[BALZAC]. - Lot 14

[BALZAC]. Ève HANSKA. L.A. to her daughter Anna Hanska, Countess Mniszech. 8 pp. in-8. One corner cut. Long and beautiful letter from Madame Hanska, addressed to her "dear beloved angel", teeming with anecdotes. Thanks to a letter from Dr. Peters and one from Georges Mniszech, her son-in-law, Madame Hanska knows that her daughter has arrived in Vienna and soon in Leopold (Lwow). Stricken, she is astonished to feel so well after so much anxiety. She recalls a ball given at the Grand Hotel for charity, then adds: "[Gaston] Marquiset [...] was much entertained at Hedwige's by the Etruscan Vase, who at that famous soirée where you were invited, extolled before everyone the virtues of his future son-in-law and especially extolled a merit that a husband expects to find in his wife, but that ordinarily a mother-in-law has no right to demand of her son-in-law - he is as pure as her fiancée would be. She's found no better way to appease him than to give him a ring with a crest of her arms & a satyr & nymph for support, with these words around it "be a man". She is so proud of this idea that she shows her ring to everyone [...]". She goes on to say, not without a sense of humor, "So, to take up my diary a la Dangeau [...]". She visited the Buttes Chaumont and marveled at this surprising landscape, "all the wonders of Switzerland, brought together but not crammed into an area of 100 square leagues", then left "these gentlemen" at the gates of the Hôtel Drouot. She evokes her friends Mme André and Mme Léon, as well as the beautiful ladies of Fontainebleau who frighten her, the play Lucrèce Borgia "without the Patti", then, at length, the difficulties encountered by her brother-in-law, Jules Lacroix, in publishing his "Roi Lear" and his quarrels with the publisher Michel Lévy, and so on. The letter ends with the words: "Adieu donc ma chère bien aimée [...] Adieu donc mon héros d'enfant", and adds: "My health is superb, never have I felt better". In 1819, Madame Hanska had married the Polish Count Wenceslas Hanski, twenty-five years her senior, and had six children. Only her only daughter, Anna, to whom this letter is sent, survived. Provenance: Jean Gigoux.