I cannot refrain from mentioning here an anecdote which is very typical of Balzac. He was about to return to Paris from Russia after his marriage. My aunt coming into his room one morning found him absorbed in writing a letter. Asking him for whom it was intended she was petrified with astonishment when he replied that it was for the Duke de Bordeaux, as the Comte de Chambord was still called at the time, to present his respects to him upon his entrance into his family! My aunt at first could not understand what it was he meant, and when at last she had grasped the fact that it was in virtue of her distant, very distant, relationship with Queen Marie Leszczinska that he claimed the privilege of cousinship with the then Head of the Royal House of France, it was with the greatest difficulty and with any amount of trouble that she prevailed upon him at last to give up this remarkable idea, and to be content with the knowledge that some Rzewuski blood flowed in the veins of the last remaining member of the elder line of the Bourbons, without intruding upon the privacy of the Comte de Chambord, who probably would have been somewhat surprised to receive this extraordinary communication from the great, but also snobbish Balzac. It was on account of this snobbishness, which had something childish about it, that he sometimes became involved in discussions, not only with my aunt, but also with several of his friends, Victor Hugo among others, who could not bring themselves to forgive him for thinking more of the great and illustrious families with which his marriage had connected him than of his own genius and marvelous talents. Hugo most unjustly accused my aunt of encouraging this "aberration," as he called it, of Balzac's mind; in which judgment of her he was vastly mistaken, because she was the person who suffered the most through it, and by it. But this unwarranted suspicion made him antagonistic to her, and probably inspired the famous description he left us of Balzac's last hours in the little volume called /Choses vues/. This was partly the cause why people afterwards said that my aunt's married life with the great writer had been far from happy, and had resolved itself into a great disappointment for both of them. The reality was very different, because during the few months they lived together, they had known and enjoyed complete and absolute happiness, and Madame de Balzac's heart was forever broken when she closed with pious hands the eyes of the man who had occupied such an immense place in her heart as well as in her life. Many years later, talking with me about those last sad hours when she watched with such tender devotion by his bedside, she told me with accents that are still ringing in my ears with their wail of agony: I lived through a hell of suffering on that day.