Balzac

by V.S.Pritchett (Author), V.S.Pritchett (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1992

  $7.59

  Honore de Balzac, with his monumental legacy, the Comedie Humaine (an unsurpassed picture of French society from the rise and fall of Napoleon to the Revolution), was one of the founding geniuses among the world's great novelists. Pritchett presents a life-size portrait of the man inside the artist, the exhuberant, uncouth provincial who combined encyclopaedic knowledge with the life of an exhibitionist and would-be dandy. He was a gourmet, a disastrous financial speculator, successful pursuer of aristocratic women, a born salesman and an untiring traveller. Yet, with some truth, Balzac called himself a monk, working 16 hours a day fuelled by an ocean of strong coffee.