PROPAGANDA: - klarsyn's site for arts & culture

The Big Hundred

Honoré de Balzac
(1799-1850)

Original name Honoré Balssa

French journalist and writer, one of the creators of realism in literature. Balzac's huge production of novels and short stories are collected under the name La Comédie humaine, which originated from Dante´s The Divine Comedy. Before his breakthrought as an author Balzac wrote several plays and novels under pseudonyms without success.

Balzac was born in Tours. His father, Bernard François Balzac, had risen to the middle class, and married the daughter of his Parisian superior, Anna-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier, who was 31 years his junior. He had worked as a state prosecuror in Paris but was transferred to Tours because of his royalistic opinions during the French Revolution. In 1814 the family moved back to Paris.

In his schoolyears Balzac was an ordinary pupil. He studied at the Collège de Vendôme and the Sorbonne, and worked then a few years in law offices. In 1819, when his family moved for financial reasons to the small town of Villeparisis, Balzac announced that he wanted to be a writer. He returned to Paris and was installed in a shabby room at 9 rue Lediguiéres, near the Bibliothéque de l'Arsenal. A few years later he described the place in LA PEAU DE CHARGIN (1931), a fantastic tale owing much to E.T.A. Hoffman. Balzac's first work, tragedy on verse, CROMWELL, made the whole family dispirited.

By 1822 Balzac had produced several novels under pseudonyms, which did not gain him literary fame. Against his family's hopes, Balzac continued his career as a writer but entered also to business. He run a publishing company and bought then a printing house, which did not have much to print. When these commercial activities failed, Balzac was left with a heavy burden of debt, which harassed him to the end of his career.

After the period of failures Balzac was 29 years old, and his efforts had been fruitless. Accepting the hospitality of General de Pommereul, he moved for a short time to Brittany in search of local color for his new novel. In 1829 appeared LA DERNIER CHOUAN (later called LES CHOUANS), a historical work in the manner of Sir Walter Scott, which he published under his own name. Balzac began to gain notice as an author and published between the years 1830 and 1832 six novelettes titled SCÈNES DE LA VIE PRIVÉE.

In 1833 Balzac conceived the idea of linking together his old novels so that they would comprehend the whole society in series of books. Eventually this plan led to 90 novels and novellas, a huge and ambitious plan, which draw a picture of the customs, atmosphere and habitat of the bourgeois France. Among the masterpieces of The Human Comedy are LE PÉRE GORIOT, LES ILLUSIONS PERDUES, LES PAYSANS, LA FEMME DE TRENTE ANS, and EUGÉNIE GRANDET. In these books Balzac covered a world from Paris to Provinces. They had also recurrent characters, susch as Eugène Rastignac, who came from an impoverished provincial family to Paris, mixed with the nobility, pursued wealth, had many mistresses, gambled and was a succesful politician.

Balzac often worked in the château at Le Saché, near Tours, although greater part of his work was done in Paris. From 1828-36 he lived at 1 rue Cassini, near to the Observatory on the edge of the city. In 1847 he moved to the Rue Fortunée. Energetically Balzac used to write daily 14 to 16 hours

During his later years Balzac lived mostly in his villa in Sèvres. Among his friends was Eveline Hanska, a rich Polish lady, with whom he had corresponded for more than 15 years, and who had posed as a model for some of his feminine portraits (Mme Hulot in LA COUSINE BETTE, 1847). In September 1848 Balzac travelled to Poland to meet her, although his health had broken down. They were married in 1850 and three months later, after the return to Paris, Balzac died there on August 18, 1850.

Le Père Goriot (1835) - originally published in the Revue de Paris in 1834, appeared in book form in 1835. An adaptation of Shakespeare's play King Lear. The pessimistic study of bourgeois society's ills after the French Revolution tells the intertwined stories of Eugène de Rastignac, an ambitious but penniless young man, and old Goriot, a father who sacrifices everything for his children. His daughters Anastaria and Delphine are married into a rich family. They are ashamed of their father and visit him only to ask for money. Rastingnac falls in love with Delphine. Goriot has gradually lost all his money, he don't have enough for a proper burial. On his death bed he learns about his daughters' egoism - they don't come to see him, but at the same time he admits his own guilty and forgives his daughters. Rastignac pays the expenses of the burial. On his last journey Goriot's coffin is followed by the empty luxus carriages of his daughters.

Museums: Musée Balzac, Château de Saché, 37190 Saché, Indre et Loire - a sixteenth century castle, devoted to the author who lived there between 1829 and 1837; La maison de Balzac, 47 rue Raynourd, Chaillot Quarter - Balzac lived there for seven years