of the Emperor to become Madame de Balzac.  The difficulties connected with her marriage consisted in the fact that having been left sole heiress of her first husband’s immense wealth, she did not think herself justified in keeping it after she had contracted another union, and with a foreigner.  She therefore transferred her whole fortune to her daughter, reserving for herself only an annuity which was by no means considerable, and it was this arrangement that had to be sanctioned, not by the sovereign who had nothing to do with it, but by the Supreme Court of Russia, which at that time was located in St. Petersburg.  Balzac, however, wishing to impress his French relatives with the grandeur of the marriage he was about to make, imagined this tale of the Czar’s opposition, in order to add to his own importance and to that of his future wife, an invention which revolted my aunt so much that in that part of her husband’s correspondence which was published by her a year or two before her death, she carefully suppressed all the passages which contained this assertion which had so thoroughly annoyed as well as angered her.  I have sometimes wondered what she would have said had she seen appear in print the curious letter which Balzac wrote immediately after their wedding to Dr. Nacquart in which he described with such pomp the different high qualities, merits, and last but not least, brilliant positions occupied by his wife’s relatives, beginning with Queen Marie Leszczinska, the consort of Louis XV, and ending with the husband of my father’s stepdaughter, Count Orloff, whom the widest stretch of imagination could not have connected with my aunt.

I cannot refrain from mentioning here an anecdote which is very typical of Balzac.  He was about to return to Paris from Russia after his marriage.  My aunt coming into his room one morning found him absorbed in writing a letter.  Asking him for whom it was intended she was petrified with astonishment when he replied that it was for the Duke de Bordeaux, as the Comte de Chambord was still called at the time, to present his respects to him upon his entrance into his family!  My aunt at first could not understand what it was he meant, and when at last she had grasped the fact that it was in virtue of her distant, very distant, relationship with Queen Marie Leszczinska that he claimed the privilege of cousinship with the then Head of the Royal House of France, it was with the greatest difficulty and with any amount of trouble that she prevailed upon him at last to give up this remarkable idea, and to be content with the knowledge that some Rzewuski blood flowed in the veins of the last remaining member of the elder line of the Bourbons, without intruding upon the privacy of the Comte de Chambord, who probably would have been somewhat surprised to receive this extraordinary communication from the great, but also snobbish Balzac.