The Human Comedy

Honoré de Balzac (1799ߝ1850) is generally credited as the inventor of the modern realistic novel. In more than ninety novels, he set forth French society and life as he saw it. He created a cast of more than two thousand individual and identifiable characters, some of whom reappear in different novels. He organized his works into his masterpiece, La Comédie humaine, which was the final result of his attempt to grasp the whole of society and experience into one varied but unified work.
 
Peter Brooks is the author of Henry James Goes to Paris, Realist Vision, Troubling Confessions, Reading for the Plot, The Melodramatic Imagination, and a number of other books, including the historical novel World Elsewhere. He taught for many years at Yale, where he was the Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, and currently is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholar at Princeton.

“Large as Balzac is, he is all of one piece and he hangs together perfectly.” —Henry James
 
“I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.” —Friedrich Engels
 
“Balzac was both a greedy child and an indefatigable observer of a greedy age, at once a fantastic and a genius, yet possessing a simple core of common sense.” —V. S. Pritchett
 
“Balzac was by turns a saint, a criminal, an honest judge, a corrupt judge, a minister, a fob, a harlot, a duchess, and always a genius.” —André Maurois
 
“All Balzac’s characters are endowed with the zest for life with which he himself was animated. All his fabrications are as intensely colored as dreams. From the highest ranks of the aristocracy to the lowest dregs of society, all the actors in his Comedié are more eager for life, more energetic and cunning in their struggles, more patient in misfortune, more greedy in pleasure, more angelic in devotion than they are in the comedy of the real world. In a word, everyone in Balzac has genius.... Every living soul is a weapon loaded to the very muzzle with will.” —Charles Baudelaire