At Madame de Berny’s house in the Oise, Balzac had written his brief and restrained masterpiece, _Le Curé de Tours_. Her difficult virtue, and all her other qualities and characteristics, made, confessedly, much of the interest of _Le Lys dans la Vallée_. That relationship of theirs--into which, as I consider, a morbid element, an exaggerated sentimentality, did at one time to some extent enter--was only wholly broken by Madame de Berny’s death. For two years at least she was the victim of a mortal illness. The illness began, and the depression caused by it in Balzac began, about 1833. But during the year 1832, Balzac, whose feeling towards Madame de Berny--‘an angel at my side’--must with long years have somewhat changed its character--during the year 1832 Balzac had passed through an experience the end of which he speaks of, long afterwards, as ‘_un des plus grands chagrins de ma vie_.’ And that was his experience with the young Madame de Castries--the Duchesse de Castries she became, in due time, some years later--a light of Parisian Society, fully as fascinating in the quietude of Aix-les-Bains as amidst the distractions of all the _salons_ of the capital. It is not from the letters that Balzac wrote to her--not, at all events, from any that have been published--that we know or can surmise how irresistible for Balzac was her personal magnetism. It is rather from certain amongst the letters sent by him to his life-long friend, his sister’s school friend, Madame Zulma Carraud of Angoulême, that we are informed of the effect of Madame de Castries’ dealings with him. She was at one time a delight, then a disillusionment, and then (and, as it seems to me, ever afterwards) a painful yet attractive memory. The rupture--never a quarrel avowed to the outsider; never indeed a rupture that was quite complete, or that was in any way explicable save under the supposition that the lady of the _belle chevelure venitienne_ had a blonde’s inconstancy and a Scottish caution--the rupture, such as it was, occurred in the autumn of 1832, when Balzac, who was to have gone over into Italy with the lady and her brother, parted from her at Geneva, and consoled himself (let me be permitted to hope) as best he could, by buying, at that famous dealer’s on the Quai des Bergues,[1] a little of the ‘Carl Théodore’ (Frankenthal) porcelain that his soul loved. The ‘collector,’ I am informed, is heartless--but he has his compensations. [1] Since moved to the Corratorie.