Honore De Balzac

At 51 years old, Honore De Balzac physical status not available right now. We will update Honore De Balzac's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Honoré de Balzac (born Honoré Balzac; 20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright.

The novel La Comédie humaine, which gives a glimpse of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally considered his magnum opus. Balzac is regarded as one of Europe's first realistic writers due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of culture.

He is best known for his multi-faceted characters; even his younger children's characters are multifaceted, morally ambiguous, and fully human.

Inanimate objects are imbued with personality; the city of Paris, which was the subject of much of his writing, takes on many human characteristics.

His writing inspired many well-known writers, including Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Jack Kerouac, and Henry James, filmmakers Akira Kurosawa, Eric Rohmer, and Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.

Many of Balzac's stories have been made into films, and they continue to inspire other writers. Balzac, a young reader and free thinker, had trouble adjusting to his grammar school's teaching style.

His willful temperament brought him difficulties throughout his life and defeated his aspirations to excel in the field of business.

Balzac was apprenticed in a law office when he finished school, but after being tired of the university's inhumanity and banal routine, he turned back on the academic course.

He tried to be a publisher, printer, investor, writer, and politician before and during his time as a writer; he failed in all of these attempts.

La Comédie Humaine focuses on his personal experience and includes scenes from his own life. Balzac suffered with health issues throughout his life, owing to his hectic writing schedule.

His family's relationship was often strained by financial and personal turmoil, and he had lost more than one friend due to critical research.

Balzac married Ewelina Hanska, a Polish aristocrat and his longtime lover, in 1850, but he died in Paris five months later.

Early life

Balzac was born as an infant and was transferred to a wet nurse the following year; his sister Laure joined him and the pair spent four years away from home. (Thoughton's influential book Émile persuaded many mothers of the time to care for their own children, but middle and upper classes still have a tendency to wet nurses.) When the Balzac children returned home, they were kept at a far cry from their parents, which affected the author-to-be very much. Miss Caroline, Le Lys dans la vallée, is the author of a French novel.

Balzac was admitted to the Oratorian grammar school in Vendôme, where he spent seven years. His father gave him no money to the child in an attempt to instill the same hard work ethic that had earned him the boy's respect in society. He was ridicule among his much wealthier classmates, which made him the object of mockery.

Balzac had a difficult time adapting to the school's structured curriculum. As a result, he was often sent to the "alcove," a punishment cell reserved for disobedient students. (When asked later if he remembered Honoré, he replied: "Remember M. Balzac?"

I should think I do!

(I had the pleasure of leading him to the dungeon more than a hundred times!) Nevertheless, his time alone afforded him ample opportunity to read every book that came his way.

Balzac performed these scenes from his youth—as he did many aspects of his life and the lives of those around him—into La Comédie humaine. Louis Lambert, his 1832 book about a young boy at an Oratorian grammar school in Vendôme, is reflected in his time in Vendôme. "He devoured books of every sort," the narrator claims, focusing indiscriminately on religious works, history and literature, philosophy, and physics. For the lack of other books, he had told me that he had an indescribable delight in reading dictionaries.

Balzac often became ill, prompting the headmaster to alert his family of a "sort of coma." "Voilà donc comme le collège nous renvoie les jolis que nous lui envoyons," his grandmother wrote as he returned home. ("Look, the academy is back to the pretty ones we send them!" Balzac's illness was attributed to "intellectual congestion," but his extended confinement in the "alcove" was undoubtedly a factor. (Meanwhile, his father had been pleading for "the means of preventing robbery and murders from obtaining them and restoring them to a productive position in society) in which he sluggishly condemned prison as a form of crime prevention.)

The Balzac family moved to Paris in 1814, and Honoré was sent to private tutors and schools for the next two and a half years. It was an unhappy time in his life, during which he attempted suicide on a bridge over the river Loire.

Balzac's 1816 classes on philosophy encouraged his students to think independently; François Guizot, who later became Prime Minister, lectured on French and classical literature; and, most importantly, Victor Cousin's philosophy taught his students to think independently.

Balzac's father had begged him to join the Society, but he spent three years in Victor Passez, a family friend, until his studies were complete. Balzac began to discover the vagaries of human nature during this period. In his 1840 novel Le Notaire, he wrote that a young person in any profession sees "the oily wheels of every fortune," the wrangling of heirs over corpses that are still cold, and the human heart grappling with the Penal Code.

Passez wanted to make Balzac his successor in 1819, but his apprentice had enough of the legislation. He hated being "a clerk, a computer, a riding-school hack, and eating and drinking at set hours. I should be as normal as everyone else. And that's what they're called living, that life on the grindstone, doing the same thing over and over again. I am hungry, and no one is able to please my hunger." He declared his intention to become a writer.

The loss of this opportunity in the Balzac household caused significant turmoil, but Honoré was not turned away completely. Rather, in April 1819, he was allowed to live in the French capital, as English scholar George Saintsbury put it -- "in a garret furnished in the most Spartan style, with a starvation allowance and an old woman to look after him," while the remainder of the family moved to a house twenty miles [32 kilometers] north of Paris.

Balzac's first project, Le Corsaire, was based on Lord Byron's The Corsair, a libretto for a comedic opera. But instead of having trouble finding a composer, he went to other pursuits.

Balzac's five-act verse tragedy Cromwell was completed in 1820. Although it pales in comparison to his later works, some commentators think it is a good text. Balzac's family was unimpressed when he returned to Villeparisis and read the entire book to his family. He began (but never finished) three books: Sténie, Falthurne, and Corsino.

Balzac's enterprising Auguste Le Poitevin, who persuaded the author to write short stories that Le Poitevin would later sell to publishers, met him in 1821. Balzac's debut soon turned to longer works, and by 1826, he had written nine books, all published under pseudonyms and often produced in collaboration with other writers. Vicaire des Ardennes (1822) — which was banned for its portrayal of nearly incestuous marriages and, in the worst case, a married priest — was attributed to a "Horace de Saint-Aubin" — which was banned from publication in 1822. These books were potboiler novels that were designed to sell quickly and titillate audiences. "They are curiously, curiously, almost enthrallingly bad," Saintsbury says. Robert Louis Stevenson is accused of attempting to discourage him from reading Balzac's early works. Samuel Rogers, an American writer, claims that "without the preparation he received for Balzac as he groped his way to his mature conception of the book, one can hardly imagine his authorship as a young man of writing under pressure" and without the habit of writing under pressure." Balzac discovered himself as he read the Novel, according to biographer Graham Robb.

Balzac produced two pamphlets in support of primogeniture and the Society of Jesus during this period. The Jesuits' book illustrative his lifelong devotion to the Catholic Church. "Christianity, not least Catholicism," he wrote in the preface to La Comédie Humaine's laminate, is the most significant component of social order.

Balzac's late 1820s dabbled in several commercial ventures, a penchant his sister blamed on the attraction of an unknown neighbor. He started his company in publishing, which eventually produced inexpensive one-volume versions of French classics, including Molière's works. Many of the books were "sold as garbage paper," indicating that this company failed miserably. Balzac had a great success with the publication of the Duchess of Abrantès' Memoirs, which included a love affair.

Balzac borrowed money from his family and friends to start a printing company, then found a type foundry. His inexperience and lack of capital sparked his failure in those trades. He sold the companies to a friend (who made them profitable), but he owed the debts for many years. Balzac owed 50,000 francs to his mother as of April 1828.

Balzac never lost his penchant for une bonne spéculation. It resurfaced painfully later when—as a well-known and busy author—he travelled to Sardinia in the hopes of reprocessing the slag from the Roman mines there. Balzac was captivated by the prospect of harvesting 20,000 acres (81 km2) of oak wood in Ukraine and exporting it to France.

Balzac's inception of several novels in 1832 conceived the proposal for a large series of books portraying "all aspects of society." Balzac hurled to his sister's apartment and declared, "I am about to become a genius." Although he originally called it Études des Murs (roughly 'Studies of manners', or "The Ways of the World"), it later became known as La Comédie Humaine, and it included all the fantasy that he had written under his own name in his lifetime. This was supposed to be Balzac's life work and his greatest achievement.

Balzac moved to Brittany and remained with the De Pommereul family outside Fougères following the demise of his businesses. There he got inspiration for Les Chouans (1829), a tale of passion in the Chouan royalist period. Despite Balzac's support for the Crown, Balzac paints the revolutionaries in a sympathetic light, even though they are in the middle of the book's most brutal scenes. This was the first book Balzac had published under his own name, and it gave him what one commentator called "passage to the Promised Land." It established him as a writer of note (even if its historical fiction-genre imitates Sir Walter Scott's) and gave him a name outside of his previous pseudonyms.

Balzac wrote El Verdugo shortly after, about a 30-year-old man who murders his father (Balzac was 30 years old at the time). This was the first work to be titled "Honoré de Balzac." He followed his father in the surname Balzac, but he added the aristocratic-sounding nobiliary particle to help him integrate into established society, rather than by right. "The aristocracy and power of talent are more significant than the aristocracy of names and material king," he wrote in 1830. The decision's timing was also crucial; as Robb explained: "The disappearance of the father coincides with the introduction of the nobiliary particle." "A symbolic inheritance" is the product of a family's past. Balzac considered toil and effort his highest mark of nobility as his father had worked his way up from poverty to a dignable society.

Balzac declared himself a Legitimist after the 1830 revolution overthrew Charles X, but not without credentials. He thought that the new July Monarchy (which had widespread support) was disorganized and unprincipled, and that a mediator was needed to maintain the political stability between the King and rebel forces. He wanted "a young and vigorous man who belongs neither to the Directoire nor to the Empire, but who is incarnate of the 1830s. Balzac decided not to run after a near-fatal crash in 1832 (he slipped and cracked his head on the pavement), but after a near-fatal tragedy in 1832, he refused to run for office.

The success of La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass' Skin or The Magic Skin), a fable-like tale about a nebious young man named Raphal de Valentin who finds an animal skin with a ferocious air of power and wealth in 1831. He acquires these items but loses the ability to control them. In the end, his health suffers and he is surrounded by his own confusion. Balzac intended the tale to chronicle life's treacherous turns of events, as well as its "serpentine motion."

Eugénie Grandet, the country's first best-seller, was born in 1833. It's also the most highly praised book of his career, a young lady inherits her father's misdeeds. The prose is straightforward, but the people (especially the bourgeois title character) are dynamic and complicated. It is followed by La Duchesse de Langeais, who is arguably the most romantic of his books.

Le Père Goriot (Old Father Goriot, 1835) was his next success, in which Balzac transposes King Lear's tale to 1820s Paris in order to inflame suspicion of little love other than the love of money. Balzac's central character, as well as the fact that he had fathered a child, Marie-Caroline Du Fresnay, with his then-married lover, Maria Du Fresnay, who had been his inspiration for Eugénie Grandet, matches the beauty of a father in this book.

The Chronique de Paris, a weekly magazine of society and politics, was founded by Balzac in 1836. He attempted to enforce strict impartiality on its pages as well as a reasoned appraisal of various faiths. "Balzac was interested in any social, political, or economic theory, whether from the right or left," Rogers writes. The magazine failed, but in July 1840, he founded the Revue Parisienne, a new type of paper. It was divided into three issues.

These dismal business ventures — as well as his incompetences in Sardinia — provided a suitable setting in which to set the two-volume Illusions perdues. (Lost Illusions, 1843). Lucien de Rubempré, a young poet trying to make a name for himself, finds himself trapped in society's darkest ambiguities. Lucien's journalistic work is influenced by Balzac's own missteps in this field. Splendeurs et misères des courisanes (The Harlot High and Low, 1847) continues Lucien's tale. In a complicated and costly effort to regain social status, he is trapped by the Abbé Herrera (Vautrin). The book undergoes a dramatic temporal shift; the first part (of four) covers a span of six years, while the final two sections focus on only three days.

Le Cousin Pons (1847) and La Cousine Bette (1848) tell the tale of Les Parents Pauvres (The Poor Relations). The author's experience as a young law clerk reflected in the debate and wrangling over wills and inheritances. Balzac's health was deteriorating by this time, making the completion of this pair of books a major achievement.

Many of his books were first serialized, as Dickens'. There were no set lengths for them. After starting inauspiciously in a small-town print shop, Illusions Perpetues extends to a thousand pages, whereas La Fille aux yeux d'or (The Girl with the Golden Eyes, 1835) opens with a broad panorama of Paris but turns into a tightly planned novella of only fifty pages. "Balzac's use of the same characters (Rastignac, Vautrin) in various parts of The Human Comedy, according to literary critic Kornelije Kvas, is a result of the realist's search for narrative economy."

Balzac's work habits were legendary. Every morning, he wrote from 1 a.m. to 8 a.m., and occasionally longer. Balzac could write quickly; some of his stories, written with a quill, were written at a rate comparable to thirty words per minute on a modern typewriter. His preferred method was to eat a light meal at five or six in the afternoon and then sleep until midnight. He soared and wrote for several hours, fuelled by innumerable cups of black coffee. He worked for fifteen hours or more at a time; he appeared to have only slept for 48 hours in the middle.

Balzac's obsession with updating and inserting printer's evidence was maintained, with printer proofs being backed up. He often repeated this process after the publication of a book, incurring significant expenses for both himself and the publisher. As a result, the final product was often different from the original text. Although some of his books never reached their conclusion, critics have also noted Les employés (The Government Clerks, 1801).

Despite Balzac's status as both a hermit and a vagrant, he maintained his writing in a social context that fed his writing. He was friends with Théophile Gautier and Pierre-Marie-Charles de la Villette de la Villette, and he was familiar with Victor Hugo. Nevertheless, he did not spend as much time in salons and clubs of Paris as some of his characters. "In the first place, he was too occupied," Saintsbury says. "In the second, he would not have been at home there." "In the second case, he would not have been at home there." However, he stayed at Château de Saché, near Tours, for his mother Jean de Margonne, his mother's lover and father to her youngest child. Many of Balzac's nirmented characters were created in the chateau's tiny second-floor bedroom. The chateau today is a museum devoted to the author's life.

Balzac, as he revealed in a letter to his sister, became embroiled in an illicit affair with fellow writer Maria Du Fresnay, who was then aged 24. From the start, her marriage to a much older man (Charles du Fresnay, Mayor of Sartrouville) had been a flop. Balzac's letter also states that the young woman had just come to inform him she was pregnant with his child. Maria Du Fresnay's daughter by Balzac, Marie-Caroline Du Fresnay, was born in 1834, 8 months after the event. This statement by French journalist Roger Pierrot in 1955 confirmed what was already suspected by several analysts: the dedicatee of the novel Eugénie Grandet, a certain "Maria," turns out to be Maria Du Fresnay herself.

Balzac's letter in February 1832 was an intriguing letter sent from Odessa -- without a return address and labeled simply "L'Étrangère" ("The Foreigner"), expressing sadness at La Peau de Chagrin's negative portrayal of women. His idea was to place a special advertisement in the Gazette de France, in the hopes that his anonymous critic would see it. Balzac and "the object of [his] sweetest aspirations": Ewelina Haska began a fifteen-year friendship.

Ewelina (née Rzewuska) was married to Marshal Wacinski, a wealthy Polish landowner living near Kyiv, twenty years her senior. To safeguard her family's fortune, it had been a marriage of convenience. Ewelina, countes of Balzac, discovered a deep passion for her emotional and social aspirations, as well as the luxury of being close to France's glamorous capital. Their correspondence shows an enthralling mixture of passion, propriety, and patience; Robb says it is "like an experimental novel in which the female protagonist is constantly trying to fit in extraneous realities, but in which the hero is determined to keep on track, whatever tricks he has to use."

Marshal Haney died in 1841, and her widow and her admirer were finally able to pursue their passions. Balzac, a Hungarian composer who wrote Franz Liszt, visited Countess Haska in St. Petersburg in 1843 and captured her admiration. The couple finally got married on March 14th, 1850, after a string of financial setbacks, health issues, and criticism from Tsar Nicholas I. Both husband and wife were unable to walk for ten hours after the 10-hour ride to and from the service: her feet were too swollen to walk, and he had serious heart disease.

Balzac had already published two treatises on marriage, Physiologie du Mariage and Scènes de la Vie Conjugale, although he married late in life. These books lacked firsthand knowledge; Saintsbury explains that "clebs cannot talk about [marriage] with much authority." The newlyweds set off for Paris in late April. On the way, his health worsened, and Ewelina wrote to her daughter about Balzac as "in a state of severe vulnerability" and "sweating profusely." On May 20, they celebrated their 50th birthday in Paris.

Balzac died in the presence of his mother, five months after his wedding on Sunday, 18 August 1850; instead, Countess Haska) had gone to bed. Victor Hugo, who later served as a pallbearer and the eulogist at Balzac's funeral, had visited him on the day.

Balzac is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Victor Hugo said at his memorial service, "Today we have people in black because of the man of talent's death; a world mourning for a man of genius." "almost every writer in Paris" attended the funeral, including Frédérick Lemaître, Gustave Courbet, Dumas père, and Dumas fils, as well as representatives of the Légion d'honneur and other dignitaries attended the funeral.

Later, French sculptor Auguste Rodin sculpted a monument to Balzac. The Balzac Monument has stood outside the intersection of Boulevard Raspail and Montparnasse in Place Pablo-Picasso since 1939. Cast in bronze. In several of Rodin's smaller sculptures, Balzac appeared.

Source