Honore de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac was a French literary artist who produced a vast number of novels and short stories collectively called La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). He helped to establish the traditional form of the novel and is generally considered to be one of the greatest novelists of all time. Balzac’s works offer a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, especially the upper and middle classes. His realistic characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many famous writers, such as Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James. Balzac was born in Tours, France, in 1799. He was the second son of Bernard-François Balssa, a former peasant who became a civil servant, and Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier, who came from a family of Parisian cloth merchants. Balzac had a troubled relationship with his parents, who sent him away to boarding school at an early age. He later studied law in Paris, but soon abandoned it to pursue a literary career. He wrote under various pseudonyms and experimented with different genres, such as drama, journalism, and criticism. He also tried to be a publisher, printer, businessman, and politician, but failed in all these endeavors. Balzac’s breakthrough came in 1831 with the publication of La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass's Skin), a novel that combined realism and fantasy. He then began to work on a series of interconnected novels that would form La Comédie humaine, which he divided into three sections: Etudes de moeurs (Studies of Manners), Etudes analytiques (Analytical Studies), and Etudes philosophiques (Philosophical Studies). Some of his most famous novels include Eugénie Grandet (1833), Le Père Goriot (1835), Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, 1837–1843), and La Cousine Bette (Cousin Bette, 1846). Balzac’s novels depict the social, economic, political, and cultural changes that occurred in France after the French Revolution and the rise of capitalism. He explored themes such as ambition, greed, love, marriage, family, class, money, power, corruption, crime, and justice. He also created memorable characters from all walks of life, such as Rastignac, Vautrin, Goriot, Grandet, Bette, Nucingen, Rubempré, and many others. Balzac’s personal life was also full of drama and romance. He had many affairs with women of different social backgrounds and statuses. He was engaged to Madame de Berny, a married woman who was 22 years older than him. He also had a long-distance relationship with Ewelina Hańska (née Contessa Rzewuska), a Polish aristocrat who was married to a Russian count. They exchanged hundreds of letters over 15 years before they finally met in person in 1833. They married in March 1850 in Berdychiv (now Ukraine), after the death of Ewelina’s husband. Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life due to his intense writing schedule and lifestyle. He often worked for 15 hours a day without rest or sleep. He consumed large amounts of coffee and other stimulants to keep himself awake and productive. He also spent lavishly on clothes, furniture, art, and books. He accumulated huge debts that he struggled to pay off. He died in Paris on August 18th 1850 at the age of 51 from heart failure. He was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery, where his tombstone bears the inscription: He was a giant