A fragile and elegant young woman had without doubt inspired this aversion in Balzac, although that is a question that I cannot answer definitively. Still it's true that the tax collector never earned a sou from him. Regarding women, Balzac, who described them so well, must have known them, and one understands the sense that the Bible attaches to this word. In one of the letters that he writes to Madame de Surville, his sister, Balzac, quite young and completely unknown, sets down an ideal for his life in two words: "To be celebrated and to be loved." The first part of this program, which all artists map out for themselves, had been realized in every way. Was the second also accomplished? The opinion of the most intimate friends of Balzac is that he practiced the chastity that he recommended to others, and shared at most platonic love; but Madame de Surville laughs at this idea, with a smile of feminine delicacy and full of discreet reserve. She maintains that her brother was unfailingly discreet, and that if he had wanted to speak, he would have had many things to say. This must be true, and without doubt the safe of Balzac contained more of the notes with delicate, sloping handwriting than the lacquered box of Canalis. There is, in his work, the scent of a woman: odor di femina; when one enters there, one hears behind the doors that close on the hidden staircase the rustling of silk and the creaking of shoes. The semicircular and padded salon on the Rue de Batailles, of which I have quoted the description inserted by the author in La Fille aux Yeux d'Or, did not remain completely virginal, as many of us had assumed. In the course of our close friendship, which lasted from 1836 until his death, only once did Balzac make allusion, with the most respectful and the most tender terms, to an attachment of his early youth, and even then he gave me only the first name of the person whose memory, after so many years, still made his eyes moisten. Had he said any more to me, I certainly would not have abused his confidences; the genius of a great writer belongs to all of the world, but his heart is his own. I touch only briefly on this tender and delicate side of Balzac's life, because I have nothing to say that does not honor him. This reserve and this mystery are those of a gentleman. If he was loved as he wished in the dreams of his youth, the world knows nothing of it.