Honoré de Balzac
(born May 20, 1799, Tours, France — died Aug. 18, 1850, Paris) French writer. Balzac began working as a clerk
in Paris at about age 16. An early attempt at a business career left him with huge debts, and for decades he
toiled incessantly to improve his worsening financial condition. In 1829 his novels and stories began to achieve
some success, and his early masterpieces soon followed. In a vast series he collectively called The Human
Comedy, eventually numbering some 90 novels and novellas, he sought to produce a comprehensive picture of
contemporary society by presenting all the varieties of human nature. Among his masterpieces are Eugénie
Grandet (1833), Père Goriot (1835), Lost Illusions (1837 – 43), A Harlot High and Low (1843 – 47), and Cousin
Bette(1846). His novels are notable for their great narrative drive, their large casts of vital and diverse
characters, and their obsessive interest in and examination of virtually all spheres of life. His best-known story
collection is his Droll Stories, 3 vol. (1832 – 37). His tumultuous life was one of mounting debts and almost
incessant toil, with frequent bouts of writing feverishly for 15 hours at a stretch (his death has been attributed to
overwork and excessive coffee consumption). He is generally considered the major early influence on realism,
or naturalism, in the novel and one of the greatest fiction writers of all time.
Biography:
Honoré de Balzac
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The French novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was the first writer to use fiction to convey the total social
scene prevailing within one country at a particular period in its history. Commonly regarded as the founder of
social realism, he also had affinities with the romantics.
Born at Tours on May 20, 1799, Honoré de Balzac was sent as a boarder, at the age of 8, to the Oratorian
College of Vendôme, an old-fashioned school where the discipline was harsh and conditions primitive. The
semiautobiographical work Louis Lambert (1832) gives a fairly faithful account of this period of Balzac's life. The
boy sought refuge from his surroundings in books, but excessive reading eventually brought on some kind of
nervous malady, and he was brought home in 1813. The following year his family moved to Paris, where he
completed his secondary education and in 1819 took a degree in law. The not inconsiderable legal knowledge
Balzac acquired at this time, both in the lecture hall and in the office of the solicitor for whom he worked, was
put to good use in a number of the novels and stories of his maturity that turn on disputed legacies (Le Cousin
Pons, 1846-1847), marriage settlements (Le Contrat de mariage, 1835), petitions
in lunacy (L'Interdiction, 1836), and bankruptcy proceedings (César Birotteau, 1837;Illusions perdues, 1837-
1843).
Early Life
To his parents' disappointment, Balzac refused to enter the legal profession and instead declared his intention to
devote himself to a literary career. His father gave him a small allowance on the understanding that at the end of
2 years he should produce a masterpiece or else abandon his ambitions. Although the expected great work did
not materialize, Balzac persisted, and between 1820 and 1825 he wrote a number of sensational or humorous
novels, some of them in collaboration with friends and none signed with his own name. These books
were devoid of literary merit, but he earned his living by them and learned some useful lessons in the art of
fiction.
Casting about for ways of making his fortune more rapidly, Balzac next set himself up as a publisher. In 1825,
he launched one-volume editions of the works of the French authors Molière and La Fontaine, but they did not
sell well. Undaunted, he acquired a printing business on borrowed capital and later a type foundry. These
commercial ventures were also failures, and Balzac's brief business career ended in 1828, when his affairs were
liquidated, leaving him with very large debts.
Thereafter he returned to literature and in 1829 published the first novel that he signed with his own name. This
was Le Dernier Chouan (the title was changed in later editions to Les Chouans), a historical novel based on the
Breton rebellion against the republican government in 1799. Balzac had undertaken careful research on the
background, traveling to Britanny in order to ensure that his descriptions of the countryside and its inhabitants
would be authentic. Since there was avogue for historical novels, the book was well received. But real fame
came to him 2 years later, when he published La Peau de chagrin, a semifantastic story in which the
talismanic shagreen skinof the title is discovered to have the magical property of granting whatever wish the
owner utters. Every time the skin is used in this way, however, it shrinks, and the young man who has acquired
it knows that his own life-span contracts correspondingly. The tale thus becomes anallegory of the conflict
between the will to enjoy and the will to survive, two principles which, according to Balzac,
are utterly irreconcilable.
Author and Socialite
Throughout the 1830s Balzac engaged in furious activity, working hard and enjoying himself hugely, in reckless
disregard of the moral he had enunciated in La Peau de chagrin. The constant struggle to earn enough to keep
his creditors at bay drove him to impose on himself a timetableof work that eventually ruined even his robust
constitution. And as the pressure of his commitments to publishers mounted, he increased his hours from 10 to
14 or even 18 a day, keeping himself awake by frequent cups of strong coffee.
Whenever Balzac earned a respite from his herculean toil, he would plunge into bouts of socialdissipation which
were only a little less exhausting. Though of sober disposition - he never drank to excess and considered the use
of tobacco to be enfeebling - he enjoyed good food and was capable of devouring gargantuan meals. In
appearance he was unprepossessing, a thick-set man with massive neck and fleshy chin, his enormous head
crowned by a mop of greasy black hair. But his magnetic gaze unfailingly compelled attention. He did his best to
offset the inelegance of his person by dressing splendidly and wearing ostentatious jewels. In spite of this strain
of vulgarity, the liveliness of his conversation and the reputation his books had given him of being an expert on
feminine psychology made him a welcome guest in a number of fashionable salons.
The Human Comedy
Balzac's lifework, apart from the early novels already mentioned and a few plays toward the end of his career,
consists of a massive series of some 90 novels and short stories collected under the title La Comédie
humaine (The Human Comedy). It was not until 1841 that this title, probably suggested to him by
Dante's Divine Comedy, made its appearance. The Human Comedy was subdivided into smaller cycles of novels:
"Scenes of Private Life," "Scenes of Political Life," Scenes of "Parisian," "Provincial," "Country" Life, and so on.
There was a separate group of "Philosophical Studies," in which Balzac gave freer rein to his love of the fantastic
and themacabre and to his interest in metapsychical phenomena such as thought transference andmesmerism.
The "Philosophical Studies" often have historical settings, whereas the rest of The Human Comedy consists of
stories that are set in Balzac's own time and describe various aspects of French society during the period of the
Bourbon restoration (1814-1830) and of the July Monarchy, which followed.
Apart from the unifying element provided by a common historical background, Balzac also devised an original
method of linking the novels by causing characters that he had introduced into one novel to reappear in
subsequent stories. This practice, extended more and more as The Human Comedy took shape, enhanced the
realistic illusion and also permitted Balzac to develop the psychology of individual characters more fully than
would have been feasible within the limits of a single novel.
Social and Ethical Assumptions
In the important preface to his collected works that Balzac wrote in 1842, he defined his function as that of
"secretary of French society." Accordingly, every class of people, from the cultivatedaristocrat down to
the brutish peasant, has a place in The Human Comedy. In the novel Le Père Goriot, lodging-house keepers,
usurers, duchesses, students, retired clerks, and gangsters rubshoulders in a manner strangely convincing in
spite of the inherent improbability of the situations.
Balzac often ascribed the basest motivations to his characters. He once wrote that the lust for gold and the
search for pleasure were the sole principles that ruled humanity. Although capable of dramatizing cases of
magnificent self-sacrifice or touching expiation (as he does in Le Lys dans la vallée, 1836, and Le Curé de
village, 1838-1839), in the vast majority of instances Balzac presents naked self-seeking served
by feverish energy and unflagging willpower. This is where the realism of his work shades off into something
else. It was the French poet Baudelaire who first pointed out that Balzac was primarily a visionary, and it was he
too who said that Balzac's characters were all replicas of their creator since they were all possessed of "genius."
In the sense that single-minded determination to achieve one's aim is part of genius, the remark has
considerable validity. The monomaniac-the man obsessed by some transcendent purpose or passion or perhaps
by some vice, to the point of sacrificing his own comfort and the welfare of his dependents - is constantly
encountered in Balzac's more impressive novels, among them Eugénie Grandet (1833), Le Père
Goriot (1834), La Recherche de l'absolu (1834), and La Cousine Bette(1846).
It is true that Balzac was writing in an age characterized more by individual endeavor than by collective effort.
This was a period when the struggle for existence among the poor or for social advancement among the less
fortunate was at its fiercest. The rigidly hierarchical framework of society which had existed before the French
Revolution had disappeared, and no solidly stratifiedsocial organization had yet replaced it. Balzac himself
deplored the anarchic individualism that he observed around him, and in the comments strewn through his
novels he argues desperately in favor of restoring the authority of central government under an absolute
monarch as a means ofextinguishing the jungle warfare of conflicting interests. Human nature, in his view, was
fundamentally depraved; any machinery, legal, political, or religious, whereby the inherent wickedness of men
could be held in check ought to be repaired and strengthened. But this teaching went against the tendencies of
the age; toward the end of his career, in the mid-1840s, Balzac could see France heading for a new popular
revolution which would finally sweep away the domination of "throne and altar." This gloomy prospect partly
accounts for the deeperpessimism of his last works.
Marriage and Death
During his last years Balzac suffered increasingly from poor health, and his morale had been weakened by the
constant frustrations and disappointments he endured in the one great love affair of his life. In 1832 he had
received his first letter from Madame Hanska, the wife of a Polish nobleman who owned extensive estates in the
Russian Empire. Balzac was flattered and excited, and he met her in Switzerland the following year. Thereafter
they kept up an ardentcorrespondence, interrupted by occasional vacations spent together in different parts of
Europe. In 1841 her husband died, but Madame Hanska obstinately refused to marry Balzac despite his earnest
pleas. Only when he fell gravely ill, during a last visit to her mansion in the Ukraine, did she consent. The
wedding took place at her home on March 14, 1850. The long journey back to France took a serious toll on
Balzac's health, and he died in Paris on Aug. 18, 1850, only a few weeks after his return.
Further Reading
Herbert J. Hunt, Honoré de Balzac (1957) is a concise biography. More detailed is André Maurois,Prometheus:
The Life of Balzac (1965; trans. 1965). Stefan Zweig, Balzac (1946; trans. 1947), still repays study. The fullest
account of Balzac's literary output is Herbert J. Hunt, Balzac's Comédie Humaine (1959), in which the novels and
other writings are studied in chronological order. In F.W.J. Hemmings, Balzac: An Interpretation of "La Comédie
Humaine" (1967), an attempt has been made to trace certain thematic patterns in the work as a whole. A
thorough study of The Comédie humaine is Félicien Marceau, Balzac and His World (1955; trans. 1967). Other
useful general studies are Samuel Rogers, Balzac and the Novel (1953), and E.J. Oliver, Honoré de
Balzac (1964).
Balzac, Honoré [Honoré de Balzac] (1799-1850). French novelist, author of La Comédie humaine. Son of
a middleranking provincial civil servant, Balzac was educated at the Collège des Oratoriens at Vendôme and then
apprenticed to a lawyer in Paris. He obtained permission to spend two years learning to write on his own, living
in a garret, composed a tragedy in verse,Cromwell, and was then advised by family friends to abandon all
literary ambition. In the 1820s he worked as a journalist and hack, penning several genre novels under the
pseudonyms of Horace de Saint-Aubin and Lord R'Hoone (an anagram of Honoré); he then became a publisher,
and, for a short while, a printer and type-founder. The collapse of these business ventures left him with large
debts, principally to his mother. Balzac's slow development contrasts with the precocious genius of Victor Hugo,
almost his exact contemporary.
In 1828 he published a historical novel, Le Dernier Chouan ou la Bretagne en 1800 (later renamedLes Chouans),
under his own name. La Physiologie du mariage, an anonymous compilation of anecdotes in the style of
contemporary guides to practical subjects, caused a minor scandal in 1829 [see Physiologies]. Balzac first
achieved public success in 1830 with La Peau de chagrin, a ‘philosophical tale’ in a brilliant, irreverent, and
wittily Romantic style. After the July Revolution of 1830, and partly out of his disappointment with the new
regime of the citizen king Louis-Philippe, Balzac adopted the style ‘de Balzac’ together with provocatively
reactionary political attitudes. In that year he also published a set of sober short stories about marriage in the
contemporary world, called Scènes de la vie privée, and it was to that vein that he returned in 1833 with the
eight-volume series of Études de mœurs au XIXe siècle, which included Eugénie Grandet. From then on he
worked at a tremendous rate, fuelling his imagination with coffee made from unroasted beans, sitting at his desk
throughout most of the night wearing a monk's robe over his increasingly corpulent body. His ambition was to
describe a whole society. The device of reappearing characters, first used in Le Père Goriot (1834), links the
plots of novels and stories set in widely differing social situations and has the effect also of creating gaps
between the characters' reappearances, gaps which Balzac tried to fill with yet more stories. In 1841 he
organized all that he had written into a single work to which he gave the title La Comédie humaine, and the first
of the planned 16 volumes appeared in 1842. A 17th volume was added in 1847.
Balzac's father died in 1829, the last-but-one survivor of a tontine. (Had he lived a few weeks more, he would
have solved his son's financial problems.) Balzac remained close to his mother, towards whom he felt
considerable resentment and who outlived him. His warmest relationship was with his sister, Laure Surville. He
had several amorous liaisons, notably with a much older woman, Laure de Berny, with the duchesse de Castries,
with Caroline Marbouty, and with the Contessa Guidoboni-Visconti, by whom he may have had a child. In 1832
he received a mysterious message from a Russian countess, Evelyne de Hanska, and began a correspondence
with her. It became the great affair of his life. Balzac's voluminous letters to Madame Hanska constitute an
unusual record of a writer's life over a period of nearly 16 years, and are published separately from his other
correspondence.
Balzac was also a society figure in the 1830s and, despite his debts, equipped himself with his own coach and
horses. He could not keep such expensive trappings for very long. He was less in public view in the 1840s and
became somewhat embittered at the success of the roman-feuilleton, which overshad-owed the publication of his
complete works. He made attempts to write for the theatre, but his most substantial play, Mercadet ou le
Faiseur, a brilliant comedy of manners and of money, was not per formed until after his death. Somewhat adrift
in revolutionary Paris in 1848, Balzac went to live with Madame Hanska on her estate at Wierzchownia, in the
Ukraine; he finally married her at Berdichev in March 1850. (Chekhov's line, ‘Balzac was married at Berdichev’
has become a Russian proverb, meaning something like: fact is stranger than fiction.) Balzac fell ill on the return
journey to Paris, took to his bed on arrival, and died. Hugo wrote a moving account of him on his death-bed, and
gave the funeral oration, in which he claimed that, ‘whether he knew it or not, whether he wished it or not’, the
novelist had been a revolutionary writer.
Balzac's best-known novels—Le Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, La Cousine Bette—contain many long and detailed
descriptions of places, interiors, and people. He was fascinated by the relationship between outward appearance
and inner reality, and subscribed, for example, to the bogus theory of phrenology, which attributed meaning to
the shape of the skull. He strove to interpret the pictures which he painted in words, but he left much that is
simply ‘there’: according toBarthes, the residue of uninterpreted detail is what creates the ‘reality effect’ in
Balzac's descriptions. His visual style of description was what first earned him the label of Realist in the critical
writing of Champfleury and Duranty. His novels also contain accurate information about the economic realities of
Restoration France, and it is largely for this reason that he was considered a realist by Marx and by subsequent
Marxist critics, in spite of the reactionary tone of much of the political sermonizing inserted into the later novels.
For George Lukács, Balzac's ‘critical realism’ lies in the relationship which he establishes in his greatest novels
between the course of history and the courses of individual lives.
Balzac has been criticized for the weakness of the endings of his novels. However, since each is but a chapter of
the potentially infinite Comédie humaine, the relative lack of dramatic unity (much exaggerated by 19th-c.
critics) is effectively determined by the overall design. Balzac was also attacked (notably by Flaubert, in his
correspondence) for the clumsiness of his style. It is true that his prose has little to do with academic notions of
fine writing. He himself looked back toRabelais, whose 16th-c. spelling and vocabulary he pastiched in Les
Contes drôlatiques. Balzac has a sense of verbal comedy as acute as Dickens's and is a masterful creator of
dialogue. His special achievements are to have created a fictional world which closely resembles the real world of
his own day and which also simulates the fragmentariness of ordinary life through the device of the reappearing
characters; to have widened the permitted social range of literary heroes; to have created a gallery of ‘typical’
characters—the miser (Grandet), the erotomaniac (Hulot), the philistine (Crevel), the arch-crook (Vautrin), the
shady dealer (Gobseck), the abandoned lover (Madame de Beauséant), the arriviste (Rastignac), the jolly
commercial traveller (Gaudissart), thefemme fatale (Valérie Marneffe), the ‘woman of thirty’, the genius-inventor
(David Séchard), and the philanthropist (Benassis)—who combine symbolic value with historical and human
plausibility, and thereby to have contributed significantly to making the novel the dominant form of literary
expression in the 19th c.
David Bellos]
