Imaginary Interviews #3: The Influential French Author Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napoleon 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 renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are morally ambiguous. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Eça de Queirós, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Benito Pérez Galdós, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx as well as the artists Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso. What follows is an interview that took place between myself and Mr. Balzac at a salon in the Bohemian sector of Paris in late 1847. It is a work of fiction that strives to faithfully reflect the artist.

Ennyman: Tell us a little bit about your childhood.

Honoré de Balzac: I was an enthusiastic reader and a rather willful, independent thinker as a child. I had trouble adapting to the rote style of teaching in my…