upon there being handsome women."
Presenting a copy of the "Comedie Humaine" to the Austrian ambassador,
he accompanies it with a letter calling attention, in the most elaborate
manner, to the typographical beauty and the cheapness of the work; the
letter reads like a prospectus or an advertisement.

In 1840 (he was forty years old) he thought seriously of marriage--with
this remark as the preface to the announcement: "_Je ne veux plus avoir
de coeur!..._ If you meet a young girl of twenty-two," he goes on,
"with a fortune of 200,000 francs, or even of 100,000, provided it can
be used in business, you will think of me. I want a woman who shall be
able to be what the events of my life may demand of her--the wife of an
ambassador, or a housewife at Les Jardies. But don't speak of this; it's
a secret. She must be an ambitious, clever girl." This project, however,
was not carried out; Balzac had no time to marry. But his friendship
with Mme. Hanska became more and more absorbing, and though their
project of marriage, which was executed in 1850, was kept a profound
secret until after the ceremony, it is apparent that they had had it a
long time in their thoughts.

For this lady Balzac's esteem and admiration seem to have been
unbounded; and his letters to her, which in the second volume are very
numerous, contain many noble and delicate passages. "You know too well,"
he says to her somewhere, with a happy choice of words belonging to the
writer, whose diction was here and there as felicitous as it was
generally intolerable--"_Vous savez trop bien que tout ce qui n'est pas
vous n'est que surface, sottise et vains palliatifs de l'absence._" "You
must be proud of your children," he writes to his sister from Poland;
"such daughters are the recompense of your life. You must not be unjust
to destiny; you may now accept many misfortunes. It is like myself with
Mme. Hanska. The gift of her affection explains all my troubles, my
weariness, and my toil; I was paying to evil, in advance, the price of
such a treasure. As Napoleon said, we pay for everything here below;
nothing is stolen. It seems to me that I have paid very little.
Twenty-five years of toil and struggle are nothing as the purchase money
of an attachment so splendid, so radiant, so complete."

Mme. Hanska appears to have come rarely to Paris, and when she came to
have shrouded her visits in mystery; but Balzac arranged several
meetings with her abroad, and visited her