Madame d'Abrantès, at the period of her greatest notoriety, occupied the ground-floor of a hotel in the Rue Rochechouart, with a garden, where dancing was often introduced upon the lawn. Some remnants of the glories of Imperialism were collected there, but the principal _habitués_ were men of letters, artists, and young men who danced well! (_les jeunes beaux qui dansaient bien!_) That one phrase characterizes at once the ex-_belle_ of the Empire, the contemporary of the sentimental Hortense de Beauharnais, and of the more than _légère_ Pauline Borghése. To the "new society of July" Mme. d'Abrantès was an object of great curiosity. "I dote on seeing that woman!" said Balzac, one evening, to Mme. Ancelot. "Only fancy! she saw Napoleon Bonaparte as a mere boy,--knew him well,--knew him as a young man, unknown,--saw him occupied, like anybody else, with the ordinary occurrences of every-day life; then she saw him grow, and grow, and rise, and throw the shadow of his name over the world. She seems to me somewhat like a canonized creature who should all at once come and recount to me the glories of paradise." Balzac, it must be premised, was bitten just at this period by the Napoleon mania, and this transformed his inquisitive attachment for Mme. d'Abrantès into a kind of passion. It was at this period that he chose to set up in his habitation in the Rue Cassini a sort of altar, on which he placed a small statue of the Emperor, with these words engraved upon the pedestal:-- "Ce qu'il avait commencé par l'épée, Je l'achèverai par la plume!" What particular part of the Imperial work this was that Balzac was to "complete by the pen" was never rightly discovered,--but for a time he had a sun-stroke for Napoleon, and his attachment for Mme. d'Abrantès partook of this influence.