BALZAC, barzak' Honore de, French novelist: b. Tours, 16 May 1799; d. Paris, 17 Aug. 1850. His family was of no account, and the aristocratic "de' (adopted perhaps in good faith) dates from 1830 or thereabouts. The surname itself seems to have been properly spelled Balsa, or Balsas, the first to alter it being the novelist's father, whose parents were peasants in Languedoc. Little is known of the elder Balzac's career, except that he was at one time a lawyer and later an officer in the com missariat; he married past middle age, and at the time of Honore's birth filled certain mu nicipal offices in the city of Tours. He is rep resented as a man of whimsical character, caustic but indulgent, with a wonderful memory, and full of schemes for malting millions and reaching the age of 100. His wife, whose natne was Sallambier, had good looks and a fortune; she is said to have been pious and imaginative, and devoted to her children's welfare, but by no means outwardly tender to them. At any rate Honore and his favorite sister Laure (afterward Madame Surville), if not her two younger children also, were brought up very strictly.
He was sent to school early with the Ora torians of Vendotne and was as miserable there as his Louis Lambert. All he learned was by desultory reading, and that in books too deep for his age. His masters thought him dull and lazy, and his absent-mindedness having devel oped into a sort of daze, he was withdrawn by his parents and became a day-scholar for a time at the College de Tours. Neither there nor at a boarding-school in Paris, to which city the family removed in 1814, was he by any means a brilliant pupil; and at home not only his talents but the ambition to write which had already seized upon him remained quite unsuspected. In 1816 he was put into a lawyer's office and 18 months later began to work with a notary, both his chiefs being intimate friends of the family; at the same time he attended various lectures at the Sorbonne, and was becoming familiar with the great writers of his coimtry. His mind was made up to devote himself to literature, when in 1819, M. de Balzac, who had recently lost money
in speculation and was about to retire, an notmced to Honore that his friend the notary offered to take him into partnership with the prospect of succeeding to his practice. Honore resisted, and begged for a chance to show his literary gift; after some discussion his father rave him his way and, while the family made its own home at Villeparisis, he was installed in an attic near the Arsenal Library on a two years' trial of his powers, with an allowance barely sufficient to keep him from starving. Here in cold and hunger and solitude, but sup ported by his unconquerable gaiety and self confidence, he set to work first on two tales which were soon to be finished, then a comedy, lastly a tragedy in verse, (Cromwell,' which he firmly believed to be a masterpiece. He brought it home with him in the spring of 1820; the family yawned when he read it, and a friend to whose judgment this first composition was submitted, Andrienx, the academician and pro fessor, recommended the young man to try his hand at anything in the world but literature. He had only spent 15 months of his probation, but his mother insisted that he should now live at home; privations had already told upon his vigor, and he was obliged to recruit in Touraine before settling down at Villeparisis. There, nothing discouraged, in the next five years he wrote, with different collaborators, no less than 31 volumes of fiction, and found publishers for them. Of the eatire worthlessness of this early work he was perfectly aware; it appeared un der various pseudonyms ((Horace de Saint Anbin) was the favorite), and when long after ward in great distress for money he allowed it to be republished, he would nerer adcnowledge the paternity.
It was at this time that he became acquainted with the Berny family, then resident at Ville parisis, and formed with Madame de Berny —a woman more than 20 years older than himself — a close friendship which lasted until her death in 1836, and to which he owed perhaps the most generous and disinterested sympathy that he ever received from man or woman.