Honoré de Balzac

French novelist and playwright

Date of Birth	:	20 May, 1799
Date of Death	:	18 Aug, 1850
Place of Birth	:	Tours, France
Profession	:	French Novelist And Playwright
Nationality	:	French

Honoré de Balzac born Honoré Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. The novella sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally regarded as his masterpiece.

Because of his detailed observations and unvarnished representation of society, Balzac is considered one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is famous for his versatile character; Even his minor characters are complex, morally ambiguous and wholly human. Inanimate objects are also imbued with character; The city of Paris, the backdrop for many of his writings, takes on many human qualities. His writings influenced many famous writers, including novelists Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert and Henry James, and filmmakers Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. Many of Balzac's works have been made into films and continue to inspire other writers. James called him "the Father indeed of us all."

An avid reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused problems throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the business world. When he finished school, Balzac was apprenticed to a law office, but he turned away from the study of law, tired of its inhumanity and general routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he tried to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic and politician; He failed in all these attempts. La Comédie Humaine reflects his real-life difficulties and includes scenes from his own experiences

Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly due to the intensity of his writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained due to financial and personal drama, and he lost several friends due to critical reviews. In 1850, Balzac married Evelina Hanska, a Polish aristocrat and his longtime love. He died in Paris six months later.

Biography

Family

Honoré de Balzac was born into a family which aspired to achieve respectability through its industry and efforts. His father, born Bernard-François Balssa, was one of eleven children from an artisan family in Tarn, a region in the south of France. In 1760 he set off for Paris with only a Louis coin in his pocket, intent on improving his social standing; by 1776 he had become Secretary to the King's Council and a Freemason (he had also changed his name to the more noble sounding "Balzac", his son later adding—without official recognition—the nobiliary particle: "de"). After the Reign of Terror (1793–94), François Balzac was despatched to Tours to coordinate supplies for the Army.

Balzac's mother, born Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier, came from a family of haberdashers in Paris. Her family's wealth was a considerable factor in the match: she was eighteen at the time of the wedding, and François Balzac fifty. As the author and literary critic Sir Victor Pritchett explained, "She was certainly drily aware that she had been given to an old husband as a reward for his professional services to a friend of her family and that the capital was on her side. She was not in love with her husband".

Honoré (named after Saint-Honoré of Amiens, who is commemorated on 16 May, four days before Balzac's birthday) was actually the second child born to the Balzacs; exactly one year earlier, Louis-Daniel had been born, but he lived for only a month. Honoré's sisters Laure and Laurence were born in 1800 and 1802, and his younger brother Henry-François in 1807.

Early life

As an infant Balzac was sent to a wet nurse; the following year he was joined by his sister Laure and they spent four years away from home. (Although Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's influential book Émile convinced many mothers of the time to nurse their own children, sending babies to wet nurses was still common among the middle and upper classes.) When the Balzac children returned home, they were kept at a frosty distance from their parents, which affected the author-to-be significantly. His 1835 novel Le Lys dans la vallée features a cruel governess named Miss Caroline, modeled after his own caregiver.

At the age of ten, Balzac was sent to the Oratorian grammar school in Vendôme, where he studied for seven years. His father, wanting to inculcate the same hard work ethic that earned him the respect of society, deliberately gave the boy a small amount of money. This made him an object of ridicule among his many wealthy classmates.

Balzac had difficulty adapting to the rote style of learning at school. As a result, he is often sent to "the alcove", a punishment cell reserved for unruly students. (The school janitor, when later asked if he remembered the honor, replied: "Remember M. Balzac? I should think I do! I had the honor of taking him to the dungeon more than a hundred times!") Nevertheless, his alone time gave the boy enough freedom to read every book that came his way.

Balzac worked these scenes from his childhood—as he did many aspects of his life and the lives of those around him—in La Comité Humaine. His time in Vendôme is reflected in Louis Lambert, an 1832 novel about a young boy studying at an oratorian grammar school in Vendôme. The narrator says: "He feasted indiscriminately on religion, history and literature, philosophy and physics, devouring all kinds of books. He told me that he found indescribable pleasure in reading dictionaries for want of other books.

Balzac often fell ill, causing the headmaster to contact his family with news of "a kind of coma". When he returned home, his grandmother said: "Voilà donc comme le collège nous renvoie les jolis que nous lui envoyons!" ("See how the Academy returns the beauties we send!") Balzac himself attributed his condition to "intellectual overcrowding", but his extended confinement in the "alcove" must have been a factor. (Meanwhile, his father wrote a treatise on "Means of Preventing Theft and Murder, and of Restoring Men in Their Commitment to a Useful Role in Society", in which he disparaged prison as a form of crime prevention.

In 1814 the Balzac family moved to Paris and Honore was sent to private tutors and schools for the next two and a half years. It was an unhappy period in his life, during which he attempted suicide on a bridge over the Loire River.

In 1816 Balzac entered the Sorbonne, where he studied under three famous professors: François Guizot, who later became prime minister, was professor of modern history; Abel-François Villemain, a recent arrival from Collège Charlemagne, lectured on French and classical literature; And, most influentially, Victor Cousin's courses in philosophy encouraged his students to think independently.

Once he finished his studies, Balzac was persuaded by his father to follow him into law; For three years he trained and worked in the office of family friend Victor Passage. It was during this time that Balzac began to understand the ambiguity of human nature. In his 1840 novel Le Notre, he wrote that a young man in the legal profession sees "the oiled wheels of every fortune, the hideous quarrels of heirs over corpses not yet cooled, men's hearts fluttering with the penal code".

In 1819 Passage offered Balzac his successor, but his apprentice had had enough of the law. He despairs of "a clerk, a machine, a riding-school hack, eating and sleeping at fixed times. I should be like everybody else. And that's what they call living, that life, that life, doing the same thing. Bar Bar.... I am hungry and nothing is given to satisfy my hunger He expressed his desire to become a writer.

The loss of this opportunity caused serious discord within the Balzac family, although the honor was not fully returned. Instead, in April 1819 he was allowed to live in the French capital - as the English critic George Saintsbury described it - "in a garret furnished in most Spartan fashion, with starvation allowances and an old woman to look after him". The rest of the family moved to a house 32 kilometers outside Paris.

First literary effort

Balzac's first project was a libretto for a comic opera called Le Corsaire, based on Lord Byron's The Corsair. Realizing he would have trouble finding a composer, however, he turned to other pursuits.

In 1820 Balzac completed the five-act verse tragedy Cromwell. Although it pales in comparison to his later works, some critics consider it a good quality read. When he finished, Balzac went to Villeparisis and read the whole work to his family; They were unprepared. He followed this effort by starting (but not finishing) three novels: Steny, Falthern, and Corsino.

In 1821 Balzac met entrepreneur Auguste Le Poitivin, who persuaded the author to write short stories, which Le Poitivin would then sell to publishers. Balzac quickly turned to longer works, and by 1826 he had written nine novels, all published under pseudonyms and often in collaboration with other authors. For example, the scandalous novel Vicaire des Ardennes (1822)—it was banned for its depiction of a near-incestuous relationship and, more seriously, of a married priest—attributed to a "Horace de Saint-Aubin". These books were Potboiler novels, which were designed to sell quickly and relax audiences. In Saintsbury's view, "they are curiously, attractively, almost enchantingly bad". Saintsbury indicates that Robert Louis Stevenson tried to discourage him from reading these early works of Balzac. American critic Samuel Rogers, however, noted that "without the training they gave Balzac, when he was approaching the mature conception of the novel, and without the habit he developed as a young man of writing under pressure, one cannot imagine him producing la Comédie Humaine". Biographer Graham Robb suggests that Balzac discovered himself as he discovered the novel.

During this time Balzac wrote two pamphlets in support of the primitive and the Society of Jesus. The latter, about the Jesuits, illustrates his lifelong admiration for the Catholic Church. In the preface to La Comédie Humaine he wrote: “Christianity, above all, Catholicism, is… a complete system for the suppression of man's perverse tendencies, the most powerful element of social order.

legacy

Balzac influenced writers of his time and beyond. He has been compared to Charles Dickens and is considered one of Dickens's significant influences. Literary critic WH. Helm called one the "French Dickens" and the other the "English Balzac" another critic Richard Lehane stated that "Balzac was the bridge between the comic realism of Dickens and the naturalism of Zola".

Gustave Flaubert was also greatly influenced by Balzac. Admiring his portrayal of society while attacking his prose style, Flaubert once wrote: "What a man he would be if he knew how to write!" A keen attention to detail and unvarnished imagery of bourgeois life. This influence shows in Flaubert's work L'éducation sentimental which is indebted to Balzac's Illusions Perdues. "What Balzac began", observed Lehane, "Flaubert helped to finish".