“At any moment death may take from me an angel who has watched over me for fourteen years; she, too, a flower of solitude, whom the world had never touched, and who has been my star. My work is not done without tears! The attentions due to her cast uncertainty upon any time of which I could dispose, though she herself unites with the doctor in advising me some strong diversions. She pushes friendship so far as to hide her sufferings from me; she tries to seem well for me. You understand that I have not drawn Claes to do as he! Great God! what changes in her have been wrought in two months! I am overwhelmed.”
M. le Breton has suggested that Madame de Berny is Catherine in La
Derniere Fee, Madame d’Aiglemont in La Femme de trente Ans, and
Madame de Beauseant in La Femme abandonnee, and has strengthened
this last statement by pointing out that Gaston de Nueil came to
Madame de Beauseant after she had been deserted by her lover, the
Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto, just as the youthful Balzac came to Madame de
Berny after she had had a lover.
It is doubtless to this friendship that Balzac refers when he writes in the last lines of La Duchesse de Langeais: “It is only the last love of a woman that can satisfy the first love of a man.” It is of interest to note that Antoinette is the Christian name of the heroine of this story. Throughout the Comedie humaine are seen quite young men who fall in love with women well advanced in years, as Calyste de Guenic with Mademoiselle Felicite des Touches in Beatrix, and Lucien de Rubempre with Madame Bargeton in Illusions perdues.
In Eugenie Grandet Balzac writes:
“Do you know what Madame Campan used to say to us? ‘My children, so long as a man is a Minister, adore him; if he falls, help to drag him to the ditch. Powerful, he is a sort of deity; ruined, he is below Marat in his sewer, because he is alive, and Marat, dead. Life is a series of combinations, which must be studied and followed if a good position is to be successfully maintained.’“
Since Madame Campan was femme de chambre of Marie Antoinette, Balzac probably heard this maxim through Madame de Berny.
Although some writers state that Madame de Berny was one of Balzac’s collaborators in composing the Physiologie du Mariage, he says, regarding this work: “I undertook the Physiologie du Mariage and the Peau de Chagrin against the advice of that angel whom I have lost.” She may have inspired him, however, in writing Le Cure de Tours, as it is dated at her home, Saint-Firmin, 1832.
In 1833, Balzac wrote Madame Hanska that he had dedicated the fourth volume of the Scenes de la Vie privee to her, putting her seal at the head of l’Expiation, the last chapter of La Femme de trente Ans, which he was writing at the moment he received her first letter. But a person who was as a mother to him and whose caprices and even jealousy he was bound to respect, had exacted that this silent testimony should be repressed. He had the sincerity to avow to her both the dedication and its destruction, because he believed her to have a soul sufficiently lofty not to desire homage which would cause grief to one as noble and grand as she whose child he was, for she had rescued him when in youth he had nearly perished in the midst of griefs and shipwreck. He had saved the only copy of that dedication, for which he had been blamed as if it were a horrible coquetry, and wished her to keep it as a souvenir and as an expression of his thanks.
Balzac was ever loyal to Madame de Berny and refused to reveal her baptismal name to Madame Hanska; soon after their correspondence began he wrote her: “You have asked me the baptismal name of the Dilecta. In spite of my complete and blind faith, in spite of my sentiment for you, I cannot tell it to you; I have never told it. Would you have faith in me if I told it? No.”
After 1834 Madame de Berny’s health failed rapidly, and her last days were full of sorrow. Among her numerous family trials Balzac enumerates:
“One daughter become insane, another daughter dead, the third dying, what blows! — And a wound more violent still, of which nothing can be told. Finally, after thirty years of patience and devotion, forced to separate from her husband under pain of dying if she remained a few days longer. All this in a short space of time. This is what I suffer through the heart that created me. . . . Madame de Berny is much better; she has borne a last shock, the illness of a beloved son whose brother has gone to bring him home from Belgium. . . . Suddenly, the only son who resembles her, a young man handsome as the day, tender and spiritual like herself, like her full of noble sentiments, fell ill, and ill of a cold which amounts to an affection of the lungs. The only child out of nine with whom she can sympathize! Of the nine, only four remain; and her youngest daughter has become hysterically insane, without any hope of cure. That blow nearly killed her. I was correcting the Lys beside her; but my affection was powerless even to temper this last blow. Her son (twenty-three years old) was in Belgium where he was directing an establishment of great importance. His brother Alexandre went for him, and he arrived a month ago, in a deplorable condition. This mother, without strength, almost expiring, sits up at night to nurse Armand. She has nurses and doctors. She implores me not to come and not to write to her.”[*]
[*] Lettres a l’Etrangere. Various writers in speaking of Madame de Berny, state that she had eight children; others, nine. Balzac remarks frequently that she had nine. Among others, Madame Ruxton says that she had eight. She gives their names and dates of birth. The explanation of this difference is probably found in the following: “I am going to fulfil a rather sad duty this morning. The daughter of Madame de B . . . and of Campi . . . asks for me. In 1824, they wished me to marry her. She was bewitchingly beautiful, a flower of Bengal! After twenty years, I am going to see her again! At forty years of age! She asks a service of me; doubtless a literary ambition! . . . I am going there. . . . Three o’clock. I was sure of it! I have seen Julie, to whom and for whom I wrote the verses: ‘From the midst of those torrents of glory and of light, etc.:’ which are in Illusions perdues. . . .” Neither the name Julie nor the date of her birth is given by Madame Ruxton.
Some secret pertaining to Madame de Berny remains untold. In 1834 Balzac writes Madame Hanska: “The greatest sorrows have overwhelmed Madame de Berny. She is far from me, at Nemours, where she is dying of her troubles. I cannot write you about them; they are things that can only be spoken of with the greatest secrecy.” He might have revealed this secret to her in 1835 when he visited her in Vienna; the following secret, however, is not explained in subsequent letters, and Balzac did not see Madame Hanska again until seven years later in St. Petersburg:
“I have much distress, even enormous distress in the direction of Madame de Berny; not from her directly but from her family. It is not of a nature to be written. Some evening at Wierzchownia, when the heart wounds are scars, I will tell it to you in murmurs so that the spiders cannot hear, and so that my voice can go from my lips to your heart. They are dreadful things, which dig into life to the bone, deflowering all, and making one distrust all, except you for whom I reserve these sighs.”
Though Madame de Berny may have been jealous of other women in her earlier association with Balzac, she evidently changed later, for he writes:
“Alas! Madame de Berny is no better. The malady makes frightful progress, and I cannot express to you how grand, noble and touching this soul of my life has been in these days measured by illness, and with what fervor she desires that another be to me what she has been. She knows the inward spring and nobility that the habit of carrying all things to an idol gives me. My God is on earth.”
Contrary to his family, Madame Carraud sympathized with Balzac in his devotion to Madame de Berny, and invited them to be her guests. In accepting he writes:
“Her life is so much bound up in mine! Ah, no one can form any true idea of this deep attachment which sustains me in all my work, and consoles me every moment in all I suffer. You can understand something of this, you who know so well what friendship is, you who are so affectionate, so good. . . . I thank you beforehand for your offer of Frapesle to her.
There, amid your flowers, and in your gentle companionship, and the country life, if convalescence is possible, and I venture to hope for it, she will regain life and health.”
He apparently did not receive such sympathy from Madame Hanska in their early correspondence:
“Why be displeased about a woman fifty-eight years old, who is a mother to me, who folds me in her heart and protects me from stings? Do not be jealous of her; she would be so glad of our happiness. She is an angel, sublime. There are angels of earth and angels of heaven; she is of heaven.”
Madame de Berny’s illness continued to grow more and more serious. The reading of the second number of Pere Goriot affected her so much that she had another heart attack. But as her illness and griefs changed and withered her, Balzac’s affection for her redoubled. He did not realize how rapidly she was failing, for she did not wish him to see her unless she felt well and could appear attractive. On his return to France from a journey to Italy with Madame Marbouty, he was overcome with grief at the news of the death of Madame de Berny. He found on his table a letter from her son Alexandre briefly announcing his mother’s death.
But the novelist did not cease to respect her criticism:
“I resumed my work this morning; I am obeying the last words that Madame de Berny wrote me; ‘I can die; I am sure that you have upon your brow the crown I wished there. The Lys is a sublime work, without spot or flaw. Only, the death of Madame de Mortsauf does not need those horrible regrets; they injure the beautiful letter she writes.’ Therefore, to-day I have piously effaced a hundred lines, which, according to many persons, disfigure that creation. I have not regretted a single word, and each time that my pen was drawn through one of them, never was the heart of man more deeply stirred. I thought I saw that grand and sublime woman, that angel of friendship, before me, smiling as she smiled to me when I used a strength so rare, — the strength to cut off one’s own limb and feel neither pain nor regret in correcting, in conquering one’s self.”
Balzac was sincere in his friendship with Madame de Berny, and never ceased to revere her memory. The following appreciations of her worth are a few of the numerous beautiful tributes he has paid her:
“I have lost the being whom I love most in the world. . . . She whom I have lost was more than a mother, more than a friend, more than any human creature can be to another; it can only be expressed by the word divine. She sustained me through storms of trouble by word and deed and entire devotedness. If I am alive this day, it is to her that it is due. She was everything to me; and although during the last two years, time and illness kept us apart, we saw each other through the distance. She inspired me; she was for me a spiritual sun. Madame de Mortsauf in Le Lys dans la Vallee, only faintly shadows forth some of the slighter qualities of this woman; there is but a very pale reflection of her, for I have a horror of unveiling my own private emotions to the public, and nothing personal to myself will ever be known.”
“Madame de Berny is dead. I can say no more on that point. My sorrow is not of a day; it will react upon my whole life. For a year I had not seen her, nor did I see her in her last moments. . . . She, who was always so lovingly severe to me, acknowledged that the Lys was one of the finest books in the French language; she decked herself at last with the crown which, fifteen years earlier, I had promised her, and, always coquettish, she imperiously forbade me to visit her, because she would not have me near her unless she were beautiful and well. The letter deceived me. . . . When I was wrecked the first time, in 1828, I was only twenty-nine years old and I had an angel at my side. . . . There is a blank which has saddened me. The adored is here no longer. Every day I have occasion to deplore the eternal absence. Would you believe that for six months I have not been able to go to Nemours to bring away the things that ought to be in my sole possession? Every week I say to myself, ‘It shall be this week! . . .’ I was very unhappy in my youth, but Madame de Berny balanced all by an absolute devotion, which was understood to its full extent only when the grave had seized its prey. Yes, I was spoiled by that angel.”[*]
[*] Madame de Berny died July 27, 1836.
So faithful was Balzac to the memory of his Dilecta that nine years after her death, he was deeply affected on seeing at the Cour d’Assises a woman about forty-five years of age, who strongly resembled Madame de Berny, and who was being arraigned for deeds caused by her devotion to a reckless youth.
LA DUCHESSE DE CASTRIES. — MADEMOISELLE DE TRUMILLY
“He who has not seen, at some ball of Madame, Duchesse de Berry, glide airily, scarcely touching the floor, so moving that one perceived in her only grace before knowing whether she was a beauty, a young woman with blond, deep-golden hair; he who has not seen appear then the young Marquise de Castries in a fete, cannot, without doubt, form an idea of this new beauty, charming, aerial, praised and honored in the salons of the Restoration.”
Balzac had a brief, yet ardent friendship with the Duchesse de Castries which ended so unhappily for him that one might say: “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned.” Madame de Castries was the daughter of the Duchesse (nee Fitz-James) and the Duc de Maille. She did not become a duchess until in 1842, and bore the title of marquise previous to that time. Separated from her husband as the result of a famous love affair, the Marquise gathered round her a group of intellectual people, among whom were the writers Balzac, Musset, Sainte-Beuve, etc., and continued active in literary and artistic circles until her death (1861).
On Balzac’s return to Paris after a prolonged visit with his friends at Sache during the month of September, 1831, he received an anonymous letter, dated at Paris, a circumstance which was with him of rather frequent occurrence, as with many men of letters.
This lady criticized the Physiologie du Mariage, to which Balzac replies, defending his position:
“The Physiologie du Mariage, madame, was a work undertaken for the purpose of defending the cause of women. I knew that if, with the view of inculcating ideas favorable to their emancipation and to a broad and thorough system of education for them, I had gone to work in a blundering way, I should at best, have been regarded as nothing more than an author of a theory more or less plausible. I was therefore, obliged to clothe my ideas, to disguise them under a new shape, in biting, incisive words that should lay hold on the mind of my readers, awaken their attention and leave behind, reflections upon which they might meditate. Thus then any woman who has passed through the ‘storms of life’ would see that I attribute the blame of all faults committed by the wives, entirely to their husbands. It is, in fact, a plenary absolution. Besides this, I plead for the natural and inalienable rights of woman. A happy marriage is impossible unless there be a perfect acquaintance between the two before marriage — a knowledge of each other’s ways, habits and character. And I have not flinched from any of the consequences involved in this principle. Those who know me are aware that I have been faithful to this opinion ever since I reached the age of reason; and in my eyes a young girl who has committed a fault deserves more interest than she who, remaining ignorant, lies open to the misfortunes of the future. I am at this present time a bachelor, and if I should marry later in life, it will only be to a widow.”
Thus was begun the correspondence, and the Duchess ended by lifting her mask and inviting the writer to visit her; he gladly accepted her gracious offer to come, not as a literary man nor as an artist, but as himself. It is a striking coincidence that Balzac accepted this invitation the very day, February 28, 1832, that he received the first letter from l’Etrangere.
What must have been Balzac’s surprise, and how flattered he must have felt, on learning that his unknown correspondent belonged to the highest aristocracy of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and that her husband was a peer of France under Charles X!
“Madame de Castries was a coquettish, vain, delicate, clever woman, with a touch of sensibility, piety and chaleur de salon; a true Parisian with all her brilliant exterior accomplishments, qualities refined by education, luxury and ari
stocratic surroundings, but also with all her coldness and faults; in a word, one of those women of whom one must never ask friendship, love or devotion beyond a light veneer, because nature had created some women morally poor.”
At first, Balzac was too enraptured to judge her accurately, but after frequenting her salon for several months, he says of her:
“It is necessary that I go and climb about at Aix, in Savoy, to run after some one who, perhaps, will laugh at me — one of those aristocratic women of whom you no doubt have a horror; one of those angelic beauties to whom one ascribes a soul; a true duchess, very disdainful, very loving, subtle, witty, a coquette, like nothing I have ever yet seen, and who says she loves me, who wants to keep me in a palace at Venice (for I tell you everything), and who desires I should write nothing, except for her; one of those women who must be worshiped on one’s knees when they wish it, and whom one has such pleasure in conquering; a woman to be dreamt of, jealous of everything.”
A few weeks later he writes from Aix:
“I have come here to seek at once both much and little. Much, because I see daily a person full of grace and amiability, little, because she is never likely to love me.”
Under the influence of the Duchesse de Castries and the Duc de Fitz-James, Balzac gave more and more prominence to Catholic and Legitimist sentiments; and it was perhaps for her sake that the novelist offered himself as a candidate for deputy in several districts, but was defeated in all of them. He thought it quite probable that the Duc de Fitz-James would be elected in at least two districts, so if he were not elected at Angouleme, the Duke might use his interest to get him elected for the place he declined.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 1542