Evansville, Indiana.



INTRODUCTION

A quantity of books have been written about Balzac, some of which are
very instructive, while others are nothing but compilations of gossip
which give a totally wrong impression of the life, works and
personality of the great French novelist. Having the honor of being
the niece of his wife, the wonderful _Etrangere_, whom he married
after seventeen years of an affection which contained episodes far
more romantic than any of those which he has described in his many
books, and having been brought up in the little house of the rue
Fortunee, afterwards the rue Balzac, where they lived during their
short married life, I can perhaps better appreciate than most people
the value of these different books, none of which gives us an exact
appreciation of the man or of the difficulties through which he had to
struggle before he won at last the fame he deserved. And the
conclusion to which I came, after having read them most attentively
and conscientiously, was that it is often a great misfortune to
possess that divine spark of genius which now and then touches the
brow of a few human creatures and marks them for eternity with its
fiery seal. Had Balzac been one of those everyday writers whose names,
after having been for a brief space of time on everyone's lips, are
later on almost immediately forgotten, he would not have been
subjected to the calumnies which embittered so much of his declining
days, and which even after he was no longer in this world continued
their subterranean and disgusting work, trying to sully not only
Balzac's own colossal personality, but also that of the devoted wife,