Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine Part 1 A K

REPERTORY OF THE COMEDIE HUMAINEPART I, A — K TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE “Work crowned by the French Academy” is a significant line borne by the title-page of the original edition of Messieurs Cerfberr and Christophe’s monumental work. The motto indicates the high esteem in which the French authorities hold this very necessary adjunct to the great Balzacian structure. And even without this word of approval, the intelligent reader needs but a glance within the pages of the /Repertory of the Comedie Humaine/ to convince him at once of its utility. In brief, the purpose of the /Repertory/ is to give in alphabetical sequence the names of all the characters forming this Balzacian society, together with the salient points in their lives. It is, of course, well known that Balzac made his characters appear again and again, thus creating out of his distinct novels a miniature world. To cite a case in point, Rastignac, who comes as near being the hero of the /Comedie/ as any other single character, makes his first appearance in /Father Goriot/, as a student of law; then appearing and disappearing fitfully in a score of principal novels, he is finally made a minister and peer of France. Without the aid of the /Repertory/ it would be difficult for any save a reader of the entire /Comedie/ to trace out his career. But here it is arranged in temporal sequence, thus giving us a concrete view of the man and his relation to this society. In reading any separate story, when reference is made in passing to a character, the reader will find it helpful and interesting to turn to the /Repertory/ and find what manner of man it is that is under advisement. A little systematic reading of this nature will speedily render the reader a “confirmed Balzacian.” A slight confusion may arise in the use of the /Repertory/ on account of the subdivision of titles. This is the fault neither of Messieurs Cerfberr and Christophe nor of the translator, but of Balzac himself, who was continually changing titles, dividing and subdividing stories, and revamping and working other changes in his books. /Cousin Betty/ and /Cousin Pons/ were placed together by him under the general title of /Poor Relations/. Being separate stories, we have retained the separate titles. Similarly, the three divisions of /Lost Illusions/ were never published together until 1843–in the first complete edition of the /Comedie/; before assuming final shape its parts had received several different titles. In the present text the editor has deemed it best to retain two of the parts under /Lost Illusions/, while the third, which presents a separate Rubempre episode, is given as /A Distinguished Provincial at Paris/. The three parts of /The Thirteen/–/Ferragus/, /The Duchess of Langeais/, and /The Girl with the Golden Eyes/–are given under the general title. The fourth part of /Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life/, /Vautrin’s Last Avatar/, which until the Edition Definitive had been published separately, is here merged into its final place. But the three parts of /The Celibates/– /Pierrette/, /The Vicar of Tours/ and /A Bachelor’s Establishment/, being detached, are given separately. Other minor instances occur, but should be readily cleared up by reference to the Indices, also to the General Introduction given elsewhere. In the preparation of this English text, great care has been exercised to gain accuracy–a quality not found in other versions now extant. In one or two instances, errors have been discovered in the original French, notably in dates–probably typographical errors–which have been corrected by means of foot-notes. A few unimportant elisions have been made for the sake of brevity and coherence. Many difficulties confront the translator in the preparation of material of this nature, involving names, dates and titles. Opportunities are constantly afforded for error, and the work must necessarily be painstaking in order to be successful. We desire here to express appreciation for the valuable assistance of Mr. Norman Hinsdale Pitman. To Balzac, more than to any other author, a Repertory of characters is applicable; for he it was who not only created an entire human society, but placed therein a multitude of personages so real, so distinct with vitality, that biographies of them seem no more than simple justice. We can do no more, then, than follow the advice of Balzac–to quote again from the original title-page–and “give a parallel to the civil register.” J. WALKER McSPADDEN INTRODUCTION Are you a confirmed /Balzacian/?–to employ a former expression of Gautier in /Jeune France/ on the morrow following the appearance of that mystic Rabelaisian epic, /The Magic Skin/. Have you experienced, while reading at school or clandestinely some stray volume of the /Comedie Humaine/, a sort of exaltation such as no other book had aroused hitherto, and few have caused since? Have you dreamed at an age when one plucks in advance all the fruit from the tree of life– yet in blossom–I repeat, have you dreamed of being a Daniel d’Arthez, and of covering yourself with glory by the force of your achievements, in order to be requited, some day, for all the sufferings of your poverty-stricken youth, by the sublime Diane, Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, Princesse de Cadignan? Or, perchance, being more ambitious and less literary, you have desired to see–like a second Rastignac, the doors of high society opened to your eager gaze by means of the golden key suspended from Delphine de Nucingen’s bracelet? Romancist, have you sighed for the angelic tenderness of a Henriette de Mortsauf, and realized in your dreams the innocent emotions excited by culling nosegays, by listening to tales of grief, by furtive hand- clasps on the banks of a narrow river, blue and placid, in a valley where your friendship flourishes like a fair, delicate lily, the ideal, the chaste flower? Misanthrope, have you caressed the chimera, to ward off the dark hours of advancing age, of a friendship equal to that with which the good Schmucke enveloped even the whims of his poor Pons? Have you appreciated the sovereign power of secret societies, and deliberated with yourself as to which of your acquaintances would be most worthy to enter The Thirteen? In your mind’s eye has the map of France ever appeared to be divided into as many provinces as the /Comedie Humaine/ has stories? Has Tours stood for Birotteau, La Gamard, for the formidable Abbe Troubert; Douai, Claes; Limoges, Madame Graslin; Besancon, Savarus and his misguided love; Angouleme, Rubempre; Sancerre, Madame de la Baudraye; Alencon, that touching, artless old maid to whom her uncle, the Abbe de Sponde, remarked with gentle irony: “You have too much wit. You don’t need so much to be happy”? Oh, sorcery of the most wonderful magician of letters the world has seen since Shakespeare! If you have come under the spell of his enchantments, be it only for an hour, here is a book that will delight you, a book that would have pleased Balzac himself–Balzac, who was more the victim of his work than his most fanatical readers, and whose dream was to compete with the civil records. This volume of nearly six hundred pages is really the civil record of all the characters in the /Comedie Humaine/, by which you may locate, detail by detail, the smallest adventures of the heroes who pass and repass through the various novels, and by which you can recall at a moment’s notice the emotions once awakened by the perusal of such and such a masterpiece. More modestly, it is a kind of table of contents, of a unique type; a table of living contents! Many Balzacians have dreamed of compiling such a civil record. I myself have known of five or six who attempted this singular task. To cite only two names out of the many, the idea of this unusual Vapereau ran through the head of that keen and delicate critic, M. Henri Meilhac, and of that detective in continued stories, Emile Gaboriau. I believe that I also have among the papers of my eighteenth year some sheets covered with notes taken with the same intention. But the labor was too exhaustive. It demanded an infinite patience, combined with an inextinguishable ardor and enthusiasm. The two faithful disciples of the master who have conjoined their efforts to uprear this monument, could not perhaps have overcome the difficulties of the undertaking if they had not supported each other, bringing to the common work, M. Christophe his painstaking method, M. Cerfberr his accurate memory, his passionate faith in the genius of the great Honore, a faith that carried unshakingly whole mountains of documents. A pleasing chapter of literary gossip might be written about this collaboration; a melancholy chapter, since it brings with it the memory of a charming man, who first brought Messieurs Cerfberr and Christophe together, and who has since died under mournful circumstances. His name was Albert Allenet, and he was chief editor of a courageous little review, /La Jeune France/, which he maintained for some years with a perseverance worthy of the Man of Business in the /Comedie Humaine/. I can see him yet, a feverish fellow, wan and haggard, but with his face always lit up by enthusiasm, stopping me in a theatre lobby to tell me about a plan of M. Cerfberr’s; and almost immediately we discovered that the same plan had been conceived by M. Christophe. The latter had already prepared a cabinet of pigeon-holes, arranged and classified by the names of Balzacian characters. When two men encounter in the same enterprise as compilers, they will either hate each other or unite their efforts. Thanks to the excellent Allenet, the two confirmed Balzacians took to each other wonderfully. Poor Allenet! It was not long afterwards that we accompanied his body to the grave, one gloomy afternoon towards the end of autumn–all of us who had known and loved him. He is dead also, that other Balzacian who was so much interested in this work, and for whom the /Comedie Humaine/ was an absorbing thought, Honore Granoux. He was a merchant of Marseilles, with a wan aspect and already an invalid when I met him. But he became animated when speaking of Balzac; and with what a mysterious, conspiratorlike veneration did he pronounce these words: “The Vicomte”–meaning, of course, to the thirty-third degree Balzacolatrites, that incomparable bibliophile to whom we owe the history of the novelist’s works, M. de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul!–“The Vicomte will approve–or disapprove.” That was the unvarying formula for Granoux, who had devoted himself to the enormous task of collecting all the articles, small or great, published about Balzac since his entry as a writer. And just see what a fascination this /devil of a man/–as Theophile Gautier once called him–exercises over his followers; I am fully convinced that these little details of Balzacian mania will cause the reader to smile. As for me, I have found them, and still find them, as natural as Balzac’s own remark to Jules Sandeau, who was telling him about a sick sister: “Let us go back to reality. Who is going to marry Eugenie Grandet?” Fascination! That is the only word that quite characterizes the sort of influence wielded by Balzac over those who really enjoy him; and it is not to-day that the phenomenon began. Vallies pointed it out long ago in an eloquent page of the /Refractaires/ concerning “book victims.” Saint Beuve, who can scarcely be suspected of fondness towards the editor-in-chief of the /Revue Parisienne/, tells a story stranger and more significant than every other. At one time an entire social set in Venice, and the most aristocratic, decided to give out among its members different characters drawn from the /Comedie Humaine/; and some of these roles, the critic adds, mysteriously, were artistically carried out to the very end;–a dangerous experiment, for we are well aware that the heroes and heroines of Balzac often skirt the most treacherous abysses of the social Hell. All this happened about 1840. The present year is 1887, and there seems no prospect of the sorcery weakening. The work to which these notes serve as an introduction may be taken as proof. Indeed, somebody has said that the men of Balzac have appeared as much in literature as in life, especially since the death of the novelist. Balzac seems to have observed the society of his day less than he contributed to form a new one. Such and such personages are truer to life in 1860 than in 1835. When one considers a phenomenon of such range and intensity, it does not suffice to employ words like infatuation, fashion, mania. The attraction of an author becomes a psychological fact of prime importance and subject to analysis. I think I can see two reasons for this particular strength of Balzac’s genius. One dwells in the special character of his vision, the other in the philosophical trend which he succeeded in giving to all his writing. As to the scope of his vision, this /Repertory/ alone will suffice to show. Turn over the leaves at random and estimate the number of fictitious deeds going to make up these two thousand biographies, each individual, each distinct, and most of them complete–that is to say, taking the character at his birth and leaving him only at his death. Balzac not only knows the date of birth or of death, he knows as well the local coloring of the time and the country and profession to which the man belongs. He is thoroughly conversant with questions of taxation and income and the agricultural conditions. He is not ignorant of the fact that Grandet cannot make his fortune by the same methods employed by Gobseck, his rival in avarice; nor Ferdinand du Tillet, that jackal, with the same magnitude of operations worked out by that elephant of a Nucingen. He has outlined and measured the exact relation of each character to his environment in the same way he has outlined and measured the bonds uniting the various characters; so well that each individual is defined separately as to his personal and his social side, and in the same manner each family is defined. It is the skeleton of these individuals and of these families that is laid bare for your contemplation in these notes of Messieurs Cerfberr and Christophe. But this structure of facts, dependent one upon another by a logic equal to that of life itself, is the smallest effort of Balzac’s genius. Does a birth-certificate, a marriage-contract or an inventory of wealth represent a person? Certainly not. There is still lacking, for a bone covering, the flesh, the blood, the muscles and the nerves. A glance from Balzac, and all these tabulated facts become imbued with life; to this circumstantial view of the conditions of existence with certain beings is added as full a view of the beings themselves. And first of all he knows them physiologically. The inner workings of their corporeal mechanism is no mystery for him. Whether it is Birotteau’s gout, or Mortsauf’s nervousness, or Fraisier’s skin trouble, or the secret reason for Rouget’s subjugation by Flore, or Louis Lambert’s catalepsy, he is as conversant with the case as though he were a physician; and he is as well informed, also, as a confessor concerning the spiritual mechanism which this animal machine supports. The slightest frailties of conscience are perceptible to him. From the portress Cibot to the Marquise d’Espard, not one of his women has an evil thought that he does not fathom. With what art, comparable to that of Stendhal, or Laclos, or the most subtle analysts, does he note –in /The Secrets of a Princess/–the transition from comedy to sincerity! He knows when a sentiment is simple and when it is complex, when the heart is a dupe of the mind and when of the senses. And through it all he hears his characters speak, he distinguishes their voices, and we ourselves distinguish them in the dialogue. The growling of Vautrin, the hissing of La Gamard, the melodious tones of Madame de Mortsauf still linger in our ears. For such intensity of evocation is as contagious as an enthusiasm or a panic. There is abundant testimony going to show that with Balzac this evocation is accomplished, as in the mystic arts by releasing it, so to speak, from the ordinary laws of life. Pray note in what terms M. le Docteur Fournier, the real mayor of Tours, relates incidents of the novelist’s method of work, according to the report of a servant employed at the chateau of Sache: “Sometimes he would shut himself up in his room and stay there several days. Then it was that, plunged into a sort of ecstasy and armed with a crow quill, he would write night and day, abstaining from all food and merely contenting himself with decoctions of coffee which he himself prepared.” [Brochure of M. le Docteur Fournier in regard to the statue of Balzac, that statue a piece of work to which M. Henry Renault–another devotee who had established /Le Balzac/–had given himself so ardently. In this brochure is found a very curious portrait of Balzac, after a sepia by Louis Boulanger belonging to M. le Baron Larrey.] In the opening pages of /Facino Cane/ this phenomenon is thus described: “With me observation had become intuitive from early youth. It penetrated the soul without neglecting the body, or rather it seized so completely the external details that it went beyond them. It gave me the faculty of living the life of the individual over whom it obtained control, and allowed me to substitute myself for him like the dervish in /Arabian Nights/ assumed the soul and the body of persons over whom he pronounced certain words.” And he adds, after describing how he followed a workman and his wife along the street: “I could espouse their very life, I felt their rags on my back. I trod in their tattered shoes. Their desires, their needs, all passed into my soul, or my soul passed into them. It was the dream of a man awakened.” One day while he and a friend of his were watching a beggar pass by, the friend was so astonished to see Balzac touch his own sleeve; he seemed to feel the rent which gaped at the elbow of the beggar. Am I wrong in connecting this sort of imagination with that which one witnesses in fanatics of religious faith? With such a faculty Balzac could not be, like Edgar Poe, merely a narrator of nightmares. He was preserved from the fantastic by another gift which seems contradictory to the first. This visionary was in reality a philosopher, that is to say, an experimenter and a manipulator of general ideas. Proof of this may be found in his biography, which shows him to us, during his college days at Vendome, plunged into a whirl of abstract reading. The entire theological and occult library which he discovered in the old Oratorian institution was absorbed by the child, till he had to quit school sick, his brain benumbed by this strange opium. The story of Louis Lambert is a monograph of his own mind. During his youth and in the moments snatched from his profession, to what did he turn his attention? Still to general ideas. We find him an interested onlooker at the quarrel of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, troubling himself about the hypothesis of the unity of creation, and still dealing with mysticism; and, in fact, his romances abound in theories. There is not one of his works from which you cannot obtain abstract thoughts by the hundreds. If he describes, as in /The Vicar of Tours/, the woes of an old priest, he profits by the opportunity to exploit a theory concerning the development of sensibility, and a treatise on the future of Catholicism. If he describes, as in /The Firm of Nucingen/, a supper given to Parisian /blases/, he introduces a system of credit, reports of the Bank and Bureau of Finance, and–any number of other things! Speaking of Daniel d’Arthez, that one of his heroes who, with Albert Savarus and Raphael, most nearly resembles himself, he writes: “Daniel would not admit the existence of talent without profound metaphysical knowledge. At this moment he was in the act of despoiling both ancient and modern philosophy of all their wealth in order to assimilate it. He desired, like Moliere, to become a profound philosopher first of all, a writer of comedies afterwards.” Some readers there are, indeed, who think that philosophy superabounds with Balzac, that the surplus of general hypotheses overflows at times, and that the novels are too prone to digressions. Be that as it may, it seems incontestible that this was his master faculty, the virtue and vice of his thought. Let us see, however, by what singular detour this power of generalization–the antithesis, one might say, of the creative power–increased in him the faculty of the poetic visionary. It is important, first of all, to note that this power of the visionary could not be put directly into play. Balzac had not long enough to live. The list of his works, year by year, prepared by his sister, shows that from the moment he achieved his reputation till the day of his death he never took time for rest or observation or the study of mankind by daily and close contact, like Moliere or Saint- Simon. He cut his life in two, writing by night, sleeping by day, and after sparing not a single hour for calling, promenades or sentiment. Indeed, he would not admit this troublesome factor of sentiment, except at a distance and through letters–“because it forms one’s style”! At any rate, that is the kind of love he most willingly admitted–unless an exception be made of the mysterious intimacies of which his correspondence has left traces. During his youth he had followed this same habit of heavy labor, and as a result the experience of this master of exact literature was reduced to a minimum; but this minimum sufficed for him, precisely because of the philosophical insight which he possessed to so high a degree. To this meagre number of positive faculties furnished by observation, he applied an analysis so intuitive that he discovered, behind the small facts amassed by him in no unusual quantity, the profound forces, the generative influences, so to speak. He himself describes–once more in connection with Daniel d’Arthez– the method pursued in this analytical and generalizing work. He calls it a “retrospective penetration.” Probably he lays hold of the elements of experience and casts them into a seeming retort of reveries. Thanks to an alchemy somewhat analogous to that of Cuvier, he was enabled to reconstruct an entire temperament from the smallest detail, and an entire class from a single individual; but that which guided him in his work of reconstruction was always and everywhere the habitual process of philosophers: the quest and investigation of causes. It is due to this analysis that this dreamer has defined almost all the great principles of the psychological changes incident to our time. He saw clearly, while democracy was establishing itself with us on the ruins of the ancient regime, the novelty of the sentiments which these transfers from class to class were certain to produce. He fathomed every complication of heart and mind in the modern woman by an intuition of the laws which control her development. He divined the transformation in the lives of artists, keeping pace with the change in the national situation; and to this day the picture he has drawn of journalism in /Lost Illusions/ (“A Distinguished Provincial at Paris”) remains strictly true. It seems to me that this same power of locating causes, which has brought about such a wealth of ideas in his work, has also brought about the magic of it all. While other novelists describe humanity from the outside, he has shown man to us both from within and without. The characters which crowd forth from his brain are sustained and impelled by the same social waves which sustain and impel us. The generative facts which created them are the same which are always in operation about us. If many young men have taken as a model a Rastignac, for instance, it is because the passions by which this ambitious pauper was consumed are the same which our age of unbridled greed multiplies around disinherited youth. Add to this that Balzac was not content merely to display the fruitful sources of a modern intellect, but that he cast upon them the glare of the most ardent imagination the world has ever known. By a rare combination this philosopher was also a man, like the story-tellers of the Orient, to whom solitude and the over-excitement of night-work had communicated a brilliant and unbroken hallucination. He was able to impart this fever to his readers, and to plunge them into a sort of /Arabian Nights/ country, where all the passions, all the desires of real life appear, but expanded to the point of fantasy, like the dreams brought on by laudanum or hasheesh. Why, then, should we not understand the reason that, for certain readers, this world of Balzac’s is more real than the actual world, and that they devoted their energies to imitating it? It is possible that to-day the phenomenon is becoming rarer, and that Balzac, while no less admired, does not exercise the same fascinating influence. The cause for this is that the great social forces which he defined have almost ended their work. Other forces now shape the oncoming generations and prepare them for further sensitive influences. It is none the less a fact that, to penetrate the central portions of the nineteenth century in France, one must read and reread the /Comedie Humaine/. And we owe sincere thanks to Messieurs Cerfberr and Christophe for this /Repertory/. Thanks to them, we shall the more easily traverse the long galleries, painted and frescoed, of this enormous palace,–a palace still unfinished, inasmuch as it lacks those Scenes of Military Life whose titles awaken dreams within us: /Forced Marches/; /The Battle of Austerlitz/; /After Dresden/. Incontestably, Tolstoy’s /War and Peace/ is an admirable book, but how can we help regretting the loss of the painting of the Grand Army and of our Great Emperor, by Balzac, our Napoleon of letters? PAUL BOURGET. REPERTORY OF THE COMEDIE HUMAINE A ABRAMKO, Polish Jew of gigantic strength, thoroughly devoted to the broker, Elie Magus, whose porter he was, and whose daughter and treasures he guarded with the aid of three fierce dogs, in 1844, in a old house on the Minimes road hard by the Palais Royale, Paris. Abramko had allowed himself to be compromised in the Polish insurrection and Magus was interested in saving him. [Cousin Pons.] ADELE, sturdy, good-hearted Briarde servant of Denis Rogron and his sister, Sylvie, from 1824 to 1827 at Provins. Contrary to her employers, she displayed much sympathy and pity for their youthful cousin, Pierrette Lorrain. [Pierrette.] ADELE, chambermaid of Madame du Val-Noble at the time when the latter was maintained so magnificently by the stockbroker, Jacques Falleix, who failed in 1929. [Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] ADOLPHE, slight, blonde young man employed at the shop of the shawl merchant, Fritot, in the Bourse quarter, Paris, at the time of the reign of Louis Philippe. [Gaudissart II.] ADOLPHUS, head of the banking firm of Adolphus & Company of Manheim, and father of the Baroness Wilhelmine d’Aldrigger. [The Firm of Nucingen.] AGATHE (Sister), nee Langeais, nun of the convent of Chelles, and, with her sister Martha and the Abbe de Marolles, a refugee under the Terror in a poor house of the Faubourg Saint-Martin, Paris. [An Episode Under the Terror.] AIGLEMONT (General, Marquis Victor d’), heir of the Marquis d’Aiglemont and nephew of the dowager Comtesse de Listomere-Landon; born in 1783. After having been the lover of the Marechale de Carigliano, he married, in the latter part of 1813 (at which time he was one of the youngest and most dashing colonels of the French cavalry), Mlle. Julie de Chatillonest, his cousin, with whom he resided successively at Touraine, Paris and Versailles.* He took part in the great struggle of the Empire; but the Restoration freed him from his oath to Napoleon, restored his titles, entrusted to him a station in the Body Guard, which gave him the rank of general, and later made him a peer of France. Gradually he forsook his wife, whom he deceived on account of Madame de Serizy. In 1817 the Marquis d’Aiglemont became the father of a daughter (See Helene d’Aiglemont) who was his image physically and morally; his last three children came into the world during a /liaison/ between the Marquise d’Aiglemont and the brilliant diplomat, Charles de Vandenesse. In 1827 the general, as well as his protege and cousin, Godefroid de Beaudenord, was hurt by the fraudulent failure of the Baron de Nucingen. Moreover, he sank a million in the Wortschin mines where he had been speculating with hypothecated securities of his wife’s. This completed his ruin. He went to America, whence he returned, six years later, with a new fortune. The Marquis d’Aiglemont died, overcome by his exertions, in 1833.** [At the Sign of the Cat and Racket. The Firm of Nucingen. A Woman of Thirty.]

• It appears that the residence of the Marquis d’Aiglemont at Versailles was located at number 57, on the present Avenue de Paris; until recently it was occupied by one of the authors of this work. ** Given erroneously in the original as 1835. AIGLEMONT (Generale, Marquise Julie d’), wife of the preceding; born in 1792. Her father, M. de Chatillonest, advised her against, but gave her in marriage to her cousin, the attractive Colonel Victor d’Aiglemont, in 1813. Quickly disillusioned and attacked from another source by an “inflammation very often fatal, and which is spoken of by women only in confidence,” she sank into a profound melancholy. The death of the Comtesse de Listomere-Landon, her aunt by marriage, deprived her of valuable protection and advice. Shortly thereafter she became a mother and found, in the realization of her new duties, strength to resist the mutual attachment between herself and the young and romantic Englishman, Lord Arthur Ormond Grenville, a student of medicine who had nursed her and healed her bodily ailments, and who died rather than compromise her. Heart-broken, the marquise withdrew to the solitude of an old chateau situated between Moret and Montereau in the midst of a neglected waste. She remained a recluse for almost a year, given over utterly to her grief, refusing the consolations of the Church offered her by the old cure of the village of Saint-Lange. Then she re-entered society at Paris. There, at the age of about thirty, she yielded to the genuine passion of the Marquis de Vandenesse. A child, christened Charles, was born of this union, but he perished at an early age under very tragic circumstances. Two other children, Moina and Abel, were also the result of this love union. They were favored by their mother above the two eldest children, Helene and Gustave, the only ones really belonging to the Marquis d’Aiglemont. Madame d’Aiglemont, when nearly fifty, a widow, and having none of her children remaining alive save her daughter Moina, sacrificed all her own fortune for a dower in order to marry the latter to M. de Saint-Hereen, heir of one of the most famous families of France. She then went to live with her son-in-law in a magnificent mansion overlooking the Esplanade des Invalides. But her daughter gave her slight return for her love. Ruffled one day by some remarks made to her by Madame d’Aiglemont concerning the suspicious devotion of the Marquis de Vandenesse, Moina went so far as to fling back at her mother the remembrance of the latter’s own guilty relations with the young man’s father. Terribly overcome by this attack, the poor woman, who was a physical wreck, deaf and subject to heart disease, died in 1844. [A Woman of Thirty.] AIGLEMONT (Helene d’), eldest daughter of the Marquis and Marquise Victor d’Aiglemont; born in 1817. She and her brother Gustave were neglected by her mother for Charles, Abel and Moina. On this account Helene became jealous and defiant. When about eight years old, in a paroxysm of ferocious hate, she pushed her brother Charles into the Bievre, where he was drowned. This childish crime always passed for a terrible accident. When a young woman–one Christmas night–Helene eloped with a mysterious adventurer who was being tracked by justice and who was, for the time being, in hiding at the home of the Marquis Victor d’Aiglemont, at Versailles. Her despairing father sought her vainly. He saw her no more till seven years later, and then only once, when on his return from America to France. The ship on which he returned was captured by pirates, whose captain, “The Parisian,” the veritable abductor of Helene, protected the marquis and his fortune. The two lovers had four beautiful children and lived together in the most perfect happiness, sharing the same perils. Helene refused to follow her father. In 1835, some months after the death of her husband, Madame d’Aiglemont, while taking the youthful Moina to a Pyrenees watering-place, was asked to aid a poor sufferer. It was her daughter, Helene, who had just escaped shipwreck, saving only one child. Both presently succumbed before the eyes of Madame d’Aiglemont. [A Woman of Thirty.] AIGLEMONT (Gustave d’), second child of the Marquis and Marquise Victor d’Aiglemont, and born under the Restoration. His first appearance is while still a child, about 1827 or 1828, when returning in company with his father and his sister Helene from the presentation of a gloomy melodrama at the Gaite theatre. He was obliged to flee hastily from a scene, which violently agitated Helene, because it recalled the circumstances surrounding the death of his brother, some two or three years earlier. Gustave d’Aiglemont is next found in the drawing-room at Versailles, where the family is assembled, on the same evening of the abduction of Helene. He died at an early age of cholera, leaving a widow and children for whom the Dowager Marquise d’Aiglemont showed little love. [A Woman of Thirty.] AIGLEMONT (Charles d’), third child of the Marquis and the Marquise d’Aiglemont, born at the time of the intimacy of Madame d’Aiglemont with the Marquis de Vandenesse. He appears but a single time, one spring morning about 1824 or 1825, then being four years old. He was out walking with his sister Helene, his mother and the Marquis de Vandenesse. In a sudden outburst of jealous hate, Helene pushed the little Charles into the Bievre, where he was drowned. [A Woman of Thirty.] AIGLEMONT (Moina d’), fourth child and second daughter of the Marquis and Marquise Victor d’Aiglemont. (See Comtesse de Saint-Hereen.) [A Woman of Thirty.] AIGLEMONT (Abel d’), fifth and last child of the Marquis and Marquise Victor d’Aiglemont, born during the relations of his mother with M. de Vandenesse. Moina and he were the favorites of Madame d’Aiglemont. Killed in Africa before Constantine. [A Woman of Thirty.] AJUDA-PINTO (Marquis Miguel d’), Portuguese belonging to a very old and wealthy family, the oldest branch of which was connected with the Bragance and the Grandlieu houses. In 1819 he was enrolled among the most distinguished dandies who graced Parisian society. At this same period he began to forsake Claire de Bourgogne, Vicomtesse de Beauseant, with whom he had been intimate for three years. After having caused her much uneasiness concerning his real intentions, he returned her letters, on the intervention of Eugene de Rastignac, and married Mlle. Berthe de Rochefide. [Father Goriot. Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] In 1832 he was present at one of Madame d’Espard’s receptions, where every one there joined in slandering the Princesse de Cadignan before Daniel d’Arthez, then violently enamored of her. [The Secrets of a Princess.] Towards 1840, the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto, then a widower, married again–this time Mlle. Josephine de Grandlieu, third daughter of the last duke of this name. Shortly thereafter, the marquis was accomplice in a plot hatched by the friends of the Duchesse de Grandlieu and Madame du Guenic to rescue Calyste du Guenic from the clutches of the Marquise de Rochefide. [Beatrix.] AJUDA-PINTO (Marquise Berthe d’), nee Rochefide. Married to the Marquis Miguel d’Ajuda-Pinto in 1820. Died about 1849. [Beatrix.] AJUDA-PINTO (Marquise Josephine d’), daughter of the Duc and Duchesse Ferdinand de Grandlieu; second wife of the Marquis Miguel d’Ajuda- Pinto, her kinsman by marriage. Their marriage was celebrated about 1840. [Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] ALAIN (Frederic), born about 1767. He was clerk in the office of Bordin, procureur of Chatelet. In 1798 he lent one hundred crowns in gold to Monegod his life-long friend. This sum not being repaid, M. Alain found himself almost insolvent, and was obliged to take an insignificant position at the Mont-de-Piete. In addition to this he kept the books of Cesar Birotteau, the well-known perfumer. Monegod became wealthy in 1816, and he forced M. Alain to accept a hundred and fifty thousand francs in payment of the loan of the hundred crowns. The good man then devoted his unlooked-for fortune to philanthropies in concert with Judge Popinot. Later, at the close of 1825, he became one of the most active aides of Madame de la Chanterie and her charitable association. It was M. Alain who introduced Godefroid into the Brotherhood of the Consolation. [The Seamy Side of History.] ALBERTINE, Madame de Bargeton’s chambermaid, between the years 1821 and 1824. [Lost Illusions.] ALBON (Marquis d’), court councillor and ministerial deputy under the Restoration. Born in 1777. In September, 1819, he went hunting in the edge of the forest of l’Isle-Adam with his friend Philippe de Sucy, who suddenly fell senseless at the sight of a poor madwoman whom he recognized as a former mistress, Stephanie de Vandieres. The Marquis d’Albon, assisted by two passers by, M. and Mme. de Granville, resuscitated M. de Sucy. Then the marquis returned, at his friend’s entreaty, to the home of Stephanie, where he learned from the uncle of this unfortunate one the sad story of the love of his friend and Madame de Vandieres. [Farewell.] ALBRIZZI (Comtesse), a friend, in 1820, at Venice, of the celebrated melomaniac, Capraja. [Massimilla Doni.] ALDRIGGER (Jean-Baptiste, Baron d’), born in Alsace in 1764. In 1800 a banker at Strasbourg, where he was at the apogee of a fortune made during the Revolution, he wedded, partly through ambition, partly through inclination, the heiress of the Adolphuses of Manheim. The young daughter was idolized by every one in her family and naturally inherited all their fortune after some ten years. Aldrigger, created baron by the Emperor, was passionately devoted to the great man who had bestowed upon him his title, and he ruined himself, between 1814 and 1815, by believing too deeply in “the sun of Austerlitz.” At the time of the invasion, the trustworthy Alsatian continued to pay on demand and closed up his bank, thus meriting the remark of Nucingen, his former head-clerk: “Honest, but stoobid.” The Baron d’Aldrigger went at once to Paris. There still remained to him an income of forty- four thousand francs, reduced at his death, in 1823, by more than half on account of the expenditures and carelessness of his wife. The latter was left a widow with two daughters, Malvina and Isaure. [The Firm of Nucingen.] ALDRIGGER (Theodora-Marguerite-Wilhelmine, Baronne d’), nee Adolphus. Daughter of the banker Adolphus of Manheim, greatly spoiled by her parents. In 1800 she married the Strasbourg banker, Aldrigger, who spoiled her as badly as they had done and as later did the two daughters whom she had by her husband. She was superficial, incapable, egotistic, coquettish and pretty. At forty years of age she still preserved almost all her freshness and could be called “the little Shepherdess of the Alps.” In 1823, when the baron died, she came near following him through her violent grief. The following morning at breakfast she was served with small pease, of which she was very fond, and these small pease averted the crisis. She resided in the rue Joubert, Paris, where she held receptions until the marriage of her younger daughter. [The Firm of Nucingen.] ALDRIGGER (Malvina d’), elder daughter of the Baron and Baroness d’Aldrigger, born at Strasbourg in 1801, at the time when the family was most wealthy. Dignified, slender, swarthy, sensuous, she was a good type of the woman “you have seen at Barcelona.” Intelligent, haughty, whole-souled, sentimental and sympathetic, she was nevertheless smitten by the dry Ferdinand du Tillet, who sought her hand in marriage at one time, but forsook her when he learned of the bankruptcy of the Aldrigger family. The lawyer Desroches also considered asking the hand of Malvina, but he too gave up the idea. The young girl was counseled by Eugene de Rastignac, who took it upon himself to see that she got married. Nevertheless, she ended by being an old maid, withering day by day, giving piano lessons, living rather meagrely with her mother in a modest flat on the third floor, in the rue du Mont-Thabor. [The Firm of Nucingen.] ALDRIGGER (Isaure d’), second daughter of the Baron and Baronne d’Aldrigger, married to Godefroid de Beaudenord (See that name.) [The Firm of Nucingen.] ALINE, a young Auvergne chambermaid in the service of Madame Veronique Graslin, to whom she was devoted body and soul. She was probably the only one to whom was confided all the terrible secrets pertaining to the life of Madame Graslin. [The Country Parson.] ALLEGRAIN* (Christophe-Gabriel), French sculptor, born in 1710. With Lauterbourg and Vien, at Rome, in 1758, he assisted his friend Sarrasine to abduct Zambinella, then a famous singer. The prima-donna was a eunuch. [Sarrasine.]
• To the sculptor Allegrain who died in 1795, the Louvre Museum is indebted for a “Narcisse,” a “Diana,” and a “Venus entering the Bath.” ALPHONSE, a friend of the ruined orphan, Charles Grandet, tarrying temporarily at Saumur. In 1819 he acquitted himself most creditably of a mission entrusted to him by that young man. He wound up Charles’ business at Paris, paying all his debts by a single little sale. [Eugenie Grandet.] AL-SARTCHILD, name of a German banking-house, where Gedeon Brunner was compelled to deposit the funds belonging to his son Frederic and inherited from his mother. [Cousin Pons.] ALTHOR (Jacob), a Hambourg banker, who opened up a business at Havre in 1815. He had a son, whom in 1829 M. and Mme. Mignon desired for a son-in-law. [Modeste Mignon.] ALTHOR (Francisque), son of Jacob Althor. Francisque was the dandy of Havre in 1829. He wished to marry Modeste Mignon but forsook her quickly enough when he found out that her family was bankrupt. Not long afterwards he married Mlle. Vilquin the elder. [Modeste Mignon.] AMANDA, Parisian modiste at the time of Louis Philippe. Among her customers was Marguerite Turquet, known as Malaga, who was slow in paying bills. [A Man of Business.] AMAURY (Madame), owner, in 1829, of a pavilion at Sauvic, near Ingouville, which Canalis leased when he went to Havre to see Mlle. Mignon [Modeste Mignon.] AMBERMESNIL (Comtesse de l’) went in 1819, when about thirty-six years old, to board with the widow, Mme. Vauquer, rue Nueve Sainte- Genevieve, now Tournefort, Paris. Mme. de l’Ambermesnil gave it out that she was awaiting the settlement of a pension which was due her on account of being the widow of a general killed “on the battlefield.” Mme. Vauquer gave her every attention, confiding all her own affairs to her. The comtesse vanished at the end of six months, leaving a board bill unsettled. Mme. Vauquer sought her eagerly, but was never able to obtain a trace of this adventuress. [Father Goriot.] AMEDEE, nickname bestowed on Felix de Vandenesse by Lady Dudley when she thought she saw a rival in Madame de Mortsauf. [The Lily of the Valley.] ANCHISE (Pere), a surname given by La Palferine to a little Savoyard of ten years who worked for him without pay. “I have never seen such silliness coupled with such intelligence,” the Prince of Bohemia said of this child; “he would go through fire for me, he understands everything, and yet he does not see that I cannot help him.” [A Prince of Bohemia.] ANGARD–At Paris, in 1840, the “professor” Angard was consulted, in connection with the Doctors Bianchon and Larabit, on account of Mme. Hector Hulot, who it was feared was losing her reason. [Cousin Betty.] ANGELIQUE (Sister), nun of the Carmelite convent at Blois under Louis XVIII. Celebrated for her leanness. She was known by Renee de l’Estorade (Mme. de Maucombe) and Louise de Chaulieu (Mme. Marie Gaston), who went to school at the convent. [Letters of Two Brides.] ANICETTE, chambermaid of the Princesse de Cadignan in 1839. The artful and pretty Champagne girl was sought by the sub-prefect of Arcis-sur- Aube, by Maxime de Trailles, and by Mme. Beauvisage, the mayor’s wife, each trying to bribe and enlist her on the side of one of the various candidates for deputy. [The Member for Arcis.] ANNETTE, Christian name of a young woman of the Parisian world, under the Restoration. She had been brought up at Ecouen, where she had received the practical counsels of Mme. Campan. Mistress of Charles Grandet before his father’s death. Towards the close of 1819, a prey to suspicion, she must needs sacrifice her happiness for the time being, so she made a weary journey with her husband into Scotland. She made her lover effeminate and materialistic, advising with him about everything. He returned from the Indies in 1827, when she quickly brought about his engagement with Mlle. d’Aubrion. [Eugenie Grandet.] ANNETTE, maid servant of Rigou at Blangy, Burgundy. She was nineteen years old, in 1823, and had held this place for more than three years, although Gregoire Rigou never kept servants for a longer period than this, however much he might and did favor them. Annette, sweet, blonde, delicate, a true masterpiece of dainty, piquant loveliness, worthy to wear a duchess’ coronet, earned nevertheless only thirty francs a year. She kept company with Jean-Louis Tonsard without letting her master once suspect it; ambition had prompted this young woman to flatter her employer as a means of hoodwinking this lynx. [The Peasantry.] ANSELME, Jesuit, living in rue des Postes (now rue Lhomond). Celebrated mathematician. Had some dealings with Felix Phellion, whom he tried to convert to his religious belief. This rather meagre information concerning him was furnished by a certain Madame Komorn. [The Middle Classes.] ANTOINE, born in the village of Echelles, Savoy. In 1824 he had served longest as clerk in the Bureau of Finance, where he had secured positions, still more modest than his own, for a couple of his nephews, Laurent and Gabriel, both of whom were married to lace laundresses. Antoine meddled with every act of the administration. He elbowed, criticised, scolded and toadied to Clement Chardin des Lupeaulx and other office-holders. He doubtless lived with his nephews. [The Government Clerks.] ANTOINE, old servant of the Marquise Beatrix de Rochefide, in 1840, on the rue de Chartes-du-Roule, near Monceau Park, Paris. [Beatrix.] ANTONIA–see Chocardelle, Mlle. AQUILINA, a Parisian courtesan of the time of the Restoration and Louis Philippe. She claimed to be a Piedmontese. Of her true name she was ignorant. She had appropriated this /nom de guerre/ from a character in the well-known tragedy by Otway, “Venice Preserved,” that she had chanced to read. At sixteen, pure and beautiful, at the time of her downfall, she had met Castanier, Nucingen’s cashier, who resolved to save her from evil for his own gain, and live maritally with her in the rue Richter. Aquilina then took the name of Madame de la Garde. At the same time of her relations with Castanier, she had for a lover a certain Leon, a petty officer in a regiment of infantry, and none other than one of the sergeants of Rochelle to be executed on the Place de Greve in 1822. Before this execution, in the reign of Louis XVIII., she attended a performance of “Le Comedien d’Etampes,” one evening at the Gymnase, when she laughed immoderately at the comical part played by Perlet. At the same time, Castanier, also present at this mirthful scene, but harassed by Melmoth, was experiencing the insufferable doom of a cruel hidden drama. [Melmoth Reconciled.] Her next appearance is at a famous orgy at the home of Frederic Taillefer, rue Joubert, in company with Emile Blondet, Rastignac, Bixiou and Raphael de Valentin. She was a magnificent girl of good figure, superb carriage, and striking though irregular features. Her glance and smile startled one. She always included some red trinket in her attire, in memory of her executed lover. [The Magic Skin.] ARCOS (Comte d’), a Spanish grandee living in the Peninsula at the time of the expedition of Napoleon I. He would probably have married Maria-Pepita-Juana Marana de Mancini, had it not been for the peculiar incidents which brought about her marriage with the French officer, Francois Diard. [The Maranas.] ARGAIOLO (Duc d’), a very rich and well-born Italian, the respected though aged husband of her who later became the Duchesse de Rhetore, to the perpetual grief of Albert Savarus. Argaiolo died, almost an octogenarian, in 1835. [Albert Savarus.] ARGAIOLO (Duchesse d’), nee Soderini, wife of the Duc d’Argaiolo. She became a widow in 1835, and took as her second husband the Duc de Rhetore. (See Duchesse de Rhetore.) [Albert Savarus.] ARRACHELAINE, surname of the rogue, Ruffard. (See that name.) [Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] ARTHEZ (Daniel d’), one of the most illustrious authors of the nineteenth century, and one of those rare men who display “the unity of excellent talent and excellent character.” Born about 1794 or 1796. A Picard gentleman. In 1821, when about twenty-five, he was poverty- stricken and dwelt on the fifth floor of a dismal house in the rue des Quatre-Vents, Paris, where had also resided the illustrious surgeon Desplein, in his youth. There he fraternized with: Horace Bianchon, then house-physician at Hotel-Dieu; Leon Giraud, the profound philosopher; Joseph Bridau, the painter who later achieved so much renown; Fulgence Ridal, comic poet of great sprightliness; Meyraux, the eminent physiologist who died young; lastly, Louis Lambert and Michel Chrestien, the Federalist Republican, both of whom were cut off in their prime. To these men of heart and of talent Lucien de Rubempre, the poet, sought to attach himself. He was introduced by Daniel d’Arthez, their recognized leader. This society had taken the name of the “Cenacle.” D’Arthez and his friends advised and aided, when in need, Lucien the “Distinguished Provincial at Paris” who ended so tragically. Moreover, with a truly remarkable disinterestedness d’Arthez corrected and revised “The Archer of Charles IX.,” written by Lucien, and the work became a superb book, in his hands. Another glimpse of d’Arthez is as the unselfish friend of Marie Gaston, a young poet of his stamp, but “effeminate.” D’Arthez was swarthy, with long locks, rather small and bearing some resemblance to Bonaparte. He might be called the rival of Rousseau, “the Aquatic,” since he was very temperate, very pure, and drank water only. For a long time he ate at Flicoteaux’s in the Latin Quarter. He had grown famous in 1832, besides enjoying an income of thirty thousand francs bequeathed by an uncle who had left him a prey to the most biting poverty so long as the author was unknown. D’Arthez then resided in a pretty house of his own in the rue de Bellefond, where he lived in other respects as formerly, in the rigor of work. He was a deputy sitting on the right and upholding the Royalist platform of Divine Right. When he had acquired a competence, he had a most vulgar and incomprehensible /liaison/ with a woman tolerably pretty, but belonging to a lower society and without either education or breeding. D’Arthez maintained her, nevertheless, carefully concealing her from sight; but, far from being a pleasurable manner of life, it became odious to him. It was at this time that he was invited to the home of Diane de Maufrigneuse, Princesse de Cadignan, who was then thirty-six, but did not look it. The famous “great coquette” told him her (so-called) “secrets,” offered herself outright to this man whom she treated as a “famous simpleton,” and whom she made her lover. After that day there was no doubt about the relations of the princesse and Daniel d’Arthez. The great author, whose works became very rare, appeared only during some of the winter months at the Chamber of Deputies. [A Distinguished Provincial at Paris. Letters of Two Brides. The Member for Arcis. The Secrets of a Princess.] ASIE, one of the pseudonyms of Jacqueline Collin. (see that name.) [Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] ATHALIE, cook for Mme. Schontz in 1836. According to her mistress, she was specially gifted in preparing venison. [The Muse of the Department.] AUBRION (Marquis d’), a gentleman-in-waiting of the Bedchamber, under Charles X. He was of the house of Aubrion de Buch, whose last head died before 1789. He was silly enough to wed a woman of fashion, though he was already an old man of but twenty thousand francs income, a sum hardly sufficient in Paris. He tried to marry his daughter without a dowry to some man who was intoxicated with nobility. In 1827, to quote Mme. d’Aubrion, this ancient wreck was madly devoted to the Duchesse de Chaulieu [Eugenie Grandet.] AUBRION (Marquise d’), wife of the preceding. Born in 1789. At thirty- eight she was still pretty, and, having always been somewhat aspiring, she endeavored (in 1827), by hook or by crook, to entangle Charles Grandet, lately returned from the Indies. She wished to make a son-in- law out of him, and she succeeded. [Eugenie Grandet.] AUBRION (Mathilde d’) daughter of the Marquis and Marquise d’Aubrion; born in 1808; married to Charles Grandet. (See that name.) [Eugenie Grandet.] AUBRION (Comte d’), the title acquired by Charles Grandet after his marriage to the daughter of the Marquis d’Aubrion. [The Firm of Nucingen.] AUFFRAY, grocer at Provins, in the period of Louis XV., Louis XVI. and the Revolution. M. Auffray married the first time when eighteen, the second time at sixty-nine. By his first wife he had a rather ugly daughter who married, at sixteen, a landlord of Provins, Rogron by name. Auffray had another daughter, by his second marriage, a charming girl, this time, who married a Breton captain in the Imperial Guard. Pierrette Lorrain was the daughter of this officer. The old grocer Auffray died at the time of the Empire without having had time enough to make his will. The inheritance was so skillfully manipulated by Rogron, the first son-in-law of the deceased, that almost nothing was left for the goodman’s widow, then only about thirty-eight years old. [Pierrette.] AUFFRAY (Madame), wife of the preceding. (See Neraud, Mme.) [Pierrette.] AUFFRAY, a notary of Provins in 1827. Husband of Mme. Guenee’s third daughter. Great-grand-nephew of the old grocer, Auffray. Appointed a guardian of Pierrette Lorrain. On account of the ill-treatment to which this young girl was subjected at the home of her guardian, Denis Rogron, she was removed, an invalid, to the home of the notary Auffray, a designated guardian, where she died, although tenderly cared for. [Pierrette.] AUFFRAY (Madame), born Guenee. Wife of the preceding. The third daughter of Mme. Guenee, born Tiphaine. She exhibited the greatest kindness for Pierrette Lorrain, and nursed her tenderly in her last illness. [Pierrette.] AUGUSTE, name borne by Boislaurier, as chief of “brigands,” in the uprisings of the West under the Republic and under the Empire. [The Seamy Side of History.] AUGUSTE, /valet de chambre/ of the General Marquis Armand de Montriveau, under the Restoration, at the time when the latter dwelt in the rue de Seine hard by the Chamber of Peers, and was intimate with the Duchesse Antoinette de Langeais. [The Thirteen.] AUGUSTE, notorious assassin, executed in the first years of the Restoration. He left a mistress, surnamed Rousse, to whom Jacques Collin had faithfully remitted (in 1819) some twenty odd thousands of francs, on behalf of her lover after his execution. This woman was married in 1821, by Jacques Collin’s sister, to the head clerk of a rich, wholesale hardware merchant. Nevertheless, though once more in respectable society, she remained bound, by a secret compact, to the terrible Vautrin and his sister. [Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] AUGUSTE (Madame), dressmaker of Esther Gobseck, and her creditor in the time of Louis XVIII. [Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] AUGUSTIN, /valet de chambre/ of M. de Serizy in 1822. [A Start in Life.] AURELIE, a Parisian courtesan, under Louis Philippe, at the time when Mme. Fabien du Ronceret commenced her conquests. [Beatrix.] AURELIE (La Petite), one of the nicknames of Josephine Schiltz, also called Schontz, who became, later, Mme. Fabien du Ronceret. [Beatrix.] AUVERGNAT (L’), one of the assumed names of the rogue Selerier, alias Pere Ralleau, alias Rouleur, alias Fil-de-soie. (See Selerier.) [Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] B BABYLAS, groom or “tiger” of Amedee de Soulas, in 1834, at Besancon. Was fourteen years old at this time. The son of one of his master’s tenants. He earned thirty-six francs a month by his position to support himself, but he was neat and skillful. [Albert Savarus.] BAPTISTE, /valet de chambre/ to the Duchesse de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu in 1830. [Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] BARBANCHU, Bohemian with a cocked hat, who was called into Vefour’s by some journalists who breakfasted there at the expense of Jerome Thuillier, in 1840, and invited by them to “sponge” off of this urbane man, which he did. [The Middle Classes.] BARBANTI (The), a Corsican family who brought about the reconciliation of the Piombos and the Portas in 1800. [The Vendetta.] BARBET, a dynasty of second-hand book-dealers in Paris under the Restoration and Louis Philippe. They were Normans. In 1821 and the years following, one of them ran a little shop on the quay des Grands- Augustins, and purchased Lousteau’s books. In 1836, a Barbet, partner in a book-shop with Metivier and Morand, owned a wretched house on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and the boulevard du Mont-Parnasse, where dwelt the Baron Bourlac with his daughter and grandson. In 1840 the Barbets had become regular usurers dealing in credits with the firm of Cerizet and Company. The same year a Barbet occupied, in a house belonging to Jerome Thuillier, rue Saint-Dominique-d’Enfer (now rue Royal-Collard), a room on the first flight up and a shop on the ground floor. He was then a “publisher’s shark.” Barbet junior, a nephew of the foregoing, and editor in the alley des Panoramas, placed on the market at this time a brochure composed by Th. de la Peyrade but signed by Thuillier and having the title “Capital and Taxes.” [A Distinguished Provincial at Paris. A Man of Business. The Seamy Side of History. The Middle Classes.] BARBETTE, wife of the great Cibot, known as Galope-Chopine. (See Cibot, Barbette.) [Les Chouans.] BARCHOU DE PENHOEN (Auguste-Theodore-Hilaire), born at Morlaix (Finistere), April 28, 1801, died at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, July 29, 1855. A school-mate of Balzac, Jules Dufaure and Louis Lambert, and his neighbors in the college dormitory of Vendome in 1811. Later he was an officer, then a writer of transcendental philosophy, a translator of Fichte, a friend and interpreter of Ballanche. In 1849 he was elected, by his fellow-citizens of Finistere, to the Legislative Assembly where he represented the Legitimists and the Catholics. He protested against the /coup d’etat/ of December 2, 1851 (See “The Story of a Crime,” by Victor Hugo). When a child he came under the influence of Pyrrhonism. He once gainsaid the talent of Louis Lambert, his Vendome school-mate. [Louis Lambert.] BARGETON (De), born between 1761 and 1763. Great-grandson of an Alderman of Bordeau named Mirault, ennobled during the reign of Louis XIII., and whose son, under Louis XIV., now Mirault de Bargeton, was an officer of the Guards de la Porte. He owned a house at Angouleme, in the rue du Minage, where he lived with his wife, Marie-Louise-Anais de Negrepelisse, to whom he was entirely obedient. On her account, and at her instigation, he fought with one of the habitues of his salon, Stanislas de Chandour, who had circulated in the town a slander on Mme. de Bargeton. Bargeton lodged a bullet in his opponent’s neck. He had for a second his father-in-law, M. de Negrepelisse. Following this, M. de Bargeton retired into his estate at Escarbas, near Barbezieux, while his wife, as a result of the duel left Angouleme for Paris. M. de Bargeton had been of good physique, but “injured by youthful excesses.” He was commonplace, but a great gourmand. He died of indigestion towards the close of 1821. [Lost Illusions.] BARGETON (Madame de), nee Marie-Louise-Anais Negrepelisse, wife of the foregoing. Left a widow, she married again, this time the Baron Sixte du Chatelet. (See that name.) BARILLAUD, known by Frederic Alain whose suspicion he aroused with regard to Monegod. [The Seamy Side of History.] BARIMORE (Lady), daughter of Lord Dudley, and apparently the wife of Lord Barimore, although it is a disputed question. Just after 1830, she helped receive at a function of Mlle. des Touches, rue de la Chaussee-d’Antin, where Marsay told about his first love affair. [Another Study of Woman.] BARKER (William), one of Vautrin’s “incarnations.” In 1824 or 1825, under this assumed name, he posed as one of the creditors of M. d’Estourny, making him endorse some notes of Cerizet’s, the partner of this M. d’Estourny. [Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] BARNHEIM, family in good standing at Bade. On the maternal side, the family of Mme. du Ronceret, nee Schiltz, alias Schontz. [Beatrix.] BARNIOL, Phellion’s son-in-law. Head of an academy (in 1840), rue Saint-Hyacinthe-Saint-Michel (now, rue Le Goff and rue Malebrache). A rather influential man in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques. Visited the salon of Thuillier. [The Middle Classes.] BARNIOL (Madame), nee Phellion, wife of the preceding. She had been under-governess in the boarding school of the Mlles. Lagrave, rue Notre-Dame des Champs. [The Middle Classes.] BARRY (John), a young English huntsman, well known in the district whence the Prince of Loudon brought him to employ him at his own home. He was with this great lord in 1829, 1830. [Modeste Mignon.] BARTAS (Adrien de), of Angouleme. In 1821, he and his wife were very devoted callers at the Bargetons. M. de Bartas gave himself up entirely to music, talking about this subject incessantly, and courting invitations to sing with his heavy bass voice. He posed as the lover of Mme. de Brebion, the wife of his best friend. M. de Brebion became the lover of Mme. de Bartas. [Lost Illusions.] BARTAS (Madame Josephine de), wife of the preceding, always called Fifine, “for short.” [Lost Illusions.] BASTIENNE, Parisian modiste in 1821. Finot’s journal vaunted her hats, for a pecuniary consideration, and derogated those of Virginie, formerly praised. [Lost Illusions.] BATAILLES (The), belonging to the bourgeoisie of Paris, traders of Marais, neighbors and friends of the Baudoyers and the Saillards in 1824. M. Bataille was a captain in the National Guard, a fact which he allowed no one to ignore. [The Government Clerks.] BAUDENORD (Godefroid de), born in 1800. In 1821 he was one of the kings of fashion, in company with Marsay, Vandenesse, Ajuda-Pinto, Maxime de Trailles, Rastignac, the Duc de Maufrigneuse and Manerville. [A Distinguished Provincial at Paris.] His nobility and breeding were perhaps not very orthodox. According to Mlle. Emilie de Fontaine, he was of bad figure and stout, having but a single advantage–that of his brown locks. [The Ball at Sceaux.] A cousin, by marriage, of his guardian, the Marquis d’Aiglemont, he was, like him, ruined by the Baron de Nucingen in the Wortschin mine deal. At one time Beaudenord thought of paying court to his pretty cousin, the Marquise d’Aiglemont. In 1827 he wedded Isaure d’Aldrigger and, after having lived with her in a cosy little house on the rue de le Planche, he was obliged to solicit employment of the Minister of Finance, a position which he lost on account of the Revolution of 1830. However, he was reinstated through the influence of Nucingen, in 1836. He now lived modestly with his mother-in-law, his unmarried sister-in-law, Malvina, his wife and four children which she had given him, on the third floor, over the entresol, rue du Mont-Thabor. [The Firm of Nucingen.] BAUDENORD (Madame de), wife of the preceding. Born Isaure d’Aldrigger, in 1807, at Strasbourg. An indolent blonde, fond of dancing, but a nonentity from both the moral and the intellectual standpoints. [The Firm of Nucingen.] BAUDOYER (Monsieur and Madame), formerly tanners at Paris, rue Censier. They owned their house, besides having a country seat at l’Isle Adam. They had but one child, Isidore, whose sketch follows. Mme. Baudoyer, born Mitral, was the sister of the bailiff of that name. [The Government Clerks.] BAUDOYER (Isidore), born in 1788; only son of M. and Mme. Baudoyer, tanners, rue Censier, Paris. Having finished a course of study, he obtained a position in the Bureau of Finance, where, despite his notorious incapacity–and through “wire-pulling”–he became head of the office. In 1824, a head of the division, M. de La Billardiere died, when the meritorious clerk, Xavier Rabourdin, aspired to succeed him; but the position went to Isidore Baudoyer, who was backed by the power of money and the influence of the Church. He did not retain this post long; six months thereafter he became a preceptor at Paris. Isidore Baudoyer lived with his wife and her parents in a house on Palais Royale (now Place des Vosges), of which they were joint owners. [The Government Clerks.] He dined frequently, in 1840, at Thuillier’s, an old employe of the Bureau of Finance, then domiciled at the rue Saint-Dominique-d’Enfer, who had renewed his acquaintance with his old-time colleagues. [The Middle Classes.] In 1845, this man, who had been a model husband and who made a great pretence of religion maintained Heloise Brisetout. He was then mayor of the arrondissement of the Palais Royale. [Cousin Pons.] BAUDOYER (Madame), wife of the preceding and daughter of a cashier of the Minister of Finance; born Elisabeth Saillard in 1795. Her mother, an Auvergnat, had an uncle, Bidault, alias Gigonnet, a short-time money lender in the Halles quarter. On the other side, her mother-in- law was the sister of the bailiff Mitral. Thanks to these two men of means, who exercised a veritable secret power, and through her piety, which put her on good terms with the clergy, she succeeded in raising her husband up to the highest official positions–profiting also by the financial straits of Clement Chardin des Lupeaulx, Secretary General of Finance. [The Government Clerks.] BAUDOYER (Mademoiselle), daughter of Isidore Baudoyer and Elisabeth Saillard, born in 1812. Reared by her parents with the idea of becoming the wife of the shrewd and energetic speculator Martin Falleix, brother of Jacques Falleix the stock-broker. [The Government Clerks.] BAUDRAND, cashier of a boulevard theatre, of which Gaudissart became the director about 1834. In 1845 he was succeeded by the proletariat Topinard. [Cousin Pons.] BAUDRY (Planat de), Receiver General of Finances under the Restoration. He married one of the daughters of the Comte de Fontaine. He usually passed his summers at Sceaux, with almost all his wife’s family. [The Ball at Sceaux.] BAUVAN (Comte de), one of the instigators of the Chouan insurrection in the department d’Ille-et-Vilaine, in 1799. Through a secret revelation made to his friend the Marquis de Montauran on the part of Mlle. de Verneuil, the Comte de Bauvan caused, indirectly, the Massacre des Bleus at Vivetiere. Later, surprised in an ambuscade by soldiers of the Republic, he was made a prisoner by Mlle. de Verneuil and owed his life to her; for this reason he became entirely devoted to her, assisting as a witness at her marriage with Montauran. [The Chouans.] BAUVAN (Comtesse de), in all likelihood the wife of the foregoing, whom she survived. In 1822 she was manager of a Parisian lottery bureau which employed Madame Agatha Bridau, about the same time. [A Bachelor’s Establishment.] BAUVAN (Comte and Comtesse de), father and mother of Octave de Bauvan. Relics of the old Court, living in a tumble-down house on the rue Payenne at Paris, where they died, about 1815, within a few months of each other, and before the conjugal infelicity of their son. (See Octave de Bauvan.) Probably related to the two preceding. [Honorine.] BAUVAN (Comte Octave de), statesman and French magistrate. Born in 1787. When twenty-six he married Honorine, a beautiful young heiress who had been reared carefully at the home of his parents, M. and Mme. de Bauvan, whose ward she was. Two or three years afterwards she left the conjugal roof, to the infinite despair of the comte, who gave himself over entirely to winning her back again. At the end of several years he succeeded in getting her to return to him through pity, but she died soon after this reconciliation, leaving one son born of their reunion. The Comte de Bauvan, completely broken, set out for Italy about 1836. He had two residences at Paris, one on rue Payenne, an heirloom, the other on Faubourg Saint-Honore, which was the scene of the domestic reunion. [Honorine.] In 1830, the Comte de Bauvan, then president of the Court of Cassation, with MM. de Granville and de Serizy, tried to save Lucien de Rubempre from a criminal judgment, and, after the suicide of that unhappy man, he followed his remains to the grave. [Scenes from a Courtesan’s life.] BAUVAN (Comtesse Honorine de), wife of the preceding. Born in 1794. Married at nineteen to the Comte Octave de Bauvan. After having abandoned her husband, she was in turn, while expecting a child, abandoned by her lover, some eighteen months later. She then lived a very retired life in the rue Saint-Maur, yet all the time being under the secret surveillance of the Comte de Bauvan who paid exorbitant prices for the artificial flowers which she made. She thus derived from him a rather large part of the sustenance which she believed she owed only to her own efforts. She died, reunited to her husband, shortly after the Revolution of July, 1830. Honorine de Bauvan lost her child born out of wedlock, and she always mourned it. During her years of toilsome exile in the Parisian faubourg, she came in contact successively with Marie Gobain, Jean-Jules Popinot, Felix Gaudissart, Maurice de l’Hostal and Abbe Loraux.[Honorine.] BEAUDENORD (Madame de), wife of the preceding. Born Isaure d’Aldrigger, in 1807, at Strasbourg. An indolent blonde, fond of dancing, but a nonentity from both the moral and the intellectual standpoints. [The Firm of Nucingen.] BEAUMESNIL (Mademoiselle), a celebrated actress of the Theatre- Francais, Paris. Mature at the time of the Restoration. She was the mistress of the police-officer Peyrade, by whom she had a daughter, Lydie, whom he acknowledged. The last home of Mlle. Beaumesnil was on rue de Tournon. It was there that she suffered the loss by theft of her valuable diamonds, through Charles Crochard, her real lover. This was at the beginning of the reign of Louis Philippe. [The Middle Classes. Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life. A Second Home.] BEAUPIED, or Beau-Pied, an alias of Jean Falcon. (See that name.) BEAUPRE (Fanny), an actress at the Theatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, Paris, time of Charles X. Young and beautiful, in 1825, she made a name for herself in the role of marquise in a melodrama entitled “La Famille d’Anglade.” At this time she had replaced Coralie, then dead, in the affections of Camusot the silk-merchant. It was at Fanny Beaupre’s that Oscar Husson, one of the clerks of lawyer Desroches, lost in gaming the sum of five hundred francs belonging to his employer, and that he was discovered lying dead-drunk on a sofa by his uncle Cardot. [A Start in Life.] In 1829 Fanny Beaupre, for a money consideration, posed as the best friend of the Duc d’Herouville. [Modeste Mignon.] In 1842, after his liaison with Mme. de la Baudraye, Lousteau lived maritally with her. [The Muse of the Department.] A frequent inmate of the mansion magnificently fitted up for Esther Gobseck by the Baron de Nucingen, she knew all the fast set of the years 1829 and 1830. [Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] BEAUSEANT (Marquis and Comte de), the father and eldest brother of the Vicomte de Beauseant, husband of Claire de Bourgogne. [The Deserted Woman.] In 1819, the marquis and the comte dwelt together in their house, rue Saint-Dominique, Paris. [Father Goriot.] While the Revolution was on, the marquis had emigrated. The Abbe de Marolles had dealings with him. [An Episode under the Terror.] BEAUSEANT (Marquise de). In 1824 a Marquise de Beauseant, then rather old, is found to have dealings with the Chaulieus. It was probably the widow of the marquis of this name, and the mother of the Comte and Vicomte de Beauseant. [Letters of Two Brides.] The Marquise de Beauseant was a native of Champagne, coming of a very old family. [The Deserted Woman.] BEAUSEANT (Vicomte de), husband of Claire de Bourgogne. He understood the relations of his wife with Miguel d’Ajuda-Pinto, and, whether he liked it or not, he respected this species of morganatic alliance recognized by society. The Vicomte de Beauseant had his residence in Paris on the rue de Grenelle in 1819. At that time he kept a dancer and liked nothing better than high living. He became a marquis on the death of his father and eldest brother. He was a polished man, courtly, methodical, and ceremonious. He insisted upon living selfishly. His death would have allowed Mme. de Beauseant to wed Gaston de Nueil. [Father Goriot. The Deserted Woman.] BEAUSEANT (Vicomtesse de), born Clair de Bourgogne, in 1792. Wife of the preceding and cousin of Eugene de Rastignac. Of a family almost royal. Deceived by her lover, Miguel d’Ajuda-Pinto, who, while continuing his intimacy with her, asked and obtained the hand of Berthe de Rochefide, the vicomtesse left Paris secretly before this wedding and on the morning following a grand ball which was given at her home where she shone in all her pride and splendor. In 1822 this “deserted woman” had lived for three years in the most rigid seclusion at Courcelles near Bayeux. Gaston de Nueil, a young man of three and twenty, who had been sent to Normandy for his health, succeeded in making her acquaintance, was immediately smitten with her and, after a long seige, became her lover. This was at Geneva, whither she had fled. Their intimacy lasted for nine years, being broken by the marriage of the young man. In 1819 the Vicomtesse de Beauseant received at Paris the most famous “high-rollers” of the day– Malincour, Ronquerolles, Maxime de Trailles, Marsay, Vandenesse, together with an intermingling of the most elegant dames, as Lady Brandon, the Duchesse de Langeais, the Comtesse de Kergarouet, Mme. de Serizy, the Duchesse Carigliano, the Comtesse Ferraud, Mme. de Lantry, the Marquise d’Aiglemont, Mme. Firmiani, the Marquise de Listomere, the Marquise d’Espard and the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse. She was equally intimate with Grandlieu, and the General de Montriveau. Rastignac, then poor at the time of his start in the world, also received cards to her receptions. [Father Goriot. The Deserted Woman. Albert Savarus.] BEAUSSIER, a bourgeois of Issoudun under the Restoration. Upon seeing Joseph Bridau in the diligence, while the artist and his mother were on a journey in 1822, he remarked that he would not care to meet him at night in the corner of a forest–he looked so much like a highwayman. That same evening Beaussier, accompanied by his wife, came to call at Hochon’s in order to get a nearer view of the painter. [A Bachelor’s Establishment.] BEAUSSIER the younger, known as Beaussier the Great; son of the preceding and one of the Knights of Idlesse at Issoudun, commanded by Maxence Gilet, under the Restoration. [A Bachelor’s Establishment.] BEAUVISAGE, physician of the Convent des Carmelites at Blois, time of Louis XVIII. He was known by Louise de Chaulieu and by Renee de Maucombe, who were reared in the convent. According to Louise de Chaulieu, he certainly belied his name. [Letters of Two Brides.] BEAUVISAGE, at one time tenant of the splendid farm of Bellache, pertaining to the Gondreville estate at Arcis-sur-Aube. The father of Phileas Beauvisage. Died about the beginning of the nineteenth century. [The Gondreville Mystery. The Member for Arcis.] BEAUVISAGE (Madame), wife of the preceding. She survived him for quite a long period and helped her son Phileas win his success. [The Member for Arcis.] BEAUVISAGE (Phileas), son of Beauvisage the farmer. Born in 1792. A hosier at Arcis-sur-Aube during the Restoration. Mayor of the town in 1839. After a preliminary defeat he was elected deputy at the time when Sallenauve sent in his resignation, in 1841. An ardent admirer of Crevel whose affectations he aped. A millionaire and very vain, he would have been able, according to Crevel, to advance Mme. Hulot, for a consideration, the two hundred thousand francs of which that unhappy lady stood in so dire a need about 1842. [Cousin Betty. The Member for Arcis.] BEAUVISAGE (Madame), born Severine Grevin in 1795. Wife of Phileas Beauvisage, whom she kept in complete subjugation. Daughter of Grevin the notary of Arcis-sur-Aube, Senator Malin de Gondreville’s intimate friend. She inherited her father’s marvelous faculty of discretion; and, though diminutive in stature, reminded one forcibly, in her face and ways, of Mlle. Mars. [The Member for Arcis.] BEAUVISAGE (Cecile-Renee), only daughter of Phileas Beauvisage and Severine Grevin. Born in 1820. Her natural father was the Vicomte Melchior de Chargeboeuf who was sub-prefect of Arcis-sur-Aube at the commencement of the Restoration. She looked exactly like him, besides having his aristocratic airs. [The Member for Arcis.] BEAUVOIR (Charles-Felix-Theodore, Chevalier de), cousin of the Duchesse de Maille. A Chouan prisoner of the Republic in the chateau de l’Escarpe in 1799. The hero of a tale of marital revenge related by Lousteau, in 1836, to Mme. de la Baudraye, the story being obtained– so the narrator said–from Charles Nodier. [The Muse of the Department.] BECANIERE (La), surname of Barbette Cibot. (See that name.) BECKER (Edme), a student of medicine who dwelt in 1828 at number 22, rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve–the residence of the Marquis d’Espard. [The Commission in Lunacy.] BEDEAU, office boy and roustabout for Maitre Bordin, attorney to the Chatelet in 1787. [A Start in Life.] BEGA, surgeon in a French regiment of the Army of Spain in 1808. After having privately accouched a Spaniard under the espionage of her lover, he was assassinated by her husband, who surprised him in the telling of this clandestine operation. The foregoing adventure was told Mme. de la Baudraye, in 1836, by the Receiver of Finances, Gravier, former paymaster of the Army. [The Muse of the Department.] BEGRAND (La), a dancer at the theatre of Porte-Sainte-Martin, Paris, in 1820.* Mariette, who made her debut at this time, also scored a success. [A Bachelor’s Establishment.]
• She shone for more than sixty years as a famous choreographical artist in the boulevards. BELLEFEUILLE (Mademoiselle de), assumed name of Caroline Crochard. BELLEJAMBE, servant of Lieutenant-Colonel Husson in 1837. [A Start in Life.] BELOR (Mademoiselle de), young girl of Bordeaux living there about 1822. She was always in search of a husband, whom, for some cause or other, she never found. Probably intimate with Evangelista. [A Marriage Settlement.] BEMBONI (Monsignor), attache to the Secretary of State at Rome, who was entrusted with the transmission to the Duc de Soria at Madrid of the letters of Baron de Macumer his brother, a Spanish refugee at Paris in 1823, 1824. [Letters of Two Brides.] BENARD (Pieri). After corresponding with a German for two years, he discovered an engraving by Muller entitled the “Virgin of Dresden.” It was on Chinese paper and made before printing was discovered. It cost Cesar Birotteau fifteen hundred francs. The perfumer destined this engraving for the savant Vauquelin, to whom he was under obligations. [Cesar Birotteau.] BENASSIS (Doctor), born about 1779 in a little town of Languedoc. He received his early training at the College of Soreze, Tarn, which was managed by the Oratorians. After that he pursued his medical studies at Paris, residing in the Latin quarter. When twenty-two he lost his father, who left him a large fortune; and he deserted a young girl by whom he had had a son, in order to give himself over to the most foolish dissipations. This young girl, who was thoroughly well meant and devoted to him, died two years after the desertion despite the most tender care of her now contrite lover. Later Benassis sought marriage with another young girl belonging to a Jansenist family. At first the affair was settled, but he was thrown over when the secret of his past life, hitherto concealed, was made known. He then devoted his whole life to his son, but the child died in his youth. After wavering between suicide and the monastery of Grande-Chartreuse, Doctor Benassis stopped by chance in the poor village of l’Isere, five leagues from Grenoble. He remained there until he had transformed the squalid settlement, inhabited by good-for-nothing Cretins, into the chief place of the Canton, bustling and prosperous. Benassis died in 1829, mayor of the town. All the populace mourned the benefactor and man of genius. [The Country Doctor.] BENEDETTO, an Italian living at Rome in the first third of the nineteenth century. A tolerable musician, and a police spy, “on the side.” Ugly, small and a drunkard, he was nevertheless the lucky husband of Luigia, whose marvelous beauty was his continual boast. After an evening spent by him over the wine-cups, his wife in loathing lighted a brasier of charcoal, after carefully closing all the exits of the bedchamber. The neighbors rushing in succeeded in saving her alone; Benedetto was dead. [The Member for Arcis.] BERENICE, chambermaid and cousin of Coralie the actress of the Panorama and Gymnase Dramatique. A large Norman woman, as ugly as her mistress was pretty, but tender and sympathetic in direct proportion to her corpulence. She had been Coralie’s childhood playmate and was absolutely bound up in her. In October, 1822, she gave Lucien de Rubempre, then entirely penniless, four five-franc pieces which she undoubtedly owed to the generosity of chance lovers met on the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle. This sum enabled the unfortunate poet to return to Angouleme. [Lost Illusions. A Distinguished Provincial at Paris.] BERGERIN was the best doctor at Saumur during the Restoration. He attended Felix Grandet in his last illness. [Eugenie Grandet.] BERGMANN (Monsieur and Madame), Swiss. Venerable gardeners of a certain Comte Borromeo, tending his parks located on the two famous isles in Lake Major. In 1823 they owned a house at Gersau, near Quatre-Canton Lake, in the Canton of Lucerne. For a year back they had let one floor of this house to the Prince and Princesse Gandolphini,– personages of a novel entitled, “L’Ambitieux par Amour,” published by Albert Savarus in the Revue de l’Est, in 1834. [Albert Savarus.] BERNARD. (See Baron de Bourlac.) BERNUS, diligence messenger carrying the passengers, freight, and perhaps, the letters of Saint-Nazaire to Guerande, during the time of Charles X. and Louis Philippe. [Beatrix.] BERQUET, workman of Besancon who erected an elevated kiosk in the garden of the Wattevilles, whence their daughter Rosalie could see every act and movement of Albert Savarus, a near neighbor. [Albert Savarus.] BERTHIER (Alexandre), marshal of the Empire, born at Versailles in 1753, dying in 1815. He wrote, as Minister of War at the close of 1799, to Hulot, then in command of the Seventy-second demi-brigade, refusing to accept his resignation and giving him further orders. [The Chouans.] On the evening of the battle of Jena, October 13, 1806, he accompanied the Emperor and was present at the latter’s interview with the Marquis de Chargeboeuf and Laurence de Cinq-Cygne, special envoys to France to implore pardon for the Simeuses, the Hauteserres, and Michu who had been condemned as abductors of Senator Malin de Gondreville. [The Gondreville Mystery.] BERTHIER, Parisian notary, successor of Cardot, whose assistant head- clerk he had been and whose daughter Felicite (or Felicie) he married. In 1843 he was Mme. Marneffe’s notary. At the same time he had in hand the affairs of Camusot de Marville; and Sylvain Pons often dined with him. Master Berthier drew up the marriage settlement of Wilhelm Schwab with Emilie Graff, and the copartnership articles between Fritz Brunner and Wilhelm Schwab. [Cousin Betty. Cousin Pons.] BERTHIER (Madame), nee Felicie Cardot, wife of the preceding. She had been wronged by the chief-clerk in her father’s office. This young man died suddenly, leaving her enceinte. She then espoused the second clerk, Berthier, in 1837, after having been on the point of accepting Lousteau. Berthier was cognizant of all the head-clerk’s doings. In this affair both acted for a common interest. The marriage was measurably happy. Madame Berthier was so grateful to her husband that she made herself his slave. About the end of 1844 she welcomed very coldly Sylvain Pons, then in disgrace in the family circle. [The Muse of the Department. Cousin Pons.] BERTON, tax-collector at Arcis-sur-Aube in 1839. [The Member for Arcis.] BERTON (Mademoiselle), daughter of the tax-collector of Arcis-sur- Aube. A young, insignificant girl who acted the satellite to Cecile Beauvisage and Ernestine Mollot. [The Member for Arcis.] BERTON (Doctor), physician of Paris. In 1836 he lived on rue d’Enfer (now rue Denfert-Rochereau). An assistant in the benevolent work of Mme. de la Chanterie, he visited the needy sick whom she pointed out. Among others he attended Vanda de Mergi, daughter of the Baron de Bourlac–M. Bernard. Doctor Berton was gruff and frigid. [The Seamy Side of History.] BETHUNE (Prince de), the only man of fashion who knew “what a hat was” –to quote a saying of Vital the hatter, in 1845. [The Unconscious Humorists.] BEUNIER & CO., the firm Bixiou inquired after in 1845, near Mme. Nourrisson’s. [The Unconscious Humorists.] BIANCHI. Italian. During the first Empire a captain in the sixth regiment of the French line, which was made up almost entirely of men of his nationality. Celebrated in his company for having bet that he would eat the heart of a Spanish sentinel, and winning that bet. Captain Bianchi was first to plant the French colors on the wall of Tarragone, Spain, in the attack of 1808. But a friar killed him. [The Maranas.] BIANCHON (Doctor), a physician of Sancerre, father of Horace Bianchon, brother of Mme. Popinot, the wife of Judge Popinot. [The Commission in Lunacy.] BIANCHON (Horace), a physician of Paris, celebrated during the times of Charles X. and Louis Philippe; an officer of the Legion of Honor, member of the Institute, professor of the Medical Faculty, physician- in-charge, at the same time, of a hospital and the Ecole Polytechnique. Born at Sancerre, Cher, about the end of the eighteenth century. He was “interne” at the Cochin Hospital in 1819, at which time he boarded at the Vauquer Pension where he knew Eugene de Rastignac, then studying law, and Goriot and Vautrin. [Father Goriot.] Shortly thereafter, at Hotel Dieu, he became the favored pupil of the surgeon Desplein, whose last days he tended. [The Atheist’s Mass.] Nephew of Judge Jean-Jules Popinot and relative of Anselme Popinot, he had dealings with the perfumer Cesar Birotteau, who acknowledged indebtedness to him for a prescription of his famous hazelnut oil, and who invited him to the grand ball which precipitated Birotteau’s bankruptcy. [Cesar Birotteau. The Commission in Lunacy.] Member of the “Cenacle” in rue des Quatre-Vents, and on intimate terms with all the young fellows composing this clique, he was consequently enabled, to an extent, to bring Daniel d’Arthez to the notice of Rastignac, now Under-Secretary of State. He nursed Lucien de Rubempre who was wounded in a duel with Michel Chrestien in 1822; also Coralie, Lucien’s mistress, and Mme. Bridau in their last illnesses. [Lost Illusions. A Distinguished Provincial at Paris. A Bachelor’s Establishment. The Secrets of a Princess.] In 1824 the young Doctor Bianchon accompanied Desplein, who was called in to attend the dying Flamet de la Billardiere. [The Government Clerks.] In Provins in 1828, with the same Desplein and Dr. Martener, he gave the most assiduous attention to Pierrette Lorrain. [Pierrette.] In this same year of 1828 he had a momentary desire to become one of an expedition to Morea. He was then physician to Mme. de Listomere, whose misunderstanding with Rastignac he learned and afterwards related. [A Study of Woman.] Again in company with Desplein, in 1829, he was called in by Mme. de Nucingen with the object of studying the case of Baron de Nucingen, her husband, love-sick for Esther Gobseck. In 1830, still with his celebrated chief, he was cited by Corentin to express an opinion on the death of Peyrade and the lunacy of Lydie his daughter. Then, with Desplein and with Dr. Sinard, to attend Mme. de Serizy, who it was feared would go crazy over the suicide of Lucien de Rubempre. [Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] Associated with Desplein, at this same time, he cared for the dying Honorine, wife of Comte de Bauvan [Honorine.], and examined the daughter of Baron de Bourlac–M. Bernard–who was suffering from a peculiar Polish malady, the plica. [The Seamy Side of History.] In 1831 Horace Bianchon was the friend and physician of Raphael de Valentin. [The Magic Skin.] In touch with the Comte de Granville in 1833, he attended the latter’s mistress, Caroline Crochard. [A Second Home.] He also attended Mme. du Bruel, then mistress of La Palferine, who had injured herself by falling and striking her head against the sharp corner of a fireplace. [A Prince of Bohemia.] In 1835 he attended Mme. Marie Gaston–Louise de Chaulieu –though a hopeless case. [Letters of Two Brides.] In 1837 at Paris he accouched Mme. de la Baudraye who had been intimate with Lousteau; he was assisted by the celebrated accoucheur Duriau. [The Muse of the Department.] In 1838 he was Comte Laginski’s physician. [The Imaginary Mistress.] In 1840 Horace Bianchon resided on rue de la Montagne- Sainte-Genevieve, in the house where his uncle, Judge Popinot, died, and he was asked to become one of the Municipal Council, in place of that upright magistrate. But he declined, declaring in favor of Thuillier. [The Middle Classes.] The physician of Baron Hulot, Crevel and Mme. Marneffe, he observed with seven of his colleagues, the terrible malady which carried off Valerie and her second husband in 1842. In 1843 he also visited Lisbeth Fisher in her last illness [Cousin Betty.] Finally, in 1844, Dr. Bianchon was consulted by Dr. Roubaud regarding Mme. Graslin at Montegnac. [The Country Parson.] Horace Bianchon was a brilliant and inspiring conversationalist. He gave to society the adventures known by the following titles: A Study of Woman; Another Study of Woman; La Grande Breteche. BIBI-LUPIN, chief of secret police between 1819 and 1830; a former convict. In 1819 he personally arrested at Mme. Vauquer’s boarding- house Jacques Collin, alias Vautrin, his old galley-mate and personal enemy. Under the name of Gondureau, Bibi-Lupin had made overtures to Mlle. Michonneau, one of Mme. Vauquer’s guests, and through her he had obtained the necessary proofs of the real identity of Vautrin who was then without the pale of the law, but who later, May, 1830, became his successor as chief of secret police. [Father Goriot. Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] BIDAULT (Monsieur and Madame), brother and sister-in-law of Bidault, alias Gigonnet; father and mother of M. and Mme. Saillard, furniture- dealers under the Central Market pillars during the latter part of the eighteenth and perhaps the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. [The Government Clerks.] BIDAULT, known as Gigonnet, born in 1755; originally an Auvergnat; uncle of Mme. Saillard on the paternal side. A paper-merchant at one time, retired from business since the year II of the Republic, he opened an account with a Dutchman called Sieur Werbrust, who was a friend of Gobseck. In business relations with the latter, he was one of the most formidable usurers in Paris, during the Empire, the Restoration and the first part of the July Government. He dwelt in rue Greneta. [The Government Clerks. Gobseck.] Luigi Porta, a ranking officer retired under Louis XVIII., sold all his back pay to Gigonnet. [The Vendetta.] Bidault was one of the syndicate that engineered the bankruptcy of Birotteau in 1819. At this time he persecuted Mme. Madou, a market dealer in filberts, who was his debtor. [Cesar Birotteau.] In 1824 he succeeded in making his grand-nephew, Isidore Baudoyer, chief of the division under the Minister of Finance; in this he was aided by Gobseck and Mitral, and worked on the General Secretary, Chardin des Lupeaulx, through the medium of the latter’s debts and the fact of his being candidate for deputy. [The Government Clerks.] Bidault was shrewd enough; he saw through–and much to his profit–the pretended speculation involved in the third receivership which was operated by Nucingen in 1826. [The Firm of Nucingen.] In 1833 M. du Tillet advised Nathan, then financially stranded, to apply to Gigonnet, the object being to involve Nathan. [A Daughter of Eve.] The nick-name of Gigonnet was applied to Bidault on account of a feverish, involuntary contraction of a leg muscle. [The Government Clerks.] BIDDIN, goldsmith, rue de l’Arbe-Sec, Paris, in 1829; one of Esther Gobseck’s creditors. [Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] BIFFE (La), concubine of the criminal Riganson, alias Le Biffon. This woman, who was a sort of Jacques Collin in petticoats, evaded the police, thanks to her disguises. She could ape the marquise, the baronne and the comtesse to perfection. She had her own carriage and footmen. [Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] BIFFON (Le), an alias of Riganson. BIGORNEAU, sentimental clerk of Fritot’s, the shawl merchant in the Bourse quarter, Paris, time of Louis Philippe. [Gaudissart II.] BIJOU (Olympe). (See Grenouville, Madame.) BINET, inn-keeper in the Department of l’Orne in 1809. He was concerned in a trial which created some stir, and cast a shadow over Mme. de la Chanterie, striking at her daughter, Mme. des Tours- Minieres. Binet harbored some brigands known as “chauffeurs.” He was brought to trial for it and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. [The Seamy Side of History.] BIROTTEAU (Jacques), a gardener hard by Chinon. He married the chambermaid of a lady on whose estate he trimmed vines. Three boys were born to them: Francois, Jean and Cesar. He lost his wife on the birth of the last child (1779), and himself died shortly after. [Cesar Birotteau.] BIROTTEAU (Abbe Francois), eldest son of Jacques Birotteau; born in 1766; vicar of the church of Saint-Gatien at Tours, and afterwards cure of Saint-Symphorien in the same city. After the death of the Abbe de la Berge, in 1817, he became confessor of Mme. de Mortsauf, attending her last moments. [The Lily of the Valley.] His brother Cesar, the perfumer, wrote him after his–Cesar’s–business failure in 1819, asking aid. Abbe Birotteau, in a touching letter, responded with the sum of one thousand francs which represented all his own little hoard and, in addition, a loan obtained from Mme. de Listomere. [Cesar Birotteau.] Accused of having inveigled Mme. de Listomere to leave him the income of fifteen hundred francs, which she bequeathed him on her death, Abbe Birotteau was placed under interdiction, in 1826, the victim of the terrible hatred of the Abbe Troubert. [The Vicar of Tours.] BIROTTEAU (Jean), second son of Jacques Birotteau. A captain in the army, killed in the historic battle of La Trebia which lasted three days, June 17-19, 1799. [Cesar Birotteau.] BIROTTEAU (Cesar), third son of Jacques Birotteau, born in 1779; dealer in perfumes in Paris at number 397 rue Saint-Honore, near the Place Vendome, in the old shop once occupied by the grocer Descoings, who was executed with Andre Chenier in 1794. After the eighteenth Brumaire, Cesar Birotteau succeeded Sieur Ragon, and moved the source of the “Queen of Roses” to the above address. Among his customers were the Georges, the La Billardieres, the Montaurans, the Bauvans, the Longuys, the Mandas, the Berniers, the Guenics, and the Fontaines. These relations with the militant Royalists implicated him in the plot of the 13th Vendemaire, 1795, against the Convention; and he was wounded, as he told over and over, “by Bonaparte on the borders of Saint-Roche.” In May, 1800, Birotteau the perfumer married Constance- Barbe-Josephine Pillerault. By her he had an only daughter, Cesarine, who married Anselme Popinot in 1822. Successively captain, then chief of battalion in the National Guard and adjunct-mayor of the eleventh arrondissement, Birotteau was appointed Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1818. To celebrate his nomination in the Order, he gave a grand ball* which, on account of the very radical changes necessitated in his apartments, and coupled with some bad speculations, brought about his total ruin; he filed a petition in bankruptcy the year following. By stubborn effort and the most rigid economy, Birotteau was able to indemnify his creditors completely, three years later (1822). But he died soon after the formal court reinstating. He numbered among his patrons in 1818 the following: the Duc and Duchesse de Lenoncourt, the Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry, the Marquise d’Espard, the two Vandenesses, Marsay, Ronquerolles, and the Marquis d’Aiglemont. [Cesar Birotteau. A Bachelor’s Establishment.] Cesar Birotteau was likewise on friendly terms with the Guillaumes, clothing dealers in the rue Saint-Denis. [At the Sign of the Cat and Racket.]
• The 17th of December was really Thursday and not Sunday, as erroneously given. BIROTTEAU (Madame), born Constance-Barbe-Josephine Pillerault in 1782. Married Cesar Birotteau in May, 1800. Previous to her marriage she was head “saleslady” at the “Little Sailor”* novelty shop, corner of Quai Anjou and rue des Deux Ponts, Paris. Her surviving relative and guardian was her uncle, Claude-Joseph Pillerault. [Cesar Birotteau.]
• This shop still exists at the same place, No. 43 Quai d’Anjou and 40 rue des Deux-Ponts, being run by M. L. Bellevaut. BIROTTEAU (Cesarine). (See Popinot, Madame Anselme.) BIXIOU,* Parisian grocer, in rue Saint-Honore, before the Revolution in the eighteenth century. He had a clerk called Descoings, who married his widow. The grocer Bixiou was the grandfather of Jean- Jacques Bixiou, the celebrated cartoonist. [A Bachelor’s Establishment.]
• Pronounced “Bissiou.” BIXIOU, son of the preceding and father of Jean-Jacques Bixiou. He was a colonel of the Twenty-first Regiment; killed at the battle of Dresden, on the 26th or 27th of August, 1813. [A Bachelor’s Establishment.] BIXIOU (Jean-Jacques), famous artist; son of Colonel Bixiou who was killed at Dresden; grandson of Mme. Descoings, whose first husband was the grocer Bixiou. Born in 1797, he pursued a course of study at the Lyceum, to which he had obtained a scholarship. He had for friends Philippe and Joseph Bridau, and Master Desroches. Later he entered the painter Gros’s studio. Then in 1819, through the influence of the Ducs de Maufrigneuse and de Rhetore, whom he met at some dancer’s, he obtained a position with the Minister of Finance. He remained with this administration until December, 1824, when he resigned. In this same year he was one of the best men for Philippe Bridau, who married Flore Brazier, known as La Rabouilleuse, the widow of J.-J. Rouget. After this woman’s death, in 1828, he was led, disguised as a priest, to the residence of the Soulanges, where he told the comte about the scandal connected with her death, knowingly caused by her husband; he told, also, about the bad habits and vulgarities of Philippe Bridau, and thus caused the breaking off of the marriage of this weather- beaten soldier with Mlle. Amelie de Soulanges. A talented cartoonist, distinguished practical joker, and recognized as one of the kings of /bon mot/, he led a free and easy life. He was on speaking terms with all the artists and all the lorettes of his day. Among others he knew the painter, Hippolyte Schinner. He turned a pretty penny, during the trial of De Fualdes and de Castaing, by illustrating in a fantastic way the account of this trial. [A Bachelor’s Establishment. The Government Clerks. The Purse.] He designed some vignettes for the writing of Canalis. [Modeste Mignon.] With Blondet, Lousteau and Nathan he was a habitue of the house of Esther Gobseck, rue Saint- Georges, in 1829, 1830. [Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] In a private room of a well-known restaurant, in 1836, he wittily related to Finot, Blondet and Couture the source of Nucingen’s fortune. [The Firm of Nucingen.] In January, 1837, his friend Lousteau had him come especially to upbraid him, Lousteau, on account of the latter’s irregular ways with Mme. de la Baudraye, while she, concealed in an ante-room, heard it all. This scene had been arranged beforehand; its object was to give Lousteau a chance to declare, apparently, his unquenchable attachment for his mistress. [The Muse of the Department.] In 1838 he attended the house-warming of Heloise Brisetout in rue Chauchat. In the same year he was attendant at the marriage of Steinbock with Hortense Hulot, and of Crevel with the widow Marneffe. [Cousin Betty.] In 1839 the sculptor Dorlange- Sallenauve knew of Bixiou and complained of his slanders. [The Member for Arcis.] Mme. Schontz treated him most cordially in 1838, and he had to pass for her “special,” although their relations, in fact, did not transcend the bounds of friendship. [Beatrix.] In 1840, at the home of Marguerite Turquet, maintained by the notary Cardot, when Lousteau, Nathan and La Palferine were also present, he heard a story by Desroches. [A Man of Business.] About 1844, Bixiou helped in a high comedy relative to a Selim shawl sold by Fritot to Mistress Noswell. Bixiou himself had purchased, in a shop with M. du Ronceret, a shawl for Mme. Schontz. [Gaudissart II.] In 1845 Bixiou showed Paris and the “Unconscious Humorists” to a Pyrrenean named Gazonal, in company with Leon de Lora, a cousin of the countryman. At this time Bixiou dwelt at number 112 rue Richelieu, sixth floor; when he had a regular position he had lived in rue de Ponthieu. [The Unconscious Humorists.] In the rue Richelieu period he was the lover of Heloise Brisetout. [Cousin Pons.] BLAMONT-CHAUVRY (Princesse de), mother of Mme. d’Espard; aunt of the Duchesse de Langeais; great aunt of Mme. de Mortsauf; a veritable d’Hozier in petticoats. Her drawing-room set the fashion in Faubourg Saint-Germain, and the sayings of this feminine Talleyrand were listened to as oracles. Very aged at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVIII., she was one of the most poetic relics of the reign of Louis XV., the “Well-Beloved;” and to this nick-name–as the records had it–she had contributed her full share. [The Thirteen.] Mme. Firmiani was received by the princess on account of the Cadignans, to whom she was related on her mother’s side. [Madame Firmiani.] Felix de Vandenesse was admitted to her “At Homes,” on the recommendation of Mme. de Mortsauf; nevertheless he found in this old lady a friend whose affection had a quality almost maternal. The princess was in the family conclave which met to consider an amorous escapade of the Duchesse Antoinette de Langeais. [The Lily of the Valley. The Thirteen.] BLANDUREAUS (The), wealthy linen merchants at Alencon, time of the Restoration. They had an only daughter, to whom the President du Ronceret wished to marry his son. She, however, married Joseph Blondet, the oldest son of Judge Blondet. This marriage caused secret hostility between the two fathers, one being the other’s superior in office. [Jealousies of a Country Town.] BLONDET, judge at Alencon in 1824; born in 1758; father of Joseph and Emile Blondet. At the time of the Revolution he was a public prosecutor. A botanist of note, he had a remarkable conservatory where he cultivated geraniums only. This conservatory was visited by the Empress Marie-Louise, who spoke of it to the Emperor and obtained for the judge the decoration of the Legion of Honor. Following the Victurien d’Esgrignon episode, about 1825, Judge Blondet was made an officer in the Order and chosen councillor at the Royal Court. Here he remained in office no longer than absolutely necessary, retreating to his dear Alencon home. He married in 1798, at the age of forty, a young girl of eighteen, who in consequence of this disparity was unfaithful to him. He knew that his second son, Emile, was not his own; he therefore cared only for the elder and sent the younger elsewhere as soon as possible. [Jealousies of a Country Town.] About 1838 Fabien du Ronceret obtained credit in an agricultural convention for a flower which old Blondet had given him, but which he exhibited as a product of his own green-house. [Beatrix.] BLONDET (Madame), wife of the preceding; born in 1780; married in 1798. She was intimate with a prefect of Orne, who was the natural father of Emile Blondet. Distant ties bound her to the Troisville family, and it was to them that she sent Emile, her favored son. Before her death, in 1818, she commended him to her old-time lover and also to the future Madame de Montcornet, with whom he had been reared. [Jealousies of a Country Town.] BLONDET (Joseph), elder son of Judge Blondet of Alencon; born in that city about 1799. In 1824 he practiced law and aspired to become a substitute judge. Meanwhile he succeeded his father, whose post he filled till his death. He was one of the numerous men of ordinary talent. [Jealousies of a Country Town.] BLONDET (Madame Joseph), nee Claire Blandureau, wife of Joseph Blondet, whom she married when he was appointed judge at Alencon. She was the daughter of wealthy linen dealers in the city. [Jealousies of a Country Town.] BLONDET (Emile), born at Alencon about 1800; legally the younger son of Judge Blondet, but really the son of a prefect of Orne. Tenderly loved by his mother, but hated by Judge Blondet, who sent him, in 1818, to study law in Paris. Emile Blondet knew the noble family of d’Esgrignon in Alencon, and for the youngest daughter of this illustrious house he felt an esteem that was really admiration. [Jealousies of a Country Town.] In 1821 Emile Blondet was a remarkably handsome young fellow. He made his first appearance in the “Debats” by a series of masterly articles which called forth from Lousteau the remark that he was “one of the princes of criticism.” [A Distinguished Provincial at Paris.] In 1824 he contributed to a review edited by Finot, where he collaborated with Lucien de Rubempre and where he was allowed full swing by his chief. Emile Blondet had the most desultory of habits; one day he would be a boon companion, without compunction, with those destined for slaughter on the day following. He was always “broke” financially. In 1829, 1830, Bixiou, Lousteau, Nathan and he were frequenters of Esther’s house, rue Saint-Georges. [Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] A cynic was Blondet, with little regard for glory undefiled. He won a wager that he could upset the poet Canalis, though the latter was full of assurance. He did this by staring fixedly at the poet’s curls, his boots, or his coat-tails, while he recited poetry or gesticulated with proper emphasis, fixed in a studied pose. [Modeste Mignon.] He was acquainted with Mlle. des Touches, being present at her home on one occasion, about 1830, when Henri de Marsay told the story of his first love affair. He took part in the conversation and depicted the “typical woman” to Comte Adam Laginski. [Another Study of Woman.] In 1832 he was a guest at Mme. d’Espard’s, where he met his childish flame, Mme. de Montcornet, also the Princesse de Cadignan, Lady Dudley, d’Arthez, Nathan, Rastignac, the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto, Maxime de Trailles, the Marquis d’Esgrignon, the two Vandenesses, du Tillet, the Baron Nucingen and the Chevalier d’Espard, brother-in-law of the marquise. [The Secrets of a Princess.] About 1833 Blondet presented Nathan to Mme. de Montcornet, at whose home the young Countess Felix de Vandenesse made the acquaintance of the poet and was much smitten with him for some time. [A Daughter of Eve.] In 1836 he and Finot and Couture chimed in on the narrative of the rise of Nucingen, told with much zest by Bixiou in a private room of a famous restaurant. [The Firm of Nucingen.] Eight or ten years prior to February, 1848, Emile Blondet, on the brink of suicide, witnessed an entire transition in his affairs. He was chosen a prefect, and he married the wealthy widow of Comte de Montcornet, who offered him her hand when she became free. They had known and loved each other since childhood. [The Peasantry.] BLONDET (Virginie), wife by second marriage of Emile Blondet; born in 1797; daughter of the Vicomte de Troisville; granddaughter of the Russian Princesse Scherbelloff. She was brought up at Alencon, with her future husband. In 1819 she married the General de Montcornet. Twenty years later, a widow, she married the friend of her youth, who this long time had been her lover. [Jealousies of a Country Town. The Secrets of a Princess. The Peasantry.] She and Mme. d’Espard tried to convert Lucien de Rubempre to the monarchical side in 1821. [A Distinguished Provincial at Paris.] She was present at Mlle. des Touches’, about 1830, when Marsay told about his first love, and she joined in the conversation. [Another Study of Woman.] She received a rather mixed set, from an aristocratic standpoint, but here might be found the stars of finance, art and literature. [The Member for Arcis.] Mme. Felix de Vandenesse saw Nathan the poet for the first time and noticed him particularly at Mme. de Montcornet’s, in 1834, 1835. [A Daughter of Eve.] Mme. Emile Blondet, then Madame la Generale de Montcornet, passed the summer and autumn of 1823 in Burgundy, at her beautiful estate of Aigues, where she lived a burdened and troubled life among the many and varied types of peasantry. Remarried, and now the wife of a prefect, eight years or so before February, 1848, time of Louis Philippe, she visited her former properties. [The Peasantry.] BLUTEAU (Pierre), assumed name of Genestas. [The Country Doctor.] BOCQUILLON, an acquaintance of Mme. Etienne Gruget. In 1820, rue des Enfants-Rouges, Paris, she mistook for him the stock-broker, Jules Desmarets, who was entering her door. [The Thirteen.] BOGSECK (Madame van), name bestowed by Jacques Collin on Esther van Gobseck when, in 1825, he gave her, transformed morally and intellectually, to Lucien de Rubempre, in an elegant flat on rue Taitbout. [Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.] BOIROUGE, president of the Sancerre Court at the time when the Baronne de la Baudraye held social sway over that city. Through his wife, he was related to the Popinot-Chandiers, to Judge Popinot of Paris, and to Anselme Popinot. He was hereditary owner of a house which he did not need, and which he very gladly leased to the baronne for the purpose of starting a literary society that, however, degenerated very soon into an ordinary clique. Actuated by jealousy, President Boirouge was one of the principals in the defeat of Procureur Clagny for deputy. He was reputed to be unchaste at repartee. [The Muse of the Department.] BOIROUGE (Madame), nee Popinot-Chandier, wife of President Boirouge; stood well among the middle-class of Sancerre. After having been leader in the opposition to Mme. de la Baudraye for nine years, she