“We have taken a whole month to go a distance usually done in six days.  Not once, but a hundred times a day, our lives have been in danger.  We have often been obliged to have fifteen or sixteen men, with levers, to get us out of the bottomless mudholes into which we have sunk up to the carriage-doors. . . .  At last, we are here, alive, but ill and tired.  Such a journey ages one ten years, for you can imagine what it is to fear killing each other, or to be killed the one by the other, loving each other as we do.  My wife feels grateful for all you say about her, but her hands do not permit her to write. . . .”

Madame de Balzac has been most severely criticized for her lack of affection for Balzac, and their married life has generally been conceded to have been very unhappy.  This supposition seems to have been based largely on hearsay.  Miss Sandars quotes from a letter written to her daughter on May 16 from Frankfort, in which, speaking of Balzac as “poor dear friend,” she seems to be quite ignorant of his condition, and to show more interest in her necklace than in her husband.  The present writer has not seen this unpublished letter; but a published letter dated a few days before the other, in which she not only refers to Balzac as her husband but shows both her affection for him and her interest in his condition, runs as follows: 

“Hotel de Russie (Dresden).  My husband has just returned; he has attended to all his affairs with a remarkable activity, and we are leaving to-day.  I did not realize what an adorable being he is; I have known him for seventeen years, and every day, I perceive that there is a new quality in him which I did not know.  If he could only enjoy health!  Speak to M. Knothe about it, I beg you.  You have no idea how he suffered last night!  I hope his natal air will help him, but if this hope fails me, I shall be much to be pitied, I assure you.  It is such happiness to be loved and protected thus.  His eyes are also very bad; I do not know what all that means, and at times, I am very sad.  I hope to give you better news to-morrow, when I shall write you.”

Comments have been made on the fact that Balzac wrote his sister his wife’s hands were too badly swollen from rheumatism to write and yet she wrote to her daughter, but there is a difference between a mother’s letter to her only child, and one to a mother-in-law as hostile as she knew hers to be.  She probably did not care to write, and Balzac, to smooth matters for her, gave this excuse.

The long awaited but tragic arrival took place late in the night of May 20, 1850.  The home in the rue Fortunee was brilliantly lighted, and through the windows could be seen the many beautiful flowers arranged in accordance with his oft repeated request to his poor old mother.  But alas! to their numerous tugs at the door-bell no response came, so a locksmith had to be sent for to open the doors.  The minutest details of Balzac’s orders for their reception had been obeyed, but the unfortunate, faithful Francois Munch, under the excitement and strain of the preparations, had suddenly gone insane.