Birthdays

Honore’ Balzac (1799-1850)

Author

While inventing the modern novel, Balzac lived a life that veered precariously between high drama and very low comedy.

His family gave him much material: his mother- of a well-off Parisian haberdasher- was married at 18 to Balzac’s father, then 50. Balzac pere was nimble of mind and flexible enough of view to survive as a civil servant under Louis XVI and Napoleon over a 43-year career. The marriage was fell somewhere between convenience and burden. As British writer and critic V. S. Pritchett explained, Madame Balzac “was certainly drily aware that she had been given to an old husband as a reward for his professional services to a friend of her family and that the capital was on her side. She was not in love with her husband."

After a classical 19th century boarding school misery, Balzac spent three years studying law and hated every minute. He set himself up as a writer, over strenuous familial objections, and wrote bad plays. Then he tried mystical, philosophical novels. No luck.

Next, he turned to churning out potboilers under assumed names, works, the critic George Saintsbury said, "are curiously, interestingly, almost enthrallingly bad." He set up as a publisher and failed. He tried the printing business, and failed. As if to round out his failures in all aspects of the written word,he ran a type foundry into the ground.

At 29, Balzac was 60,000 francs in debt, mostly to his mother. He took the Byronic course, adopting an extinct family’s coat of arms, inserting the honorific “de” into his name, and became a Parisian party animal and salong character, conducting affairs with wealthy older women. Rather like Proust, he stored up impressions of people and events, and by 1834 envisioned his masterwork to come: a seemingly endless series of novels and short stories of all of human nature: La Comedie humaine.

Balzac turned his volcanic energies to his writing-desk; he wrote slowly but, seemingly, endlessly. He took a light meal at 5 or 6 pm, then slept until midnight. There followed an allnighter/alldayer writing marathon.

His output grew in sales and public favor, though for most of his life he was still writing to stay ahead of creditors. He was notorious for rewriting whole books in the publisher's galleys, driving up typesetting costs and cutting into his profits. Nevertheless, in fifteen years, he cranked out ninety books and short stories in his project, with some three thousand characters- 2400 of them named, many reappearing from time to time through the series. His plots drawn from the real lives of people of every class, city and country; his muscular prose and genius for dialogue; all came together for him as he wrote, and wrote and wrote, fueled by a bottomless mug of coffee.

In the early 1830s Balzac received an anonymous letter from a fan, regretting the cynicism, atheism and misogyny of his latest work. Enthralled, he bought an ad in a French publication which, improbably, she saw. Ewelina Hanska was an heiress in a marriage of convenience to a Pole living in Kiev; both became smitten. In 1841 Hanska’s husband died, and Balzac went to see her in St. Petersburg only to find the composer-pianist Franz Liszt fluttering around her. Fending him off, Balzac finally married Ewelina in March, 1850, after a harrowing ten-hour carriage ride to the church that nearly did them both in.

Somewhat  recovered, the couple set out for Paris in April; Balzac's health- abused for so many years, began to fail, and in August, he died. He was lionized in death; Hugo was his eulogist and a pallbearer. Nearly every significant European novelist of the next century acknowledged Balzac’s influence- and not a few Americans, including Poe, Henry James, Faulkner, and Kerouac. His work has been the basis of innumerable plays, movies, television program and radio presentations.

Related sites:

Project Gutenberg: Works of Balzac (free, online)

La Comedie Humaine by Balzac (website)

Balzac’s Paris: A Guided Tour

Musee Rodin: The Balzac Monument

City of Paris Museums: The Balzac House