The deadlock in which he found himself had been preparing since his visit to Saint Petersburg. Whether the intimacy created there between Madame Hanska and himself was that of two lovers in the chaster sense, or, as Monsieur Gabriel Ferry assets, in his _Balzac et ses Amies_, that of a closer union, it had haunted him during his subsequent twelvemonth's loneliness. And when Eve, who had come to spend the winter at Dresden, discouraged, from fear of her society friends' backbiting, the idea of his going there to see her, he grew incapable of concentrating his mind on his books; and, even in his letters to her, chafed and was irritable, scolding her for not stamping her envelopes, and recommending her to acquire habits of order and economy! confessing the while that, to escape from his melancholy, he had been playing lansquenet, dining out, going to the theatres, and leading a nonchalant life. The tone was a bold one to assume, but clever. His tyrant, already repenting the pledges given, had been hinting it would be better not to carry them out. Her own relatives were quite as much against the match as Balzac's, she reminded him, while narrating all the malicious tittle-tattle that mutual acquaintances were constantly telling her. She defended him, she said. "A mistake!" retorted Balzac. "When, in your presence, any one attacks me, your best plan is to mock the slanderers by outdoing them. When some one sneeringly remarked to Dumas that his father was a nigger, he answered: 'My grandfather was a monkey.'" His scolding for once did good. Eve did not like his "wounding prose," but she talked no more of breaking with him. On the contrary, she relented as far as to remove the embargo on his going to Dresden; so in May he went. And, what was more, she came in August to Paris; incognito, since the visit was without the Czar's permission, she and her daughter Anna travelling from the frontier under the names of Balzac's sister and niece. In the novelist's correspondence, there is a curious letter written on the 2nd of August to Madame Emile de Girardin. In it the writer excuses himself for not calling on her, being obliged to remain at home on account of the disquieting condition of a lady friend of his who had hurt herself and was under medical treatment. The inference is that the lady in question was staying in his house; and a note written to Madame Hanska, on the 4th of September, with its allusion to the Passy garden in which they had walked so much together, makes it sufficiently plain that she was the August guest. Although no proofs have yet come to light which we can accept as irrefutable, there seems to be ground for the supposition put forward that a premature confinement was the illness, carefully concealed from every one.