Honoré de Balzac

A family in Tours

Balzac was born on 20 May 1799 in Tours, a quiet town on the Loire river. His father, Bernard-François, came from a poor farming family in the Tarn, in southern France. The family's real name was "Balssa". Bernard-François changed it to "Balzac". This new name sounded like the name of an old noble family. He worked hard and gained a better place in society. He became an officer who bought food and other goods for the army. He was also a well-known man in Tours. He was already 52 years old when Honoré was born.

Balzac's mother, Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier, came from a very different family. Her parents were Paris shopkeepers who sold cloth and things used for sewing. She was only 21 when Honoré, her first child to live, was born. Her family had chosen her husband for her, and the marriage was not happy. She did not show Honoré much love. Later, Balzac wrote bitterly about her. In one letter, he even said that he had never truly had a mother.

Like many babies at that time, Honoré was sent to live with a wet nurse. A wet nurse was a woman who was paid to feed and care for another woman's baby. She lived in the village of Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire, near Tours. Honoré stayed with her until he was four years old. Some writers who have studied his life connect this early separation with an important subject in his books. His novels often show children who do not receive enough love. They also show mothers who love one child more than another.

Honoré had two sisters, Laure, born in 1800, and Laurence, born in 1802. He also had a younger brother, Henry, born in 1807. Laure remained close to Honoré throughout his life. She later wrote the first book about him. Henry was their mother's favourite child. Most historians believe that Bernard-François was not Henry's real father. They think his father was Jean de Margonne, a family friend who owned the castle of Saché near Tours.

Despite these painful experiences, the Balzac home was not always sad. Pierre Barbéris studied the family's papers. He describes them as a lively and hopeful family who often laughed and joked. They belonged to the growing middle class. The young Honoré did not feel that the world had rejected him. His later dark view of society did not come only from an unhappy childhood.

Hard years at school

In 1807, when Honoré was eight years old, his family sent him to the well-known school of Vendôme. He was a boarder, which means that he lived at the school. The school was run by former members of the Oratory, a Catholic group that taught children. Its rules were very strict. The pupils stayed there throughout the year, even during the holidays. Their parents rarely visited them. During Balzac's six years at the school, his mother came to see him only twice.

School records describe Honoré as a fat, quiet boy with red cheeks. He was often punished. However, the school had a large library, and a kind teacher allowed him to read as much as he wished. Honoré also read in secret, even when he had been locked in a room as a punishment. He read many books about history, philosophy, and religion.

An old story says that, between the ages of twelve and fourteen, he wrote a work called the "Treatise on the Will". It was said to be a study of the power of the human mind. However, this work was not really written by the young Balzac. It belongs to Louis Lambert, the main character of Balzac's later novel of the same name. The earliest philosophical notes by Balzac that still exist were written several years later, when he was studying law in Paris.

In April 1813, before the school year had ended, his family took him home. He was weak and thin. He also seemed strangely distant, almost like a person walking in his sleep. Perhaps his many hours of secret reading had made him ill. Fresh air and long walks helped him become well again.

About twenty years later, Balzac used his memories of Vendôme in his novel Louis Lambert (1832). The novel tells the story of a very gifted boy who writes a secret "Treatise on the Will" while studying at the school. The book mixes Balzac's memories with invented events, but the school in the novel is clearly based on the real school of Vendôme.

Balzac wrote this unusual novel far from Paris, at the castle of Saché, in June and July 1832. He had recently been badly hurt when he fell from his carriage. Paris was still troubled by street fighting and by the arrests and punishments that followed it. Pierre Barbéris, who studied this part of Balzac's life closely, describes the novel as a journey back to the deepest sources of Balzac's own life and thought.

Paris, law, and a first failure

Balzac first experienced life in Paris without his family. From October 1813 to March 1814, he lived as a boarder at the Ganzer and Beuzelin school. From there, he went to classes at the Lycée Charlemagne. In 1814, Bernard-François received a new job in Paris. At the end of the year, the whole family moved to the capital. Honoré finished his school studies there.

In 1816, he began to study law. At the same time, he worked as a clerk for the lawyer Jean-Baptiste Guyonnet de Merville. A clerk was a young office worker. He later worked for Passez, a family friend who was a notary. A notary is a legal officer who prepares official papers such as contracts and wills.

In these offices, Balzac saw the hidden side of life in Paris. He learned about family fights over money, secret debts, poor widows, and clever tricks with contracts. He never forgot these experiences. Lawyers, notaries, and money-lenders appear in many of his novels.

At the same time, he was already becoming less interested in law. His earliest philosophical notes that still exist come from these years. They discuss the soul and ask whether it continues to live after death. One of these notes was written on the back of a legal paper that the young clerk had prepared himself. Several notes repeat, almost exactly, the free-thinking ideas of the 18th century that his father admired.

Balzac completed his law degree in 1819. In the same year, his father was forced to retire. Bernard-François's yearly income fell from about 7,800 francs to less than 1,700. The family left Paris and moved to the cheaper village of Villeparisis.

His parents wanted Honoré to become a notary, but he refused. He wanted to become a writer. After many family arguments, his parents agreed to let him try. For about two years, they would give him a small amount of help while he tried to begin a literary career.

A later story says that Balzac received 1,500 francs each year. Pierre Barbéris showed that this was probably not true. The family had recently lost most of its income and could not have paid so much. Honoré received small packages, clean clothes, and useful help from home. His family also watched his spending very closely.

The plan was kept secret. Friends and relations were told that Honoré was living with his family in Albi, in southern France, where his father had been born. In reality, he moved into a cold, small room under the roof at 9 rue Lesdiguières, near the Bastille. There he began to write.

His first large project was Cromwell, a tragedy in verse. This was a serious play written in poetry. Balzac worked on it for several months. In May 1820, he read it to his family and some of their friends. The reading was a complete failure.

The family asked Andrieux, a professor at the Collège de France, to give his opinion. Andrieux had once taught Laure's new husband, the engineer Surville, at the École polytechnique. In September, the play was also read to Lafon, an actor from the Théâtre-Français. Andrieux said that the young man could choose any career he wished, except literature.

Balzac refused to accept this judgment. In fact, he was already becoming more interested in novels than in drama. Around August 1820, he had started a novel called Falthurne. Soon afterwards, he began Sténie, an unfinished story written as a group of letters and set in Tours. In it, he wrote about the "children of the century and of liberty". This was many years before Musset used the famous title Confession of a Child of the Century in 1836.

Novels published under other names

After his serious play failed, Balzac turned to popular fiction. From about 1820 to 1822, he worked with another young writer, Auguste Lepoitevin de l'Égreville. From 1823 to 1825, he worked with Horace Raisson. Both men produced fast and cheap novels for the popular market.

Between 1822 and 1825, Balzac published many novels under invented names. The names he used most often were "Lord R'Hoone", made by changing the order of the letters in "Honoré", and "Horace de Saint-Aubin".

He did not choose these false names entirely by himself. His mother did not want the family name to appear on the books. Even in 1829, Balzac still hesitated before putting his real name on his first serious novel.

These early books followed popular forms. Some were dark stories about castles. Others were comic adventures or copies of the style of the Scottish novelist Walter Scott. The business soon began to bring in money. Early in 1822, Balzac sold three novels to the publisher Hubert. He received first 800 francs, then 1,000, and finally 2,000 francs. He happily wrote to his sister that "Lord R'Hoone" would soon become a fashionable writer, famous for producing many books and loved by women readers.

Balzac himself did not think highly of these novels. In a letter to his sister, he called one of them "literary rubbish". Later, he refused to publish them under his own name.

However, they were useful training. By writing them, Balzac learned how to build a plot, keep a story moving, and work very quickly. Some ideas from these forgotten books later returned in much better form in his mature novels.

Pierre Barbéris studied all these early novels closely. He believed that they were the first testing ground for Balzac's later world. In Le Vicaire des Ardennes (1822), a girl called Annette gives her savings to her cousin Charles, who later betrays her. This story already contains the main idea of Eugénie Grandet.

In Wann-Chlore, which Balzac began in 1822, the bitter Madame d'Arneuse is clearly based on Balzac's own mother. The pirate Argow, who is loved and forgiven by an innocent young woman, also points forward to the great criminals and outsiders of La Comédie humaine.

During these years, Balzac also met Laure de Berny, the first great love of his life. She was married and twenty-two years older than he was. Their love affair began in 1822. She became his adviser, taught him about high society, lent him money, and remained his most loyal friend.

Balzac called her "la Dilecta", meaning "the chosen woman". She stayed close to him until she died in 1836. Balzac later said that without her, he would have died.

Printer and publisher: a business failure

In 1825, Balzac left literature for business. He became a publisher. His plan was modern and sensible. He wanted to publish the complete works of classic writers such as Molière and La Fontaine in single, cheap books. However, the books did not sell.

In 1826, he began a larger business. With a partner, André Barbier, he bought a printing shop in the rue des Marais-Saint-Germain in Paris, now called the rue Visconti. Balzac received the official licence, moved into rooms above the shop, and managed seven printing presses and thirty-six workers.

In 1827, he added another business: a type foundry, a workshop that made metal letters for printing. However, he never stopped writing completely.

One of the first books recorded as being printed on his presses, in June 1826, was a work of his own. It was a short first version of the Physiologie du mariage. Balzac printed it only to test his new equipment. It was never sold to the public, and perhaps only one copy still exists. The public version, published in 1829, was twice as long.

His printing shop also produced the Annales romantiques, a small yearly book connected with the new Romantic movement.

Balzac was not a good businessman. He signed too many promises to pay money, borrowed from many people, and spent money on expensive furniture while his workers waited for their wages. The French economy was also going through a crisis, and many companies failed during these years.

In 1828, Balzac's businesses collapsed. His mother and Madame de Berny paid part of his debts. Even after the final accounts were completed, he still owed about 60,000 francs. This was a very large amount, and much of it was owed to members of his own family.

Balzac never completely escaped from this debt. During the rest of his life, new spending and new loans continued to increase it.

However, the failure gave him two kinds of useful knowledge. First, he now understood the world of money from direct experience. He knew about bills, loans, interest, and bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is the legal condition of a person or business that cannot pay its debts. This knowledge appears throughout his novels.

Second, the printing shop later returned in his fiction. His great novel Illusions perdues begins inside a small printing house in the provinces. Balzac describes it with the knowledge of someone who had worked in the trade himself.

The story also had an unexpected ending. Madame de Berny's young son Alexandre took control of the type foundry. It later became the successful company Deberny et Peignot, which continued in business until 1972.

His first success

Balzac was ruined at the age of twenty-nine. He returned to the only work he believed he could do: writing. This time, he prepared his books more carefully.

In 1828, he travelled to Brittany in western France. He wanted to study the places and memories connected with the Chouan wars. These were royalist uprisings against the French Revolution. He stayed in Fougères with the baron de Pommereul, a retired general whose father had been a friend of Balzac's father.

Balzac explained that a play could be created in Paris with cottages made of painted cardboard. A novel, however, needed real places and real landscapes that the writer had seen. Many Romantic writers of the time laughed at the idea of travelling simply to observe a place. Balzac travelled and studied it carefully. This journey was an early example of the documentary method that he later used throughout his career. This method was based on real places and facts.

The result was Le Dernier Chouan, later called Les Chouans. It was a historical novel written in the style of Walter Scott.

In an early version of the foreword, Balzac created one last false identity. He called himself "Victor Morillon", a poor dreamer from the country around Vendôme who had taught himself everything. The invented life of Morillon already points forward to the character Louis Lambert. Balzac then removed this false name.

He signed a contract with the publisher Urbain Canel in January 1829. The contract paid him 1,000 francs. This was only half the amount that one of his earlier novels under a false name had earned. The book appeared in four small volumes in the middle of March 1829.

For the first time, Balzac signed a novel with his real name. The book sold slowly, but serious readers noticed it. In June of the same year, his father Bernard-François died.

At the end of 1829, Balzac published the Physiologie du mariage, or "Physiology of Marriage", without his name. It is a clever and daring study of marriage, love, and unfaithfulness. It became a subject of conversation in the fashionable salons of Paris.

In 1830, he published the Scènes de la vie privée, or "Scenes of Private Life". This was a group of six short works about women, marriage, and family life. Readers, especially women, discovered a writer who seemed to understand the hidden parts of their lives. Balzac had found his public.

Fame, luxury, and eighteen hours of work a day

In August 1831, Balzac published La Peau de chagrin, known in English as The Wild Ass's Skin or The Magic Skin. It tells the story of a young man who receives a magic piece of skin. The skin grants every wish he makes. However, it becomes smaller after each wish, and his remaining life becomes shorter with it.

The novel was a great success. It made Balzac famous. It also presented one of his most important ideas: desire uses up life itself.

The first readers also saw the novel as a picture of their own time. In January 1831, Balzac was writing "Letters on Paris" for the newspaper Le Voleur. In one of these letters, he discussed the books published during the previous year.

He chose four works: his own Physiologie du mariage, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir, Jules Janin's La Confession, and Charles Nodier's Histoire du roi de Bohême. He wrote that these books carried the smell of a dying society. He gave them a new name: the "school of disenchantment". Disenchantment means losing hope and faith in old beliefs.

In July 1830, a revolution had removed King Charles X. However, the new government soon disappointed many of the young people who had helped to create it. For Pierre Barbéris, La Peau de chagrin, written soon after this disappointment, became the clearest and most complete work of the school that Balzac had named. It is also the first novel in which a young man called Rastignac appears.

Around this time, Honoré Balzac began to call himself Honoré "de" Balzac, as though he came from the aristocracy. He behaved like a dandy, a man who pays great attention to elegant clothes and manners.

He bought expensive clothes from a fashionable tailor. He also bought a carriage, walking sticks covered with jewels, and meals in the best restaurants. He collected old furniture and works of art. Almost everything was bought on credit. His debts grew as quickly as his fame.

Balzac even created a theory of dandyism. In the autumn of 1830, he published the Traité de la vie élégante, or "Treatise on Elegant Life", in the fashion paper La Mode. The work reads clothes and manners as a language of signs. It is partly serious and partly comic.

Barbéris finds a quiet sadness below the jokes. The dandy was also a child of a century that gave strong young men no useful place for their energy.

Behind this show of wealth, Balzac worked at an extraordinary speed. Le Colonel Chabert (1832) tells of a soldier of Napoleon who returns after being believed dead. He finds that the new society has no place for him.

Le Curé de Tours (1832) describes a small but bitter struggle between priests in a quiet town. Balzac then wrote Louis Lambert (1832) and Eugénie Grandet (1833). The second novel tells the story of a rich miser and his gentle daughter in Saumur. A miser is a person who loves money and hates spending it.

Balzac also wrote the Contes drolatiques, or "Droll Stories", between 1832 and 1837. These are comic and openly sexual stories written in a style that copies old French and the works of Rabelais.

In December 1834, Balzac described his life in a letter to his friend Zulma Carraud. He said that he slept for five hours and worked for eighteen hours each day. The great flow of work carrying him forward had never moved so quickly.

At the beginning of 1835, he was so tired that he sometimes slept for seventeen hours. However, readers greatly admired the novel he was then writing. It was Le Père Goriot.

An attempt at politics

During the summer of 1830, Balzac was far from Paris. He was staying with Madame de Berny at La Grenadière, a small country house above the Loire near Tours. From there, he followed the July Revolution from a distance. During three days of fighting in the streets of Paris, King Charles X was driven from power and Louis Philippe I became king.

On 25 July, Charles X signed the orders that caused the crisis. On the same day, Balzac was walking through the countryside to visit his friends, the Margonne family, at Saché. During the walk, he stopped at a poor cottage and asked an old woman for some milk.

The woman was caring for abandoned children as though they were her own. Her simple kindness moved him deeply. Balzac described the meeting in a short work called "Scène de village", or "Village Scene". It was not published during his life, but he later used it in Le Médecin de campagne.

Pierre Barbéris sees this walk in July as one of the first beginnings of the Scenes of Country Life. While newspapers and politicians fought over power, Balzac had met another France: a world of poor and quiet people who were almost never noticed by the great movement of history.

After returning to Paris, Balzac wrote many political articles. At this time, his ideas were still generally liberal. Between September 1830 and March 1831, he published a series called "Lettres sur Paris", or "Letters on Paris", in Le Voleur.

In these letters, he followed the new government from week to week and gave his opinions about it. His tone became colder and more critical with each letter. He complained that France was being ruled by tired old men.

He also made a prediction. The new government would soon raise the same questions that Charles X had raised. Charles X had raised them in the name of royal power. The new government would raise them in the name of liberty. Balzac also hoped to win a seat in parliament.

Before the elections of 1831, he published a short political book called the Enquête sur la politique de deux ministères. He sent forty copies to his old friend, the baron de Pommereul, because he hoped to become a candidate in the area of Fougères.

He also considered standing at Cambrai. In Tours, royalists asked him to become their candidate. He refused, even though he was neither a republican nor a supporter of the government. None of these plans led to an election campaign.

The legitimists wanted to restore the old royal family. Balzac first moved toward them at the very end of 1831. In the spring of 1832, the change became public. He began to write for their new newspaper, Le Rénovateur.

His first article for the paper, published in March 1832, protested against a plan to destroy the monument to the murdered duke of Berry.

The scholar Bernard Guyon studied Balzac's political change year by year. He argued that it was not a sudden emotional decision. It was a careful and practical choice.

Balzac believed that a writer who wanted a political career needed the support of an organized party. The royalist party was weak and needed new talent. Balzac thought that it would give him an important place more quickly than the liberal side, which was already full of ambitious men.

His new friend, the marquise de Castries, was the niece of the duke of Fitz-James, an important legitimist leader. Guyon believed that she supported and strengthened Balzac's decision, but that she did not create it.

Barbéris points to another fact that makes the situation more complex. During the same months, Balzac continued to sell strong articles attacking the government to La Caricature, a newspaper of the left.

In 1832, therefore, two political sides of Balzac existed together: a royalist side and a rebellious side close to the left. Barbéris argues that Balzac's royalism was mainly a position from which he could fight the government. It gave him a way to attack the new power of money. It was very different from the sad royalism of old nobles who only wished to return to the past.

Balzac's royalism remained practical rather than emotional. In May and June 1832, Le Rénovateur published his Essai sur la situation du parti royaliste, or "Essay on the Situation of the Royalist Party". He told the royalists that they had to face the problems of the 19th century as modern problems.

In September 1832, he wrote another article for the same paper, called "Du Gouvernement moderne", or "On Modern Government". In this article, he went further. The idea that the old royal family had a natural right to rule might seem absurd, he wrote. However, even if legitimacy did not exist, it would have to be invented. He saw it as a useful way to give government strength and stability.

Le Rénovateur thought the article was too daring and did not publish it. It first appeared only in 1933.

Barbéris reads it as an argument for a strong, well-managed, and open society, written under royalist language. In such a society, Balzac wrote, social classes should not be closed walls. They should be open fields of competition that anyone could enter. In this way, no human energy would be wasted.

Balzac never received an opportunity to stand in an election. In June 1832, while staying at Saché, he discussed with his friend Margonne the possibility of becoming a candidate at Chinon. Like his earlier political plans, this idea came to nothing. He never stood for parliament during the July Monarchy.

In private, Balzac was less sure of himself than he appeared in public. In June 1832, he wrote openly to his friend Zulma Carraud. He said that he threw himself into political storms and the dry winds of literary fame because he had not been given the simple happiness of being loved.

After this period, Balzac placed more of his political ideas inside his novels. The first important example was Le Médecin de campagne (1833). He had partly planned it as a book that could help him win voters.

Barbéris gives the book a more personal meaning. The year 1832 had brought Balzac accidents, political failure, and loneliness. Le Médecin de campagne was his way of recovering.

Its hero, Doctor Bénassis, improves the life of a poor mountain village. He is the first major character in Balzac's work who builds something useful instead of only suffering or fighting against society.

Balzac offered himself as a candidate again in 1848, but once more he was not elected.

Le Père Goriot and the return of characters

Balzac wrote Le Père Goriot, or "Old Goriot", very quickly between September 1834 and January 1835. It first appeared in a magazine.

The novel takes place in a poor and dirty boarding house in Paris called the Pension Vauquer. Three people who live there are especially important.

Old Goriot is a retired maker of pasta who has given everything he owns to his two selfish daughters. Eugène de Rastignac is a poor young student from southern France who wants to rise in society. Vautrin is a strange and powerful man who is really an escaped convict.

At the end of the novel, Goriot dies almost alone. Rastignac stands on the heights of the Père Lachaise cemetery and looks down at Paris. He gives his famous challenge to the city: from now on, the struggle is between Paris and himself.

However, this challenge is not the last sentence of the novel. Balzac added another sentence and made it stronger in later editions.

Rastignac has just declared war on society. His first act in this war is to go to dinner with Madame de Nucingen, one of Goriot's own daughters. Pierre Barbéris studied the manuscript and Balzac's corrections. He believed that this ending contains the main meaning of the novel. Rastignac's revolt does not free him from the corrupt world. It takes him directly to the tables where its rich members eat.

While writing the novel, Balzac developed one of the most important ideas of his career: characters would return. The same invented people would appear in different novels at different times in their lives.

For example, Rastignac had already appeared as an older man in La Peau de chagrin. In Le Père Goriot, readers saw him as a young student. Vautrin would return in later novels under different names.

Balzac was very excited by this idea. According to a story told by his family, he ran to his sister's home and announced that he was becoming a genius.

The manuscript shows the exact moment when he made this decision. At first, Balzac called the student "Massiac". While writing, he crossed out this name and replaced it with "Rastignac", the name of a character who already appeared in another work.

Rastignac's family was partly based on Balzac's own family. A letter that Rastignac receives from his sister Laure closely follows a real letter written to Balzac by his sister Laurence in October 1819.

From this time, Balzac's separate novels slowly became parts of one enormous connected work. The return of characters became one of the main ideas behind La Comédie humaine.

Women, letters, and "the Stranger"

Women were central to Balzac's life and to his letters. After Madame de Berny, he became close to the duchess of Abrantès. She was the widow of one of Napoleon's generals and told Balzac many stories about the Empire.

In 1832, he was deeply hurt by the marquise de Castries. She was an important noblewoman who had helped move him toward the royalist party. She encouraged his love, allowed him to follow her to Aix-les-Bains and Geneva, and then refused him.

Balzac later took revenge through fiction. In La Duchesse de Langeais (1834), a proud noblewoman plays with the love of an honest soldier and suffers terribly as a result.

On 28 February 1832, Balzac received a letter from Odessa. It was signed only "L'Étrangère", meaning "the Stranger" or "the Foreign Woman". The writer was Ewelina Hańska, a Polish countess.

She lived with her much older husband on a very large estate at Wierzchownia in Ukraine, which was then part of the Russian Empire.

She admired Balzac's books. However, she feared that his recent writing was less morally pure than his early Scènes de la vie privée. Balzac answered her, and a very long exchange of letters began.

He continued writing to her for the rest of his life. Of these letters, 414 still exist. Together, they are about one quarter as long as the whole of La Comédie humaine. They are among the best sources for understanding his life and the way he worked.

Balzac and Ewelina first met in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in September 1833. They met again in Geneva during the winter. They became lovers on 26 January 1834.

They met once more in Vienna in 1835. After that, they did not see one another for eight years and could communicate only by letter.

Ewelina was married, rich, careful, and far away. Balzac dreamed that her elderly husband would die and that she would finally be free to marry him.

Balzac also had other, less public relationships. He almost certainly had a daughter with Maria Du Fresnay, a young married woman who admired him. The child, Marie, was born in 1834. Balzac continued to know the family and mentioned Marie in his will.

Stories also connected him with several other women. However, work filled more of his nights than love did.

Debts, newspapers, and great plans

Fame did not make Balzac's life peaceful. In 1836, he lost a large amount of money on the Chronique de Paris, a newspaper that he had bought and directed. In the following year, he only just avoided being sent to prison for debt.

Madame de Berny died in July 1836. Balzac had just completed Le Lys dans la vallée, or "The Lily of the Valley". Its pure and unhappy heroine, Madame de Mortsauf, was partly based on Madame de Berny.

In the same year, Balzac tried a new form of publication. His short novel La Vieille Fille, or "The Old Maid", appeared in separate parts, day after day, in a French daily newspaper. It is often called the first French novel to be published in this way.

This new form, called the serial novel, changed literature. Balzac helped to develop it, and it soon controlled much of his working life. Many of his later novels had to be written under the pressure of daily publication dates.

Balzac never stopped hoping to make a quick fortune. In 1838, he travelled to Sardinia because he believed that ancient Roman silver mines could be opened again. The plan was not foolish. The mines later made money, but another person had already obtained the right to work them.

Balzac returned home with even less money. He then spent large sums on Les Jardies, a small country house at Sèvres near Paris. Among his many plans, he imagined growing pineapples there and selling them in Paris. The house itself cost him about 50,000 francs in 1839.

To hide from the people to whom he owed money, Balzac sometimes used false names. From October 1840, he rented rooms in the village of Passy near Paris. The house had a hidden back door that allowed him to escape visitors.

He lived there for seven years. It is the only one of his homes in Paris that still exists. It is now the Maison de Balzac museum at 47 rue Raynouard.

A defender of writers

In 1839, Balzac became president of the Société des gens de lettres, a new association of French writers. He worked to protect the rights of authors.

He wanted strong laws to protect literary property. Literary property is the idea that a written work belongs to its author. Balzac also fought newspapers that copied and printed books without paying the writers.

His public letters about these questions helped prepare the later development of copyright law in France.

He also tried to save a notary called Peytel, who had been sentenced to death for murder. Balzac believed that he was innocent and wrote publicly in his defence. His efforts failed.

Balzac also wanted to succeed in the theatre, but most of his plays failed. His play Vautrin opened in Paris on 14 March 1840. The famous actor Frédérick Lemaître played the main part.

In the fourth act, Lemaître appeared in a wig that made him look like King Louis Philippe. The king's son left the theatre in anger. The government banned the play the next day.

Several of Balzac's other plays failed or were refused by theatres. Critics usually consider Le Faiseur, also called Mercadet, to be his best comedy.

It tells the story of a brilliant debtor who uses clever tricks against his creditors, the people to whom he owes money. The play became successful only in 1851, after Balzac had died.

In 1840, Balzac made another attempt to succeed in journalism. He wrote almost all of three issues of a magazine called the Revue parisienne.

The magazine lost money. However, critics still see some of its articles as among the best literary criticism of the 19th century. The most famous example is Balzac's long and generous study of Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme. Balzac praised the novel at a time when very few people understood how great Stendhal was.

One title for a single world: 1841 and 1842

By 1840, Balzac had written many novels and stories. He understood that they formed one great picture of society.

He searched for a title for the whole work and chose La Comédie humaine, or "The Human Comedy". The title answers the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Dante had described a journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven. Balzac would describe a journey through modern society.

In October 1841, Balzac signed a contract with a group of publishers led by Furne. They planned to publish a complete and organized edition of his works under the new title.

The first volumes appeared in 1842. They opened with the famous "Avant-propos", or foreword, in which Balzac explained the complete plan of his work.

By 1848, the Furne edition had grown to seventeen volumes. Balzac continued to correct his personal copy until the end of his life. Scholars call this copy the "Furne corrigé". Modern editions of La Comédie humaine are largely based on it.

In November 1841, Ewelina Hańska's husband, Wacław Hański, died in Ukraine. Balzac learned about the death early in 1842. Ewelina was now free to marry. Balzac gave himself one final great aim: he wanted her to become his wife.

Last great novels and failing health

Ewelina did not agree to marry Balzac immediately. She had a daughter whose future marriage had to be arranged, and she wanted to protect her wealth. She also had doubts about Balzac, who spent money more quickly than he earned it.

In 1843, Balzac travelled to Saint Petersburg to meet her after eight years apart. In 1845 and 1846, they travelled together through Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Italy.

In 1846, Ewelina became pregnant. Balzac was very happy and had already chosen the name Victor-Honoré for the child. However, the baby was born dead at the end of the year. People close to Balzac believed that he never fully recovered from this loss.

Despite these difficulties, Balzac continued to write. The complete Illusions perdues, or "Lost Illusions", appeared in three parts between 1837 and 1843.

The novel tells the story of Lucien de Rubempré, a handsome but weak young poet from the provinces. Paris and the dishonest world of newspapers destroy him.

The story continues in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, or "The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans", which Balzac finished in 1847. Lucien enters a darker Paris ruled by police officers, bankers, and hidden powers. Vautrin controls much of this world from the shadows.

In 1846 and 1847, Balzac published the two novels known as the Parents pauvres, or "Poor Relations".

La Cousine Bette tells the story of a poor and jealous cousin who secretly destroys her rich relatives. Le Cousin Pons tells the story of a gentle old music lover. His valuable collection of art awakens the greed of everyone around him.

La Cousine Bette, which was published in parts in a daily newspaper, was the last great popular success of Balzac's life.

His health was now becoming very poor. Many years of working at night, drinking coffee, and worrying about money had damaged his heart.

In September 1847, he made his first long journey to Wierzchownia, Ewelina's home in Ukraine. He returned to Paris in February 1848 and saw the revolution that ended the July Monarchy. He even watched the crowd enter the Tuileries palace.

In the autumn of 1848, he returned to Ukraine. He stayed there for a year and a half and was seriously ill. Doctors found that he had severe heart disease. He also suffered from bronchitis and problems with his eyes. He could hardly write any longer.

Marriage and death

Balzac and Ewelina finally married on 14 March 1850. The wedding took place in the church of Saint Barbara in Berdychiv, a town in Ukraine.

Balzac was already very ill. At the end of April, the couple began the long and painful journey back across Europe. They reached Paris late during the night of 20 to 21 May 1850.

Their arrival became like a scene from one of Balzac's darkest stories. He had prepared a splendid house for Ewelina in the rue Fortunée in Paris. It was filled with works of art, flowers, and lights.

However, when they arrived during the night, nobody opened the door. The servant who had been left in charge had become mentally ill. He had damaged parts of the house and locked himself inside. A locksmith had to open the door so that the exhausted couple could enter their own home.

Balzac lived for less than three more months. His legs became badly swollen, an infection developed, and his sight became weaker.

On 18 August 1850, Victor Hugo visited him and found him close to death. Balzac died that night at the age of fifty-one.

A famous story says that, while dying, he called for Bianchon, the great doctor from his novels. It was as though the world he had invented had become more real to him than the real world.

There is no proof that this story is true. However, as one scholar wrote, it is exactly the kind of thing that Balzac might have done.

His funeral took place on 21 August 1850. Balzac was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, on the same heights from which Rastignac had challenged Paris.

Victor Hugo gave a famous speech beside the grave. He said that all Balzac's works together formed one single book. It was a living, bright, and deep book in which the whole of modern civilization could be seen moving.

After 1850

Ewelina de Balzac remained in Paris. Over time, she paid all her husband's debts. She protected his papers and arranged for his unfinished books to be completed and published.

Le Député d'Arcis appeared in 1854. Charles Rabou completed the unfinished work. Les Paysans, or "The Peasants", was also unfinished and appeared in 1855.

Ewelina died in April 1882 and was buried in the same grave as Balzac.

Balzac's mother died in 1854. During the 1850s, his sister Laure Surville published the first biography of him. She based it partly on his letters.

One work made from many books

La Comédie humaine is the name that Balzac gave, from 1841, to his main collection of novels and stories. It contains about ninety finished works. Balzac planned to write many more. A list that he printed in 1845 contains 137 titles. More than one third of these planned works were therefore never written. Even though it was never finished, the collection is very large. It has thousands of pages and about 2,500 named characters.

Balzac explained the purpose of the work in his foreword of 1842. He wanted to write the kind of history that ordinary historians often leave out: the history of manners. By "manners", he meant the everyday ways in which people live, feel and behave in a society. The novels cover a period from about the French Revolution of 1789 to Balzac's own time. Most of their stories take place during the Restoration, from 1815 to 1830, and the July Monarchy, from 1830 to 1848. Balzac wrote that French society itself would be the historian and that he would only be its secretary.

The foreword of 1842

The "Avant-propos", or foreword, of 1842 is one of the most studied texts about the history of the novel. In it, Balzac explains that his main idea came from a comparison between human society and the animal world.

Balzac followed with great interest the debates between important French naturalists. Naturalists were scientists who studied living things. He was especially interested in Georges Cuvier and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Geoffroy believed that all animals were different forms of one basic plan of life. Their surroundings helped to shape them into different species. Balzac used a similar idea to describe society. Just as there are different animal species, he wrote, there are and always will be different social types.

For Balzac, a soldier, a shopkeeper, a lawyer, a priest and a rich man with no work were as different from one another as a wolf, a crow and a sheep. An animal is shaped by its surroundings. In the same way, a person is shaped by his or her social surroundings: the home, the town, the job, the social class and the amount of money the person has. This is why Balzac describes houses, streets, clothes and furniture so carefully. For him, these details are not only decoration. They help to form people's lives and characters.

The scholars who took part in a large conference about Balzac in 1980 showed how strongly these scientific ideas shaped his whole system. They also showed that the ideas agreed with his political views. They allowed him to describe very great changes in society while he continued to believe that society remained, at a deeper level, one complete whole.

Two other statements from the foreword became famous. Balzac said that his list of invented characters would compete with the état civil, the official French record of births, marriages and deaths. He also said that he wrote by the light of two eternal truths: Religion and Monarchy. The section about his ideas later in this article explains this surprising statement.

How the work is organized

Balzac divided his novels and stories into three large groups. He divided the first group again into six kinds of "scenes":

• Études de mœurs (Studies of Manners) form the main part of the collection. These novels describe life in France. The group has six parts: Scenes of Private Life, Scenes of Provincial Life, Scenes of Parisian Life, Scenes of Political Life, Scenes of Military Life and Scenes of Country Life.
• Études philosophiques (Philosophical Studies) try to discover the hidden causes behind life in society. They often include strange, fantastic or religious ideas. Examples include La Peau de chagrin and Louis Lambert.
• Études analytiques (Analytical Studies) are clever books written more like essays. They examine the main rules of life in society. Examples include the Physiologie du mariage and the Petites Misères de la vie conjugale.

Balzac described these three levels as effects, causes and principles. The Studies of Manners show what happens in society. The Philosophical Studies ask why it happens. The Analytical Studies try to explain its general laws.

The system looks very clear on paper. In practice, Balzac often wrote quickly and under great pressure. He moved some books from one group to another, and several parts remained very small. However, the plan shows his greatest aim. He did not only want to tell stories. He wanted to explain a whole world.

Characters who come back

One of the most important features of La Comédie humaine is that many characters return in several books. The scholar Fernand Lotte counted about 2,500 characters in the whole collection. Of these, 573 appear in more than one novel or story. The banker Nucingen appears most often, in thirty-one works. He is followed by the doctor Horace Bianchon, who appears in twenty-nine works, the fashionable Henri de Marsay, who appears in twenty-seven, and Rastignac, who appears in twenty-five.

This system has several effects. It joins the different books together and makes them part of one world. It also saves time, because Balzac does not need to introduce a well-known character again. Most importantly, it makes the world of the books seem real.

Rastignac first appears as a young man in 1819 in Le Père Goriot. He returns years later in other novels, when he has become rich and hard. Readers feel that he has continued to live between the books, even when Balzac was not writing about him. The writer Félicien Marceau compared this effect to talk in a small town, where every name reminds people of several other stories.

Readers can also see the characters change over time. Rastignac begins as a kind and warm-hearted student. Step by step, Paris teaches him to become a cold and successful man. In the later novels, he is a count, a government minister and a millionaire.

Vautrin, the escaped prisoner, ends his career as the head of the Paris security police. This ending is dark but also based on real life. Vidocq, the first real head of this police force, had also been a criminal. Doctor Bianchon is honest and hard-working. He is present at about half of the deathbeds in La Comédie humaine. According to a famous story, Balzac even called for Bianchon when he himself was dying. Goriot, however, never returns. Balzac did not later write about the earlier years of Goriot's life.

Two novels stand at the centre of this large group of connected stories: Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. Albert Béguin counted 265 characters in these two books. Of these, 147 also appear in other parts of La Comédie humaine. This is a much larger share than in most of Balzac's books. Almost every part of Balzac's world has a connection with these two novels.

Béguin called Le Père Goriot the "mother cell" from which the whole connected system developed. He saw Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes together as the central turning point of the system.

Some famous books of the Comédie humaine

This section gives short descriptions of some of Balzac's best-known works. The table in the section "Selected works" below gives links to the complete French texts on Wikisource.

Eugénie Grandet (1833). The story takes place in the quiet town of Saumur. Old Grandet once made wooden barrels, but he has secretly become very rich. His love of gold controls the whole house. His daughter Eugénie falls in love with her poor cousin Charles and gives him her small collection of gold coins. Her father's cold anger and Charles's later betrayal slowly change her. She begins as a fresh young woman and ends as a lonely, generous and unhappy rich woman. The novel is one of literature's most complete studies of greed, or the love of money.

Le Père Goriot (1835). This novel is described above. Goriot's blind love for his daughters, Rastignac's lessons in ambition and Vautrin's terrible ideas about society have made it Balzac's most widely read novel. Henry James placed it among the small number of the greatest novels ever written.

Le Colonel Chabert (1832). Colonel Chabert was officially reported dead after one of Napoleon's battles. Years later, he returns to Paris. His wife has married another man and does not want Chabert to return. The law does not know what to do with a dead man who is still alive. Critics often describe the work as a short and powerful masterpiece about war, money, marriage and personal identity.

La Recherche de l'Absolu (1834). In Flanders, Balthazar Claës destroys his loving family because he cannot stop his chemical experiments. He is searching for the "Absolute", the one basic element behind all matter. In this novel, science becomes a passion as dangerous as greed or gambling.

Le Lys dans la vallée (1836). In the peaceful valley of the Indre, near Saché, the young Félix de Vandenesse falls in love with Madame de Mortsauf, a married and deeply moral woman. Their love remains pure, but it destroys her all the same. The novel contains some of Balzac's most personal memories. These include memories of his childhood without enough love and of his relationship with Madame de Berny.

César Birotteau (1837). César Birotteau is an honest seller of perfume in Paris. A land deal and the plans of the banker Nucingen ruin him. He spends the rest of his life paying back every franc that he owes. He dies from joy on the day when his good name is restored. Balzac turns the laws of business failure into a powerful story and makes an ordinary shopkeeper into a kind of hero.

Illusions perdues (1837 to 1843). Many readers and critics believe that this is Balzac's greatest novel. Lucien de Rubempré is a handsome young poet from the provinces. He comes to Paris because he wants fame, but journalism, pride and debt destroy him. At the same time, his brother-in-law David Séchard is a printer and inventor in the provinces. Other people quietly steal his invention from him. The novel gives a complete picture of the modern world of print. It describes newspapers, publishers, critics, paper-making and the buying and selling of opinions.

Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1838 to 1847). This novel continues the story of Illusions perdues. Vautrin is now hiding under the clothes and name of a Spanish priest. He tries to rebuild Lucien's fortune. To do this, he uses the love of Esther, a courtesan, and the money of the banker Nucingen. A courtesan was a woman who was paid to spend time with rich men. The story includes police officers, secret agents, prisons and suicide. At the end, Vautrin makes an extraordinary change. The great criminal becomes the head of the police.

La Cousine Bette (1846). The story takes place in Paris during the rule of Louis Philippe. Cousin Bette is poor and unmarried. She secretly plans the destruction of the Hulot family. The attractive but dangerous Madame Marneffe helps her. At the same time, the old Baron Hulot destroys his life because he cannot control his desire for women. Modern critics also study the novel for what it says about gender, jealousy and desire. Gender means the roles that society gives to men and women.

Le Cousin Pons (1847). Pons is a poor old musician who owns a wonderful collection of paintings and art objects. He does not fully understand how valuable it is. When the people around him discover its value, they gather around the dying man like hungry birds. Many readers consider this one of Balzac's darkest and most moving books.

Many other works are also important. Gobseck (1830) is the story of a money-lender who thinks deeply about money and human life. Sarrasine (1830) is a strange story about love, art and a mistake about a person's identity. It became famous again during the 20th century. La Fille aux yeux d'or (1835) is a violent Paris story about desire. Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu (1831) tells of an old painter who destroys his own masterpiece because he wants to make it perfect. La Femme de trente ans (1832 to 1834) gave the French language a new type of character: the interesting "woman of thirty".

Ursule Mirouët (1841) and La Rabouilleuse (1842) are two important novels about family battles over inheritance in the provinces. An inheritance is the money and property that a person leaves after death. Une ténébreuse affaire (1841) is one of the first political detective novels. In Le Médecin de campagne (1833) and Le Curé de village (1839), Balzac presents his ideas about society and religion. Les Paysans was left unfinished and published in 1855. It is his dark study of the struggle between peasants and landowners.

Money

Money has a very important place in Balzac's novels. From his own painful experience, he understood that the France created by the Revolution had become a society ruled by money. The old rules based on birth and social rank were becoming weaker. People could become rich very quickly, but they could also lose everything just as quickly.

Balzac's novels give many exact figures. They tell readers how much people earn, how much rent they pay, what dowries they receive, and how much they owe. A dowry is money or property that a woman brings into a marriage. The novels also give exact prices and rates of interest. Readers in Balzac's time knew these things well and could check his figures. His numbers were usually correct.

Balzac describes every level of the world of money. At the lowest level are money-lenders such as the frightening but intelligent Gobseck. Gobseck believes that gold contains everything that human beings desire.

In the middle are shopkeepers and merchants such as César Birotteau. For Birotteau, paying every debt is almost a religious duty.

At the highest level stands the powerful banker Nucingen. In La Maison Nucingen, Balzac explains carefully how this "Napoleon of finance" made his fortune. Three times, Nucingen pretended that his bank was close to failure. This frightened the people who had lent him money. He then paid them with shares that were worth less than they appeared to be. Each false crisis made him richer.

Modern readers may feel that these pages describe financial scandals from a much later time. One scholar writes that Balzac understood almost everything about capital and credit.

In Balzac's work, debt is more than a subject. It makes the stories move forward. The struggle between people who owe money and the people who have lent it appears in many of his plots.

Debt also controlled Balzac's own life. From 1828 until his death, he was almost always in debt. In a strange way, this helped to produce his books. He had to write to pay what he owed, and every new debt forced him to write another work.

Energy, desire, and thought that kills

Behind Balzac's picture of society lies a philosophy of life. He believed that every human being receives a limited amount of life energy. He sometimes imagined it as a kind of living fluid. Thought, desire, and strong passion use up this energy. A person who desires too strongly uses up life very quickly.

La Peau de chagrin turns this idea into a fable. A magic piece of skin becomes smaller whenever its owner makes a wish. At the same time, the owner's remaining life becomes shorter.

Louis Lambert tells the story of a boy with an extraordinary mind. His thought becomes so powerful that it destroys both his body and his mind. All his will passes into the life of the spirit, and he dies because he has thought too much.

In many of Balzac's philosophical stories, one idea or passion becomes too strong and destroys the person who follows it. The painter Frenhofer is destroyed by his search for perfect art in Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu. The chemist Claës destroys himself through his search for the basic secret of matter in La Recherche de l'Absolu.

The love of money rules the miser Grandet. Goriot is destroyed by his uncontrolled love for his daughters. Balzac called thought the great destroyer of humanity, and he built many stories around this idea.

This helps to explain why so many of Balzac's characters live for only one passion. Critics sometimes call this monomania. Monomania is a state in which one fixed idea rules a person's mind.

This single passion gives Balzac's characters much of their power. It also shows one of Balzac's own fears. He knew that he was using up his life in the same way when he worked for eighteen hours a day.

The same human energy can also move upward toward religion and mysticism. Balzac read the Swedish thinker Emanuel Swedenborg, who wrote about visions of heaven. Balzac used Swedenborg's ideas rather freely in Louis Lambert, and especially in Séraphîta (1834).

Séraphîta is the strange and beautiful story of an angel-like being who lives in the mountains of Norway. Both a man and a woman fall in love with this being.

Balzac dreamed that human love and human will could rise, step by step, until they reached the level of angels. However, at the end of Séraphîta, he also accepts that this dream fails. Human beings remain tied to time and to their own weaknesses.

Paris and the provinces

Balzac's novels often place two different parts of France against one another. The first is la province, the world of towns far from Paris. Life there is slow and closed. Everyone watches everyone else, everybody knows the other families, and hatreds can continue for many years.

The other world is Paris. Paris is fast, bright, and cruel. It attracts young people and then uses up their energy. Balzac describes it more than once as a monster that eats people.

The whole story of Illusions perdues follows a young man as he moves from the provinces to Paris.

However, Balzac does not simply say that one of these worlds is good and the other is bad. His provincial towns contain monsters such as Grandet and the Rogron cousins, who make the young Pierrette suffer. They also contain people of great goodness.

Paris destroys Lucien, but it also contains the Cénacle. The Cénacle is a group of poor, honest, and gifted young men who support one another.

Balzac is interested in the whole system. He shows how people, money, and ambition move from the provinces to Paris, and sometimes return. In both places, readers can follow the rise of the bourgeoisie, or middle class, and the slow fall of the old nobility.

Young people without a place

One subject appears throughout La Comédie humaine: the place of young people in a society that does not know what to do with them.

The critic Pierre Barbéris wrote a long study about Balzac and the mal du siècle. This French expression means the "sickness of the century". It was often used for the sadness felt by the Romantic generation.

Barbéris explained this sadness through history. He did not see it as only a general feeling of unhappiness. For him, it was the feeling of a whole generation whose strength and ambition could not be used by any of the governments that followed Napoleon.

In his large 1970 study of the young Balzac, Barbéris explained the problem in simple economic terms. The mal du siècle was mainly caused by the lack of good jobs.

A new kind of person had appeared: the student. He had received an education and was full of ambition, but the society of the Restoration had no useful place for him. Balzac had been a law student in Paris in 1817, and Barbéris saw him as the first novelist of this problem of youth.

Around 1830, a new figure appeared in French literature: the poor student. He comes to Paris with talent and hope, but finds hunger, cold rooms, and doors that remain closed to him. Balzac gave this figure a central place in his novels.

In June 1830, Balzac wrote an article about two parks in Paris. Rich people rode through the Bois de Boulogne. Poor students walked in the Luxembourg Garden.

Balzac wrote that France had two kinds of youth. The first enjoyed life. The second made life into work. He added that the badly dressed young men of the second group would produce all the country's future talents.

Barbéris says that this second youth was both invited and rejected. The promises of the new century invited it to act. However, the older men who controlled all the important positions kept it outside.

Rastignac, Raphaël de Valentin in La Peau de chagrin, and Lucien in Illusions perdues all belong to this second youth. They work, hope, and use up their strength.

Barbéris also showed how much of Balzac himself can be found in these young men. They are like the young Balzac when he first arrived in Paris. They also show what he might have become if he had not found a place for his energy in writing novels.

Even young noblemen cannot find a real place in Balzac's world. The restored monarchy, he suggests, could not give useful work even to the young members of its own class.

For Balzac, the July Revolution of 1830 did not cure this problem. Young people had made the revolution, but the new government quickly forgot them.

Ten years later, Balzac gave this complaint to his character Marcas. Marcas says that August 1830 was created by youth and intelligence, but that the new government forgot to give youth and intelligence their proper share.

For Barbéris, this explains Balzac's loss of hope. It describes a clear social and historical problem. It is not a general belief that life is always without hope. Barbéris strongly argues that the sickness of the century was not only a private illness of the mind.

Politics and religion

Balzac's political opinions surprise many readers. He described social change with great care, but he also said that he supported the king and the Church.

In the foreword of 1842, he wrote that he worked by the light of two eternal truths: Religion and Monarchy.

Balzac saw the Catholic Church as a complete system that could control the selfish side of human nature. He believed that a strong king could protect social order.

In his view, the Revolution of 1789 had divided family property and allowed every individual to desire everything. It had therefore released the selfishness that his novels describe.

However, Balzac had not always held these opinions. As the section about his life explains, the young Balzac had been closer to liberal ideas. He joined the royalist party only in 1832, and personal ambition was an important reason for his choice.

Even his early politics were complex. In 1824, he published two pamphlets without giving his name. One was about the special rights of the eldest son, and the other was about the Jesuits. In these texts, the young Balzac attacked both the liberal picture of society and the government of the Restoration. He was already asking what place a modern state could offer to educated young people.

Bernard Guyon studied Balzac's political thought in detail. He described Balzac's royalism as a royalism based on reason, not on emotion.

Balzac did not defend the old monarchy because he believed it was holy. He defended it because he thought it was the strongest available system for keeping society in order.

Guyon also found two different sides of Balzac living together. One Balzac was hopeful. He inherited the ideas of the 18th century and believed in progress and civilization. The other Balzac was deeply doubtful. He believed that thought and civilization could destroy the people they touched.

Balzac describes his ideal society in Le Médecin de campagne and Le Curé de village. It is an ordered and religious country society led by strong people who work for the common good.

However, Doctor Bénassis's actual plans in Le Médecin de campagne include new roads, trade, a free school, and small farmers who own their land. Many of these plans come from the liberal and enlightened ideas that Balzac claimed to oppose.

His novels are also much less simple than his political statements. His priests include saints, foolish men, and cold political plotters such as the abbé Troubert. Some of his republican characters, such as Michel Chrestien, are shown as people of great courage and goodness.

Balzac also describes the real workings of banks, newspapers, and personal interest with great honesty. His criticism was so strong that later socialist thinkers saw him as an important writer for their own side.

The Marxist critic György Lukács argued that Balzac's honesty as an observer was stronger than his royalist opinions.

Pierre Barbéris made a similar argument. He wrote that Balzac attacked the new world of money in the name of the old world. However, what the novels truly show is history moving forward. This is why Balzac's books continue to speak to later generations.

Zola said more simply that readers should not listen to Balzac's political opinions. In spite of those opinions, Balzac's books worked for the future.

The difference between Balzac the conservative thinker and Balzac the honest observer remains one of the main questions discussed by scholars.

Observer and visionary

For many years, especially in France, people praised Balzac mainly as a great observer. They saw him as an exact painter of French society and as an early master of realism.

This view is correct, but it describes only one half of his work. The poet Charles Baudelaire already argued against it in the 1850s. He said that Balzac's true genius was the genius of a visionary, not that of a simple writer who copied reality. A visionary is someone who sees beyond the ordinary world.

The Swiss critic Albert Béguin built a whole book around this idea. The book first appeared as Balzac visionnaire in 1946 and was later expanded into Balzac lu et relu.

For Béguin, Balzac does not simply copy the world around him. Like Shakespeare, he creates another complete world. It uses the same materials as ordinary life, but Balzac organizes them according to the laws of his own personal mythology. A personal mythology is a private world of powerful images, stories, and symbols.

Even Balzac's most realistic novels can suddenly move faster and become almost poetic. Ordinary objects then seem to carry a hidden or mysterious meaning.

The German scholar Ernst Robert Curtius made a similar argument. He wrote that readers fully understand Balzac only when they allow themselves to be carried away by his magic.

For this reason, Curtius believed that poets such as Baudelaire, Hugo, Browning, Wilde, and Hofmannsthal understood Balzac better than many other readers did.

Pierre Barbéris reached a similar idea through history. Writing about La Peau de chagrin, he said that the fantastic parts of the story move toward realism, while realism is brought to life by the fantastic.

Many modern critics accept both views. Balzac is a great writer of facts and documents about his century. At the same time, he is a maker of myths.

His great figures include Vautrin, the criminal who acts like both a demon and a protector; Goriot, who becomes a kind of Christ of fatherhood; the magic skin; and the search for the Absolute. Balzac joined close observation of the real world with a very powerful imagination.

Women, family, and different forms of desire

Women and family life are among the central subjects of Balzac's work. His first loyal readers were mainly women.

He wrote with real sympathy about women who suffered in unhappy marriages and about the narrow education given to girls. He also described the loneliness of unmarried older women and the quiet courage of mothers.

At the same time, Balzac defended marriage as an important social institution. A social institution is an organized and lasting part of society. He also feared what he called the disorder created by uncontrolled passion.

These two views appear together in his books. This is one reason why readers continue to discuss his treatment of women and family life.

Modern critics have also shown that many different forms of desire appear in La Comédie humaine. Some of Balzac's works describe forms of desire and personal identity that most writers of his time did not discuss openly.

These works include Sarrasine, La Fille aux yeux d'or, and La Cousine Bette. Vautrin is another important example. His love for the young men whom he protects is deep and possessive. This means that he wants to control them and keep them for himself.

Recent scholars study Balzac as an important early writer about the different social forms of sexuality. This includes desire between people of the same sex. It also includes characters who do not follow the usual roles expected of men and women.

Cousin Bette herself is hard, thin, and dressed in an unusual way. Modern critics often study her as an important example of a character who lives outside the gender rules of her society.

Working like a monk at night

Balzac's way of working became famous even while he was alive. His letters show that the stories about it were mostly true. He usually went to bed at about six in the evening. At midnight, his servant woke him. Balzac then put on a long white robe that looked like the clothing of a monk. A cord went around his waist, and his scissors and paper knife hung from it.

He sat at a small, simple table and used the same table for many years. He carried it with him whenever he moved to another house. He called it the witness of all his troubles. With the curtains closed and candles giving him light, he wrote for eight hours or more while most of Paris was asleep.

Coffee helped him stay awake during these long nights. Balzac made it himself and drank it very strong. He described its effect on his mind as if an army were entering a battle. Memories rushed forward like soldiers attacking. Comparisons came at a gallop, and logic arrived with its guns.

Balzac knew that so much coffee was harming him. In 1845, he wrote that after many months of drinking too much of it, coffee had almost stopped helping him. He also said that his stomach was always painful. One writer who studied his life believed that Balzac may have drunk about fifty thousand cups of coffee in total.

In the morning, Balzac took a bath and ate a small meal. Messengers then arrived from the printers. They brought printed test pages for him to correct and carried away the new pages that he had written. He received friends for only a short time and tried to avoid the people to whom he owed money. In the evening, he went to bed, and the same cycle began again. During his busiest years, he followed this way of life for weeks without stopping. It seriously damaged his health.

Using printed pages as drafts

For most writers, proofs are printed test pages used to correct small mistakes before a book is published. For Balzac, a proof was another draft of the book.

He asked the printers to use large sheets of paper with wide empty spaces around the text. He then rewrote the work. He crossed out words, added new sentences in the empty spaces, and glued extra strips of paper onto the pages. When he sent the proofs back, they were covered with so many lines and additions that they looked like a spider's web.

The printers arranged the new text and sent him another set of proofs. Balzac then began correcting and rewriting them again. Some books went through fifteen or sixteen sets of proofs.

Only the most experienced typesetters could understand his corrections. Typesetters were the workers who arranged the metal letters used for printing. Even when they received twice their normal pay, they refused to work on what they called "Balzac copy" for more than one hour at a time.

Balzac had used this difficult method from the beginning of his career. During the winter of 1828 to 1829, while he was completing Le Dernier Chouan, he almost used up the patience of his friend Latouche, who was paying the printing costs. Balzac wrote to his sister in great distress about receiving the fortieth proof.

This method cost a great deal of money. Publishers often made Balzac pay for the many corrections himself. However, it also shows something important about the way he wrote. His books may seem to have been produced very quickly, like a great flood of words. In fact, he rewrote them again and again.

Modern scholars study his manuscripts and corrected proofs. They can see his novels growing one layer at a time, almost like living things. For example, Louis Lambert became three times longer through seven different editions published over ten years. Pierre Barbéris studied the different endings of Le Père Goriot line by line. They are another example of the slow and careful work hidden behind Balzac's apparent speed.

Description as a kind of science

Almost every novel by Balzac begins with the description of a place. It may be a street, a house, or a room. Balzac describes it slowly and in great detail.

The famous opening pages of Le Père Goriot lead the reader through the Pension Vauquer, the poor boarding house where much of the story takes place. Balzac describes the smell of boiled cabbage and the old, damaged furniture. He then introduces Madame Vauquer, the woman who owns the house. He writes that her appearance explains the boarding house, just as the boarding house helps to explain her.

Some readers have found these long descriptions boring. However, they are at the centre of Balzac's method. For him, objects can speak. A person's rooms, clothes, and face are like documents. A careful observer who knows how to read these signs can discover the person's past and may even guess what will happen to the person later.

Balzac compares the novelist to Cuvier, the famous scientist. Cuvier could study one bone and use it to rebuild the form of a whole extinct animal. An extinct animal is an animal whose kind no longer exists.

In the same way, Balzac believed that a novelist could study a cravat or an old armchair and rebuild a whole human life from it. A cravat was a piece of cloth that a man wore around his neck. Balzac also believed that the connection worked in both directions. People shape the places in which they live, but those places also slowly shape the people.

His style: attacks and defence

Critics attacked Balzac's writing style from the beginning of his career, and these attacks never completely ended. Sainte-Beuve and other critics of the time thought that his writing was heavy, hurried, too full of details, and sometimes vulgar.

Flaubert believed that every sentence should be made as perfect as possible. He made a cruel joke about Balzac: what a great man Balzac would have been, if only he had known how to write.

Balzac often wrote too quickly because he had to finish his work by a fixed date. This can be seen in his books. Some sentences are badly formed, and some parts are longer and heavier than they need to be.

His defenders answer that Balzac's style should not be judged as a failed form of the clear and controlled classical style. It is a different kind of instrument. It was made to create strength, movement, and a great amount of life.

Albert Béguin showed how Balzac's writing can suddenly become full of energy during his greatest scenes. Balzac often follows the ideas suggested by the words themselves. One word leads him to another nearby word. A likeness of sound may lead him into a whole new group of ideas.

Proust defended Balzac against Sainte-Beuve. Readers may still disagree about the quality of individual sentences. However, most agree about the final effect. Few works of prose give a stronger feeling of a world crowded with people, objects, desires, and movement.

In France

Balzac was already famous when he died, but he was not yet accepted as a classic writer. His full fame grew slowly after 1850. In 1858, the philosopher Hippolyte Taine published a long study of his work. Taine described Balzac as the most complete writer about human nature since Shakespeare. The next generation of French novelists grew up under his influence.

Gustave Flaubert admired Balzac, although he often tried not to. He was afraid of copying him. In his private notes, he warned himself not to write in the manner of Le Lys dans la vallée. He also criticized Balzac's style. However, he called La Cousine Bette a masterpiece. When Balzac died, Flaubert wrote that France had lost an immense man, who had understood his own age with courage.

Émile Zola openly called himself a disciple of Balzac. A disciple is a follower and pupil. Zola's own group of twenty novels, the Rougon-Macquart, follows the history of one family during the Second Empire. Its general plan was directly influenced by La Comédie humaine.

Before beginning the series, Zola even wrote a private note called "Differences between Balzac and myself". He wanted to protect his own project from Balzac's very strong influence. Zola promised himself that his work would be more scientific and less large.

A famous drawing made by André Gill in 1878 shows Zola greeting a bust of Balzac. The bust politely returns the greeting.

Through Zola, Balzac became the respected grandfather of the whole naturalist school. Naturalists followed Zola's idea that novels should study society and human behaviour in a scientific way. However, the scientific Balzac was only one part of the writer.

Marcel Proust knew La Comédie humaine extremely well. In his essays, he defended Balzac against Sainte-Beuve. He also learned from Balzac's use of returning characters. In Proust's own very long novel, In Search of Lost Time, the same characters also return, grow older, and change from one volume to another.

Balzac had many French admirers during the 20th century. The philosopher Alain wrote a book about him. The writer Blaise Cendrars said that he had read the whole of La Comédie humaine about ten times. The young writer Raymond Radiguet called Balzac the greatest French novelist.

Around the world

Balzac became famous outside France quite early. In Russia, the young Fyodor Dostoyevsky translated Eugénie Grandet before writing his own first novel. Balzac's mixture of money, crime, and spiritual suffering had a deep influence on Dostoyevsky's work.

In the English-speaking world, Henry James was, according to one scholar, Balzac's most eager disciple. James called Balzac "the father of us all". He also said that he had learned more about the art of writing fiction from Balzac than from any other writer.

Oscar Wilde loved Balzac's work. He joked that the death of Lucien de Rubempré was one of the greatest sorrows of his own life. Other writers who admired Balzac included Edgar Allan Poe, the Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós, and, much later, Italo Calvino.

Political thinkers also read Balzac. Karl Marx knew La Comédie humaine well and quoted it. He even refers to one of Balzac's stories in Das Kapital.

Marx's friend Friedrich Engels made a famous statement about Balzac. He wrote that Balzac had taught him more about French society than all the historians, economists, and experts in numbers of the same period together.

Balzac supported the monarchy, but many socialists later admired him. This shows how honest and powerful his picture of society was.

Scholars and critics

Scholars have studied Balzac from almost every possible point of view. Early researchers such as Marcel Bouteron and the Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul collected his manuscripts and letters.

The German scholar Ernst Robert Curtius published an important study in 1923. In Switzerland, Albert Béguin published Balzac visionnaire in 1946. These critics helped to create the modern picture of Balzac as a visionary writer, not only as a realistic observer.

After 1945, French scholars became very interested in Balzac's politics and in his place in history. Bernard Guyon's study of his political and social ideas first appeared in 1947. It follows Balzac's ideas from year to year. Guyon shows how the young writer, who was first close to the political left, slowly became a royalist.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Pierre Barbéris read the whole of Balzac's work as the story of one generation. This generation had been formed by the French Revolution, Napoleon's Empire, and the years of disappointment that came after them.

Barbéris developed this idea in books such as Balzac et le mal du siècle (1970), Le Monde de Balzac (1973), and his long study of Le Père Goriot (1972).

The two volumes of Balzac et le mal du siècle both have the subtitle "an experience of the absurd". They follow Balzac's development year by year from 1799 to 1833.

The first volume studies the forgotten early novels as serious documents. They show both a young writer and a whole generation trying to find a place in society.

The second volume follows Balzac through the Revolution of 1830 and the disappointment that came after it. It moves from the "school of disenchantment" to Le Médecin de campagne. For Barbéris, these were the years when Balzac's true world and mature way of writing were born.

Marxist critics, especially György Lukács, made Balzac a model of great realism.

In 1970, Roland Barthes chose one short story by Balzac, Sarrasine, for his book S/Z. This became one of the most important works of modern literary theory. Literary theory is the study of how literature creates meaning.

Barthes divided the story into hundreds of small parts. He used them to show how the meaning of a story is slowly built.

French university research on Balzac has been very large. Scholars have produced many critical editions of his works. The most important is the twelve-volume Pléiade edition of La Comédie humaine, completed in 1981 under the direction of Pierre-Georges Castex.

There is also a yearly journal called L'Année balzacienne. Several dictionaries explain Balzac's many characters. Cerfberr and Christophe published one in 1887, and Fernand Lotte later produced another.

There are also guides to the whole work. One example is Gaston de Zélicourt's Le Monde de « La Comédie humaine » (1979), which gives a summary of each of the more than ninety novels and stories.

In 1980, an important international conference brought together leading Balzac scholars. Its subject was "Balzac: the invention of the novel". The scholars studied the main parts of Balzac's method: characters who return, descriptions that explain people, and the novel used as a complete history of society.

In English, The Cambridge Companion to Balzac (2017) brings together recent research about his treatment of history, philosophy, money, gender, film and theatre versions of his work, and his influence around the world.

Places and museums

Several places help to keep Balzac's memory alive. The most important is the Maison de Balzac in Paris. This is the small house in Passy where he lived and worked from 1840 to 1847. He also used it as a place to hide from the people to whom he owed money. The house is now a museum and a centre for research. Visitors can see his famous small writing table and his decorated coffee pot there.

The castle of Saché, in the Loire valley, is also a Balzac museum. Balzac often stayed there with the Margonne family. He wrote parts of Le Père Goriot, Louis Lambert, and Le Lys dans la vallée in the house. In Tours, the town where he was born, a street and a statue also keep his name alive.

The statue by Rodin

One of the strangest parts of Balzac's later fame concerns a statue. Zola was then the leader of the writers' society that Balzac had once led. He wanted Paris to honour Balzac with a monument. In 1891, the work was given to the sculptor Auguste Rodin.

Rodin studied Balzac's portraits and clothes. He even looked at the measurements kept by Balzac's tailor. He worked on the statue for seven years. When he finally showed it in 1898, many people were shocked.

The statue did not show a calm and respectable great man wearing a formal coat. Instead, it showed a rough giant wrapped in his monk-like robe. The large head and heavy body made him look like a force of nature.

The writers' society refused the statue, and newspapers made fun of it. Rodin took the plaster model back to his home. A bronze version was finally placed in Paris only in 1939, many years after the deaths of both Rodin and Zola.

It stands at the corner of the boulevard du Montparnasse and the boulevard Raspail. Today, the Monument to Balzac is seen as one of the works that helped to begin modern sculpture. Copies of it can be found in museums around the world.

In films, on radio, and on stage

Few writers have had their works adapted as often as Balzac. To adapt a work means to turn it into a film, play, radio programme, or another form.

The cinema began using Balzac's stories very early. There have been at least thirteen film versions of La Peau de chagrin. Eleven of these were made outside France. There have also been at least seven films based on La Duchesse de Langeais.

Very different directors have filmed this same story. Jacques de Baroncelli made a version in 1942. He had to remove some scenes because of German censorship during the war. In 2007, Jacques Rivette made a close version of the novel called Ne touchez pas la hache, with Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu.

Television has also used Balzac's works very often. French television alone has made more than forty films and series from his books. Between 1965 and 1971, British viewers could watch BBC versions of Eugénie Grandet, Père Goriot, and Cousin Bette on Saturday evenings.

Scholars say that television is especially well suited to Balzac. Many of his stories are about private life inside homes. His careful attention to faces, rooms, and objects also works well with the close views used on television.

Radio has also worked well for Balzac because it brings out the importance of voices and sounds in his books. Even ballet has used his work. The Bolshoi in Moscow has presented a full-length ballet based on Lost Illusions.

These many new versions have not weakened Balzac's work. They have helped each new group of readers and viewers discover it again.

Reading Balzac today

Balzac is still read in many editions and languages. In French, the main scholarly edition is the twelve-volume Pléiade edition of La Comédie humaine. Cheap paperback editions of individual novels are also easy to find.

The complete French texts can be read for free on Wikisource. His letters are also available in modern editions, especially the Lettres à Madame Hanska.

The word "Balzacian" has entered the language. It is used for a real or invented social world that is crowded, strongly influenced by money, full of ambition, and described without false hope.

People still read Balzac because the problems in his books have not disappeared. He writes about a society ruled by money, public image, and ambition. He writes about young people from poor or unknown families who try to succeed in the capital. He shows newspapers selling opinions, bankers becoming rich through financial crises, and families fighting over inheritances. He also shows people using up their lives through desire and ambition.

Readers in the 21st century can still recognize all these things. Balzac once described France in 1840 as a country interested only in material success. Money controlled every question, and individualism threatened to destroy the nation. Individualism here means that each person lives only for himself or herself. One of Balzac's biographers writes that the same sentence could still be used today if the date were changed.

Early novels under false names

Before 1829, Balzac published novels under pen names, working partly with other writers. As "Lord R'Hoone" he signed L'Héritière de Birague (1822), Jean-Louis (1822) and Clotilde de Lusignan (1822). As "Horace de Saint-Aubin" he signed Le Centenaire (1822), Le Vicaire des Ardennes (1822), La Dernière Fée (1823), Annette et le criminel (1824) and Wann-Chlore (1825). He also published some small works without any name, such as the Code des gens honnêtes (1825). Some unfinished early attempts also survive from his student years. Among them are the tragedy Cromwell (1820), the unfinished novels Falthurne and Sténie (a story in letters set in Tours), and a plan for an opera, Le Corsaire.

Plays

Balzac wrote several plays. L'École des ménages (written 1839) was refused by the theaters of his time. Vautrin (staged 1840) was banned after one night. Then came Les Ressources de Quinola (1842), Paméla Giraud (1843) and La Marâtre (1848). Le Faiseur, also called Mercadet, was staged with great success in 1851, after his death. At his death he also left unfinished novels, among them Les Paysans, Le Député d'Arcis and Les Petits Bourgeois. The last two were completed by Charles Rabou.