It is doubtless to this friendship that Balzac refers when he writes in the last lines of La Duchesse de Langeais:  “It is only the last love of a woman that can satisfy the first love of a man.”  It is of interest to note that Antoinette is the Christian name of the heroine of this story.  Throughout the Comedie humaine are seen quite young men who fall in love with women well advanced in years, as Calyste de Guenic with Mademoiselle Felicite des Touches in Beatrix, and Lucien de Rubempre with Madame Bargeton in Illusions perdues.

In Eugenie Grandet Balzac writes: 

“Do you know what Madame Campan used to say to us?  ’My children, so long as a man is a Minister, adore him; if he falls, help to drag him to the ditch.  Powerful, he is a sort of deity; ruined, he is below Marat in his sewer, because he is alive, and Marat, dead.  Life is a series of combinations, which must be studied and followed if a good position is to be successfully maintained.’”

Since Madame Campan was femme de chambre of Marie Antoinette, Balzac probably heard this maxim through Madame de Berny.

Although some writers state that Madame de Berny was one of Balzac’s collaborators in composing the Physiologie du Mariage, he says, regarding this work:  “I undertook the Physiologie du Mariage and the Peau de Chagrin against the advice of that angel whom I have lost.”  She may have inspired him, however, in writing Le Cure de Tours, as it is dated at her home, Saint-Firmin, 1832.

In 1833, Balzac wrote Madame Hanska that he had dedicated the fourth volume of the Scenes de la Vie privee to her, putting her seal at the head of l’Expiation, the last chapter of La Femme de trente Ans, which he was writing at the moment he received her first letter.  But a person who was as a mother to him and whose caprices and even jealousy he was bound to respect, had exacted that this silent testimony should be repressed.  He had the sincerity to avow to her both the dedication and its destruction, because he believed her to have a soul sufficiently lofty not to desire homage which would cause grief to one as noble and grand as she whose child he was, for she had rescued him when in youth he had nearly perished in the midst of griefs and shipwreck.  He had saved the only copy of that dedication, for which he had been blamed as if it were a horrible coquetry, and wished her to keep it as a souvenir and as an expression of his thanks.

Balzac was ever loyal to Madame de Berny and refused to reveal her baptismal name to Madame Hanska; soon after their correspondence began he wrote her:  “You have asked me the baptismal name of the Dilecta.  In spite of my complete and blind faith, in spite of my sentiment for you, I cannot tell it to you; I have never told it.  Would you have faith in me if I told it?  No.”

After 1834 Madame de Berny’s health failed rapidly, and her last days were full of sorrow.  Among her numerous family trials Balzac enumerates: