A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist. Balzac ranks among the great masters of the novel. Along with Flaubert, he is generally regarded as a founding father of realism in European fiction. His large output of novels and stories, collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, is a broad panorama of French society in the period of the Restoration (1815-1830) and the July Monarchy (1830-1848). He was born at Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France on the rue de l'Armée Italienne, into a well-to-do bourgeois family. He himself later added the “de” to his name. His father, Bernard-François Balssa, named his son after St Honoré whose day had just been celebrated. He had risen to the middle class, and married in 1797 the daughter of his Parisian superior, Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier; she was 31 years his junior. Balzac spent the first four years of life in foster care, not so uncommon practice in France even in the 20th century. His first years he spent in the village of Saint-Cyr, and returned to his parents at the age of four. He was sent to a grammar school at Tours and later to a boarding school at Vendôme, where he was a dull student but a voracious reader. In 1814 the family moved back to Paris and in 1816 Balzac began studying law at the Sorbonne in Paris, but after receiving his license in 1819 he decided to abandon law for literature. Balzac contributed to political and artistic reviews set up by a new generation of intellectuals who viewed the cultural debris of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, and the complacency of the restored monarchy with a mixture of cynicism, idealism and regret. By 1830 political discontent had swelled enough to overturn the Bourbon monarchy for good. The new regime of the 'bourgeois monarch' Louis Philippe, which lasted until nearly the end of Balzac's life, is the context of most of his novels. 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. Balzac's first work was Cromwell. The tragedy in verse made the whole family dispirited. By 1822 Balzac had produced several novels under pseudonyms, but he was ignored as a writer. Against his family's hopes, Balzac continued his career in literature, believing that the simplest road to success was writing. Unfortunately, he also tried his skills in business. Balzac ran a publishing company and he bought a printing house, which did not have much to print. When these commercial activities failed, Balzac was left with a heavy burden of debt. The journals to which he contributed were increasingly looking for short fiction, which Balzac was able to provide. A collection 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. Throughout his life he worked with feverish activity, sleeping a few hours in the evening and writing from midnight until noon or afternoon of the next day. He was ridden with debts, which were increased rather than relieved by his business ventures. 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. With Le dernier Chouan (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 Goat-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 the next 20 years he produced the vast collection of novels and short stories called La Comédie humaine, which originated from Dante´s The Divine Comedy. This, his greatest work, is a reproduction of the French society of his time, picturing in precise detail more than 2,000 characters from every class and every profession. La Comédie humaine consists of 95 finished works (stories, novels or analytical essays) and 48 unfinished works (or which exist only as titles). The chief novels in La Comédie humaine are 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). Outweighing Balzac’s faults—his lack of literary style, his moralizing, his tendency toward melodrama—are his originality, his great powers of observation, and his vivid imagination. His short stories include some of the best in the language, but his attempts at drama failed. Le Père Goriot (1835), originally published in the Revue de Paris in 1834, appeared in book form in 1835. The story is an adaptation of Shakespeare's play King Lear, a pessimistic study of bourgeois society's ills after the French Revolution. It 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. Rastignac falls in love with Delphine. Goriot has gradually lost all his money, he doesn't have enough for a proper burial. On his death bed Goriot learns about his daughters' egoism - they don't come to see him. At the same time he admits his own guilt and forgives his daughters. Rastignac pays the expenses of the burial. Goriot's coffin is followed by the empty luxurious carriages of his daughters. 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). La Cousin Bette (1848) contained thinly veiled autobiographical elements of Balzac's love affairs. In the story a spinster, Cousin Bette, tries to revenge her family with a beautiful courtesan Valerie Marneffe all her disappointments. The aristocratic Baron Hulot d'Evry, whom Bette had wanted to marry, had married her cousin, Adeline. She also loses her new love, Count Wenceslas Steinbock, to Baron Hulot's daughter. Valerie seduces Hulot, who has several mistresses, and Steinbock. After some financial troubles Hulot escapes into the slums. Adeline finds him. Bette falls ill with pneumonia and dies. Hulot continues his affairs with a cook, and finally marries the cook's apprentice. Of novels in provincial setitbusngs 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 serialised, like those of Dickens, but in Balzac's case there was no telling how long they would end up. Les 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 took the toll 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. 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 letitbusng 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. In 1849, as his health was failing, Balzac travelled to Poland to visit Eveline Hanska, a wealthy Polish lady, with whom he had corresponded for more than 15 years. They married in 1850, 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. |
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