It would seem as though there were an attack on her aloofness in the long criticism he sent her from his lodgings on Madame d'Arnim's _Bellina_, a French translation of which had been published not long before he left Paris. After some general remarks on the circumstance of a girl's fancying herself in love with a great man living at a distance, he waxed wroth over what he styled Bellina's head-love, and over head-love in general. To this monster, Merimee, in his _Double Mistake_, had given a thrust but a thrust that made it bleed only. The cleverer Madame d'Arnim had poisoned it with opium. "In order for the literary expression of love to become a work of art and to be sublime," he continued, "the love that depicts should itself be complete; it should occur in its triple form, head, heart, and body; should be a love at once sensual and divine, manifested with wit and poetry. Who says love says suffering; suffering from separation; suffering from disagreement. Love in itself is a sublime and pathetic drama. When happy, it is silent. Now, the cause of the tedium of Madame d'Arnim's book," he added, "is easily discoverable by a soul that loves. Goethe did not love Bellina. Put a big stone in Goethe's place--the Sphinx no power has ever been able to wrest from its desert sand--and Bellina's letters are understandable. Unlike Pygmalion's fable, the more Bellina writes, the more petrified Goethe becomes, the more glacial his letters. True, if Bellina had perceived that her sheets were falling upon granite, and if she had abandoned herself to rage or despair, she would have composed a poem. But, as she did not love Goethe, as Goethe was a pretext for her letters, she went on with her girl's journal; and we have read some (not intended for print) much more charming, not in units, but in tens." In the rest of the criticism, Balzac swirls round his guns and directs his fire on Goethe's replies to Bellina. The latter's epistles were accompanied with presents of braces and slippers and flannel waistcoats, which were much more appreciated by the poet than her theories on music. Not so did he, Balzac, treat his Lina, his Louloup --such was the inference suggested. Every one of her, i.e. Eve's sayings was treasured up, after being duly pondered upon. Such adulation must have been delicious to Madame Hanska; and yet she sent her sighing swain back into his loneliness, with his bonds riveted tighter, his promises to break with all rivals more solemn, and a disappointment, over his deferred hopes, that brought on an illness after his return.