“I have much distress, even enormous distress in the direction of Madame de Berny; not from her directly but from her family.  It is not of a nature to be written.  Some evening at Wierzchownia, when the heart wounds are scars, I will tell it to you in murmurs so that the spiders cannot hear, and so that my voice can go from my lips to your heart.  They are dreadful things, which dig into life to the bone, deflowering all, and making one distrust all, except you for whom I reserve these sighs.”

Though Madame de Berny may have been jealous of other women in her earlier association with Balzac, she evidently changed later, for he writes: 

“Alas!  Madame de Berny is no better.  The malady makes frightful progress, and I cannot express to you how grand, noble and touching this soul of my life has been in these days measured by illness, and with what fervor she desires that another be to me what she has been.  She knows the inward spring and nobility that the habit of carrying all things to an idol gives me.  My God is on earth.”

Contrary to his family, Madame Carraud sympathized with Balzac in his devotion to Madame de Berny, and invited them to be her guests.  In accepting he writes: 

“Her life is so much bound up in mine!  Ah, no one can form any true idea of this deep attachment which sustains me in all my work, and consoles me every moment in all I suffer.  You can understand something of this, you who know so well what friendship is, you who are so affectionate, so good. . . .  I thank you beforehand for your offer of Frapesle to her.  There, amid your flowers, and in your gentle companionship, and the country life, if convalescence is possible, and I venture to hope for it, she will regain life and health.”

He apparently did not receive such sympathy from Madame Hanska in their early correspondence: 

“Why be displeased about a woman fifty-eight years old, who is a mother to me, who folds me in her heart and protects me from stings?  Do not be jealous of her; she would be so glad of our happiness.  She is an angel, sublime.  There are angels of earth and angels of heaven; she is of heaven.”

Madame de Berny’s illness continued to grow more and more serious.  The reading of the second number of Pere Goriot affected her so much that she had another heart attack.  But as her illness and griefs changed and withered her, Balzac’s affection for her redoubled.  He did not realize how rapidly she was failing, for she did not wish him to see her unless she felt well and could appear attractive.  On his return to France from a journey to Italy with Madame Marbouty, he was overcome with grief at the news of the death of Madame de Berny.  He found on his table a letter from her son Alexandre briefly announcing his mother’s death.

But the novelist did not cease to respect her criticism: