Unlike Victor Hugo and Balzac, she founded ' no school, though Fromentin, Theuriet, Cherbuliez, Fabre and Bazin might be claimed as her collateral descendants.
Her nights were spent in writing, which seemed in her case a relaxation from the real business of the day, playing with her grandchildren, gardening, conversing with her visitors - it might be Balzac or Dumas, or Octave Feuillet or Matthew Arnold - or writing long letters to Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert.
His mother married Francois de Balzac, marquis d'Entragues, and one of her daughters, Henriette, marchioness of Verneuil, afterwards became the mistress of Henry IV.
Literary men owed him also much; not only did he throw his famous library open to them, but he pensioned all their leaders, including Descartes, Vincent Voiture (1598-1648), Jean Louis Guez de Balzac (1597-1654) and Pierre Corneille.
To these works should be added his monuments to "Cardinal Lavigerie" and "General de La Fayette" (the latter in Washington), and his statues of "Lamartine" (1876) and "St Vincent de Paul" (1879), as well as the "Balzac," which he executed for the Societe des gens de lettres on the rejection of that by Rodin; and the busts of "Carolus-Duran" and "Coquelin cadet" (1896).
