Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac set out to do for French society what a naturalist does for a species: describe every specimen. La Comédie humaine runs to more than ninety finished novels and stories with some two thousand named characters, many of them recurring, so that a minor figure in one book turns out to be the centre of another. He worked at night on prodigious quantities of coffee, wrote standing at a small table in a white robe, and revised so heavily in proof that his printers charged him extra. He had been ruined as a printer himself, and the knowledge of exactly how debt destroys a household runs through everything he wrote. Money is his true subject: who has it, who wants it, and what it costs to keep. He died at fifty-one, five months after finally marrying the Polish countess he had courted by letter for eighteen years.