In the year 1829, when he was just beginning to attain a slight success, Balzac received a long letter written in a woman’s hand.  As he read it, there came to him something very like an inspiration, so full of understanding were the written words, so full of appreciation and of sympathy with the best that he had done.  This anonymous note pointed out here and there such defects as are apt to become chronic with a young author.  Balzac was greatly stirred by its keen and sympathetic criticism.  No one before had read his soul so clearly.  No one—­not even his devoted sister, Laure de Surville—­had judged his work so wisely, had come so closely to his deepest feeling.

He read the letter over and over, and presently another came, full of critical appreciation, and of wholesome, tonic, frank, friendly words of cheer.  It was very largely the effect of these letters that roused Balzac’s full powers and made him sure of winning the two great objects of his first ambition—­love and fame—­the ideals of the chivalrous, romantic Frenchman from Caesar’s time down to the present day.

Other letters followed, and after a while their authorship was made known to Balzac.  He learned that they had been written by a young Polish lady, Mme. Evelina Hanska, the wife of a Polish count, whose health was feeble, and who spent much time in Switzerland because the climate there agreed with him.

He met her first at Neuchatel, and found her all that he had imagined.  It is said that she had no sooner raised her face, and looked him fully in the eyes, than she fell fainting to the floor, overcome by her emotion.  Balzac himself was deeply moved.  From that day until their final meeting he wrote to her daily.

The woman who had become his second soul was not beautiful.  Nevertheless, her face was intensely spiritual, and there was a mystic quality about it which made a strong appeal to Balzac’s innermost nature.  Those who saw him in Paris knocking about the streets at night with his boon companions, hobnobbing with the elder Dumas, or rejecting the frank advances of George Sand, would never have dreamed of this mysticism.

Balzac was heavy and broad of figure.  His face was suggestive only of what was sensuous and sensual.  At the same time, those few who looked into his heart and mind found there many a sign of the fine inner strain which purified the grosser elements of his nature.  He who wrote the roaring Rabelaisian Contes Drolatiques was likewise the author of Seraphita.

This mysticism showed itself in many things that Balzac did.  One little incident will perhaps be sufficiently characteristic of many others.  He had a belief that names had a sort of esoteric appropriateness.  So, in selecting them for his novels, he gathered them with infinite pains from many sources, and then weighed them anxiously in the balance.  A writer on the subject of names and their significance has given the following account of this trait: