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His mind dwelt constantly on these preparations for his married life; and he continued to correspond with Mery, and to entrust him with delicate commissions which required much bargaining. At this Mery was not, according to his own account, very successful, as he remarks in an amusing letter to Balzac: "I call to witness all the marble false gods which decorate Lazardo's dark museum.
Petersburg, he gives his impressions of the "capital of Brandenburg" in a tone which almost seems to denote a prevision of the style of allusion to this locality and its inhabitants which was to become fashionable among his countrymen thirty years later. Balzac detested Prussia and the Prussians.
The preface to the novel that opened the series The Heiress of Birague speaks of an old trunk bequeathed by an uncle and filled with manuscripts, which the author had merely to edit. And the apology had more truth in it than he meant it to convey. Balzac was quite aware of the small merit of this hack-work. To Laure he confessed: "My novel is finished.
However, in the spring of 1832, the time which we are considering, Madame Hanska was not even a name to Balzac; she was merely "L'Etrangere," an unknown woman who might be pretty or ugly, young or old; but who at any rate possessed the knack or perhaps the author of "Seraphita" or of "Louis Lambert" would have said the power by transmutation of thought and sympathy of interesting him in the highest degree.
Curiously enough, Balzac seemed rather pleased at this news, which reached him at Berlin, on his journey home to France. He had made use of the services of two practised writers for the theatre to fit his melodrama to the exigencies of the stage, and possibly this fact dulled his interest in it. At any rate he was strangely philosophical about its fate.
During Lepitre's tuition he composed a speech supposed to be addressed by the wife of Brutus to her husband, after the condemnation of her sons, in which, Laure tells us, the anguish of the mother is depicted with great power, and Balzac shows his wonderful faculty for entering into the souls of his personages.
It is usual to refer to Balzac as the first great realist of the French, indeed, of modern fiction. Strictly, he is not the first in France, as we have seen, since Beyle preceded him; nor in modern fiction, for Jane Austen, so admirably an artist of verity, came a generation before.
"Give me a book that is something like life, and I'll read it," he exclaimed impatiently; "but I can't swallow the high-flown prosings of impossibly virtuous inanities." One day, indeed, he had been struck by the power of a book, a book written by a certain Frenchman called Balzac.
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!
It has depths and recesses that did not appear till now, enticing to criticism, promising plentiful illustration of the ideas that have been gathered by the way. One after another, the rarer, obscurer effects of fiction are all found in Balzac, behind his blatant front. He illustrates everything, and the only difficulty is to know where to begin.
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