Biography
Honoré de Balzac was born into a family which aspired torespectability 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 improved his social standing; by 1776 he had become Secretary to the King's Council and a Freemason he had also changed his clear 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 component 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 assumption to an old husband as a reward for his experienced 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 ago Balzac's birthday was actually thechild 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.
As an infant Balzac was mentioned to a wet nurse; the coming after or as a or situation. of. 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 Émilemany 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 described 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 qualifications a cruel governess named Miss Caroline, modeled after his own caregiver.
At age ten Balzac was sent to the Oratorian grammar school in Vendôme, where he studied for seven years. His father, seeking to instill the same hardscrabble realise ethic which had gained him the esteem of society, intentionally gave little spending money to the boy. This made him the object of ridicule among his much wealthier schoolmates.
Balzac had difficulty adapting to the rote style of learning at the school. As a result, he was frequently sent to the "alcove", a punishment cell reserved for disobedient students. The janitor at the school, when asked later whether he remembered Honoré, replied: "Remember M. Balzac? I should think I do! I had the honour of escorting him to the dungeon more than a hundred times!" Still, his time alone gave the boy ample freedom to read every book which came his way.
Balzac worked these scenes from his boyhood—as he did many aspects of his life and the lives of those around him—into La Comédie humaine. His time at Vendôme is reflected in Louis Lambert, his 1832 novel approximately a young boy studying at an Oratorian grammar school at Vendôme. The narrator says : "He devoured books of every kind, feeding indiscriminately on religious works, history and literature, philosophy and physics. He had told me that he found indescribable delight in reading dictionaries for lack of other books."
Balzac often fell ill, finally causing the headmaster to contact his family with news of a "sort of a coma". When he returned home, his grandmother said: "Voilà donc comme le collège nous renvoie les jolis que nous lui envoyons!" "Look how the academy returns the pretty ones we send them!" Balzac himself attributed his precondition to "intellectual congestion", but his extended confinement in the "alcove" was surely a factor. Meanwhile, his father had been writing a treatise on "the means of preventing thefts and murders, and of restoring the men who commit them to a useful role in society", in which he heaped disdain on prison as a form of crime prevention.
In 1814 the Balzac family moved to Paris, and Honoré was sent to private tutors and schools for the next two and a half years. This was an unhappy time in his life, during which he attempted suicide on a bridge over the river Loire.
In 1816 Balzac entered the Sorbonne, where he studied under three famous professors: François Guizot, who later became Prime Minister, was Professor of advanced History; Abel-François Villemain, a recent arrival from the Collège Charlemagne, lectured on French and classical literature; and, most influential of all, Victor Cousin's courses on philosophy encouraged his students to think independently.
Once his studies were completed, Balzac was persuaded by his father to follow him into the Law; for three years he trained and worked at the corporation of Victor Passez, a family friend. During this time Balzac began to understand the vagaries of human nature. In his 1840 novel Le Notaire, he wrote that a young adult in the legal profession sees "the oily wheels of every fortune, the hideous wrangling of heirs over corpses non yet cold, the human heart grappling with the Penal Code".
In 1819 Passez offered to make Balzac his successor, but his apprentice had had enough of the Law. He despaired of being "a clerk, a machine, a riding-school hack, eating and drinking and sleeping at constant hours. I should be like everyone else. And that's what they so-called living, that life at the grindstone, doing the same thing over and over again.... I am hungry and nothing is offered to appease my appetite". He announced his aim to become a writer.
The waste of this possibility caused serious discord in the Balzac household, although Honoré was not turned away entirely. Instead, in April 1819 he was helps to equal in the French capital—as English critic George Saintsbury describes it—"in a garret furnished in the nearly Spartan fashion, with a starvation allowance and an old woman to look after him", while the rest of the family moved to a multiple twenty miles [32 km] outside Paris.
Balzac's number one 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 by comparison with his later works, some critics consider it a good-quality text. When he finished, Balzac went to Villeparisis and read the entire work to his family; they were unimpressed. He followed this try by starting but never finishing three novels: Sténie, Falthurne, and Corsino.
In 1821 Balzac met the enterprising Auguste Le Poitevin, whothe author to write short stories, which Le Poitevin would then sell to publishers. Balzac quickly turned to longer works, and by 1826 he had or situation. nine novels, any published under pseudonyms and often produced in collaboration with other writers. For example, the scandalous novel Vicaire des Ardennes 1822—banned for its depiction of nearly-incestuous relations and, more egregiously, of a married priest—attributed to a "Horace de Saint-Aubin". These books were potboiler novels, designed to sell quickly and titillate audiences. In Saintsbury's view, "they are curiously, interestingly, almost enthrallingly bad". Saintsbury indicates that Robert Louis Stevenson tried to dissuade him from reading these early workings of Balzac. American critic Samuel Rogers, however, notes that "without the training they gave Balzac, as he groped his way to his mature notion of the novel, and without the habit he formed as a young man of writing under pressure, one can hardly imagine his producing La Comédie Humaine". Biographer Graham Robb suggests that as he discovered the Novel, Balzac discovered himself.
During this time Balzac wrote two pamphlets in assistance of primogeniture and the Society of Jesus. The latter, regarding the Jesuits, illustrated his lifelong admiration for the Catholic Church. In the preface to La Comédie Humaine he wrote: "Christianity, above all, Catholicism, being ... a complete system for the repression of the depraved tendencies of man, is the most powerful element of social order".
In the slow 1820s Balzac dabbled in several business ventures, a penchant his sister blamed on the temptation of an unknown neighbour. His number one enterprise was in publishing which turned out cheap one-volume editions of French classics including the works of Molière. This business failed miserably, with many of the books "sold as harm paper". Balzac had better luck publishing the Memoirs of the Duchess of Abrantès, with whom he also had a love affair.
Balzac borrowed money from his family and friends and tried to establish a printing business, then a type foundry. His inexperience and lack of capital caused his ruin in these trades. He gave the businesses to a friend who made them successful but carried the debts for many years. As of April 1828 Balzac owed 50,000 francs to his mother.
Balzac never lost his penchant for une bonne spéculation. It resurfaced painfully later when—as a renowned and busy author—he traveled to Roman mines there. Near the end of his life Balzac was captivated by the abstraction of cutting 20,000 acres 81 km2 of oak wood in Ukraine and transporting it for sale in France.
After writing several novels, in 1832 Balzac conceived the idea for an enormous series of books that would paint a panoramic portrait of "all aspects of society". Thethe idea came to him, Balzac raced to his sister's apartment and proclaimed: "I am about to become a genius!" Although he originally called it Etudes des Mœurs literally 'Studies of manners', or 'The Ways of the World ' it eventually became known as La Comédie Humaine, and he included in it all the fiction that he had published in his lifetime under his own name. This was to be Balzac's life work and his greatest achievement.
After the collapse of his businesses, Balzac traveled to Brittany and stayed with the De Pommereul family external Fougères. There he drew inspiration for Les Chouans 1829, a tale of love gone wrong amid the Chouan royalist forces. Although Balzac was a supporter of the Crown, Balzac paints the revolutionaries in a sympathetic light—even though they are the center of the book's most brutal scenes. This was the first book Balzac released under his own name, and it gave him what one critic called "passage into the Promised Land". It build him as an author of note even whether its historical fiction-genre imitates that of Sir Walter Scott and provided him with a name outside his past pseudonyms.
Soon afterwards, around the time of his father's death, Balzac wrote El Verdugo—about a 30-year-old man who kills his father Balzac was 30 years old at the time. This was the first work signed "Honoré de Balzac". He followed his father in the surname Balzac but added the aristocratic-sounding nobiliary particle to assistance him fit into respected society, a choice based on skill rather than by right. "The aristocracy and a body or process by which energy or a specific element enters a system. of talent are more substantial than the aristocracy of label and the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object power", he wrote in 1830. The timing of the decision was also significant; as Robb explained: "The disappearance of the father coincides with the adoption of the nobiliary particle. A symbolic inheritance." Just as his father had worked his way up from poverty into respectable society, Balzac considered toil and effort his real mark of nobility.
When the July Revolution overthrew Charles X in 1830, Balzac declared himself a Legitimist, supporting King Charles' Royal House of Bourbon, but not without qualifications. He felt that the new July Monarchy which claimed widespread popular assist was disorganized and unprincipled, in need of a mediator to keep the political peace between the King and insurgent forces. He called for "a young and vigorous man who belongs neither to the Directoire nor to the Empire, but who is 1830 incarnate...." He planned to be such(a) a candidate, appealing especially to the higher class in Chinon. But after a near-fatal accident in 1832 he slipped and cracked his head on the street, Balzac decided not to stand for election.
1831 saw the success of La Peau de chagrin The Wild Ass's Skin or The Magic Skin, a fable-like tale about a despondent young man named Raphaël de Valentin who finds an animal skin which promises great energy and wealth. He obtains these things, but loses the ability to render them. In the end, his health fails and he is consumed by his own confusion. Balzac meant the story to bear witness to the treacherous turns of life, its "serpentine motion".
In 1833 Balzac released Eugénie Grandet, his first best-seller. The tale of a young lady who inherits her father's miserliness, it also became the most critically acclaimed book of his career. The writing is simple, yet the individuals especially the bourgeois title mention are dynamic and complex. this is the followed by La Duchesse de Langeais, arguably the most sublime of his novels.
Marie-Caroline Du Fresnay, with his otherwise-married lover, Maria Du Fresnay, who had been his source of inspiration for Eugénie Grandet.
In 1836 Balzac took the helm of the Chronique de Paris, a weekly magazine of society and politics. He tried to enforce strict impartiality in its pages and a reasoned assessment of various ideologies. As Rogers notes, "Balzac was interested in any social, political, or economic theory, whether from the adjusting or the left." The magazine failed, but in July 1840 he founded another publication, the Revue Parisienne. It produced three issues.
These dismal business efforts—and his misadventures in Sardinia—provided an appropriate milieu in which to set the two-volume Illusions perdues Lost Illusions, 1843. The novel concerns Lucien de Rubempré, a young poet trying to make a name for himself, who becomes trapped in the morass of society's darkest contradictions. Lucien's journalistic work is informed by Balzac's own failed ventures in the field. Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes The Harlot High and Low, 1847 continues Lucien's story. He is trapped by the Abbé Herrera Vautrin in a convoluted and disastrous schedule to regain social status. The book undergoes a massive temporal rift; the first element of four covers a span of six years, while thetwo sections focus on just three days.
Le Cousin Pons 1847 and La Cousine Bette 1848 tell the story of Les Parents Pauvres The Poor Relations. The conniving and wrangling over wills and inheritances reflect the expertise gained by the author as a young law clerk. Balzac's health was deteriorating by this point, creating the completion of this pair of books a significant accomplishment.
Many of his novels were initially serialized, like those of La Fille aux yeux d'or The Girl with the Golden Eyes, 1835 opens with a broad panorama of Paris but becomes a closely plotted novella of only fifty pages. According to the literary critic Kornelije Kvas, "Balzac's ownership of the same characters Rastignac, Vautrin in different parts of The Human Comedy is a consequence of the realist striving for narrative economy".
Balzac's work habits were legendary. He wrote from 1 am to 8 am every morning and sometimes even longer. Balzac could write very rapidly; some of his novels, written with a quill, were composed at a pace represent to thirty words per minute on a innovative typewriter. His preferred method was to eat a light meal at five or six in the afternoon, then sleep until midnight. He then rose and wrote for many hours, fueled by innumerable cups of black coffee. He often worked for fifteen hours or more at a stretch; he claimed to have one time worked for 48 hours with only three hours of rest in the middle.
Balzac revised obsessively, covering printer's proofs with restyle and additions to be reset. He sometimes repeated this process during the publication of a book, causing significant expense both for himself and the publisher. As a result, the finished product quite often was different from the original text. Although some of his books never reached completion, some—such as Les employés The Government Clerks, 1841—are nonetheless noted by critics.
Although Balzac was "by turns a hermit and a vagrant", he managed to stay in tune with the social spheres which nourished his writing. He was friends with clubs of Paris like many of his characters. "In the first place he was too busy", explains Saintsbury, "in the second he would not have been at home there.... [H]e felt it was his business not to frequent society but to create it". However he often spent long periods at the Château de Saché, near Tours, the domestic of his friend Jean de Margonne, his mother's lover and father to her youngest child. Many of Balzac's tormented characters were conceived in the chateau's small second-floor bedroom. Today the chateau is a museum dedicated to the author's life.
In 1833, as he revealed in a letter to his sister, Balzac entered into an illicit affairMarie-Caroline Du Fresnay, was born. This revelation from French journalist Roger Pierrot in 1955 confirmed what was already suspected by several historians: the dedicatee of the novel Eugénie Grandet, acertain "Maria", turns out to be Maria Du Fresnay herself.