Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850)

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
Love is a game in which one always cheats.

Born in a middle class family, he studied law at the Paris School of Law, although he mostly attended literary courses. He was first employed by an attorney, then in a notary's office, and later he tried business with unsuccessful results. Finally, his family gave him the consent to pursue a literary career. Due to the failure of his first works (a tragedy in verses and a philosophic novel), he looked for an economic independence through becoming a journalist and a narrative commercial writer. His sentimental relationship with "Dilecta", Laura de Berny, who was 20 years older than him, supported him in that period. At 30 years, cornered by debt, he finally had his first success with an historic novel, that was immediately followed by a cultural essay. These two brought him popularity. That was the beginning of his brilliant career as a writer and journalist, which he was intensely dedicated to (forced by his debts). He wrote almost a hundred novels or stories, that would later collect under the name of 'Human Comedy." In 1850, when his body was already very debilitated by the hard work, he married Eva Hanska, a Polish noblewoman, with whom he had troublesome relationship for many years. Several months after his marriage, he died. Creator of the realist novel, Balzac had a strong influence on all 8th century fictional works; the originality of his work lay in the variety of his characters, on the exact description of the environment, and in the discovery of tragedy in ordinary life.

Criticism

Balzac's men and women are, somehow, as individual as any characters of romanticism. His style helped to initiate the new realist school which succeeded romanticism. This was the method of the photograph or of the daguerreotype, the close reproduction of the details of life. Today, the novels of Balzac are valued as documents for the study of the period they chiefly describe, the reign of Louis Philippe. Balzac's stories are apt to deal with the selfish side of life, but those results were due to the social conditions of the time or from the prejudices of his mind than from the inherent demands of his style.

Works

Les Chouans (1829, first published as Le Dernier Chouan)
La Peau de chagrin (1831)
“La Comédie humaine”: Louis Lambert (1832), Eugénie Grandet (1833), La Recherche de l’absolu (1834), Le Père Goriot (1835), Les Illusions perdues (1837), César Birotteau (1837), La Cousine Bette (1847), and Le Cousin Pons (1847).

Additional Information
Balzac's Oevre http://www.concordance.com/balzac.htm