three years
longer; in reality he worked for fifteen. But two years after the
declaration we have just quoted, it seemed to him that he should break
down: "My poor sister, I am draining the cup to the dregs. It is in vain
that I work my fourteen hours a day; I can't do enough. While I write
this to you I find myself so weary that I have just sent Auguste to take
back my word from certain engagements that I had formed. I am so weak
that I have advanced my dinner hour in order to go to bed earlier; and I
go nowhere." The next year he writes to his mother, who had apparently
complained of his silence: "My good mother, do me the charity to let me
carry my burden without suspecting my heart. A letter for me, you see,
is not only money, but an hour of sleep and a drop of blood."

We spoke just now of Balzac's sentimental consolations; but it appears
that at times he was more acutely conscious of what he missed than of
what he enjoyed. "As for the soul," he writes to Mme. Carraud in 1833,
"I am profoundly sad. My work alone sustains me in life. Is there then
to be no woman for me in this world? My physical melancholy and _ennui_
last longer and grow more frequent. To fall from this crushing labor to
nothing--not to have near me that soft, caressing mind of woman, for
whom I have done so much!" He had, however, a devoted feminine friend,
to whom none of the letters in these volumes are addressed, but who is
several times alluded to. This lady, Mme. de Berny, died in 1836, and
Balzac speaks of her ever afterward with extraordinary tenderness and
veneration. But if there had been a passion between them, it was only a
passionate friendship. "Ah, my dear mother," he writes on New Year's
day, 1836, "I am harrowed with grief. Mme. de Berny is dying; it is
impossible to doubt it. No one but God and myself knows what my despair
is. And I must work--work while I weep!" He writes of Mme. de Berny at
the time of her death as follows. The letter is addressed to a lady with
whom he was in correspondence more or less sentimental, but whom he
never saw: "The person whom I have lost was more than a mother, more
than a friend, more than any creature can be for another. The term
_divinity_ only can explain her. She had sustained me by word, by act,
by devotion, during my worst weather. If I live, it is by her; she was
everything for me. Although for two years illness and time had separated
us, we were visible at a distance for each other. She rea