Balzac, HONORÉ DE, was born at Tours on the 20th May 1799. He was educated at the Collège de Vendôme and studied law at the Sorbonne. In opposition to his father's wish that he should become a notary, he left Tours in 1819 to seek his fortune as an author in Paris. From 1819 to 1830 he led a life of frequent privation and incessant industry, producing stories which neither found nor deserved to find readers, and incurring—mainly through unlucky business speculations—a heavy burden of debt, which harassed him to the end of his career. He first tasted success in his thirtieth year on the publication of Les Derniers Chouans, which was soon afterwards followed by La Peau de Chagrin, a marvellous interweaving of the supernatural into modern life, and the earliest of his great works. After writing several other novels, he formed the design of presenting in the Comédie Humaine a complete picture of modern civilisation. All ranks, professions, arts, trades, all phases of manners in town and country, were to be represented in his imaginary system of things. In attempting to carry out this impossible design, he produced what is almost in itself a literature. The stories composing the Comédie Humaine are classified as 'Scènes de la Vie Privée, de la Vie Parisienne, de la Vie Politique, de la Vie Militaire,' &c. They are connected by a web of intrigue which has the Paris of the Restoration for its centre, but which stretches its threads over the provinces. Each of the actors in the brilliant crowded drama is minutely described and clothed with individuality, while the scenes in which they move are set forth with a picturesqueness and verisimilitude hardly to be matched in fiction. Among the masterpieces which form part of Balzac's vast scheme may be mentioned La Recherche de l'Absolu, Le Père Goriot, Les Illusions Perdues, Les Paysans, Les Marana, La Femme de trente Ans, Les Parents Pauvres, and Eugénie Grandet. The Contes Drôlatiques (1833) stand by themselves. They are a series of gross stories in the vein of Rabelais, Balzac reproducing with masterly skill the French of the 16th century. Balzac's industry was phenomenal. He represents himself as working regularly for fifteen and even eighteen hours a day. He wrote eighty-five novels in twenty years, and he was not a ready writer, being very fastidious in regard to style, and often expending more labour on his proof-sheets than he had given to his manuscript. His work did not bring him wealth; his yearly income, even when he was at the height of his fame, is said to have rarely exceeded 12,000 francs. During his later years he lived principally in his villa, Les Jardies, at Sèvres. In 1849, when his health had broken down, he travelled to Poland to visit Madame Hanska, a rich Polish lady, with whom he had corresponded for more than fifteen years. In 1850 she became his wife, and three months after the marriage, in August of the same year, Balzac died at Paris. His influence on literature has been deep and many-sided, and novelists with so little in common as Feuille and Zola alike claim him for their master. He studied character and the machinery of society in a scientific spirit, but he was not content with the photographic reproduction of fact. He was a visionary as well as an analyst, an idealist and a realist in one. The materials acquired by study were shaped and coloured by his fiery and teeming imagination. In the Comédie Humaine we see the everyday world reflected in a magic mirror, where the lights are brighter, the shadows darker; where objects stand out in sharper relief, and are sometimes oddly distorted. He strenuously exaggerates in the delineation of character. 'Every one in Balzac,' says Baudelaire, 'down to the very scullions, has genius.' His work bears trace of the strain with which it was produced; it is often coarse, often extravagant, occasionally dull. But few writers give such an impression of intellectual force, and in the power of investing his creations with apparent reality he stands first among novelists.
The 'edition definitive' of his works was published in 25 vols. (1869-75); with a supplemental Histoire des Œuvres, by Lovenjoul (1879), who wrote Autour de Balzac in 1897. See also the Life by his sister (1858); Barrière, L'Œuvre de Balzac (1890); a Memoir by K. P. Wormeley (1892); and Saintsbury's Preface to the translation of La Peau de Chagrin (1895). Many of the works have been translated into English, some of them several times over.