The novel deals with the struggle in the heart of a Madame de Mortsauf, torn between her affection for Felix de Vandenesse and her determination to remain outwardly faithful in conduct towards her husband. With his invariable enthusiasm for subjects that pleased him in his own work, Balzac believed and affirmed that this secret combat waged in a valley of the Indre was as important as the most famous military battle ever fought. Possibly the amount of early personal biography in the book--yet a good deal romanced--led him to this conviction. Possibly, too, the richness with which he adorned its style helped to foster the opinion he held, which critics have not ratified. Not even Lamartine, his eulogist, found much to say in favour of the story. To the first part alone he gave his approval, likening it to the Song of Solomon. The rest he thought vulgar, and hinted that the heroine degenerates into a sort of hermaphrodite character. Brunetiere's estimate, given in a parenthesis, is not much more favourable. And Taine, when dipping into the book for examples of Balzac's style, neutralizes his praise of one portion by his depreciation of another. Apart from the question of the novel's style, which is turgid because the lyric note intrudes, the most legitimate objection to the book is the sentimentalism which pervades it throughout, and palls on the reader before he reaches the conclusion. Like Richardson in his _Pamela_, but far to a greater extent than Richardson, Balzac has placed the struggle on the physical plane. Madame de Mortsauf permits de Vandenesse to make love to her, to caress her, and she accords him everything with the single exception of that which would confer on her husband the right to divorce her. The interest of the book therefore is largely a material one. The moral issue is thrown into the background. And de Vandenesse, moreover, is not a person that inspires us with respect or even pity. He consoles himself with Lady Dudley, while swearing high allegiance to his Henriette. In sooth, the swain's position resembled the novelist's own. Honore was also inditing oaths of fidelity to his "dear star," his "earth-angel" in far-away Russia, while worshipping at shrines more accessible. Lady Dudley may well have been, for all his denial, the Countess Visconti, of whom Madame Hanska was jealous and on good grounds, or else the Duchess de Castries, to whom he said that, in writing the book, he had caught himself shedding tears. His reminiscences of Madame de Berny aided him in composing the figure of the heroine, whose death-bed scene was soon to become sober reality. Madame de Berny died in July, having had a last pleasure in perusing the story that immortalized her affection for the novelist. Balzac had been intending to pay her a farewell visit; but he was then in the midst of embarrassments of all kinds, and the journey was postponed until it was too late.