Madame de Berny was of great help to Balzac in the social world and was perhaps instrumental in developing the friendship between him and the Duchesse de Castries.  It was the Duc de Fitz-James who asked Balzac (1832) to write a sort of program for the Royalist party, and later (1834), wished him to become a candidate for deputy.  This Duc de Fitz-James was the nephew of the godmother of Madame de Berny.  It was to please him and the Duchesse de Castries that Balzac published a beautiful page about the Duchesse d’Angouleme.

Although Madame de Berny was of great help to Balzac in the financial and social worlds, of greater value was her literary influence over him.  With good judgment and excellent taste she writes him:  “Act, my dear, as though the whole multitude sees you from all sides at the height where you will be placed, but do not cry to it to admire you, for, on all sides, the strongest magnifying glasses will instantly be turned on you, and how does the most delightful object appear when seen through the microscope?”

She had had great experience in life, had suffered much and had seen many cruel things, but she brought Balzac consolation for all his pains and a confidence and serenity of which his appreciation is beautifully expressed: 

“I should be most unjust if I did not say that from 1823 to 1833 an angel sustained me through that horrible struggle.  Madame de Berny, though married, was like a God to me.  She was a mother, friend, family, counselor; she made the writer, she consoled the young man, she created his taste, she wept like a sister, she laughed, she came daily, like a beneficent sleep, to still his sorrows.  She did more; though under the control of a husband, she found means to lend me as much as forty-five thousand francs, of which I returned the last six thousand in 1836, with interest at five per cent., be it understood.  But she never spoke to me of my debt, except now and then; without her, I should, assuredly, be dead.  She often divined that I had eaten nothing for days; she provided for all with angelic goodness; she encouraged that pride which preserves a man from baseness,—­for which to-day my enemies reproach me, calling it a silly satisfaction in myself—­the pride that Boulanger has, perhaps, pushed to excess in my portrait.”

Balzac’s conception of women was formed largely from his association with Madame de Berny in his early manhood, and a reflection of these ideas is seen throughout his works.  It was probably to give Madame de Berny pleasure that he painted the mature beauties which won for him so many feminine admirers.

It is doubtless Madame de Berny whom Balzac had in mind when in Madame Firmiani he describes the heroine: