Balzac is both the embodiment of his age and its most revealing exception. He arrived in Paris from the provinces at a time when class distinctions were beginning to dissolve, and completed his father's rise from peasant origins to become the friend of bankers, diplomats and politicians, the accomplice or enemy of almost every writer worth knowing, the lover of two duchesses and, eventually, the husband of a Polish countess whom he courted for sixteen years by correspondence. From the moment he decided, as it were, to become a genius, Balzac's life resembled an encyclopedia with a plot: his legal studies, his selfimposed seclusion in a garret from which he hoped to emerge a great philosopher and poet, his fascination with the secret, sordid life of the city, his first, pseudonymous novels — gory, sentimental and memorably bad — his disastrous business ventures that showed him every aspect of the book-trade he later depicted in Illusions Perdues. By the time Balzac achieved fame with La Peau de Chagrin in 1831 as a rosycheeked, chubby Romantic, his incongruities were already well established: a rationalist who tried to harness supernatural powers; a social observer who turned characters into real people and the real people he loved, seduced or exploited into characters; a brilliant businessman who was always on the edge of bankruptcy; an expert fantasizer who believed that the vital fluid known as will-power diminishes with every desire; a defender of the Family with at least one illegitimate child and a wide repertoire of sexual appetites; a man with a phenomenal capacity for self-deception who can be treated (according to Henry James) as 'a final authority on human nature'. With time, Balzac's ironies have, if anything, increased: the realist who was really a visionary; the political thinker who stood for parliament and denounced the evils of democracy; the monarchist hailed by Marxists as a revolutionary and whose works, for that reason, have always filled out the shelves of bookshops in Communist countries; the last traditional story-teller and father of the modern novel whose tales have confused or inspired most modern schools of criticism.

All creators disappear in their creations; but there, too, they provide the keys to mysteries they may not have solved or even formulated themselves. Balzac's principal creation was La Comédie Humaine, comprising over a hundred novels, short stories, studies and several unfinished works. Intellectually as well as politically, the period covered by La Comedie Humaine is the great turning point of European history, an age of revolutions during which an industrial economy was imposed on what was still a feudal society. Balzac's epic of modern life is the last attempt by any writer to comprehend and educate a whole world in all its diversity, to offer a complete, unified, scientific picture of society and human experience, from the evocative trivia of day-to-day existence to the complex, organic machinery of power and bureaucracy. With Shakespeare and Dickens, Balzac is the most prolific creator of memorable characters in Western literature: there are over 2000 of them in La Comédie Humaine alone, joined to each other by an endless umbilical cord of family relations and coincidences (the genealogical table of Balzac's characters covers three walls of his house in Paris); although if one includes characters who were removed from later editions, those who are not named or whose existence is only implied, and a few animals with recognizable personalities, the total rises to well over 3500. . .