Honore de Balzac to Evelina Hanska

Honoré de Balzac (May 20, 1799 - August 18, 1850), was a French novelist.

He was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France in the rue de l'Armée Italienne.

He would become one of the creators of Realism in literature. His Human Comedy (La Comédie humaine) spanned more than 90 novels and short stories in an attempt to comprehend and depict the realities of life in modern bourgeois France.

Balzac's work habits are legendarily intimidating - he wrote for up to 15 hours a day, fuelled by innumerable cups of black coffee. Because of this extraordinarily large output, many of the novels display minor imperfections and in some cases outright careless writing. Several, however, are widely recognized to be masterpieces: La peau de chagrin, Cousine Bette, Le père Goriot, Eugènie Grandet and Les illusions perdues.

Balzac's realistic prose and his strength as an encyclopedic recorder of his age outshine any small detracting qualities of his style to make him a Dickensian bastion of French literature.

Balzac is buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France. He is commemorated by a monumental statue which Auguste Rodin was commissioned to sculpt.

Honore de Balzac wrote this letter to Madame Evelina Hanska, a Polish countess.

Sunday 19th

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

I rise up every moment saying 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 life. I have never before been like that. You have devoured everything.

I feel foolish and happy as soon as I 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 talk to you as if you were there. 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!