cted upon me;
she was a moral sun. Mme. de Mortsauf, in the 'Lys dans la Vallee,' is a
pale expression of this person's slightest qualities." Three years
afterward he writes to his sister: "I am alone against all my troubles,
and formerly, to help me to resist them, I had with me the sweetest and
bravest person in the world; a woman who every day is born again in my
heart, and whose divine qualities make the friendships that are compared
with hers seem pale. I have now no adviser in my literary difficulties;
I have no guide but the fatal thought, 'What would she say if she were
living?'" And he goes on to enumerate some of his actual and potential
friends. He tells his sister that she herself might have been for him a
close intellectual comrade if her duties of wife and mother had not
given her too many other things to think about. The same is true of Mme.
Carraud: "Never has a more extraordinary mind been more smothered; she
will die in her corner unknown! George Sand," he continues, "would
speedily be my friend; she has no pettiness whatever in her soul--none
of the low jealousies which obscure so many contemporary talents. Dumas
resembles her in this; but she has not the critical sense. Mme. Hanska
is all this; but I cannot weigh upon her destiny." Mme. Hanska was the
Polish lady whom he ultimately married, and of whom we shall speak.
Meanwhile, for a couple of years (1836 and 1837), he carried on an
exchange of opinions, of the order that the French call _intimes_, with
the unseen correspondent to whom we have alluded, and who figures in
these volumes as "Louise." The letters, however, are not love letters;
Balzac, indeed, seems chiefly occupied in calming the ardor of the lady,
who was evidently a woman of social distinction. "Don't have any
friendship for me," he writes; "I need too much. Like all people who
struggle, suffer, and work, I am exacting, mistrustful, wilful,
capricious.... If I had been a woman, I should have loved nothing so
much as some soul buried like a well in the desert--discovered only when
you place yourself directly under the star which indicates it to the
thirsty Arab."

His first letter to Mme. Hanska here given bears the date of 1835; but
we are informed in a note that he had at that moment been for some time
in correspondence with her. The correspondence had begun, if we are not
mistaken, on Mme. Hanska's side, before they met; she had written to him
as a literary admirer. She was a Polis