Though fertile in incidents, the year of 1845 was, from a literary
point of view, more barren than any in Balzac's past career, exception, of course, made for the time lost during his printing-house adventure. Beyond his short, witty sketch, A Man of Business, relating the tricks employed by the princes of bohemianism to pay their debts and indulge their caprices gratis, no finished work was published. The Peasants, which the author never entirely got through, was taken up repeatedly, and as often put aside from sheer inability to proceed.
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.
If the supposition be correct, it explains the convalescent's being
joined by Balzac again in September at Baden-Baden, where the
arrangements were made for Eve and himself to meet in October at
Chalon-sur-Saone and to travel together to Italy. It was during this
second stay in Germany that the play of the Saltimbanques they had
seen suggested to the novelist the amusing nicknames which he
henceforth adopted when writing to Madame Hanska's family. Anna was
dubbed Zephirine; her betrothed, Gringalet; Eve, Atala; and
himself, Bilboquet. Georges, the betrothed, who was a Pole bearing
the title of Count Mniszech, was a young man of scientific tastes and
considerable learning, for whom Balzac conceived a great liking, and
whom he helped in his entomological researches.