Honore de Balzac was born on March 20, 1799 in Tours, France. His father named Bernard Francois Balzac, was a regional administrator, who married a daughter of his boss. The family moved to Paris in 1815. There Balzac went to Sorbonne, matriculated in jurisprudence, and became a clerk for an attorney. His efforts of publishing his early novels under a pseudonym and in his own publishing company failed. He was in debt. His activity as a journalist brought recognition among intellectuals for his political and cultural reviews, which resonated with the mixed social expectations during the Restoration. But with the 1830 fall of the Bourbon monarchy came the new, 'bourgeous' (or capitalist) monarchy, a chimera, doomed to fall in the 1848 European Revolution. Such was the political background for Balzac's literary works. Balzac created the idea of a serialized cross-genre web of stories and novels, linked together as a broad historic panorama of lives and events. This idea was implemented in his "La Comedie humane" (The Human Comedy). It included almost a hundred stories, novels and essays, some of which unfinished. Such a vast body of handwriting could not become possible without an obsession. His plans and plots grew constantly and often changed, just to include a new idea based on a fresh gossip. All together his works reflected on a mosaic of life in Paris and France from 1820s to 1850. "Les Chouans" (1829) was a prologue to the collection of Balsac's interconnected works, known as the Human Comedy; it really opened with "Scenes de la Vie Privee", six Scenes From a Private Life (1830-1832) and "La Peau de chagrin" (The Goat-skin 1831). Balzac was writing 14 to 18 hours a day and often through the night, constantly doping himself with countless cups of coffee. He draw upon ideas from Water Scott and Shakespeare, like in "Le pere Goriot" (Father Goriot 1835), a King Lear type story set in 1820s Paris. He also created many of his own purely original plots and introduced over 2,000 characters through the books of the Human Comedy. The largest "stones" in his pyramid of fiction are "Eugene Grande" (1833), a thousand-page saga "Les Illusions Perdues" (Lost Illusions 1843), "Le cousin Pons" (1847), "La Cousine Bette" (1848). Balsac's novel "Eugenia Grande" was translated into Russian by the young writer Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1844. One year before his death, being in declining health, Balzac traveled to Poland to see his pen-friend of 15 years, Countess Evelina Hanska. She was a wealthy lady of Polish Nobility. They married in Berdichev, Russian Empire, in 1850, when Balzac had only 3 months left to live. He died on August 18, 1850 in Paris, and was laid to rest in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise.

Uncle of actress Jeanne de Balzac .