Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac wrote some ninety novels and stories in twenty years, working through the night on coffee, always in debt, and died at fifty-one, months after marrying the Polish countess he had courted for eighteen years. He conceived them as one work, The Human Comedy, a complete natural history of French society from the Restoration to the July Monarchy, with characters recurring from book to book. Père Goriot is the usual way in, Eugénie Grandet the tightest, Cousin Bette the darkest. Marx said he learned more from Balzac than from all the economists.