He had been visited that day by Victor Hugo, who later served as pallbearer and eulogist at Balzac's funeral.

Anthony Pugh, in his book Balzac's Recurring Characters, says that the technique is employed " for the most part without that feeling of self-indulgence that mars some of Balzac's later work.

Among his last completed works were the illustrations for Balzac's Droll Stories ( 1961 ) and for his own poem The Rhyme Of The Flying Bomb ( 1962 ), which he had written some 15 years earlier.

Many of Balzac's works have been made into or have inspired films, and they are a continuing source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and critics.

" Realism is nothing if not urban ", notes critic Peter Brooks ; the scene of a young man coming into the city to find his fortune is ubiquitous in the realist novel, and appears repeatedly in Balzac's works, such as Illusions Perdues.

Marx's work Das Kapital also makes constant reference to the works of Balzac and urged Engels to read Balzac's work The Unknown Masterpiece.

Marcel Proust similarly learned from the Realist example ; he adored Balzac and studied his works carefully, although he criticised what he called Balzac's " vulgarity.

* Honoré de Balzac's works: text, concordances and frequency lists

8vo ), the French translation of Hoffman's tales ( 1843, 8 vo ), the first collective edition of Balzac's works ( Paris, Houssiaux, 1850, 20 vols.

Balzac's works were slow to be translated into English because they were perceived as unsuitable for female readers.

Many of Balzac's shorter works have elements taken from the popular " roman noir " or gothic novel, but often the fantastic elements are used for very different purposes in Balzac's work.

As depicted in his works, Balzac's spiritual philosophy suggests that individuals have a limited quantity of spiritual energy and that this energy is dissipated through creative or intellectual work or through physical activity ( including sex ), and this is made emblematic in his philosophical tale La Peau de chagrin, in which a magical wild ass's skin confers on its owner unlimited powers, but shrinks each time it is used in science.

Balzac's final plan ( 1845 ) of the Comédie Humaine is as follows ( projected works are not included ; dates are those of initial publication, whether or not the work was initially conceived as part of the Comédie Humaine ):

Balzac's work habits are legendary – he did not work quickly, but toiled with an incredible focus and dedication.

Representations of the city, countryside, and building interiors are essential to Balzac's realism, often serving to paint a naturalistic backdrop before which the characters ' lives follow a particular course ; this gave him a reputation as an early naturalist.

" Balzac's story Une Heure de ma Vie ( An Hour of my Life, 1822 ), in which minute details are followed by deep personal reflections, is a clear ancestor of the style which Proust used in À la recherche du temps perdu.

Balzac's vision of a society in which class, money and personal ambition are the major players has been endorsed by critics of both left-wing and right-wing political tendencies.

") Descriptions of her meager quarters are – as usual in Balzac's work – an acute reflection of her personality.

Several of Balzac's characters, particularly Louis Lambert, traverse mystical crises and / or develop syncretic spiritual philosophies about human energy and action that are largely modelled on the life and work of Emanuel Swedenborg ( 1688 – 1772 ).

Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac's collected letters are credited with executing ( in French prose ) a reform paralleling Francois de Malherbe's in verse.

Lucien's journalism work is informed by Balzac's own failed ventures in the field.

Balzac's health was deteriorating by this point, making the completion of this pair of books a significant accomplishment.

* In Honore de Balzac's novel " Pere Goriot ", it is stated by Vautrin that Eugène de Rastignac's family is living off of chestnuts ; symbolism that is used to represent how impoverished Eugene's family is.

Saumur is also the scene for Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet, written by the French author in 1833, and the title of a song from hard rock band Trust ( whose lyrics express their poor opinion of the city: narrow-minded, bourgeois and militaristic ).

At the turn of the century, Saintsbury edited and introduced an English edition of Honoré de Balzac's novel series La Comédie humaine, translated by Ellen Marriage and published in 1895-8 by J. M. Dent.

It marks the first serious use by the author of characters who had appeared in other books, a technique that distinguishes Balzac's fiction.

She amuses herself by mocking her lovers ' devotion, and this wickedness – not to mention her gruesome demise – has led some critics to speculate that she is actually the focus of Balzac's morality tale.

In Europe, he translated Balzac's Contes drôlatiques, which was published in 1874 by Chatto and Windus ; but it was considered too racy and was withdrawn, only to be reissued in 1903.

Other opera librettos include La rose de Terone ( 1840 ), Si j ' étais roi ( 1852 ), Le muletier de Tolède ( 1854 ) ( on which Michael Balfe's The Rose of Castille ( 1857 ) was based ), and À Clichy ( 1854 ) by Adolphe Adam, Massenet's early Don César de Bazan ( 1872 ) and Hervé's La nuit aux soufflets ( 1884 ) He prepared for the stage Balzac's posthumous comedy Mercadet ou le faiseur, presented at the Théâtre du Gymnase Marie Bell in 1851.

* The Cat " a story for music ", 1979, in Restoration, London, Methuen, 1982, from Honoré de Balzac's Peines d ' amour d ' une chatte anglaise, music by H. W.

Also Rodin was inspired by Delacroix's painting Dante and Virgil Crossing the Styx, Michelangelo's The Last Judgment, Honoré de Balzac's book La Comedié Humaine, and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal.

The importance of the woman is underlined by Balzac's contention that, while a biologist may gloss over the differences between a male and female lion, " in Society the woman is not simply the female of the man ".

Balzac's first novel Les Chouans was inspired by this vogue and tells of the rural inhabitants of Brittany during the revolution with Cooper-like descriptions of their dress and manners.

The difference in outcome is partly explained by Balzac's views on heredity: Rastignac comes from a noble family, while only Rubempré's mother comes from a noble family ( he had to obtain royal permission to use his mother's family name instead of his father's name Chardon ).

Many of the novels in this period, including Balzac's, were published in newspapers in serial form, and the immensely popular realist " roman feuilleton " tended to specialize in portraying the hidden side of urban life ( crime, police spies, criminal slang ), as in the novels of Eugène Sue.

Balzac's extensive use of detail, especially the detail of objects, to illustrate the lives of his characters made him an early pioneer of literary realism.

This was a significant accomplishment owing to his bad health, but its length made Balzac's writing speed especially remarkable.

The character Eugène de Rastignac had appeared as an old man in Balzac's earlier philosophical fantasy novel La Peau de chagrin.

Although Balzac's La Vieille Fille ( The Old Maid ), 1836, was the first such work published in France, the roman-feuilleton gained prominence thanks mostly to his friends Eugène Sue and Alexandre Dumas, père.

If Balzac's goal was ( as he claimed ) to write a realist novel from his " own old pen " rather than mimic the style of Eugène Sue, history and literary criticism have declared him successful.

Critics like Alfred Nettement and Eugène Marron declared that Balzac's sympathy lay with Baron Hulot and Valérie Marneffe.

* Eugène de Rastignac in Honoré de Balzac's Le Père Goriot.