Balzac

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

HONORÉ DE (bälts-ac'), a French author, born at Tours, May 20, 1799. He was educated at the Collége de Vendôme and studied law at the Sorbonne. In opposition to his father's wish that he should become a notary, he left Tours in 1819 to seek his fortune as an author in Paris. From 1819 to 1830 he led a life of frequent privation and incessant industry, producing stories and becoming burdened with debt. He first tasted success in his 30th year on the publication of "The Last of the Chouans," which was soon afterward followed by "The Magic Skin," a marvelous interweaving of the supernatural into modern life, and the earliest of his great works. After writing several other novels, he formed the design of presenting in the "Human Comedy" a complete picture re of modern civilization, especially in France. All ranks, professions, arts, trades, all phases of manners in town and country, were to be represented in his imaginary system of things. In attempting to carry out this impossible design, he produced what is almost in itself a literature. The stories composing the "Human Comedy" are classified as "Scenes of Private Life of Parisian Life, of Political Life, of Military Life," etc. Each of the actors in the brilliant crowded drama is mi HONORÉ DE BALZAC nutely described and clothed with individuality, while the scenes in which they move are set forth with a picturesqueness and verisimilitude hardly to be matched in fiction. Among the masterpieces which form part of Balzac's vast scheme may be mentioned "Lost Illusions," "The Peasants," "The Woman of Thirty," "Poor Relations," "The Quest of the Absolute," and "Eugénie Grandet." The "Droll Stories" (1833) stand by themselves. He wrote 85 novels in 20 years, and he was not a ready ready writer, being b very fastidious in regard to style, and often expending more labor on his proof sheets than he had given to his manuscript. In his later years he lived principally in his villa, Les Jardies, at Sèvres. In 1849, when his health had broken down, he traveled to Poland to visit Madame Hanska, a rich Polish lady, with whom he had corresponded for more than 15 years. In 1850 she became his wife, and three months after the marriage, in August of the same year, Balzac died at Paris. His influence on literature has been deep and many-sided, and novelists with so little in common as Feuillet and Zola alike claim him for their master. He studied character and the machinery of society in a scientific spirit, but he was not content with the photographic reproduction of fact. He was a visionary as well as an analyst, an idealist and a realist in one. His work bears trace of the strain with which it was produced; it is often coarse, often extravagant, occasionally dull. But few writers give such an impression of intellectual force and in the power of investing his creations with apparent reality he stands first among novelists. The édition definitive of his works was published in 25 volumes (1869- 1875); the last contains his correspondence from 1819 to 1850 (English translation, with memoir, 2 vols., 1879). A supplemental volume is the "History of the Works of Honoré de Balzac," by Lovenjoul (1879 ). A complete translation was made by Miss K. P. Wormley (1889-1894) and another edition was edited by Saintbury (1899).