Heaven is satisfied with what we have done."

A person who had intimately known both Balzac and my aunt said one day
that they completed each other by the wide difference which existed in
their opinions in regard to the two important subjects of religion and
politics. The remark was profoundly true, because it was this very
difference which allowed them to bring into their judgments an
impartiality which we seldom meet with in our modern society. They
mutually respected and admired each other, and even when they were not
in perfect accord, or just because they were not in perfect accord as
to this or that thing, they nevertheless tried, thanks to the respect
which they entertained for each other, to look upon mankind, its
actions, follies and mistakes, with kindness and indulgence. The
curious thing in regard to their situation was that my aunt who had
been born and reared in one of the most select and prejudiced of
aristocratic circles, never knew what prejudice was, and remained
until the last day of her life a staunch liberal, who could never
bring herself to ostracize her neighbor, because he happened to think
or to believe otherwise than she did herself. She was perfectly
indifferent to advantages of birth, fortune or high rank, and she was
rather inclined to criticize than to admire the particular society and
world amidst which she moved. Balzac on the contrary, though a
_bourgeois_ by origin, cared only for those high spheres for which he
had always longed since his early youth, and of which a sudden freak
of fortune so unexpectedly had opened him the doors. In that sense he
was the _parvenu_ his enemies have accused him of being, and he often
showed himself narrow minded, until at last his wife's influence made
him consider, without the disdain he had affected for them before,
people who were not of noble birth or of exalted rank. On the other
hand, Madame de Balzac, thanks to her husband's Catholic and
Legitimistic tendencies and sympathies, became less sarcastic than had
been the case when she had, perhaps more than she ought, noticed the
smallnesses and meannesses of the particular set of people who at that
period constituted the cream of European society. They both came to
acquire a wider view of the world in general, thanks to their
different ways of looking at it, and this of course turned to their
great mutual advantage.

I will not extend myself here on the help my aunt was to Balzac all
through the ye