Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac
Portrait of Honoré de Balzac, after an 1842 photographic by Louis-Auguste Bisson Portrait of Honoré de Balzac, after an 1842 photographic by Louis-Auguste Bisson
Born	(1799-05-20)20 May 1799 Tours, France
Died	(1850-08-18)18 August 1850 Paris, France
Occupation	Novelist, Playwright
Genre	Novel, Novella, Play, Short story
Literary movement	Literary realism

"Balzac" redirects here. For other uses, see Balzac (disambiguation).

Honoré de Balzac (French IPA: [ɔnɔ'ʀe də bal'zak]) (May 20, 1799 – August 18, 1850) was a nineteenth-century French novelist and playwright. His major opus, a sequence of almost 100 novels and plays collectively entitled La Comédie Humaine, is a broad panorama of French society in the years after the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte. Balzac is regarded as a founding father of realism in European literature.

An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble fitting into the society of his grammar school. This pattern repeated itself throughout his life, creating tension and frustration as he tried to gain entry into the various circles of Paris. His fiction reflects the difficulties he faced in real life, and he often included scenes taken directly from his experience.

Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, due largely to his breakneck work schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal drama, and he lost more than one friend over critical review. In 1850, he married Ewelina Hańska, his longtime paramour; six months later, he died.

Biography

Family

Honoré de Balzac was born into a family which had struggled to achieve respectability. His father, born Bernard-François Balssa, was one of eleven children born to a poor family in the southern region of Tarn. In 1760 The elder Balzac set off for Paris with only a louis in his pocket, determined to improve his social standing; by 1776 he had become Secretary to the King's Council and a Freemason. (He had also changed his name to that of an ancient noble family, and added — without any official cause — the aristocratic-sounding de.) After the Reign of Terror, he was sent to Tours to coordinate provisions for the Army.

Balzac's mother, born Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier, came from a family of haberdashers in Paris. Only eighteen at the time of their wedding (he was fifty), her family's wealth was a considerable factor in Bernard-François' attention toward her. As V. S. Pritchett puts it: "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 (so named after Saint Honoré of Amiens, whose day had recently passed) was actually the second child born in the Balzac family; exactly one year previous, Louis-Daniel had been born, but lived for only a month. His sisters Laure and Laurence were born in 1800 and 1802, respectively; his brother Henry-François was born in 1807.

Early life

Immediately after his birth, Honoré was sent to a wet-nurse; he was joined by his sister Laure soon afterwards and they spent four years away from home. When they returned to their mother and father, they enjoyed at best a frigid distance, which affected the author-to-be significantly. His novel Le Lys dans la Vallée features a cruel governness named Miss Caroline, modeled after his own caretaker.

At the age of eight Balzac was sent to the Oratorian grammar school at Vendôme, where he studied for seven years. His father, seeking to instill the same hardscrabble work ethic which had vaulted him into the esteem of society, intentionally sent very little spending money to the boy. This made him the object of ridicule among his much wealthier schoolmates.

Balzac had difficulty adapting himself 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 if 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 plow through every book which came his way.

Portrait by Louis Boulanger (1829)

Balzac worked these scenes from his childhood — 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 about a young boy studying at an Oratorian grammar school at Vendôme. The narrator states: "He devoured books of every kind, feeding indiscriminately on religios works, history and literature, philosophy and physics. He had told me that he found indescribable delight in reading dictionaries for lack of other books."

But though his mind was receiving nourishment, the same could not be said for Balzac's body. He became ill with great regularity, 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 young people we send them!") Balzac himself attributed his condition to "intellectual congestion," but his extended confinement in the alcove was surely a factor. (Meanwhile, his father has 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 heaps 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 by all accounts a fairly unhappy time in his life, punctuated by a suicide attempt 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 the Collège Charlemagne, delivered lectures on French and classical literature to packed audiences. And — most influential of all — Victor Cousin's courses on philosophy encouraged in his students a yearning for independent thought.

Once his studies were completed, Balzac was persuaded by his father to follow him into the law; for three years Honoré trained and worked at the office of Victor Passez, a friend of the family. It was during this time that he got a real taste for the vagaries of human nature. Years later, he would write in "Le Notaire" that a young person in the legal profession sees "the oily wheels of every fortune, the hideous wrangling of heirs over corpses not 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 fixed hours. I should be like everyone else. And that's what they call 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 intention to be a writer.

The loss of this opportunity caused some serious discord in the Balzac house, although Honoré was not turned away entirely. Instead, in April 1819 he was allowed to live in the French capital — as George Saintsbury describes it — "in a garret furnished in the most Spartan fashion, with a starvation allowance and an old woman to look after him," while the rest of the family moved to a house twenty miles outside of Paris.

First literary efforts

Balzac's first project was a comic opera called Le Corsaire, based on Lord Byron's tale of Conrad the pirate. Realizing he would have trouble finding a composer, however, he turned to other interests.

In 1820, he finished the five-act verse tragedy Cromwell. Although it is — as are many early works by accomplished writers — of negligible quality, biographer Graham Robb says it is "quite readable on its own terms." Critic and poet Samuel Rogers calls it "wooden and immature." When he finished, Balzac went to Villeparisis and read the entire work to his family. They were unimpressed. He followed this effort by starting (but never finishing) three novels: Sténie, Falthurne, and Corsino.

In 1821 Balzac met an enterprising man named Auguste Lepoitevin; he convinced his new friend to write stories, which Lepoitevin would then sell to publishers. This effort quickly turned to longer works, and by 1826 Balzac had written nine novels, all published under pseudonyms and often produced in collaboration with other writers. The scandalous novel Vicaire des Ardennes (1822), banned for its depiction of pseudo-incestuous relations and — more importantly — of a married priest, for example, was the work of 'Horace de Saint-Aubin'.

These books were potboiler historical novels in the manner of Walter Scott and Anne Radcliffe. English critic George Saintsbury opines that "They are curiously, interestingly, almost enthrallingly bad." He indicates that Robert Louis Stevenson, who had read Balzac's earliest writing, tried to dissuade him from the task.

Still, it was a vital process for the novelist. As Rogers notes, "without the training they gave Balzac, as he groped his way to his mature conception 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." As Robb puts it: "Discovering the Novel, Balzac was discovering himself."

"Une bonne speculation"

Laure Junot, Duchesse d'Abrantès

In the late 1820s, Balzac also dabbled in several business ventures, blamed by his sister on the temptation of an unknown neighbor. The first of these was a publishing enterprise, which turned out cheap one-volume editions of French classics including the works of Molière. This business failed miserably, with many of his books "sold as waste paper". He had better luck publishing the memoirs of Laure Junot, Duchesse d'Abrantès — with whom he also had an affair.

Borrowing money from his family and other sources, he tried again as a printer and then as a typefounder. But as with the publishing business, Balzac's lack of experience and insufficient 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. In April 1828, he owed his own mother 50,000 francs.

This penchant for une bonne speculation never left Balzac, and resurfaced painfully much later when — as a renowned and busy author — he traveled to Sardinia in the hopes of reprocessing the slag from the Roman mines in that country. Toward the end of his life, he became captivated by the idea of cutting 20,000 acres of oak wood in the Ukraine and transporting it for sale in France.

La Comédie Humaine and literary success

Main article: La Comédie humaine

In 1832 (after writing several of the novels in it), Balzac spawned the idea for an enormous series of books painting an enormous portrait of "all aspects of society." When the idea struck, he raced to his sister's apartment and proclaimed: "I am about to become a genius." Although he originally called it Etudes des Mœurs, it eventually became known as La Comédie Humaine. This was to be Balzac's life work, his monumental contribution to global literature.

After the collapse of his businesses, Balzac traveled to Brittany and stayed with the de Pommereul family outside Fougères. It was here that he drew inspiration for Les Chouans (1829), a tale of love gone wrong amid the Chouan royalist forces. This was the first book Balzac released under his own name, and it gave him "passage into the Promised Land." It established his style as an author of note (even as the surface owes a debt to Scott), and provided Balzac with a literary reputation of his own.

1831 saw the success of La Peau de Chagrin (The Wild Ass's Skin), a fable-like tale about a despondent young man named Raphaël de Valentin, who finds an animal skin promising (then, as if by magic, delivering — until finally destroying) great power and wealth. Balzac meant the story to bear witness to the treacherous turns of life, its "serpentine motion."

In 1833, Balzac struck gold with Eugénie Grandet, his first best-selling novel. It also became the most critically-acclaimed book of his career. The writing is simple, yet the individuals inside (especially the bourgeois title character) are dynamic and complex.

File:Maison-de-Balzac hi-res.jpg

Balzac's house in Paris. View from the Rue Berton.

Le Père Goriot (Old Father Goriot, 1835) was his next big success. In it, Balzac transposes the story of King Lear to 1820s Paris, in order to rage at a society bereft of all love save the love of money. The centrality of a father in this novel coincides with Balzac's own position — not only as mentor to his troubled young secretary, Jules Sandeau, but also the fact that he had (most likely) fathered a child, Marie-Caroline, with his otherwise-married lover, Maria Du Fresnay.

His misadventures in Sardinia provided an appropriate milieu in which to compose the two-volume Les Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, 1843). Lucien de Rubempré, a young poet trying to make a name for himself in society, becomes trapped in the morass of society's darkest contradictions. Lucien's journalism work reflects Balzac's abysmal experiment with the Chronique de Paris, a newspaper he briefly tried to manage.

Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (The Harlot High and Low, 1847) continues Lucien's story, wherein he is trapped by the Abbé Herrera (Vautrin), in a convoluted and disastrous plan to regain social status. The book undergoes a massive temporal rift; the first part (of four) covers a span of six years, while the final two sections focus on just three days.

Le Cousin Pons (1847) and La Cousine Bette (1848) combine to tell the story of Les Parents Pauvres (The Poor Relations). The conniving and wrangling over wills and inheritances reflects the expertise gained by the author as a young law clerk. Balzac's health was deteriorating by this point, making the completion of this pair of books a significant accomplishment.

Many of his novels were initially serialized, like those of Dickens, but in Balzac's case there was no telling how long they would end up. Illusions perdues extends to a thousand pages after starting inauspiciously in a small-town print shop, whereas La fille aux yeux d'Or (Tiger-eyes, 1835) opens grandly with a panorama of Paris but ties itself up as a closely-plotted novella of only fifty.

Work habits

Balzac's work habits were legendary — he did not work quickly, but toiled with an incredible focus and dedication. His preferred method was to eat a light meal at five or six in the afternoon, then sleep until midnight. He then rose and then wrote for many hours, fuelled by innumerable cups of black coffee. He would often work for fifteen hours or more at a stretch; he claimed to have once worked for 48 hours with only three hours of rest in the middle.

He revised obsessively, sending back printer's proofs almost obscured by changes and additions to be reset. Balzac sometimes continued this process repeatedly during the publication of a book, causing significant expense for both himself and the publisher. As a result, the finished product was frequently quite different from the original book. While certain books of his never reached a finished state, some works which are really only work-in-progress, such as Les employés (The Government Clerks, 1841), are of real interest.

Although Balzac was "by turns a hermit and a vagrant", he managed to stay connected to the social world which nourished his writing. He was friends with Théophile Gautier and Pierre-Marie-Charles de Bernard du Grail de la Villette, and knew Victor Hugo. Nevertheless, he did not spend the ample time in salons and clubs as did 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."

He would, however, often spend long periods staying at Château de Saché, near Tours, the home 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 small second-floor bedroom. Today the Château is a museum dedicated to the author's life.

Portrait of Ewelina Hańska by Holz Sowgen, 1825

Marriage and later life

In February of 1832, Balzac received a letter from Odessa — lacking a return address and signed only by "L'Étrangère" (The Stranger) — expressing sadness at the cynicism and atheism in La Peau de Chagrin and its negative portrayal of women. He responded by purchasing a classified advertisement in the Gazette de France, hoping that his secret critic would find it. Thus began a fifteen-year correspondence between Balzac and "the object of [his] sweetest dreams": Ewelina Hańska.

She was married to a man twenty years older than herself: Wacław Hański, a wealthy Polish landowner living in Kiev; it was an arrangement of convenience to preserve her family's fortune. In Balzac, Ewelina found a kindred spirit for her emotional and social desires, with the added benefit of feeling a connection to the glamorous capital of France. Their correspondence reveals an intriguing dance of propriety and patience; Robb says it is "like an experimental novel in which the female protagonist is always trying to pull in extraneous realities but which the hero is determined to keep on course, whatever tricks he has to use."

When M. Hański died in 1841, his widow and her admirer finally had the chance to pursue their affections. Competing with the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, Balzac visited her in St. Petersburg in 1843 and impressed himself on her heart. After a series of economic setbacks, health problems, and prohibitions from the Tsar, they were finally able to wed. On March 14, 1850, with Balzac's health in serious decline, they drove to a church in Berdyczów and were married. The ten-hour journey to and from the ceremony took a toll on both husband and wife: Her feet were too swollen to walk, and he endured severe heart trouble.

Balzac's monument at Cimetière du Père-Lachaise

Several months later, on August 18, Balzac died. His mother was the only one with him when he expired; Mme. Hańska had gone to bed. He had been visited that day by Victor Hugo, who later served as a pallbearer and delivered the eulogy.

He lies buried in the Cimetière du Père Lachaise. "Today," said Hugo at the ceremony, "we have a people in black because of the death of the man of talent; a nation in mourning for a man of genius." The funeral was attended by "almost every writer in Paris", including Frédérick Lemaître, Gustave Courbet, Dumas père and Dumas fils. Later, Balzac became the subject of a monumental statue by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, which stands near the intersection of Boulevard Raspail and Boulevard Montparnasse.

Political and religious views

Throughout his life, Balzac showed an interest in politics and society (as evidenced by the close attention paid to these subjects in La Comédie Humaine). He considered himself both a Royalist and a Conservative; Saintsbury calls Balzac's opinions "not unintelligent and not ungenerous, though somewhat inconsistent and not very distinctly traceable to any choerent theory." Samuel Rogers prefers to state it thusly: "Balzac was interested in any social, political, or economic theory, whether from the right or the left."

In 1824, before the success of Les Chouans, Balzac wrote two pamphlets in support of Primogeniture and the Society of Jesus. A lifetime supporter of Catholicism, he wrote in a preface to La Comédie Humaine: "Christianity, and especially Catholicism, being a complete repression of man's depraved tendencies, is the greatest element in Social Order."

Balzac also produced two treatises on the subject of marriage: Physiologie du Mariage and Scènes de la Vie Conjugale, which suffered from a lack of knowledge. He had never been married when he wrote these works, and Saintsbury points out that "Coelebs cannot talk of [marriage] with much authority." Subsequent collections of political writing were published in 1831 (Lettres sur Paris) and 1836 (La France et l'Étranger).

Use of particle de

Balzac's father had added the noble-sounding de to his name in order to fit into the social circles he wished to join; it appears his son did likewise. Still, he had a refined sense of ownership for the title. "The aristocracy and authority of talent are more substantial than the aristocracy of names and material power," he wrote in 1830.

Also significant is the fact that Balzac's story El Verdugo, written in the same year as his father's death — about a 30-year old man who kills his father (Balzac was 30 years old at the time) — is the first work signed "Honoré de Balzac." Robb frames it this way: "The disappearance of the father coincides with the adoption of the nobiliary particle. A symbolic inheritance."

Writing style and themes

Balzac planned to include 48 additional works in the Comédie, which remained unfinished at the time of his death. He grouped the books by subject matter, rather than an absolute timeline. This piecemeal style is reflective of the author's own life. "The vanishing man," writes Pritchett, "who must be pursued from the rue Cassini to . . . Versailles, Ville d'Avray, Italy, and Vienna can construct a settled dwelling only in his work."

His use of repeating characters, moving in and out of the Comédie's books, provided Balzac with a sociological power not avilable to most writers. "When the characters reappear," notes Rogers, "they do not step out of nowhere; they emerge from the privacy of their own lives which, for an interval, we have not been allowed to see."

He also used a technique which Marcel Proust called "retrospective illumination," whereby a character's past is revealed long after she or he first appears — not unlike real life. "Balzac's characters," Robb notes, "were as real to him as if he were observing them in the outside world." The characters' reality was noted by playwright Oscar Wilde, who said: "One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of [Les Illusions perdues protagonist] Lucien de Rubempré. . . . It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh."

1901 edition of The Works of Honoré de Balzac

The author's literary mood evolved over time, from one of despondency and chagrin to one of solidarity and hope. "There is nothing left for literature but mockery in a world that has collapsed" he remarked in the preface to La Peau de Chagrin. But the cynicism declined as his oeuvre progressed, and he revealed great sympathy for those who are pushed to one side by society.

Thematically, Balzac concerned himself overwhelmingly with the darker essence of human nature and the corrupting influence of middle and high societies. He worked hard to observe humanity in its most representative state; he moved incognito among the masses of Parisian society frequently to do research. He used incidents from his life and the people around him, in works like Eugénie Grandet and Louis Lambert.

A nearly infinite reserve of energy propels the characters in Balzac's novels. Struggling against the currents of human nature and society, they may lose more often than they win — but only rarely do they give up. This universal trait is a reflection of Balzac's own social wrangling, that of his family, and an interest in the Austrian mystic and physician Franz Mesmer, who pioneered the study of animal magnetism. (Balzac spoke often of a "nervous and fluid force" between individuals.)

The influence of Paris is felt deeply in La Comédie. Nature takes a back seat to the artificial metropolis, in stark contrast to the depictions of weather and wildlife in the countryside. "If in Paris," Rogers says, "we are in a man-made region where even the seasons are forgotten, these provincial towns are nearly always pictured in their natural setting."

The transposition of human elements and inanimate objects is another recurring theme. For example, Balzac said, "the streets of Paris possess human qualities and we cannot shake off the impressions they make upon our minds." His friend Hyacinthe de Latouche had extensive knowledge of hanging wallpaper; Balzac used this both in his home at Rue Cassini and in his literature. The descriptions of the Pension Vauquer in Le Père Goriot focus specifically on the wallpaper, speaking loudly to the identities of those living inside.

Bust of Balzac by Auguste Rodin, in the Victoria and Albert Museum

Legacy

After his death Balzac became recognised as one of the fathers of Realism in literature, and distinct in his approach from the "pure" Romantics like Victor Hugo. Novelist Émile Zola declared Balzac the father of the Naturalist novel, and French author Gustave Flaubert wrote about his sociological acumen: "What a man he would have been had he known how to write!" Balzac's story Une Heure de ma Vie (An Hour of my Life, 1822) is a clear ancestor of Marcel Proust's intricate reflections in À la Recherche du Temps Perdus.

In the years following his death, Balzac's vision of a society in flux — where class, money and personal ambition are the major players — achieved the distinction of being endorsed equally by critics of Left-wing and Right-wing political tendencies. Friedrich Engels wrote: "I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together." Balzac has received high praise from critics as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Camille Paglia. In 1970 Roland Barthes published S/Z, a detailed analysis of Balzac's story Sarrasine and a key work in structuralist literary criticism.

Balzac's influence can also be seen through his appearance in popular culture. Many of his works have been made into popular films, including Les Chouans (in 1947), Le Père Goriot (BBC mini-series, in 1968), and La Cousine Bette (in 1998, starring Jessica Lange). Balzac was also adapted into a character in Orson Scott Card's alternate history novels of the series The Tales of Alvin Maker. Balzac is presented as a crude but deeply witty and insightful man.

In 2000, Chinese/French author Dai Sijie published Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse Chinoise (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, in which a suitcase filled with novels helps to sustain prisoners being "re-educated" during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It was made into a film (adapted and directed by the author) in 2002.

Works

Tragic verse

• Cromwell (1819)

Incomplete at time of death

• Le Corsaire (opera)
• Sténie
• Falthurne
• Corsino

Published pseudonymously

"Lord R'Hoone", in collaboration

• L'Héritière de Birague (1822)
• Jean-Louis (1822)

"Horace de Saint-Aubin"

• Clotilde de Lusignan (1822)
• Le Centenaire (1822)
• Le Vicaire des Ardennes (1822)
• La Dernière Fée (1823)
• Annette et le Criminal (Argon le Pirate) (1824)
• Wann-Chlore (1826)

Published anonymously

• Du Droit d'Ainesse (1824)
• Histoire Impartiale des Jésuites (1824)
• Code des Gens Honnêtes (1826)

Selected titles from La Comédie humaine

• Les Chouans (1829)
• Sarrasine (1830)
• La Peau de chagrin (1830)
• Le Colonel Chabert (1832)
• La Fille aux Yeux d'Or (1833)
• Eugénie Grandet (1833)
• Le Contrat de Mariage (1835)
• Le Père Goriot (1835)
• Le Lys dans la Vallée (1835)
• Illusions perdues (I, 1837; II, 1839; III, 1843)
• La Cousine Bette (1846)
• Le Cousin Pons (1847)
• Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1847)

Plays

• L'École des Ménages (1839)
• Vautrin (1839)
• Les Ressources de Quinola (1842)
• Paméla Figaud (1842)
• La Marâtre (1848)
• Mercadet ou le Faiseur (1848)

Tales

• Contes drolatiques (1832-37)

See also

• La Comédie Humaine
• Realism (arts)
• Ewelina Hańska
• Laure Junot
• Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Bibliography

• Fernquest, Jon. Reader's Guide: Themes in the Novels of Balzac. Balzac's World. Retrieved on 23 August 2007.

• Pritchett, V. S. (1973). Balzac. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc. ISBN 039448357X.

• Robb, Graham (1994). Balzac: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393036790.

• Rogers, Samuel (1953). Balzac & The Novel. New York: Octagon Books. LCCN 75-0.

• Saintsbury, George (1901). "Honoré de Balzac". The Works of Honoré de Balzac (Vol. I, pp. vii-xivi). Philadelphia: Avil Publishing Company. OCLC 6314807

• Saintsbury, George Edward Bateman (1911). "Balzac, Honore de." The Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed., Vol. 3). New York: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Wikisource. Retrieved on 18 August 2007.

External links

• Works by Honoré de Balzac at Project Gutenberg
• Honore de Balzac by Albert Keim and Louis Lumet' at Project Gutenberg
• Bio and selected works
• Reader's Guide: Themes in the Novels of Balzac
• Honoré de Balzac's works: text, concordances and frequency lists
• Balzac and anthropology:
• Balzac on mimetism, language, desire for the absolute
• Free book downloads in HTML, PDF, text formats at ebooktakeaway.com
• Pathfinder guide to Balzac and The Human Comedy
• Victor Hugo's eulogy for Honoré de Balzac
• Greta Garbo & Balzac

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