Word: zweig
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Helens in Hecubas. The second impulse that led Balzac to write the 90-odd novels of The Human Comedy, says Zweig, was his passion for women. In his early books, while still in his twenties, he had fiercely championed loveless ladies entering frustrated middle age, the married woman whose husband took her for granted and seldom into his arms. Women became his first devotees, wrote him letters by the thousands, frequently offered themselves to their indiscriminate advocate. Wrote Zweig: "This man could see a Helen in every woman, even in Hecuba, as soon as his will power came into play...
...Zweig's own testimony, Balzac's load of debt from his business failures and love of high living seems to have driven him on to writing as much as women or the urge to power. The ill-mannered, unkempt son of a tight-fisted petit bourgeois, he was at heart a snob and a social climber who faked a claim to nobility. To keep up with the post-Napoleonic Joneses, Balzac sat at his table for twelve hours a day, years on end, turning out alternately tripe and masterpieces. Before he was 40 his fame was such that...
...edited and somewhat rewritten by Zweig's friend Richard Friedenthal, it still exposes its incompleteness, especially in the sketchy final chapters. Balzac is the December choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which 13 years ago singled out Zweig's Marie Antoinette...
...Zweig has two explanations for the vast productivity of the squat, ugly writer who became the acknowledged master of the 19th Century realistic novel. One was Balzac's feverish lust for power. "If the opportunity had offered, Balzac might equally well have become a businessman or a slave-dealer, a speculator in real estate or a banker. It was mere chance that directed his genius into the channel of literature...
...Chagrin made him an outstanding figure in French literature, he continued-like a married woman secretly visiting a maison de rendezvous to earn some pin-money-to frequent his former low haunts and degrade the famous Honoré de Balzac to the status of a cheap hack. . . ." In fact, Zweig does a better job of explaining the hack in Balzac than he does in explaining his greatness...