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Balzac explains this seeming aversion to the marriage state as we know it to-day, in his two books, written during his early thirties, namely, Louis Lambert and Seraphita.
"My dear Seraphita, are you ill?" he said. "You look paler than usual." She turned slowly towards him, tossing back her hair like a pretty woman whose aching head leaves her no strength even for complaint. "I was foolish enough to cross the fiord with Minna," she said. "We ascended the Falberg." "Do you mean to kill yourself?" he said with a lover's terror.
While he was at Milan, the Italian sculptor Puttinati modelled his bust, which pleased him so much that he gave him a order for a group representing Seraphita showing the path heavenward to Wilfrid and Minna. At Venice, he began Massimilla Doni, one of his philosophic novels, in which the love episode is interwoven with mysticism and music, and Rossini's Mose is analysed with skill.
I, therefore, had begun, as it were, to read Balzac backwards; instead of beginning with the plain, simple, earthly tragedy of the Père Goriot, I first knelt in a beautiful but distant coigne of the great world of his genius Seraphita. Certain nuances of soul are characteristic of certain latitudes, and what subtle instinct led him to Norway in quest of this fervent soul?
Thenceforward, his predilection for theories of the occult went hand in hand with his equally strong taste for the analytic observation of visible phenomena; and not infrequently he indulged in their simultaneous literary expression. The composing of Seraphita was carried on at the same time as his Search for the Absolute and Pere Goriot.
They prepared to bid the earth farewell; for they told me they should be transformed when their child had passed the state of infancy which needed their fostering care until the strength to exist alone should be given to her. "Their child was born, the Seraphita we are now concerned with.
We can just fancy one of her dignified later heroines, all self- renunciation and rural sentiment, preaching in vain to that real woman, Emma Bovary. HER we know, her we remember, as we remember few, comparatively, of Balzac's thronging faces, from La Cousine Bette to Seraphitus Seraphita.
And yet, with this seemingly exhaustive and lucid exposition of the effects of Illumination, Seraphita declares that "to conceive the nature of this gift we must possess it."
Moreover if Seraphita had intended to teach the love of the religious devotee to The Absolute instead of a perfected sex-love, she would not have pointed out to both Wilfrid and Minna that which she, in her superior vision, her supra-consciousness, perceived, namely, that Wilfrid and Minna were really intended for spiritual mates, and that what they each saw in her was really a prophecy of their own perfected and spiritualized love.
To Wilfrid she said she loved "God." To Minna she used the term "Heaven," and when Minna questioned: "But art thou worthy of heaven when thou despisest the creatures of God?" Seraphita answered: "Couldst thou love two beings at once? Would a lover be a lover if he did not fill the heart? Should he not be the first, the last, the only one? She who loves will she not quit the world for her lover?
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