Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac wrote about ninety novels and stories in twenty years and worked himself to death doing it. Born in Tours in 1799 to a father who had changed his name from Balssa and a mother twenty-two years younger, he was boarded out to a wet nurse and then sent to a harsh school, and was, by his own account, unloved. He trained as a lawyer, refused the profession, and spent years writing potboilers under pseudonyms. He then went into business as a printer and publisher and failed comprehensively, leaving debts that pursued him for the rest of his life and that shaped both his working habits and his subject matter. He worked at night, wearing a monk's robe, from midnight for twelve to sixteen hours, sustained by very large quantities of strong coffee, and rewrote so heavily on proofs that printers charged him for it. From 1834 he conceived the plan of linking his novels into a single structure, La Comédie humaine, presenting a complete account of French society after the Revolution — the provinces, Paris, the law, journalism, the peasantry, the aristocracy and the new money. Some two thousand characters recur across the volumes, so that a minor figure in one is the protagonist of another. Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, Lost Illusions and Cousin Bette are the best known. His subject is almost always money and what people do to get it. He courted the Polish countess Ewelina Hańska by letter for eighteen years and married her in March 1850, five months before he died in Paris at fifty-one.

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