showed himself narrow minded, until at last his wife’s influence made him consider, without the disdain he had affected for them before, people who were not of noble birth or of exalted rank.  On the other hand, Madame de Balzac, thanks to her husband’s Catholic and Legitimistic tendencies and sympathies, became less sarcastic than had been the case when she had, perhaps more than she ought, noticed the smallnesses and meannesses of the particular set of people who at that period constituted the cream of European society.  They both came to acquire a wider view of the world in general, thanks to their different ways of looking at it, and this of course turned to their great mutual advantage.

I will not extend myself here on the help my aunt was to Balzac all through the years which preceded their marriage, when there seemed no possibility of the marriage ever taking place.  She encouraged him in his work, interested herself in all his actions, praised him for all his efforts, tried to be for him the guide and the star to which he could look in his moments of dark discouragement, as well as in his hours of triumph.  Without her affection to console him, he would most probably have broken down under the load of immense difficulties which constantly burdened him, and he never would have been able to leave behind him as a legacy to a world that had never property appreciated or understood him, those volumes of the Comedie humaine which have made his name immortal.  Madame Hanska was his good genius all through those long and dreadful years during which he struggled with such indomitable courage against an adverse fate, and her devotion to him certainly deserved the words which he wrote to her one day, “I love you as I love God, as I love happiness!”

All this has taken me very far from Miss Floyd’s book, though what I have just written about my uncle and aunt completes in a certain sense the details she has given us concerning the wonderful romance which after seventeen years of arduous waiting, made Madame Hanska the wife of one of the greatest literary glories of France.  Her work is magnificent and she has handled it superbly, and reconstituted two remarkable figures who were beginning to be, not forgotten, which is impossible, but not so much talked about by the general public, who a few years ago, had shown itself so interested in their life history as it was first disclosed to us in the famous Lettres a l’Etrangere, published by the Vicomte Spoelberch de Lovenjoul.  She has also cleared some of the clouds which had been darkening the horizon in regard to both Balzac and his wife, and restored to these two their proper places in the history of French literature in the nineteenth century.  She has moreover shown us a hitherto unknown Balzac, and a still more unknown Etrangere, and this labor of love, because it was that all through, can only be viewed with feelings of the deepest gratitude by the few members still left alive of Madame de Balzac’s family, my three brothers and myself.  I feel very happy to be given this opportunity of thanking Miss Floyd, in my brothers’ name as well as in my own, for the splendid work which she has done, and which I am quite certain will ensure for her a foremost place among the historians of Balzac.