orrected proofs of _Martyres ignores_, and by dedicating to
her _La fausse Maitresse_, published in 1841. The dedication, however,
did not appear until several months later.

In a long and beautiful dedication, Balzac inscribed _Les Employes_ to
the Comtesse Serafina San-Severino, nee Porcia, and to her brother,
Prince Alfonso Serafino di Porcia, he dedicated _Splendeurs et Miseres
des Courtisanes_, concerning which he thought a great deal while
visiting in the latter's home in Milan. The hotel having become
intolerable to the novelist, he was invited by Prince Porcia to occupy
a little room in his home, overlooking the gardens, where he could
work at his ease. The Prince, a man of about Balzac's age, was very
much in love with the Countess Bolognini, and was unwilling to marry
at all unless he could marry her, but her husband was still living.
The Prince lived only ten doors from his Countess, and his happiness
in seeing her so frequently, together with his riches, provoked gloomy
meditations in the mind of the poor author, who was so far from his
_Predilecta_, so overcome with debts, and forced to work so hard.

To Madame la Comtesse Bolognini, nee Vimercati, who was afterwards
married to Prince Porcia, Balzac dedicated _Une Fille d'Eve_:

"If you remember, madame, the pleasure your conversation gave to a
certain traveler, making Paris live for him in Milan, you will not
be surprised that he should lay one of his works at your feet, as
a token of gratitude for so many delightful evenings spent in your
society, nor that he should seek for it in the shelter of your
name which, in old times, was given to not a few of the tales by
one of your early writers, dear to the Milanese. You have a
Eugenie, already beautiful, whose clever smile proclaims her to
have inherited from you the most precious gifts a woman can
possess, and whose childhood, it is certain, will be rich in all
those joys which a sad mother refused to the Eugenie of these
pages. If Frenchmen are accused of bring frivolous and inconstant,
I, you see, am Italian in my faithfulness and attachments. How
often, as I write the name of Eugenie, have my thoughts carried me
back to the cool stuccoed drawing-room and little garden of the
_Viccolo dei Capuccini_, which used to resound to the dear child's
merry laughter, to our quarrels, and our stories. You have left
the _Corso_ for the _Tre Monasteri_, where I know nothing of your