Welcome back to The Deep Dive. This is the place
where we take a huge stack of research biographies,
literary analysis, historical context, and boil
it all down to the one essential thing you really
need to know. And today we're talking about a
writer whose life wasn't just interesting, it
was, well, it was a wreck. A truly spectacular,
chaotic, and perpetually indebted wreck. We are
diving into Honoré de Balzac. The one and only.
Absolutely. The great French novelist and playwright.
And before we even touch on the sweeping grandeur
of his work, we have to start with the man's
self -confidence. Yeah. It's almost unbelievable.
It really is. It's the ultimate writerly mic
drop. So it's 1832. After years of writing under
pseudonyms, years of failed projects, Balzac
has this sudden seismic realization about what
his life's work is going to be. And he doesn't
just, what, jot it down in a notebook? Oh, no.
He races to his sister's apartment, bursts in
and proclaims, I am about to become a genius.
That is just phenomenal, especially considering
he was more often than not hiding from creditors
at that point. But he wasn't wrong, was he? Not
at all. That moment, that self -declaration was
the real conception of his colossal achievement,
La Comédie Humaine. The human comedy. Right.
And this isn't just one book. I mean, it's a
whole sequence of novels. It's a universe. Ninety
one of them either completed or planned. It's
this absolutely dense panoramic sweep of French
society in the decades right after Napoleon.
He documents everyone from like the lowest peasant
and the struggling clerk all the way up to the
great financiers and the aristocracy. Every single
level. So our mission today for you listening
is to give you the shortcut. The shortcut to
understanding why Balzac is really unanimously
seen as one of the founders of realism in European
literature. And more than that, we're extracting
the core insight here, which is that Balzac built
this incredible monument to society literally
out of the wreckage of his own life. We need
to see how his genuinely difficult. dramatic
and failure ridden personal life, his debt, his
legal training, his endless romantic drama, how
all of that directly fueled the unfiltered detail
picture of society that defines his work. He
had to observe the world so acutely because,
well, he was constantly at war with it. OK, let's
unpack this. And we have to start at the very
beginning because the creation of Balzac, the
writer. really starts with the creation of the
name Balzac itself. He wasn't born Honoré du
Balzac. He was born plain Honoré Balzac. And
even that name was basically a piece of social
engineering by his father. Tell us about him,
Bernard -Francois Balzac. Right, Balzac. He was
the son of an artisan from the southwest of France,
a true self -made man. The sources say he set
off for Paris in 1760 with just a single coin
in his pocket. Driven by just... Ferocious ambition.
Completely. He didn't just climb the social ladder.
He sprinted up it. He eventually rises to this
really prestigious position, secretary to the
king's council. And if you're climbing, you need
to refine the image. Balsa sounds a bit rustic.
Balzac sounds more established, more noble. So
the father changes the name and the son, Honoré,
takes that aspiration and just supercharges it.
That's where the famous little particle comes
in. Exactly. Honoré just starts adding it himself,
de Balzac. With no official recognition, no royal
decree, he was literally self -ennobling through
his pen name. A huge declaration of his own artistic
worth. And he was completely open about it. In
1830, he wrote that the aristocracy and authority
of talent are more substantial than the aristocracy
of names and material power. So he's arguing
that his hard work, his brilliance, that was
his... True most of nobility. Way more than any
inherited title. And that's a crucial insight
for you right there. He's steeped in the language
of the old aristocracy. But at the same time,
he's embracing this new revolutionary idea that
your achievement is what gives you status. That
tension between the old order and the new capitalist
meritocracy is basically the engine of la comédie
humaine. It is. And his family life was just
as defined by this kind of social climbing and,
frankly, financial calculation. His mother and
Charlotte Laura Salam. came from a wealthy Parisian
family of haberdashers. A commercial background.
A good dowry. And a stark contrast in age. She
was 18. His father was 50. The sources are pretty
brutal about this. They're clear it was a purely
transactional marriage. She knew she was basically
a reward for her husband's professional services
to a family friend. She was not in love with
him. So from the moment he's born, Balzac's entire
world is built on money, ambition, and a profound
lack of emotional warmth. The exact elements
he would later expose with surgical precision
in his novels. And that lack of warmth, it started
immediately. Oh, yeah. As an infant, he was sent
away to a wet nurse. He spent four years away
from home. When he and his sister Lore finally
came back, their parents kept them at a, quote,
frosty distance. This isn't just biographical
trivia. It's the genesis of the cold analytical
observer. Right. His novel, La Liste dans la
Vallée, has this cruel governess. Miss Caroline,
who was modeled directly on his own caregiver.
These early deprivations gave him this intense,
critical distance. Home wasn't a refuge. It was
a subject for analysis. And the isolation just
got worse. At age 10, he was sent off to the
Vendome Oratorian Grammar School for seven years.
And his father, determined to instill this hard
work ethic, intentionally gave him very little
money. So he became an object of ridicule among
his wealthier classmates. He's learning about
class disparity not from a book, but from daily
humiliation. And his response to the school's
rigid learning style was just rebellion. He couldn't
do rote memorization, so he was constantly being
punished. The punishment being confinement in
the alcove, a disciplinary cell. And get this.
The school janitor later recalled having the,
quote, honor of escorting him to the dungeon
more than 100 times. More than 100 times. That's
astonishing. It's almost every few weeks for
seven years. It is. But here's where the personal
failure flips into intellectual triumph. The
confinement, ironically, gave him total freedom
to read. So while he's being punished, he's educating
himself. He devoured the school's library. Everything.
Literature, philosophy, history, physics. He
even read through dictionaries for, in his words,
indescribable delight. Just for the knowledge
itself. That boundless appetite for facts, for
cataloging society, that's what drove La Comédie
Humaine. He even put that exact habit into his
novel Louis Lambert. But all that manic intellectual
energy had a physical cost. Definitely. He returned
home from school suffering from sort of a coma,
which he blamed on intellectual congestion. It's
a theme he'd explore in later ambition, literally
consuming the body. And the despair became very
real. The sources confirm that between 1814 and
1816, he attempted suicide on a bridge over the
River Loire. So this was a young man marked by
neglect, isolation, and genuine despair long
before he was a famous writer. And yet his parents
were still determined he'd have a safe, respectable
career. So in 1816, he goes to the Sorbonne to
study law. And that part was actually intellectually
stimulating. He studied under influential thinkers
who encouraged independent thought. But then
came the practical side of it. The apprenticeship.
And this was the single most important, albeit
negative, training of his entire life. Three
years in a law office. Let's pause on this because
it's absolutely vital. He wasn't just any kind
of lawyer. He trained first as an avoué and then
as a notaire. We need to be clear about what
these jobs were in 19th century Paris. An avoué
was like a solicitor. He prepared the cases,
the bankruptcies, the foreclosures, the financial
disputes, all the messy stuff. And a notaire
was even more central to the machinery of money.
Much more. They handled contracts, wills, mortgages,
marriage settlements, real estate. Basically
every document that moved money and property
around. So Balzac wasn't just reading law books.
He was watching the naked transaction of human
ambition and failure every single day. He saw
who was rising, who was falling. He processed
the paperwork that documented every hidden family
secret, every moral compromise. He basically
had a front row seat to the engine room of Parisian
society. He said it perfectly in his novel Le
Notaire. He wrote that a young law clerk sees
the oily wheels of every fortune, the hideous
wrangling of heirs over corpses not yet cold,
the human heart grappling with the penal code.
Wow. The oily wheels of every fortune. That's
it. That's the birth of literary realism right
there. Seeing society not as some grand ideal,
but as this, this morally hideous machine. Which
is why. When the notaire he worked for, Manning
Passes, offered to make Balzac his successor
a stable, lucrative, respectable job for life,
he said no. He refused. He said he wouldn't be
a quirk, a machine, a writing school hack. I
should be like everyone else. A total betrayal
of his family's plans for him. The family was
furious, but they let him live in a garret in
Paris, a tiny room furnished in the most Spartan
fashion on a starvation allowance. So he went
from observing the machine. to being crushed
by it. He was now living the life of the struggling
artist he would write about so many times. But
success did not come quickly. His first attempts
at writing were, well, they were spectacular
failures. He tried an opera libretto, a tragedy
in verse called Cromwell. Which his family read
and universally declared to be awful. So he tivets.
Desperate for money, the constant theme of his
life, he starts churning out commercial fiction
under pseudonyms. Right. Horace de Saint -Aubin.
These were the potboilers, designed to be sensational
and sell fast. Like Vickerti's Ardenne, which
was banned for being too scandalous. Exactly.
The critics called them curiously, interestingly,
almost enthrallingly bad. But they were essential
training, weren't they? That habit of writing
under immense financial pressure. It was his
boot camp. Without the potboilers, he never could
have produced La Comédie Humaine. And at the
same time, he's failing as a writer. He's failing
even more spectacularly as a businessman. This
is the great paradox. The man who understood
the oily wheels of fortune better than anyone
alive was a terrible businessman. He tried publishing
cheap one -volume classics. That failed. The
books were sold as scrap paper. Then he tried
to build a printing business and then a type
foundry. All with grand ambition and zero practical
sense. He had no capital, no experience. The
sources show he racked up massive debts. 50 ,000
francs owed just to his mother by 1828. That's
a huge amount of money for the time. It's enough
to buy a very comfortable apartment in Paris.
It's years of income for a successful professional.
And that suffocating debt, which he carried for
most of his life, shaped everything he wrote.
his critique of money wasn't intellectual it
was visceral it was a lived reality absolutely
his fascination with misers and avarice in books
like eugenie grande that came from hiding from
bailiffs not from reading philosophy and he never
learned his lesson Even after he was famous,
he was still chasing these get -rich -quick schemes.
He traveled all the way to Sardinia, hoping to
reprocess slag from ancient Roman mines. What
a ridiculous idea. And later he had this scheme
to buy 20 ,000 acres of oak wood in Ukraine and
ship it to France. He was always chasing the
one big score that would free him from the grind
of writing for money. So the man who had become
the great documentarian of society's pursuit
of wealth was himself a frantic, chaotic speculator.
And every failure just gave him more raw material
for his work. And that cycle of ambition and
failure leads us right to 1832, to that moment
in his sister's apartment where he realizes he
doesn't need to escape his world. He needs to
capture it whole. That's the conception of the
whole project, this enormous series that would
paint a panoramic portrait of all aspects of
society. By this point, he'd had his first real
success under his own name, Le Chouin, in 1829.
That was his passage into the promised land.
It proved he could do serious literature. And
then the masterpieces started coming quickly.
La peau de chagrin, the wild ass's skin, in 1831.
It's this fantastic story about a magical piece
of skin that grants wishes but shrinks each time,
consuming the owner's life force. A perfect metaphor
for the ambition and burnout he saw all around
him. And in 1833, we get Eugénie Grande, his
first real bestseller, a harrowing story of a
young woman whose spirit is just crushed by her
miserly father. It is the perfect distillation
of that avarice he knew so well. And then in
1835, Le Père Goriot. which is often seen as
the keystone of the whole series. It's basically
King Lear, but set in a dingy Parisian boarding
house in the 1820s. A father who gives everything
to his daughters and is abandoned by them. It's
this bitter rage against a society where money
has replaced love. And these works establish
him as this new thing. A literary realist. He
was influenced by romantics like Walter Scott,
but he took a radical turn. He wanted to depict
human existence through cold, hard particulars,
a sociological approach to fiction. He even said
it himself. He believed that details alone will
henceforth determine the merit of works. And
he proved it on the page. His descriptions of
decor, of clothing, of architecture, they're
exhaustive, but they're not just descriptive
flair, they're functional. They tell you everything.
A character's social standing, their credit rating,
their moral state. Think about the famous opening
of Le Père Goriot, the description of the penchant
vocaire. He describes the wall. Wallpaper cheap,
faded, peeling, stained with grease in such minute
detail. The wallpaper itself has a history. It
speaks of the identities of those living inside.
Right. And that's why someone like Emil Zola
later called Balzac the father of the naturalist
novel. He saw the world through clear glass.
He connected human behavior directly to the environment.
Poverty isn't an abstract idea. It's the physical
reality of cheap, greasy wallpaper defining your
life. And beyond the setting, his great innovation
was his characters. They were complex, morally
ambiguous. fully human. He was aiming for this
high psychological realism. He said writers should
use whatever literary device seems capable of
giving the greatest intensity of life to their
characters. And his characters manage this incredible
balancing act. They represent a social type.
The ambitious young man from the provinces, the
criminal mastermind, the fallen aristocrat. But
they're never just cartoons. They're messy and
individual. And the mechanism that elevates the
whole project, that turns it from a collection
of novels into a single interconnected world,
is his use of recurring characters. Right. Characters
like Eugene de Rastignac, the ambitious social
climber, or the terrifying criminal Vautrin.
They pop up in dozens of different books. This
was revolutionary for fiction at the time. When
a character reappears, they bring their entire
history with them. They emerge from the privacy
of their own lives. It solidifies the sense that
Balzac's fictional Paris is a real, living, breathing
world. It was so powerful that it blurred the
lines between fiction and reality for his readers.
Yeah. The anecdote about Oscar Wilde is the perfect
example. Oh, it's incredible. When the character
Lucien de Ribempre dies in one of the novels,
Wilde confessed it was, quote, one of the greatest
tragedies of my life. It haunts me in my moments
of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh. People
were grieving fictional characters as if they
were real people. They were real to them. And
what drives these characters is this intense
energy. Balzac was fascinated by the pseudoscience
of his day, like Mesmer's theories on animal
magnetism. The kind of life force. Exactly. A
nervous and fluid force. And his characters are
just burning with it. They're constantly struggling
against society. And they often burn themselves
out in the process. It's that energy that is
literally consumed in Le Pot de Chagrin. And
the final piece of his realism is the character
of place, particularly Paris. He was meticulous.
He would walk the city for hours, studying neighborhoods,
taking notes. His descriptions can go on for
15 or 20 pages of intricate detail. Because for
him, Paris wasn't just a backdrop. He said, The
streets of Paris possess human qualities. It
was the artificial metropolis, this labyrinth
where man -made chaos had overwhelmed nature.
It became the model for every great city novelist
who followed, from Dickens in London to Gostoevsky
in St. Petersburg. The critic Peter Brooks put
it perfectly. Realism is nothing if not urban.
The story of the young man coming to the city
to make his fortune. That's the central story
of Bolzac's world. And here's another fascinating
link to his own chaotic life. Some of his most
tormenting characters were written while he was
staying at the Chateau de Sachet. Okay. This
estate was owned by his friend, Jean de Margon,
who was also his mother's lover and the father
of her youngest child. Wait, what? His mother
was having a long -term affair with the man whose
house Balzac used as a writing retreat. Exactly.
Even the physical place he created from was tangled
up in the same web of domestic secrets and moral
ambiguity that defined his novels. He could never
escape it. Which leads us right into the sheer
intensity of his personal life, which was obviously
required to produce this mountain of work. We
have to talk about his work habits. They're legendary
and, frankly, terrifying. They were inhuman,
completely. His standard schedule was to eat
a light meal in the afternoon, sleep until midnight,
then get up at 1 a .m. and write nonstop until
8 in the morning. Fueled by coffee. Innumerable
cups of black coffee. The sources suggest his
consumption was so prolific, some say over 50
cups a day, though that's debated, that modern
researchers think it was a factor in his death.
He was literally burning himself out for his
art. And the physical pace was incredible. Writing
with a quill, he could compose at a rate that's
like 30 words per minute on a modern typewriter.
But the real obsession was in the revision process.
He was a publisher's nightmare, right? Oh, a
total nightmare. He'd send the pages to the printer,
get the proofs back, and then just cover them
with changes, additions, rewrites, and then do
it again. And again. It cost a fortune in printing
fees. A fortune. And it meant the finished book
was often vastly different from the first draft.
It speaks to this mind that was just constantly
running, never satisfied. And that perpetual
motion, that intensity, it defined his romantic
life, too. It was as complex as any of his plots.
To put it mildly. Let's start with Maria du Fresne
in 1833. She was 24, a writer, and married to
an older man. A classic Balzacian setup. It was
an illicit affair, and in 1834, she gave birth
to their secret daughter, Marie Caroline, and
significantly, Maria was the person to whom he
dedicated Eugénie Grandet. His lovers were often
his muses. And there's another footnote here,
right? That he was also listed in the Paris police
records. Of known homosexuals, yes. indicating
at least suspicion that he was attracted to men
as well. His emotional life was a secret history,
just like the ones in his novels. But the central
love of his life was someone else entirely, someone
he courted for years by letter. Countess Ewelina
Hoska, a Polish aristocrat living near Kyiv,
his sweetest dream. And it started completely
anonymously. In 1832, she sends him a letter
from Odessa, signed only l 'étranger, the foreigner,
criticizing his work. And a 15 -year correspondence
begins with him placing a classified ad in a
newspaper, hoping she'll see it. She was also
in a marriage of convenience to a man 20 years
older. It's the same pattern. Their letters are
this incredible dance of passion, intellectual
debate, and proper decorum, all conducted across
thousands of miles. And after her husband died
in 1841, Balzac finally went to pursue her in
person. He visited her in St. Petersburg in 1843,
and despite some serious competition, including
from the composer Franz Liszt, He won her heart.
But getting to the altar was fraught with classic
Balzac problems. Of course. Financial collapse,
his health was failing, and he even had to get
approval from Tsar Nicholas I, who wasn't keen
on one of his noblewomen marrying a foreigner.
They finally got permission and were married
in 1850. A tragic fulfillment of a lifetime of
waiting. It really was. The wedding was in March
1850 in what is now Ukraine. And the journey
itself, a 10 -hour carriage ride, just physically
devastated him. He was already in a state of
collapse. Completely. They arrived back in Paris
on his 51st birthday, May 20th. His wife reported
he was in a state of extreme weakness. And just
five months later. Five months after finally
achieving the marriage and stability he'd craved
his whole life. Honoré de Balzac died on August
18, 1850. Gangrene, associated with congestive
heart failure. His mother was at his deathbed,
but his new wife, Eve, had gone to bed. A final,
profoundly human moment of attachment. And the
funeral was the ultimate social event. Victor
Hugo gave the eulogy, declaring, A nation in
mourning for a man of genius. Almost every writer
in Paris was there. Dumas, father and son. A
suitably dramatic end for a life lived in service
of drama. Okay, this is where Balzac, the objective
observer, becomes almost shocking. Because the
man who wrote the blueprint for literary realism,
who captured the cold, hard reality of bourgeois
France, was politically an extreme conservative.
He was a legitimist. Meaning he supported the
royal house of Bourbon. He believed in the divine
right of the king and rejected the new, more
liberal July monarchy that came in after the
1830 revolution. He was looking backward. idealizing
the old aristocratic order. He was heavily influenced
by counter -revolutionary philosophers. He once
said that when Louis VI was beheaded, The revolution
beheaded in his person all fathers of families.
He saw the breakdown of political order as the
destruction of the family itself. And he had
this lifelong admiration for the Catholic Church.
Right. And the preface to La Comédie Humaine,
he calls it a complete system for the repression
of the depraved tendencies of man. And crucially,
the most powerful element of social order. So
here's the first huge contradiction. The writer
who spent his career meticulously cataloging
human corruption, greed, lust, ambition, was
convinced that only the strictest, most repressive
institutions could keep it all in check. Exactly.
He chronicled the rise of the financial bourgeoisie,
but politically he despised them. His work is
a monumental record of the very society he thought
was morally bankrupt. And surprise, surprise.
Balzac the politician was just as much a failure
as Balzac the businessman. He genuinely saw himself
as a potential political leader. He called for
a young and vigorous man to mediate things, not
so subtly suggesting himself. But a freak accident
in 1832, he slipped on the street and cracked
his head, prevented him from actually standing
for election. So political action was closed
to him. Only observation remained. He tried journalism.
to have a more direct impact, but that failed
too. He ran a couple of magazines. And they both
folded almost immediately. The market rejected
his attempts to impose political order, just
like it rejected his businesses. He was only
successful when he was depicting the chaos, not
when he was trying to control it. And this brings
us to the most stunning paradox of all. The thing
that confirms his objective genius. Because he
was such a keen, unflinching observer of class
and money and ambition, his work became a central
reading for his bitterest ideological opponents.
We're talking about Marxists and socialists,
the founders of modern political thought. They
used Balzac's novels as their primary textbook
on how 19th century capitalism actually worked.
It's the ultimate intellectual twist. Despite
Balzac's fervent monarchist views, Friedrich
Engels, co -founder of Marxism, said he learned
more from Balzac than from all the professional
historians, economists and statisticians put
together. Karl Marx references Balzac in Das
Kapital. And the anecdote about Leon Trotsky
is just incredible. What's that? Trotsky would
famously read Balzac's novels right in the middle
of meetings of the Central Committee. Seriously?
To the annoyance of his colleagues. He was reading
fiction for factual political truth. Think about
the weight of that. The very men who wanted to
overthrow the society Balzac politically revered
were using his work as the key document showing
exactly how that system operated and why it needed
to be destroyed. His political intentions became
totally irrelevant. The truth and the scope of
his observations were simply too powerful, too
accurate to be ignored by anyone. And that kind
of objective, comprehensive truth just fundamentally
changed the course of literature. Balzac didn't
just write great books. He basically invented
the template for the modern social novel. You
can trace a direct line from Balzac to pretty
much every major realist, naturalist, and even
early modernist writer of the next hundred years.
Let's start with Henry James, the great American
novelist who was obsessed with European society
and psychology. James called Balzac really the
father of us all. He admired Balzac's sheer ambition
to portray what he called a beast with a hundred
claws society and all its terror and glory. But
James had his critiques, too. Oh, he did. He
felt that the artist of the comedy Humane is
half smothered by the historian. But that's also
a compliment, right? It acknowledges that Balzac
was so successful at being a social historian
that the facts sometimes overwhelmed the art.
The debt is still profound. And then there's
the constant comparison to Charles Dickens. One
is the French Dickens, the other the English
Balzac. Balzac was a huge influence on Dickens,
especially in his use of vivid cityscapes and
characters that represent social types. And what
about Flaubert, the ultimate prose stylist? Flaubert
was hugely influenced by Balzac's commitment
to detail and his unvarnished look at bourgeois
life. But Flaubert's critique is legendary. What
a man he would have been had he known how to
write. Exactly. The perfectionist in Flaubert
couldn't handle Balzac's sometimes rough prose.
But even he had to admit the sheer power of the
vision. And Flaubert's great novel, L 'Education
Sentimentale, owes a clear structural debt to
Balzac's illusions perdue. And we come back to
Emil Zola. Who declared Balzac the definitive
father of the naturalist novel. Zola saw that
Balzac was the first to really get that environment
is destiny. That your behavior is tied to your
class, your heredity, your physical surroundings.
And finally, Marcel Prost. another giant. Proust
adored Balzac. He studied him carefully and even
adopted some of his techniques like what's called
retrospective illumination. Which is what exactly?
It's when you reveal a character's backstory
or their full complexity long after they've first
been introduced. It deepens the sense that the
world is real and ongoing. Proust used that to
layer memory and history onto his characters.
So the influence is just everywhere. And beyond
the literary giants there are these great little
stories about his chaos. working life that just
underline his constant desperate hustle. Like
the idea of the vanishing man. Right. The idea
that he was always on the move, escaping creditors,
and that the only settled, stable home he could
ever build was the world of the human comedy
itself. His fictional world was the complete
opposite of his real one. And then there's that
ghostwriting anecdote from 1838. It's pure cynical
Balzac. He ghostwrote a book called Maxime des
Pensées de Napoléon for a former hatter. A former
hatter. Why? For the hustle. The goal wasn't
historical accuracy. It was to get the hatter
the Legion of Honor medal by dedicating the book
to King Louis Philippe and flattering him excessively.
And did it work? It worked. The hatter got his
medal and Balzac got 4 ,000 francs. But here's
the kicker. Balzac later admitted he just invented
some of the Napoleon maxims. He made them up.
Completely. And critics noted that the invented
ones seem surprisingly absolutist even for Napoleon.
It's the ultimate Balzacian scheme monetizing
reputation and political cynicism to pay off
a debt. His impact, of course, continues today.
His novels are constantly being adapted for film
and TV. The stories are timeless because the
themes, greed, ambition, social climbing are
timeless. And he pops up in weird places, like
in Francois Truffaut's film The 400 Blows, where
the young hero plagiarizes Balzac and then lights
a small fire in his honor. And, of course, he's
a permanent fixture in Paris. The sculptor Auguste
Rodin created that incredible monument to Balzac,
this powerful, brooding bronze statue that stands
in the city today. So we circle all the way back
to our central truth. Honoré de Balzac was a
spectacular failure at almost everything practical
he ever tried. Businessman, politician, lawyer,
even a successful romantic in the end. He married
his great love five months before he died. But
every debt, every failure, every sleepless night
fueled that obsessive, detailed literary project.
He took the ugly reality he saw in those law
offices, the oily wheels of every fortune and
the hideous wrangling of heirs, and forged it
into the grandest, most objective picture of
a society ever attempted. His work proves that
to really understand a society, you have to observe
its chaos, its contradictions, its materialism.
You have to be willing to look through that clear
glass, no matter how harsh the reflection is.
He turned personal struggle into unparalleled.
And that leaves us with our final provocative
thought for you to take away. Honoré de Balzac
was a fervent monarchist, a committed Catholic.
He believed the old aristocratic order was essential.
Yet his work became the factual foundation for
the founders of communism. So what does that
tell us about the power of unfiltered observation?
That a writer's political intentions can be completely
overwritten by the sheer truth and scope of the
world he creates. The world he observed was more
honest than the world he wished for. Food for
thought. That was a truly deep dive into the
genius and the chaos of Honoré de Balzac. We'll
see you next time.