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In his surprise, he related to Castries what the King had said; Castries told it to Madame la Duchesse d'Orleans, who reported it to M. d'Orleans and to me.
At the same time, while with regret and trouble in his heart he tried to relegate Madame de Berny to the position of an ordinary friend, and felt the delightful agitation, followed by bitter mortification, of his intercourse with Madame de Castries, we must remember that from time to time he received a flowery epistle from Russia, written in the turgid and rather bombastic style peculiar to Madame Hanska.
Loving Balzac so tenderly, growing old so quickly, with Madame de Castries and the unknown Russian ready to seize the empire which she had abdicated willingly, though at bitter cost, what a temptation it must have been to leave these words unsaid, and now that she was parting from Balzac to accord him the unstinted admiration for which he yearned!
He had interested in this noble enterprise the priests of the Mission of the Holy Ghost, who themselves possessed lands in French Guiana. A letter from Marshal de Castries, dated 6th June, 1785, proves that the unfortunate Louis XVI, extending his beneficent intentions to the blacks and free men of colour, had ordered similar experiments to be made at the expense of Government.
Accordingly Mme. de Balzac watched over his interests, just as she formerly did in 1832, when he had gone to Aix in the company of Mme. de Castries; and Balzac sent instructions to her from Russia, but their tone showed an assurance, a certain complete tranquillity, which he had not had in the days of his laborious youth.
He was now established in a simple little room, with a view over the lovely valley of the Lac du Bourget; he got up each morning at half-past five, and worked from then till half-past five in the evening, his dejeuner being sent in from the club, and Madame de Castries providing him with excellent coffee, that primary necessity of his existence.
To drop joking, all of us new hands were taught our work as well as sailors could teach us, which was so effectually done that what we once learnt we never forgot; this work being to treat ropes and rigging as if they were reasoning and responsible beings, and to be capable of making fast or letting loose, whensoever it so pleased us, anything under the sun, from knotting a reef point to parbuckling a cask a dodge by which, I believe, Admiral Rodney, or Abercromby, or some other hero, during the times of the wars, contrived to drag one of his ship's guns to the top of a lofty mountain guarding the entrance to Castries, the harbour of Saint Lucia, which was by this means captured from its French possessors, and is now numbered with the rest of our West Indian colonies.
In this gallery, and in the salon, there were always during the night several beds, in which, for security's sake, certain Swiss guards and servants slept. These beds had been put in their usual place this evening before the bad news came from Meudon. In the midst of the conversation of the ladies, Madame de Castries touched the bed, felt something move, and was much terrified.
There is a wagon road along the shore of Keezee lake and across the hills to De Castries Bay. Light draft steamboats can go within twelve miles of De Castries. Surveys have been made with the design of connecting Keezee Lake and the Gulf of Tartary by a canal. A railway has also been proposed, but neither enterprise will be undertaken for many years.
All this time he had not forgotten Madame de Berny, or the faithless Madame de Castries; and is profoundly miserable. On January 1st, 1833, he writes to his faithful friend, Madame Carraud, to pour out his troubles, and says: "In vain I try to transfer my life to my brain; nature has given me too much heart, and in spite of everything, more than enough for ten men is left. Therefore I suffer.
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