Honore de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (French pronunciation: /ɔnɔʁe d(ə) balzak/; Tours, May 20, 1799-Paris, August 18, 1850) was a French novelist and playwright, representative of the so-called realist novel of the century XIX. A tireless worker, he produced a monumental work, The Human Comedy, a coherent cycle of several dozen novels whose objective was to describe in an almost exhaustive way the post-Napoleonic French society of his time to, according to his famous phrase, make him « the competence to the civil registry”. It is generally considered his magnum opus.

Thanks to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered portrayal of society, Balzac is considered one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is famous for his multifaceted characters: even his minor characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well: the city of Paris, the backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. His work influenced many famous writers, including the novelists Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James, and the filmmakers François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. Many of Balzac's works have been made into films and continue to inspire other writers.

A keen reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adjusting to the teaching style of his school. His willful nature caused her problems throughout her life and frustrated her ambitions to succeed in the business world. When he finished school, Balzac reluctantly apprenticed in a notary's office, but gave up law school after growing tired of his inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his writing career, he tried to be an editor, a printer, a businessman, a critic, and a politician; in all these endeavors he failed. The Human Comedy reflects his real difficulties and includes scenes taken from his own experience.

Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly due to his intense pace of writing. His relationship with his family was often strained by his financial and personal problems, and he lost more than one friend to his scathing criticism. In 1850, Balzac married Ewelina Hańska, a Polish aristocrat and his lifelong love; she died in Paris five months later.

Biography

Family

Honoré de Balzac was born in Tours, into a bourgeois family. His father, born Bernard-François Balssa, came from a poor farming family in the Tarn, Midi region of France. An enterprising spirit, Bernard-François left his native village and went to Paris, determined to improve her social status. Thanks to the basic education he had received from a family priest of his, Bernard-François found employment as a civil servant in the secretariat of the Conseil du Roi (King's Council), although claims that in 1776 he was secretary of the Conseil, and even avocat du roi, seem to be inventions of Bernard-Francois himself. Balssa, for Balzac, arguing a distant (and false) kinship with the aristocratic Balzac family, which was opportunely extinct. By 1789, the year of the Revolution, Bernard-François de Balzac (he commonly added, without official permission, the aristocratic "de") was sufficiently well connected and had made a considerable fortune, his main backer being General Baron Francois René Jean de Pommereul. After the Reign of Terror (1793-1794), he considered it convenient to put himself at the service of the Directory, and achieved, through Pommereul's intermediation, a lucrative position in the army quartermaster. In this performance he would enrich himself considerably, and establish valuable relations among the Parisian bourgeoisie. After a time of obscure business dealings, he left his position in the mayor's office to work as first secretary of the Daniel Dourmerc banking house in Paris. At the age of 50, he would marry Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier, 18, daughter from one of his superiors at the Dourmerc bank; the marriage was arranged between Bernard-François himself and the Sallambier family, who, despite the age difference, saw Bernard-François as an excellent match. Once the marriage was celebrated, Bernard-François considered that, to avoid uncomfortable circumstances for being a subordinate of his mother-in-law in the bank, he should leave the business. Resorting to his friends, he was sent to Tours as Subsistence Commissioner, in charge of coordinating the acquisition of food and supplies for the 22nd division of the army.

The couple would settle in Tours, where, thanks to the fortune of Balzac senior and Anne-Charlotte herself, they enjoyed general consideration. General de Pommereul would achieve for Balzac the prestigious (and lucrative) position of administrator of the hospice in Tours. While they were residing in that city, Anne-Charlotte gave birth, in 1799, to Honoré Balzac, the second-born son of the couple, although the first-born, Louis-Daniel, born a year earlier, had died after a month. In the same city, Honoré's sisters, Laure and Laurence (1800 and 1802 respectively), and the younger brother Henry-François, would be born in 1807.

Childhood and youth

Honoré de Balzac's childhood was difficult, characterized mainly by the emotional detachment shown by his parents; this would deeply mark Honoré, who would always seek relationships with women older than him, capable of offering him the love that his mother denied him in his childhood. As soon as he was born he was entrusted to a wet nurse, with whom he would live until the age of four outside the parental home; he was only allowed to visit his parents, as if he were a stranger, two Sundays of each month. who was not allowed any childish amusement. At the age of eight, his mother insisted on sending him to a boarding school in the town of Vendôme, where he would spend the next seven years. The conditions of the boarding school were harsh: there were no school holidays, so he barely saw his parents in all that time; His mother, hoping to awaken in him a thrifty and hardworking zeal, hardly sent him money, for which Balzac was ridiculed by his classmates; the boarding school study system, based on the continuous memorization of texts, did not suit Honoré, who would be one of the worst students in his class; his listless attitude earned him frequent punishment, both corporal and in detention cells... His experiences at school would be captured in the semi-autobiographical novel Louis Lambert (1832).

In 1814 Honoré left the boarding school, apparently after having suffered a long indeterminate illness (Balzac would speak of an "intellectual congestion"). That same year, his family moved to Paris, where the young Honoré was first educated at the boarding school of Georges Lepître, an old family friend and, when his lack of progress in his studies began to worry the family, at the boarding school of a certain monsieur (lord) Gancer, where Honoré finished his studies in 1816. Simultaneously, and after the fall of the Napoleonic Empire, Bernard-François lost his positions in the service of the State. The family, hoping to save expenses, moves to the outskirts of Paris, to the town of Villeparisis. Although during this time Balzac would come into contact with French and Anglo-Saxon literature, this period is one of great unhappiness for Balzac, marked by his mother's continuous pressure to make something of him in life, and the bitterness with which he treats all his actions.. Apparently Honoré would claim to have attempted suicide by throwing himself from a bridge over the Loire in this period.

In 1816, hoping to make him a lawyer, he was sent to study at the Sorbonne, where Balzac attended Victor Cousin's courses on philosophy. His interest in the Swedish philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, whom he already knew through his mother, seems to have fully developed during this period. His love of reading and literature makes him dedicate himself professionally to these, but he finds many family impediments, especially on the part of his mother. When he manages to graduate, his father makes him enter the office of a notary friend of the family, Victor Passez, work with which he will acquire a great knowledge of the legal intricacies, and will form a rather negative opinion of the economic management of the high partnership. In 1819, Passez, planning a future retirement, offered Honoré a partner in his firm; The latter, disgusted by the monotony of the work, as well as by seeing his literary aspirations frustrated, rejects him, and announces to his family his intention to settle in Paris as a successful writer.

Literary beginnings

Despite family opposition, he achieved his goal and in the summer of 1819 settled in Paris, where he lived poorly at 9 rue Lesdiguières until 1821. During that period he composed Cromwell (1820), a work in verse in the style of Schiller, with a historical theme, very clumsy and of very low quality. Reading it to his family, who is extremely confused as to its quality, he manages to get his brother-in-law, a civil engineer, to present it to the professor of literature at the École Polytechnique, who kindly rejects it and advises Balzac devote himself to prose.

Disheartened, fearing that despite everything he would have to dedicate himself to the notary's office, in 1821 he met Auguste Lepoitevin, an aspiring writer who, appreciating Honoré's extraordinary capacity for work, proposed to Balzac to create a curious literary association, in which that he writes short serial novels that Lepotevin is in charge of selling to the publisher. After publishing three novels in collaboration with Lepoitevin in less than a year and under a pseudonym, Balzac became independent and decided to dedicate himself fully to this literary business, hoping to become rich enough in the shortest possible period, in order to be able to dedicate himself later to authentic literature. Balzac's boundless capacity for work led him to start receiving and accepting orders of all kinds. In the period from 1821 to 1829, Balzac wrote, commissioned by unscrupulous publishers, under various pseudonyms, sometimes even allowing others to sign their works, a multitude of low-quality novels (at least nine of them are known, but they are he suspects at least as many others; Balzac himself did not want to record which were his). He would also write works on the natural sciences, history, newspaper articles, political pamphlets, all commissioned by publishers who expected quick and efficient delivery. Balzac's style, which is sometimes messy and unstable, seems to suffer from these years in which, according to Stefan Zweig, Balzac sells his soul to the highest bidder.

Balzac and business

It seems that the profits of this period could have been large, ensuring an annual income of more than 4,000 francs. However, from 1825 Balzac began to mix in the most picturesque businesses, in which he lost all his income and that they will force him to live forever in debt.

The first of these was the edition in a single volume of the complete works of Molière and La Fontaine, in 1825. At the suggestion of a publisher, Balzac believes he sees in this business the beginning of his fortune: in principle, he reasons, the one-volume edition of the works of La Fontaine will make the middle class, which has neither the income nor the space to house one of the luxurious editions of these complete works in twenty volumes, run to buy them, especially if they are add quality illustrations. The business, which Balzac financed almost entirely when the rest of the partners withdrew, and with which he lost thousands of francs, was very unsuccessful: the text of the work was too small, the illustrations were of poor quality, and the price of the volume, 20 francs, is prohibitive. In the edition of some 2,000 volumes, Balzac has spent about 50,000 francs that he has had to borrow, and the cost of printing each volume is 13 francs. As time passes he sees that they are not sold and begins to reduce the price to 13 francs, and later 10, 9, 7 and 5 francs; even so, he barely manages to sell about 20 books, so when creditors pressure him to pay his debts, Balzac, in desperation, sells the 2,000 volumes to a provincial publisher for 5 francs a book; However, the publisher does not pay him in cash, but rather draws a letter in his favor, and when Balzac demands payment, he does so in kind, with an edition of poor-quality manuals that are worthless. Thus, the business is paradoxical, since Balzac not only fails to sell a single book, but when he tries to recover part of the investment by getting rid of them, he ends up with another series of even less salable books instead.^{[citation required]}

Around 1827, he became involved in other businesses related to the publishing world, which also failed and left him in debt. First, he becomes an editor; he founds a printing press in the Parisian Marais, spending a large sum to obtain the printing license, the capital for the machinery, the workers, and so on. The printing press began to work, but badly: Balzac did not establish any editorial criteria, and dedicated himself to publishing all kinds of pamphlets, advertisements, books, manuals... After a few months, it was clear that business was not going well; then, in order to make up for it, he decides to create, getting into debt again, a newspaper that he himself edits; its editorial line, chaotic, and the little interest it arouses help to sink the situation a little more. Therefore, to refloat the two businesses, which he has managed to entangle and amalgamate in an abstruse way, he decides to found a type foundry; however, his absolute ignorance about this field and the delays he suffers in starting activities make these businesses fail. Finally, it turns out that his disastrous management has managed to intermingle the three companies in such a chaotic way that his family lawyer, fearing the bad name that Balzac's bankruptcy could bring him, imposes on him as administrator the liquidation or transfer of the companies.; it takes him about two years to unravel the situation. Curiously, once they are cleaned up, printing and type foundry will turn out to be very prosperous businesses.^{[citation needed]}

Despite the help of Madame de Berny, fifteen years his senior, with whom he had relations and who opened the doors of the Parisian world to him, he went through serious financial difficulties. In April 1828 he owed his own mother some £50,000, and it seems that he had begun the habit of contracting debts to pay others.

Literary success

Balzac bust, for Rodin.

In 1829, at the age of 30, and harassed by creditors, he stumbled across an episode of the Chuan War that inspired him especially. Influenced by the work of Walter Scott, he decides to novelize the episode, for which he turns to one of the people who lived through it, the old General de Pommereul, an old friend of his father whom, hoping to flee from his creditors in Paris, he visits in Fougéres. In that town he completed the novel, whose quality, well above the serials he had produced until then, encouraged him to sign it with his name. The novel, which initially appears with the title The last chuan (later he would revise it and republish it as Los Chuanes), it sells poorly, but it allows him to attract attention. In a few years he becomes the fashionable character and the most prolific author in Paris. His astonishing performance was due to his habit of writing for about 15 hours a day, in the quiet of the night and drinking liters of black coffee. He did it in complete isolation, which is why critics have traditionally questioned where the author could obtain the barrage of data of all kinds (society, economy, events, gossip...) that saturate his novels.

His first real successes with the public date back to 1831, when he appeared La Peau de chagrin (The skin of chagrin), which appears in the Revue de Paris. This semi-fantastic novel would receive praise from critics (including the elderly Goethe) and from the public, thus sealing Balzac's literary prestige. Among other curiosities, it is the first novel in which it occurs to him to make his characters from a previous novel reappear.^{[citation required]}

In 1832, he first conceived the idea of creating a series of interrelated novels that portray the society of his time. These novels, which will make up the Scènes de la vie privée, will be the seeds of Balzac's great work, la Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy). Scenes include his greatest hits from the 1930s, such as Eugénie Grandet (1833), which will be the first major best-seller, and Le Père Goriot (1835), one of his most famous novels. During this decade, Balzac, despite knowing unprecedented success, was beset by economic problems caused by the ruinous businesses in which he invested: he bought some ancient Roman mines in Sardinia, believing that a new vein of gold had been found in them, and he even goes so far as to visit them, returning to Paris full of great enthusiasm that is soon cut short when he sees that he has been deceived.

At the same time, he meets the great love of his life, Ewelina Hańska, a countess of Polish origin, in 1832. It was the countess herself who, after reading La piel de zapa, got into Contact Honore. First he will send him a series of anonymous letters with no return address, signed L'Etrangére (The Foreigner), and to allow Balzac to reply, he suggests that he put a series of cryptic advertisements on the Gazette de France and l'Observateur. A wealthy Russian woman, she puts all her enthusiasm into building a love relationship with Countess Hanska. It has been pointed out that for the Countess, a married woman very jealous of her social status, the relationship with Balzac was more than anything an entertainment with which to pass the time in the solitude of her farm in the Ukraine, for which, in general, she will show cold and manipulative with Balzac. Even so, they will maintain sporadic relationships, which will lead him to visit the countess in Switzerland when in 1833 she is on vacation with her husband (with whom he will establish a relationship and who will believe that Balzac is a new friend of his family), as well as, the following year, to Vienna, where Balzac can assess his true international fame when the entire Viennese high society welcomes him with open arms. After the death of Baron Hanska in 1842, Balzac imagines that Countess Hanska will be willing to seal her love with marriage, and he begins to insist strongly on this. However, the Countess, who fears for her inheritance and her status, and who does not really love Balzac, is reticent; Over the next eight years, she will try to avoid any commitment to the writer, arguing for all kinds of excuses: lack of permission from the tsar, problems with her husband's will, need to find a good husband for her only daughter before leaving. getting married to Balzac,... Finally, to force the situation, Balzac travels to St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1848, where he seems to get a commitment. In 1849 he travels to Wierchownia, the countess's Ukrainian estate, where he seems to get a final betrothal. After returning to Paris, he returned to the Ukraine in the early 1850s, where, due to the harshness of winter and his failing health, he fell ill. The countess, seeing that Balzac would not survive for long in any case, finally agreed to marry him, and they were married on May 14, 1850, a few months before the writer's death (August 18).

The Human Comedy and death

In 1842 Balzac, seeing how his Scènes de la vie privée were advancing, decided to expand them, and published his famous avant-propos, the editorial plan in which he outlined the characteristics and contents of his opus magnum, the Human Comedy (as opposed to Dante's Divine Comedy). set of his work, to offer a study of French society between the fall of the Empire and the July Monarchy (1815-1830). Of this great project, 50 of the 137 novels that were to compose it were incomplete.

In 1843, and already within the Human Comedy, he published Lost Illusions, bildungsroman that narrates the misadventures of Lucien de Rubempré, a young poet who tries to thrive in the Paris of the time. The novel finds its continuation in Splendor and Misery of the Courtesans, in which Lucien tries to recover his lost status with the help of one of Balzac's most recurring characters, the mischievous Vautrin. Cousin Pons (1847) and Cousin Bette (1848) narrate the social contrast between the two characters and their wealthier relatives, criticizing the social hypocrisy with which they are treated. To compose them, Balzac based himself on his experiences with Passez notaries. By 1847, Balzac's health had suffered markedly, and the completion of these novels was an achievement for him.

In 1850, after a series of economic problems, health problems and the express prohibition of the Russian tsar, Balzac married Countess Hanska in Wierzchownia (Ukraine), with whom he moved to live in a splendid residence at outskirts of Paris. The return trip worsens the delicate health of Balzac, who will suffer serious health problems until his death five months later. On the day of his death, he had been visited by his friend and great admirer Victor Hugo, who will be in charge of offering the famous panegyric on Honoré. Balzac was buried in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, and his figure is commemorated by a monumental statue commissioned by the sculptor Auguste Rodin, which stands at the intersection of the boulevards of Raspail and Montparnasse.^{[ citation required]}

Before his tomb, Victor Hugo pronounced the following words in his honor:

From now on the eyes of men will look again at the faces, not those who have ruled, but of those who have thought.

The funeral was also attended by Frédéric Lemaître, Gustave Courbet and Alexandre Dumas father and son, among many others.^{[citation required]}

Writing style

Monument to Balzac of Auguste Rodin in the square Pablo Picasso, Paris

The Human Comedy was unfinished at the time of his death: Balzac had plans to include numerous other books, most of which he never got started. Often, he would jump between works in progress. He edited his "finished papers" frequently between editions. Such a fragmentary style reflects the author's own life, a possible attempt to stabilize it through fiction. "The disappearing man," wrote Sir Victor Pritchett, "who must be pursued from rue Cassini to... Versailles, Ville d'Avray, Italy, and Vienna, can only build a stable abode in the handiwork of he".

Realism

Balzac's extensive use of detail, especially that of objects, to illustrate the lives of his characters made him one of the early pioneers of literary realism. Although he admired and was inspired by the romantic style of the Scottish novelist Walter Scott, Balzac tried to describe human existence through the use of particulars. In the preface to the first edition of Scènes de la vie privée, he wrote: "the author firmly believes that details are the only which determine the merit of the works." The copious descriptions of decorations, clothing, and possessions help bring the characters to life. For example, Balzac's friend Henri de Latouche knew very well how to hang paper painted. Balzac carried this over into his descriptions of the Pension Vauquer in Le Père Goriot, making the wallpaper speak to the identities of those who lived inside.

Some critics consider Balzac's writing to be an example of naturalism—a more pessimistic and analytical form of realism, which attempts to explain human behavior as intrinsically linked to the environment. French novelist Émile Zola declared Balzac the father of the naturalistic novel. Zola noted that while the romantics viewed the world through a colored lens, the naturalist sees it through clear glass—precisely the kind of effect that Balzac tried to achieve in his works.

Works

Novels (selection)

• The skin of the shoe, 1831
• Colonel Chabert, 1832
• Louis Lambert, 1832
• Rural doctor, 1833
• Eugenia Grandet, 1834
• The search for absolute, 1834
• Papa Goriot, 1834
• The girl in the eyes of gold, 1835
• The Duke of Langeais, 1836
• The lily in the valley, 1836
• César Birotteau, 1837
• Lost illusions (I, 1837; II, 1839; III, 1843)
• Splendors and misery of the courtiers, 1838-1847
• A dark matter, 1841
• Ursule Mirouët, 1842
• Cousin Bette, 1846
• Cousin Pons, 1847
• The reverse of contemporary history, 1848

Stories (selection)

• The bag
• The peace of the home
• The message
• Mrs. Firmiani
• La Grenadière
• The abandoned woman
• The atheist mass
• The illustrious Gaudissart
• Facino Cane
• Sarrasine
• Pierre Grassou
• A businessman
• A prince of bohemia
• Gaudissart II
• An episode under Terror
• Z. Brands
• A passion in the desert
• Jesus Christ in Flanders
• Melmoth reconciled
• The Unknown Masterpiece
• Bye.
• The recruit
• The executioner
• A drama on the seashore
• La Posada Roja
• The long-life elixir
• The proscribed

Essays (selection)

• Small miseries of conjugal life (1830-1846)
• Elegant Life Treaty (1830)

Honorary Distinctions

• 1845: Knight of the Order of the Legion of Honour.
• 1814: Condecorated with the decoration of the Lis. (Reino de Francia)