Balzac, Honore de

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

bal'zak, Honore de (1779-1850), a noted French novelist. He was born at Tours. He began his literary career as a writer for the Paris papers, but soon developed into a writer of anonymous novels. At the age of thirty, The Last of the Chouans appeared over his own name. It is not only one of his best stories, but the one best fitted, perhaps, for young readers. Balzac planned a vast series of novels to be known as The Human Comedy, in which he proposed to classify the follies and peculiarities of human nature in four groups of novels, entitled: Scenes of Private Life; of Parisian Life; of Political Life; of Military Life. He actually wrote eighty-five novels in twenty years. Library sets of his works contain twenty-five volumes. In spite of quantity, Balzac was not a careless writer. He polished his work with the utmost care and often threw away whole sections after they had been submitted to him in proof. Balzac is not considered a refined writer. In some respects he was not superior to Fielding and Smollett. It is probably high praise to call him a French Thackeray, though many of his character sketches remind the reader of Dickens. His purpose was serious. He called himself a "Secretary of Society," who "drew up the inventory of vices and virtues, aiming, with infinite patience and courage, to compose for the France of the nineteenth century that history of morals which the old civilizations have left untold." He aimed to leave future generations a series of social pictures such as he wished had been left by earlier writers.