Honoré de Balzac
Encyclopedia
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus
was a sequence
of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine
, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon.
Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature
. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters, who are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists
such as Marcel Proust
, Émile Zola
, Charles Dickens
, Edgar Allan Poe
, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert
, Marie Corelli
, Henry James
, William Faulkner
, Jack Kerouac
, and Italo Calvino
, and philosophers
such as Friedrich Engels
. Many of Balzac's works have been made into or have inspired films, and they are a continuing source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and critics.
An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. When he finished school, Balzac was an apprentice in a Law office
, but he turned his back on the study of Law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts. La Comédie Humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience.
Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly due to his intense writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal drama, and he ended several friendships over critical reviews. In 1850 he married Ewelina Hańska
, his longtime love; he died five months later.
de.) After the Reign of Terror
(1793–94), he was sent to Tours
to coordinate supplies for the Army.
Balzac's mother, born Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier, came from a family of haberdasher
s in Paris. Her family's wealth was a considerable factor in the match: she was eighteen at the time of the wedding, and Bernard-François fifty. As British writer and critic V. S. Pritchett
explained, "She was certainly drily aware that she had been given to an old husband as a reward for his professional services to a friend of her family and that the capital was on her side. She was not in love with her husband."
Honoré (so named after Saint Honoré of Amiens
, who is commemorated on 16 May, four days before Balzac's birthday) was actually the second child born to the Balzacs; exactly one year previous, Louis-Daniel had been born, but he lived for only a month. Honoré's sisters Laure and Laurence were born in 1800 and 1802, and his brother Henry-François in 1807.
's influential book Émile
convinced many mothers of the time to nurse their own children, sending babies to wet-nurses was still common among the middle and upper classes.) When the Balzac children returned home, they were kept at a frigid distance by their parents, which affected the author-to-be significantly. His 1835 novel Le Lys dans la Vallée features a cruel governess named Miss Caroline, modeled after his own caregiver.
At age eight Balzac was sent to the Oratorian
grammar school in Vendôme
, where he studied for seven years. His father, seeking to instill the same hardscrabble work ethic which had gained him the esteem of society, intentionally gave little spending money to the boy. This made him the object of ridicule among his much wealthier schoolmates.
Balzac had difficulty adapting to the rote style
of learning at the school. As a result, he was frequently sent to the "alcove," a punishment cell reserved for disobedient students. (The janitor at the school, when asked later if he remembered Honoré, replied: "Remember M. Balzac? I should think I do! I had the honour of escorting him to the dungeon more than a hundred times!") Still, his time alone gave the boy ample freedom to read every book which came his way.
Balzac worked these scenes from his boyhood – as he did many aspects of his life and the lives of those around him – into La Comédie Humaine
. His time at Vendôme is reflected in Louis Lambert
, his 1832 novel about a young boy studying at an Oratorian grammar school at Vendôme. The narrator says : "He devoured books of every kind, feeding indiscriminately on religious works, history and literature, philosophy and physics. He had told me that he found indescribable delight in reading dictionaries for lack of other books."
Although his mind was receiving nourishment, the same could not be said for Balzac's body. He often fell ill, finally causing the headmaster to contact his family with news of a "sort of a coma". When he returned home, his grandmother said: "Voilà donc comme le collège nous renvoie les jolis que nous lui envoyons!" ("Look how the academy returns the pretty ones we send them!") Balzac himself attributed his condition to "intellectual congestion", but his extended confinement in the "alcove" was surely a factor. (Meanwhile, his father had been writing a treatise on "the means of preventing thefts and murders, and of restoring the men who commit them to a useful role in society", in which he heaped disdain on prison as a form of crime prevention.)
In 1814 the Balzac family moved to Paris, and Honoré was sent to private tutors and schools for the next two and a half years. This was an unhappy time in his life, during which he attempted suicide
on a bridge over the Loire River.
In 1816 Balzac entered the Sorbonne
, where he studied under three famous professors. François Guizot
, who later became Prime Minister
, was Professor of Modern History. Abel-François Villemain
, a recent arrival from the Collège Charlemagne, lectured on French and classical literature. And – most influential of all – Victor Cousin
's courses on philosophy encouraged his students to think independently.
Once his studies were completed, Balzac was persuaded by his father to follow him into the law; for three years he trained and worked at the office of Victor Passez, a family friend. During this time Balzac began to understand the vagaries of human nature. In his 1840 novel Le Notaire, he wrote that a young person in the legal profession sees "the oily wheels of every fortune, the hideous wrangling of heirs over corpses not yet cold, the human heart grappling with the Penal Code."
In 1819 Passez offered to make Balzac his successor, but his apprentice had had enough of the law. He despaired of being "a clerk, a machine, a riding-school hack, eating and drinking and sleeping at fixed hours. I should be like everyone else. And that's what they call living, that life at the grindstone, doing the same thing over and over again…. I am hungry and nothing is offered to appease my appetite." He announced his intention to be a writer.
The loss of this opportunity caused serious discord in the Balzac household, although Honoré was not turned away entirely. Instead, in April 1819 he was allowed to live in the French capital – as English critic George Saintsbury
describes it – "in a garret furnished in the most Spartan fashion, with a starvation allowance and an old woman to look after him", while the rest of the family moved to a house twenty miles [32 km] outside Paris.
called Le Corsaire, based on Lord Byron's The Corsair
. Realizing he would have trouble finding a composer, however, he turned to other pursuits.
In 1820 Balzac completed the five-act verse tragedy Cromwell
. Although it pales in comparison to later works, some critics consider it a quality text. When he finished, Balzac went to Villeparisis
and read the entire work to his family; they were unimpressed. He followed this effort by starting (but never finishing) three novels: Sténie, Falthurne, and Corsino.
In 1821 Balzac met the enterprising Auguste Lepoitevin, who convinced the author to write short stories, which Lepoitevin would then sell to publishers. Balzac quickly turned to longer works, and by 1826 he had written nine novels, all published under pseudonyms and often produced in collaboration with other writers. For example, the scandalous novel Vicaire des Ardennes (1822) – banned for its depiction of nearly-incestuous relations and, more egregiously, of a married priest – was attributed to a 'Horace de Saint-Aubin'. These books were potboiler
novels, designed to sell quickly and titillate audiences. In Saintsbury's view, "They are curiously, interestingly, almost enthrallingly bad." Saintsbury indicates that Robert Louis Stevenson
tried to dissuade him from reading these early works of Balzac. American critic Samuel Rogers, however, notes that "without the training they gave Balzac, as he groped his way to his mature conception of the novel, and without the habit he formed as a young man of writing under pressure, one can hardly imagine his producing La Comédie Humaine." Biographer Graham Robb
suggests that as he discovered the Novel, Balzac discovered himself.
During this time Balzac wrote two pamphlets in support of primogeniture
and the Society of Jesus
. The latter, regarding the Jesuit order, illustrated his life-long admiration for the Catholic Church. In the preface to La Comédie Humaine he wrote: "Christianity, and especially Catholicism, being a complete repression of man's depraved tendencies, is the greatest element in Social Order."
. This business failed miserably, with many of the books "sold as waste paper". Balzac had better luck publishing the memoirs of Laure Junot, Duchess of Abrantès – with whom he also had an affair.
Balzac borrowed money from his family and friends, and tried to build a printing business, then a typefounder enterprise. His inexperience and lack of capital caused his ruin in these trades. He gave the businesses to a friend (who made them successful) but carried the debts for many years. As of April 1828 Balzac owed 50,000 francs to his mother.
Balzac never lost his penchant for une bonne spéculation. It resurfaced painfully later when – as a renowned and busy author – he traveled to Sardinia
in the hopes of reprocessing the slag
from the Roman mines in that country. Near the end of his life Balzac was captivated by the idea of cutting 20000 acres (81 km²) of oak wood
in Ukraine
and transporting it for sale in France.
After the collapse of his businesses, Balzac traveled to Brittany
and stayed with the de Pommereul family outside Fougères
. There he drew inspiration for Les Chouans
(1829), a tale of love gone wrong amid the Chouan
royalist forces. Although Balzac was a supporter of the crown, Balzac paints the counter-revolutionaries in a sympathetic light – even though they are the center of the book's most brutal scenes. This was the first book Balzac released under his own name, and it gave him what one critic called "passage into the Promised Land". It established him as an author of note (even if the surface owes a debt to Walter Scott
) and provided him with a name outside his past pseudonyms.
Soon afterwards, around the time of his father's death, Balzac wrote El Verdugo – about a 30-year-old man who kills his father (Balzac was 30 years old at the time). This was the first work signed "Honoré de Balzac". Like his father, he added the aristocratic-sounding particle to help him fit into respected society, but it was a choice based on skill, not birthright. "The aristocracy and authority of talent are more substantial than the aristocracy of names and material power", he wrote in 1830. The timing of the decision was also significant; as Robb explained: "The disappearance of the father coincides with the adoption of the nobiliary particle. A symbolic inheritance." Just as his father had worked his way up from poverty into respectable society, Balzac considered toil and effort his real mark of nobility.
When the July Revolution
overthrew Charles X
in 1830, Balzac declared himself a Legitimist, supporting Charles' House of Bourbon
– but with qualifications. He felt that the new July Monarchy
(which claimed widespread popular support) was disorganized and unprincipled, in need of a mediator to keep the political peace between the King and insurgent forces. He called for "a young and vigorous man who belongs neither to the Directoire nor to the Empire, but who is 1830 incarnate…." He planned to be such a candidate, appealing especially to the higher classes in Chinon
. But after a near-fatal accident in 1832 (he slipped and cracked his head on the street), Balzac decided not to stand for election.
1831 saw the success of La Peau de Chagrin
(The Wild Ass's Skin or The Magic Skin), a fable-like tale about a despondent young man named Raphaël de Valentin who finds an animal skin which promises great power and wealth. He obtains these things, but loses the ability to manage them. In the end, his health fails and he is consumed by his own confusion. Balzac meant the story to bear witness to the treacherous turns of life, its "serpentine motion."
In 1833 Balzac released Eugénie Grandet
, his first best-selling novel. The tale of a young lady who inherits her father's miserliness, it also became the most critically acclaimed book of his career. The writing is simple, yet the individuals (especially the bourgeois title character) are dynamic and complex.
Le Père Goriot
(Old Father Goriot, 1835) was his next success, in which Balzac transposes the story of King Lear
to 1820s Paris in order to rage at a society bereft of all love save the love of money. The centrality of a father in this novel matches Balzac's own position – not only as mentor to his troubled young secretary, Jules Sandeau, but also the fact that he had (most likely) fathered a child, Marie-Caroline, with his otherwise-married lover, Maria Du Fresnay.
In 1836 Balzac took the helm of the Chronique de Paris, a weekly magazine of society and politics. He tried to enforce strict impartiality in its pages and a reasoned assessment of various ideologies. As Rogers notes, "Balzac was interested in any social, political, or economic theory, whether from the right or the left." The magazine failed, but in July 1840 he founded another publication, the Revue Parisienne. It lasted for three issues.
These dismal business efforts – and his misadventures in Sardinia – provided an appropriate milieu in which to set the two-volume Illusions Perdues (Lost Illusions, 1843). The novel concerns Lucien de Rubempré, a young poet trying to make a name for himself, who becomes trapped in the morass of society's darkest contradictions. Lucien's journalism work is informed by Balzac's own failed ventures in the field. Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes
(The Harlot High and Low, 1847) continues Lucien's story. He is trapped by the Abbé Herrera (Vautrin
) in a convoluted and disastrous plan to regain social status. The book undergoes a massive temporal rift; the first part (of four) covers a span of six years, while the final two sections focus on just three days.
Le Cousin Pons
(1847) and La Cousine Bette
(1848) tell the story of Les Parents Pauvres (The Poor Relations). The conniving and wrangling over wills and inheritances reflect the expertise gained by the author as a young law clerk. Balzac's health was deteriorating by this point, making the completion of this pair of books a significant accomplishment.
Many of his novels were initially serialized, like those of Dickens
. Their length was not predetermined. Illusions Perdues extends to a thousand pages after starting inauspiciously in a small-town print shop, whereas La Fille aux yeux d'or (The Girl with the Golden Eyes, 1835) opens with a broad panorama of Paris but becomes a closely plotted novella
of only fifty pages.
Balzac revised obsessively, covering printer's proofs with changes and additions to be reset. He sometimes repeated this process during the publication of a book, causing significant expense for both himself and the publisher. As a result, the finished product was frequently quite different from the original book. While some of his books never reached a finished state, some of those – such as Les employés (The Government Clerks, 1841) – are nonetheless noted by critics.
Although Balzac was "by turns a hermit and a vagrant", he managed to stay connected to the social world which nourished his writing. He was friends with Théophile Gautier
and Pierre-Marie-Charles de Bernard du Grail de la Villette
, and he knew Victor Hugo
. Nevertheless, he did not spend as much time in salons and clubs as did many of his characters. "In the first place he was too busy", explains Saintsbury, "in the second he would not have been at home there…. [H]e felt it was his business not to frequent society but to create it." Nonetheless he often spent long periods at Château de Saché
, near Tours
, the home of his friend Jean de Margonne, his mother's lover and father to her youngest child. Many of Balzac's tormented characters were created in the small second-floor bedroom. Today the Château is a museum dedicated to the author's life.
– lacking a return address and signed only by "L'Étrangère" ("The Foreigner") – expressing sadness at the cynicism and atheism in La Peau de Chagrin and its negative portrayal of women. He responded by purchasing a classified advertisement in the Gazette de France, hoping that his secret critic would find it. Thus began a fifteen-year correspondence between Balzac and "the object of [his] sweetest dreams": Ewelina Hańska
.
Hańska was married to a man twenty years her senior, Wacław Hański
, a wealthy Polish landowner living near Kiev
. It had been a marriage of convenience
to preserve her family's fortune. In Balzac Ewelina found a kindred spirit for her emotional and social desires, with the added benefit of feeling a connection to the glamorous capital of France. Their correspondence reveals an intriguing balance of passion, propriety and patience; Robb says it is "like an experimental novel in which the female protagonist is always trying to pull in extraneous realities but which the hero is determined to keep on course, whatever tricks he has to use."
Wacław Hański died in 1841, and his widow and her admirer finally had the chance to pursue their affections. Competing with the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt
, Balzac visited her in St. Petersburg in 1843 and impressed himself on her heart. After a series of economic setbacks, health problems, and prohibitions from the Tsar
, the couple were finally able to wed. On 14 March 1850, with Balzac's health in serious decline, they drove from her estate in Wierzchownia (village of Verkhivnia) to a church in Berdyczów (city of Berdychiv, today in Ukraine) and were married. The ten-hour journey to and from the ceremony took a toll on both husband and wife: her feet were too swollen to walk, and he endured severe heart trouble.
Although he married late in life, Balzac had already written two treatises on marriage: Physiologie du Mariage and Scènes de la Vie Conjugale. These works suffered from a lack of firsthand knowledge; Saintsbury points out that "Cœlebs cannot talk of [marriage] with much authority." In late April the newly-weds set off for Paris. His health deteriorated on the way, and Ewelina wrote to her daughter about Balzac being "in a state of extreme weakness" and "sweating profusely". They arrived in the French capital on 20 May, his fifty-first birthday.
Five months after his wedding, on 18 August, Balzac died. His mother was the only one with him when he expired; Mme. Hańska had gone to bed. He had been visited that day by Victor Hugo
, who later served as pallbearer and eulogist
at Balzac's funeral.
Balzac was buried at the Cimetière du Père Lachaise in Paris. "Today", said Hugo at the ceremony, "we have a people in black because of the death of the man of talent; a nation in mourning for a man of genius." The funeral was attended by "almost every writer in Paris", including Frédérick Lemaître
, Gustave Courbet
, Dumas père
and Dumas fils
. Later, Balzac became the subject of a monumental statue by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin
, which stands near the intersection of Boulevard Raspail
and Boulevard Montparnasse. Rodin featured Balzac in several of his smaller sculptures as well.
can construct a settled dwelling only in his work."
. While he admired and drew inspiration from the Romantic
style of Scottish novelist Walter Scott
, Balzac sought to depict human existence through the use of particulars. In the preface to the first edition of Scènes de la Vie privée, he writes: "The author firmly believes that details alone will henceforth determine the merit of works…." Plentiful descriptions of décor, clothing, and possessions help breathe life into the characters. For example, Balzac's friend Hyacinthe de Latouche had knowledge of hanging wallpaper. Balzac transferred this to his descriptions of the Pension Vauquer in Le Père Goriot, making the wallpaper speak of the identities of those living inside.
Some critics consider Balzac's writing exemplary of naturalism – a more pessimistic and analytical form of realism, which seeks to explain human behavior as intrinsically linked with the environment. French novelist Émile Zola
declared Balzac the father of the naturalist novel. Zola indicated that, whereas Romantics saw the world through a colored lens, the naturalist sees through a clear glass – precisely the sort of effect Balzac attempted to achieve in his works.
, who said: "One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of [Illusions Perdues protagonist] Lucien de Rubempré…. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh."
At the same time, the characters represent a particular range of social types: the noble soldier, the scoundrel, the proud workman, the fearless spy, the alluring mistress. That Balzac was able to balance the strength of the individual against the representation of the type is evidence of the author's skill. One critic explained that "there is a center and a circumference to Balzac's world."
Balzac's use of repeating characters, moving in and out of the Comédies books, strengthens the realist representation. "When the characters reappear", notes Rogers, "they do not step out of nowhere; they emerge from the privacy of their own lives which, for an interval, we have not been allowed to see." He also used a realist technique which French novelist Marcel Proust
later named "retrospective illumination", whereby a character's past is revealed long after she or he first appears.
A nearly infinite reserve of energy propels the characters in Balzac's novels. Struggling against the currents of human nature and society, they may lose more often than they win – but only rarely do they give up. This universal trait is a reflection of Balzac's own social wrangling, that of his family, and an interest in the Austrian mystic and physician Franz Mesmer
, who pioneered the study of animal magnetism
. Balzac spoke often of a "nervous and fluid force" between individuals, and Raphaël Valentin's decline in La Peau de Chagrin exemplifies the danger of withdrawing from the company of other people.
The influence of Paris permeates La Comédie. Nature defers to the artificial metropolis, in contrast to the depictions of weather and wildlife in the countryside. "If in Paris", Rogers says, "we are in a man-made region where even the seasons are forgotten, these provincial towns are nearly always pictured in their natural setting." Balzac said, "the streets of Paris possess human qualities and we cannot shake off the impressions they make upon our minds." His labyrinthine city provided a literary model used later by English novelist Charles Dickens
and Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky
. The centrality of Paris in La Comédie Humaine is key to Balzac's legacy as a realist. "Realism is nothing if not urban", notes critic Peter Brooks
; the scene of a young man coming into the city to find his fortune is ubiquitous in the realist novel, and appears repeatedly in Balzac's works, such as Illusions Perdues.
Balzac concerned himself overwhelmingly with the darker essence of human nature and the corrupting influence of middle and high societies. He worked to observe humanity in its most representative state, frequently passing incognito among the masses of Parisian society to do research. He used incidents from his life and the people around him, in works like Eugénie Grandet and Louis Lambert.
's democratic republicanism. Nevertheless, his keen insight regarding working-class conditions earned him the esteem of many Socialists and Marxists. Engels said that Balzac was his favorite writer.
and has been called one of Dickens' influences. Critic W. H. Helm calls one "the French Dickens" and the other "the English Balzac". Critic Richard Lehan says that "Balzac was the bridge between the comic realism of Dickens and the naturalism of Zola
."
Gustave Flaubert
was also substantially influenced by Balzac. Praising his portrayal of society while attacking his prose
style, Flaubert once wrote: "What a man he would have been had he known how to write!" While he disdained the label of "realist", Flaubert clearly took heed of Balzac's close attention to detail and unvarnished depictions of bourgeois life. This influence shows in Flaubert's work L'education sentimentale, which owes a debt to Balzac's Illusions Perdues. "What Balzac started", says Lehan, "Flaubert helped finish."
Marcel Proust
similarly learned from the Realist example; he adored Balzac and studied his works carefully, although he criticised what he called Balzac's "vulgarity." Balzac's story Une Heure de ma Vie (An Hour of my Life, 1822), in which minute details are followed by deep personal reflections, is a clear ancestor of the style which Proust used in À la recherche du temps perdu
. However, Proust wrote later in life that the contemporary fashion to rank Balzac higher than Tolstoy was "madness."
Perhaps the author most affected by Balzac was American expatriate novelist Henry James
. In 1878 James wrote with sadness about the lack of contemporary attention paid to Balzac, and lavished praise on him in four essays (in 1875, 1877, 1902, and 1913). In 1878 James wrote: "Large as Balzac is, he is all of one piece and he hangs perfectly together." He wrote with admiration of Balzac's attempt to portray in writing "a beast with a hundred claws." In his own novels James explored more of the psychological motives of the characters and less of the historical sweep exhibited by Balzac – a conscious style preference. "[T]he artist of the Comédie Humaine," he wrote, "is half smothered by the historian." Still, both authors used the form of the realist novel to probe the machinations of society and the myriad motives of human behavior.
Balzac's vision of a society in which class, money and personal ambition are the major players has been endorsed by critics of both left-wing and right-wing political tendencies. Marxist Friedrich Engels
wrote: "I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together." Balzac has received high praise from critics as diverse as Walter Benjamin
and Camille Paglia
. In 1970 Roland Barthes
published S/Z
, a detailed analysis of Balzac's story Sarrasine
and a key work in structuralist literary criticism.
Balzac has also influenced popular culture. Many of his works have been made into popular films and television serials, including Les Chouans (1947), Le Père Goriot (1968 BBC mini-series), and La Cousine Bette (1974 BBC mini-series, starring Margaret Tyzack
and Helen Mirren
; 1998 film, starring Jessica Lange
). He is included in François Truffaut
's 1959 film, The 400 Blows
. Truffaut believed Balzac and Proust to be the greatest of French writers. He was also adapted into a character in Orson Scott Card
's alternate history series The Tales of Alvin Maker
; he is presented as a crude but deeply witty and insightful man. Chinese author Dai Sijie
published Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse Chinoise
(Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress)(2000), in which a suitcase filled with novels helps to sustain city youths sent to the countryside for "re-education" during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It was made into a film (adapted and directed by the author) in 2002. The Japanese rock band Balzac
is also named in his honor.
Incomplete at time of death
Published pseudonymously
As "Lord R'Hoone", in collaboration
As "Horace de Saint-Aubin"
Published anonymously
Selected titles from La Comédie humaine
Plays
Tales
Summaries, reviews and other information about Balzac and his works are being collated at the collaborative blog La Comedie Humaine
Masterpiece
Masterpiece in modern usage refers to a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill or workmanship....
was a sequence
Novel sequence
A novel sequence is a set or series of novels which share common themes, characters, or settings, but where each novel has its own title and free-standing storyline, and can thus be read independently or out of sequence.-Definitions:...
of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine is the title of Honoré de Balzac's multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy .-Overview:...
, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon.
Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature
European literature
European literature refers to the literature of Europe.European literature includes literature in many languages; among the most important of the modern written works are those in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Polish, German, Italian, Modern Greek, Czech and Russian and works by the...
. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters, who are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
such as Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
, Émile Zola
Émile Zola
Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...
, Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
, Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...
, Marie Corelli
Marie Corelli
Marie Corelli was a British novelist. She enjoyed a period of great literary success from the publication of her first novel in 1886 until World War I. Corelli's novels sold more copies than the combined sales of popular contemporaries, including Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G...
, Henry James
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
, William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
, and Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...
, and philosophers
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
such as Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
. Many of Balzac's works have been made into or have inspired films, and they are a continuing source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and critics.
An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. When he finished school, Balzac was an apprentice in a Law office
Law
Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...
, but he turned his back on the study of Law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts. La Comédie Humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience.
Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly due to his intense writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal drama, and he ended several friendships over critical reviews. In 1850 he married Ewelina Hańska
Ewelina Hańska
Eveline Hańska was a Polish noblewoman best known for her marriage to French novelist Honoré de Balzac. Born at the Wierzchownia estate in Volhynia, Hańska married landowner Wacław Hański when she was a teenager...
, his longtime love; he died five months later.
Family
Honoré Balzac was born into a family which had struggled nobly to achieve respectability. His father, born Bernard-François Balssa, was one of eleven children from a poor family in Tarn, a region in the south of France. In 1760 the elder Balzac set off for Paris with only a louis coin in his pocket, determined to improve his social standing; by 1776 he had become Secretary to the King's Council and a Freemason. (He had also changed his name to that of an ancient noble family, and added – without any official cause – the nobiliary particleNobiliary particle
A nobiliary particle is used in a family name or surname in many Western cultures to signal the nobility of a family. The particle used varies depending on the country, language and period of time. This article is dedicated to explain how noble families of different countries identify themselves by...
de.) After the Reign of Terror
Reign of Terror
The Reign of Terror , also known simply as The Terror , was a period of violence that occurred after the onset of the French Revolution, incited by conflict between rival political factions, the Girondins and the Jacobins, and marked by mass executions of "enemies of...
(1793–94), he was sent to Tours
Tours
Tours is a city in central France, the capital of the Indre-et-Loire department.It is located on the lower reaches of the river Loire, between Orléans and the Atlantic coast. Touraine, the region around Tours, is known for its wines, the alleged perfection of its local spoken French, and for the...
to coordinate supplies for the Army.
Balzac's mother, born Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier, came from a family of haberdasher
Haberdasher
A haberdasher is a person who sells small articles for sewing, such as buttons, ribbons, zips, and other notions. In American English, haberdasher is another term for a men's outfitter. A haberdasher's shop or the items sold therein are called haberdashery.-Origin and use:The word appears in...
s in Paris. Her family's wealth was a considerable factor in the match: she was eighteen at the time of the wedding, and Bernard-François fifty. As British writer and critic V. S. Pritchett
V. S. Pritchett
Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett CH CBE , was a British writer and critic. He was particularly known for his short stories, collected in a number of volumes...
explained, "She was certainly drily aware that she had been given to an old husband as a reward for his professional services to a friend of her family and that the capital was on her side. She was not in love with her husband."
Honoré (so named after Saint Honoré of Amiens
Honoratus of Amiens
Saint Honoratus of Amiens was the seventh bishop of Amiens. His feast day is May 16.-Life:...
, who is commemorated on 16 May, four days before Balzac's birthday) was actually the second child born to the Balzacs; exactly one year previous, Louis-Daniel had been born, but he lived for only a month. Honoré's sisters Laure and Laurence were born in 1800 and 1802, and his brother Henry-François in 1807.
Early life
As an infant Balzac was sent to a wet-nurse; the following year he was joined by his sister Laure and they spent four years away from home. (Although Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques RousseauJean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
's influential book Émile
Emile: Or, On Education
Émile, or On Education is a treatise on the nature of education and on the nature of man written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered it to be the “best and most important of all my writings”. Due to a section of the book entitled “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” Émile was be...
convinced many mothers of the time to nurse their own children, sending babies to wet-nurses was still common among the middle and upper classes.) When the Balzac children returned home, they were kept at a frigid distance by their parents, which affected the author-to-be significantly. His 1835 novel Le Lys dans la Vallée features a cruel governess named Miss Caroline, modeled after his own caregiver.
Oratory of Jesus
The Society of the Oratory of Jesus , also known as French Oratory, is a catholic Congregation founded in 1611 in Paris by Pierre de Bérulle...
grammar school in Vendôme
Vendôme
Vendôme is a commune in the Centre region of France.-Administration:Vendôme is the capital of the arrondissement of Vendôme in the Loir-et-Cher department, of which it is a sub-prefecture. It has a tribunal of first instance.-Geography:...
, where he studied for seven years. His father, seeking to instill the same hardscrabble work ethic which had gained him the esteem of society, intentionally gave little spending money to the boy. This made him the object of ridicule among his much wealthier schoolmates.
Balzac had difficulty adapting to the rote style
Rote learning
Rote learning is a learning technique which focuses on memorization. The major practice involved in rote learning is learning by repetition by which students commit information to memory in a highly structured way. The idea is that one will be able to quickly recall the meaning of the material the...
of learning at the school. As a result, he was frequently sent to the "alcove," a punishment cell reserved for disobedient students. (The janitor at the school, when asked later if he remembered Honoré, replied: "Remember M. Balzac? I should think I do! I had the honour of escorting him to the dungeon more than a hundred times!") Still, his time alone gave the boy ample freedom to read every book which came his way.
Balzac worked these scenes from his boyhood – as he did many aspects of his life and the lives of those around him – into La Comédie Humaine
La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine is the title of Honoré de Balzac's multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy .-Overview:...
. His time at Vendôme is reflected in Louis Lambert
Louis Lambert (novel)
Louis Lambert is an 1832 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac , included in the Études philosophiques section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine...
, his 1832 novel about a young boy studying at an Oratorian grammar school at Vendôme. The narrator says : "He devoured books of every kind, feeding indiscriminately on religious works, history and literature, philosophy and physics. He had told me that he found indescribable delight in reading dictionaries for lack of other books."
Although his mind was receiving nourishment, the same could not be said for Balzac's body. He often fell ill, finally causing the headmaster to contact his family with news of a "sort of a coma". When he returned home, his grandmother said: "Voilà donc comme le collège nous renvoie les jolis que nous lui envoyons!" ("Look how the academy returns the pretty ones we send them!") Balzac himself attributed his condition to "intellectual congestion", but his extended confinement in the "alcove" was surely a factor. (Meanwhile, his father had been writing a treatise on "the means of preventing thefts and murders, and of restoring the men who commit them to a useful role in society", in which he heaped disdain on prison as a form of crime prevention.)
In 1814 the Balzac family moved to Paris, and Honoré was sent to private tutors and schools for the next two and a half years. This was an unhappy time in his life, during which he attempted suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
on a bridge over the Loire River.
In 1816 Balzac entered the Sorbonne
Sorbonne
The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...
, where he studied under three famous professors. François Guizot
François Guizot
François Pierre Guillaume Guizot was a French historian, orator, and statesman. Guizot was a dominant figure in French politics prior to the Revolution of 1848, a conservative liberal who opposed the attempt by King Charles X to usurp legislative power, and worked to sustain a constitutional...
, who later became Prime Minister
Prime Minister of France
The Prime Minister of France in the Fifth Republic is the head of government and of the Council of Ministers of France. The head of state is the President of the French Republic...
, was Professor of Modern History. Abel-François Villemain
Abel-François Villemain
Abel-François Villemain was a French politician and writer.-Biography:Villemain was born in Paris and educated at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He became assistant master at the Lycée Charlemagne, and subsequently at the École Normale. In 1812 he gained a prize from the Academy with an essay on Michel...
, a recent arrival from the Collège Charlemagne, lectured on French and classical literature. And – most influential of all – Victor Cousin
Victor Cousin
Victor Cousin was a French philosopher. He was a proponent of Scottish Common Sense Realism and had an important influence on French educational policy.-Early life:...
's courses on philosophy encouraged his students to think independently.
Once his studies were completed, Balzac was persuaded by his father to follow him into the law; for three years he trained and worked at the office of Victor Passez, a family friend. During this time Balzac began to understand the vagaries of human nature. In his 1840 novel Le Notaire, he wrote that a young person in the legal profession sees "the oily wheels of every fortune, the hideous wrangling of heirs over corpses not yet cold, the human heart grappling with the Penal Code."
The loss of this opportunity caused serious discord in the Balzac household, although Honoré was not turned away entirely. Instead, in April 1819 he was allowed to live in the French capital – as English critic George Saintsbury
George Saintsbury
George Edward Bateman Saintsbury , was an English writer, literary historian, scholar and critic.-Biography:...
describes it – "in a garret furnished in the most Spartan fashion, with a starvation allowance and an old woman to look after him", while the rest of the family moved to a house twenty miles [32 km] outside Paris.
First literary efforts
Balzac's first project was a libretto for a comic operaComic opera
Comic opera denotes a sung dramatic work of a light or comic nature, usually with a happy ending.Forms of comic opera first developed in late 17th-century Italy. By the 1730s, a new operatic genre, opera buffa, emerged as an alternative to opera seria...
called Le Corsaire, based on Lord Byron's The Corsair
The Corsair
The Corsair was a semi-autobiographical tale in verse by Lord Byron in 1814 , which was extremely popular and influential in its day, selling ten thousand copies on its first day of sale...
. Realizing he would have trouble finding a composer, however, he turned to other pursuits.
In 1820 Balzac completed the five-act verse tragedy Cromwell
Cromwell (tragedy)
Cromwell is an 1820 verse tragedy by Honoré de Balzac. When it was finished, it was reviewed by a man named Andrieux, the former tutor of Eugène Surville, Balzac's sister. On the manuscript, Andrieux wrote: "The author should do anything he likes, but not literature."-Bibliography:* Robb, Graham ....
. Although it pales in comparison to later works, some critics consider it a quality text. When he finished, Balzac went to Villeparisis
Villeparisis
Villeparisis is a commune in the Seine-et-Marne department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France. It is located in the north-eastern suburbs of Paris from the centre.-Transportation:...
and read the entire work to his family; they were unimpressed. He followed this effort by starting (but never finishing) three novels: Sténie, Falthurne, and Corsino.
In 1821 Balzac met the enterprising Auguste Lepoitevin, who convinced the author to write short stories, which Lepoitevin would then sell to publishers. Balzac quickly turned to longer works, and by 1826 he had written nine novels, all published under pseudonyms and often produced in collaboration with other writers. For example, the scandalous novel Vicaire des Ardennes (1822) – banned for its depiction of nearly-incestuous relations and, more egregiously, of a married priest – was attributed to a 'Horace de Saint-Aubin'. These books were potboiler
Potboiler
Potboiler or pot-boiler is a term used to describe a poor quality novel, play, opera, or film, or other creative work that was created quickly to make money to pay for the creator's daily expenses . Authors who create potboiler novels or screenplays are sometimes called hack writers...
novels, designed to sell quickly and titillate audiences. In Saintsbury's view, "They are curiously, interestingly, almost enthrallingly bad." Saintsbury indicates that Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....
tried to dissuade him from reading these early works of Balzac. American critic Samuel Rogers, however, notes that "without the training they gave Balzac, as he groped his way to his mature conception of the novel, and without the habit he formed as a young man of writing under pressure, one can hardly imagine his producing La Comédie Humaine." Biographer Graham Robb
Graham Robb
Graham Macdonald Robb FRSL is a British author.Robb was born in Manchester and educated at the Royal Grammar School Worcester and Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied Modern Languages...
suggests that as he discovered the Novel, Balzac discovered himself.
During this time Balzac wrote two pamphlets in support of primogeniture
Primogeniture
Primogeniture is the right, by law or custom, of the firstborn to inherit the entire estate, to the exclusion of younger siblings . Historically, the term implied male primogeniture, to the exclusion of females...
and the Society of Jesus
Society of Jesus
The Society of Jesus is a Catholic male religious order that follows the teachings of the Catholic Church. The members are called Jesuits, and are also known colloquially as "God's Army" and as "The Company," these being references to founder Ignatius of Loyola's military background and a...
. The latter, regarding the Jesuit order, illustrated his life-long admiration for the Catholic Church. In the preface to La Comédie Humaine he wrote: "Christianity, and especially Catholicism, being a complete repression of man's depraved tendencies, is the greatest element in Social Order."
"Une bonne spéculation"
In the late 1820s Balzac dabbled in several business ventures, a penchant his sister blamed on the temptation of an unknown neighbor. His first venture was a publishing enterprise which turned out cheap one-volume editions of French classics including the works of MolièreMolière
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature...
. This business failed miserably, with many of the books "sold as waste paper". Balzac had better luck publishing the memoirs of Laure Junot, Duchess of Abrantès – with whom he also had an affair.
Balzac borrowed money from his family and friends, and tried to build a printing business, then a typefounder enterprise. His inexperience and lack of capital caused his ruin in these trades. He gave the businesses to a friend (who made them successful) but carried the debts for many years. As of April 1828 Balzac owed 50,000 francs to his mother.
Balzac never lost his penchant for une bonne spéculation. It resurfaced painfully later when – as a renowned and busy author – he traveled to Sardinia
Sardinia
Sardinia is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea . It is an autonomous region of Italy, and the nearest land masses are the French island of Corsica, the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Tunisia and the Spanish Balearic Islands.The name Sardinia is from the pre-Roman noun *sard[],...
in the hopes of reprocessing the slag
Slag
Slag is a partially vitreous by-product of smelting ore to separate the metal fraction from the unwanted fraction. It can usually be considered to be a mixture of metal oxides and silicon dioxide. However, slags can contain metal sulfides and metal atoms in the elemental form...
from the Roman mines in that country. Near the end of his life Balzac was captivated by the idea of cutting 20000 acres (81 km²) of oak wood
Oak
An oak is a tree or shrub in the genus Quercus , of which about 600 species exist. "Oak" may also appear in the names of species in related genera, notably Lithocarpus...
in Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
and transporting it for sale in France.
La Comédie Humaine and literary success
After writing several novels, in 1832 Balzac conceived the idea for an enormous series of books that would paint a panoramic portrait of "all aspects of society." When the idea struck, he raced to his sister's apartment and proclaimed: "I am about to become a genius." Although he originally called it Etudes des Mœurs (Study of Mores), it eventually became known as La Comédie Humaine, and he included in it all the fiction that he had published in his lifetime under his own name. This was to be Balzac's life work and his greatest achievement.After the collapse of his businesses, Balzac traveled to Brittany
Brittany
Brittany is a cultural and administrative region in the north-west of France. Previously a kingdom and then a duchy, Brittany was united to the Kingdom of France in 1532 as a province. Brittany has also been referred to as Less, Lesser or Little Britain...
and stayed with the de Pommereul family outside Fougères
Fougères
Fougères is a commune and a sub-prefecture of the Ille-et-Vilaine department in Brittany, in north-western France.-Sights:Fougères' major monument is a medieval stronghold built atop a granite ledge, which was part of the ultimately unsuccessful defence system of the Duchy of Brittany against...
. There he drew inspiration for Les Chouans
Les Chouans
Les Chouans is an 1829 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac and included in the Scènes de la vie militaire section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine. Set in the French region of Brittany, the novel combines military history with a love story between the aristocratic...
(1829), a tale of love gone wrong amid the Chouan
Chouannerie
The Chouannerie was a royalist uprising in twelve of the western departements of France, particularly in the provinces of Brittany and Maine, against the French Revolution, the First French Republic, and even, with its headquarters in London rather than France, for a time, under the Empire...
royalist forces. Although Balzac was a supporter of the crown, Balzac paints the counter-revolutionaries in a sympathetic light – even though they are the center of the book's most brutal scenes. This was the first book Balzac released under his own name, and it gave him what one critic called "passage into the Promised Land". It established him as an author of note (even if the surface owes a debt to Walter Scott
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....
) and provided him with a name outside his past pseudonyms.
Soon afterwards, around the time of his father's death, Balzac wrote El Verdugo – about a 30-year-old man who kills his father (Balzac was 30 years old at the time). This was the first work signed "Honoré de Balzac". Like his father, he added the aristocratic-sounding particle to help him fit into respected society, but it was a choice based on skill, not birthright. "The aristocracy and authority of talent are more substantial than the aristocracy of names and material power", he wrote in 1830. The timing of the decision was also significant; as Robb explained: "The disappearance of the father coincides with the adoption of the nobiliary particle. A symbolic inheritance." Just as his father had worked his way up from poverty into respectable society, Balzac considered toil and effort his real mark of nobility.
When the July Revolution
July Revolution
The French Revolution of 1830, also known as the July Revolution or in French, saw the overthrow of King Charles X of France, the French Bourbon monarch, and the ascent of his cousin Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, who himself, after 18 precarious years on the throne, would in turn be overthrown...
overthrew Charles X
Charles X of France
Charles X was known for most of his life as the Comte d'Artois before he reigned as King of France and of Navarre from 16 September 1824 until 2 August 1830. A younger brother to Kings Louis XVI and Louis XVIII, he supported the latter in exile and eventually succeeded him...
in 1830, Balzac declared himself a Legitimist, supporting Charles' House of Bourbon
House of Bourbon
The House of Bourbon is a European royal house, a branch of the Capetian dynasty . Bourbon kings first ruled Navarre and France in the 16th century. By the 18th century, members of the Bourbon dynasty also held thrones in Spain, Naples, Sicily, and Parma...
– but with qualifications. He felt that the new July Monarchy
July Monarchy
The July Monarchy , officially the Kingdom of France , was a period of liberal constitutional monarchy in France under King Louis-Philippe starting with the July Revolution of 1830 and ending with the Revolution of 1848...
(which claimed widespread popular support) was disorganized and unprincipled, in need of a mediator to keep the political peace between the King and insurgent forces. He called for "a young and vigorous man who belongs neither to the Directoire nor to the Empire, but who is 1830 incarnate…." He planned to be such a candidate, appealing especially to the higher classes in Chinon
Chinon
Chinon is a commune in the Indre-et-Loire department in central France well known for Château de Chinon.In the Middle Ages, Chinon developed especially during the reign of Henry II . The castle was rebuilt and extended, becoming one of his favorite residences...
. But after a near-fatal accident in 1832 (he slipped and cracked his head on the street), Balzac decided not to stand for election.
1831 saw the success of La Peau de Chagrin
La Peau de chagrin
La Peau de chagrin is an 1831 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac . Set in early 19th-century Paris, it tells the story of a young man who finds a magic piece of shagreen that fulfills his every desire. For each wish granted, however, the skin shrinks and consumes a portion of...
(The Wild Ass's Skin or The Magic Skin), a fable-like tale about a despondent young man named Raphaël de Valentin who finds an animal skin which promises great power and wealth. He obtains these things, but loses the ability to manage them. In the end, his health fails and he is consumed by his own confusion. Balzac meant the story to bear witness to the treacherous turns of life, its "serpentine motion."
In 1833 Balzac released Eugénie Grandet
Eugénie Grandet
Eugénie Grandet is an 1833 novel by Honoré de Balzac about miserliness, and how it is bequeathed from the father to the daughter, Eugénie, through her unsatisfying love attachment with her cousin. As is usual with Balzac, all the characters in the novel are fully realized...
, his first best-selling novel. The tale of a young lady who inherits her father's miserliness, it also became the most critically acclaimed book of his career. The writing is simple, yet the individuals (especially the bourgeois title character) are dynamic and complex.
Le Père Goriot
Le Père Goriot
Le Père Goriot is an 1835 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac , included in the Scènes de la vie Parisienne section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine...
(Old Father Goriot, 1835) was his next success, in which Balzac transposes the story of King Lear
King Lear
King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The title character descends into madness after foolishly disposing of his estate between two of his three daughters based on their flattery, bringing tragic consequences for all. The play is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological...
to 1820s Paris in order to rage at a society bereft of all love save the love of money. The centrality of a father in this novel matches Balzac's own position – not only as mentor to his troubled young secretary, Jules Sandeau, but also the fact that he had (most likely) fathered a child, Marie-Caroline, with his otherwise-married lover, Maria Du Fresnay.
In 1836 Balzac took the helm of the Chronique de Paris, a weekly magazine of society and politics. He tried to enforce strict impartiality in its pages and a reasoned assessment of various ideologies. As Rogers notes, "Balzac was interested in any social, political, or economic theory, whether from the right or the left." The magazine failed, but in July 1840 he founded another publication, the Revue Parisienne. It lasted for three issues.
These dismal business efforts – and his misadventures in Sardinia – provided an appropriate milieu in which to set the two-volume Illusions Perdues (Lost Illusions, 1843). The novel concerns Lucien de Rubempré, a young poet trying to make a name for himself, who becomes trapped in the morass of society's darkest contradictions. Lucien's journalism work is informed by Balzac's own failed ventures in the field. Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes
Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes
Honoré de Balzac's Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, translated either as The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans or as A Harlot High and Low, was published in four parts from 1838-1847. It continues the story of Lucien de Rubempré, who was a main character in Illusions perdues, a preceding...
(The Harlot High and Low, 1847) continues Lucien's story. He is trapped by the Abbé Herrera (Vautrin
Vautrin
Vautrin is a character from the novels of French writer Honoré de Balzac in the La Comédie humaine series. His real name is Jacques Collin...
) in a convoluted and disastrous plan to regain social status. The book undergoes a massive temporal rift; the first part (of four) covers a span of six years, while the final two sections focus on just three days.
Le Cousin Pons
Le Cousin Pons
Le Cousin Pons is virtually the last of the 94 works of Honoré de Balzac’s Comédie humaine, which are in both novel and short story form. Begun in 1846 as a novella, or long-short story, it was envisaged as one part of a diptych, Les Parents pauvres , the other part of which was La Cousine Bette...
(1847) and La Cousine Bette
La Cousine Bette
La Cousine Bette |Bette]]) is an 1846 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Set in mid-19th century Paris, it tells the story of an unmarried middle-aged woman who plots the destruction of her extended family. Bette works with Valérie Marneffe, an unhappily married young lady, to seduce and...
(1848) tell the story of Les Parents Pauvres (The Poor Relations). The conniving and wrangling over wills and inheritances reflect the expertise gained by the author as a young law clerk. Balzac's health was deteriorating by this point, making the completion of this pair of books a significant accomplishment.
Many of his novels were initially serialized, like those of Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
. Their length was not predetermined. Illusions Perdues extends to a thousand pages after starting inauspiciously in a small-town print shop, whereas La Fille aux yeux d'or (The Girl with the Golden Eyes, 1835) opens with a broad panorama of Paris but becomes a closely plotted novella
Novella
A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...
of only fifty pages.
Work habits
Balzac's work habits are legendary – he did not work quickly, but toiled with an incredible focus and dedication. His preferred method was to eat a light meal at five or six in the afternoon, then sleep until midnight. He then rose and wrote for many hours, fueled by innumerable cups of black coffee. He would often work for fifteen hours or more at a stretch; he claimed to have once worked for 48 hours with only three hours of rest in the middle.Although Balzac was "by turns a hermit and a vagrant", he managed to stay connected to the social world which nourished his writing. He was friends with Théophile Gautier
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....
and Pierre-Marie-Charles de Bernard du Grail de la Villette
Pierre-Marie-Charles de Bernard du Grail de la Villette
Pierre-Marie-Charles de Bernard du Grail de la Villette , better known simply as Charles de Bernard, was a French writer.-Biography:...
, and he knew Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
. Nevertheless, he did not spend as much time in salons and clubs as did many of his characters. "In the first place he was too busy", explains Saintsbury, "in the second he would not have been at home there…. [H]e felt it was his business not to frequent society but to create it." Nonetheless he often spent long periods at Château de Saché
Château de Saché
The Château de Saché is a stately home built from the converted remains of a feudal castle. It is situated in Saché, Indre-et-Loire, the heart of the French Touraine, in the valley of the river Indre...
, near Tours
Tours
Tours is a city in central France, the capital of the Indre-et-Loire department.It is located on the lower reaches of the river Loire, between Orléans and the Atlantic coast. Touraine, the region around Tours, is known for its wines, the alleged perfection of its local spoken French, and for the...
, the home of his friend Jean de Margonne, his mother's lover and father to her youngest child. Many of Balzac's tormented characters were created in the small second-floor bedroom. Today the Château is a museum dedicated to the author's life.
Marriage and later life
In February 1832 Balzac received a letter from OdessaOdessa
Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...
– lacking a return address and signed only by "L'Étrangère" ("The Foreigner") – expressing sadness at the cynicism and atheism in La Peau de Chagrin and its negative portrayal of women. He responded by purchasing a classified advertisement in the Gazette de France, hoping that his secret critic would find it. Thus began a fifteen-year correspondence between Balzac and "the object of [his] sweetest dreams": Ewelina Hańska
Ewelina Hańska
Eveline Hańska was a Polish noblewoman best known for her marriage to French novelist Honoré de Balzac. Born at the Wierzchownia estate in Volhynia, Hańska married landowner Wacław Hański when she was a teenager...
.
Wacław Hański
Wacław Hański was a Polish noble, landowner, marszałek of the nobility in the Volhynian Governorate. First husband of Ewelina Hańska.-References:...
, a wealthy Polish landowner living near Kiev
Kiev
Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....
. It had been a marriage of convenience
Marriage of convenience
A marriage of convenience is a marriage contracted for reasons other than the reasons of relationship, family, or love. Instead, such a marriage is orchestrated for personal gain or some other sort of strategic purpose, such as political marriage. The phrase is a calque of - a marriage of...
to preserve her family's fortune. In Balzac Ewelina found a kindred spirit for her emotional and social desires, with the added benefit of feeling a connection to the glamorous capital of France. Their correspondence reveals an intriguing balance of passion, propriety and patience; Robb says it is "like an experimental novel in which the female protagonist is always trying to pull in extraneous realities but which the hero is determined to keep on course, whatever tricks he has to use."
Wacław Hański died in 1841, and his widow and her admirer finally had the chance to pursue their affections. Competing with the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...
, Balzac visited her in St. Petersburg in 1843 and impressed himself on her heart. After a series of economic setbacks, health problems, and prohibitions from the Tsar
Tsar
Tsar is a title used to designate certain European Slavic monarchs or supreme rulers. As a system of government in the Tsardom of Russia and Russian Empire, it is known as Tsarist autocracy, or Tsarism...
, the couple were finally able to wed. On 14 March 1850, with Balzac's health in serious decline, they drove from her estate in Wierzchownia (village of Verkhivnia) to a church in Berdyczów (city of Berdychiv, today in Ukraine) and were married. The ten-hour journey to and from the ceremony took a toll on both husband and wife: her feet were too swollen to walk, and he endured severe heart trouble.
Although he married late in life, Balzac had already written two treatises on marriage: Physiologie du Mariage and Scènes de la Vie Conjugale. These works suffered from a lack of firsthand knowledge; Saintsbury points out that "Cœlebs cannot talk of [marriage] with much authority." In late April the newly-weds set off for Paris. His health deteriorated on the way, and Ewelina wrote to her daughter about Balzac being "in a state of extreme weakness" and "sweating profusely". They arrived in the French capital on 20 May, his fifty-first birthday.
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
, who later served as pallbearer and eulogist
Eulogy
A eulogy is a speech or writing in praise of a person or thing, especially one recently deceased or retired. Eulogies may be given as part of funeral services. However, some denominations either discourage or do not permit eulogies at services to maintain respect for traditions...
at Balzac's funeral.
Balzac was buried at the Cimetière du Père Lachaise in Paris. "Today", said Hugo at the ceremony, "we have a people in black because of the death of the man of talent; a nation in mourning for a man of genius." The funeral was attended by "almost every writer in Paris", including Frédérick Lemaître
Frédérick Lemaître
Frédérick Lemaître — birth name Antoine Louis Prosper Lemaître — was a French actor and playwright, one of the most famous players on the celebrated Boulevard du Crime.-Biography:...
, Gustave Courbet
Gustave Courbet
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. The Realist movement bridged the Romantic movement , with the Barbizon School and the Impressionists...
, Dumas père
Alexandre Dumas, père
Alexandre Dumas, , born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie was a French writer, best known for his historical novels of high adventure which have made him one of the most widely read French authors in the world...
and Dumas fils
Alexandre Dumas, fils
Alexandre Dumas, fils was a French author and dramatist. He was the son of Alexandre Dumas, père, also a writer and playwright.-Biography:...
. Later, Balzac became the subject of a monumental statue by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin
Auguste Rodin
François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...
, which stands near the intersection of Boulevard Raspail
Boulevard Raspail
Boulevard Raspail is a boulevard of Paris, in France.Its orientation is north-south, and joins boulevard Saint-Germain with place Denfert-Rochereau whilst traversing 7th, 6th and 14th arrondissements...
and Boulevard Montparnasse. Rodin featured Balzac in several of his smaller sculptures as well.
Writing style
The Comédie Humaine remained unfinished at the time of his death – Balzac had plans to include numerous other books, most of which he never started. He frequently moved between works in progress, and "finished" works were often revised between editions. This piecemeal style is reflective of the author's own life, a possible attempt to stabilize it through fiction. "The vanishing man", writes Pritchett, "who must be pursued from the rue Cassini to … Versailles, Ville d'Avray, Italy, and ViennaVienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
can construct a settled dwelling only in his work."
Realism
Balzac's extensive use of detail, especially the detail of objects, to illustrate the lives of his characters made him an early pioneer of literary realismRealism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
. While he admired and drew inspiration from the Romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
style of Scottish novelist Walter Scott
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....
, Balzac sought to depict human existence through the use of particulars. In the preface to the first edition of Scènes de la Vie privée, he writes: "The author firmly believes that details alone will henceforth determine the merit of works…." Plentiful descriptions of décor, clothing, and possessions help breathe life into the characters. For example, Balzac's friend Hyacinthe de Latouche had knowledge of hanging wallpaper. Balzac transferred this to his descriptions of the Pension Vauquer in Le Père Goriot, making the wallpaper speak of the identities of those living inside.
Some critics consider Balzac's writing exemplary of naturalism – a more pessimistic and analytical form of realism, which seeks to explain human behavior as intrinsically linked with the environment. French novelist Émile Zola
Émile Zola
Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...
declared Balzac the father of the naturalist novel. Zola indicated that, whereas Romantics saw the world through a colored lens, the naturalist sees through a clear glass – precisely the sort of effect Balzac attempted to achieve in his works.
Characters
Balzac sought to present his characters as real people, neither fully good nor fully evil, but fully human. "To arrive at the truth", he wrote in the preface to Le Lys dans la vallée, "writers use whatever literary device seems capable of giving the greatest intensity of life to their characters." "Balzac's characters", Robb notes, "were as real to him as if he were observing them in the outside world." This reality was noted by playwright Oscar WildeOscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
, who said: "One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of [Illusions Perdues protagonist] Lucien de Rubempré…. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh."
At the same time, the characters represent a particular range of social types: the noble soldier, the scoundrel, the proud workman, the fearless spy, the alluring mistress. That Balzac was able to balance the strength of the individual against the representation of the type is evidence of the author's skill. One critic explained that "there is a center and a circumference to Balzac's world."
Balzac's use of repeating characters, moving in and out of the Comédies books, strengthens the realist representation. "When the characters reappear", notes Rogers, "they do not step out of nowhere; they emerge from the privacy of their own lives which, for an interval, we have not been allowed to see." He also used a realist technique which French novelist Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
later named "retrospective illumination", whereby a character's past is revealed long after she or he first appears.
Franz Mesmer
Franz Anton Mesmer , sometimes, albeit incorrectly, referred to as Friedrich Anton Mesmer, was a German physician with an interest in astronomy, who theorised that there was a natural energetic transference that occurred between all animated and inanimate objects that he called magnétisme animal ...
, who pioneered the study of animal magnetism
Animal magnetism
Animal magnetism , in modern usage, refers to a person's sexual attractiveness or raw charisma. As postulated by Franz Mesmer in the 18th century, the term referred to a supposed magnetic fluid or ethereal medium believed to reside in the bodies of animate beings...
. Balzac spoke often of a "nervous and fluid force" between individuals, and Raphaël Valentin's decline in La Peau de Chagrin exemplifies the danger of withdrawing from the company of other people.
Place
Representations of the city, countryside, and building interiors are essential to Balzac's realism, often serving to paint a naturalistic backdrop before which the characters' lives follow a particular course; this gave him a reputation as an early naturalist. Intricate details about locations sometimes stretch for fifteen or twenty pages. As he did with the people around him, Balzac studied these places in depth, traveling to remote locations and surveying notes that he had made on previous visits.The influence of Paris permeates La Comédie. Nature defers to the artificial metropolis, in contrast to the depictions of weather and wildlife in the countryside. "If in Paris", Rogers says, "we are in a man-made region where even the seasons are forgotten, these provincial towns are nearly always pictured in their natural setting." Balzac said, "the streets of Paris possess human qualities and we cannot shake off the impressions they make upon our minds." His labyrinthine city provided a literary model used later by English novelist Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
and Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov....
. The centrality of Paris in La Comédie Humaine is key to Balzac's legacy as a realist. "Realism is nothing if not urban", notes critic Peter Brooks
Peter Brooks
Peter Brooks is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University and Andrew W. Mellon Scholar in the department of Comparative Literature and the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He is formerly Professor in the Department of English and School of Law at the...
; the scene of a young man coming into the city to find his fortune is ubiquitous in the realist novel, and appears repeatedly in Balzac's works, such as Illusions Perdues.
Perspective
Balzac's literary mood evolved over time from one of despondency and chagrin to one of solidarity and courage – but not optimism. La Peau de Chagrin, among his earliest novels, is a pessimistic tale of confusion and destruction. But the cynicism declined as his oeuvre progressed, and the characters of Illusions Perdues reveal sympathy for those who are pushed to one side by society. As part of the 19th century evolution of the novel as a "democratic literary form", Balzac wrote that "les livres sont faits pour tout le monde," ("books are written for everybody").Balzac concerned himself overwhelmingly with the darker essence of human nature and the corrupting influence of middle and high societies. He worked to observe humanity in its most representative state, frequently passing incognito among the masses of Parisian society to do research. He used incidents from his life and the people around him, in works like Eugénie Grandet and Louis Lambert.
Politics
Balzac was a highly conservative Royalist; in many ways, he is the antipode to Victor HugoVictor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
's democratic republicanism. Nevertheless, his keen insight regarding working-class conditions earned him the esteem of many Socialists and Marxists. Engels said that Balzac was his favorite writer.
Legacy
Balzac influenced the writers of his time and beyond. He has been compared to Charles DickensCharles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
and has been called one of Dickens' influences. Critic W. H. Helm calls one "the French Dickens" and the other "the English Balzac". Critic Richard Lehan says that "Balzac was the bridge between the comic realism of Dickens and the naturalism of Zola
Émile Zola
Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...
."
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...
was also substantially influenced by Balzac. Praising his portrayal of society while attacking his prose
Prose
Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...
style, Flaubert once wrote: "What a man he would have been had he known how to write!" While he disdained the label of "realist", Flaubert clearly took heed of Balzac's close attention to detail and unvarnished depictions of bourgeois life. This influence shows in Flaubert's work L'education sentimentale, which owes a debt to Balzac's Illusions Perdues. "What Balzac started", says Lehan, "Flaubert helped finish."
Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
similarly learned from the Realist example; he adored Balzac and studied his works carefully, although he criticised what he called Balzac's "vulgarity." Balzac's story Une Heure de ma Vie (An Hour of my Life, 1822), in which minute details are followed by deep personal reflections, is a clear ancestor of the style which Proust used in À la recherche du temps perdu
In Search of Lost Time
In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past is a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust. His most prominent work, it is popularly known for its considerable length and the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine." The novel is widely...
. However, Proust wrote later in life that the contemporary fashion to rank Balzac higher than Tolstoy was "madness."
Perhaps the author most affected by Balzac was American expatriate novelist Henry James
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
. In 1878 James wrote with sadness about the lack of contemporary attention paid to Balzac, and lavished praise on him in four essays (in 1875, 1877, 1902, and 1913). In 1878 James wrote: "Large as Balzac is, he is all of one piece and he hangs perfectly together." He wrote with admiration of Balzac's attempt to portray in writing "a beast with a hundred claws." In his own novels James explored more of the psychological motives of the characters and less of the historical sweep exhibited by Balzac – a conscious style preference. "[T]he artist of the Comédie Humaine," he wrote, "is half smothered by the historian." Still, both authors used the form of the realist novel to probe the machinations of society and the myriad motives of human behavior.
Balzac's vision of a society in which class, money and personal ambition are the major players has been endorsed by critics of both left-wing and right-wing political tendencies. Marxist Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
wrote: "I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together." Balzac has received high praise from critics as diverse as Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...
and Camille Paglia
Camille Paglia
Camille Anna Paglia , is an American author, teacher, and social critic. Paglia, a self-described dissident feminist, has been a Professor at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania since 1984...
. In 1970 Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
published S/Z
S/Z
S/Z, published in 1970, is Roland Barthes's structuralist analysis of "Sarrasine", the short story by Honoré de Balzac. Barthes methodically moves through the text of the story, denoting where and how different codes of meaning function...
, a detailed analysis of Balzac's story Sarrasine
Sarrasine
Sarrasine is a novella written by Honoré de Balzac. It was published in 1830 , and is part of his Comédie Humaine.-Commentary:...
and a key work in structuralist literary criticism.
Balzac has also influenced popular culture. Many of his works have been made into popular films and television serials, including Les Chouans (1947), Le Père Goriot (1968 BBC mini-series), and La Cousine Bette (1974 BBC mini-series, starring Margaret Tyzack
Margaret Tyzack
Margaret Maud Tyzack, CBE was a British actress.-Early life:Tyzack was born in Essex, England, the daughter of Doris and Thomas Edward Tyzack. She grew up in West Ham...
and Helen Mirren
Helen Mirren
Dame Helen Mirren, DBE is an English actor. She has won an Academy Award for Best Actress, four SAG Awards, four BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, four Emmy Awards, and two Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Awards.-Early life and family:...
; 1998 film, starring Jessica Lange
Jessica Lange
Jessica Phyllis Lange is an American actress who has worked in film, theatre and television. The recipient of several awards, including two Academy Awards, four Golden Globes and one Emmy, Lange is regarded as one of the première female actors of her generation.Lange was discovered by producer...
). He is included in François Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
's 1959 film, The 400 Blows
The 400 Blows
The 400 Blows is a 1959 French film directed by François Truffaut. One of the defining films of the French New Wave, it displays many of the characteristic traits of the movement. The story revolves around Antoine Doinel, an ordinary adolescent in Paris, who is thought by his parents and teachers...
. Truffaut believed Balzac and Proust to be the greatest of French writers. He was also adapted into a character in Orson Scott Card
Orson Scott Card
Orson Scott Card is an American author, critic, public speaker, essayist, columnist, and political activist. He writes in several genres, but is primarily known for his science fiction. His novel Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead both won Hugo and Nebula Awards, making Card the...
's alternate history series The Tales of Alvin Maker
The Tales of Alvin Maker
The Tales of Alvin Maker is a series of novels by Orson Scott Card that revolve around the experiences of a young man, Alvin Miller, who discovers he has incredible powers for creating and shaping things around him...
; he is presented as a crude but deeply witty and insightful man. Chinese author Dai Sijie
Dai Sijie
Dai Sijie is a French author and filmmaker of Chinese ancestry.-Biography:Dai Sijie was born in China in 1954. Because he came from an educated middle-class family, the Maoist government sent him to a reeducation camp in rural Sichuan from 1971 to 1974, during the Cultural Revolution. After his...
published Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse Chinoise
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Dai Sijie, and published in 2000 in French and in English in 2001. It is the author's first published novel. Its original French title is Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise...
(Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress)(2000), in which a suitcase filled with novels helps to sustain city youths sent to the countryside for "re-education" during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It was made into a film (adapted and directed by the author) in 2002. The Japanese rock band Balzac
Balzac (band)
Balzac is a Japanese punk band formed in 1992 in Osaka. The band was founded by singer and songwriter Hirosuke Nishiyama, who has remained the only constant member of the band since its creation...
is also named in his honor.
Works
Tragic verseIncomplete at time of death
Published pseudonymously
As "Lord R'Hoone", in collaboration
As "Horace de Saint-Aubin"
Published anonymously
Selected titles from La Comédie humaine
- Les ChouansLes ChouansLes Chouans is an 1829 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac and included in the Scènes de la vie militaire section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine. Set in the French region of Brittany, the novel combines military history with a love story between the aristocratic...
(1829) - SarrasineSarrasineSarrasine is a novella written by Honoré de Balzac. It was published in 1830 , and is part of his Comédie Humaine.-Commentary:...
(1830) - La Peau de chagrinLa Peau de chagrinLa Peau de chagrin is an 1831 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac . Set in early 19th-century Paris, it tells the story of a young man who finds a magic piece of shagreen that fulfills his every desire. For each wish granted, however, the skin shrinks and consumes a portion of...
(1831) - Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnuLe Chef-d'œuvre inconnuLe Chef-d’œuvre inconnu is a short story by Honoré de Balzac. It was first published in the newspaper L'Artiste with the title "Maître Frenhofer" in August 1831...
(1831) - Le Colonel ChabertLe Colonel Chabert (novel)Le Colonel Chabert is an 1832 novella by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac . It is included in his series of novels known as La Comédie humaine , which depicts and parodies French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy...
(1832) - Le Curé de ToursLe Curé de ToursLe Curé de Tours is a long short story by Honoré de Balzac, written in 1832. Originally entitled Les Célibataires , it was published in that year in volume III of the 2nd edition of Scènes de la vie privée, then republished in 1833 and again in 1839, still with the same title but as one of the...
(1832) - La Fille aux yeux d'orThe Girl with the Golden EyesLa Fille aux yeux d'or is a novella by Honoré de Balzac. It is the third part of the Thirteen series, which includes the short stories Ferragus and La Duchesse de Langeais...
(1833) - Eugénie GrandetEugénie GrandetEugénie Grandet is an 1833 novel by Honoré de Balzac about miserliness, and how it is bequeathed from the father to the daughter, Eugénie, through her unsatisfying love attachment with her cousin. As is usual with Balzac, all the characters in the novel are fully realized...
(1833) - Le Contrat de mariage (1835)
- Le Père GoriotLe Père GoriotLe Père Goriot is an 1835 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac , included in the Scènes de la vie Parisienne section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine...
(1835) - Le Lys dans la vallée (1835)
- La Rabouilleuse (1842)
- Illusions perdues (I, 1837; II, 1839; III, 1843)
- La Cousine BetteLa Cousine BetteLa Cousine Bette |Bette]]) is an 1846 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Set in mid-19th century Paris, it tells the story of an unmarried middle-aged woman who plots the destruction of her extended family. Bette works with Valérie Marneffe, an unhappily married young lady, to seduce and...
(1846) - Le Cousin PonsLe Cousin PonsLe Cousin Pons is virtually the last of the 94 works of Honoré de Balzac’s Comédie humaine, which are in both novel and short story form. Begun in 1846 as a novella, or long-short story, it was envisaged as one part of a diptych, Les Parents pauvres , the other part of which was La Cousine Bette...
(1847) - Splendeurs et misères des courtisanesSplendeurs et misères des courtisanesHonoré de Balzac's Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, translated either as The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans or as A Harlot High and Low, was published in four parts from 1838-1847. It continues the story of Lucien de Rubempré, who was a main character in Illusions perdues, a preceding...
(1847)
Plays
- L'École des ménages (1839)
- Vautrin (1839)
- Les Ressources de Quinola (1842)
- Paméla Giraud (1842)
- La Marâtre (1848)
- Mercadet ou le faiseur (1848)
Tales
- Contes drolatiques (1832–37)
- La Grande Bretèche
- An Episode of terror
Summaries, reviews and other information about Balzac and his works are being collated at the collaborative blog La Comedie Humaine
External links
(plain text and HTML)- http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A%28texts%29%20-contributor%3Agutenberg%20AND%20%28subject%3A%22Balzac%2C%20Honor%C3%A9%20de%201799-1850%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Balzac%2C%20Honor%C3%A9%20de%2C%201799-1850%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Honor%C3%A9%20de%20Balzac%22%20OR%20title%3A%22Honor%C3%A9%20de%20Balzac%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Honor%C3%A9%20de%20Balzac%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Balzac%2C%20Honore%20de%201799-1850%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Balzac%2C%20Honore%20de%2C%201799-1850%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Honore%20de%20Balzac%22%20OR%20title%3A%22Honore%20de%20Balzac%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Honore%20de%20Balzac%22%29Works by or about Honore de Balzac] at Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
(scanned books original editions color illustrated) - Honoré de Balzac's works: text, concordances and frequency lists
- Balzac and anthropology
- Balzac on mimetism, language, desire for the absolute
- Reader's Guide: Themes in the Novels of Balzac
- Free book downloads in HTML, PDF, text formats at ebooktakeaway.com
- Pathfinder guide to Balzac and The Human Comedy
- Victor Hugo's eulogy for Honoré de Balzac
- Special Issue of Lingua Romana on Balzac