affectionate
terms with his family, and it was due to her that Balzac's mother was
able to spend her last years in comfort. These facts speak for
themselves, and, to my mind at least, dispose better than volumes on
the subject could do of the conscious or unconscious calumny cast by
Victor Hugo on my aunt's memory. It must here be explained that the
real reason why he did not see her, when he called for the last time
on his dying friend, and concluded so hastily that she preferred
remaining in her own apartments than at her husband's side, consisted
in the fact that she did not like the poet, who she instinctively
felt, also did not care for her, so she preferred not to encounter a
man whom she knew as antagonistic to herself at an hour when she was
about to undergo the greatest trial of her life, and she retired to
her room when he was announced. But Hugo, who had often reproached
Balzac for being vain, had in his own character a dose of vanity
sufficient to make him refuse to admit that there could exist in the
whole of the wide world a human being who would not have jumped at the
chance of seeing him, even under the most distressing of
circumstances.

I have said already that my aunt's opinions consisted of a curious
mixture of atheism and a profound belief in the Divinity. Her mind was
far too vigorous and too deep to accept without discussion the dogmas
of the Roman Catholic Church to which she belonged officially, and she
formed her own ideas as to religion and the part it ought to play in
human existence. She held the firm conviction that we must always try,
at least, to do what is right, regardless of the sorrow this might
entail upon us. In one of her letters to my mother, she says:

"You will know one day, my dear little sister, that what one cares
the most to read over again in the book of life are those
difficult pages of the past when, after a hard struggle, duty has
remained the master of the battle field. It has buried its dead,
and brushed aside all the reminders that were left of them, and
God in his infinite mercy allows flowers and grasses to grow again
on this bloody ground. Don't think that by these flowers, I mean
to say that one forgets. No, on the contrary, I am thinking of
remembrance, the remembrance of the victory that has been won
after so many sacrifices; I am thinking of all those voices of the
conscience which come to soothe us, and to tell us that our Father
in