My beloved angel,
I am
nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two
ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them.
I can no longer
think of anything but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me
to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most
amorous caresses take possession of me.
As for my heart, there you will
always be - very much so. I have a delicious sense of you there. But
my God, what is to become of me, if you have deprived me of my reason?
This is a monomania which, this morning, terrifies me.
I rise up every
moment saying to myself, “Come, I am going there!” Then I sit down again, moved
by the sense of my obligations. There is a frightful conflict. This
is not life. I have never before been like that. You have devoured
everything.
I feel foolish and happy as soon as I think of you. I
whirl round in a delicious dream in which in one instant I live a thousand
years. What a horrible situation!
Overcome with love, feeling love in
every pore, living only for love, and seeing oneself consumed by griefs, and
caught in a thousand spiders’ threads.
O, my darling Eva, you did not
know it. I picked up your card. It is there before me, and I talk to
you as if you were there. I see you, as I did yesterday, beautiful,
astonishingly beautiful.
Yesterday, during the whole evening, I said to
myself “she is mine!” Ah! The angels are not as happy in Paradise as I was
yesterday!
Honore de Balzac
Sunday 19th June 1836
