It is owing to this charlatanism [the spacious distribution of the streets, etc.] that Berlin has a more populous look than Petersburg; I would have said "more animated" look if I had been speaking of another people; but the Prussian, with his brutal heaviness, will never be able to do anything but crush. To produce the movement of a great European capital you must have less beer and bad tobacco, and more of the French or Italian spirit; or else you must have the great industrial and commercial ideas which have produced the gigantic development of London; but Berlin and its inhabitants will never be anything but an ugly little city, inhabited by an ugly big people.
"I have seen Tieck _en famille_," he says in another letter. "He seemed pleased with my homage. He had an old countess, his contemporary in spectacles, almost an octogenarian--a mummy with a green eye-shade, whom I supposed to be a domestic divinity.... I am at home again; it is half-past six in the evening, and I have eaten nothing since this morning. Berlin is the city of _ennui_; I should die here in a week. Poor Humboldt is dying of it; he drags with him everywhere his nostalgia for Paris."
Balzac passed the winter of 1848-'49 and several months more at Vierzschovnia, the Polish estate of Mme. Hanska and her children. His health had been gravely impaired, and the doctors had absolutely forbidden him to work. His inexhaustible and indefatigable brain had at last succumbed to fatigue. But the prize was gained; his debts were paid; he was looking forward to owning at last the money that he should make. He could afford--relatively speaking at least--to rest. His fame had been solidly built up; the public recognized his greatness. Already, in 1846, he had written: "You will learn with pleasure, I am sure, that there is an immense reaction in my favor. At last I have conquered! Once more my protecting star has watched over me.... At this moment the public and the papers turn toward me favorably; more than that, there is a sort of acclamation, a general consecration.... It is a great year for me, dear Countess."
To be ill and kept from work was, for Balzac, to be a chained Prometheus; but there was much during these last months to alleviate his impatience. His letters at this period are easier, less painfully preoccupied than at any other; and he found in Poland better medical advice than he deemed obtainable in Paris. He was preparing a house in Paris to receive him as a married man--preparing it apparently with great splendor. At Les Jardies the pictures and divans and tapestries had mostly been nominal--had been present only in grand names, chalked grotesquely upon the empty walls. But during the last years of his life Balzac appears to have been a great collector. He bought many pictures and other objects of value; in particular, there figures in these letters a certain set of Florentine furniture which he was willing to sell again, but to sell only to a royal purchaser. The King of Holland appears to have been in treaty for it. Readers of the "Comédie Humaine" have no need to be reminded of the author's passion for furniture; nowhere else are there such loving or such invidious descriptions of it. "Decidedly," he writes once to Mme. Hanska, "I will send to Tours for the Louis XVI. secretary and bureau; the room will then be complete. It's a matter of a thousand francs; but for a thousand francs what can one get in modern furniture? _Des platitudes bourgeoises, des misères sans valeur et sans goût._"