Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (born Honoré Balzac on 20 May 1799; died 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His major work is the novel sequence *La Comédie humaine*, a broad portrait of French life after Napoleon. Because he observed details closely and depicted society without filtering it, Balzac is considered a founder of realism in European literature. His characters are complex and morally ambiguous, even the minor ones, and he gave human qualities to objects and places, especially Paris, which appears often in his writing. Many later writers—including Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, and Fyodor Dostoevsky—were influenced by him, as were filmmakers François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. His works have been adapted into films and used as frameworks by other authors. Henry James called him "really the father of us all."

Balzac was the second child of Bernard-François Balssa and Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier. An older brother, Louis-Daniel, lived only a month. His sisters Laure and Laurence were born in 1800 and 1802, and his younger brother Henry-François in 1807. As a baby, Balzac was sent to a wet nurse; his sister Laure joined him the next year, and they stayed away from home for four years. This was common among middle- and upper-class families, even though Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book *Émile* had encouraged mothers to nurse their own children. When the children returned, their parents kept a cold distance, which affected Balzac deeply. His 1835 novel *Le Lys dans la vallée* includes a cruel governess named Miss Caroline, based on his own caregiver. At age ten, Balzac entered the Oratorian grammar school in Vendôme, where he studied for seven years. His father, wanting to teach him a hard work ethic, gave him very little spending money, which made him a target for ridicule among wealthier classmates. Balzac struggled with the school’s rote learning and was often sent to the "alcove," a punishment cell for disobedient students. The janitor later recalled escorting him to the dungeon more than a hundred times. Alone, Balzac read every book he could find. He later used these experiences in *La Comédie humaine*. His 1832 novel *Louis Lambert* features a boy at the same school who "devoured books of every kind" and found delight in reading dictionaries. Balzac often fell ill, and the headmaster eventually contacted his family about a "sort of a coma." When he came home, his grandmother remarked on how the academy returned the pretty ones they sent. Balzac blamed "intellectual congestion," but his time in the alcove likely contributed. Meanwhile, his father was writing a treatise criticizing prison as a way to prevent crime. In 1814, the family moved to Paris, and Balzac studied with private tutors and schools for two and a half years. During this time, he attempted suicide on a bridge over the Loire. In 1816, he entered the Sorbonne, studying under François Guizot (later Prime Minister), Abel-François Villemain, and Victor Cousin, who encouraged independent thinking. After his studies, his father pushed him into law. Balzac worked for three years in the office of avoué Jean-Baptiste Guillonnet-Merville, then trained with notary Édouard-Victor Passez, a family friend. This work taught him about human nature. In his 1840 novel *Le Notaire*, he wrote that a young person in law sees "the oily wheels of every fortune, the hideous wrangling of heirs over corpses not yet cold, the human heart grappling with the Penal Code."

In 1819, Passez offered to make Balzac his successor, but Balzac refused. He despaired of being "a clerk, a machine, a riding-school hack" and declared he wanted to become a writer. This caused serious family conflict, but he was not thrown out. In April 1819, he moved to Paris, living in a sparsely furnished garret.