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Updated: June 3, 2025
He therefore explained to his son Madame Surville tells us that M. Passez, to whom he had formerly been of service, had in gratitude offered to take Honore into his office, and at the end of a few years would leave him his business, when, with the additional arrangement of a rich marriage, a prosperous future would be assured to him.
He would arrive at the house of Madame Surville, his sister, who tells the story, hardly able to drag himself along, in a gloomy, dejected state, with his skin sallow and jaundiced. "Don't console me," he would say in a faint voice, dropping into a chair; "it is useless I am a dead man."
"Fear nothing, madam," he said, looking as if he could have annihilated the whole German force with his own invincible arm. "A Frenchman's heart beats under your hand. A Frenchman's devotion protects you." Grace's head sank on his shoulder. Monsieur Surville felt that he had asserted himself; he looked round invitingly at Mercy. She, too, was an attractive woman.
Still absorbed in his perusal of the dispatches, and now and then making notes of what he read by the help of writing materials placed at his side, Captain Arnault was interrupted by the appearance of an intruder in the room. Surgeon Surville, entering from the kitchen, drew aside the canvas screen, and approached the little round table at which his superior officer was sitting.
The sculptor, however, came to live in the same house with his fiancee, and his family wrote him letters which he showed to Madame Surville, containing damaging revelations about family matters. As a culminating indiscretion, his mother wrote to this sculptor, "who is David, or Pradier, or Ingres," a letter in which she treated him like a street boy. What would Laure do in these circumstances?
Nevertheless, Cook's judgment enabled him to inaugurate friendly relations in most places where he stopped long enough to enable the natives to become acquainted with the strangers. It was not so with other voyagers. De Surville, a Frenchman, who called at Doubtless Bay very shortly after Cook left it, destroyed a village, and carried off a chief.
He does not even seem to have stood on his rights during his lifetime, as in 1826, after the death of Laurence, who had become Madame de Montzaigle it must have been a satisfaction to the Balzac family to have one indisputable "de" among them cards were sent out in the names of M. and Madame Balzac, M. and Madame Surville, and MM. Honore and Henri Balzac.
Apparently the Survilles, or at least M. Surville for it is certain that the devoted Laure would have worked herself to death to help Honore did not see their way to proceeding at this rate of composition, as the next letter from Balzac, written on August 20th, is full of reproaches because the manuscript has not been at once returned to him, that he may go on with it himself.
Her affection, however, was expressed rather by action than in speech. She had great imagination, adds Madame Surville; and, says the novelist, "this imagination, which she has bequeathed me, bandies her ever from north to south and from south to north."
Besides Honore, she had three children: Laure, afterwards Madame Surville; Laurence, who died young; and Henry, the black sheep of the family, who returned from the colonies, after having made an unsatisfactory marriage, and who, during the last years of Honore de Balzac's life, required constant monetary help from his relations.
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