r than death
itself.

Having spent all my childhood and youth under the protection and the
roof of Madame de Balzac, it was quite natural that every time I saw
another inaccuracy or falsehood concerning her or her great husband
find its way into the press, I should be deeply affected. At last I
began to look with suspicion at all the books dealing with Balzac or
with his works, and when Miss Floyd asked me to look over her
manuscript, it was with a certain amount of distrust and prejudice
that I set myself to the task. It seemed to me impossible that a
foreigner could write anything worth reading about Balzac, or
understand his psychology. What was therefore my surprise when I
discovered in this most remarkable volume the best description that
has ever been given to us of this particular phase of Balzac's life
which hitherto has hardly been touched upon by his numerous
biographers, his friendships with the many distinguished women who at
one time or another played a part in his busy existence, a description
which not only confirmed down to the smallest details all that my aunt
had related to me about her distinguished husband, but which also gave
an appreciation of the latter's character that entirely agreed with
what I had heard about its peculiarities from the few people who had
known him well, Theophile Gautier among others, who were still alive
when I became old enough to be intensely interested in their different
judgments about my uncle. After such a length of years it seemed
almost uncanny to find a person who through sheer intuition and hard
study could have reconstituted with this unerring accuracy the figure
of one who had remained a riddle in certain things even to his best
friends, and who in the pages of this extraordinary book suddenly
appeared before my astonished eyes with all the splendor of that
genius of his which as years go by, becomes more and more admired and
appreciated.

One must be a scholar to understand Balzac; his style and manner of
writing is often so heavy and so difficult to follow, reminding one
more of that of a professor than of a novelist. And indeed he would
have been very angry to be considered only as a novelist, he who
aspired and believed himself to be, as he expressed it one day in the
course of a conversation with Madame Hanska, before she became his
wife, "a great painter of humanity," in which appreciation of his work
he was not mistaken, because some of the characters he