Eveline Hańska (; 6 January – 11 April 1882) was a Polish noblewoman best known for her marriage to French novelist Honoré de Balzac. Born at the Wierzchownia estate in VolhyniaJuanita Helm Floyd, Women in the Life of Balzac. Page 136. Kessinger Publishing, 2004 reprint. . Retrieved 8 October 2011. (now Ukraine), Hańska married landowner Wacław Hański when she was a teenager.Frederic Ewen, Heroic imagination: the creative genius of Europe... Page 498. New York University Press, 2004 reprint. . Hański, who was about 20 years her senior, suffered from depression. They had five children, but only a daughter, Anna, survived.
In the late 1820s, Hańska began reading Balzac's novels, and in 1832, she sent him an anonymous letter. This began a decades-long correspondence in which Hańska and Balzac expressed a deep mutual affection. In 1833, they met for the first time, in Switzerland. Soon afterward he began writing the novel Séraphîta, which includes a character based on Hańska.
After her husband died in 1841, a series of complications obstructed Hańska's marriage to Balzac. Chief of these was the estate and her daughter Anna's inheritance, both of which might be threatened if she married him. Anna married a Polish count, easing some of the pressure. About the same time, Hańska gave Balzac the idea for his 1844 novel Modeste Mignon. In 1850 they finally married, and moved to Paris, but he died six months later. Though she never remarried, she took several lovers, and died in 1882.
Biography
Family and early life Hańska was the fourth of seven children born to Count Adam Wawrzyniec Rzewuski (1760-1825) and his wife, Justyna Rdułtowska (1775-1836).Robb, p. 226; Pierrot, p. 12. Note that spelling changes for the feminine form of Polish surnames. The House of Rzewuski was established as Polish nobility, known for wealth and military prowess.Robb, p. 226. He states: "Eveline Hanska, the fourth of seven children, came from a historic Polish family, the Rzewuskis, many of them brilliant warriors, statesmen, adventurers and lunatics." One ancestor had imprisoned his own mother in a tower to extract his part of an inheritance.Cronin, p. 153; Robb, p. 226; Korwin-Piotrowska (1938), p. 21. Hańska's great-grandfather, Wacław Rzewuski, was a famous writer and a Grand Crown Hetman.Pierrot, p. 3. When the Russian Empire gained control of lands owned by the family through the Partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century, Rzewuski swore his allegiance to Catherine II. He was rewarded with a comfortable position in the ranks of the empire. Moving between assignments in Kiev, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere, he chose as his primary residence the village of Pohrebyszcze in the region of Vinnytsia.Pierrot, pp. 3–7; Robb, pp. 226–227.
She was born in the Pohrebyszcze castle, in the Kiev Governorate of Russian partition of Poland. Although scholars agree that Hańska was born on 6 January, the year is disputed.Robb, p. 227; Pierrot, pp. 12–16; Korwin-Piotrowska (1933), pp. 20–21. Even the date of 6 January is contentious, and is complicated by the transition at the time from the Julian to Gregorian calendar. See Floyd, p. 203 and Pierrot, pp. 12–16. Her biographers and those of Balzac offer conflicting evidence of her age, taken from correspondence, family records, and testimonies from descendants. Most estimates range between 1801 and 1806.Pierrot, pp. 12–16; Floyd, p. 203; Cronin, p. 153. Maurois implies on p. 219 that she was born in 1799. Balzac's biographer Graham Robb writes: "Balzac chose 1806 as her date of birth and he was probably right."Robb, p. 227. Roger Pierrot's 1999 biography of Hańska, however, contends that she was born in 1804.Pierrot, p. 14. His certainty is cited to an entry for Adam Rzewuski in the Dictionary of Polish Biography which gives his birth date as 24 December 1804. Eveline was born roughly one year earlier. Polish Biographical Dictionary gives 24 December 1805 (Julian) which converts to 5 January 1806 (Gregorian).
Like her brothers and sisters, Hańska was educated by her parents about family lineage and religion. Her mother was a devout Catholic, but her father also taught the children about Voltairian rationality. The family was secluded in Pohrebyszcze, with only occasional trips away. Once a year, the family visited Kiev for a market gathering, during which Rzewuski sold grain and her mother purchased clothing and supplies for the estate.
Ewelina had three brothers: Adam, Ernest and Henryk, and three sisters: Alina, Karolina (better known as Karolina Sobańska) and Paulina. Hańska was closest to her brother Henryk, who later became famous for his work in the genre of Polish folk literature known as gawęda szlachecka. They shared a passion for philosophical discussions, especially related to love and religion. Hańska's other brothers, Adam and Ernest, both pursued military careers.Pierrot, pp. 49–55. Hańska's eldest sister, Karolina, was admired as a child for her beauty, intellect, and musical talent. She later married a man 34 years her senior, a landowner from Podole named Hieronim Sobański. They separated after two years, and she began a series of passionate affairs with some of her many suitors. These included the Russian general Ivan Ossipovitch Witt, the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, and the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin. The Tsar considered her behavior scandalous and declared her dangerously disloyal. As a result, Hańska and the other Rzewuski women were watched carefully by police when they visited the Russian capital of St Petersburg.Gerson, p. 153. Hańska's younger sisters, Alina and Paulina, married early into comfortable upper-class families. Alina married a wealthy landowner from Smilavičy, whose father had gained his fortune by managing property for the Ogiński family. Her nephew Stanisław Moniuszko became a renowned composer. Paulina married a banker from Odessa named Jan Riznič.
Marriage to Hański
In 1819 Ewelina married Wacław Hański, a noble who lived nearby at Verhivnya (Wierzchownia). Their marriage was a union of wealthy families, not of passion. His estate covered and owned over 3,000 serfs, including 300 domestic servants. The manor had been designed by a French architect, and its owner filled it with luxuries from around the world: paintings from galleries in Milan and London, dinnerware from China, and a library of 25,000 books in a variety of languages. Hański boasted that none of the furniture was Russian.Robb, p. 227; Gerson, pp. 151–152; Cronin, p. 155.
Hański was more than 20 years older than Ewelina, who was a teenager at the time of their wedding, and his personality clashed with her youthful vigor. He spent most of the day supervising the grounds, by some accounts with an iron fist.Robb, p. 452 note 7. After dinner he was usually too fatigued to spend time with his wife, and retired early. He was generally dour, and lived with a depressed condition that Hańska referred to as "blue devils". Although she was surrounded by opulence, Hańska found herself dissatisfied with her new life and with her husband's emotional distance in particular. As one biographer put it: "He loved Eve but he was not deeply in love with her."
In the first five years of their marriage, Hańska gave birth to five children, four of whom died as infants. The surviving daughter, Anna (b. 1825-30 d. 1915), was a welcome joy to Hańska, and she trusted her care to a young governess named Henriette Borel who had moved to Wierzchownia from the Swiss town of Neuchâtel.
The estate at Wierzchownia was isolated. Hańska was bored by visits to the court at St. Petersburg, and even more bored by noble guests in her own home. She found nothing in common with the ladies of high society, and longed for the stimulating discussions she had enjoyed with her brother Henryk. She spent her time reading the books her husband imported from faraway lands.Gerson, p. 154; Cronin, pp. 157–158.
Becoming "The Stranger"
One of the writers who most enchanted Hańska was the French novelist Honoré de Balzac. After laboring in pseudonymous obscurity for 10 years, Balzac published Les Chouans (The Chouans) in 1829. A tale of star-crossed love amidst a royalist uprising in Brittany, it was the first work to which he signed his own name. Hańska was intrigued by the glowing portrayal of the female protagonist, driven by true love to protect the object of her desire. She also enjoyed Balzac's Physiologie du mariage (The Physiology of Marriage), also published in 1829, which heaps satirical scorn on husbands and celebrates the virtue of married women.Cronin, p. 158; Maurois, p. 155.
When she read his 1831 novel La Peau de chagrin (The Magic Skin), however, Hańska was appalled by the coarse depiction of Foedora, the so-called "femme sans cœur" ("woman without a heart"). She felt that Balzac had lost the reverence shown in his earlier works, and worried that he had based Foedora on a real woman from his life. Motivated partly by concern, partly by boredom, and partly by a desire to influence the life of a great writer (as her sister Karolina had done), she wrote to Balzac.Robb, pp. 226–227; Cronin, pp. 158–159; Korwin-Piotrowska (1938), pp. 68–70.
On 28 February 1832 Hańska posted a letter from Odessa with no return address. In it, she praised Balzac for his work, but scolded him for the negative portrayal of women in La Peau de chagrin. She urged a return to the glowing representations in his earlier novels, and signed enigmatically: "L'Étrangère" ("The Stranger" or "The Foreigner").Maurois, p. 218; Dargan, p. 29; Robb, pp. 223–224. "L'Étrangère" can also mean "The Foreigner".Some sources suggest that Hańska had her daughter's governess write the actual letter as she dictated. See Cronin, pp. 158–159 and Gerson (who suggests an elaborate plan involving Hańska's cousins), pp. 154–155. Balzac was intrigued by the letter; he took out a personal advertisement in the Gazette de France indicating his receipt of an anonymous letter and expressing regret for being unable to reply. She probably never saw this notice.Robb, p. 224; Maurois, p. 218; Gerson, p. 155. Cronin says on p. 163 that La Quotidienne was one of the only French newspapers allowed into Russia at the time.
Hańska wrote to Balzac several times during 1832.Cronin, p. 161; Robb, p. 224. The exact number of letters is unknown. On 7 November she posted a seven-page letter filled with praise and flattery:Your soul embraces centuries, Monsieur; its philosophical concepts appear to be the fruit of long study matured by time; yet I am told that you are still young. I would like to know you, but feel that I have no need to do so. I know you through my own spiritual instinct; I picture you in my own way and feel that were I to set eyes upon you I should exclaim, 'That is he!' Your outward semblance probably does not reveal your brilliant imagination; you have to be moved, the sacred fire of genius has to be lit, if you are to show yourself as you really are, and you are what I feel you to be—a man superior in his knowledge of the human heart.
She insisted, however, that they could never meet, and indeed that he should never know her name: ("For you I am The Stranger, and shall remain so all my life.") Still, she wished for him to write back, so she advised him to place a notice in La Quotidienne to "L'É" from "H.B.". He purchased a notice similar to the earlier one in the Gazette, and signed it according to her instructions.Maurois, p. 219; Cronin, p. 163; Gerson, p. 156.