Balzac, Honoré de
Balzac, Honoré de ( 1799 – 1850 ),French novelist, author of the great series of co-ordinated and interconnected novels and stories known collectively as the Comédie humaine. The 91 separate completed works—137 were planned—that make up the whole were written between 1827 and 1847 . The preface ( 1842 ) to the first collected edition ( 1842 – 8 ) of Balzac's works, which first applies the general title to them, sets out his grand design to give an authentic and comprehensive fictional representation of French society in the latter years of the 18th cent. and the first half of the 19th. Critical analysis was an essential part of his aim, and by bold analogies between the novelist's art and that of the natural scientist and the historian he claimed for his ‘studies’ the orderly method, seriousness of purpose, and intellectual scope of these disciplines. The novels were classified under three main...
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