Ah!  I do not forget your motherly goodness, your divine sympathy for those who suffer. . . .  Well, then as soon as you wish to come to Paris, you will come without even letting us know.  You will come to the Rue Fortunee exactly as to your own house, absolutely as I used to go to Frapesle.  I claim this as my right.  I recall to your mind what you said to me at Angouleme, when broken down after writing Louis Lambert, ill, and as you know, fearing lest I should go mad.  I spoke of the neglect to which these unhappy ones are abandoned.  ‘If you were to go mad, I would take care of you.’  Those words, your look, and your expression have never been forgotten.  All this is still living in me now, as in the month of July 1832.  It is in virtue of that word that I claim your promise to-day, for I have almost gone mad with happiness. . . .  When I have been questioned here about my friendships you have been named the first.  I have described that fireside always burning, which is called Zulma, and you have two sincere woman-friends (which is an achievement), the Countess Mniszech and my wife."[*]

[*] Balzac is not exaggerating about the free use he made of her home,
    for besides going there for rest, he worked there, and two of his
    works, La Grenadiere and La Femme abandonnee, were signed at
    Angouleme.

His devotion is again seen in the beautiful words with which he dedicates to her in 1838 La Maison Nucingen: 

 “To Madame Zulma Carraud.

“To whom, madame, but to you should I inscribe this work, to you whose lofty and candid intellect is a treasury to your friends, to you who are to me not only an entire public, but the most indulgent of sisters?  Will you deign to accept it as a token of a friendship of which I am proud?  You, and some few souls as noble as your own, will grasp my thought in reading la Maison Nucingen appended to Cesar Birotteau.  Is there not a whole social contrast between the two stories?

“DE BALZAC.”

While hiding from his creditors, Balzac took refuge with Madame Carraud at Issoudun, where he assumed the name of Madame Dubois to receive his mail.  Here he met some people whose names he made immortal by describing them in his Menage de Garcon, called later La Rabouilleuse.  The priest Badinot introduced him to La Cognette, the landlady to whom the vineyard peasant sold his wine.  La Cognette, some of whose relatives are still living, plays a minor role in the Comedie humaine.  Her real name was Madame Houssard; her husband, whom Balzac incorrectly called “Pere Cognet,” kept a little cabaret in the rue du Bouriau.  “Mere Cognette,” who lost her husband about 1835, opened a little cafe at Issoudun during the first years of her widowhood.  Balzac was an intermittent and impecunious client of hers; he would enter her shop, quaff a cup of coffee, execrable to the palate of a connoisseur like him, and “chat a bit” with the good old woman who probably unconsciously furnished him with curious material.