ayed he
might not be the one she was expecting. But no written confession of
the Countess's exists to prove that such a thought damped her
enthusiasm.

Balzac's impression was recorded in a letter to his sister. "I am
happy, very happy," he wrote. "She is twenty-seven, possesses most
beautiful black hair, the smooth and deliciously fine skin of
brunettes, a lovely little hand, is naive and imprudent to the point
of embracing me before every one. I say nothing about her colossal
wealth. What is it in comparison with beauty. I am intoxicated with
love." The one drawback to the meeting was Monsieur Hanski. "Alas!"
adds the writer, "he did not quit us during five days for a single
second. He went from his wife's skirt to my waistcoat. And Neufchatel
is a small town, where a woman, an illustrious foreigner, cannot take
a step without being seen. Constraint doesn't suit me."

Evidently, during the Neufchatel intercourse, some sort of
understanding must have been reached, based on the rather unkind
anticipation of the Count Hanski's death. At that time, the
gentleman's health was precarious. He survived, however until 1841,
meanwhile more or less cognizant of his wife's attachment and offering
no opposition. He even deemed himself honoured by Balzac's friendship.
How rapid the progress of the novelist's passion was for the new idol
may be judged by the letter he despatched to Geneva, two or three
months later, in December, whilst he was correcting the proofs of
_Eugenie Grandet_. "I think I shall be at Geneva on the 13th," he
wrote. "The desire to see you makes me invent things that ordinarily
don't come into my head. I correct more quickly. It's not only courage
you give me to support the difficulties of life; you give me also
talent, at any rate, facility. . . . My Eve, my darling, my kind,
divine Eve! What a grief it is to me not to have been able to tell you
every evening all that I have done, said, and thought."

The visit to Geneva was paid, and lasted six weeks, the novelist
quitting Switzerland only on the 8th of February 1834. From this date
onward, a regular correspondence was kept up between them,
compensating for their seeing each other rarely. The project of
marriage, more tenaciously pursued by Balzac than by his Eve, was yet
no hindrance to his fleeting fancies for other women. These interim
amours have a good deal preoccupied his various biographers, partly
because of the undoubted use he made of them in hi