Balzac set out to do something no novelist had attempted: to write the complete natural history of a society. Not one novel, but ninety — all interlocking, sharing characters, mapping every corner of France from the aristocrat’s salon to the convict’s cell. He called the whole edifice La Comédie humaine, the Human Comedy, and it is one of the wonders of literature.
The trick that binds it together is the recurring character. A young man glimpsed rising in one novel is the ruthless banker of another; a courtesan’s tragedy in one book is a footnote in a third. Read enough of them and you begin to feel you are not reading fiction but observing a real, crowded, breathing world — which was exactly Balzac’s ambition. Money is his great subject, the secret force that moves every marriage, every friendship, every crime, and no one has anatomized ambition and greed with more ferocious energy.
Where to start? With Father Goriot, the gateway, where the young Rastignac first learns the city’s rules. Then Lost Illusions, Eugénie Grandet, Cousin Bette — and outward into the whole teeming map.
This edition gathers the complete Human Comedy — every novel, novella and tale — with the Droll Stories and the letters. It is a lifetime’s reading, and the foundation of the realist novel Zola would inherit.
Read The Complete Works of Balzac →
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