see her again! At forty years of age! She asks a service of me;
doubtless a literary ambition! . . . I am going there. . . . Three
o'clock. I was sure of it! I have seen Julie, to whom and for whom
I wrote the verses: 'From the midst of those torrents of glory and
of light, etc.:' which are in _Illusions perdues_. . . ." Neither
the name _Julie_ nor the date of her birth is given by Madame
Ruxton.

Some secret pertaining to Madame de Berny remains untold. In 1834
Balzac writes Madame Hanska: "The greatest sorrows have overwhelmed
Madame de Berny. She is far from me, at Nemours, where she is dying of
her troubles. I cannot write you about them; they are things that can
only be spoken of with the greatest secrecy." He might have revealed
this secret to her in 1835 when he visited her in Vienna; the
following secret, however, is not explained in subsequent letters, and
Balzac did not see Madame Hanska again until seven years later in St.
Petersburg:

"I have much distress, even enormous distress in the direction of
Madame de Berny; not from her directly but from her family. It is
not of a nature to be written. Some evening at Wierzchownia, when
the heart wounds are scars, I will tell it to you in murmurs so
that the spiders cannot hear, and so that my voice can go from my
lips to your heart. They are dreadful things, which dig into life
to the bone, deflowering all, and making one distrust all, except
you for whom I reserve these sighs."

Though Madame de Berny may have been jealous of other women in her
earlier association with Balzac, she evidently changed later, for he
writes: