Beyle of about the same date are also incompatible with intimate
knowledge. Nodier (after some contrary expressions) he seems to have
regarded as most good people did regard that true man of letters and
charming tale-teller; while among the younger generation Theophile
Gautier and Charles de Bernard, as well as Goslan and others, were his
real and constant friends. But he does not figure frequently or
eminently in any of the genuine gossip of the time as a haunter of
literary circles, and it is very nearly certain that the assiduity
with which some of his heroes attend _salons_ and clubs had no
counterpart in his own life. In the first place he was too busy; in
the second he would not have been at home there. Like the young
gentleman in _Punch_, who "did not read books but wrote them," though
in no satiric sense, he felt it his business not to frequent society
but to create it.

He was, however, aided in the task of creation by the ladies already
spoken of, who were fairly numerous and of divers degrees. The most
constant, after his sister Laure, was that sister's schoolfellow,
Madame Zulma Carraud, the wife of a military official at Angouleme and
the possessor of a small country estate at Frapesle, near Tours. At
both of these places Balzac, till he was a very great man, was a
constant visitor, and with Madame Carraud he kept up for years a
correspondence which has been held to be merely friendly, and which
was certainly in the vulgar sense innocent, but which seems to me to
be tinged with something of that feeling, midway between love and
friendship, which appears in Scott's letters to Lady Abercorn, and
which is probably not so rare as some think. Madame de Berny, another
family friend of higher rank, was the prototype of most of his
"angelic" characters, but she died in 1836. He knew the Duchesse
d'Abrantes, otherwise Madame Junot, and Madame de Girardin, otherwise