His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled, La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon.

La Comédie humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience.

Selected titles from La Comédie humaine

* La Comédie humaine, a sequence of almost 100 novels and plays by Honoré de Balzac, set during the Restoration and the July Monarchy

Balzac also pays homage to Rabelais by quoting him in more than twenty novels and the short stories of La Comédie humaine ( The Human Comedy ).

** Honoré de Balzac-La Comédie humaine (" The Human Comedy ", a novel cycle which includes Père Goriot, Lost Illusions, and Eugénie Grandet )

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.

Balzac often employed this practice, such as in his Comédie humaine.

Le Père Goriot (, Old Goriot or Father Goriot ) is an 1835 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac ( 1799 – 1850 ), included in the Scènes de la vie Parisienne section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine.

Around this time, Balzac began organizing his work into a sequence of novels that he eventually called La Comédie humaine, divided into sections representing various aspects of life in France during the early 19th century.

In 1843 Balzac placed Le Père Goriot in the section of La Comédie humaine entitled " Scènes de la vie parisienne " (" Scenes of life in Paris ").

Although he had prepared only a small predecessor for La Comédie humaine, entitled Études de Mœurs, at this time, Balzac carefully considered each work's place in the project and frequently rearranged its structure.

La Comédie humaine.

* Dedinsky, Brucia L. " Development of the Scheme of the Comédie humaine: Distribution of the Stories ".

The Evolution of Balzac's Comédie humaine.

Balzac and His Reader: A Study in the Creation of Meaning in La Comédie humaine.

Category: Books of La Comédie humaine

Zola, with the book of the Rougon-Macquart under his arm, salutes the statue of Honoré de Balzac | Balzac. Early in his life, Zola discovered the work of Honoré de Balzac and his famous cycle La Comédie humaine.

* Balthazar Claes, the main character of Honore de Balzac's The Quest of the Absolute in the series La Comédie humaine

Category: Books of La Comédie humaine

In French literature, Honoré de Balzac's ambitious La Comédie humaine, a set of nearly 100 novels, novellas and short stories with some recurring characters, started to come together during the 1830s.

The book is part of the Scènes de la vie parisienne section of Balzac's novel sequence La Comédie humaine (" The Human Comedy ").

The first collected edition of La Cousine Bette was organized into 132 chapters, but these divisions were removed when Balzac added it to his massive collection La Comédie humaine in 1848.

* Besser, Gretchen R. Balzac's Concept of Genius: The Theme of Superiority in the " Comédie humaine ".

* Madden, James C. Weaving Balzac's Web: Spinning Tales and Creating the Whole of La Comédie humaine.

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 ):

La Comédie humaine (, The Human Comedy ) is the title of Honoré de Balzac's ( 1799 – 1850 ) multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy ( 1830 – 1848 ).

He similarly formed the ambition of writing a sequence of ten novels inspired by Balzac ’ s Comédie humaine, in which he would depict characters from all strata of society rather than peasants, and compare and contrast different moments in history by depicting the experiences of members of the same family in times a hundred years apart.

La Peau de chagrin belongs to the Études philosophiques group of Balzac's sequence of novels, La Comédie humaine.

Although the bulk of the Comédie humaine takes place during the Restoration and the July Monarchy, there are several novels which take place during the French Revolution and others which take place in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, including " About Catherine de Medici " and " The Elixir of Long Life ".

His La Comédie humaine, a vast collection of nearly 100 novels, was the most ambitious scheme ever devised by a writer of fiction — nothing less than a complete contemporary history of his countrymen.

The Comédie Humaine remained unfinished at the time of his death – Balzac had plans to include numerous other books, most of which he never started.

Balzac conceived his grand project, The Human Comedy, while writing Eugénie Grandet and incorporated it into the Comédie by revising the names of some of the characters in the second edition.

The following are some of the major themes that recur throughout the various volumes of the Comédie humaine:

In 1790 she wrote a play, Le Marché des Noirs ( The Black Market ) which was rejected by the Comédie Française ; the text was burned after her death.

Among his best-known plays are Le Mercure galant, the title of which was changed to La Comédie sans titre (" Play without a title ") ( 1683 ) when the publisher of the literary review of the same name objected ( see " Mercure de France "); La Princesse de Clêves ( 1676 ), an unsuccessful play which, when refurbished with fresh names by its author, succeeded as Germanicus ; Esope à la ville ( 1690 ); and Esope à la cour ( 1701 ). His lack of dramatic instinct could hardly be better indicated than by the scheme of his Esope, which allows the fabulist to come on the stage in each scene and recite a fable.

She became a star of the Comédie Italienne ( which became the Opéra-Comique ), where she created over 60 roles.

It was originally built between 1779 and 1782, in the garden of the former Hôtel de Condé, to a Neoclassical design by Charles De Wailly and Marie-Joseph Peyre, originally in order to house the Comédie Française, which, however, preferred to stay at the Théâtre-Français in the Palais Royal.

" La Comédie humaine ", which he then exhibited, turned the tide of his fortune, and Ma sœur n ' y est pas ( purchased by the emperor Napoleon III ) obtained for its author a third-class medal in 1853.

In the last half of his preface, Balzac explains the Comédie humaines different parts ( which he compares to " frames " and " galeries "), and which are more or less the final form of the collection ( see below ).

At the outbreak of the Revolution she was imprisoned for six months with other royalist members of the Comédie Française, and she did not reappear upon that stage until the close of 1793, and then only for a short time.