[Gutenberg 3822] • Balzac

Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) was a nineteenthcentury French novelist and playwright. His work of almost 100 novels and plays collectively entitled La Comedie humaine, is a broad, often satirical panorama of French society, particularly the petite bourgeoisie, in the years after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815-namely the period of the Restoration (1815-1830) and the July Monarchy (1830-1848). Along with Gustave Flaubert, whose work he influenced, Balzac is generally regarded as a founding father of realism in European literature.