“Balzac said that he burned my aunt’s letters in order to reassure her one day when she had reasons to fear they would fall into other hands than those to whom they belonged.  After his death, my aunt found them all, and I am sorry to say that it was she who burned them, and that I was present at this autodafe, and remember to this day my horror and indignation.  But my aunt as well as my father had a horror of leaving letters after them, and strange to say, they were right in fearing to leave them because in both cases, papers had a fate they would not have liked them to have.”

The sketch of the family of Madame Honore de Balzac as given in Un Roman d’Amour, is so inaccurate that the Princess Radziwill has very kindly made the following corrections of it for the present writer: 

“(1) Madame Hanska was really born on December 24th, not 25th, 1801.  You will find the date on her grave which is under the same monument as that of Balzac, in Pere Lachaise in Paris.  I am absolutely sure of the day, because my father was also born on Christmas Eve, and there were always great family rejoicings on that occasion.  You know that the Roman Catholic church celebrates on the 24th of December the fete of Adam and Eve, and it is because they were born on that day that my father and his sister were called Adam and Eve.  I am also quite sure that the year of my aunt’s birth was 1801, and my father’s 1803, and should be very much surprised if my memory served me false in that respect.  But I repeat it, the exact dates are inscribed on my aunt’s grave. . . .  I looked up since I saw you a prayer book which I possess in which the dates of birth are consigned, and thus found 1801, and I think it is the correct one, but at all events I repeat it once more, the exact date is engraved on her monument.

“(2) Caroline Rzewuska, my aunt’s eldest sister, and the eldest of the whole family, is the Madame Cherkowitsch of Balzac’s letters, and not Shikoff, as the family sketch says.  It is equally ridiculous to say that some people aver she was married four times, and had General Witte for a husband; but Witte was a great admirer of hers at the time she was Mme. Sobanska.  There is also a detail connected with her which is very little known, and that is that she nearly married Sainte-Beauve, and that the marriage was broken off a few days before the one fixed for it to take place.  That was before she married Jules Lacroix, and wicked people say that it was partly disappointment at having been unable to become the wife of the great critic, which made her accept the former.

“(3) My aunt Pauline was married to a Serbian banker settled in Odessa, a very rich man called Jean Riznitsch, but he was neither a General nor a Baron.  Her second daughter, Alexandrine, married Mr. Ciechanowiecki who also never could boast of a title, and whose father had