Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of almost 100 novels and plays collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815.
Easton Press Honoré de Balzac books
Old Goriot - The Collector's Library of Famous Editions - 1993
Eugenie Grandet - The Collector's Library of Famous Editions - 1998
Franklin Library Honoré de Balzac books
Droll Stories - Collected Stories of the World's Greatest Writers - 1978
Pere Goriot - World's Best Loved Books - 1980
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Who was Honoré de Balzac?
Balzac's literary output began with chronicles and sketches on widely varied social and artistic topics. The journals to which he contributed were increasingly looking for short fiction, which Balzac was able to provide. A collection Scènes de la vie privée (Scenes from Private Life) came out in 1829, and was well received: these were tales told with a journalistic eye which looked into the fabric of modern life and did not shun social and political realities. Balzac had found a distinctive voice.
He had already turned out potboiler historical novels in the manner of Walter Scott and Anne Radcliffe, on commission from publishers, but only under pseudonyms ('Horace de Saint-Aubin', for example, was responsible for the scandalous Vicaire des Ardennes (1822), banned for its depiction of pseudo-incestuous relations and, more importantly, of a married priest). With Le Dernier chouan, however (1829) he entered the mainstream as an author of full-length fiction.
This sober tale of provincial France in Revolutionary times was soon overshadowed by the success in 1831 of La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass's Skin), a fable-like tale delineating the excesses and vanities of contemporary life. With public acclaim and the assurance of publication, Balzac's subsequent novels began to shape themselves into a broad canvas depicting the turbulent unfolding of destinies amidst the visible finery and squalor of Paris, and the dramas hidden under the surface of respectability in the quieter world of provincial family life.
In Le Père Goriot (Old Father Goriot, 1835), his next big success, he transposed the story of King Lear to 1820s Paris to rage at a society bereft of all love save the love of money. His novels are unified by a vision of a world in which the social and political hierarchies of the Ancien Régime had been replaced by a pseudo-aristocracy of favouritism, patronage and commercial fortunes, and where a "new priesthood" of financiers had filled the gap left by the collapse of organised religion. "There is nothing left for literature but mockery in a world that has collapsed" he remarked in the preface to La peau de chagrin, but the cynicism grew less as his oeuvre progressed and he revealed great sympathy for those whom society pushes to one side when the old certainties have gone and everything is up for grabs.
Along with shorter pieces and novellas there followed notably Les Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, 1843), Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (The Harlot High and Low, 1847), Le Cousin Pons (1847) and La Cousine Bette (1848). Of novels in provincial settings Le curé de Tours (The Vicar of Tours, 1832), Eugénie Grandet (1833), Ursule Mirouet (1842) and Modeste Mignon (1844) are highly regarded.
Many of his novels were initially serialized, like those of Dickens, but in Balzac's case there was no telling how long they would end up. Illusions perdues extends to a thousand pages after starting inauspiciously in a small-town print shop, whereas La fille aux yeux d'Or (Tiger-eyes, 1835) opens grandly with a panorama of Paris but ties itself up as a closely-plotted novella of only fifty.
Balzac's work habits were legendary he wrote for up to 15 hours a day, fuelled by innumerable cups of black coffee, and without relinquishing the social life which was the source of his observation and research. (Many of his stories start with fragments of the plot overheard at social gatherings, before uncovering the real story behind the gossip.) He revised obsessively, sending back printer's proofs almost obscured by changes and additions to be reset. Even a sturdy physique like his paid the price of his ever expanding plans for new works and new editions of old ones. There was unevenness in this prodigious output, but some works which are really only work-in-progress such as Les employés (The Government Clerks, 1841), are of real interest.
The writer would often spend long periods staying at Château de Saché, near Tours, the home of his friend Jean de Margonne, who was his mother's lover and the father of her youngest child. Many of his often tormented characters were conceived in the small second floor bedroom were he would often work long into the night. Today the Chateau is an evocative museum dedicated to the life of Balzac.
Curiously, he continued to worry about money and status even after he was rich and respected, and believed he could branch out into politics or into the theatre without letting up on his novels. His letters and memoranda reveal that ambition was not only ingrained in his character, but acted on him like a drug every success leading him on to enlarge his plans still further and ahead of time, around 1847, his strength began to fail. A polarity can be found in his cast of characters between the profligates who expend their life-force and the misers who live long but become dried-up and withdrawn. His contemporary Victor Hugo exiled himself to Guernsey in disgust at French politics, but lived on to write poems about being a grandfather decades after Balzac's death. Balzac himself could not, by temperament, draw back or curtail his vision.
Death
In 1849, as his health was failing, Balzac travelled to Poland to visit Eveline Hanska, a wealthy Polish landowner in Wierzchownia, with whom he had corresponded for more than 15 years. Enduring the writer's complicated terms of endearment, such as "nelly curieux," the meddling Eveline lavished Balzac with patience throughout his stay in Poland. They married in Berdyczów in 1850, but shortly thereafter Balzac departed for the western coast of France to mediate the continued enrollment of his brother David in the prestigious seminary, "Études Mathématiques." The Breton Provost - a direct descendent of Bishop Berkeley- informed Balzac that there was little likelihood that the protracted matriculation of his brother would be granted and three months later, Balzac died.
He lies buried in the cemetery of Père Lachaise, overlooking Paris, and is commemorated by a monumental statue commissioned from Auguste Rodin, standing near the intersection of Boulevard Raspail and Boulevard Montparnasse. "Henceforth" said Victor Hugo at his funeral "men's eyes will be turned towards the faces not of those who are the rulers but of those who are the thinkers." the funeral was also attended by Frédéric Lemaître, Gustave Courbet, Dumas père and Dumas fils et al.
Legacy
After his death Balzac became recognised as one of the fathers of Realism in literature, and distinct in his approach from the "pure" Romantics like Victor Hugo. La Comédie humaine spanned more than 90 novels and short stories in an attempt to comprehend and depict the realities of life in contemporary bourgeois France. In the 20th Century his vision of a society in flux, where class, money and personal ambition were the major players, achieved the distinction of being endorsed equally by critics of Left-wing and Right-wing political tendencies.
He guided European fiction away from the overriding influence of Walter Scott and the Gothic school, by showing that modern life could be recounted as vividly as Scott recounted his historical tales, and that mystery and intrigue did not need ghosts and crumbling castles for props. Maupassant, Flaubert and Zola were writers of the next generation who were directly influenced by him, and Marcel Proust acknowledged his influence.
In one of his last tales, Les comédiens sans le savoir (The Unwitting Actors, 1847) a provincial is rescued from a ruinous speculation by a boulevardier who asks him "Will you not now concede, my friend, that Paris is bigger than you are?". What Balzac had brought to fiction was the social context, a factor unrecognized by the Romantics, for whom the inner world of the individual was all that counted.
In the 1960s, the counter-culture unearthed two strange and mystical novels from Balzac's early years: the quasi-autobiographical Louis Lambert (1832) and Séraphîta (1834), in which an angel guides the gender-bending hero/heroine around the solar-system. Some academics have claimed that alchemy, animal-magnetism and other esoteric theories underlie Balzac's interpretation of society, and that his credentials as a Realist should be questioned. This idea, explored in particular by French critic Albert Béguin in his collection of essays Balzac lu et relu (1965), emerges from a remark attributed to Charles Baudelaire, who observed that Balzac's work was not so much 'observational' as 'visionary'. More recently, critics have conjoined these two models of a visionary and Realist Balzac to create a more nuanced version of his work. The critical literature on Balzac is moreover very large, and one can find almost any shade of opinion if one looks for it.
In 1970 Roland Barthes published S/Z – a detailed analysis of Balzac's story Sarrasine and a key work in structuralist literary criticism.
It is Balzac the observer of society, morals and human psychology who continues to appeal to readers today. His novels have always remained in print. His vivid realism and his encyclopedic gifts as a recorder of his age outweigh the sketchiness and inconsistent quality of some of his works.
In the 1990s, one of Balzac's stories, A Passion in the Desert was made into a feature film with the same name starring Ben Daniels.
Balzac was adapated into a character in Orson Scott Card's alternate history novels of the series The Tales of Alvin Maker. In this he is presented as a crude but deepy witty and insightful man.
Honoré de Balzac quotes
"The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness."
"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
"The more one judges, the less one loves."
"Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine."
"Love is a game in which one always cheats."
"The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed."
"Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact."
"Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation."
"The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin."
Source and additional information: Honoré de Balzac