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I'm Ready for You: On Balzac
Balzac’s work gives us, for the first time in fiction, a detailed analysis of the relationship between the individual...
In the 1842 preface he compares himself to a zoologist, and his Paris reads like a sort of bestiary, a record of places and ways of life that no longer exist, an intricate, endlessly compelling social, political and moral landscape populated by often bizarre, monomaniacal characters. Half of Lost Illusions takes place in Angoulême, and some of his finest novels – for instance Eugénie Grandet, Ursule Mirouët and La Rabouilleuse( The Black Sheep) – are set almost entirely in provincial towns. (Balzac published a long and interesting description of the book’s genesis and legal troubles, ‘Historique du procès auquel a donné lieu “Le Lys dans la vallée”’, but no English translation has ever included it.)
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