While the famous Vicomtesse de Beauseant (La Femme abandonnee) has many characteristics of the Duchesse d’Abrantes, and some of those of Madame de Berny, and La Femme abandonnee was written the year Balzac severed his relations with his Dilecta.  But it is especially in the gentleness and patience portrayed in Madame Firmiani, in the affection and self-sacrifice of Pauline de Villenoix for Louis Lambert, and the devotion of Pauline Gaudin to Raphael in La Peau de Chagrin that Madame de Berny is most strikingly represented.  She was all this and more to Balzac.  Furthermore, he may have obtained from her his historical color for Un Episode sous la Terreur, just as he was influenced by Madame Junot in writing stories of the Empire and Corsican vengeance.

It was perhaps to avoid recognition of the heroine and to revenge himself on Madame de Castries that he made the Duchesse de Langeais enter a convent and die, after her failure to master the Marquis de Montriveau, while for his part the hero soon forgot her.

Soon after introducing Madame de Mortsauf (Le Lys dans la Vallee), Balzac compares her to the fragrant heather gathered on returning from the Villa Diodati.  After studying carefully his long period of association with Madame Hanska, one can see the importance which the Villa Diodati had in his life.  This is only another incident, small though it be, showing how this woman impressed herself so deeply on the novelist that almost unconsciously he brought memories of his Predilecta into his work.  It has been shown that she served as a model for some of his most attractive heroines; was honored, under different names, with the dedication of three works besides the one dedicated to her daughter; and was the originator of one of his most popular novels for young girls, while many traces of herself and her family connections are found throughout the whole Comedie humaine.

Though by far the most important of them all, she was only one of the many etrangeres he knew.  As has been observed, he knew women of Russia, Poland, Germany, Austria, England, Italy and Spain, and had traveled in most of these countries; hence one is not surprised at the large number of foreign women who have appeared in his work.  Among the most noted of these are Lady Brandon (La Grenadiere); Lady Dudley (Le Lys dans la Vallee); Madame Varese (Massimilla Doni); la Duchesse de Rhetore (Albert Savarus), who was in reality Madame Hanska, although presented as being Italian; Madame Claes (La Recherche de l’Absolu), of Spanish origin though born in Brussels; Paquita Valdes (La Fille aux Yeux d’Or); and the Corsican Madame Luigi Porta (La Vendetta).

In regard to Balzac’s various women friends, J. W. Sherer has very appropriately observed:  “And the man was worthy of them:  the student of his work knows what a head he had; the student of his life, what a heart.”