The second of the just published letters addressed to Madame de Hanska contains sentences which are meaningless, if it is not to Madame de Castries that they refer. ‘Only Heaven and I can ever understand the frightful energy with which a heart must be endowed, if, being full of tears that are repressed, it must suffice still for the labours of writing.’ Again--and this time why should I translate?--the cry of a moment: ‘_Toutes mes passions, toutes mes croyances, sont trompées._’ And he tells his correspondent that Madame Recamier at least never sat, as was supposed, for Feodora.[2] ‘I met a Feodora once, but her I shall never paint; besides, the _Peau de Chagrin_ was written long before I met her.’[3] Yet again, ‘I made Feodora out of two women whom I knew, but not intimately. Observation was enough for me--with a few confidences to boot.’ [2] Feodora, the evil genius, one may say, of the _Peau de Chagrin_. [3] If this was Madame de Castries, the intention did not always hold good, since more than touches of that charmer there are supposed to be in the _Duchesse de Langeais_. What Balzac seems to have been struck with, from the first, in Evelina de Hanska, was her sincerity and oneness of purpose, the truth of her devotion to his work, and a certain similarity, an immediate sympathy, between his nature and hers. Much of his work, as he avows, has been done to strike the public--to provide the public with that without which it could scarcely accord him the attention he asked. But ‘certainly there are books in which I have loved to be myself; and you will know well which they are, for they are those in which my heart has spoken.’ When at length the two came together, at Neuchâtel in 1833--as in Vienna, and in Russian Poland itself, in later years--there was nothing, it seems, in either to diminish the interest or to break the spell. And the fascination continued. I have for my own part a little theory that the sympathy of the woman, her deep interest in his work, her participation in it (_Séraphita_ and some kindred labour, whatever be its defects, would never have existed but for that influence of this mystic Northerner), gave the attachment, as far as Balzac was concerned, something of the features of an attachment of consolation. His early adoration, as I hold, his boyish passion, was for Madame de Berny. And, in maturer years, his ideal, his very dream of beauty and of charm, was Madame de Castries--Madame de Castries set, so to put it, in the best of her backgrounds: Madame de Castries at Aix-les-Bains. Never, I think, in Balzac’s life was that experience, or the force of it, equalled. But in Evelina de Hanska, whether as friend or wife, he discovered and obtained a steady rest--a rest the more assured, it may be, because she entertained for him feelings of a deeper devotion than any that were extended by that admirable and almost lifelong comrade,