Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright whose vast prose cycle La Comédie humaine mapped the social, financial, and moral life of post-Napoleonic France. Born in Tours to a self-made administrator father and a much younger mother, he studied law in Paris but abandoned it for the precarious trade of letters.

After a decade of failed publishing and printing ventures that left him deeply in debt, he found his voice with Les Chouans (1829) and the philosophical novel La Peau de chagrin (1831). Working through the night fuelled by black coffee, he produced more than ninety novels and stories at an astonishing pace, often revising on galley proofs that printers came to dread.

The grand design announced in 1842 grouped his fiction into Studies of Manners, Philosophical Studies, and Analytical Studies, with recurring characters such as Eugène de Rastignac, the convict Vautrin, the country doctor Bénassis, and the miser Père Grandet weaving across volumes. Books including Le Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, Illusions perdues, and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes are still pillars of the European novel.

Balzac corresponded for years with the Polish countess Ewelina Hańska and married her in March 1850, only to die five months later in Paris of heart failure aggravated by overwork. Victor Hugo delivered the eulogy at Père Lachaise, where Balzac's tomb is now a literary pilgrimage site.

The masculine name Honoré comes from the Latin honoratus, "honoured" or "esteemed," and was popular in France through Saint Honoré of Amiens, patron of bakers. Balzac's father had taken the name de Balzac to claim noble lineage, and the writer kept the particle even as he chronicled the merchants and clerks below it.