Balzac to Eva.

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 nothing 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 say 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 a life.
I have never before been like that. You have devoured everything.

I feel foolish and happy as soon as I let myself 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 talked to you as if you were here.
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!”