Neuchatel (1833) and Later
Before too long, however, another letter from L'Etrangere reported that she and her husband -for indeed she was married, with a young daughter - would soon be visiting western Europe and she might meet Balzac in Neuchatel in Switzerland, but very discreetly.
In September 1833, the two finally met. His unnamed admirer turned out to be beautiful, slightly over thirty, from eastern Europe, still young and vivacious, intelligent, very well read in European literature, thoughtful, sensitive, elegant, and aristocratic of manner. Ewelina Hanska, nee Rzewuska, came from one of the great families of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, related to Polish royalty, with large estates in Ukraine, by then part of the Russian Empire.What a contrast to Balzac, the awkward and ambitious writer who only pretended to be an aristocrat! He was short, overweight, and not very good looking at all. But he still had something magnetic about him (Figure 10). “A happy wild-boar,” was how one friend described him, and his ever good humour and infectious enthusiasm for life (he was only thirty-four) soon swept the young lady from Ukraine completely away. They vowed eternal love and met again the next December in Geneva, where they became lovers.6
But Ewelina's husband, Waclaw Hanski, was a problem. A Polish nobleman, he was about twenty years older than his wife and in bad health, but not expected to die soon. Balzac was introduced to him and was soon playing the role of a family friend. In fact, the two men got along quite well, agreeing on politics and having a mutual interest in the economics of agriculture, for Hanski, it transpired, was one of the richest men in Ukraine and owned a vast estate in the province of Kyiv with thousands of hectares of good agricultural land and many thousands of serfs to work them. He and Ewelina - “Eve” to Balzac - lived in a great, neoclassical chateau called “Verkhivnia,” with an enormous colonnaded portico, dozens of elegant rooms, a large library of thousands of volumes, furniture from around the world, rich Persian carpets, and hundreds of household serfs to look after them.
The house had even its own hospital with a resident doctor. Eve and her daughter, Anna, were heirs to all this.Balzac was quite swept away by his good fortune. Love! Beauty! Aristocracy! Enormous wealth! And Hanski actually invited him to visit the family in Ukraine, sending him a large engraved print of his great home! Eve, however, held back. The situation was complicated and dangerous, and she knew it. After her return to Verkhivnia she continued to correspond with Balzac, and some of her letters were quite passionate. The separated lovers had to wait.7
Meanwhile, Hanski lived on, despite his poor health. At one point, he intercepted some of Balzac's letters to his wife and was outraged. But the resourceful French writer, who was in the habit of writing to Eve almost every day, dreamed up an excuse, and the cuckolded husband, ever trusting, actually believed it or, at least, pretended to. This went on for several years, Balzac thinking more and more of his beautiful love in far-off Ukraine. This did not prevent him from having affairs with other women, and, indeed, word reached Eve about these, but again he talked his way out of the difficulty, and her suspicions were quieted. He never was to completely give up on his dreamy vision of Ukraine as a quiet oasis in the desert of life's troubles that he now dearly wished to visit.