Honoré de Balzac, often said to be the greatest of French novel-ists, was born in Tours on May 20, 1799. His father was a civil servant who had survived the Revolution and risen under Napoleon; his mother came from a middle-class Parisian family. Raised by a wet nurse until the age of four, he was later sent to study at the Oratorian college in Vendôme. In 1814 the family moved to the Marais district of Paris, where Balzac attended the Lycée Charlemagne. Following three years as a legal clerk he earned a Bachelor of Law degree in 1819, but soon decided to pursue a literary career. His first effort, Cromwell, a verse tragedy, was a complete failure. During the 1820s Balzac supported himself as a hack journalist, turning out sensational novels and potboilers under various pseudonyms. He also tried to make money in several publishing ventures, all of which failed and left him saddled with debt. The appearance in 1829 of Les Chouans, the first work published under his own name, along with La Physiolo-gie du mariage, marked the beginning of Balzac's success as a nov-elist. Scènes de la vie privée (1830), a collection of short stories, quickly enhanced his reputation.

"Salute me for at this very moment I am in the throes of becoming a genius," Balzac announced to his sister in 1833, when he conceived the idea of pouring all his creativity into writing one great chronicle of the age, La Comédie Humaine. "[lt] was at first as a dream to me," he later explained. "French society would be the real author; I should only be the secretary. By drawing up an inventory of vices and virtues, by collecting the chief facts of the passions, by depicting characters, by choosing the principal incidents of social life, by composing types out of a combination of homogeneous characteristics, I might perhaps succeed in writing the history which so many historians have neglected: that of Manners. By patience and perseverance I might produce for France in the nineteenth century the book which we must all regret that Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia, and India have not bequeathed to us: a history of their social life."

Balzac devoted the rest of his life to this monumental task. Clothed in a white dressing gown that resembled a monk's robe and imbibing huge quantities of strong black coffee, he began writing at midnight and continued until midday. Famous for composing an entire work on successive galley proofs instead of submitting a finished manuscript to printers, Balzac published five or six books a year, with as many others in various stages of completion. Over a period of two decades he produced ninety-two novels filled with some two thousand characters. Among the most outstanding are Eugénie Grandet(1833), Le Père Goriot 1835), César Birotteau (1837), Ilusions perdues (1837-1843), Ursule Mirouët (1842), La Cousine Bette 1846), and Le Cousin Pons (1847).