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.

CATHERINE, PRINCESS RADZIWILL.