While he was in Poland his mother was his general agent, and he wrote to her the most minute directions of everything appertaining to the house, its fixtures and decorations; and finally, on the 17th March, 1850, he wrote from Vierzschovnia as follows:— “Three days ago I married the only woman whom I have loved, whom I love more than ever, and whom I shall love until death. I believe that this union is the recompense that God has held in reserve for me through so many adversities, years of work, and difficulties suffered and overcome. My youth was unhappy and my spring was flowerless, but I shall have the most brilliant summer and the sweetest of autumns.” Balzac had now fulfilled his two immense desires: he was celebrated, he was beloved. His own income combined with that which remained to his wife—she had, at his instance, made over the greater portion of her fortune to her children—sufficed for the realization of his most extravagant dreams. “I shall live to be eighty,” he said. “I will terminate the ‘Comédie Humaine’ and write dozens of dramas. I will have two children,—not more; two look well on the front seat of a landau.” It was all too beautiful; nothing remained but death, and five months after his marriage, on the 20th of August, 1850, after thirty years of ceaseless toil, at the very moment when the world was his, Balzac, as a finishing touch to his own “Études Philosophiques,” died suddenly of disease of the heart. At his grave in Père-Lachaise is a simple monument, bearing for epitaph that “single name which tells all and makes the passer dream;” and here, at the very spot where Rastignac, after the burial of Père Goriot, hurled his supreme defiance at Paris, Victor Hugo delivered the funeral oration. “Alas!” he said, “this powerful and tireless worker, this philosopher, this thinker and poet, whose existence was filled with more labors than days, passed among us that life of struggles and combats common in all time to all great men. To-day, at last, he is at peace: he has taken leave of contests and hatreds, and enters now both glory and the tomb. Hereafter he will shine above all the clouds about us, high among the stars of our country.” ----- Footnote 20: _H. de Balzac_, by Eugène de Mirecourt. _H. de Balzac_, by Armand Bashet. _Balzac en Pantoufles_, by Léon Gozlan. Footnote 21: A villa on the Loire. Footnote 22: The disastrous result of his lawsuit with the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Footnote 23: Madame de Berny, a devoted friend. Footnote 24: An allusion to the pirated editions of his works. Footnote 25: At Les Jardies. CHAPTER V. THE THINKER. “Un écrivain doit se regarder comme un instituteur des hommes.”—BONALD.