Love Letter from Balzac to Countess Ewelina Hańska

My beloved angel,

I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them.

I can no longer think of nothing but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you.

I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me.

As for my heart, there you will always be - very much so. I have a delicious sense of you there.

But my God, what is to become of me, if you have deprived me of my reason?

Lorenzo Bartolini | Buste d'Ewelina Hańska, 1837 | Musée Bertrand, à Châteauroux, France

This is a monomania which, this morning, terrifies me.

I rise up every moment say to myself, ‘Come, I am going there!’ Then I sit down again, moved by the sense of my obligations.

There is a frightful conflict.

This is not a life. I have never before been like that.

You have devoured everything. I feel foolish and happy as soon as I let myself think of you. I whirl round in a delicious dream in which in one instant I live a thousand years.

What a horrible situation!

Overcome with love, feeling love in every pore, living only for love, and seeing oneself consumed by griefs, and caught in a thousand spiders’ threads.

O, my darling Eva, you did not know it.

I picked up your card. It is there before me, and I talked to you as if you were here.

I see you, as I did yesterday, beautiful, astonishingly beautiful.

Yesterday, during the whole evening, I said to myself ‘She is mine!’

Ah! The angels are not as happy in Paradise as I was yesterday!

Auguste Rodin | Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ewelina Hańska (1805-1882) was a Polish noblewoman best known for her marriage to French novelist Honoré de Balzac.

Born at the Wierzchownia estate in Volhynia (now Ukraine), Hańska married landowner Wacław Hański when she was a teenager. Hański, who was about 20 years her senior, suffered from depression. They had five children, but only a daughter, Anna, survived.

In the late 1820s, Hańska began reading Balzac's novels, and in 1832, she sent him an anonymous letter.

This began a decades-long correspondence in which Hańska and Balzac expressed a deep mutual affection.

In 1833, they met for the first time, in Switzerland. Soon afterward he began writing the novel Séraphîta, which includes a character based on Hańska.

After her husband died in 1841, a series of complications obstructed Hańska's marriage to Balzac.

Chief of these was the estate and her daughter Anna's inheritance, both of which might be threatened if she married him. Anna married a Polish count, easing some of the pressure.

About the same time, Hańska gave Balzac the idea for his 1844 novel Modeste Mignon.

In 1850 they finally married, and moved to Paris, but he died five months later. Though she never remarried, she took several lovers, and died in 1882.

Franz Skarbina | What to Write, 1892