Although Balzac wrote Madame Hanska that when he called the girl loved by Dr. Benassis in his "Confession" (Le Medecin de Campagne) "Evelina," he said to himself, "She will quiver with joy in seeing that her name has occupied me, that she was present to my memory, and that what I deemed loveliest and noblest in the young girl, I have named for her," some think that the lady he had in mind was not Mme. Hanska, but Eleonore de Trumilly, who really was a young unmarried girl, while Madame Hanska was not only married, but the mother of several children. Again, letters written by the author to his family show his condition to have been desperate at that time. Balzac asserts that the story of /Louis Lambert/ is true to life; hence, despondent over his own situation, he makes Louis Lambert become insane, and causes Dr. Benassis to think of suicide when disappointed in love. Thus was the novelist doomed, early in his literary career, to meet with a disappointment which, as has been seen, was to be repeated some months later with more serious results, when his adoration for the Duchesse de Castries was suddenly turned into bitterness. MADAME HANSKA.--LA COMTESSE MNISZECH.--MADEMOISELLE BOREL.-- MESDEMOISELLES WYLEZYNSKA.--LA COMTESSE ROSALIE RZEWUSKA.-- MADEMOISELLE CALISTE RZEWUSKA.--MADAME CHERKOWITSCH.-- MADAME RIZNITSCH.--LA COMTESSE MARIE POTOCKA. "And they talk of the first love! I know nothing as terrible as the last, it is strangling." The longest and by far the most important of Balzac's friendships began by correspondence was the one with Madame Eveline Hanska, whose first letter arrived February 28, 1832. The friendship soon developed into a more sentimental relationship culminating March 14, 1850, when Madame Hanska became Madame Honore de Balzac. This "grand and beautiful soul-drama" is one of the noblest in the world, and in the history of literature the longest. So long was Balzac in pursuit of this apparent chimera, and so ardent was his passion for his "polar star" that the above words of Quinola may well be applied to his experience. So fervent was his adoration, so pathetic his sufferings and so persistent his pursuit during the seventeen long years of waiting that Miss Betham-Edwards has appropriately said of his letters to Madame Hanska: "Opening with a pianissimo, we soon reach /a con molto expressione/, a /crescendo/, a /molto furore/ quickly following. Every musical term, adjectival, substantival, occurs to us as we read the thousand and odd pages of the two volumes. . . . Nothing in his fiction or any other, records a love greatening as the tedious years wore on, a love sovereignly overcoming doubt, despair and disillusion, such a love as the great Balzac's for /l'Etrangere/."