Balzac by Frederick Wedmore — Read

Through the ‘usual channels of information' -- I mean, of course, the daily papers -- many readers have become aware of the recent publication, in the _Revue de Paris_, of a series of Balzac's letters. But few have understood their importance. Their interest for the student is great, for in a revelation of their author, that is impressive and almost final, they confirm to the full the view of Balzac which those of us have taken (I took it myself in my little _Life_ of him in the ‘Great Writers' Series) who have perceived that by his temperament and inclination, as well as by his power, he is divided widely from those more sordid and limited realists at whose head it was erewhile the fashion to place him. Romance, it has been claimed -- often by friend and foe alike -- Romance was Victor Hugo's, Materialism was Balzac's. And now Balzac is found -- and one has a right to be surprised, not of course at the kind, but only at the degree of the manifestation -- he is found in mature years to be in his own conduct more simply and absolutely romantic than the most visionary or most warm-hearted schoolgirl. He works himself into a genuine and indescribably enthusiastic, but always respectful, attachment to a young married woman whom he has never seen, who inquires of him about his stories, who sends him _Thomas à Kempis_ (which he translates later into the _Médecin de Campagne_: ‘c'est l'Evangile en action'), who writes to him confidentially for a year or two before she meets him, who later receives him as her guest in Russian Poland, and whom he marries at last, in 1850, only several years after the death of her husband.

The facts that have been mentioned latest have been known since about the time of the publication of the now familiar couple of volumes of Balzac's _Correspondence_. It is the earlier and most interesting part of the story that is new. The report had previously been current that Balzac had for the first time been made aware of Madame de Hanska's existence when he was staying at, or passing through, Neuchâtel, in September 1833. She announced, so it was said, her wish to be introduced to him on hearing that he was at the hotel; and this last autumn (such is the vanity of human effort upon matters after all not profoundly important), I established the fact, in concert with the present proprietor of the Hôtel Belle Vue at Neuchâtel, that the old but not yet disused Hôtel du Faucon must have been the hostelry in which this memorable meeting took place. The ‘Faucon,' which had been built just in the middle of the little town but a few years before the date of Balzac's visit, was then the inn at which a traveller of any importance was sure to descend -- neither the ‘Belle Vue' nor the ‘Lac' existed at that period. Let us take courage, however -- our trouble was not so useless as I had for a moment imagined it. The actual meeting-place of two friends, two ‘lovers' (in Walt Whitman's sense, at all events), is in the end at least as interesting as the meeting-place of two strangers, who were to warm towards each other only in future years. They met, then, we may fairly presume, at the Faucon at Neuchâtel, but met after a correspondence by turns polite and chivalrous, intimate and ardent.