Her portrait gives the idea of an elegant rather than pretty woman,
with a long neck, sloping shoulders, black curls on the temples, at
each side of a high forehead, and large, languishing dark eyes, under
pencilled eyebrows. The oval face has a character of gentle
melancholy, and there is something subdued and suffering in the whole
expression which invites our pity. She wears in the portrait an Empire
dress, confined under the arms by a yellow ribbon.

"La dilecta," as Balzac calls her, cannot have been a very happy
woman. Of her nine children, watched with the most tender solicitude,
only four lived to grow up; and of these her favourite son, "beautiful
as the day, like her tender and spiritual, like her full of noble
sentiments," as Balzac says, died the year before her; and only an
insane daughter and a wild, unsatisfactory son survived her. This
terrible blow broke her heart, and she shut herself up and refused to
see even Balzac during the last year of her life. The end must at any
rate have been peaceful, as, in order to prolong her existence as much
as possible, it had been found necessary to separate her from the
irritable husband with whose vagaries she had borne patiently during
thirty tedious years; but perhaps she was sorry in the end that this
was necessary. Madame de Mortsauf, in the "Lys dans la Vallee," is
intended to be a portrait of her, though Balzac says that he has only
managed to give a faint reflection of her perfections. However this
may be, Henriette de Mortsauf is a charming and ethereal creation, and
from her we can understand the fascination Madame de Berny exerted
over Balzac, and can realise that, as he says to Madame Hanska, her
loss can never be made up to him. It is possible also to sympathise
with the feeling, perhaps unacknowledged even to himself, which peeps
out in a letter to Madame Hanska in 1840.[*] In this he reproaches his
correspondent for her littleness in not writing to him because he
cannot answer her letters quickly, and tells her that he has lately
been in such straits that he has not been able to pay for franking his
letters, and has several times eaten a roll on the Boulevards for his
dinner. He goes on: "Ah! I implore you, do not make comparisons
between yourself and Madame de Berny. She was of infinite goodness and
of absolute devotion; she was what she was. You are complete on your
side as she on hers. One never compares two great things. They are
what they are.