I correct more quickly. It's not only courage
you give me to support the difficulties of life; you give me also
talent, at any rate, facility. . . . My Eve, my darling, my kind,
divine Eve! What a grief it is to me not to have been able to tell you
every evening all that I have done, said, and thought."
The visit to Geneva was paid, and lasted six weeks, the novelist
quitting Switzerland only on the 8th of February 1834. From this date
onward, a regular correspondence was kept up between them,
compensating for their seeing each other rarely. The project of
marriage, more tenaciously pursued by Balzac than by his Eve, was yet
no hindrance to his fleeting fancies for other women. These interim
amours have a good deal preoccupied his various biographers, partly
because of the undoubted use he made of them in his novels, and partly
also because of the trouble he gave himself to establish among circles
outside his own immediate entourage the legend of his being a sort of
Sir Galahad, leading a perfectly chaste life and caring only for his
literary labours. Says Theophile Gautier:--
"He used to preach to us a strange literary hygiene. We ought to shut
ourselves up for two or three years, drink water, eat soaked lupines
like Protogenes, go to bed at six o'clock in the evening, and work
till morning .
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