me would not relinquish the sweet joys of
widowhood.

In a year Madame Hanska arrives with her daughter. They are delighted
with the house, and remain for a month, when pressing business in Poland
calls them hence. Balzac accompanies them a hundred miles, and then goes
back home to his "Human Comedy."

The years pass very much as they did when Monsieur Hanska was alive,
only they miss that gentleman, having nobody now but the public to
bamboozle, and the public having properly sized up the situation has
become very apathetic--busy looking for morsels more highly spiced. Who
in the world cares about what stout, middle-aged widows do, anyway!

* * * * *

Occasionally, in letters to Madame Hanska, Balzac referred to Madame De
Berney. This seems to have caused Madame Hanska once to say, "Why do you
so often refer to ancient history and tell me of that motherly body who
once acted as your nurse, comparing me with her?"

To this Balzac replies: "I apologize for comparing you with Madame De
Berney--she was what she was, and you are what you are. Great souls are
always individual--Madame De Berney was a great and lofty spirit, and no
one can ever take her place. I apologize for comparing you with her."

Madame De Berney led Balzac; Madame Hanska ruled him. Madame Hanska was
one who alternately beckoned and pursued. Without her Balzac could not
have gone on. She held him true to his literary course, and without her
he must surely have fallen a victim of arrested energy. She demanded a
daily accounting from the mill of his mind. She supplied both goad and
greens.

And more than that she sapped his life-forces and robbed him of his red
corpuscles; so that, before he was fifty, he was old, worn-out, undone,
with an excess of lime in his bones.

Literary creation makes a terrific tax on vitality. Ideas do not flow
until the pulse goes above eighty, and this means the rapid breaking
down of tissue. The man who writes two hours daily, and writes well, can
not do much else. He is like the racehorse--do not expect the
record-breaker to pull a plow all day, and go fast heats in the evening.
Balzac was the most tremendous worker in a literary way the world has
ever seen. He doubtless made mistakes in his life's course, but the
wonder is, that he did not make more. He was constantly absorbed in what
Theophile Gautier has called "the Balzac Universe," looking after the
characters he had created, seein