Madame Evelina de Hanska came into Balzac’s life about 1833, just after he had shaken off the unfortunate influence of the Duchesse de Castries.  The young Polish countess was much impressed, we are told, by reading the ‘Scenes de la vie privee’ (Scenes of Private Life), and was somewhat perplexed and worried by Balzac’s apparent change of method in ’La Peau de chagrin.’  She wrote to him over the signature “L’Etrangere” (A Foreigner), and he answered in a series of letters recently published in the Revue de Paris.  Not long after the opening of this correspondence the two met, and a firm friendship was cemented between them.  The lady was about thirty, and married to a Russian gentleman of large fortune, to whom she had given an only daughter.  She was in the habit of traveling about Europe to carry on this daughter’s education, and Balzac made it his pleasure and duty to see her whenever he could, sometimes journeying as far as Vienna.  In the interim he would write her letters which possess great charm and importance to the student of his life.  The husband made no objection to the intimacy, trusting both to his wife and to Balzac; but for some time before the death of the aged nobleman, Balzac seems to have distrusted himself and to have held slightly aloof from the woman whom he was destined finally to love with all the fervor of his nature.  Madame Hanska became free in the winter of 1842-3, and the next summer Balzac visited St. Petersburg to see her.  His love soon became an absorbing passion, but consideration for her daughter’s future withheld the lady’s consent to a betrothal till 1846.  It was a period of weary waiting, in which our sympathies are all on one side; for if ever a man deserved to be happy in a woman’s love, it was Balzac.  His happiness came, but almost too late to be enjoyed.  His last two years, which he spent in Poland with Madame de Hanska, were oppressed by illness, and he returned to his beloved Paris only to die.  The struggle of thirty years was over, and although his immense genius was not yet fully recognized, his greatest contemporary, Victor Hugo, was magnanimous enough to exclaim on hearing that he was dying, “Europe is on the point of losing a great mind.”  Balzac’s disciples feel that Europe really lost its greatest writer since Shakespeare.

In the definitive edition of Balzac’s writings in twenty-four volumes, seventeen are occupied by the various divisions of the ’Comedie humaine.’  The plays take up one volume; and the correspondence, not including of course the letters to “L’Etrangere,” another; the ’Contes drolatiques’ make still another; and finally we have four volumes filled with sketches, tales, reviews, and historical and political articles left uncollected by their author.