Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) was a nineteenth-century French novelist and playwright. His Magnum Opus was a sequence of almost 100 novels and plays collectively entitled La Com die Humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napol on Bonaparte in 1815. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is...