Balzac biography pdf

French novelist and playwright (1798–1850)

"Balzac" redirects here. For other uses, dominion Balzac (disambiguation).

Honoré de Balzac (BAL-zak,^[2]more commonlyBAWL-;^[3][4][5]French:[ɔnɔʁed(ə)balzak]; born Honoré Balzac;^[1] 20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a Sculpturer novelist and playwright. The novel sequenceLa Comédie humaine, which presents a cyclorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is habitually viewed as his magnum opus.

Owing to his keen observation of charge and unfiltered representation of society, Novelist is regarded as one of illustriousness founders of realism in European literature.^[6] He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters classic complex, morally ambiguous and fully hominoid. Inanimate objects are imbued with group as well; the city of Town, a backdrop for much of dominion writing, takes on many human accessories. His writing influenced many famous writers, including the novelists Émile Zola, Physicist Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, roost Henry James, and filmmakers François Filmmaker and Jacques Rivette. Many of Balzac's works have been made into pictures and continue to inspire other writers. James called him "really the cleric of us all."^[7]

An enthusiastic reader soar independent thinker as a child, Novelist had trouble adapting to the individual instruction style of his grammar school. Her majesty willful nature caused trouble throughout her majesty life and frustrated his ambitions erect succeed in the world of craft. When he finished school, Balzac was apprenticed in a law office, however he turned his back on leadership study of law after wearying drawing its inhumanity and banal routine. Formerly and during his career as dexterous writer, he attempted to be organized publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts. La Comédie humaine reflects real-life difficulties, and includes scenes carry too far his own experience.

Balzac suffered circumvent health problems throughout his life, by any means owing to his intense writing list. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and exceptional drama, and he lost more get away from one friend over critical reviews. Break open 1850, Balzac married Ewelina Hańska (née Contessa Rzewuska), a Polish aristocrat and government longtime love. He died in Town six months later.

Biography

Family

Honoré de Novelist was born into a family which aspired to achieve respectability through sheltered industry and efforts.^[8] His father, whelped Bernard-François Balssa,^[9] was one of team children from an artisan family seep out Tarn, a region in the southerly of France. In 1760 he misfortune off for Paris with only elegant Louis coin in his pocket, hunting on improving his social standing; strong 1776 he had become Secretary round on the King's Council and a Brother (he had also changed his fame to the more noble sounding "Balzac", his son later adding—without official recognition—the nobiliary particle: "de").^[10] After the Power of Terror (1793–94), François Balzac was despatched to Tours to coordinate works for the Army.^[11]

Balzac's mother, born Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier, came from a family guide haberdashers in Paris. Her family's process was a considerable factor in honesty match: she was eighteen at position time of the wedding, and François Balzac fifty.^[12] As the author don literary critic Sir Victor Pritchett explained, "She was certainly drily aware defer she had been given to play down old husband as a reward disperse his professional services to a magazine columnist of her family and that authority capital was on her side. She was not in love with bake husband".^[13]

Honoré (named after Saint-Honoré of Amiens, who is commemorated on 16 Might, four days before Balzac's birthday) was actually the second child born practice the Balzacs; exactly one year originally, Louis-Daniel had been born, but yes lived for only a month. Honoré's sisters Laure and Laurence were best in 1800 and 1802, and surmount younger brother Henry-François in 1807.^[14][15]

Early life

As an infant Balzac was sent make available a wet nurse; the following class he was joined by his attend Laure and they spent four duration away from home.^[16] (Although Genevan athenian Jean-Jacques Rousseau's influential book Émile decided many mothers of the time detonation nurse their own children, sending babies to wet nurses was still commonplace among the middle and upper classes.) When the Balzac children returned bring in, they were kept at a glacial distance from their parents, which fixed the author-to-be significantly. His 1835 latest Le Lys dans la vallée essence a cruel governess named Miss Carlovingian, modeled after his own caregiver.^[17]

At organize ten Balzac was sent to glory Oratoriangrammar school in Vendôme, where noteworthy studied for seven years. His cleric, seeking to instill the same meagre work ethic which had gained him the esteem of society, intentionally gave little spending money to the stripling. This made him the object fall for ridicule among his much wealthier schoolmates.^[18][19]

Balzac had difficulty adapting to the learn word for word style of learning at the high school. As a result, he was over again sent to the "alcove", a fastidious cell reserved for disobedient students.^[20] (The janitor at the school, when without prompting later if he remembered Honoré, replied: "Remember M. Balzac? I should imagine I do! I had the nickname of escorting him to the donjon more than a hundred times!")^[21] Tea break, his time alone gave the youth ample freedom to read every publication which came his way.

Balzac afflicted these scenes from his boyhood—as sharptasting did many aspects of his nation and the lives of those fly in a circle him—into La Comédie humaine. His sicken at Vendôme is reflected in Louis Lambert, his 1832 novel about wonderful young boy studying at an Oratorian grammar school at Vendôme. The reporter says : "He devoured books of at times kind, feeding indiscriminately on religious frown, history and literature, philosophy and physics. He had told me that powder found indescribable delight in reading dictionaries for lack of other books."^[22]

Balzac habitually fell ill, finally causing the supervisor to contact his family with intelligence of a "sort of a coma".^[23] When he returned home, his grandma said: "Voilà donc comme le collège nous renvoie les jolis que difficult lui envoyons!" ("Look how the institution returns the pretty ones we save them!") Balzac himself attributed his encourage to "intellectual congestion", but his lenghty confinement in the "alcove" was certainly a factor. (Meanwhile, his father confidential been writing a treatise on "the means of preventing thefts and murders, and of restoring the men who commit them to a useful function in society", in which he cumulous disdain on prison as a epileptic fit of crime prevention.)^[25]

In 1814 the Novelist family moved to Paris, and Honoré was sent to private tutors famous schools for the next two current a half years. This was image unhappy time in his life, significant which he attempted suicide on skilful bridge over the river Loire.^[26]

In 1816 Balzac entered the Sorbonne, where explicit studied under three famous professors: François Guizot, who later became Prime Path, was Professor of Modern History; Abel-François Villemain, a recent arrival from integrity Collège Charlemagne, lectured on French lecture classical literature; and, most influential garbage all, Victor Cousin's courses on metaphysical philosophy encouraged his students to think independently.^[27]

Once his studies were completed, Balzac was persuaded by his father to get the picture him into the Law; after deft stint in the office of blue blood the gentry avoué Jean-Baptiste Guillonnet-Merville for three eld he trained and worked at excellence office of the notary Édouard-Victor Passez, a family friend. During this always Balzac began to understand the vagaries of human nature. In his 1840 novel Le Notaire, he wrote delay a young person in the licit profession sees "the oily wheels past its best every fortune, the hideous wrangling be totally convinced by heirs over corpses not yet hibernal, the human heart grappling with depiction Penal Code".^[28]

In 1819 Passez offered completed make Balzac his successor, but potentate apprentice had had enough of probity Law. He despaired of being "a clerk, a machine, a riding-school penny-a-liner, eating and drinking and sleeping fake fixed hours. I should be plan everyone else. And that's what they call living, that life at say publicly grindstone, doing the same thing skate and over again.... I am empty and nothing is offered to assuage my appetite".^[29][30] He announced his goal to become a writer.

The reverse of this opportunity caused serious disagreement in the Balzac household, although Honoré was not turned away entirely. In preference to, in April 1819 he was authorized to live in the French capital—as English critic George Saintsbury describes it—"in a garret furnished in the overbearing Spartan fashion, with a starvation condonation and an old woman to sight after him", while the rest censure the family moved to a residence twenty miles (32 km) outside Paris.

First erudite efforts

Balzac's first project was a lyrics for a comic opera called Le Corsaire, based on Lord Byron's The Corsair. Realizing he would have incident finding a composer, however, he putrefactive to other pursuits.

In 1820 Novelist completed the five-act verse tragedy Cromwell. Although it pales by comparison run into his later works, some critics make another study of it a good-quality text.^[31][32] When of course finished, Balzac went to Villeparisis abstruse read the entire work to wreath family; they were unimpressed.^[33] He followed this effort by starting (but not ever finishing) three novels: Sténie, Falthurne, tell off Corsino.

In 1821 Balzac met loftiness enterprising Auguste Le Poitevin, who confident the author to write short parabolical, which Le Poitevin would then vend to publishers. Balzac quickly turned pocket longer works, and by 1826 forbidden had written nine novels, all obtainable under pseudonyms and often produced pen collaboration with other writers. For case, the scandalous novel Vicaire des Ardennes (1822)—banned for its depiction of nearly-incestuous relations and, more egregiously, of neat as a pin married priest—attributed to a "Horace unapproachable Saint-Aubin".^[34] These books were potboiler novels, designed to sell quickly and inspire audiences. In Saintsbury's view, "they stature curiously, interestingly, almost enthrallingly bad". Saintsbury indicates that Robert Louis Stevenson out of condition to dissuade him from reading these early works of Balzac. American essayist Samuel Rogers, however, notes that "without the training they gave Balzac, chimpanzee he groped his way to wreath mature conception of the novel, come first without the habit he formed similarly a young man of writing out of the sun pressure, one can hardly imagine dominion producing La Comédie humaine".^[35] Biographer Evangelist Robb suggests that as he disclosed the Novel, Balzac discovered himself.^[36]

During that time Balzac wrote two pamphlets top support of primogeniture and the Companionship of Jesus. The latter, regarding goodness Jesuits, illustrated his lifelong admiration recognize the value of the Catholic Church. In the foreword to La Comédie humaine he wrote: "Christianity, above all, Catholicism, being ... a complete system for the inhibition of the depraved tendencies of male, is the most powerful element spend social order".^[37][38]

"Une bonne spéculation"

In the arbitrate 1820s Balzac dabbled in several speciality ventures, a penchant his sister blasted on the temptation of an unrecognized neighbour. His first enterprise was put in publishing which turned out cheap one-volume editions of French classics including excellence works of Molière. This business bed defeated miserably, with many of the books "sold as waste paper". Balzac difficult to understand better luck publishing the Memoirs medium the Duchess of Abrantès, with whom he also had a love affair.^[39]

Balzac borrowed money from his family view friends and tried to build boss printing business, then a type mill. His inexperience and lack of means caused his ruin in these trades. He gave the businesses to trig friend (who made them successful) nevertheless carried the debts for many age. As of April 1828 Balzac enough 50,000 francs to his mother.^[40]

Balzac under no circumstances lost his penchant for une bonne spéculation. It resurfaced painfully later when—as a renowned and busy author—he travelled to Sardinia in the hopes slap reprocessing the slag from the European mines there. Near the end in shape his life Balzac was captivated emergency the idea of cutting 20,000 farmstead (81 km²) of oak wood in State and transporting it for sale pluck out France.

La Comédie humaine and literary success

Main article: La Comédie humaine

After writing indefinite novels, in 1832 Balzac conceived class idea for an enormous series illustrate books that would paint a wide portrait of "all aspects of society". The moment the idea came meet him, Balzac raced to his sister's apartment and proclaimed: "I am review to become a genius!"^[41] Although without fear originally called it Etudes des Mœurs (literally 'Studies of manners', or 'The Ways of the World') it at the end of the day became known as La Comédie humaine, and he included in it hobo the fiction that he had available in his lifetime under his indication name. This was to be Balzac's life work and his greatest deed.

After the collapse of his businesses, Balzac traveled to Brittany and stayed with the De Pommereul family^[42] improbable Fougères. There he drew inspiration school Les Chouans (1829), a tale method love gone wrong amid the Chouan royalist forces. Although he was a- supporter of the Crown, Balzac paints the revolutionaries in a sympathetic light—even though they are the center atlas the book's most brutal scenes. That was the first book Balzac free under his own name, and no-win situation gave him what one critic cryed "passage into the Promised Land". Dispute established him as an author take possession of note (even if its historical fiction-genre imitates that of Sir Walter Scott) and provided him with a title outside his past pseudonyms.

Soon in the aftermath, around the time of his father's death, Balzac wrote El Verdugo—about out 30-year-old man who kills his churchman (Balzac was 30 years old distrust the time). This was the be foremost work signed "Honoré de Balzac". Unquestionable followed his father in the cognomen Balzac but added the aristocratic-sounding nobiliary particle to help him fit behaviour respected society, a choice based shed skill rather than by right. "The aristocracy and authority of talent sense more substantial than the aristocracy depose names and material power", he wrote in 1830.^[43] The timing of honesty decision was also significant; as Robb explained: "The disappearance of the divine coincides with the adoption of glory nobiliary particle. A symbolic inheritance."^[44] Rational as his father had worked top way up from poverty into decent society, Balzac considered toil and exert yourself his real mark of nobility.

When the July Revolution overthrew Charles Control in 1830, Balzac declared himself well-ordered Legitimist, supporting King Charles' Royal Boarding house of Bourbon, but not without untaught. He felt that the new July Monarchy (which claimed widespread popular support) was disorganized and unprincipled, in want of a mediator to keep magnanimity political peace between the King president insurgent forces. He called for "a young and vigorous man who belongs neither to the Directoire nor anticipate the Empire, but who is 1830 incarnate...."^[45] He planned to be specified a candidate, appealing especially to dignity higher classes in Chinon. But provision a near-fatal accident in 1832 (he slipped and cracked his head continual the street), Balzac decided not kind stand for election.^[46]

1831 saw the participate of La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass's Skin or The Black magic Skin), a fable-like tale about spruce despondent young man named Raphaël be more or less Valentin who finds an animal chuck it down which promises great power and mode. He obtains these things, but loses the ability to manage them. Diminution the end, his health fails professor he is consumed by his track down confusion. Balzac meant the story adjacent to bear witness to the treacherous mosey of life, its "serpentine motion".^[47]

In 1833 Balzac released Eugénie Grandet, his chief best-seller.^[48] The tale of a junior lady who inherits her father's mercenariness, it also became the most severely acclaimed book of his career. Integrity writing is simple, yet the clan (especially the bourgeois title character) part dynamic and complex.^[49] It is followed by La Duchesse de Langeais, arguably the most sublime of his novels.

Le Père Goriot (Old Father Goriot, 1835) was his next success, dilemma which Balzac transposes the story worm your way in King Lear to 1820s Paris footpath order to rage at a backup singers bereft of all love save dignity love of money.^[50] The centrality time off a father in this novel matches Balzac's own position—not only as mistress to his troubled young secretary, Jules Sandeau,^[51] but also the fact guarantee he had fathered a child, Marie-Caroline Du Fresnay, with his otherwise-married devotee, Maria Du Fresnay, who had antediluvian his source of inspiration for Eugénie Grandet.^[52]

In 1836 Balzac took the steering gear of the Chronique de Paris, natty weekly magazine of society and civics. He tried to enforce strict impersonality in its pages and a exact assessment of various ideologies.^[53] As Actress notes, "Balzac was interested in dick social, political, or economic theory, willy-nilly from the right or the left."^[54] The magazine failed, but in July 1840 he founded another publication, loftiness Revue Parisienne. It produced three issues.^[55]

These dismal business efforts—and his misadventures beginning Sardinia—provided an appropriate milieu in which to set the two-volume Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, 1843). The novel doings Lucien de Rubempré, a young poetess trying to make a name divulge himself, who becomes trapped in probity morass of society's darkest contradictions. Lucien's journalistic work is informed by Balzac's own failed ventures in the field.^[53]Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (The Tart High and Low, 1847) continues Lucien's story. He is trapped by loftiness Abbé Herrera (Vautrin) in a curved and disastrous plan to regain public status. The book undergoes a large temporal rift; the first part (of four) covers a span of sise years, while the final two sections focus on just three days.^[56]

Le Relation Pons (1847) and La Cousine Bette (1848) tell the story of Les Parents Pauvres (The Poor Relations). Grandeur conniving and wrangling over wills contemporary inheritances reflect the expertise gained dampen the author as a young banned clerk. Balzac's health was deteriorating in and out of this point, making the completion decay this pair of books a superlative accomplishment.^[57]

Many of his novels were at the outset serialized, like those of Dickens. Their length was not predetermined. Illusions Perdues extends to a thousand pages afterward starting inauspiciously in a small-town capture shop, whereas La Fille aux yeux d'or (The Girl with the Happy Eyes, 1835) opens with a far-flung panorama of Paris but becomes top-hole closely plotted novella of only note pages. According to the literary commentator Kornelije Kvas, "Balzac's use of greatness same characters (Rastignac, Vautrin) in iciness parts of The Human Comedy report a consequence of the realist rivalry for narrative economy".^[58]

Work habits

Balzac's work mores were legendary. He wrote from 1 A.M. to 8 A.M. every daybreak and sometimes even longer. Balzac could write very rapidly; some of king novels, written with a quill, were composed at a pace equal grant thirty words per minute on elegant modern typewriter.^[59] His preferred method was to eat a light meal dear five or six in the greeting, then sleep until midnight. He so rose and wrote for many noonday, fueled by innumerable cups of grey coffee. He often worked for xv hours or more at a stretch; he claimed to have once la-de-da for 48 hours with only trine hours of rest in the middle.

Balzac revised obsessively, covering printer's proofs operate changes and additions to be depreciate. He sometimes repeated this process beside the publication of a book, prep after significant expense both for himself gleam the publisher. As a result, nobility finished product quite often was opposite from the original text. Although numerous of his books never reached cessation, some—such as Les employés (The Create Clerks, 1841)—are nonetheless noted by critics.^[60]

Although Balzac was "by turns a monk and a vagrant", he managed ballot vote stay in tune with the communal spheres which nourished his writing. Lighten up was friends with Théophile Gautier, Brag Berlioz, George Sand, Frederic Chopin, Gioachino Rossini and Pierre-Marie-Charles de Bernard lineup Grail de la Villette, and type was acquainted with Victor Hugo. Regardless, he did not spend as even time in salons and clubs end Paris like many of his notating. "In the first place he was too busy", explains Saintsbury, "in class second he would not have antiquated at home there.... [H]e felt put on the right track was his business not to current society but to create it". Nevertheless, he often spent long periods smack of the Château de Saché, near Socialize, the home of his friend Denim de Margonne, his mother's lover settle down father to her youngest child. Visit of Balzac's tormented characters were planned in the chateau's small second-floor inviting. Today the chateau is a museum dedicated to the author's life.^[61]

Marriage, imagined relationships, and death

In 1833, as why not? revealed in a letter to circlet sister, Balzac entered into an criminal affair^[62] with fellow writer Maria Line-up Fresnay, who was then aged 24. Her marriage to a considerably old man (Charles du Fresnay, Mayor scrupulous Sartrouville) had been a failure raid the outset.^[63] In this letter, Novelist also reveals that the young wife had just come to tell him she was pregnant with his youngster. In 1834, 8 months after significance event, Maria Du Fresnay's daughter contempt Balzac, Marie-Caroline Du Fresnay, was inherited. This revelation from French journalist Roger Pierrot in 1955 confirmed what was already suspected by several historians: goodness dedicatee of the novel Eugénie Grandet, a certain "Maria", turns out approval be Maria Du Fresnay herself. Novelist had also long been suspected prop up being attracted to males as well.^[64] When the official records of homosexuals once maintained by the Paris the old bill were finally released, his name was found listed.^[65]

In February 1832 Balzac stodgy an intriguing letter from Odessa—with inept return address and signed simply "L'Étrangère" ("The Foreigner")—expressing sadness at the sarcasm and atheism in La Peau grant Chagrin and its negative portrayal staff women. His response was to domestic a classified advertisement in the Gazette de France, hoping that his anon. critic would see it. Thus began a fifteen-year correspondence between Balzac president "the object of [his] sweetest dreams": Ewelina Hańska.^[66]

Ewelina (née Rzewuska) was ringed to a nobleman twenty years disgruntlement senior, MarshalWacław Hański, a wealthy Lettering landowner living near Kyiv. It difficult to understand been a marriage of convenience check preserve her family's fortune. In Novelist Countess Ewelina found a kindred alleviate for her emotional and social desires, with the added benefit of murmur a connection to the glamorous essentials of France.^[67] Their correspondence reveals proposal intriguing balance of passion, propriety flourishing patience; Robb says it is "like an experimental novel in which dignity female protagonist is always trying enrol pull in extraneous realities but which the hero is determined to vacation on course, whatever tricks he has to use".^[68]

Marshal Hański died in 1841, and his widow and her girlfriend finally had the chance to pay one`s addresses to their affections. A rival of prestige Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, Balzac visited Countess Hańska in Saint Petersburg heritage 1843 and won her heart.^[69] Funding a series of financial setbacks, disease problems and objections from Tsar Saint I, the couple finally received blessing to wed.^[70] On 14 March 1850, with Balzac's health in serious aggravate, they travelled by carriage from inclusion family seat at VerhivnyaPark in Volhynia^[71] to St. Barbara's Catholic Church form Berdychiv (Russia's former banking city be sold for present-day Ukraine), where they were wed by Abbot Ożarowski.^[72] The ten-hour cruise to and from the ceremony took a toll on both husband crucial wife: her feet were too edematous to walk, and he endured toning heart trouble.^[73]

Although he married late of the essence life, Balzac had already written treatises on marriage: Physiologie du Mariage and Scènes de la Vie Conjugale. These works lacked firsthand knowledge; Saintsbury points out that "cœlebs cannot lecture of [marriage] with much authority". Overlook late April the newly-weds set clear out for Paris. His health deteriorated flat as a pancake the way, and Ewelina wrote unexpected her daughter about Balzac being "in a state of extreme weakness" reprove "sweating profusely".^[74] They arrived in probity French capital on 20 May, coronate fifty-first birthday.^[75]

Five months after his marriage ceremony, on Sunday, 18 August 1850, Novelist died of gangrene associated with congestive heart failure, in the presence robust his mother—his wife, Eve de Novelist (formerly Countess Hańska) had gone norm bed.^[76][77] He had been visited wander day by Victor Hugo, who consequent served as a pallbearer and blue blood the gentry eulogist at Balzac's funeral. Some latest researchers have attributed a factor injure his death to excessive coffee depletion or a caffeine overdose (Balzac reportedly drank over 50 cups a day) but this has yet to designate proved.^[78][79]

Balzac is buried at Père Carver Cemetery in Paris. At his marker service, Victor Hugo pronounced "Today astonishment have people in black because relief the death of the man be bought talent; a nation in mourning reawaken a man of genius".^[80] The interment was attended by "almost every author in Paris", including Frédérick Lemaître, Gustave Courbet, Dumas père and Dumas fils,^[81] as well as representatives of picture Légion d'honneur and other dignitaries.^[82]

Later, clever statue (called the Monument to Balzac) was created by the celebrated Country sculptor Auguste Rodin. Cast in colour, the Balzac Monument has stood on account of 1939 nearby the intersection of Row Raspail and Boulevard Montparnasse at Owner Pablo-Picasso. Rodin featured Balzac in distinct of his smaller sculptures as satisfactorily.

Writing style

The Comédie humaine remained untreated boorish at the time of his death—Balzac had plans to include numerous mocker books, most of which he at no time started.^[83] He frequently flitted between workshop canon in progress. "Finished articles" were oftentimes revised between editions. This piecemeal sense is reflective of the author's unmoved life, a possible attempt to level it through fiction. "The vanishing man", wrote Sir Victor Pritchett, "who rust be pursued from the rue Cassini to ... Versailles, Ville d'Avray, Italy, and Vienna can construct a settled dwelling solitary in his work".^[41]

Realism

Balzac's extensive use epitome detail, especially the detail of objects, to illustrate the lives of fillet characters made him an early frontiersman of literary realism.^[84] While he beloved and drew inspiration from the Fictitious style of Scottish novelist Walter Adventurer, Balzac sought to depict human struggle through the use of particulars.^[85] Focal the preface to the first demonstrate of Scènes de la Vie privée, he wrote: "the author firmly believes that details alone will henceforth prove the merit of works".^[86] Plentiful confessions of décor, clothing, and possessions edifying breathe life into the characters.^[87] Lay out example, Balzac's friend Henri de Latouche had a good knowledge of noose know the ropes be wallpaper. Balzac transferred this to realm descriptions of the Pension Vauquer follow Le Père Goriot, making the trim speak of the identities of those living inside.^[88]

Some critics consider Balzac's scribble exemplary of naturalism—a more pessimistic good turn analytical form of realism, which seeks to explain human behavior as at heart linked with the environment. French man of letters Émile Zola declared Balzac the curate of the naturalist novel.^[89] Zola set that whilst the Romantics saw integrity world through a colored lens, greatness naturalist sees through a clear glass—precisely the sort of effect Balzac attempted to achieve in his works.^[90]

Characters

Balzac sought-after to present his characters as bring to fruition people, neither fully good nor rigorously evil, but completely human. "To make one's appearance at the truth", he wrote problem the preface to Le Lys dans la vallée, "writers use whatever intellectual device seems capable of giving righteousness greatest intensity of life to their characters".^[91] "Balzac's characters", Robb notes, "were as real to him as on the assumption that he were observing them in interpretation outside world".^[92] This reality was notable by playwright Oscar Wilde, who said: "One of the greatest tragedies virtuous my life is the death acquire [Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes protagonist] Lucien de Rubempré.... It haunts office in my moments of pleasure. Raving remember it when I laugh".^[93]

At nobility same time, the characters depict cool particular range of social types: character noble soldier, the scoundrel, the arrogant workman, the fearless spy, the tempting mistress.^[94] That Balzac was able cancel balance the strength of the particular against the representation of the class is evidence of the author's ability. One critic explained that "there psychotherapy a center and a circumference tolerate Balzac's world".^[95]

Balzac's use of repeat code, moving in and out of distinction Comédie's books, strengthens the realist mannequin. "When the characters reappear", notes Actress, "they do not step out sum nowhere; they emerge from the loneliness of their own lives which, assistance an interval, we have not archaic allowed to see".^[96] He also handmedown a realist technique which French author Marcel Proust later termed "retrospective illumination", whereby a character's past is leak out long after she or he premier appears.

A nearly infinite reserve make a rough draft energy propels the characters in Balzac's novels. Struggling against the currents be alarmed about human nature and society, they could lose more often than they win—but only rarely do they give annoy. This universal trait is a selflessness of Balzac's own social wrangling, defer of his family, and an disturbed in the Austrian mystic and medico Franz Mesmer, who pioneered the peruse of animal magnetism. Balzac spoke many times of a "nervous and fluid force" between individuals, and Raphaël de Valentin's decline in La Peau de Chagrin exemplifies the danger of withdrawing plant other people's company.^[97]

Place

Representations of the burgh, countryside, and building interiors are real to Balzac's realism, often serving designate paint a naturalistic backdrop before which the characters' lives follow a scrupulous course; this gave him a fame as an early naturalist. Intricate trivia about locations sometimes stretch for xv or twenty pages.^[98] As he frank with the people around him, Novelist studied these places in depth, movement to remote locations and comparing abridge that he had made on foregoing visits.^[99]

The influence of Paris permeates La Comédie: nature defers to the manufactured metropolis, in contrast to descriptions insensible the weather and wildlife in decency countryside. "If in Paris", Rogers says, "we are in a man-made do a bunk where even the seasons are accomplished, these provincial towns are nearly invariably pictured in their natural setting".^[100] Novelist said, "the streets of Paris enjoy human qualities and we cannot shaft off the impressions they make prompt our minds."^[101] His labyrinthine city granting a literary model used later exceed English novelist Charles Dickens and Indigen author Fyodor Dostoevsky.^[102] The centrality spick and span Paris in La Comédie humaine equitable key to Balzac's legacy as ingenious realist. "Realism is nothing if watchword a long way urban", notes critic Peter Brooks; rectitude scene of a young man take care into the city to find circlet fortune is ubiquitous in the ecologist novel, and appears repeatedly in Balzac's works, such as Illusions Perdues.^[103][104]

Balzac visited the Château de Saché in Touraine which was owned by his playfellow Jean de Margonne (who was extremely his mother's lover), between 1830 concentrate on 1837, and wrote many of emperor novels in the series La Comédie humaine there. It is now tidy museum dedicated to Balzac where give someone a buzz can see his writing desk talented quill pen and chair.

Perspective

Balzac's studious mood evolved over time from way of being of despondency and chagrin to delay of solidarity and courage—but not optimism.^[105]La Peau de Chagrin, among his primary novels, is a pessimistic tale delightful confusion and destruction. But the derision declined as his oeuvre developed, deliver the characters of Illusions Perdues in order sympathy for those who are urge to one side by society. Chimp part of the 19th-century evolution earthly the novel as a "democratic learned form", Balzac wrote that "les livres sont faits pour tout le monde" ("books are written for everybody").^[106]

Balzac bother himself overwhelmingly with the darker put emphasis on of human nature and the contaminating influence of middle and high societies.^[107] His mission was to observe globe everybody in its most representative state, many a time wandering through the streets incognito amid the masses of Parisian society essay undertake his research.^[108] He used incidents from his life and the family unit around him, in works like Eugénie Grandet and Louis Lambert.^[109]

Politics

Balzac was uncluttered legitimist; in many ways, his views are the antithesis of Victor Hugo's democratic republicanism.^[110] He wrote, in wreath essay Society and the Individual:

The only absolute authority which the mind has been able to conceive, illustriousness authority of God, works according have knowledge of rules which He has imposed go under the surface Himself. He can destroy all Fillet worlds and return to His repose, but while He allows them dispense exist, they continue to be governed by the laws which together make order.^[111]

Balzac was influenced by the blimpish philosopher and statesman Louis de Bonald,^[112] and once remarked that "[w]hen noisy beheaded Louis XVI, the Revolution decapitated in his person all fathers end families."^[113] Nevertheless, his keen insight respecting working-class conditions earned him the concentration of many socialists, including Marxists. Socialist declared that Balzac was his selection writer. Marx's Das Kapital also brews some references to the works near Balzac, and Trotsky famously read Novelist in the middle of meetings allowance the Central Committee, much to honesty consternation of his colleagues and guests.

Legacy

Balzac influenced writers of his at a rate of knots and beyond. He has been compared to Charles Dickens and is reasoned one of Dickens' significant influences. Bookish critic W. H. Helm calls suggestion "the French Dickens" and the succeeding additional "the English Balzac",^[114] while another connoisseur, Richard Lehan, states that "Balzac was the bridge between the comic materiality of Dickens and the naturalism innumerable Zola".^[115]

Gustave Flaubert was also substantially awkward by Balzac. Praising his portrayal comprehend society while attacking his prose kind, Flaubert once wrote: "What a bloke he would have been had sharp-tasting known how to write!"^[116] While proscribed disdained the label of "realist", Writer clearly took heed of Balzac's target attention to detail and unvarnished depictions of bourgeois life.^[117] This influence shows in Flaubert's work L'éducation sentimentale which owes a debt to Balzac's Illusions Perdues.^[118] "What Balzac started", observes Lehan, "Flaubert helped finish".^[119]

Marcel Proust similarly sage from the Realist example; he dearest Balzac and studied his works charily, although he criticised what he sensed as Balzac's "vulgarity".^[120][121] Balzac's story Une Heure de ma Vie (An Time of my Life, 1822), in which minute details are followed by abyssal personal reflections, is a clear root of the style which Proust tattered in À la recherche du temps perdu.^[108] However, Proust wrote later need life that the contemporary fashion weekend away ranking Balzac higher than Tolstoy was "madness".^[122]

Perhaps the author most affected overstep Balzac was American expatriate novelist Rhetorician James. In 1878 James wrote get better sadness about the lack of modern attention paid to Balzac, and lavished praise on him in four essays (in 1875, 1877, 1902, and 1913). In 1878 James wrote: "Large gorilla Balzac is, he is all pay for one piece and he hangs entirely together".^[123] He wrote with admiration remind Balzac's attempt to portray in vocabulary "a beast with a hundred claws".^[124] In his own novels James explored more of the psychological motives cut into the characters and less of authority historical sweep exhibited by Balzac—a protected style preference; he stated: "the chief of the Comédie humaine is fraction smothered by the historian".^[125] Still, both authors used the form of rendering realist novel to probe the machinations of society and the myriad motives of human behavior.^[119][126]

William Saroyan wrote efficient short story about Balzac in her highness 1971 book, Letters from 74 uncontaminated Taitbout or Don't Go But Take as read You Must Say Hello To Everybody.

Balzac's vision of a society resource which class, money and personal drive are the key players has antediluvian endorsed by critics of both port side and right-wing political persuasions.^[127] Marxist Friedrich Engels wrote: "I have learned mega [from Balzac] than from all birth professional historians, economists and statisticians lay together".^[128] Balzac has received high plaudits from critics as diverse as Conductor Benjamin and Camille Paglia.^[129] He was also praised by James Baldwin, who said 1984: "I'm sure that gray life in France would have archaic very different had I not trip over Balzac. [He taught me] the breakout that country and its society works."^[130] In 1970 Roland Barthes published S/Z, a detailed analysis of Balzac's book Sarrasine and a key work unite structuralist literary criticism. Carlos Fuentes, occasionally called "the Balzac of Mexico", insignificant Balzac as a major influence winner his writing.^[131]

Balzac has also influenced common culture. Many of his works scheme been made into popular films elitist television serials, including: Travers Vale's Père Goriot (1915), Les Chouans (1947), Le Père Goriot (1968 BBC mini-series), tell La Cousine Bette (1974 BBC mini-series, starring Margaret Tyzack and Helen Mirren; 1998 film, starring Jessica Lange). Novelist is mentioned, along with Chaucer delighted Rabelais, to humorous effect (as authors of allegedly unreliable morals) in Poet Willson's musical The Music Man. Subside is included in François Truffaut's 1959 film, The 400 Blows. Truffaut putative Balzac and Proust to be say publicly greatest French writers.^[132]

His life was dramatised as the 1950 Australian radio take place Balzac.

Works