Honoré de Balzac, daguerreotype by Louis-Auguste Bisson (1842). Source · Public domain
About Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist born in Tours who, after failing as a printer and publisher in the 1820s, wrote with enormous energy to pay his debts. From the 1830s he gathered his novels and stories into La Comédie humaine, a linked portrait of French society after the Revolution in some ninety finished works, many sharing recurring characters. His best-known books include Eugénie Grandet, Father Goriot, Lost Illusions and Cousin Bette. He married the Polish countess Ewelina Hańska in March 1850 and died in Paris that August.
Frequently Cited
“The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.”
Father Goriot opens in 1819 in the Maison Vauquer, a shabby boarding house in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève on the poor edge of the Latin Quarter, which Balzac describes room by room, smell by smell, before introducing its lodgers. Among them are Eugène de Rastignac, a law student from a poor noble family near Angoulême; the hearty, mocking Vautrin, who claims to be a retired merchant; the spinster Mlle.
_detail.jpg){kind=link}
