custom-houses.


LA COMTESSE VISCONTI--MADAME DE VALETTE--MADEMOISELLE KOZLOWSKA

"Madame de Visconti, of whom you speak to me, is one of the most
amiable of women, of an infinite, exquisite kindness; a delicate
and elegant beauty. She helps me much to bear my life. She is
gentle, and full of firmness, immovable and implacable in her
ideas and her repugnances. She is a person to be depended on. She
has not been fortunate, or rather, her fortune and that of the
Count are not in keeping with this splendid name. . . . It is a
friendship which consoles me under many griefs. But,
unfortunately, I see her very seldom."

Madame Emile Guidoboni-Visconti, nee (Frances Sarah) Lowell, was an
Englishwoman another _etrangere_. Balzac shared the same box with her
at the Italian opera, and in the summer of 1836, he went to Turin to
look after some legal business for the Viscontis. He had not known
them long before this, for he writes, in speaking of _Le Lys dans la
Vallee_: "Do they not say that I have painted Madame Visconti? Such
are the judgments to which we are exposed. You know that I had the
proofs in Vienna, and that portrait was written at Sache and corrected
at La Bouleauniere, before I had ever seen Madame Visconti."[*]

[*] La Bouleauniere was the home of Madame de Berny, at Nemours.
Balzac visited Madame Hanska at Vienna in the spring of 1835.

Either this new friendship became too ardent for the comfort of Madame
Hanska, or she heard false reports concerning it, for she made