Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 September 1886 — Balzac’s Wife. [ARTICLE]

Balzac’s Wife.

Everything that concerns Balzac’s life is mysterious, but this attachment tO,Mme. de Hanska seems to me to give us the key to many points that are otherwise incomprehensible. First of all, it helps to explain his herculean literary labors and that intemperance of toil which, while fatally undermining his health, yet enabled him to produce such a prodigious quantity of work. To my mind, the explanation of Balzac’s immense efforts is his old double thirst for celebrity and love. “To devote myself to the happiness of a woman is my perpetual dream,” he wrote to his sister in his earlier years. He had now found the woman of his dreams, and he worked in the hope of one day laying his glory and his millions at her feet. This happy day came at last. Mme. de Hanska was left a widow in 1847, and after having seen her daughter Anna married to Count Mniszech and having settled her affairs in Poland she became the wife of Honore de Balzac., The marriage was celebrated on March 14, 1850, at Wierzchownia, and the patient lover was at last able to announce “the happy denouement of that grand and fine drama of the heart which has lasted sixteen years.” “Three days ago I married the

only woman that T eveFjdVfcff' wfiomT love more than ever, and whom I shall love until death. This union is,'l believe, the reward which God held in reserve for so much adversity, so many years of labor, so many difficulties encountered and surmounted. I have had neither a happy youth nor a flowery spring; I shall have the most brilliant summer, the sweetest of all autumns, Cornhill Magazine.