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There he hoped the wedding would quickly take place, and that Monsieur and Madame Honore de Balzac would return to Paris, and would live to a ripe old age in married happiness; he writing many masterpieces, she helping with advice, and forming a salon where her social position, cleverness, and charm would surround her with the highest in the land.
Petersburg, possibly during one of their walks on the quay, or on a cozy evening when the samovar was brought up at nine o'clock, and placed on the white table with yellowish lines she had promised Balzac that he might meet her next year at Dresden.
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.
There is a close kinship between that statue of Balzac and this statue of which I am to tell you. Both induce, above all, a profound sense of unrest, of heroic will to overcome all obstacles.
Though he read Balzac all the year through, he still enjoyed the Waverley Novels as much as when he had first come upon them, in thick leather-bound volumes, in his grandfather's library. He nearly always read Scott on Christmas and holidays, because it brought back the pleasures of his boyhood so vividly. He liked Scott's women.
Art, in her, wedded to genius, resulted in that incomparable epistolary style which left Balzac and Voiture far away behind her, and which Voltaire himself even has not surpassed.
These are not the words of ordinary mourning, or of an ordinary woman. It is a saying over which Balzac would have rubbed his episcopal hands.
These two stories were written at no long interval, yet, for some reason or other, Balzac did not at once unite them. /La Vieille Fille/ first appeared in November and December 1836 in the /Presse/, and was inserted next year in the /Scenes de la Vie de Province/. It had three chapter divisions. The second part did not appear all at once. There were eight chapter divisions in this latter.
His allegiance to Balzac remained unshaken, though he was conscious of lengthiness when he read him aloud. This author's deep and hence often poetic realism was, I believe, bound up with his own earliest aspirations towards dramatic art. His manner of reading aloud a story which he already knew was the counterpart of his own method of construction.
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. 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.
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