True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself.
Honoré de Balzac (attributed)
Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His great project, La Comédie humaine, is a sequence of nearly a hundred novels, stories and studies presenting a panorama of French society in the years after the fall of Napoleon.
Balzac wrote at a ferocious pace, often through the night, fuelled by legendary quantities of black coffee. He was also constantly in debt, thanks to failed business ventures in printing and publishing and a taste for expensive furniture and fine clothes, and much of his writing was done to keep creditors at bay. Money, ambition and luck run through almost everything he wrote.
A novel that begins at the gaming table
One of Balzac's most famous novels, La Peau de chagrin (1831), usually translated as The Wild Ass's Skin or The Magic Skin, opens in a gambling house at the Palais-Royal in Paris. A young man, Raphaël de Valentin, stakes his last gold coin, loses it, and walks out intending to drown himself in the Seine. Instead he wanders into an antique shop and is given a magical skin that grants every wish, but shrinks with each one, and his life shrinks with it.
The opening chapter is still one of the best descriptions of a casino in literature: the cold croupiers, the old gamblers who have lost everything except the habit, the hush when the wheel turns. Balzac's Paris was full of such rooms until public gaming houses were closed by law at the end of 1837. For more novels that begin, or end, at the tables, see our reading list for poker and casino fans.
Where to start with Balzac
- Le Père Goriot (1835): a father who gives everything to his ungrateful daughters, and the young Rastignac learning how Paris works.
- Eugénie Grandet (1833): a portrait of a miser and the daughter he controls.
- Lost Illusions (1837–1843): a provincial poet's rise and fall in the world of Paris journalism and publishing, which still feels startlingly modern.
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