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.

It was on account of this snobbishness, which had something childish
about it, that he sometimes became involved in discussions, not only