[*] Madame d’Abrantes presented several objects of a literary nature
    to Balzac, among others, a book of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a few
    leaves of which he presented to Madame Hanska for her collection
    of autographs.

In La Femme abandonnee, Balzac describes Madame de Beauseant as having taken refuge in Normandy, “after a notoriety which women for the most part envy and condemn, especially when youth and beauty in some way excuse the transgression.”  Can it be that the novelist thus condones the fault of this noted character because he wishes to pardon the liaison of Madame d’Abrantes with the Comte de Metternich?

Is it then because so many traces of Madame d’Abrantes are found in La Femme abandonnee, and allusions are made to minute episodes known to them alone, that he dedicated it to her?

Was Balzac thinking of the Duchesse d’Abrantes when, in Un Grand Homme de Province a Paris, speaking of Lucien Chardon, who had just arrived in Paris at the beginning of the Restoration, he writes:  “He met several of those women who will be spoken of in the history of the nineteenth century, whose wit, beauty and loves will be none the less celebrated than those of queens in times past.”

In depicting Maxime de Trailles, the novelist perhaps had in mind M. de Montrond, about whom the Duchess had told him.  Again, many characteristics of her son, Napoleon d’Abrantes, are seen in La Palferine, one of the characters of the Comedie humaine.

If Madame de Berny is Madame de Mortsauf in Le Lys dans la Vallee, Madame d’Abrantes has some traits of Lady Dudley, of whom Madame de Mortsauf was jealous.  The Duchess gave him encouragement and confidence, and Balzac might have been thinking of her when he made the beautiful Lady Dudley say:  “I alone have divined all that you were worth.”  After Balzac’s affection for Madame de Berny was rekindled, Madame d’Abrantes, who was jealous of her, had a falling out with him.

It was probably Madame Junot who related to Balzac the story of the necklace of Madame Regnault de Saint-Jean d’Angely, to which allusion is made in his Physiologie du Mariage, also an anecdote which is told in the same book abut General Rapp, who had been an intimate friend of General Junot.  At this time Balzac knew few women of the Empire; he did not frequent the home of the Countess Merlin until later.  While Madame d’Abrantes was not a duchess by birth, Madame Gay was not a duchess at all, and Madame Hamelin still further removed from nobility.

It is doubtless to Madame d’Abrantes that he owes the subject of El Verdugo, which he places in the period of the war with Spain; to her also was due the information about the capture of Senator Clement de Ris, from which he writes Une tenebreuse Affaire.