortunately it happened that about this time (1814) he and his
parents removed to Paris, which was his home by choice, until his death
in 1850. He studied here under famous teachers, and gave three years
to the pursuit of law, of which he was very fond as literary material,
though he refused to practise.

This was the more grievous, since a great part of the family property
had been lost. The Balzacs were afflicted by actual poverty, and Honore
endeavored, with his pen, to beat the wolf back from the door. He earned
a little money with pamphlets and occasional stories, but his thirst
for fame was far from satisfied. He was sure that he was called to
literature, and yet he was not sure that he had the power to succeed. In
one of his letters to his sister, he wrote:

I am young and hungry, and there is nothing on my plate. Oh, Laure,
Laure, my two boundless desires, my only ones--to be famous, and to be
loved--they ever be satisfied?

For the next ten years he was learning his trade, and the artistic use
of the fiction writer's tools. What is more to the point, is the fact
that he began to dream of a series of great novels, which should give
a true and panoramic picture of the whole of human life. This was the
first intimation of his "Human Comedy," which was so daringly undertaken
and so nearly completed in his after years. In his early days of
obscurity, he said to his readers:

Note well the characters that I introduce, since you will have to follow
their fortunes through thirty novels that are to come.

Here we see how little he had been daunted by ill success, and how his
prodigious imagination had not been overcome by sorrow and evil fortune.
Meantime, writing almost savagely, and with a feeling combined of
ambition and despair, he had begun, very slowly indeed, to create a
public. These ten years, however, had loaded him with debts; and his
struggle to keep himself afloat only plunged him deeper in the mire.
His thirty unsigned novels began to pay him a few hundred francs, not
in cash, but in promissory notes; so that he had to go still deeper into
debt.

In 1827 he was toiling on his first successful novel, and indeed one of
the best historic novels in French literature--The Chouans. He speaks of
his labor as "done with a tired brain and an anxious mind," and of the
eight or ten business letters that he had to write each day before he
could begin his literary work.

"Postage and an omnibus are extravagances that I cannot allow myself,"
he writes. "I stay at home so as not to wear out my clothes. Is that
clear to you? "

At the end of the next year, though he was already popular as a
novelist, and much sought out by people of distinction, he was at the
very climax of his poverty. He had written thirty-five books, and was in
debt to the amount of a hundred and twenty-four thousand francs. He was
saved from bankruptcy only by the aid of Mme. de Berny, a woman of high
character, and one whose moral influence was very strong with Balzac
until her early death.

The relation between these two has a sweetness and a purity which are
seldom found. Mme. de Berny gave Balzac money as she would have given it
to a son, and thereby she saved a great soul for literature. But there
was no sickly sentiment between them, and Balzac regarded her with a
noble love which he has expressed in the character of Mme. Firmiani.

It was immediately after she had lightened his burdens that the real
Balzac comes before us in certain stories which have no equal, and
which are among the most famous that he ever wrote. What could be more
wonderful than his El Verdugo, which gives us a brief horror while
compelling our admiration? What, outside of Balzac himself, could be
more terrible than Gobseck, a frightful study of avarice, containing
a deathbed scene which surpasses in dreadfulness almost anything in
literature? Add to these A Passion in the Desert, The Girl with the
Golden Eyes, The Droll Stories, The Red Inn, and The Magic Skin, and you
have a cluster of masterpieces not to be surpassed.

In the year 1829, when he was just beginning to attain a slight success,
Balzac received a long letter written in a woman's hand. As he read
it, there came to him something very like an inspiration, so full of
understanding were the written words, so full of appreciation and of
sympathy with the best that he had done. This anonymous note pointed out
here and there such defects as are apt to become chronic with a
young author. Balzac was greatly stirred by its keen and sympathetic
criticism. No one before had read his soul so clearly. No one--not even
his devoted sister, Laure de Surville--had judged his work so wisely,
had come so closely to his deepest feeling.

He read the letter over and over, and presently another came, full of
critical appreciation, and of wholesome, tonic, frank, friendly words
of cheer. It was very largely the effect of these letters that roused
Balzac's full powers and made him sure of winning the two great objects
of his first ambition--love and fame--the ideals of the chivalrous,
romantic Frenchman from Caesar's time down to the present day.

Other letters followed, and after a while their authorship was made
known to Balzac. He learned that they had been written by a young Polish
lady, Mme. Evelina Hanska, the wife of a Polish count, whose health was
feeble, and who spent much time in Switzerland because the climate there
agreed with him.

He met her first at Neuchatel, and found her all that he had imagined.
It is said that she had no sooner raised her face, and looked him
fully in the eyes, than she fell fainting to the floor, overcome by
her emotion. Balzac himself was deeply moved. From that day until their
final meeting he wrote to her daily.

The woman who had become his second soul was not beautiful.
Nevertheless, her face was intensely spiritual, and there was a mystic
quality about it which made a strong appeal to Balzac's innermost
nature. Those who saw him in Paris knocking about the streets at night
with his boon companions, hobnobbing with the elder Dumas, or rejecting
the frank advances of George Sand, would never have dreamed of this
mysticism.

Balzac was heavy and broad of figure. His face was suggestive only of
what was sensuous and sensual. At the same time, those few who looked
into his heart and mind found there many a sign of the fine inner strain
which purified the grosser elements of his nature. He who wrote the
roaring Rabelaisian Contes Drolatiques was likewise the author of
Seraphita.

This mysticism showed itself in many things that Balzac did. One little
incident will perhaps be sufficiently characteristic of many others. He
had a belief that names had a sort of esoteric appropriateness. So, in
selecting them for his novels, he gathered them with infinite pains from
many sources, and then weighed them anxiously in the balance. A writer
on the subject of names and their significance has given the following
account of this trait:

The great novelist once spent an entire day tramping about in the
remotest quarters of Paris in search of a fitting name for a character
just conceived by him. Every sign-board, every door-plate, every affiche
upon the walls, was scrutinized. Thousands of names were considered
and rejected, and it was only after his companion, utterly worn out by
fatigue, had flatly refused to drag his weary limbs through more than
one additional street, that Balzac suddenly saw upon a sign the name
"Marcas," and gave a shout of joy at having finally secured what he was
seeking.

Marcas it was, from that moment; and Balzac gradually evolved a
Christian name for him. First he considered what initial was most
appropriate; and then, having decided upon Z, he went on to expand this
into Zepherin, explaining minutely just why the whole name Zepherin
Marcas, was the only possible one for the character in the novel.

In many ways Balzac and Evelina Hanska were mated by nature. Whether
they were fully mated the facts of their lives must demonstrate. For the
present, the novelist plunged into a whirl of literary labor, toiling as
few ever toiled--constructing several novels at the same time, visiting
all the haunts of the French capital, so that he might observe and
understand every type of human being, and then hurling himself like a
giant at his work.

He had a curious practise of reading proofs. These would come to him in
enormous sheets, printed on special paper, and with wide margins for his
corrections. An immense table stood in the midst of his study, and upon
the top he would spread out the proofs as if they were vast maps. Then,
removing most of his outer garments, he would lie, face down, upon the
proof-sheets, with a gigantic pencil, such as Bismarck subsequently used
to wield. Thus disposed, he would go over the proofs.

Hardly anything that he had written seemed to suit him when he saw it
in print. He changed and kept changing, obliterating what he disliked,
writing in new sentences, revising others, and adding whole pages in the
margins, until perhaps he had practically made a new book. This process
was repeated several times; and how expensive it was may be judged from
the fact that his bill for "author's proof corrections" was sometimes
more than the publishers had agreed to pay him for the completed volume.

Sometimes, again, he would begin writing in the afternoon, and continue
until dawn. Then, weary, aching in every bone, and with throbbing head,
he would rise and turn to fall upon his couch after his eighteen hours
of steady toil. But the memory of Evelina Hanska always came to him;
and with half-numbed fingers he would seize his pen, and forget his
weariness in the pleasure of writing to the dark-eyed woman who drew him
to her like a magnet.

These are very curious letters that Balzac wrote to Mme. Hanska. He
literally told her everything about himself. Not only were there long
passages instinct with tenderness, and with his love for her; but he
also gave her the most minute account of everything that occurred, and
that might interest her. Thus he detailed at length his mode of living,
the clothes he wore, the people whom he met, his trouble with his
creditors, the accounts of his income and outgo. One might think that
this was egotism on his part; but it was more than that. It was a strong
belief that everything which concerned him must concern her; and he
begged her in turn to write as freely and as fully.

Mme. Hanska was not the only woman who became his friend and comrade,
and to whom he often wrote. He made many acquaintances in the
fashionable world through the good offices of the Duchesse de Castries.
By her favor, he studied with his microscopic gaze the beau monde of
Louis Philippe's rather unimpressive court.

In a dozen books he scourged the court of the citizen king--its
pretensions, its commonness, and its assemblage of nouveaux riches. Yet
in it he found many friends--Victor Hugo, the Girardins--and among them
women who were of the world. George Sand he knew very well, and she made
ardent love to him; but he laughed her off very much as the elder Dumas
did.

Then there was the pretty, dainty Mme. Carraud, who read and revised his
manuscripts, and who perhaps took a more intimate interest in him than
did the other ladies whom he came to know so well. Besides Mme. Hanska,
he had another correspondent who signed herself "Louise," but who never
let him know her name, though she wrote him many piquant, sunny letters,
which he so sadly needed.

For though Honore de Balzac was now one of the most famous writers of
his time, his home was still a den of suffering. His debts kept pressing
on him, loading him down, and almost quenching hope. He acted toward his
creditors like a man of honor, and his physical strength was still
that of a giant. To Mme. Carraud he once wrote the half pathetic, half
humorous plaint:

Poor pen! It must be diamond, not because one would wish to wear it, but
because it has had so much use!

And again:

Here I am, owing a hundred thousand francs. And I am forty!

Balzac and Mme. Hanska met many times after that first eventful episode
at Neuchatel. It was at this time that he gave utterance to the poignant
cry:

Love for me is life, and to-day I feel it more than ever!

In like manner he wrote, on leaving her, that famous epigram:

It is only the last love of a woman that can satisfy the first love of a
man.

In 1842 Mme. Hanska's husband died. Balzac naturally expected that an
immediate marriage with the countess would take place; but the woman
who had loved him mystically for twelve years, and with a touch of the
physical for nine, suddenly draws back. She will not promise anything.
She talks of delays, owing to the legal arrangements for her children.
She seems almost a prude. An American critic has contrasted her attitude
with his:

Every one knows how utterly and absolutely Balzac devoted to this one
woman all his genius, his aspiration, the thought of his every moment;
how every day, after he had labored like a slave for eighteen hours, he
would take his pen and pour out to her the most intimate details of his
daily life; how at her call he would leave everything and rush across
the continent to Poland or to Italy, being radiantly happy if he could
but see her face and be for a few days by her side. The very thought of
meeting her thrilled him to the very depths of his nature, and made him,
for weeks and even months beforehand, restless, uneasy, and agitated,
with an almost painful happiness.

It is the most startling proof of his immense vitality, both physical
and mental, that so tremendous an emotional strain could be endured
by him for years without exhausting his fecundity or blighting his
creativeness.

With Balzac, however, it was the period of his most brilliant work;
and this was true in spite of the anguish of long separations, and the
complaints excited by what appears to be caprice or boldness or a faint
indifference. Even in Balzac one notices toward the last a certain sense
of strain underlying what he wrote, a certain lack of elasticity and
facility, if of nothing more; yet on the whole it is likely that without
this friendship Balzac would have been less great than he actually
became, as it is certain that had it been broken off he would have
ceased to write or to care for anything whatever in the world.

And yet, when they were free to marry, Mme. Hanska shrank away. Not
until 1846, four years after her husband's death, did she finally give
her promise to the eager Balzac. Then, in the overflow of his happiness,
his creative genius blazed up into a most wonderful flame; but he soon
discovered that the promise was not to be at once fulfilled. The shock
impaired that marvelous vitality which had carried him through debt, and
want, and endless labor.

It was at this moment, by the irony of fate, that his country hailed him
as one of the greatest of its men of genius. A golden stream poured
into his lap. His debts were not all extinguished, but his income was so
large that they burdened him no longer.

But his one long dream was the only thing for which he cared; and though
in an exoteric sense this dream came true, its truth was but a mockery.
Evelina Hanska summoned him to Poland, and Balzac went to her at once.
There was another long delay, and for more than a year he lived as a
guest in the countess's mansion at Wierzchownia; but finally, in March,
1850, the two were married. A few weeks later they came back to France
together, and occupied the little country house, Les Jardies, in which,
some decades later, occurred Gambetta's mysterious death.