what
I said to you, and you do not understand my heart and affection.
This grieves me most of all! . . ."

The above extract is sadly typical of a relationship of thirty years,
1820-1850, between a mother, on the one hand, who never understood or
appreciated her son--and a son, on the other, whose longings for
maternal affection were never fully gratified. To his mother Balzac
dedicated _Le Medicin de Campagne_, one of his finest sociological
studies.

Madame Surville has described Balzac's mother, and her own, as being
rich, beautiful, and much younger than her husband, and as having a
rare vivacity of mind and of imagination, an untiring activity, a
great firmness of decision, and an unbounded devotion to her family;
but as expressing herself in actions rather than in words. She devoted
herself exclusively to the education of her children, and felt it
necessary to use severity towards them in order to offset the effects
of indulgence on the part of their father and their grandmother.
Balzac inherited from his mother imagination and activity, and from
both of his parents energy and kindness.

Madame de Balzac has been charged with not having been a tender mother
towards her children in their infancy. She had lost her first child
through her inability to nurse it properly. An excellent nurse,
however, was found for Honore, and he became so healthy that later his
sister Laure was placed with the same nurse. But she never seemed
fully to understand her son nor even to suspect his promise. She
attributed the sagacious remarks and reflections of his youth to
accident, and on such occasions she would tell him that he did not
understand what he was saying. His only reply would be a sweet,
submissive smile which irritated her, and which she called arrogant
and presumptuous. With her cold, calculating temperament, she had no
patience with his staking his life and fortune on uncertain financial
undertakings, and blamed him for his business failures. She suffered
on account of his love of luxury and his belief in his own greatness,
no evidence of which seemed sufficient to her matter-of-fact mind. She
continued to misjudge him, unaware of his genius, but in spite of her
grumbling and harassing disposition, she often came to his aid in his
financial troubles.

Contrary to the wishes of his parents, who had destined him to become
a notary, Balzac was ever dreaming of literary fame. His mother not
unnaturally thought that