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Updated: June 17, 2025
She delighted in perfumes, would stick her nose into bouquets, bite scented handkerchiefs with little spasms of pleasure, and walk about among the scent bottles on the toilet table, smelling at their stoppers; no doubt, she would have used the powder puff if she had been permitted. Such was Seraphita, and never did cat more amply justify a poetic name.
It has been said that Madame Hanska, whom the author finally married only six months previous to his death, was the original of Seraphita, but it would seem that this great affection, tender and enduring as it was, partook far more of a beautiful friendship between two souls who knew and understood each other's needs, than it did of that blissful and ecstatic union of counterparts, which everywhere is described by those who have experienced it, as a sensation of melting or merging into the other's being.
In "Seraphita" Balzac expressed what may be termed spiritual love and that spiritual union with the Beloved, which the Sufis believed to be the result of a perfect and complete "mating," between the sexes, on the spiritual plane, regardless of physical proximity or recognition, but which is also elsewhere described as the soul's glimpse of its union with the Absolute or God.
Were I to tell you how and at what point the plant merges into the animal you would begin to doubt your doubts. You have plotted to question me; you will admit that?" "Yes, dear Seraphita," answered Wilfrid; "but the desire is a natural one to men, is it not?" "You will bore this dear child with such topics," she said, passing her hand lightly over Minna's hair with a caressing gesture.
When he looked at Seraphita she was lying on the bear's-skin, her head resting on her hand, her face calm, her eyes brilliant. Wilfrid gazed at her silently; but his face betrayed a deferential fear in its almost timid expression. "Yes, dear," he said at last, as though he were answering some question; "we are separated by worlds. I resign myself; I can only adore you.
"You are suffering?" she said in a voice whose intonations produced upon his heart the same effect as that of her look. "Would I could help you!" "Love me as I love you." "Poor Minna!" she replied. "Why am I unarmed!" exclaimed Wilfrid, violently. "You are out of temper," said Seraphita, smiling. "Come, have I not spoken to you like those Parisian women whose loves you tell of?"
Entering thus into the consciousness of others I am able to divine both the future and the past * though what I have said does not define the gift of Specialism, for to conceive the nature of that gift we must possess it." This describes in terms similar to those employed by others who possess cosmic consciousness, the results of this inner light, which Seraphita calls a "mirror."
"Thou shalt know hereafter," he said, in the feeble voice of a man who lies down to die. "Help, help! he is dying!" cried Minna. Wilfrid ran towards them. Seeing Seraphita as she lay on a fragment of gneiss, where time had cast its velvet mantle of lustrous lichen and tawny mosses now burnished in the sunlight, he whispered softly, "How beautiful she is!"
Wilfrid says to her: "Have you no soul that you are not seduced by the prospect of consoling a great man, who will sacrifice all to live with you in a little house by the border of a lake?" "But," answers Seraphita, "I am loved with a love without bounds." And when Wilfrid with insane anger and jealousy asked who it was whom Seraphita loved and who loved her, she answered "God."
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.
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