Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a French novelist born in Tours who failed as a printer and publisher and from about 1830 set out to describe the whole of French society in a connected series of novels and stories he eventually called The Human Comedy. It runs to some ninety finished works, among them Father Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, Lost Illusions and Cousin Bette, with more than two thousand characters who reappear from book to book. He wrote at night on quantities of black coffee, was perpetually in debt and in flight from creditors, and married his longtime correspondent Ewelina Hańska in 1850, five months before his death at fifty-one.