blish a
complete edition of his works with engravings. This was to be the
first appearance of the long-dreamt-of "Comedie Humaine," the great
work of Balzac's life.

However, for a time even this took secondary place, as on January 5th,
1842, a letter with a black seal arrived from Madame Hanska; and gave
the important news of the death of M. de Hanski, which had taken place
on November 10th, 1841. Balzac's letter in answer to this is pathetic
to any one cognisant of his subsequent history. He begins with
confidence:[*] "As to me, my dear adored one, although this event
enables me to reach what I have desired so ardently for nearly ten
years, I can, before you and God, say in justice, that I have never
had anything in my heart but complete submission, and that in my most
terrible moments I have not soiled my soul with evil wishes." Further
on, he tells her that nothing in him is changed; and suddenly seized
with a terrible doubt from the ambiguous tone of her letter, he cries,
in allusion to a picture of Wierzchownia which always hung in his
study: "Oh! I am perhaps very unjust, but this injustice comes from
the passion of my heart. I should have liked two words for myself in
your letter. I have hunted for them in vain--two words for the man
who, since the landscape in which you live has been before his eyes,
has never continued working for ten minutes without looking at it."

[*] "Lettres a l'Etrangere."

He longs to start at once to see her, but from the tone of her letter
he gathers that he had better wait until she writes to him again, when
he begs for the assurance that her existence will henceforward belong
to him, and that no cloud will ever come between them. He is alarmed
about her anxiety on the subject of her letters. They are quite safe,
he says, kept in a box like the one in which she keeps his. "But why
this uneasiness now? Why? This is what I ask myself in terrible
anxiety!" He finishes with "Adieu, my dear and beautiful life whom I
love so much, and to whom I can now say 'Sempre medesimo.'"

Madame Hanska, in reply to this letter, objected strongly to the
breach of "les convenances" which would be committed if Balzac came to
see her early in her widowhood; and it was not till July 17th, 1843,
that he was at last permitted to meet her in St. Petersburg, and then
he had not seen her since his visit to Vienna, eight years before.

However, he was now full of happy anticipations, and it was with the
gr