19.6.08
Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850). French-born novelist. 1832: he received a fan letter from a married Polish noble woman, Countess Éveline Hanska. A correspondence ensued, and they met twice. The two promised to marry each other once her husband died. Their relationship endured for seven-teen years, and their correspondence, collected in the four-volume Letters to a Foreigner, is one of the greatest examples of epistolary love. Finally in March 1850, when he was already mortally ill, the two wed. Balzac died in Paris five month later.
My Beloved Angel
I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them. I can no longer think of nothing but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me. As for my heart, there you will always be -- very much so. I have a delicious sense of you there. But my God, what is to become of me, if you have deprived me of my reason. This is a monomania which, this morning, terrifies me. I rise up every moment saying to myself, "Come, I am going there!" Then I sit down again, moved by the sense of my obligations. There is a frightful conflict.
This is not life. I have never before been like that. You have devoured everything. I whirl round in a delicious dream in which in one instant I live a thousand years. What a horrible situation! Overcome with love, feeling love in every pore, living only for love, and seeing oneself consumed by griefs, and caught in a thousand spiders' threads. O, my darling Eva, you did not know it, I picked up your card. It is there before me, and I talked to you as if you were there. I see you, as I did yesterday, beautiful, astonishingly beautiful. Yesterday, during the whole evening, I said to myself, "She is mine!" Ah! The angels are not as happy in paradise as I was yesterday!
written, GeminiSide
