Women in the Life of Balzac | Page 7

mentioning here an anecdote which is very typical of Balzac. He was about to return to Paris from Russia after his marriage. My aunt coming into his room one morning found him absorbed in writing a letter. Asking him for whom it was intended she was petrified with astonishment when he replied that it was for the Duke de Bordeaux, as the Comte de Chambord was still called at the time, to present his respects to him upon his entrance into his family! My aunt at first could not understand what it was he meant, and when at last she had grasped the fact that it was in virtue of her distant, very distant, relationship with Queen Marie Leszczinska that he claimed the privilege of cousinship with the then Head of the Royal House of France, it was with the greatest difficulty and with any amount of trouble that she prevailed upon him at last to give up this remarkable idea, and to be content with the knowledge that some Rzewuski blood flowed in the veins of the last remaining member of the elder line of the Bourbons, without intruding upon the privacy of the Comte de Chambord, who probably would have been somewhat surprised to receive this extraordinary communication from the great, but also snobbish Balzac.
It was on account of this snobbishness, which had something childish about it, that he sometimes became involved in discussions, not only with my aunt, but also with several of his friends, Victor Hugo among others, who could not bring themselves to forgive him for thinking more of the great and illustrious families with which his marriage had connected him than of his own genius and marvelous talents. Hugo most unjustly accused my aunt of encouraging this "aberration," as he called it, of Balzac's mind; in which judgment of her he was vastly mistaken, because she was the person who suffered the most through it, and by it. But this unwarranted suspicion made him antagonistic to her, and probably inspired the famous description he left us of Balzac's last hours in the little volume called /Choses vues/. This was partly the cause why people afterwards said that my aunt's married life with the great writer had been far from happy, and had resolved itself into a great disappointment for both of them. The reality was very different, because during the few months they lived together, they had known and enjoyed complete and absolute happiness, and Madame de Balzac's heart was forever broken when she closed with pious hands the eyes of the man who had occupied such an immense place in her heart as well as in her life. Many years later, talking with me about those last sad hours when she watched with such tender devotion by his bedside, she told me with accents that are still ringing in my ears with their wail of agony: I lived through a hell of suffering on that day.
Nevertheless she bore up bravely under the load of the unmerited misfortunes which had fallen upon her. Her first care, after she had become for the second time a widow, was to pay Balzac's debts, which she proceeded to do with the thoroughness she always brought to bear in everything she undertook. She remained upon the most affectionate terms with his family, and it was due to her that Balzac's mother was able to spend her last years in comfort. These facts speak for themselves, and, to my mind at least, dispose better than volumes on the subject could do of the conscious or unconscious calumny cast by Victor Hugo on my aunt's memory. It must here be explained that the real reason why he did not see her, when he called for the last time on his dying friend, and concluded so hastily that she preferred remaining in her own apartments than at her husband's side, consisted in the fact that she did not like the poet, who she instinctively felt, also did not care for her, so she preferred not to encounter a man whom she knew as antagonistic to herself at an hour when she was about to undergo the greatest trial of her life, and she retired to her room when he was announced. But Hugo, who had often reproached Balzac for being vain, had in his own character a dose of vanity sufficient to make him refuse to admit that there could exist in the whole of the wide world a human being who would not have jumped at the chance of seeing him, even under the most distressing of circumstances.
I have said already that my aunt's opinions consisted of a curious mixture of atheism and a profound belief in the Divinity. Her mind was far too vigorous and too deep to accept