Word: balzacs
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...Balzac's masterpiece, La Comedie Humaine, contains 91 interwoven novels, and more than 2,000 characters. Its theme is the power of money...
This is a kind of literary marriage that is becoming increasingly popular: a longish essay on a suitably cultural subject wedded to lavish and largely relevant illustration. In the case of Balzac, the union is not exactly bliss. One might wish to trade some of the Paris street scenes for more text, but the subject would probably overwhelm any possible approach...
...Balzac wrote the way some men talk: compulsively, brilliantly, endlessly. In a career of only 21 years he managed to get down on paper all of France in the first half of the 19th century. He understood every nuance of provincial ambition, every deadly trap a great city lays impersonally for the young adventurer and the sick old man alike. Some of his characters' names have become inter changeable with vices- old man Grandet with avarice, Cousin Bette with envy...
Money was something Honoré de Balzac knew about intimately because his mirror manias were spending and collecting. A small man with comically short legs, he spent fortunes on clothes, bought gloves by the dozen and fancied bejeweled canes. Another passion was furniture, rugs and bric-a-brac. All his tastes were expensive and execrable...
...Balzac was born in 1799 in Touraine, the province of France that is perhaps least regional and most national in feeling. His family had sizable social ambitions, most of them never satisfied. They tried to force their son to be a lawyer, but from the moment Balzac encountered the library of his boring, squalid boarding school, he was totally committed to the life of the imagination...