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Updated: May 8, 2025
In one of the first, it is interesting to see that he is obliged to soothe her uneasiness at the strange variety of his handwritings, as Madame Carraud had answered one of her letters in his name; and to allay her suspicions, he makes the rather unlikely explanation, that he has as many writings as there are days in the year.
"I have had no flowery spring," said his letter to Madame Carraud. "But I shall have the most brilliant of summers, the mildest of autumns. . . . I am almost crazy with delight."
To Madame Carraud he also owed an introduction to his most intimate male friend, Auguste Borget, a genre painter who travelled in China, and drew many pictures of the scenery there.
He arrived there on the 17th, intending to stay five weeks and happy to have reached this friendly asylum. Mme. Carraud was one of the women who had the most faith in Balzac; she was the recipient of his confidences, even the most delicate ones; and when his conduct displeased her she did not hesitate to take him to task.
Jealous of everything! After his stay at Sache, Balzac went on to the Poudrerie, where he became ill from overwork, and wrote to his sister that a journey was quite necessary for his health. On August 22nd he started from Angouleme, having borrowed 150 francs from M. Carraud to take him as far as Lyons.
When Madame Surville went to live at Versailles, she was delighted to find that an old schoolfellow, Madame Carraud, was settled there, her husband holding the post of director of the military school at Saint-Cyr.
Carraud, who read and revised his manuscripts, and who perhaps took a more intimate interest in him than did the other ladies whom he came to know so well. Besides Mme. Hanska, he had another correspondent who signed herself "Louise," but who never let him know her name, though she wrote him many piquant, sunny letters, which he so sadly needed.
Carraud that his work was in its own line a greater achievement than the Cathedral at Bourges was in architecture, spent whole days in shaping and reshaping a phrase, like some sublime mason who by a prodigy had built a cathedral single-handed and whose heart bled upon discovering a neglected carving in the shadow of some buttress and expended infinite pains to perfect it, although it was almost invisible amidst the vastness and the beauty of the whole structure.
In his pride and satisfaction, he showed it to many friends, Madame Carraud being among the number; but she, with her usual rather provoking common-sense, refused to share his enthusiasm, and suggested that it might have been written as a practical joke.
It is curiously characteristic of Balzac, that at this very time, when in secret he contemplates marriage, he writes to Madame Carraud that he is going to Aix to run after some one who will perhaps laugh at him one of those aristocratic women she would no doubt hold in abhorrence: "An angel beauty in whom one imagines a beautiful soul, a true duchess, very disdainful, very loving, delicate, witty, a coquette, a novelty to me!
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