re brought upon him by a long course not so
much of extravagance in actual expenditure (though there was something of
this) as of financial irregularities of almost every
description,--anticipations of earnings, costly methods of production (he
practically wrote his novels on a succession of printed revises),
speculations, travel, and lastly the collection of curiosities. As regards
the second, although his fashion of life made him by turns a hermit and a
vagrant, he was on good terms with most of the famous men of letters of his
day from Hugo downwards, and seems never to have quarrelled with any man,
except with some of his editors and publishers, by his own fault. Balzac
was indeed, in no belittling sense of the word, one of the most
good-natured of men of genius. But his friendships with the other sex are
of much more importance, and not in the least matters of mere gossip. His
sister Laure, as has been said, and a school-friend of hers, Mme Zulma
Carraud, played important and not questionable parts as his correspondents.
But at least three ladies, all of a rank higher than his own, figure as his
"Egerias" to such an extent that it is hardly extravagant to say that
Balzac would not have been Balzac without them. These are Madame de Berny,
a lady connected with the court of the _ancien regime_, much older than
himself and the mother of nine children, to whom he was introduced in 1821,
who became to him _La dilecta_, who was the original of Mme de Mortsauf in
_Le Lys dans la vallee_, and who seems to have exercised an excellent
influence on him in matters of taste till her death in 1836; the marquise
de Castries, who took him up for a time and dropped him, and who has been
supposed to have been his model for his less impeccable ladies of fashion;
and lastly, the Polish-Russian countess Evelina Hanska, who after
addressing, as _l'Etrangere_, a letter to him as early as 1832, became his
idol, rarely seen but constantly corresponded with, for the last eighteen
years, and his wife for the last few months of his life. Some of his
letters to her have long been known, but the bulk of them constituted the
greatest recent addition to our knowledge of him as given in the two
volumes of _Lettres a l'etrangere_. Of hers we have practically none and it
is exceedingly hard to form any clear idea of her, but his devotion is
absolutely beyond question.

Business, friendship and love, however, much more other things, were in
Balzac's c