page_title: Ewelina Hańska
section_title: Later years and death
hierarchical_section_title: Ewelina Hańska / Biography / Later years and death
context_page_description: Eveline Hańska was a Polish noblewoman best known for her marriage to French novelist Honoré de Balzac. Born at the Wierzchownia estate in Volhynia, Hańska married landowner Wacław Hański when she was a teenager. 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 five months later.
context_section_description: Hańska lived with Balzac's mother for a time after his death, in the house he had spent so much time and expense furnishing. The elder Mme. Balzac moved in with a friend after several months, and Hańska approached the remains of her late husband's writing. Several works had been left incomplete, and publishers inquired about releasing a final edition of his grand collection La Comédie humaine. Hańska sponsored new editions of his works and was involved in editing some of them, even adding occasional content. Balzac's debt, meanwhile, still exceeded 200,000 francs, which Hańska paid while also providing for his mother's living expenses. One of her letters at the time gives voice to her frustrations: "In nursing my husband's incurable malady I ruined my health, just as I have ruined my private fortune in accepting the inheritance of debts and embarrassments which he left me." Anna and Jerzy moved into a nearby house in Paris.
  Despite her obligations, Hańska was a beautiful unmarried woman of means living in Paris. The writer Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly described her this way: "Her beauty was imposing and noble, somewhat massive, a little fleshy, but even in stoutness she retained a very lively charm which was spiced with a delightful foreign accent and a striking hint of sensuality." As she began sorting through Balzac's papers, she called on his friend, Champfleury, for assistance. As they worked one evening, he complained of a headache. "I'll make it go away," she said, and began massaging his forehead. As he wrote later: "There are certain magnetic effluvia, in such situations, of which the effect is that the matter does not stop there." Her affair with the man twenty years her junior was brief, but it provided a tremendous release to Hańska, who had spent decades with older men in various states of ill health. She began partaking of the social life around her. "The night before last I laughed as I have never done before," she wrote in 1851. "Oh, how wonderful it is not to know anyone or have to worry about anyone, to have one's independence, liberty on the mountain-tops, and to be in Paris!"
  Champfleury was intimidated by her vitality and jealousy, and removed himself from her life. On his recommendation, she turned creative control of Balzac's unfinished novels Le Député d'Arcis and Les Petits Bourgeois to another writer, Charles Rabou. Rabou added extensively to them and published both books in 1854. To soothe the publisher, Hańska falsely claimed that Balzac had chosen Rabou as his literary successor.
  Hańska met the painter Jean Gigoux when she hired him in 1851 to paint Anna's portrait. They began a relationship that lasted many years, but never married. Over the next thirty years, Hańska and particularly her spend-thrift daughter spent the remainder of their fortune on fine clothing and jewelry. Jerzy, meanwhile, succumbed to mental disorders and died in 1881, leaving behind a trail of debts. Hańska was forced to sell the house, but was allowed to continue living there. She died on 11 April 1882 and was buried in Balzac's grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery.
caption: Hańska spent her last thirty years in a relationship with painter Jean Gigoux.[94]
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