Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac was born at Tours in 1799; his father, of peasant stock, had risen by his own efforts to become an official. To please his family he studied law and worked as a clerk in a lawyer's office, but he was determined to be a writer. His early novels failed; he then went into publishing and printing and ran up huge debts, and was pursued by creditors for the rest of his life. To pay them off he drank vast quantities of strong coffee and wrote from midnight to the following noon, sometimes working fifteen hours a day. At thirty he made his name with the novel The Chouans, and in the next twenty years wrote more than ninety novels, gathered under the title The Human Comedy, with more than two thousand characters, aiming to be the 'secretary' of French society. After corresponding for more than fifteen years with the Polish countess Madame Hańska, he at last married her, and died only five months after the wedding.