at St. Petersburg and on her
Polish estates. He was devotedly fond of her children, and the tranquil,
opulent family life to which she introduced him appears to have been one
of the greatest pleasures he had known. In several passages which, for
Balzac, may be called graceful and playful, he expresses his
homesickness for her chairs and tables, her books, the sight of her
dresses. Here is something, in one of his letters to her, which is worth
quoting: "In short, this is the game that I play; four men will have
had, in this century, an immense influence--Napoleon, Cuvier, O'Connell.
I should like to be the fourth. The first lived on the blood of Europe;
_il s'est inocule des armees_; the second espoused the globe; the third
became the incarnation of a people; I--I shall have carried a whole
society in my head. But there will have been in me a much greater and
much happier being than the writer--and that is your slave. My feeling
is finer, grander, more complete, than all the satisfactions of vanity
or of glory. Without this plenitude of the heart I should never have
accomplished the tenth part of my work; I should not have had this
ferocious courage." During a few days spent at Berlin, on his way back
from St. Petersburg, he gives his impressions of the "capital of
Brandenburg" in a tone which almost seems to denote a prevision of the
style of allusion to this locality and its inhabitants which was to
become fashionable among his countrymen thirty years later. Balzac
detested Prussia and the Prussians.

It is owing to this charlatanism [the spacious distribution of
the streets, etc.] that Berlin has a more populous look than
Petersburg; I would have said "more animated" look if I had
been speaking of another people; but the Prussian, with his
brutal heaviness, will never be able to do anything but crush.
To produce the movement of a great European capital you must
have less beer and bad tobacco, and more of the French or
Italian spirit; or else you must have the great industrial and
commercial ideas which have produced the gigantic development
of London; but Berlin and its inhabitants will never be
anything but an ugly little city, inhabited by an ugly big
people.

"I have seen Tieck _en famille_," he says in another letter. "He seemed
pleased with my homage. He had an old countess, his contemporary in
spectacles, almost an octogenarian--a mummy with a green