to relate that, during the time he was a
clerk to a Procureur, he was requested one day to cut up a partridge
at his master's table. With the first dig of the knife, he not only
severed the partridge but the dish also, and drove his weapon into the
wood of the table. Detail worth noticing, this feat procured him the
respect of the Procureur's wife. The portrait sketched of him by his
daughter Laure represents him, between sixty and seventy, as a fine
old man, still vigorous, with courteous manners, speaking little and
rarely of himself (in this very different from Honore), indulgent
towards the young, whose society he was fond of, allowing to all the
same liberty that he claimed for himself, upright and sound in
judgment notwithstanding his eccentricities, of equable humour, and so
mild in character that he made every one around him happy. Delighting
in conversation, now grave, now curious, now prophetic, he was always
eagerly listened to by his elder son, whose indebtedness to him cannot
be doubted.

Balzac's mother, who was married at eighteen, was a Parisian by birth.
Her father was Director of the Paris Hospitals. At the Hotel-Dieu
there is a Sallambier ward which perpetuates his memory. A small,
active woman of nervous temperament, irritable and inclined to worry
about trifles, she yet had abundant practical sense--a quality less
developed in her husband. Her daughter tells us she was beautiful,
that she had remarkable vivacity of mind, much firmness and decision,
and boundless devotion to her family. Her affection, however, was
expressed rather by action than in speech. She had great imagination,
adds Madame Surville; and, says the novelist, "this imagination, which
she has bequeathed me, bandies her ever from north to south and from
south to north." Exceedingly pious, with a bias to mysticism, she
possessed a library of books bearing on such doctrines, which were
read by her son and afterwards utilized by him in his fiction.

Honore was the second child of his parents. The first dying in infancy
through the poorness of Madame Balzac's milk, he was sent to a house
on the outskirts of the town and suckled by a foster-mother. His
sister Laure, a year younger than himself, was submitted to the same
treatment, and the two children remained away from home until they
were four and three years old respectively. From her remembrance of
him, when both were toddling mites, his sister speaks of him as a
charming little bo