Having spent all my childhood and youth under the protection and the roof of Madame de Balzac, it was quite natural that every time I saw another inaccuracy or falsehood concerning her or her great husband find its way into the press, I should be deeply affected. At last I began to look with suspicion at all the books dealing with Balzac or with his works, and when Miss Floyd asked me to look over her manuscript, it was with a certain amount of distrust and prejudice that I set myself to the task. It seemed to me impossible that a foreigner could write anything worth reading about Balzac, or understand his psychology. What was therefore my surprise when I discovered in this most remarkable volume the best description that has ever been given to us of this particular phase of Balzac's life which hitherto has hardly been touched upon by his numerous biographers, his friendships with the many distinguished women who at one time or another played a part in his busy existence, a description which not only confirmed down to the smallest details all that my aunt had related to me about her distinguished husband, but which also gave an appreciation of the latter's character that entirely agreed with what I had heard about its peculiarities from the few people who had known him well, Theophile Gautier among others, who were still alive when I became old enough to be intensely interested in their different judgments about my uncle. After such a length of years it seemed almost uncanny to find a person who through sheer intuition and hard study could have reconstituted with this unerring accuracy the figure of one who had remained a riddle in certain things even to his best friends, and who in the pages of this extraordinary book suddenly appeared before my astonished eyes with all the splendor of that genius of his which as years go by, becomes more and more admired and appreciated.