His 1835 novel Le Lys dans la vallée features a cruel governess named Miss Caroline, modeled after his own caregiver. (Although Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's influential book Émile convinced many mothers of the time to nurse their own children, sending babies to wet nurses was still common among the middle and upper classes.) When the Balzac children returned home, they were kept at a frosty distance from their parents, which affected the author-to-be significantly. Early life Īs an infant Balzac was sent to a wet nurse the following year he was joined by his sister Laure and they spent four years away from home. Honoré's sisters Laure and Laurence were born in 18, and his younger brother Henry-François in 1807.
Honoré (named after Saint-Honoré of Amiens, who is commemorated on 16 May, four days before Balzac's birthday) was actually the second child born to the Balzacs exactly one year earlier, Louis-Daniel had been born, but he lived for only a month.
RESTAURANT STORY HACK TOOL PROFESSIONAL
As the author and literary critic Sir Victor Pritchett explained, "She 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. Her family's wealth was a considerable factor in the match: she was eighteen at the time of the wedding, and François Balzac fifty. īalzac's mother, born Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier, came from a family of haberdashers in Paris. After the Reign of Terror (1793–94), François Balzac was despatched to Tours to coordinate supplies for the Army. In 1760 he set off for Paris with only a Louis coin in his pocket, intent on improving his social standing by 1776 he had become Secretary to the King's Council and a Freemason (he had also changed his name to the more noble sounding "Balzac", his son later adding-without official recognition-the nobiliary particle: " de"). His father, born Bernard-François Balssa, was one of eleven children from an artisan family in Tarn, a region in the south of France.
Honoré de Balzac was born into a family which aspired to achieve respectability through its industry and efforts. 1.7 Marriage and romantic relationships.1.5 La Comédie Humaine and literary success.In 1850, Balzac married Ewelina Hańska, a Polish aristocrat and his longtime love he died in Paris five months later. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal drama, and he lost more than one friend over critical reviews. La Comédie Humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience.īalzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly owing to his intense writing schedule. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician he failed in all of these efforts.
When he finished school, Balzac was apprenticed in a law office, but he turned his back on the study of law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. Many of Balzac's works have been made into films and continue to inspire other writers.Īn enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His writing influenced many famous writers, including the novelists Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James, and filmmakers François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Owing to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post- Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus. Honoré de Balzac ( / ˈ b æ l z æ k/ BAL-zak, more commonly US: / ˈ b ɔː l-/ BAWL-, French: born Honoré Balzac – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. Portrait of Honoré de Balzac by Jean Alfred Gérard-Séguin
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