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Updated: June 3, 2025
In the first rapture of his meeting at Neufchatel, he did indeed open his heart to his sister, Madame Surville; but his habitual discretion, and his care for the reputation of the woman he loved, soon imposed silence upon him, and he ceased to comment on the great drama of his life.
Madame Surville attributes the fiasco to the professional jealousy of competitors, who discouraged the public from buying; but the cause of the discomfiture lay rather in the faulty manner in which the partners carried out their plan.
In 1820 she married an engineer, M. Midy de la Greneraye Surville, and from the first the marriage was not very happy, as Honore writes, a month after it took place, to blame Laure for her melancholy at the separation from her family, and to counsel philosophy and piano practice.
The Pretty Mary, hugging the coast as closely as she dared, crawled in the thin breeze all day, and saw nothing. It would be madness to land at Cape Surville, for the whole station would be on the alert; so Blunt, as night was falling, stood off a little across the mouth of Pirates' Bay.
"I have already told you that I shall stay here," she answered. Monsieur Surville lifted his hands in polite remonstrance. Mercy held back the curtain, and pointed to the cottage door. "Go," she said. "My mind is made up." Even at that final moment the Frenchman asserted himself. He made his exit with unimpaired grace and dignity. "Madam," he said, "you are sublime!"
He shunned doctors, advocated exercise, long walks, woollen garments for every season, and a more scientific propagation of his species. His daughter afterwards Madame Surville says of him in the short biography she wrote of her brother: "My father often railed at mankind, whom he accused of unceasingly contributing to their own misfortune.
Balzac's mother had, as we have already seen, taken up her abode with Madame Surville, long before the often-deferred appearance in Paris of her son and daughter-in-law; but Honore had given directions, that at any rate she was to leave the Rue Fortunee before he and his bride arrived.
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.
Both the bust and the famous daguerreotype of him belong to the commencement of the Forties. The sculptor Etex had asked him to sit for a bust; but David had the preference, being a friend. His profile of the novelist, sketched in view of a medallion, an engraving of which appeared in 1843 in the Loire Illustree for August, was deemed by Madame Surville to be the only real likeness of her brother.
About the same time, M. Surville, another Frenchman, in a voyage from the East Indies into the Pacific, landed on the north coast of a country east of New Guinea; he had not an opportunity of examining this land, but it seems probable that it was one of Solomon's Islands.
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