k, but he could not
forget the tragic suffering he had undergone. The experience he had
recently passed through he disclosed in one of his most noted stories,
_La Duchesse de Langeais_, which he wrote largely in 1834 at the same
fatal city of Geneva, but this time, while enjoying the society of the
beautiful Madame Hanska. In this story, under the name of the heroine,
the Duchesse de Langeais, he describes the Duchesse de Castries:

"This was a woman artificially educated, but in reality ignorant; a
woman whose instincts and feelings were lofty, while the thought
which should have controlled them was wanting. She squandered the
wealth of her nature in obedience to social conventions; she was
ready to brave society, yet she hesitated till her scruples
degenerated into artifice. With more wilfulness than force of
character, impressionable rather than enthusiastic, gifted with
more brain than heart; she was supremely a woman, supremely a
coquette, and above all things a _Parisienne_, loving a brilliant
life and gaiety, reflecting never, or too late; imprudent to the
verge of poetry, and humble in the depths of her heart, in spite
of her charming insolence. Like some straight-growing reed, she
made a show of independence; yet, like the reed, she was ready to
bend to a strong hand. She talked much of religion, and had it not
at heart, though she was prepared to find in it a solution of her
life."

In the same story under the name of the Marquis de Montriveau, Balzac
is doubtless portraying himself. It was probably in the home of the
Duchesse de Castries that Balzac conceived some of his ideas of the
aristocracy of the exclusive Faubourg Saint-Germain, a picture of
which he has drawn in this story of which she is the heroine. Her
influence is seen also in the characters so minutely drawn of the
heartless _Parisienne_, no longer young, but seductive, refined and
aristocratic, though deceptive and perfidious.

Before publishing _La Duchesse de Langeais_, the novelist was either
tactful or vindictive enough to call on Madame de Castries and read to
her his new book. He says of this visit: "I have just returned from
Madame de C----, whom I do not want for an enemy when my book comes
out and the best means of obtaining a defender against the Faubourg
Saint-Germain is to make her approve of the work in advance; and she
greatly approved of it." But a few weeks later, he writes: "Here I am,
on bad t