ore's other visions.
Even Balzac's buoyancy was not always proof against the depressing
influence of two or three days of starvation, and he sometimes
descended to the lowest depths, and groped in those dark places from
which death seems the only escape. When he tells us in "La Peau de
Chagrin" that Raphael walked with an uncertain step in the Tuileries
Gardens, "as if he were in some desert, elbowed by men whom he did not
see, hearing, through all the voices of the crowd, one voice alone,
the voice of Death," it is Balzac himself, who, after glorious
aspirations, after being in imagination raised to heights to which
only a great nature can aspire, now lay bruised and worsted, a
complete failure, and thought that by suicide he would at least obtain
peace and oblivion. He knew to the full the truth of his words:
"Between a self-sought death and the abundant hopes whose voices call
a young man to Paris, God only knows what may intervene, what
contending ideas have striven within the soul, what poems have been
set aside, what moans and what despair have been repressed, what
abortive masterpieces and vain endeavours."[*]

[*] Honore de Balzac, "La Peau de Chagrin."

Looking back years afterwards at this terrible time, he can find only
one reason why he did not put an end to himself, and that was the
existence of Madame de Berny: "She was a mother, a woman friend, a
family, a man friend, an adviser," he cries enthusiastically; "she
made the writer, she consoled the young man, she formed his taste, she
cried like a sister, she laughed, she came every day, like a merciful
slumber, to send sorrow to sleep."[*] Certainly there was no woman on
earth to whom Balzac owed so deep a debt of gratitude, and certainly
also he joyfully acknowledged his obligations. "Every day with her was
a fete," he said to Madame Hanska long afterwards.

[*] "Lettres a l'Etrangere."

About this time another friendship was beginning, which, though slower
in growth and not so passionate in character, was as faithful, and was
only terminated by Balzac's death. When Madame Surville went to live
at Versailles, she was delighted to find that an old schoolfellow,
Madame Carraud, was settled there, her husband holding the post of
director of the military school at Saint-Cyr. Honore had known Madame
Carraud since 1819; but he first became intimate with her and her
husband in 1826, and later he was their constant guest at Angouleme,
where Commandant Carraud