Biography Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac (1799 - 1850) is the author of La Comédie humaine, one of the most impressive books in the French literature (it consists of 90 novels).
Honoré de Balzac attended the Sorbonne University in Paris having literary ambition. His parents put him in an attic apartment (which inspired the apartment of his heroes in La Peau de Chagrin) and financed him for two years to write. Balzac wrote a tragedy in verse, but it was a failure. His teachers discouraged him from continuing writing.
This did not discourage him and instead, he turned into novels. Adhering to the literary taste of the era, he wrote historical novels for money. Later, he would describe those books as "literary rubbish."
In 1825, Balzac associated with people who published Molière and Jean de La Fontaine. Abandoned by his associates in 1826, he got into a debt of sixteen thousand francs. This did not prevent him from creating a type foundry in 1827, which was a huge financial failure. He collapsed under a debt amounting to one hundred thousand francs.
After the bankruptcy, Balzac returned to writing to finally find success. This was the beginning of The Comédie humaine. He created recurring character throughout the novels, alternating main and secondary characters depending on the stories, creating more complex relationships throughout the works that gave it an extraordinary realism.
A hard worker crippled by debts (he died prematurely at the age of fifty-one years old), Balzac lived on rue de Passy in Paris in a house with two doors that allowed him to escape when their creditors presented themselves. By setting up its Parisian office on the very same street, Eurochannel paid him tribute.
The novel cycle of La Comédie humaine and the principle of recurring characters has influenced many writers, including French writer Emile Zola (1840 - 1902) in his Rougon-Macquart cycle.
His novels are an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the film adaptations of his stories; there are about one hundred films in many countries adapted from his stories.